This is the time of year when I get nostalgic for the tinsel and trash of my childhood holidays. Christmas was when the K-Tel schmaltz factory would infiltrate my cartoon afternoons with commercials hawking the "hits" from the likes of Mac Davis, Mouth & MacNeal and Donny Osmond...
But for my seventh Yuletide I caught the buzz from another K-Tel classic compilation: Superstars! The year was 1974. I was in grade two at HT Thrift in South Surrey and I was ready to rock to the sounds of BTO, Paper Lace and...The Three Degrees. I begged my parents for the album, declared that I was going to be a "rockstar," and on that magical morning when I ripped open the tinsel trash *voila!* Superstars awaited.
It wasn't until years later, after my double album and my collection of 8-tracks had disappeared, that I learned K-Tel was a Canadian company founded by Philip Kives, a native of Saskatchewan. K-Tel got started in the late 60s with blockbusters like Twenty-five Polka Greats, which, according to their website, "sold a million and a half in Canada and [sic] USA."
Poor Whitney Houston. Unlike her song, she actually did have it all before she threw it away. Regardless of her buffoonery in recent years, or the fact that she paved the way for banshees like Celine Dion and Michael Bolton, Whitney had talent. And exuberance, which is what I responded to when I was too drunk to fuck or care about what the deejay was playing. Yeah, I wanted to dance with somebody...feel that heat...in 1987.
When the world today turned from Syrian massacres and yahoo Republicans to all things Whitney, I was reminded of WB Yeats' poem, "The Stolen Child":
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand
Not his best by a long shot, but one of his most popular. Such is the way of the world. Popularity, as Boy George knew, not only breeds contempt; it also accelerates the dissemination of schmaltz. The world may not be any "more full of weeping" than it is full of joy, but a maudlin tear sure makes the news cycle spin. We in that amorphous bubble called "the public," or more aptly, "the audience," lap it up. Of course, it's always better when some genuine despair is thrown in like a crack habit or a televised meltdown.
(Whitney Houston in 2001 @ Michael Jackson's 30th Anniversary Concert
)Those who've had loved ones tangled up in addiction's amphetamine embrace know the futility of convincing them of their disease. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion - the death drive is overwhelming. If that's what happened to Whitney Houston, it's sad, but not surprising. At least the Grammy Awards are tomorrow - the full parade of celebrity grief will be on display and the audience will be faithfully tuned in, anticipating a glitzy, Cirque du Soleil-style catharsis.
We live in an age of cheap sentiment and Whitney Houston occupied that sweet spot where art collides with decor and becomes schmaltz. Her aesthetic was the embodiment of sentimentality and melodrama, as deep as a Hallmark-card kiss, as sweet as a saccharine-coated melody. She's forever linked in my mind with trips to the mall or the muzak that accompanies elevators to vague, pastel-stained offices containing nothing more than isolated cubicles of despair. There lingers her song. May she rest in peace.
Schmaltz legitimizes from the bottom up, not the top down. So-called “legitimacy” as it currently exists, is a sham. Schmaltz, I suggest, is an attempt to reclaim what Fredric Jameson called “totality” though “global cognitive mapping” by using the atomized tools of our present condition:
“A new totalizing political art – if it is indeed possible at all – will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say its fundamental object- the space of multinational capital - at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion."
Schmaltz is actually a food, a rendered pâté. The verb "to render" is central to the Schmaltz aesthetic. Schmaltz renders art from the elite to the collective and mashes genres together to create its own accessible taste.
"Legitimate" art as Pierre Bourdieu would define it, supports the taste preferences of the dominant class, or what he called, "The Aristocracy of Culture." Legitimate art is endowed with the privilege of speaking for humanity, for expressing the soul of our time. In this way artists are, in Shelley’s famous phrase, "the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
Schmaltz rejects this view as hubris, vanity and snobbery masking as universality. Schmaltz is the great leveler – it’s only assumption is if one person can do it, then so can I. It collapses all hierarchies, flattens authority, and reverses the flow of justice from a transcendent domain to an immanent one. The defining attributes of Schmaltz are that it is sincere and earnest – essentially kitsch without irony.
I got the idea to pursue this work-in-progress from Carl Wilson's book on Celine Dion, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. He identifies Schmaltz as a kind of recurring ephemeral phenomenon:
"Schmaltz is an unprivate portrait of how private feeling is currently conceived, which social change can pitilessly revise."
I'm not sure I'd agree that Schmaltz is exclusively "private feeling" - most art originates from a "private" space, essentially. Schmaltz differentiates itself through its fearless approach to sentimentality. Schmaltz replaces the notion of cool with genuine feeling. That it sometimes appears drippy or sappy is not only worth embracing because it offends Bourdieu's aristocracy, but because humans are sometimes naturally inclined this way. When it comes to the realm of feeling, Schmaltz exclaims, "No shame!"
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