Hauntology: Endgame: Tramp Stamps
I Don't Use The Word In This Piece But I Think It Is Apropos (Warning: Long)
Lately I’ve been enamored again with Tramp Stamps, a living embodiment of making every single wrong move possible, painstakingly, calculatingly. It was an endeavor that feels doomed to incineration at the first touch of the wider internet, fated to be disintegrated in a discourse flash fire the moment their video for “I’d Rather Die” dropped.
What did I find so interesting about the Tramp Stamps story? Because four months after the #Discourse died down, I still want to strike this iron, even if it’s cold and brittle enough to shatter at the slightest touch.
I see something totally of its time, and utterly disconnected from its own purported context. A bundle of symbols without referent, swirling around in front of us, daring us to take it seriously and not as a brazen con job by a record label. Something so out of step with current trends and its own musical idiom that it couldn’t be anything but a lab created band triangulated and engineered for what is assumed to be maximum broad appeal.
Music existing as nothing more than references, in sound, in lyrics, in presentation, with the assumption that will be enough. An incoherent stew unaware of its own history that hopes its audience will be dumb enough not to look deeper. It is not music looking towards the future, it is engineered nostalgia to evoke the feeling that Tramp Stamps have always existed.
Okay, that last one is a bit of a reach, but you can see what I’m talking about here. Tramp Stamps is music purpose-built to remind us of a past—not necessarily *our* past or even *the* past as it exists in the historical record—it is *a* past, constructed entirely out of references and symbols unmoored from context, a constellation of things meant to spark recognition without engagement. Because to engage with it means to see its artifice, and to see the artifice means to engage with some pretty strange questions.
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So, bullet points. Tramp Stamps:
•An all-girl pop-punk trio
•E-Girl aesthetics
•Had been posting TikToks for months
•Transparently attempting to appeal to Gen-Z kids
•Were the target of merciless teasing on TikTok
The initial read on the band was that they were obvious industry plants—that is, an artist or band who is backed by label money slyly presented as grassroots, DIY, or organically popular in one way or another. You might be familiar with a rather famous one: Lana Del Rey, who released “Video Games” on an indie label (and was on SNL as an “unsigned” artist!) before it turned out that she was just backed by Interscope and their considerable resources.
Now, I’m not saying industry plants are always bad. I was fooled early on by Del Rey’s music—those luscious string sections could have been constructed through high-quality cut-together samples etc etc—but learning the truth didn’t put me off her early work. I was a fan! But here’s the point: if the work is good and speaks for itself, the extra-musical contextual stuff can be disregarded (to a degree—there are more important conversations to be had about class, access, who has the freedom to create, what sort of environment this creates for artist and who gets to thrive and who has to scrape by in anonymity etc etc etc and how that relates to cultural production and who owns the means of production #thereisaspectrehauntingpopmusic). I think the problem with industry plants—if they even meaningfully exist in the matter that we’re talking about here—is that assumptions are made about what a certain segment of fans might like, and a product is sold to them based on being an “authentic representation” (whatever the hell that means (wow I love parentheticals)) of that segment of their fandom. The ol’ “out of touch suits picking up on out-of-date trends and forcing them on teens” model of marketing.
I will admit that I was on board with that line of thinking. I thought they had emerged fully-formed, Athena-like, from an old A&R rep’s forehead. Lots of people thought that, and why wouldn’t we? It seemed too calculated and behind-the-times to be organic. The e-girl hair, the adoption of mid-10’s tumblr culture, the music videos full of pop-punk/emo signifiers with little or no connection to context, the bizarrely and brazenly Autotuned vocals from Marisa Maino, the fact that all three members had careers in music and their own false starts at stardom? Every single thing was like a box being checked for a trio of artists who needed fat stacks of cash from a major label to get eyeballs on them and blow up.
Y tho? Why did we make that snap judgement when presented with this aesthetic package, after learning about all three members’ pasts, after filing it away as a too-calculated ploy to get the attention of gen-z teens into punk?
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Here is where I talk about art, nostalgia, and aesthetics, intertwined with the “industry plant” narrative, why people ran with it, and why exactly everybody clung to it so tightly until we were proven wrong.
Obviously, it was easier to tell ourselves that this was created by someone else, but it’s worth interrogating that impulse. Why we feel that way is crucial to understanding why people had such a negative reaction to the band.
The easiest answer is this: no one wanted to truly believe three music industry professionals would decide to create a band situated squarely in an aesthetic mode at least five years old. A group of songwriters wouldn’t willingly make dated music that sounds like a poorly recorded mix of Katy Perry, Ke$ha, Paramore, Lit, and Blink-182. They certainly wouldn’t have an incredibly well-designed and -stocked merch store, a professional-looking website, and tone-deaf promo copy unless there was a team running things behind the scenes. That’s all stuff that you get when an out-of-touch label has decided to push you on the populace.
And that sense of label control seeps down through every part of the package, from the highly calculated but irritatingly unspecific lyrics to their affected acting in every video. It had to be a work. To an outside observer, it was so obviously inauthentic that there could be absolutely NO WAY an earnest, genuine person who cared about pop-punk and tumblr aesthetics would make something this blatantly false.
Right?
Well, Tramp Stamps threw that narrative out totally with their response post. According to the information available, this was 100% their doing, their work, their project. This thing, so dated and lifeless and forced, was an earnest attempt to appeal to a market that was always going to clearly see through their bullshit. The con was never going to work, but they went through it anyways. That deserves the bare minimum of praise.
But I keep coming back to the reflexive and pervasive “industry plant” argument, which hadn’t stopped dogging them, weeks after the band explicitly dismissed it.
To say that they are a product of capital is at once correct, incorrect, and the only option. A band created out of empty signifiers designed to generate maximum appeal isn’t solely the province of money-men. The decisions that led to the band itself were borne out of material conditions, yes, but those decisions can be made by anyone. It’s just that the perception of something that calculated, that exactingly precise, isn’t usually of people without access to the means of production. We don’t conceive of inauthentic work as being created by individuals, because individuals have their own idiosyncrasies, their own defining characteristics, enough to leave a few rough edges—at least something unusual. Not to be unfair about it, but Tramp Stamps has none of that—their inability to feel like something their own seems to be their only trait.
You could glibly say that everything, in some capacity, is a product of capital—it is the dominant system of economic exchange, be it material, conceptual, or cultural. Everything has to pass through the grinder of Capital, to say otherwise is to be willfully ignorant or operating in bad faith. So let’s dispense with that argument.
Being a product of capital means operating on its logic, playing on its terms. That perception of fakery, of being something created in a laboratory or via focus group is what I mean when I say Tramp Stamps are a product of capital.
But what does it mean for them not to be a product of capital? Ironically, their image being wholly and internally manufactured is how they are not a product of capital. Rather, it’s a fair bit more insidious: the needs of the market being so internalized (or viewed as something that requires absolute adherence), that this feels like the correct path. Beyond all of their shaky justifications about their origins and funding (Artists Without A Label, or AWAL, is a distribution company owned by Sony), that this was their final judgement about what was on-trend and hip should tell you how much they underestimated their potential audience.
Their music itself is a means to an end, a way to simply augment the visual package, rather than an artistic entity that can exist on its own merits. It doesn’t really work without internalized reference points, a mish-mash of pop-punk, early 10’s pop, and heavily sanitized riot grrl performed through overbearing auto-tune. As Tramp Stamps exist without any real identity as a band within the wider context of music discussion, it turns into some sort of hollow container in which to pour our own reactions into, rather than as a fully formed thing demanding engagement.
That their lyrics reflected this sort of behind-the-times tabula rasa seems to strengthen the argument that this was a calculated attempt at stardom, moreso than the norm. They are an obvious appeal at snotty, girlboss feminism, sloganeering without any deeper examination. “I’d rather die/than hook up with another straight white guy” is a common sentiment, but the song overplays its hand, turning a wink and a nudge into a facial contortion followed by an elbow to the ribs. (That the wider public read this line as some sort of racial fetishization—a purely bad faith argument—is another topic entirely, but one inextricably linked to the same capitalist modes of thinking present here.)
So this wasn’t exactly astroturf, but it was created by following the logic of the market without regard for how it could be perceived. A band whose image is so brazenly cynical and condescending could not come from anything but the material conditions created by capitalism, and the severely constrained horizons of possibility they represent. It is, at once, an invention both outside and within capital, but by following the wrong impulses, was unable to reap the rewards of either mode of creation.
And this is where the story stops, with this contradiction. I find myself haunted by the disconnect, the palatably packaged defiance that gnashed its teeth without drawing blood, that fought without leaving marks. Was this a case of believing the bullshit?
I don’t know.
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Hi
I think I’m back. The classroom portion of Massage Therapy school ended the day I wrote this sentence (July 22, 2021).
ME ELSEWHERE
I wrote a review for Superman and The Authority #1 for Comic Watch. I loved it. A big part of that is the opportunity the book presents for a close reading of Morrison’s body work and legacy.
There was also this piece I wrote a few months ago for BNet, about Anti-MLM creators and the eternal cycle of internet drama. Really proud of it—Brian deserves a lot of credit, though, putting in the work to really get my words to *sing*.
READING
The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells is pretty good. Finished the first four novellas, pondering on whether or not to read the full-length novel at the moment. The series treads a lot of the same terrain I want to cover in my Captain Ron stories, so it’s good inspiration.
Doomsday Clock by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank is, at once, a masterpiece and a disaster of the highest order. It will be the subject of a newsletter or a commentary piece on Comic Watch.
The Shadow of the Gods by John Gwynne was a brutally violent Norse-inspired fantasy. Lots of violence, lots of great character work, a gory good time.
The Department of Truth, Vol. 1: very good. Incredible Sienkiewicz-inspired art, perfect for the paranoiac horror-thriller narrative.
The End of Men: What if World War Z but Hillary Clinton Girlboss?
The Last Picture Show: one of the most deeply moving novels I’ve ever read.
Watching
Land was really good. Robin Wright and Demián Bichir are great together.
Ted Lasso was uplifting without being overbearingly saccharine, which is a feat.
Godzilla vs. Kong is wasted on a TV screen, no matter how large. I simply must see it in the theater.
Central Park’s most recent episode was a fucking stunner. “A Moment Forever Ago” just pulses with melancholy.
In more salacious viewing, JCS-Criminal Psychology is a pretty neat Youtube channel.
Listening
Playing
Falling back on comfort games. Dead Cells has been a particular favorite. My JRPG backlog is massive, and will only get bigger come fall when SMTV drops.