The stunning Single cover of the latest single by Pay-TV (by Pixie Von Flash)Oscar Wilde once postulated that fashion was a form of ugliness so intolerable that we've got to alter it every six months. The Swedish trinity Pay-TV take this point and simply deconstruct our sociological "space" and its "paradigms" through their disco anthem Fashion Report. The single cover alone (seen above) taken by Pixie Von Flash does a lot to reorganise the norms of pop history, girlband mythology and disco anthology. However I want to concentrate on the song itself. In a time of war, glamour and conservative radicalism, Pay-TV observe the stationary fix of the world by observing the spewed mess of digital news media controlled by a handful of corporate companies. Neena Fatale, Chanelle Ferrari and Claudia Cash are Pay-TV. They front the worlds first post-modern girlband. This means they voice their embodiment. Their chorus is one that recoils in a post-feminist vista of the world. This is a world where saving the world is a capitalist venture and can only result in air pollution. They are right.
The Swedish trio declare decadence is "out" along with evolution and revolution, its Other-prostitution is rejoiced and stripped of her children. The sublime lyrics of Hakan Lidbo predicts, theorizes and travails the world and its wonderful ethical codes, political labels and designer mistakes. In the song we are presented dialectics placed directly on the dancefloor. This is the queer kind of strut that the likes of Judith Butler of the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkeley once demanded in her groundbreaking text Gender Trouble and The Politics of the Performative.
But I think Pay-TV go beyond these post-modern fusions.
In many ways, Fashion Report is the first meta-political resistance pop song. There are no other songs out there like this. It is anarchic yet refuses to enter into the the well-trodden trope of resistance songs that the likes of the Madonna's Hey You belongs. No, the dialectics, and indeed the rhetoric, contained in Fashion Report moves beyond the Other and exposes something else. Something classically quite apart from hegemony vs resistance. Fashion Report demands the dualism is somehow side-stepped.
Take for example the resistance movements organized in the 1960's based on sexual liberation. It is often described as the Sexual Revolution but we now know better. Simon Critchley of the New School for Social Research said in his brilliant text Infinitely Demanding that "where the sexual revolution [has turned] the culture industry into a sex industry - ask yourself, is there today anything less transgressive and more normalizing than pornography?". (p.124)
Fashion Report is Pay-TV's way of exposing this same juncture and provide something of a theory that refuses resistance while contemporaneously rejects hegemony.
Its also a fucking catchy pop song! They must be sent to represent the "OtherLostNations" at next years Eurovision immediately! DontStopthePop is very proud to allow its readers to exclusively legally download the track & in the coming weeks expect a lot more from Pay-TV here. A lot more! Spread the word people-they are back! Coming up Pay-TV-wise on this site, DontStopthePop will discuss the new album (its amazing!), chat about tea, do chaos, fake and shake it with the girls. This site will also feature more amazing mp3's from the group so keep your eyes peeled.....
