Rory Sanger

In the spaces between human emotions, we find ‘affects’, feelings that cannot be given familiar labels such as: happy, sad or angry. Affect theory is the study of these enigmatic feelings, and it seems that music is the best place to find them; after all, music is a universally celebrated art form full of emotions that have an enigmatic and often inexplicable effect upon their listeners, regardless of the genre or era from which the music comes. There are endless possibilities for songs that would benefit from a study in affect theory, any track that contains some level of emotion would qualify; it’s practically impossible to name a song that couldn’t be used, after all, what would a song with no feeling to it actually sound like?

For this article, I have chosen a fairly contemporary track by pre-eminent psychedelic music project Tame Impala, the solo project of producer, songwriter and musician Kevin Parker, which only transforms into a band for live performance purposes. The song is ‘Keep on Lying’, the lesser-known eighth track from Parker’s sophomore album Lonerism, preceding the band's garage-rock hit ‘Elephant’. It is an atmospheric and trippy jam backboned by pulsating synths, airy drums, and an erratic guitar solo that unfolds in a sea of ambient voices and laughter. More importantly, it’s filled with ‘affects’ in its music, lyrics and production. Released in 2012, Lonerism is his emotional rollercoaster, the quintessential neo-psychedelic album; imagine The Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver modernised with waves of prismatic synthesisers and hurled into an exploding rainbow of musical vibrancy. It’s colourful, textured and emotionally rich.

‘Keep on Lying’ begins with a fade in, ends with a fade out and is bookended by the same repeated verse, a verse that ends with the line ‘I’ll just keep on lying to you’[1]. With this technique and the song’s title, Parker creates a perpetual cycle of self-doubt and refusal to face the truth; the illusion is that the song can be played on a continuous loop, wallowing in an emotionally ambiguous place. This ambiguity comes through in the lyrics, most notably in the third verse: ‘There is something you should know/But hell if I’d ever let it show’[2], and this is where the magic of affects come into the music; Parker shows us that ‘visceral forces… other than conscious knowing’[3] are at play here or, put simply, subconscious emotions are happening within the music that cannot be labelled, somewhere between loneliness, doubt and sadness. Lonerism is even an affect in itself, a fabricated word that refers to a unique experience of loneliness; we cannot define it with a familiar dictionary term. The title’s uniqueness to Parker compliments his unconventional approach to music-making, or as he says ‘the fact that you’re doing it wrong is going to make it sound different to how everyone else [did] it’[4]. It would seem that this if-it-sounds-good-it’s-good approach to songwriting provides Parker with Tame Impala’s unique stamp, allowing him to explore feelings in his music that cannot be heard anywhere else, hence affects are naturally created by this process.

Less of the lyrical side of things and more to the music; ‘Keep on Lying’ has a lot of affect contained within how it sounds alone, the song is driven by synths that pulse on every beat of the song, becoming more and more washed away as the song descends into a hallucinogenic jam punctuated by a haphazard guitar solo, progressively erratic drum fills and ‘ambient sounds recorded on a dictaphone’[5]. It is a musical portrait of emotion being driven towards ‘movement, toward[s] thought’[6], and as the music picks up momentum and the instruments of the song start to blend, the track seems to be perpetually falling apart yet always holds together. Parker’s dictaphone recording features ambient conversation and laughter, sinisterly manipulated by digital reverb and delay. Supposedly, it’s what the song’s protagonist hears at a house party; a sea of conversation socially inaccessible to them. It’s ‘persistent proof of a body’s… ongoing immersion in… the world’s obstinacies and rhythms’[7]. In the case of ‘Keep on Lying’ we as listeners, along with the protagonist of the song, are immersed in this social ambience whilst the ‘rhythms’ of the music carry us away simultaneously on a flying carpet of psychedelia. The rhythm of the music is syncopated and solid yet it is constantly melting into a psychedelic whirlpool as the song progresses, like a perfect balance between liquid and solid, ‘Keep on Lying’ epitomises a kind of sitting-on-the-fence between emotional states, and nothing could be more indicative of affect theory.

Citations:

[1] Tame Impala, Lonerism, Modular Recordings MODVL161, 2012, LP liner notes.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Melissa Gregg,; Gregory J. Seigworth, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’ in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2010), 1.

[4] Mark Davie, ‘Lonerism: Tame Impala in the Studio - The story behind Tame Impala’s one-man production process’, AudioTechnology, 1 December, 2013, https://www.audiotechnology.com/features/lonerism-tame-impala-in-the-studio.

[5] Sophie Smith, ‘‘Lonerism’: Tame Impala’s Grand Psychedelic Pop Experiment’, udiscovermusic, 5 October, 2019, https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/tame-impala-lonerism-album/.

[6] Gregg,; Seigworth, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, 1.

[7] Ibid, 1.