The first full-length from the London duo of the same name draws from a range of beat-forward subgenres popular during the 1990s, particularly those that built on the legacy of dub.
But this is no exercise in slavish mimesis. The music often sounds as though it were coming from far away, passing through substances that muddy its impact.
“Cold Ice”, for example, begins with the deep rumble and echo-drenched pinging that Portishead made famous on their debut album. The bed for “Behind the Velvet Rope” recalls legendary Detroit label Underground Resistance’s lusher releases. “Cindy (In Her Halston)” evokes the transitional period when dub was morphing into dubstep.
In contrast to the icy precision of Kraftwerk’s iconic 1978 song “The Model”, this is the sonic equivalent of smudged lipstick and mascara tear stains. Even the spoken-word samples from and about models feel disordered and remote, as if they were being summoned from a post-semantic afterlife.
This may have something to do with the fact that Supermodel is a side project from film directors Joe Connor and Emile Rafael. The day jobs of these film directors have surely exposed them to the virtues and vices of celebrity culture, inspiring a desire to examine it from a critical distance.
That’s why they blur the distinction between text—the supermodel as finished product—and context—the before, after, and alongside of that laboriously conjured perfection.
The lavish liner notes for Supermodel situate it “within the tension” between two worlds: “the ecstatic seduction of fashion mythology and the impulse to dismantle its illusions from within”.
To that end, Connor and Rafael invest their creative energies in producing an auditory mise-en-scène that complicates and even contradicts the impeccable surfaces of high fashion.
While it would be justified to call this album “cinematic”, their primary consideration for framing the music in this way is conceptual. They aren’t simply interested in supermodels for their own sake, but because their cultural significance transcends the professional domain of people who work in the fashion industry.
“One Fuck You Moment,” which slices up and rearranges a famous Veronica Webb quote from the 1995 documentary Catwalk, concludes with an assessment of the fashion world: “I think it’s very innocent compared to the music or movie industry…It’s similar, but a step down…I don’t know. It’s a funny thing, too. I mean, fashion is quite a ridiculous thing.”
Whether this statement reflects true or false humility, it communicates a longstanding prejudice against the fashion industry.
Part of this has to do with the fact that fashion is the mode of artistic expression least likely to produce work with staying power. Rapid change, after all, is the point, whether we are considering the seasonal collections themselves or the models who can see their own expiration date in the mirror from the moment they begin their careers.
As Supermodel aims to demonstrate, though, the historical situation of fashion is far more complicated. Precisely because designs and the models who showcase them are doomed to premature obsolescence, they can stand in for an era better than more durable culture.
In other words, supermodels in the 1990s functioned synecdochally, representing that decade the way movie stars represented the 1920s.
That’s before the consumer internet could deliver music and film efficiently. And before fame started to be eaten away by an entrepreneurial social media ecology in which amateurs loom large.
Even if people were already reading entertainment news online in the 1990s, they still had to pay for its subject the old-fashioned way. As a consequence, the media industries were flush with cash, enabling profligate lifestyles that now seem shockingly innocent, not of the flesh, but of the financial networks that made transgression feasible.
It’s hard to imagine a better subject for a critique of that era than the rise of the supermodel. No longer did being wildly famous require that a person do something, such as singing, acting, or writing. It was sufficient just to be memorably beautiful.
While this trend could already be discerned during the 1960s, as Twiggy’s celebrity demonstrated, by the 1990s, the exaltation of supermodels had spread far beyond the fashion industry to match or even exceed the treatment of movie and rock stars, despite what people in the fashion industry may have thought.
Sonic Youth’s 1992 song “Swimsuit Issue”, in which Kim Gordon recites the names of models who appeared in Sports Illustrated’s annual revenue generator, dates from a period when critics of mainstream consumer culture shifted their attention from Hollywood and the music industry to supermodels.
The liner notes make a great case for taking this approach.
“Beneath the nostalgia also sits a political undercurrent,” they note. “The supermodel era coincided with the acceleration of global consumer capitalism, the consolidation of media power, and the rise of celebrity as commercial infrastructure.”
That’s high-concept for popular music, reinforcing the impression that the tracks on Supermodel serve an indexical function, pointing to something beyond their auditory content.
Whereas the liner notes most definitely tell, however, the music mostly confines itself to showing. It’s certainly possible that someone listening to the album out of context would reach the same conclusions as its creators, but it is by no means guaranteed.
There are strong parallels here to the Hyperdub label’s first Burial releases in the 2000s, which could be interpreted as a retrospective critique of the previous decade’s culture, but also worked apolitically, as ear-pleasing ambient music.
Because Supermodel is looking back over a much longer span of time, perceiving the record’s critical dimension feels a little easier. But the fact that the liner notes have so much explaining to do—nearly 750 words worth—implies that the music buries the lede.
This quality is also evident in the music video Supermodel recently released for the song “Seventeen Days”, which is full of striking shots, yet too thematically complicated to deliver a clear message.
It’s also worth asking whether Supermodel is guilty of reproducing the phenomenon it is supposedly trying to critique, if on a more abstract level.
If you call your duo Supermodel and then release an eponymous album several years into your project, dissolving the boundary between subject and object comes with the territory.
In a sense, the term “supermodel” is the most important achievement of the fashion industry in the 1990s, with its deliberate echo of “superhero”.
Supermodels weren’t just the part of that era’s culture best suited to representing it as a whole. They were also the perfect part, in every sense of the term, to avert our gaze from its holes.
To invoke the supermodel, even in a self-consciously critical fashion, is to perpetuate the category’s fetishistic function, compensating for the lack we do not wish to acknowledge.
During the 1990s, this disavowal was primarily spatial. Today, by contrast, it is more temporal, directing our attention away from developments—corporate downsizing, the rise of Big Tech, the geopolitical imbalances caused by the end of the Cold War—that shaped the world we encounter today.
This is not to diminish Supermodel’s achievement. They have made a record that is intellectually stimulating without sounding didactic, one that will surely come to mind when the fashion industry is mentioned.
Perhaps the duo’s next musical collaboration will counter this overvaluation of the supermodel category.
Photograph courtesy of Thomas Hawk. Published under a Creative Commons license.
