Blood on the Tracks Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, and (Un)popular Music from Britney to Black Metal

This article explores Pynchon’s allusions to popular (and unpopular) music in Bleeding Edge (2013). I argue that Pynchon’s engagement with music can not only be understood in terms of its periodizing function but also as an intricate practice of historical and prophetic/proleptic layering. This practice compellingly highlights some of the ways in which music is both uniquely subversive and uniquely vulnerable to co-optation. In doing so, Pynchon’s fiction resonates with much-debated critiques of popular music by theorists such as Attali and Adorno, while at the same time significantly departing from them. The analysis ranges across the novel’s sonic extremes, from the inescapable mega-hits of Britney Spears to the infamous Norwegian black metal scene. It uses a strategically-chosen selection of tracks as ports of entry into the “musical unconscious” (Julius Greve and Sascha Pohlmann's term). Combining immersive close work on Bleeding Edge with extended discussions of the musical worlds beyond the novel's immediate parameters, the article ultimately moves towards a more expansive thesis: Music, I contend, can tell us as much about Pynchon as Pynchon does about music.

the transgressive and/or countercultural potential of musical expression, as well as in the perils of selling out to the proverbial "Man". More broadly, I would suggest from the outset that a kind of primordial tension rumbles beneath the surface of Pynchon's prose -between music, in Adorno's terms, as "the immediate manifestation of impulse" and music as "the locus of its taming." 9 Music in Pynchon can thus be understood (contra Nietzsche) as both Dionysian and Apollonian. It is "intoxicating" and "moderating", revelatory and reified. 10 As John Joseph Hess remarks in a (pre-"Playlist") article on Mason & Dixon (1997), "to emphasize the importance of music to Pynchon's fiction is to risk stating the obvious". The word "music", he points out, appears on over 300 occasions. At the same time, however, it highlights the "paradoxically under-examined" and "strangely undertheorized". There is, nevertheless, a "diverse and growing body of critical attention" in this area, and Hess duly acknowledges the contributions of a range of scholars. 11 With few exceptions, much of this critical effort has focused on Pynchon's canonical works from the sixties and seventies. There is also a strong emphasis on the structural and thematic significance of classical music (using that generic marker in its most London and New York: Vintage, 1995), 440. 9 Adorno, "Fetish", 288.
10 See Karol Berger, Beyond Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 403. Berger reads the opening claims of Adorno's "Fetish" as a critique of Nietzsche, and I have adopted the terminology he employs to explain the distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian -two of the foundational categories used to conceptualize music per se and (at least implicitly) its socio-political and psychical functioning. Although Berger identifies a shared "intuition" behind Adorno and Nietzsche's "critique of Wagnerian decadence", the former "revises The Birth of Tragedy" "[i]n one brilliant move" by insisting on a kind of simultaneity between "expressive detail" (Dionysian) and "large form" or "structure" (Apollonian). 11  Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 5 elastic sense), alongside Pynchon's own ditties (which can be thought of variously as periodizing, choric, and disruptive). 12 Gravity's Rainbow is the most-discussed text by some distance. The novel has been described by J. O. Tate as a Gesamtkunstwerk "of Wagnerian ambition, association, and accomplishment" that ultimately "savages" the völkisch, all-conquering mania of precisely such an enterprise. 13 For Kathryn Hume and Thomas J. Knight, "[m]usic proves to be so important to the novel that it creates the dimensions of its own loci of activity, its own metaphoric universe". It bridges "the abyss" between the novel's multiple realities, from the "quotidian" to the "supranatural", and it serves as a "vehicle for prophecy" by "projecting diachronically into the future". 14 Besides the contribution of Hess, which teases out some compelling links between references to Plato in Mason & Dixon and a wider concern with forms of musical and civic harmony after American independence, 15 this overview can now be supplemented with the more recent work of Anahita Rouyan and Sean Carswell. The former illuminates the unique "audionarratological" qualities of Gravity's Rainbow and the special value attributed to "vocal performance", while the latter explores the layered, politicized meanings of the ukulele (an instrument that appears in all eight novels). 16 Hänggi's 2017 doctoral thesis on "Pynchon's Sonic Fiction" will, one hopes, become the first monograph on the subject. 17 Although Pynchon scholarship has not yet fully addressed some of the intellectual currents that inform contemporary 12 Hess, building on the work of Clerc, suggests that "Pynchon's lyrics might [in some cases] be considered as a sort of Brechtian ' alienation effect'", 3. Given Hess's focus on Mason & Dixon, this point is strengthened by the novel's references to John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), which was adapted by Brecht as The Threepenny Opera in 1928. 13  Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 6 approaches to the relationship between literature and music, the ongoing conversation here is clearly a rich one. 18 Building on these foundations, this analysis explores the soundscapes of Bleeding Edge (2013). It is primarily concerned with the allusions to popular (and in some respects unpopular) music from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
It argues that there is a distinct creative relationship between Pynchon's treatment of music in this novel -which begins in the spring of 2001 and finishes around the same time the following year, the shockwaves of 9/11 still reverberating -and his expansive, networked take on what it means to live at the bleeding edge of history and technology. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael Jarvis contrasts the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson with Pynchon's "historical novel" -stuffed as it is with "the signifiers of Gen-Y media saturation" -in order to argue that while Gibson can be read as a chronicler of an "unevenly distributed future" that we already inhabit, Pynchon's text "demonstrates how quickly the present becomes the unremembered past". 19 It is my contention, however, that music in Bleeding Edge contributes to an altogether more intricate and interesting practice of historical layering, while also pointing towards the known and unknown futures beyond the novel's present time. Exploring the novel's musical references therefore helps to establish a unique way of "hearing double", of "listening" to its complex then/now dynamics. Stumbling across millennial chart-toppers such as Nelly's "Ride Wit Me" or Semisonic's "Closing Time" might well induce what Jarvis calls an "incredulous realization" (at least for readers belonging to certain demographics) that the times, as it were, are not just a-changin' but already thoroughly transformed. 20  Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 7 deeper processes in play here, already hinted at by Hume and Knight's claim about the "metaphoric universe" of music and its "diachronic" pulsing in Gravity's Rainbow.
Jacques Attali's Noise (1977), for instance, one of the most influential and audacious accounts of "the political economy of music", consistently stresses the ways music functions as a "herald of the future": [S]tyles and economic organization of music are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself on the order of things. 21 As Steven Shaviro notes, Noise was of course written "before the Walkman, let alone the iPod," and the prophetic/utopian elements of Attali's own theory -particularly the notion that "[a]s the consumption of music (and of images) becomes ever more privatized and solipsistic" it will "mutate into a practice of freedom" -can appear naïve when measured against, say, the "retromania" diagnosed by Simon Reynolds. 22 In contrast to the "profound mutation, delocalized and diffuse, that fundamentally changes the code of social reproduction" imagined by Attali,23 the dominant forms of contemporary popular culture, argues Reynolds, are driven by cutting (and indeed bleeding) edge digital technology but find themselves perversely unable to innovate. The twenty-first century, he polemically claims, is under the sign of the prefix "'re'" -"revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments." The radical promise of the digital age is ever more difficult to perceive vis-à-vis the mesmeric, endless rearrangement and consumption of the recent past (specifically the past that still belongs to "living memory"). 24 There are certainly moments in Bleeding Edge that appear to dramatize some of what Reynolds is articulating here, most obviously via the lavish tech sector party "Closing Time", track 1 on Feeling Strangely Fine, MCA, 1998; Jarvis, "Deep Web." 21 Attali,Noise,11. 22  Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 8 held at Tworkeffx, a SoHo nightclub. The official theme of the event is "1999", with "a darker subtext of Denial." A long descriptive sequence with echoes of F. Scott Fitzgerald details how the crowd of webheads take part in a "consensual delusion" that "they're still in the pre-crash fantasy" and dance "in the shadow of last year's dreaded Y2K, now safely history." The sound-system, "looted from a failed arena somewhere in Eastern Europe," blasts the obligatory Prince track, alongside latenineties tunes by the light college rock band Barenaked Ladies (presumably their droll yet saccharine single "It's All Been Done" is the implied, doubly-ironized reference) and hip hop crew Bone Thugs-N-Harmony (notable for advancing Gangsta rap by incorporating aspects of spiritual inquiry associated with soul and gospel, and whose bestselling album is entitled E. 1999 Eternal). 25  Nevertheless, Attali's emphasis on the inherent "futurity" of music, as well as his insistence that music is a privileged site where "mutations first occur", 27 uniquely vulnerable to co-optation yet uniquely insubordinate, helps to complicate a straightforward reading of Bleeding Edge in which the musical allusions are simply period details that do no more than communicate how rapidly the "now" becomes "then". It also points to how the role of music in the novel cannot be exclusively conceived of in terms of some neoliberal Ouroboros -the inane gurglings of popular culture eating itself -or explained away via sweeping declarations about gentrification, infantilisation, tech-mediated nostalgia, and so on. With both the historicity and futurity of 25 Prince, "1999", track 1 on 1999(Warner Brothers, 1982; Barenaked Ladies, "It's All Been Done", track 2 on Stunt (Reprise, 1998);Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, E. 1999Eternal, Ruthless Records, 1995 27 Attali, Noise, 6.
Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 9 music in mind, my analysis strategically ranges across Bleeding Edge's sonic extremes, from the inescapable mega-hits of Britney Spears to the abject, gruesome aesthetics of black metal. These two reference points are paired in the novel with what appear to be vivid, more venerable contrasts (the Beach Boys and Frank Sinatra) and they represent the diversity as well as the interconnectedness of the novel's "heterophonic" playlist. 28 More specifically, they are used in the later sections of this project as ports of entry into a "musical unconscious", a term I borrow from Julius Greve and Sascha Pöhlmann's reflections on the "peculiar role" of music in American Studies. 29 Music, I contend, can tell us as much about Pynchon as Pynchon does about music, and giving this claim substance necessitates a combination of immersive close work with the novel itself and a more expansive treatment of the musical worlds beyond the immediate parameters of the text. Music reverberates, pulses, and echoes through individual and collective bodies, through the levels of the psyche, through the historical and contemporary layers of Pynchon's fiction. Exploring these layers and the wider contexts I have hinted at is therefore part of a critical process that lends an ear to Attali's (and Pynchon's) immensely suggestive yet never quite fully articulated conception of music's double quality, its simultaneous amenability and recalcitrance in the face of power.

II. Swinging Detectives and Millennial Shifts
Like so many of Pynchon's novels, Bleeding Edge draws on the conventions of crime/detective narratives. Given the genre's enduring influence on Pynchon, an intriguing and relatively under-scrutinized set of literary-musical relationships emerges as part of the backdrop here. The multifarious interplay between crime writing and music stretches from Conan Doyle's Holmes, who famously owns a Stradi-28 This term is borrowed from St. Clair, used throughout Sound and Aural Media, cited in n. 6. 29 Julius Greve and Sascha Pöhlmann, "Introduction: What is the Musical Unconscious?," in America and the Musical Unconscious (New York and Dresden: Atropos Press, 2015), 9. The introduction to this edited collection outlines various ways of conceptualizing the musical unconscious -as an "excess of meaning", as a contextual reservoir, as "transtemporal" and "technological" motion, and as a factor in the construction of "imagined communities" (22,25,29,36). Each of these notions comes to bear on the approach I have adopted here. varius violin and (rather less famously) is the author of a privately-circulated thesis on the "Polyphonic Motets of Lassus", to the record company suits and wannabe pop stars of Elmore Leonard's Be Cool (1999). 30 James Ellroy has conceptualised his neonoir prose as an attempt to create his own version of the "big, thunderous music" he associates with Beethoven and Bruckner. 31 The significance of jazz and blues for Walter Mosely, both aesthetically and politically given his post 9/11 reflections on African American culture as a bulwark against US "economic domination" and militarism, is well established. 32 Donald E. Westlake, whose description of New York City as an "enigmatic suspect" provides the epigraph to Bleeding Edge, has (like Raymond Chandler and Pynchon himself) an unproduced libretto on his CV. 33 Music, in other words, has bled for a long while into the various modes of sleuthing and has nourished crime fiction's defining thematic concern with broader kinds of harmony and dissonance. Analogies between musical connoisseurship and the processes of detection further contribute to the relationship, as does the way crime writing divides and spreads into distinct micro-genres and fan cultures (operating in tandem with what Jorge Luis Borges calls the "continual and delicate infraction of its rules"). 34 This diverse but tangible living tradition provides a broad framework for thinking about Pynchon's connection to music that is just as significant as any high-modernist poly- The novel begins with a low-key attempt to probe the suspect diversion of funds from a shadowy Internet start-up firm called hashslingrz to an even more suspect company, Darklinear Solutions. However, the "centrifugal" energy that defines Pynchon's associative, paranoid style -his habit of working through "a string of citations" is notably likened to John Coltrane's soloing technique by Jonathan Lethem -cannot be held back for long. 35 The case quickly develops into an elaborate network of strange and dubious transactions, all seemingly tied in some way to the villainous dotcom entrepreneur Gabriel Ice. The woman charged with playing the heroic detective is the de-certified fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow -a Jewish New Yorker, resident of the "Yupper West Side" of Manhattan, and doting mother of two (166). As Maxine negotiates a series of increasingly difficult challenges, she is obliged to become conscious of the costs -economic, emotional, and ethical -that she and others are incurring, and must strike a precarious balance between her desires, her responsibility to her family, her principles, and the quest for definitive answers.
Woven into her investigation are possible connections to 9/11 (Pynchon strategically flirting here with aspects of trutherism), the CIA's history of clandestine support for repressive regimes during the Cold War, a "virtual sanctuary" known as DeepArcher

Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 12
With a specific focus on music in mind, and indeed the pervasive emphasis in crime fiction on grey areas of the law, we should note that Bleeding Edge is set just after a landmark court case that began in May 2000. Metallica, soon followed by hip hop impresario Dr. Dre, became the first recording artists to sue Napster, the peer-topeer file sharing service, for copyright infringement and racketeering. Napster was founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker in 1999. Both were still teenagers, armed only with Dell notebooks. Their journey from the margins to the mainstream invites a series of parallels with the eccentric cast of "wired" characters -online anarchists and corporate sharks -that populate Bleeding Edge. The Napster source code written by Fanning combined "the instant-messaging system of Internet Relay, the filesharing functions of Microsoft Windows, and the advanced […] filtering capabilities of various search engines." 36 It quickly mutated from a beta program used by tech-savvy students at Northeastern University to an unprecedented economic and existential challenge to the music industry as it then was -noting here that Bleeding Edge's "widely coveted yet ill-defined DeepArcher application" designed by Justin and Lucas offers "an invisible self-recoding pathway" into untraceable virtual space, where radical new forms of freedom and exchange, alongside previously undreamt of "Neolib mischief", may become possible (67,79,411). Napster, as Greg Kot explains, played a central role in turning the downloading of MP3s, once "a relatively esoteric pursuit", into a global, everyday practice. 37 After a general suit was filed by the Recording Industry Association of America, Metallica's decision to sue generated enormous publicity -compounded by an infamous stunt pulled by the band's outspoken drummer Lars Ulrich, who appeared on the front steps of Napster's San Mateo headquarters alongside a pick-up truck loaded with box files containing the "names of hundreds of thousands of […] users who were making Metallica songs available on the Internet." 38 In contrast to artists such as the Beastie Boys, one of the first major groups to make their music freely available via 36  their own website, Metallica's stance provoked a significant blowback from fans and cultural commentators, with many dismayed by the spectacle of arena-filling millionaires taking on a company at that point associated with a youthful, dynamic kind of cyber-geek utopianism. 39 If a new form of theft was the charge levelled against Napster, hypocrisy and greed were the rather more time-honoured accusations made against a band that had cut their teeth in the 80s Bay Area thrash metal scene, a beerand-sweat-drenched era of underground tape-trading, live-show bootlegging, the DIY reproduction of logos, and so on. Ulrich's rhetoric in defending the band's legal action, however, invoked a high-minded opposition to "art being traded like a commodity", later supplemented by a kind of anti-establishment machismo in describing the whole episode as a territorial "street fight" about "control". 40 Sean Parker, arrested for hacking by the FBI aged 15, is now on the Forbes billionaire list, having served as the first president of Facebook, and is a major investor in Spotify (as the regulation of digital music continues to evolve in the era of algorithmic data-mining). Dr. Dre, who proclaims himself "the same O. G." in a fiery musical riposte to critics and haters, "mad at me 'cause I can finally afford to provide", has also left a significant mark on the consumption of digital music by lending his braggadocious cred to the Beats Electronics range of headphones and speakers, and an early streaming service (both now absorbed by Apple). 41 As Hänggi notes, Bleeding Edge has "the longest playlist of Pynchon's novels in relative terms (i.e., per word) and is second only to Gravity's Rainbow in absolute terms". https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/metallica-sue-napster-for-copyright-infringe-  42 Hänggi, "Sonic Fiction", 138. It is also noted, however, that the novel "contains the fewest songs composed by Pynchon, the fewest Pynchon songs sung by the novel's characters, and the highest count of canned music playing".

Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 14
The very notion of the "playlist" as it is currently understood, of course, emerges from the digital transformations that frame, and flow through, this novel. The context outlined above also helps to reveal some of the logic behind Pynchon's engagement with genres such as metal and hip hop for the first time in his career. While neither Metallica nor Dr. Dre is alluded to directly, some of Pynchon's more eyebrow-raising excursions into these musical terrains will be explored in the latter stages of this analysis. Napster is namechecked in Bleeding Edge, though, by Reg Despard, the documentary-maker whose initial visit to the "Tail 'Em and Nail 'Em" agency sets the whole case in motion.
"Someday there'll be a Napster for videos," he later tells Maxine, and "it'll be routine to post anything and share it with anybody", to which she responds by asking "How could anybody make money doing that?" (348-49). Jarvis interprets Reg's foresight here as "a complex joke" -YouTube is "thriving" (bought by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006 and now just as crucial to the integrated dissemination and archiving of music as it is to recorded images), while "Napster […] has long been relegated to a historical footnote." 43 This reading is undoubtedly persuasive on one level. However, it rather understates the game-changing significance of Napster (which in its most recent, paid-for incarnation actually released a playlist of Pynchon-inspired music to celebrate the publication of Bleeding Edge) 44 and does not acknowledge the complex ways digital technology actively reconfigures the cultural interplay between past, present, and future. The broader point then is that the musical allusions and performances in Bleeding Edge are both the product of and a reflection on the unprecedented availability of recorded music in the twenty-first century. The novel's playlist is at the very least implicitly tied to major changes in listening habits, in the attribution of value to music, in the rights and status of music-makers, in the creation and dissolution of musical subcultures, in relations between music and the world of physical objects (or "meatspace" in the novel's own lexicon). This is not to suggest that Pynchon succumbs to the hyperbolic "digital exceptionalism" identified by Bruce Epperson, who criticizes accounts of Napster that appear oblivious to the history 43 Jarvis, "Deep Web." 44 See https://us.napster.com/blog/post/thomas-pynchon-and-pop-music. of intellectual property law and previous "experiments in shareware" such as the radio. 45 As I have already hinted, musical allusion in the novel actively contributes to a process of historical layering. The impact of these millennial shifts, however, remains undeniably profound.
If the rise of Napster has been summarized in terms such as "The Day the Music was Set Free", the novel's backdrop also includes "The Day the Music Died". 46 This second phrase was the headline lifted from the well-known lyrics of Don McLean's "American Pie" by the San Francisco Chronicle to summarise Woodstock '99 -"one of the biggest debacles in concert history", according to Jane Ganahl, the author of the column, and another intersection of sorts between music and criminality. 47 Following on from a 25 th -anniversary festival in '94 that passed largely without incident, this hyper-commodified, MTV-backed revival of the legendary "Aquarian exposition", as the 1969 event was billed, ended up paralleling Altamont (the original Woodstock's dark double) as a kind of shorthand for the bitter end of a decade. The peace and love evoked by the iconic image of a dove resting on the neck of a guitar was supplanted by infrastructural chaos (MTV's Kurt Loder described the scene as "like a concentration camp"), and numerous instances of sexual assault, fighting, and vandalism. 48 A performance by the nü-metal act Limp Bizkit, who received $1.8 million from Napster to fund a free concert tour that same summer, is espe-  of festivalgoers defended the implicated performers by claiming that much of the unrest was a reaction against Woodstock becoming "Commercialstock" -the result, in other words, of a failure to deliver on the promise of an "emancipative imaginary", or the "semiotic and mythic burden" that music in this context is seemingly required to bear. 53 However, as Christopher Gair argues in an outstanding discussion of the documentary record of the 1969 festival, it is problematic to invoke the original Woodstock as some Edenic, unsullied idyll against which subsequent falls are measured. The event was, in itself, deeply marked by "the contradictions of the counterculture movement at the end of the 1960s". It might not have "exploded into violence in the manner of Altamont" (or its late nineties corporate-backed sequel), but closely analyzing the remarkable footage compiled by Michael Wadleigh nonetheless exposes a "utopia/dystopia dialectic" that is far more nuanced than the widely mythologized narrative of "a community offering genuine alternatives to dominant American lifestyles". 54 The vibes, as it were, are thoroughly mixed, not only due to the fabled brown acid.
Pynchon, of course, has engaged with the counterculture (and indeed with "alternatives" to America as it was and is) from the outset of his career. His fictions, as

Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 18
Vice (2009) as "this little parenthesis of light" continues to exert its intoxicating influence. 57 The Bleeding Edge playlist, moreover, features numerous references to artists from the Woodstock '99 milieu -it includes two, Jamiroquai and Moby, 58 who actually performed there -and also alludes to popular music which can be associated, as Hänggi astutely emphasizes, with US military interventions after 9/11. Easy listening, Middle-of-the-Road balladry, and themes from movies and television shows also feature heavily. It is therefore tempting to speculate that Bleeding Edge "may indicate […] Pynchon's hopes for resistance by means of making music as staged in his earlier novels have been disappointed". 59 But just as Gair reads Wadleigh's film of Woodstock as both a celebration and an exposé, any reader of Pynchon will know that utopian and/or subversive openings of all kinds -from the Zone in Gravity's Rainbow to DeepArcher in Bleeding Edge -are invariably precarious, fragile, and embattled. An analysis of music in this most recent novel cannot rely on a onedimensional sense of a more radical, innocent, or authentic past (both within and beyond the confines of his fiction). Pynchon is quite clearly alert to the hazards of nostalgia, and Bleeding Edge satirizes the digital acceleration of sentimental longing for times-gone-by via the Tworkeffex scene I have already mentioned. His own brand of "nostalgia" is, as James Berger argues in relation to Vineland (1990), a "nostalgia for the future, for possibilities of social harmony glimpsed at crucial moments in the past, but not ever yet realized." 60 In addition, the sanctimony that characterizes many reflections on Woodstock '99 is clearly not a promising basis for analyzing the role of musical allusion in Bleeding Edge or Pynchon's relationship to music more generally. Impish remarks about "widespread Attention Deficit Disorder" aside, the novel again provides a 57 Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), 254. 58 Specifically to "Canned Heat" and "Cosmic Girl" by the former and "That's When I Reach For My Revolver" by the latter (221-22 pre-emptive set of critical parameters. When Vyrva confesses to Maxine that she has betrayed her husband, Justin (one of the duo behind DeepArcher), by having an affair with the reviled Gabriel Ice, their conversation unfolds tellingly: 'Since Las Vegas last summer. We even got in a quickie on September 11 th , which makes it that much worse…' 'I hope you're not saying you caused that somehow? That would be really and Sally Nevius. A full transcript of the 1985 Senate hearing on "sexually explicit and offensive content" is archived here: http://www.joesapt.net/superlink/shrg99-529/.
Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 20 violence is like blaming Marilyn Manson for Columbine. At the same time, though, the novel maintains a fierce stance against "the capitalist drive to commodify everything" 63 and toys with the role that popular music might play in feeding and facilitating a variety of dark impulses and power structures. Using the novel's own allusions as routes into the "musical unconscious" will bring these claims to light, as well as point to a broader interpretive strategy that encompasses both reading and listening.
Nevertheless, for all the layers of qualification here, it is still legitimate to claim that Bleeding Edge attributes "affirmative" meanings to popular music. The novel welcomes musical expressions of whimsy, affection, anger, sorrow, comfort, and arousal in a way that many thinkers working in the post-Frankfurt School tradition would never countenance (Attali can be included here given his quasi-Adornian approach to commodified popular music, even if Noise ultimately climaxes with an eyebrowraisingly flamboyant kind of utopianism). Pynchon, after all, is a novelist who once wrote that "rock and roll remains one of the last honorable callings", in the liner notes for Nobody's Cool, a 1996 album by the alt-guitar band Lotion, who once appeared in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and had a track included on a compilation CD sold exclusively in Taco Bell restaurants. 64 Although it would be foolish to take this statement entirely at face value, the case for further investigation of the novel's soundscapes is a compelling one.

III. Catsuits & Jumpsuits
With my previous description of the novel's sonic extremes in mind, it is appropriate that the very first allusion to music of any kind in Bleeding Edge represents one of the most prominent nodes in this network. It occurs when Pynchon details a past encounter at a Long Island warehouse between Maxine and Dwayne Z. Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 21 Cubitts, a "gizmo retailer" and "low-stakes hustler" with a persistent record of " inventory fraud": 'Dizzy, what.' 'Oops, I did it again, as Britney always sez.' 'Look at this,' stomping up and down the aisles taking and lifting sealed cartons at random. A number of these, to somebody's surprise maybe, not Maxine's, seemed, though sealed, to have nothing inside. (7) The reference here is to "Oops! … I Did It Again" by Britney Spears, the lead single from the album of the same name released in 2000. The song was written and coproduced by Max Martin, a "sui generis" musician from Stockholm described as the "master hooksmith" of contemporary pop. 65 For better or worse (exposure to such music is not always a question of choice or even autonomy), Martin is a principal shaper of how the contemporary world sounds and has been identified as the main culprit behind the much maligned yet wildly successful formula known as the "millennial whoop". This relatively early example of his hit-making craft, which quickly achieved a kind of inescapable ubiquity, holds the US record for the most additions to radio station rosters in a single day. It was accompanied by a kitsch, sci-fi inspired video that features Britney performing an elaborately choreographed dance routine in a red catsuit. The song itself is glossy, mid-tempo, bubblegum funk-pop in C sharp minor with a bona-fide "earworm" chorus. 66 The fact that it has wormed its way, as it were, into Dizzy's everyday speech -the outcome of complex interactions between neurology, cultural dissemination systems, and capitalist marketing strategies -is "dishevelled model of an ocean liner" that shares "a number of design elements with RMS Titanic" is described just five pages later, when Pynchon recounts Maxine's first encounter with Reg on a bizarre cruise holiday. Two of her recurring professional ties (and two important plot strands) are thus delicately inflected, via chains of allusion, with tones both sugary and doom-laden, arguably heightened by the parallels that are sometimes drawn between the sinking of the great ship and 9/11 as era-defining calamities registered on a global scale. 67 "Oops" also helped to establish Britney's trademark vocal approach -an affected, slightly nasal delivery in the soubrette range -and the lyrics have provoked a range of gendered (not to mention sexually and morally charged) interpretations by music journalists. It has been condemned as "a jailbait manifesto" and lauded as a "sweetly sadistic companion to the masochism lite lurking beneath her debut" (entitled "… Baby One More Time"). 68 While connections to the (sado)masochistic and fetishistic practices that recur throughout Pynchon's work are not wholly implausible, 69 the wider point here is that this song and its accompanying video helped to accelerate the pathologization of Britney as a symbol of both innocence and corruption at the dawn of the twenty-first century. She is a figure, as Christopher R. Smit argues, who has been "offered" to the world in "many forms": "a child prodigy, a southern belle, an adolescent play thing, a body to be desired, a desire embodied", ultimately culminating in her "exile" from the polis of pop culture after an unpleasant, exploitatively publicized breakdown in 2007. 70  as Britney can be located in the more specific context of a "postfeminist franchise" culture that fuses "empowerment rhetoric with traditionalist identity paradigms".
The "ambivalent" milieu that Britney belongs to, they suggest, cannot be accurately characterized using "straightforward distinctions between progressive and regressive" (or indeed the loaded, hyperbolic scorn and praise that fill column inches). Her songs thus celebrate a diffuse concept of "girlhood" in a way that implicitly builds In one sense of course, Dizzy's quotation from "Oops" is just another surface detail -goofy, fleeting, part of the flotsam and jetsam strewn throughout Bleeding Edge.
Moreover, it might be tempting for some readers to find an implied (and judgemental) link between the music of Britney Spears and the trashy gadgets that Dizzy peddles in his unhinged TV commercials: "closet organizers, kiwi peelers, laser-assisted wine-bottle openers, pocket rangefinders that scan the lines at the checkout" (6).
The machine behind the "Britney Spears Economy" (approximately $120 million in annual revenue between 2001 and 2008) produced innumerable novelty items and other merchandise that would not be out of place in Dizzy's warehouse. 73 Going a little further, one of the more obvious critical manoeuvres here would be to frame the allusion as an expression of the "repetitive volatilization" that, according to Fredric Jameson, defines the musical dimension of mass cultural experience. There is, in effect, no "' original' musical text" for the scholar/detective to uncover because we encounter such music in so many different commodified environments. In this way, Jameson claims, we never really hear pop songs "for the first time". Any attachments Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 24 are fully as much a function of our own familiarity as of the work itself: the pop single, by means of repetition, insensibly becomes part of the existential fabric of our own lives, so that what we listen to is ourselves, our own previous auditions. 74 Pop culture becoming "part of the existential fabric of our own lives" is most certainly a notable aspect of Pynchon's fiction and is especially acute in Bleeding Edge given its digital emphasis. With Jameson's framework in mind, the particularity (and to some extent the historicity) of the allusion to Britney Spears is not the point -it could just as well be Christina Aguilera, Alanis Morrisette, or Limp Bizkit. Dizzy could instead quip about a genie in a bottle, rain on a wedding day, doin' it all for the nookie, and so on. Musical allusion of this sort could therefore be understood not only in terms of all-pervasive commodification and the general "noise" of popular culture but also as the soundtrack to subjectivity itself and its tech-mediated dispersal. However, Jameson's attempt to build on the Frankfurt School approach to mass culture is sealed off from the resurgence of musical hermeneutics 75 and consistently shys away from the many implications of his own notion of "volatility". The "power" of popular music, as Shaviro ventures, may actually be rooted in (not contrary to) "its commodity status, how it works through the logic of repetition and commodification, and pushes this further [as a 'volatile' form] than any capitalist apologetics would find comfortable." 76 Moreover, Greve and Pöhlmann's work, while evidently indebted to Jameson, theorizes the musical unconscious as a contextual "resource of connotations that oscillate between absence and presence". These "connotations" encompass aspects of "musical performance and its reception, technological advances and cultural and historical regimes". 77 Combined with an expanded sense of the "ambivalent" field that Britney inhabits (according to Tasker and Negra), the specifics of the reference therefore acquire more substance. It exemplifies how the novel's allusions to popular music open up creative and critical possibilities that are reducible to neither hollow parody nor despairing indictments of its emptiness (like Dizzy's fraudulent cartons).
As I have already noted, Hänggi's approach to Bleeding Edge places a strong emphasis on how the novel's playlist can be interpreted in a post 9/11 context. He identifies, for example, the oblique nods to songs that were effectively banned from the airwaves by the Clear Channel corporation in the immediate aftermath of the attacks (REM's "It's the End of the World as We Know It", Sinatra's "New York, New York") as well as references to styles of music played by US troops during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (metal, hip hop), and to artists whose songs have been used to torture prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. 78 Britney Spears is one of the latter. According to the 2005 Schmidt-Furlough report on allegations of abuse at the detention camp, so-called "futility music" was deployed as part of Gitmo's Standard Operating Procedure. "Metallica, Britney Spears, and Rap" are mentioned in the report, with further details emerging from the testimonies of detainees and military personnel. 79 Britney's songs were played at high volume in repeating loops while prisoners were immobilized in stress positions or subjected to strobe lighting.
"Oops", specifically, has also been used by the United Kingdom's Merchant Navy to deter pirates while patrolling the coast of Somalia in the same year that Bleeding Edge was published. 80 The fact that Dizzy references the song in the presence of gadgets that subtly recall aspects of military technology helps to compound this link (the terms "laser-assisted" and "rangefinder" have lethal resonances). This is not to say, however, that the contemporary weaponization of music is unprecedented or restricted to particular genres. Hänggi points to the use of The inhumane and illegal punishment meted out in Gitmo is of course not the direct responsibility of Britney Spears, even when factoring in a toe-curling (but also rather smugly derided) interview on CNN's aptly named "Crossfire" (Figure 2). The interview took place a week after her onstage kiss with Madonna at the MTV Awards and roughly five months after the invasion of Iraq: "I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful [sic] in what happens". Footage from the interview, which also included a question about the singer's favourite kind of Pepsi (the answer: "Pepsi's Pepsi"), was subsequently used by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). 87 Britney, in fact, was once described as "our President Bush" by the founder of the entertainment news outlet TMZ and skewered in a Rolling Stone profile as "the canary in the coal mine of our culture". She is the "perfect celebrity for America in decline", wrote Vanessa Grigoriadis. "She just doesn't give a fuck". 88   mass culture, the gender politics and cruelty of stardom, or the types of insight we demand from performers -points to the genuinely sinister side of music's volatile and/or vulnerable quality when harnessed by the Military-Industrial Complex. This does not invalidate Shaviro's insistence that popular music has the capacity to "work through" or elude the grim forces of co-optation in ways that are perhaps yet to be fully realized or theorized. But there are clearly questions of cost and complicity in play here -awful and harrowing noises echoing around the musical unconscious, the sonic equivalent of what Pynchon would call "bad karma". Indeed, Maxine's response to the Britney allusion (a time-travelling reference, as it were, that points forward to post-9/11 warfare while also connecting to past conflicts) could be interpreted on some level as an attempt to ward this off. She grits her teeth and starts whistling "Help Me, Rhonda", the classic 1965 single by the Beach Boys (7).
One immediate temptation might therefore be to pit Brian Wilson's compositional wizardry against Britney's Full-Spectrum Dominance, the pop visionary vs. the corporate construct. Indeed, the music of the Beach Boys offers a distinctive combination of instantly hummable sunshine melodies and crafty experimentalism, of the clean cut and the far out. The band feature in Inherent Vice 89 and Pynchon is said to have met Brian Wilson during the original Smile sessions in 1967 (although by all accounts the encounter was a rather stilted affair). 90 Lyrically, "Help Me, Rhonda"'s emphasis on finding a new lover after being jilted, an oddly jaunty expression of "emotional desperation", also functions as a sort of riposte to "Oops". 91 However, as with the Britney reference and the wider contextual framework of the two Woodstocks, there are many vibrations to contend with, already hinted at by the slight disjunction between lyrical content 89 Doc Sportello sings "a few falsetto bars of 'Wouldn't It Be Nice'" to his on/off partner Penny (72) and the novel closes with the hippie detective driving through a thick fog (of metaphor too), with "God Only Knows" on the Vibrasonic (368 and vocal delivery in a number of the Beach Boys' tracks. The tale of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys is, after all, another narrative of opposites collapsing into one another -innocence and experience, virtue and vice, creativity and destruction -that compellingly overlaps with many of Pynchon's enduring concerns while also exposing some unexpected parallels with the "ambivalence" of the Britney phenomenon. After beginning life as a garage band, the group forged a unique Californian sound forever associated with dreamy yet bittersweet evocations of youthful high jinks and endless summer. They revolutionised studio-recording techniques, and Wilson is widely regarded as one of popular music's geniuses (compared to Mozart, for instance, in a BBC feature). 92 As Ben Ratliff writes, the Beach Boys are now "heavy" with an aura of "honor", "fixed identity", and "essential rightness." 93 However, credibility or cultural capital of the kind denied to Britney is no defence against the violent repurposing of music and its trappings. The pre-9/11 examples of musicas-torture outlined above are testament to this and two of the not-so-secret locations on the Guantánamo base are named "Strawberry Fields" and "Penny Lane" after Beatles songs. 94 Neither does exceptional talent provide immunity from other forms of tension, contradiction, and imbroglio. The Beach Boys helped to prepare some of the ground for the sixties countercultural explosion, with the band going on to absorb aspects of LSD-soaked psychedelia, but the square aspects of their sound and image meant that this relationship was a consistently awkward one. 95 The succinctly focused song-writing and teenage angst of their early work laid foundations for the Ramones and SoCal skate punk, yet Brian Wilson has claimed, albeit with a strong hint of disingenuousness, that he is baffled by "fast music". 96  Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 30 and released a song written by Charles Manson. 97 In 1983, just prior to the Orwellian year in which Vineland is set, the Beach Boys were dubbed "America's Band" by Ronald Reagan (Figure 3). They became "willing participants in presidential political theater" and were framed as the musical embodiment of the wholesome family values and unquestioning patriotism that Bleeding Edge identifies as ideologically resurgent in the wake of 9/11. 98 The band were a regular fixture at federally-sanctioned Fourth of July celebrations in the early eighties, despite their epic and well-documented substance abuse (a concern once raised by Reagan's Interior Secretary James Watt) and their support for environmental programs that were distinctly at odds with burgeoning neoliberal policy. 99   Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 32 ing for pop that perhaps also highlights music's complex relationship to the body and to gendered forms of exploitation and sacrifice can be detected in the swirling noise and information behind the Britney reference. As reported by MTV News, the singer suffered an injury during the video shoot for "Oops" after being struck on the head by falling camera equipment, receiving four stitches before resuming her performance. 105 This does not mean that Bleeding Edge erases all distinctions between these "blood tracks" 106 or that committed value judgements about popular music are somehow off the table. Rather, engaging with the Bleeding Edge playlist means coming to terms with a complex series of contexts, compromises, and (guilty) pleasures. It also demonstrates how it is the very "ambivalence" and "volatility" of popular music that makes it so worrisome and, simultaneously, so useful to authority. Thus, the "smooth legato phrasing" of Frank Sinatra, 107 to be discussed further vis-à-vis the novel's allusions to metal, was briefly considered taboo during the corporate policing of the airwaves after 9/11, while explicitly anti-establishment and/or pacifistic

IV. Pigs' Heads and Bobby-Soxers
If Britney's "Oops" represents one of the novel's musical extremes, Pynchon's references to metal would appear to locate us in a very different dimension. In various senses, though, these extremes can be understood as an expression of interconnectedness. It could be argued, for instance, that the novel's musical allusions, when conceptualised as a playlist, reflect some of the potentially stimulating ways digital listening challenges long-standing formats and overrides many of the sociological factors that have kept contrasting or divisive styles of music in separate realms. This possibility comes with the proviso, as Ratliff warns in Every Song Ever (2016), that surrendering to the algorithms of streaming services can create "bottomless comfort zones", a risk which connects to the novel's wider concern with the internet as an instrument of control and/or narcissistic distraction. 109 Ratliff's warning, in an otherwise optimistic discussion of the "compensations" of digital listening, also helps to put some of the zeal of Attali's pre-Big Data utopianism into perspective (specifically his image of the consumer-as-producer and the emancipatory "mutation[s]" that emerge from "[p]leasure tied to the self-directed gaze"), 110 while at the same time lending a new pertinence to Adorno's pummelling critique, for all its wince-inducing elements, of atomistic "regressive" listening. 111 More groundedly, though, the sonic extremes of Pynchon's novel can be brought into contact with each other given Hänggi's claim that music in Bleeding Edge acquires a variety of charged meanings in the light of 9/11 and the War on Terror -a framework that is equally applicable to bubblegum pop and crunching riffs. With my focus now shifting to the latter, Jonathan R. Pieslak's interviews with US troops for his study Sound Targets (2009)  of music I guess, things like that, metal, hardcore." 112 Other soldiers have referred to "war itself" as "heavy metal". 113 What is striking, though, is that Pynchon's novel does   9/11, 26. 115 Metallica, Metallica, Elektra, 1991. Commonly referred to as "The Black Album" on account of its cover art. 116 "'Whole problem 'th you folks's generation,' Isaiah opined, 'nothing personal, is you believed in nerd Driscoll Padgett end up at Maxine's apartment as "real-estate casualties" of 9/11, black metal is the "soundtrack of choice" for their "spare-room activities" when under the influence of Ambien, the sleeping pill that can be used recreationally for its hallucinatory and libido-boosting effects (332-33). The squalling bleakness of black metal, which often prioritises wall-of-sound atmosphere over anything resembling a hook, sometimes verging on a kind of infernal psychedelia, is superficially (and of course humorously) set up as the headache-inducing alternative to the rather more sedate tunes enjoyed by Maxine and her estranged husband, Horst, who have resumed their "marital relations" by this point in the narrative. Horst is rendered "helpless", we are told, upon hearing "the most poignant B-flat in all lounge music", and "Maxine has long ago learned to seize the moment" (332). The enchanting B-flat in question can be heard in "Time After Time", a light jazz standard written by Cahn and Styne that was first popularized by Frank Sinatra's performance in the 1947 movie It Happened in Brooklyn (accompanied by a young off-screen André Previn on piano). 117 Perhaps not-so-incidentally, the note that Pynchon emphasizes here was cemented into the foundations of Western composition out of musico-theological necessity. For church musicians in the later Middle Ages, flattening B to a perfect fifth below F helped to avoid the dreaded diabolus in musica (also known as the tritone or augmented fourth in modern tonal theory). 118 Centuries later, that once forbidden sound would become a core characteristic of heavy metal, with Tommy Iommi's opening guitar chords on Black Sabbath's debut heralding the birth of this most intricately and passionately stratified genre. 119 It is especially integral to black metal's disreputable chthonic racket.
your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it-but you sure didn't understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, the whole alternative America, el deado meato'". See Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (London: Minerva, 1990), 373. Like Eric, Isaiah provides sharp critical insight, but Pynchon offsets this by describing the young punk as a "violence enthusiast" (19 As a result of the headlines and fright it generated for a brief period in the nineties, black metal is a sub-genre that is arguably more written about and debated than actually listened to (although Pynchon could well be the first literary writer to acknowledge its existence). Given the vigorous contestation of certain events, influences, and milestones, any account is likely to raise hackles in one way or another.
It is fair to say, however, that Mayhem and Burzum, the two Norwegian acts listed by Pynchon, developed out of a relatively diffuse selection of 1980s extreme metal bands. Notable points of reference from this period include Bathory (whose early albums had the most discernible impact on the so-called "second wave"), Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, and Venom (whose 1982 album gave the sub-genre its name while not contributing greatly to the idiosyncrasies of its sound). 120 Mayhem, who released their punk-inflected Deathcrush EP in 1987, provide something of a bridge between black metal's beginnings and its moment in the spotlight. Sarcófago, who disrupt the Eurocentrism of the typical origin story because of their roots in Belo Horizonte, corresponded with members of the youthful Mayhem and are sometimes credited with pioneering the use of "corpsepaint". 121 This black-and-white face makeup, designed to make performers appear undead or ghoulish, treads a fine line between the ridiculous and the genuinely unnerving, and has become one of the sub-genre's most recognisable visual tropes.
Musically, Norwegian black metal from the early nineties is defined by its "necro" sound: ferociously raw production; repetitive, grinding guitar work interspersed or overlaid with tremolo picking; blast-beat drums; tortured, barely decipherable vocals (Varg Vikernes, the lone creative force behind Burzum, explains that he screamed through a call center head-set instead of a real microphone on early recordings). 122 Lyrics often draw on Satanic and occult themes, combining shock-value belligerence with a more depressive and brooding emphasis on existential desolation or the experience of the freezing wilderness (Norway's landscapes are clearly a significant inspiration). Per "Dead" Ohlin, the singer in Mayhem from 1988 until his suicide in 1991, would perform in clothes left to rot in the ground, mutilate himself on stage with broken glass, and throw pigs' heads into the audience. In a rare interview, he speaks with pride about quickly reducing a crowd of 300 people to 50 as a result of such behaviour. 123 According to Thurston Moore, the early years of Mayhem can be understood in terms of "the reality and irreality of mortification through the expression of annihilating sound and passion." 124 Ohlin's morbid, confrontational antics and eventual suicide -"a kid", as Moore writes, "who felt death as his ultimate gesture and invocation of the expulsion of self" 125 -muddle the distinctions between youthful nihilism, mental illness, and performance art. All of this was eclipsed, however, by the subsequent grotesquery that Norwegian black metal will forever be associated with. Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth, Mayhem's guitarist and one of the scene's principle ideologues, crassly took photographs of his bandmate's corpse (one of which was shared in the mail and even- 128 Patterson provides a summary of the church burnings  and the murder of Aarseth (170-80).
Burzum's EP was released by Deathlike Silence Productions in 1993.

Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 38
The musician once known by the moniker "Count Grishnackh" (a Tolkien reference) served 15 years of his prison sentence, during which time Burzum evolved into an ambient synth project, and now runs the "Thulean Perspective" YouTube channel -a baleful and pathetic phantasmagoria of blood-and-soil survivalism, neo-pagan spirituality, and racist pseudo-science. A year before the publication of Bleeding Edge, it was revealed that Vikernes had lived for a brief period of his childhood in Baghdad, his father part of a team of nation-building engineers hired by the Iraqi Ba'ath Party at the start of Saddam Hussein's rule in 1979. Through black metal, Pynchon therefore alludes to some disquieting instances of "art bleeding into reality", 129 as well as to genuine musical innovation, and to a series of what Greve and Pöhlmann call "cultural and historical regimes" (both prior to and beyond the novel's immediate time span). As a consequence, further waves of sound and fury can be heard echoing through the musical unconscious of this text: the unholy shrieks and darkly poetic utterances of Ohlin; the din of amplifier feedback and media notoriety; cracks emerging in social democratic models, given Norwegian black metal's emergence from a kind of "exhaustion" with "easy life"; 130 heated debates about the value of art made by dangerous, prejudiced, and compromised men. The sound, to paraphrase Moore, of all hell breaking loose. Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 39 avant-garde musicians who would never dream of growing their hair or wearing a bullet belt and has been placed into (seemingly) unlikely dialogue with traditions ranging from techno to African American field songs. It has been packaged, parodied, and reinvented -not so much as the "utopia/dystopia dialectic" that Gair identifies in sixties counterculture, nor the dialectic that informs Attali's musings on the distinct phases of musical development, but as a typically Pynchonian intertwining of incorporation, appropriation, and resistance, of idealised authenticity and cynical theatricality, of creative freefall and the laws of genre. A group of cross-disciplinary academics has even developed Black Metal Theory: "a speculative […] endeavour," according to the manifesto of the journal Helvete, which "eschew[s] any approach that treats theory and metal discretely, preferring to take the left-hand path by insisting on some kind of connaturality between the two, a shared capacity for nigredo." 132 This would surely tickle the author who refers in Vineland to "the indispensable Italian Wedding Fake Book, by Deleuze & Guattari," used by the Vomitones at a mob gig (97), and in Bleeding Edge to an NYU critical theorist who interprets Reg's pirate video career as a "'neo-Brechtian subversion of the diegesis'" (9). 133 On the subject of academia, Wagner Lamounier of Sarcófago, "all of whose CDs are present in Eric's effects" (333), has been (since 2004) a Professor of Economic Science and Applied Statistics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He has been a notable critic of the Norwegian scene, while maintaining that authentic black metal must be considered "the most depraved and disgusting kind of sick music around" and is not "a capitalist merchandise item". He describes early Sarcófago as "a revolt" against religious and political "oppression" -note here that Maxine's therapist, Shawn, conceives of US capitalism as "'the holy fuckin market'" (338) -and stresses that " http://www.ironfistzine.com/2012/08/23/wagner-antichrist-interview-sarcofago-refuses-to-die/. campaign known as "Operation Condor", actively facilitated by the US. Having helped to depose Salvador Allende in Chile, Windust moves to neighboring Argentina. He, revealingly, stays on after the Dirty War "to advise the IMF stooges that rose to power in its aftermath" and has a "thirty-year history of visiting-lecturer gigs, including the infamous School of the Americas" (108-09). 135 Yet again, musical allusion proves to be an integral but not immediately apparent element of Pynchon's imbrication of historicity and futurity (in this particular case a layering of political and artistic shock doctrines). While Lamounier has consigned black metal to his past, Mayhem have continued to write and perform music. Against considerable odds given their "frac-  ing pigs' heads. Pynchon's claim in his liner notes for Lotion that "a working band is a miracle of everyday life" takes on a special kind of acuity in this light. 137 Although the leap from Frank Sinatra to black metal appears to represent one of the novel's starkest juxtapositions, the same kind of complexity that characterizes the relationship between "Oops" and "Help Me, Rhonda" can be detected in this sequence. Indeed, in strictly musical terms, the fact that lounge jazz and extreme metal can find a common home in, say, the compositions of John Zorn (a  Chris Rojek, Frank Sinatra (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 100, 18. extended to the apparently intoxicating, gendered effects of his voice and looks in a wartime context). The crooner once suspected of communist sympathies, subsequently a regular visitor at JFK's Camelot before expulsion due to his mob links, was wooed by Richard Nixon in the early seventies as "part of a conscious strategy" to define the terms of the Vietnam debate. 140 Openly dismissive of a one-time Hollywood cowboy's campaign for the governorship of California, Sinatra later helped to raise $4 million for the "Republican coffers" during Reagan's bid to become Commanderin-Chief. 141 Sinatra and the different phases of his musical output are therefore intimately connected to the presidential eras that in some respects define Pynchon's work. He was given a full military funeral, despite never actually serving, as a kind of "surrogate old soldier" -authorized by Bill Clinton in 1998. 142 , 1945-1975(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009 Rojek, Sinatra, 52. 142 Rojek,Sinatra,101. 143 According to Rojek, "the reason why Sinatra so relished playing the part of Major Ben Marco […] is that the brainwashed Marco eventually exposes both his Korean controllers and their establishment puppets, John and Eleanor Iselin (played by James Gregory and Angela Lansbury). The moral is that the establishment is always rotten". Rojek connects this to Sinatra's investment in a certain kind of "meritocratic" idealism, which also accounts for "his notably relaxed attitude to the Mafia, who sought to realize the American dream by illegal activity." Rojek, Sinatra, 27. 144 Rojek, Sinatra, 100. beloved borough, eventually pursuing a singing career and finding true love with a nurse he first met in England (a fellow Brooklynite played by Gloria Grahame). The merits of the film are almost entirely musical. Cahn and Styne's song is now a standard, and other highlights include a surprising rendition of "Là ci darem la mano" from Don Giovanni that sees Sinatra duetting with the soprano Kathryn Grayson (a strange, "never distributed version" of Mozart's opera featuring the Marx Brothers is briefly described in Bleeding Edge [418]). As a contrived, easy-going romantic comedy, the film gently dramatizes and obfuscates some of the struggles of the postwar, post-traumatic condition. Nevertheless, one does not need to have pored over Gravity's Rainbow to have some appreciation of the significance of World War Two in Pynchon's counter-histories of the United States and how this link to past conflict therefore contributes to an intricately "decentred" engagement with 9/11 that frames the attacks in relation not only to the dotcom bubble but also to the whole "American Century". It is therefore appropriate that the ambiguities of Sinatra's career, as Chris Rojek argues, make it "one of the best expressions of the psychology and politics of achieved celebrity" in precisely that context. 146 Given Bleeding Edge's immersion in the spatio-temporal dynamics of New York, the intermedial connection to Brooklyn after the war provides, in addition, 146 Rojek, Sinatra, 179. And as if directly lifted from the pages of Pynchon's novel, black metal yoga classes take place at the Lucky 13 Saloon: "a bi-monthly sensory experience" advertised using the salutation "Namaslay!" 148 As with Sinatra, there is nuance too in metal's relationship to war and authority, despite the glorifying and overtly fascistic impulses it may harbor. In many respects, black metal -the form most obviously associated with violence -arguably contains numerous elements at odds with any kind of rabid or chest-beating veneration of battle (as its use in yoga classes perhaps indicates). Much black metal is dominated by a sense of "abyssal" melancholy, 149 eerie solitude, and inward journeying, and the subgenre has an underappreciated penchant for oddball, self-aware aesthetic choices.
Even Mayhem's first EP, which showcases the fledgling band at their most raw and adolescent (sample song titles include "Necrolust" and "Chainsaw Gutsfuck"), sets an early precedent for black metal's eccentricity by opening with a curious electronic composition by Conrad Schnitzler of Tangerine Dream. It sounds like a video game marching beat programmed on a malfunctioning synthesizer with a touch of gamelan influence. 150 The metal genre more broadly has no monopoly on visions of fied by Hänggi as "the liveliest" style of music in Bleeding Edge due to some striking instances of vocal performance that appear "unspoiled by cynicism", 151 has its tragic body count (Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls are briefly mentioned in the novel) and its Gangsta aggression (aspects of which have been notably defended by Zadie Smith as "formal condition[s]" of hip hop's "epic" mode). 152 For Attali, though, the fact that "death is everywhere in music," death both "physical" and "institutional", is undoubtedly cause for lament, even if the musician's role vis-à-vis sacrifice and violence is an "exceedingly ambiguous" one. 153 However, while Attali is wedded to a utopian practice of "composition", both visionary and vague, that might free music from these deathly ties, there are many ways of tempering this stance -from David Toop's foundational assertion that sound is by definition a "sinister resonance", an uncanny synthesis of "desire" and "dread", to Slavoj Žižek's claim that "libidinal investment" in the spectacle of certain metal performance styles (uncomfortably close to the Nazi rally for some) is precisely what "liberates" such elements from fascist "articulation" and suspends the "corrosion of media". 154 In a similar vein, Stubberud of Mayhem has argued for a kind of socializing dimension to the music he has devoted himself to by describing it as "psychotherapy" for listeners. 155 Thus, it is not necessarily a contradiction that a genre sometimes used to soundtrack actual combat also encompasses voices of dissent, disillusionment, and critique (or that such voices can be unwittingly repurposed for torture, as previously explored). Black Sabbath's "War Pigs", Judas Priest's "Some Heads Are Gonna Roll", Sepultura's "Territory", Metallica's "One", Napalm Death's entire discography, the list 151 Hänggi, "Sonic Fiction", 138. 152 Smith's point primarily relates to "boasting" but is deployed here for its wider implications. See "The House That Hova Built", The New York Times Style Magazine, September 2, 2012. https://www.nytimes. com/2012/09/09/t-magazine/the-house-that-hova-built.html. 153 Attali,Noise,125. goes on. 156 These are some of the genre's set texts. Given metal's genuinely global diversification and reach, as well as the emphasis in Bleeding Edge on the historical processes that both precede and follow 9/11, it is also important to acknowledge the "constructively empowering" role that extreme forms of the genre have played for subcultural communities in conflict zones such as Iraq and Syria. 157 Bringing the analysis a little closer in, the strong tendency in anti-war metal songs to pit boots-onthe-ground soldiers against corrupt or incompetent officialdom, summed up by Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson via the old witticism "lions led by donkeys", 158 is actually not too far removed from the stress Sinatra places on the profundity of front-line experience and the integrity and pluck of "the little guy". Both contain at least the seeds of a critique of power and an awareness of human cost, even if both sometimes risk tipping over into varieties of what Rojek calls "oleaginous" sentiment. 159 The wider point then is that the two references continue to fold into each other. They cannot be satisfactorily or accurately contained in discrete categories. 160 Upsetting what initially looks and sounds like a straightforward contrast therefore has a variety of implications. Interestingly, it also reveals how Bleeding Edge -despite its clear rejection of a certain brand of opportunistic conservative moralizing after 9/11 -still toys with anxieties about the corruptive influence of music. 156 Track 1 on Paranoid, Vertigo, 1970; track 8 on Defenders of the Faith, Columbia Records, 1984; track 2 call to order), but which significantly departs from his unbending insistence that popular music under capitalism does little more than feed an "imitative assimilation to commodity models". 168 In addition, "listening" to Pynchon's fiction, tuning in to the sounds of historicity and futurity, vividly brings to life Attali's core claim, as glossed by Shaviro, that "music is one of the foremost spheres in which the struggles, inventions, innovations, and mutations that determine the structure of society take place". Or in other words, "[m]usic is not a mere part of what traditional Marxists called the 'superstructure'". 169 Yet committing to such a stance does not entail a wholescale subscription (on Pynchon's part or mine) to Attali's vision of an impending compositional utopia in which the commodity is superseded. This is more than just the benefit of world-weary, digi-hip, twenty-first century hindsight: the utopian impulses of Pynchon's work are potent but they are also subject to constant renegotiation. Magic mingles with melancholy, celebration with the counting of costs. The process of analyzing Bleeding Edge and its musical unconscious reveals no signs of what Eric Drott calls the "vulgar antimaterialism" of Attali's final flourish in Noise. 170

V. Outro: Welcome Aboard
While this analysis has concentrated on just four allusions -Britney, the Beach Boys, black metal, and Sinatra -the possibilities of further literary-musical detection are certainly not exhausted. The reference to "Korobushka", for instance, the nineteenthcentury Russian folk song that would go on to become the music for Tetris on the Nintendo Gameboy, 171 contributes to the novel's positioning of 9/11 within the geopolitical framework of a Cold War that is not quite "over" in any straightforward 168 Adorno, "Fetish", 309. 169 Shaviro, "Attali's Noise." 170 Eric Drott, "Rereading Jacques Attali's Bruits", Critical Inquiry 41, no. 4 (2015): 753, my emphasis.
Drott makes a striking case for situating Attali's work on music and noise in the context of late seventies "political debates concerning the Union de la gauche" in France and stresses the "performative character" of his utopian projections vis-à-vis the "vulgar materialism espoused by the Parti communiste". 171 Note that Tetris is (anachronistically) alluded to in Against the Day (2006) via a Russian airship captain who dumps bricks on ground-level targets, "always in the four-block fragments which had become his signature". See Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 123.
Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 51 sense. 172 The puzzle game was designed by Alexey Pajitnov during his time at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences; the 8-bit "chiptune" version of "Korobushka" known as "Theme A" was created by Hirokazu Tanaka in the year the Berlin wall came down. 173 When Maxine hears the "tinny electronic melody" in a semi-abandoned office complex, she asks herself if she has "entered some supernatural timewarp" (43). It is the sound of the past, as it were, specifically of the complex global tech relays that develop into the novel's present, and a sound that uncannily heralds the fraught future just a little further beyond the End of History. The "thawing" that Tetris represents, in other words, carries an implicit reminder that some of the militant by-products of US-Soviet relations are alive and dangerous.
The resonances of this reminder are perhaps enhanced by the fact that the original song evolved from a narrative poem by Nikolai Nekrasov -a tale of trade, romance, robbery, and murder. As "an anthem of nineties workplace fecklessness", it is also the sound of a certain kind of complacency and disengagement (43). In light of Rachel Sykes' compelling critique of US literary responses to 9/11 for a "failure […] to be quiet", which is "symptomatic of a kind of exceptionalism that dismisses the present's continuity with the past and equates loudness with narratives of progress", the sounds of Bleeding Edge and the musical unconscious -plaintive, sprightly, and hellish alike -open up a rather different way of thinking about the critical value of certain "noisy" fictions. 174 To further demonstrate the scope of these openings, the same approach used to explore the four previous examples could also be applied to, say, Pynchon's allusion to the rappers' feud between Jay-Z and Nas (282). Given my discussion of metal, a genre that is at the very least partly tied to white privilege, the specific reference to "The World is Yours" (1994) by Nas provides, via his metaphor-rich flow and bone-dry 172 Given Pynchon's stint in the navy and his role as a technical writer for Boeing, Severs examines the novel "as Pynchon's personal post-9/11 rumination on the ongoing relevance to his fictional project of his personal involvement in the Cold War". See "'A terrible inertia '", 77-78. 173 See https://tetris.com/article/9/the-history-of-the-tetris-theme-music. 174 Rachel Sykes, "'All that Howling Space': '9/11' and the Aesthetic of Noise in Contemporary American Thomas: Blood on the Tracks 52 punning, an alternative yet complementary take on the notion of infernal forces. "Dwellin' in the Rotten Apple, you get tackled", he raps, with the whole system of New York City life described as the "devil's lasso". Music's relationship to political authority and economy, undoubtedly a key issue for Pynchon, is also prominent here, as suggested by the lines before the track's first chorus: "I'm out for presidents to represent me/I'm out for dead presidents to represent me". 175 Both rappers were notably included on the White House playlist in the period during which Bleeding Edge was written and published, and Jay-Z was an active supporter of Barack Obama throughout his two campaigns. 176 Obama also imitated the brush-brush movement popularized by the video for Jay-Z's "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" when responding to comments by Hilary Clinton during the Democratic primaries (Figure 6). 177 The scandalous violence that took place in Norway is not required for the notion of art bleeding into reality to appear credible. The most appropriate coda to this analysis, however, comes from details that have already surfaced from the musical unconscious -Maxine's 175 Track 4 on Illmatic, Columbia Records, 1994. 176 See references to Nas, Jay-Z, and the president's "rap palate" in Jann S. Wenner, "Obama in Command", Rolling Stone, October 14, 2010. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/obama-incommand-the-rolling-stone-interview-188620/. 177   and Pynchon uses this as a prompt for conceptualising the band's "creative itinerary".
Beneath the "edge-of-chaos guitar passages", he claims, "may also be detected the weird jiving sense of humor of a cruise combo". But this claim comes with a significant qualification. "If it's a cruse gig," he writes, "it sure runs through peculiar waters," full of undetonated mines from the cultural disputes that began in the Sixties, unexplained lights now and then from just over the horizon, stowaways who sneak past security and meddle with the amps causing them to emit strange Rays, unannounced calls at ports that seem almost like cities we have been to, though not quite, cityscapes that all converge to New York in some form, which is after all where these guys are from. 181 178 See Steeve Coupeau, The History of Haiti (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 82-83. 179 Released as a single in 1979 on MGM/Polydor. 180 Lotion, Full Isaac, spinArt, 1994. 181 Pynchon, liner notes. In many respects, Pynchon's description of Nobody's Cool provides a fitting metaphor for his own career. More precisely, it helps to summarize the role of music in Bleeding Edge and the critical potential of reading and listening in tandem. The danger, especially on a ship, is that music may offer only the false, destructive promises of the sirens' song -briefly referenced by Attali to embellish his early "hypothesis of music as a simulacrum of sacrifice", with Odysseus cast in the role of symbolic "scapegoat", 182 and more famously interpreted by Adorno and Horkheimer as an allegory for "the entanglement of myth, domination, and labor." 183 (The Love Boat, in fact, as sung by Jones, alluringly "promises something for everyone.") We nevertheless encounter plenty of "weird jiving humor" in the face of this peril and also a profound sense of something else "trying to find a pathway through to us" -a "something" I have interpreted as both historical understanding and prophetic/propletic insight, intimately and consistently bound up with both the resistance to and the expression of power.
Something that continues to bleed through to "our own corrupted and perilous day, when everybody's heard everything and knows more than they wish they did." 184 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their fantastically rigorous, helpful, and thought-provoking responses. I hope that the final version of the project does justice to their efforts. I must also thank Daniela Vazquez Kalf (teacher, artist, and cultural consultant extraordinaire) for her invaluable advice on approaching popular music. 182 Attali,Noise,29. 183 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (1944; London and New York: Verso, 1997), 36. 184 Pynchon, liner notes. An alternative way of putting this comes from Michael Chanan, paraphrasing parts of a pamphlet written by the American composer Elie Siegmeister in the 1930s. "[C]apitalism has created the most magnificent apparatus for the production, distribution and consumption of music that the world has ever seen. Yet this apparatus is so riddled with contradictions […] that it continues to negate its own potentialities. Nevertheless, music somehow continually manages to escape this negation, to shake off the bonds of commercialization and escape to freedom: because it has its own inner resources for overcoming the contradictions of this, our disturbed and disturbing reality." See Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 178.