The Knife - Shaking the Habitual (2013)
Genre: Electronic, Experimental
Judith Butler was the first great sociological thinker to acknowledge that gender is not born, it is made. There is no gene in our DNA which dictates that a man cannot benefit from a moisturizer or enjoy a cocktail. There is no biological imperative that drives women to paint their nails, and nothing preventing them from practicing carpentry. Baby boys are not born with an innate preference for the colour blue, and why is “is it a boy or a girl” a higher priority question than “is the baby healthy”? Gender is not genetic or dichotomous. It is tradition, passed down from history, filtered, and interpreted by the culture of a given generation. Gender, Butler concluded, is a performance which is practiced and developed for show.
A closely related concept in sociology is that of Erving Goffman's impression management, which posits that people perform their various roles on two stages: the front of house, where behaviours are controlled in the presence of strangers, and the back stage, where a person breaks out of the characters they play. Everyone engages in impression management daily when they go to work, when they host dinner for friends, when they present to a boardroom, or when they post on the internet.
The concepts of gender performance and impression management intersect and pervade our lives, affecting everything from how we dress, what we eat, and even our posture when we sit in a crowded room. Women are inclined to eat more peckishly if in the presence of men or strangers. In a classroom or on a bus, men will tend to sprawl their belongings and slump, taking up more physical space than the women, whose posture will be more self-contained. This crash-course in gender theory may seem preposterous to some, but it is a necessary background to the feminist-postmodernist Shaking the Habitual, a work of sociology in both theory and performance.
If ever there was a convincing case for feminist-postmodernism, it would be found in The Knife, who have engaged heavily in impression management throughout their career writing stone-cold electropop. The duo have refused articles, interviews, and live shows, appeared for years disguised in venetian masks, and have accepted awards dressed like melting aliens. 2006's Silent Shout applied this obscurity directly, and Karin Dreijer Andersson performed her part with pitch-shifting effects, eschewing her voice and even her gender in an arctic tundra of synths.
Silent Shout's performance of gender was merely a precursor to Shaking the Habitual, which stands not only as one of the year's best records, but as a remarkable work of gender theory in an industry where it is not well represented. There are many compelling examples of women in the music industry, but they often suffer from the restrictions of gender roles prevalent in the art, taking a backseat in song-writing or having their voice stereotyped into uses for softness and clarity, with all of the imperfections that give a male voice character glossed over. Habitual soaks these tropes in kerosene and sets them ablaze with a middle finger and a smirk.
Shaking the Habitual opens with the aquatic pop song “A Tooth for an Eye”, where Dreijer Andersson's voice rises in tension like a flood siren, her rasp setting the textural tone of the album to follow, The Knife's most distant and removed album yet. The ascent is followed immediately by the blackened beats of “Full of Fire”, demonstrating that if Silent Shout were a cold smoulder, Habitual is a raging inferno. Dreijer Andersson laughs at her own social commentary, but it sounds more like a threat. As the song closes, prompting the listener to “talk about gender, baby”, her voice deteriorates into a mechanical screech neither male nor female, or even human. From this point the album alternately sears and boils through an hour and a half of thinly-veiled discontent. “Without You My Life Would Be Boring” is a classic Knife pop song, scattered with primitive beats and bird-calls, over which Dreijer Andersson trills territorial and graphic imagery of pissing-matches. “Raging Lung” sees the fury return, the disillusionment with economic stratification spelled out with a contemptuous sneer. The dark washes of normalized injustice are punctuated with questioning squeals, unsettled and confused. “Stay Out Here” is a love-letter to Occupy Wall Street protestors, whose voices diffuse through the dense buzz and sinister submerged beat.
Shaking the Habitual is not free of flaws however, and is bogged down at its mid and endpoints with filler, as most double-albums tend to be. The listener may struggle to wade through the combined thirty-minutes of brown, sludgy drone, which serve only to break up the flow and tone of the album, and are perhaps best left at the bottom of the melting-pot which they came from. Even taken as a whole though, Habitual is still superior to the year's repertoire, and is the most ambitious and complex Knife album to date. Shaking the Habitual lives up to its promise in respect to music, both as a pop album and as a Knife album. Like the concepts it conveys, it can be challenging to interpret and digest, but it is an achievement for equality in society as well as in music, which departs from the norms while remaining thoroughly The Knife in sound and ideology. If Shaking the Habitual has made any impression, it's that music is as much a woman's territory as a man's.