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

Abstract

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 Pöhlmann'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.