The Ghost Network

by Catie Disabato

  The mystery of Monson’s identity might never be solved. De Poisson’s lowborn man who swindled his way onto Columbus’s ship is as likely to be real as Charles’s cross-dressing aristocrat. “The mystery is more interesting than any answer to the mystery,” the Situationist Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in his private, unpublished diary on the subject of both Monson and life in general.f Chtcheglov became interested in Monson during the five years he spent incarcerated at a mental hospital in Paris, following his attempt to blow up the Eiffel Tower because the lights shone into his apartment at night, making it difficult for him to sleep. The mental hospital’s library, stocked with cast-offs from the Université de Paris, included a copy of Charles’s New Biography. Chtcheglov smuggled the book out of the hospital when he was released, then tracked down a copy of de Poisson’s biography through his friends at the university.

  Molly Metropolis found Monson through Chtcheglov, during Molly’s first frantic inhalation of Situationist texts, when she read some of Chtcheglov’s letters in which he indicated he kept a diary while he was committed. Determined to track it down, Molly contacted Chtcheglov’s daughter, Lynnette. She agreed to sell Molly her father’s diary, and Molly received a bounty in return: Chtcheglov’s copies of both Monson biographies had been attached to his diary by rubber bands.

  Inspired by the mystery of Monson’s life, Molly Metropolis asked Berliner to sign the screen prints he made for her as either Antoine or Antoinette Monson. She also seems to have established a legal identity for Antoinette Monson. As I was researching Molly’s connection to the historical mystery figure, I found Monson in Chicago, on a deed. An Antoinette Monson owned an office building, which was damaged in some kind of fire in early 2010—though when Taer began searching for Berliner, the building had not yet burned.

  Marie-Hélène Kraus told Anna Kirkpatrick, “As a Situationist, walking somewhere doesn’t count if you have a destination in mind.” I wonder how Kraus would’ve weighed in on Taer and Nix’s walking through Chicago; they had a destination in mind but they didn’t know where the destination was. Most likely, Kraus would’ve approved. Their progress was slow; the conditions were terrible. Chicago has a reputation for rough winters because of the wind, which both lowers the temperature and blows the snow and freezing rain into the faces of pedestrians. Sometimes the wind is so strong that the rain falls horizontally. According to Taer’s notes, she and Nix suffered through at least one day of horizontal rain. Once, to avoid getting hit by hailstones the size of quarters, they had to huddle for twenty minutes in a narrow doorway that smelled like urine. One evening it was warm enough that it rained instead of snowed, but overnight the rain froze to black ice on the sidewalks, which was hard to see and easy to slip on. The temperature made their jeans feel like sheets of ice against their legs. Taer loved to complain about the cold.

  They had problems with Berliner’s map, too. They realized quickly that it probably wasn’t drawn to scale. Even with Davis’s notes, they weren’t sure which streets the maps depicted. Berliner had drawn the street that Davis had labeled North Clybourn Avenue vertically, but on a regular street map aligned to a compass, North Clybourn ran diagonally from northeast to southwest. Most of the streets that crossed North Clybourn adhered to a strict north-south, east-west grid system, so when the streets hit North Clybourn, they formed a row of triangles. Berliner’s map depicted one of those triangles, a very strange one where two of the streets didn’t actually meet. Taer and Nix interpreted this as Berliner having walked through most of the triangle except half a block on one street. It was either that, they assumed, or he simply drew the triangle sloppily. They tried to figure out which triangle of streets Berliner had drawn on his map. They hiked the same streets over and over again, talking about music, people in college they had slept with who had then avoided them in the dining hall, and their first big breakups. Sometimes they walked silently because they had to wrap scarves around their mouths and noses to block out the snow and wind. They slipped on ice and fell.

  As February progressed, Taer became more frustrated as their search proved futile. She also gained some weight, as she always did in winter, which made her cheeks and breasts look rounder, but also upset her. Nix slept on the couch more often; they had lethargic, sometimes orgasmless, sex. Nix avoided walking around with Taer, and Taer let her recede. Taer went out alone, moving aimlessly through the snow, barely even looking at the buildings. She walked every single triangle of streets off North Clybourn but couldn’t distinguish the building that would crack open and spill out secrets from all the other offices and apartments and storefronts. She sometimes left the triangles, refusing to turn at a stoplight when she felt like continuing on straight ahead. She was stuck.

  In the months before her disappearance, Molly Metropolis spent most of her time with her creative team, her General Council. The General Council included her choreographer, her personal trainer, her stylists, her dancers, and her manger/creative director Momo Waxler, among others. She was inspired by Andy Warhol’s infamous Factory and tried to include that kind of collective art-making in her own life. Molly published a list of the original members of the General Council, with their nicknames, in the liner notes of Cause Célèbrety when it was released on September 16, 2008. It reads as follows, with my notes in parentheses and italics:

  Metro. (Molly Metropolis)

  T.T. (Tasha Taylor—Molly’s personal assistant before Nix)

  Momo. (Momo Waxler—Creative Director)

  Peaches. (Anna “Peaches” Fontaine—Dancer)

  Ali. (Ruann Alison West—Dancer)

  R. “Prince.” (Ronnie Princeton—engineer of Molly’s various contraptions)

  J.F.P. (Joe Frank Parker—Choreographer)

  Nance. (Nancy DeWitt—Costume Designer)

  (When the UK edition of Cause Célèbrety was released in November, the list had expanded to include Belle Brandice, Ronnie “Tech” F. [The Tech Guy, Tour Manager 2008–2009], R. “Gina” N. [Regina Nix], and David Walker: The Librarian.)

  The members of the General Council helped create the subway-map body paint design that decorated her in the “New Vogue Riche” music video, her now-iconic metallic bodysuit from her 2009 MTV Video Music Awards performance, and the LED “mini city” from the “Apocalypse Dance” video.

  In an interview with NeonLimelight.com, Molly described the formation of her General Council: “I brought together a costume designer and a choreographer and a makeup artist and instead of making just a team or just a family, we made a team and a family that lives in a city together” [italics mine].

  For Molly Metropolis, songwriting wasn’t a simple process of writing lyrics and selecting beats, it was creating a large-scale work of art. While she tweaked her hooks, she sketched costume ideas for the song’s music video, discussed choreography ideas with Parker, and designed cover art for the single. She treated writing a song like making a movie and as such, she needed a full crew.

  Molly Metro traveled almost constantly during 2008, even when she wasn’t touring; she lived in Chicago, but spent half of her time in Los Angeles for music industry–related business. Her friends and the members of the General Council thought Molly visited Chicago to see her dancer friends Ali and Peaches, who had once been members of a very early version the General Council, but whose contracts Molly had terminated in early 2008. Instead, Molly spent her time assembling The Ghost Network with Nicolas Berliner.

  Once she and Berliner had completed The Ghost Network, Molly stayed in Chicago to work with her General Council and write, produce, and record songs for Cause Apocalyptic. Although none of the songs on the album had been officially released before, at least three of the tracks that ultimately made it onto Cause Apocalyptic stemmed from previously leaked early Molly Metropolis demos. Those three tracks reworked for her new album include “Lost,” “Beneath the Pavement,” and “Bang Bang.”

  In Chicago, Molly fell into a creative routine. She woke up midmorning and after a long workout with her pers
onal trainer, she went to her studio space to meet with the members of the General Council. Everyone assembled around lunchtime. Sometimes Molly was social, eating, talking, and drinking wine with her friends and collaborators. Sometimes she shut herself up in one of her private recording rooms, blocked off the windows, and wrote her lyrics in isolation. She shared the themes she was developing, as well as some snippets of lyrics and melody, which the other members of the General Council used to begin designing stage sets and developing marketing strategies. Parker started choreographing the “Apocalypse Dance” music video before Molly had even finished the song. The choreography involved a lot of leaps and sudden drops to the floor.

  In the early evenings, the General Council had “family dinner.” Molly required that every member of the G.C. attend at least two family dinners a week, and she preferred when everyone attended all of them. The dinners were catered; the food was paid for by SDFC. Most nights, all the Council members met around the large wooden dinner table. While they ate fish, salad, and quinoa (Molly had gained a few pounds and was on a strict diet and a directive from the label to slim), they discussed the aesthetic focus of the new album and the tour that would support it. Everyone was invited to offer suggestions, but Molly’s final word was law.

  While Molly was developing Cause Apocalyptic, she also communicated extensively with noted fashion designer Johan Van Duncan and his assistant, Angela Sebastian-Hay to discuss costuming for her music videos and live shows. Van Duncan reportedly sent Molly early sketches of the sculpted platform stilettos and the “distressed” metallic-green-rhinestone and mirror-glass encrusted body suit she wore in the “Apocalypse Dance” video. Molly visited Van Duncan’s studio, tried on outfits, and often socialized with the designer. After returning from visits with Van Duncan—who committed suicide on February 10, 2010, just over a month after Molly disappeared—Molly reported to her dancers that Van Duncan’s mood was “stunningly creative, but equally stunningly dark.”

  In September 2008, SDFC flew Molly and the whole General Council to Los Angeles to record the album under the watchful eye of her Executive Producer, Darren J. Horner. At six feet four inches and three hundred pounds, Horner was an intimidating presence with an unflinching work ethic. Crack his shell, though, and he has a big smile and easy laugh. He made his name nurturing Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera’s careers. Along the way, he developed a reputation for working well with difficult personalities. SDFC tapped him to produce Molly Metropolis’s second record because they thought he had the wherewithal to take her over-the-top aesthetic and highbrow aspirations and shape them into a consumable pop product, without betraying the essential “Molly-ness” her Pop Eaters knew and loved.

  To prepare himself for Molly, Horner ingested a steady stream of ’80s synth-pop like Duran Duran and the Pet Shop Boys, as well as contemporary examples of synthwave or “Outrun Techno” like Twin Shadow’s album Confess. He also prepared himself for a battle. Horner had heard rumors that Molly Metropolis was headstrong and argumentative, so he expected to have to reel her in. Molly defied Horner’s expectations; she was a collaborative worker and as docile as a pussycat.

  Impressed with Molly’s professionalism and satisfied by her obedience, Horner never guessed he was being played. Molly’s friends at SDFC had warned her that Horner was a “big personality” and Molly decided the best way to work with him was to make him think he was making every decision. She manipulated him subtly throughout the entire recording process, fighting quietly for her aesthetic voice to shine through the studio production. At the same time, Horner was an experienced and adept enough producer to understand when the studios had caught lightning in a bottle. He knew Molly’s success primarily had to do with her distinctive point of view. Of course, under the costumes and rhetoric, Molly wrote straightforward pop songs. In 2008, Molly was a hard sell because her songs were considered “dance,” not Top 40, and SDFC’s marketing team stumbled a bit while pushing a non-white artist, who wasn’t already a star, outside of the “urban” demographic. But by the time she and Horner were recording her second album, she’d remade the Top 40 in her image.g

  After slowly cobbling together her first album with SDFC producers and ex-boyfriend Davin Karl, with whom she had a terrible, prolonged breakup, Molly wanted the production process for Cause Apocalyptic to go smoothly. It did, but the post-production process didn’t follow suit.

  Laurence Rappaport, the president of A&R at SDFC and Molly’s personal handler within the company, wanted to release the eight songs as a second disc of bonus tracks, tacked onto a re-release of Cause Célèbrety, scheduled to drop on November 18. Molly thought the price of a two-disc set would be too expensive for some of her fans; she also insisted that the new tracks were a thematic and emotional step forward for her. Putting them under the name Cause Célèbrety wouldn’t make sense, artistically, because the music wasn’t about “Celebrity” anymore, it was about dancing ’til the end of the world. Rappaport thought the album would sell better with the name Cause Célèbrety. He cared about her “artistic vision,” but he cared more about engineering a hit record. He thought the music business, and his own career, couldn’t afford splashy failures. He thought Molly was still too new, and the album-buying public wasn’t ready for a second album and a second set of singles. Radio DJs were still playing “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” on Saturday nights like it was a newly released track.

  Rappaport had other problems with Molly. He didn’t like the way she conducted herself in interviews. He thought she talked too much about racism and not enough about her hair. He wanted her to pose for more “candid” photos; he wanted her to ditch the wig and weaves and let her hair “be natural.” Molly told him in an e-mail that she wanted to “perform her own hair.” He asked her not to refer to herself as a feminist, and instead espouse feminist viewpoints without ever using the word; whenever Molly said “feminist,” she passive-aggressively apologized to Rappaport for “letting her brain show.” Molly thought she was smarter than Rappaport, and that angered him most of all.

  Rappaport and Molly fought dramatically. They kept it out of texts and mostly out of e-mails, out of anything that could be hacked and leaked, but their phone conversations were loud and aggressive. Nix had never seen Molly truly angry with someone before Rappaport. For Molly, her fight over the release of Cause Apocalyptic was the fight of her life; they weren’t arguing about what to do with the eight tracks, they were fighting about Molly’s whole career. “It’s the only real war I’ve ever fought in my life,” she told Nix. “This is for me and about me. I feel like I’m being born, fighting my way out of the womb, and Laurence, he’s not even a person, he’s just the narrow canal I’m fighting my way out of. The baby always makes it out. Or else it dies.”

  Molly made it out by challenging Rappaport with a high-stakes bet. She bet that when SDFC released the single “Apocalypse Dance,” the song would perform well enough to support an album release. If she was right, SDFC would release Cause Apocalyptic as a separate EP. If “Apocalypse Dance” didn’t perform, they would release the two-disc version of Cause Célèbrety. Rappaport accepted the bet and the “Apocalypse Dance” single was released on November 17, followed by the music video on November 30.

  “Apocalypse Dance,” a gutsy, throaty number in a minor key, debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart—Molly’s best charting debut. “Apocalypse Dance” was also Molly Metropolis’s fifth consecutive single to hit number one. Molly won the bet, so she got her way.

  At that time, SDFC decided to release the album on January 25, 2009. Horner, Molly, and Rappaport spent a few weeks polishing, fixating on minutia in the mixing process. SDFC made the album available for pre-order in December, so that it could be given as a holiday gift. Cause Apocalyptic was certified Gold before Christmas Day.

  On the back of the “Apocalypse Dance” single and the steady sales of Cause Apocalyptic, Molly Metro’s Apocalypse Ball tour went ahead as planned in late November. Her gari
sh performances of her unreleased tracks also helped increase buzz about the album. On the Internet, fans established warring camps of “spoiler” and “anti-spoiler” sects. The first watched crude cell-phone videos of Molly’s performances on YouTube, and downloaded bootleg live albums, while the “anti-spoiler” fans avoided hearing the songs before buying the album or attending the live show.

  Then, eleven days before the album’s scheduled release date, Molly Metropolis vanished.

  As Molly’s disappearance remained unsolved, Cause Apocalyptic became an even more contested issue. Would SDFC release the album on its scheduled date or would they wait for Molly Metro to return? Molly’s fans took to their Twitters, Tumblrs, and Facebook pages to demand the album that most of the media was already referring to as “Molly’s last.” Music journalists and bloggers spread a rumor that the album would be coming out on time, but the track list would be “retooled.” Fans then demanded that SDFC release “Molly’s version” of the album.

  Despite the frantic tone and pace of speculation, SDFC refused to release a statement more concrete than: “We have the utmost respect for Molly Metropolis and her work. We are attempting to execute her vision of the album.” In fact, SDFC was attempting to execute a version of the album that, thematically at least, resonated with Molly’s status of missing-in-action. The bloggers were right; they revised the track list. Originally, Molly and Horner arranged the eight new songs in the following order:

  1. Apocalypse Dance

  2. Party Babylon

  3. Beneath the Pavement

  4. La Deluge

  5. I’ll Find You

  6. Bang Bang

  7. Dance ’Til We Drop