I Hear A New World

I Pity the Poor Immigrant

2008-07-27T17:27:00.000-07:00

So, we have been watching Mad Men. It is just as amazing as everybody says it is. There is a lot more to write about it than I can think through right now, but I wanted to jot down some notes about Mad Men and history, in particular the American relationship with history. (I will proceed as if readers know the basic details of the show, so you might not want to read on if you haven't seen it and want to stay surprised).

Mad Men is centered around Don Draper, a man who has renounced his own past--as a poor son of a prostitute and a cruel father-- in order to become the "man in the grey flannel suit," the "organization man," the "other-directed" bourgeois business man of the Eisenhower era. He brings to mind Thomas McGrath's observation about the contradiction between American individualism and history as the world of collective memory. In the United States, McGrath wrote, "history no longer functions, has been 'paved over.' In the East man begins every day for himself."

This is the stuff of the great American novel, Martin Guerre, the confidence man, David Levinsky, Gatsby, etc. As such, the potential is great for overreach and pretension. But this is avoided, because the world Draper lives in is depicted as terrible: meaningless and stupid, filled with racism and class hatred, misogyny and sexual harassment. The significance of Draper's remaking of himself thus transcends the particular drama of one ad executive's personal journey... it becomes an engagement with the thing in the name of which America's sacrifices (racism, genocide, war-- the horrors of which, always denied in the rhetoric of patriots, provides the spur for Draper's renunciation of his past) have been justified: suburbia, shopping, the white republic. We are left with the distinct impression that this was a bad trade. With the exception of The Sopranos, this is an opinion that is almost never uttered in contemporary American culture, an opinion that the white middle class does not speak. "The rest of the world wants to be like us," they say. Maybe it is this notion that makes it hard to say: "this sucks."

Draper's circumstance calls to mind Bob Dylan's "I Pity the Poor Immigrant," one of the most moving and beguiling songs ever written:

I pity the poor immigrant

Who wishes he would've stayed home,

Who uses all his power to do evil

But in the end is always left so alone.

That man whom with his fingers cheats

And who lies with ev'ry breath,

Who passionately hates his life

And likewise, fears his death.

I pity the poor immigrant

Whose strength is spent in vain,

Whose heaven is like Ironsides,

Whose tears are like rain,

Who eats but is not satisfied,

Who hears but does not see,

Who falls in love with wealth itself

And turns his back on me.

I pity the poor immigrant

Who tramples through the mud,

Who fills his mouth with laughing

And who builds his town with blood,

Whose visions in the final end

Must shatter like the glass.

I pity the poor immigrant

When his gladness comes to pass

In Mad Men, the representative of the singer in "I Pity the Poor Immigrant" is Draper's brother, Adam, who seeks him out in the hopes of an explanation, and whose very existence is a threat to Draper's charade. To Adam, Draper indeed "falls in love with wealth itself" and turns his back on him. Draper tries to pay Adam off to make him go away; he cannot satisfy Adam's desire for historical honesty, for truth and reconciliation. Adam's suicide is thus in a real way a murder, caused by Draper's refusal or inability to provide him with the history he needs.

Socialism is Love

2008-07-01T22:01:00.000-07:00

So I updated my muxtape, because, among other things, I wanted to share my newest obsession, Jamaican (I believe the appelation "roots" is the correct one vis-a-vis reggae terminology, by I have a hard time navigating the nomenclature... mea culpa) singer Max Romeo, and his amazing song, "Socialism is Love." As a socialist, I like this song, and its message, that socialism is love. I really don't need much more than that in a song. Which is a confession of a ridiculously high tolerance for sentimental left wing propaganda, I suppose. At the end of the day, though, I prefer having a high tolerance of sentimental left wing propaganda than a high tolerance for sentiental fascist propaganda, which must be true of my many contemporaries who love Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and Frank Miller. Also, this song is musically remarkable-- it achieves the sublime, wonky, gremlins-at-the-pitch-wheel-and-reverb-knob effect that otherwise can only be found in the work of Joe Meek and the musicians of the Rat-Drifting persuasion.

According to Jamaican music expert Steve Barrow, Max Romeo was born Max Smith in 1944,
the eldest of nine children. He acquired the nickname "Romeo" from the father of a would-be girlfriend, which stuck when his producer Bunny Lee began to call him "Max Romeo." In the early 1970s he began carving out an identity as a "militant singer"-- singing about "what's happening for the people to hear... the prices too high, things are too hard and what have you." Romeo told Barrow that in those days, people listened to singers "to tell them what's happening." At around the same time, he began working with Lee "Scratch" Perry and Winston "Niney" Holness.

Barrow writes that in late 1971, Romeo recorded a song called "Let the Power Fall on I," which was picked up by Michael Manley's People's National Party (PNP) and played during campaign events in 1972. Many of the songs that Romeo recorded in the years after 1972-- a period of intense working class self-activity following the PNP landslide electoral victory- were penned as agitprop for Manley and the PNP, celebrating "Joshua" (Manley's political moniker) and condemning "Pharaoh" (Manley's rival Hugh Shearer of the Jamaican Labor Party).

Barrow quotes Romeo on this period: "The first year or so, people was questioning what’s happening, is this ‘socialism’ ? Those songs were actually encouraging him. (Manley) was an idol of mine; I had to come up with other songs to build up his confidence. It goes on for a while too, with (songs like ) 'Socialism Is Love.'"

Romeo's connection with the PNP became less direct over the course of the 1970s, but his music remained politically militant, if increasingly voiced in a Rastafarian idiom: in songs like anti-clerical "The Reverend" and on "concept albums like "Revelation Time," recorded at Perry's legendary Black Ark Studio. Romeo noted that "Revelation Time" was "really a revolutionary album. It came from 1972, when we had a revolutionary movement, with Mr Michael Manley trying to change society from capitalism to socialism. At the time I was socialist-minded - because it’s the only form of poor people government, socialism."

***

I should make some notes on the other tracks, though unfortunately I am too tired to really annotate:

The Raincoats song is awesome; the Neil Young track is from a soundboard recording of a show from the early 1970s I found online... it seems to me like the sort of thing that some of my friends would like; The Byrds track is also from a bootleg... the sound quality isn't amazing, and the band is incredibly out of tune, but this one of my favorite alltime songs, even if it might seem initially just another mesh trucker hat americana ballad, it is not at all that (and has the same "minor literature" quality as songs like You Got the Silver, which proves that Keith is the genius singer of the Stones, or Stage Fright, which proves that Danko was the Band's best singer, of Box of Rain, similarly demostrating that Phil Lesh was the best singer of the Grateful Dead), sung by Clarence White, perhaps my favorite musician ever, with barely a syllable legible as English, my favorite kind of singing, and concluding with some beautiful telecasterage; Harvey Mandel's Wade In the Water is a slice of amazing instrumental fuzz rock from the masterpiece instrumental record Christo Redentor; Swamp Dogg's take on John Prine's Sam Stone is baffling and heart breaking and miraculous; Madvillian speaks for itself; Pentangle's Willy of Winsbury makes me nostalgic for days with Eric and Martin and is included mostly for Nick's benefit-- might be too flooffy for him, but it strikes me as maybe the sort of thing he would like... this is also a radical socialist song, part of the Child ballad song-family that celebrates love over power and property; Wynn Stewart's song can only be heard as heartbreakingly ironic, I think, and I am on a one man campaign to get people to recognize the greatness of Stewart, the least-celebrated of the Bakersfield country masters (the steel on this track is awesome, as well)... this makes me nostalgic for Austin honky tonks... and I left the Nic Jones up because it is so hard to find and so wonderfully wonderful. Maybe I will make another muxtape with highlights from this record.

Oh, and everybody should pick up Peter Linebaugh's book The Magna Carta Manifesto: a 1000 year history of the commons, which could be subtitled "socialism is love."

Mux Obliged

2008-04-19T21:07:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the inspiration of Nick Hennies, I have made a muxtape.

Muxtape seems to be some sort of online mixtape website.

I decided to set myself some parameters: only songs that you could listen to in the car or while washing dishes, nothing too arty or dynamically extreme, and songs about which I might have something interesting to say. I figure that the point of this sort of thing is to invite friends to actually listen to the songs posted. I think most everybody I know would like these songs.

I am going to write about this muxtape with the following parameters: each piece gets written about in no more time than it takes to listen to the song. This will include checking wikipedia, and naps, and other things, so this might not be the most
helpful guide:

1)Takeshi Terauchi: this is really dream music for me... it combines the kind of gorgeous farfisa/rocksichord melodies I always hope will be in martial arts films from the 60s, but only ever find in Seijun Suzuki's movies, incredibly awesome Nokie Edwards meets Sonny Sharrock clean tone-treble pickup guitar playing (with no reverb-- a godsend for the reverb-allergic surf fan, which is sort of like being a matzoh-ball allergic Jew). The form is also wonderful---almost meta-hockets between 2 or 3 aural areas, and the glue of monkees-style country fills.

2) Judee Sill--"The Pearl": I have raved about Sill before, but I had to include this, because this may the single most beautiful song in my collection. I have 29 gigs of music that I love on my ipod, but I listen to this song every time I turn it on.

3) Stonewall Jackson-- "The Alcohol of Fame": I usually hate jokey country songs, and I really hate puns, so this is a weird one for me. To be honest, one reason I love this song so much is that I didn't realize it was a pun for weeks after I got the record. I just loved the metaphor of "alcohol of fame" and how apt it seemed for our current moment... this one though, also, proves that great country sidemen are the greatest thing in the world-- I am pretty sure this is Lloyd Green on pedal steel and Charlie McCoy on harmonica....

4) Bootsy's Rubber Band: In high school, I loved p-funk more than almost anything else in the world. After I got into sullen slow music, I felt I had to renounce funky music... and I hated the frat boys who loved funk music... but this was an epic mistake. This music really is utopian in the best sense-- and suggests the pertinence of things that go "wah,wah, wah" to collective happiness. Bootsy is also one of the best singers in the history of music... his gloss on Houng Dog is better psychedelic intertextuality than DJ Spooky's whole career, and the synth strings are so mind-blowingly rad. I also love how wide the pocket is. Bringing me to a question: what is the widest pocket on record? Or, more nerdily, how many bars does the longest funk groove go before returning to the one?

5)Hackberry Ramblers, "Jolie Blond": I think this one is on the Harry Smith anthology, but I could be wrong. This is of course a blindingly obvious choice for a cajun tune, but what the fuck, it is perfect. First, it is a waltz. Why do I forget that I love waltzes? Like, I would be in an all waltz band. I would even understand if people thought we sucked. I just think it is the way to make music, unless a really convincing argument otherwise can be made. Charles Stivale used to write essays on Louisiana music and Deleuze and Guattari, which I thought were dumb, but which I now see the point of, listening to this...

6) Bushwick Bill-- "Little Big Man" So darned great... Bushwick Bill's music always reminds me of the famous story about James Baldwin, who responded to an interviewer's question: how did it feel to grow up poor, black, and gay with the answer: "I thought I hit the jackpot." Bill's control of the line is truly remarkable, and the lyrical tricknology is always 3 times more sophisticated than it needs to be to still rock. Also, the bit of dancehall toasting makes me deliriously happy. Finally, the semi-cheesy rock groove is really effectively deployed. Sue me.

7)Nic Jones--"Us Poor Fellows": Nic Jones occupies so deep a place in my heart I can't really write about him. I was introduced to his music by Martin Arnold, who may introduce everybody to Nic Jones, but when he played me his record Penguin Eggs I felt that something intended for me was being beamed into my brain. With the exception of Derek Bailey little else has struck me thus. This comes from an incredible record, a ballad opera called, I think, the Transports. It has all of the amazing British Isles folks doing ballads, woven into a theatrical narrative of some sort. This song recurs 4 or 5 times. Anyways, it is one of the most touching and moving labor songs I have ever heard. A recipe-- this song, welsh rarebit, some glensomething whiskey, and Linebaugh and Rediker's Many-Headed Hydra. Also, the orchestration, by the Collins sisters (or one of them, at least) is so fucking righteous-- odd goreous polyphony, the beloved musical ethic and social philosophy of my dear friends in Toronto.

8)K-Rob/Rammellzee-- "Beat Bop": embarassingly enough, I didn't hear this tune until very recently. It is brilliant, beguiling electro... I have become really interested in Rammellzee recently... his rap, the second voice on this track, is wildly mind-melting. The cello (?) that intercuts his part is a beautiful choice.Of course, the choice of so reverby a track for a mixtape by a reverb-hater is perverse and probably lame... This song also features in Style Wars, one of my favorite movies ever... very worth seeing, if any of you are looking for a good documentary with lots of footage of Ed Koch looking like a total dick.

9) Blind Alfred Reed-- "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live": I fear that this is also on the Harry Smith anthology, but maybe I am confusing it with the Bristol Sessions. Anyhoo, Blind Alfred Reed is to my mind the great labor poet of the American old-time tradition. This song is so fucking hardcore and militant it is hard to believe that it was published. Reed also did religious songs in the masochistic/self-flagellating Methodist tradition, I think.... inteteresting. We usually think of the latter as
depoliticizing. We're wrong, I guess.

10) Henson Cargill-- "Skip a Rope": Great late 1960s Nashville production, Cargill's voice is fantastic, the guitar fills are pure brilliance (I have to asume James Burton, but who knows), love the finger snaps. I am into this song for many reasons, but one of them is that it is part of an important body of late 1960s country social protest songs-- usually ignored by historians who think country was all "Okie" in this time... between Cargill, Lynn, Paycheck,Campbell and others, there were tons of protest songs way better than "For What It's Worth" coming out of Nashville.

11) Judas Priest--"Rapid Fire": I was never a big JP fan in my teen years, but now I cannot get enough. Rob Halford is a total genius. The riff to this song is really heavy. I love riffs, but I don't like playing them. I like playing widdly widdly solos. This song has some of that too!

9)Archie Shepp-- "Blues for Brother George Jackson": Beautiful tune from the 1972 record "Attica Blues."

Goddamn

2008-03-20T15:54:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of talk lately about Barack Obama and his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. For the most part, this talk has followed the logic of neoliberalism, which sees all political problems, in the final analysis, as technical (rather than complicated mixtures of ethical, ideological and historical dilemmas, which they typically are). Thus, I think the declaration that finally Obama has opted to talk to America about the issue of race as if Americans are grown-ups (to paraphrase Jon Stewart), is premature.

Thinking about race like a grown-up means acknowledging the hurts of history without moving prematurely to a phony feel-good resolution. From the evidence I have seen, Rev. Wright is a much more sophisticated, brave, and lucid student of race in America than Obama, even at Obama's most impressive moments of oratory. American historians find Wright's claims uncontroversial. Why won't American media seriously consider the merits of Wright's claims?

Once the media decided that Wright was going to be a problem for Obama, the only question for pundits, critics, and the Obama campaign itself was how best to control the damage. Lost in this rush to evaluate how well Obama has performed public contrition and denunciation of Wright are larger questions. For instance, why are African American politicians asked to publicly negotiate their relationships to radical intellectuals when whites are not? The whole affair has brought back unwelcome memories of the early 1990s, when as a teen I became accustomed to seeing African American leaders regularly called on by smug white neocons to publicly denounce every fringe NOI cleric, hip-hop artist, and Afrocentrist scholar that could be discovered in the United States, an obligation demanded of no other group. Of course, the notion that Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant whites should likewise have been forced to answer for every extremist on their mailing lists, boards of directors, and bookshelves would have struck the members of the American establishment as absurd. The recent coverage of Obama and Wright suggests that no lessons were learned from this ugly chapter.

Why am I writing about the Obama/Wright controversy on a blog devoted primarily to music? Because Wright's oratory resonates with the last fifty years of African American popular music, both sacred and secular. Assuming that we can read snippets of "incendiary" speech, deprived of their context and musicality, and pass judgments on Wright's message, makes no sense. Just as bourgeois rap critics have not yet learned to listen to hip-hop as a contradictory gestalt that scrambles the logic of Western aesthetics intentionally, so critics of Wright's sermons appear not to believe that the form (the sermon), context (religious worship at a particular historical conjuncture), and larger literary and aesthetic tradition (African American oratory writ large) matter in evaluating his "message" (as if it was necessarily unitary, as if it was not collectively and collaboratively produced, as if irony and hyperbole are categories applicable only to James Joyce, not African American religious speech)...

The Wright speech that has garnered the most attention pivots on the phrase, "God damn America." Looking at the way this phrase appears in context, the primary motivation appears to be the mass incarceration of African Americans over the last 30 years, a tragedy and crime that mocks America's self-image as steadily progressing towards racial equality, and indeed as a just society. I would be surprised if any reader of Ruth Gilmore's Golden Gulag, Sasha Abramsky's American Furies, Marie Gottschalk's The Prison and the Gallows, or the work of Angela Davis, Loic Wacquant, Dylan Rodriguez, or Alan Gomez on the carceral state could come to a contrary position.

I am sure that the suggestion that 9/11 represented America's "chickens coming home to roost" was a more powerful spur to kneejerk reaction against Wright's words. We can argue about specifics, but consider the following thought experiment. If you were teaching the history of 9/11, (a task that sometimes falls to me as a TA for US History surveys), what would you include in a reader, syllabus, or lecture? Wouldn't you focus on US foreign policy in the final decades of the Cold War? Could you really leave out US middle-east policy and respect yourself in the morning? Would you really present this history in a manner strikingly different than Wright?

Finally, Wright's speech calls to mind another provocative use of the phrase "goddamn" in African American literature: Nina Simone's 1963 song "Mississippi Goddamn." Simone's brilliant song teaches us many things. One of those things is that words sometimes have more than one meaning, and that sometimes these meanings fall in the space between two syntactical locations. Here is a clip of Simone, and the lyrics to "Mississippi Goddamn":

MISSISSIPPI GODDAMN
The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddamn
And I mean every word of it

Alabama's got me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddamn

Alabama's got me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddamn

Can't you see it can't you feel it
It's all in the air
I can't stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer

Alabama's got me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddamn

This is a show tune
But the show hasn't been written for it yet

Hound dogs on my trail
Schoolchildren sitting in jail
Black cat crossed my path
I think every day's gonna be my last
Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We're all gonna get it in due time

I don't belong here I don't belong there
I've even stopped believing in prayer
Don't tell me I tell you
Me and my people just about do
I've been there so I know
Keep on saying go slow

But that's just the trouble too slow
Washing the windows too slow
Picking the cotton too slow
You're just plain rotten too slow
Too damn lazy too slow
Thinking's crazy too slow

Where am I going
What am I doing
I don't know I don't know
Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
Cos everybody knows about Mississippi Goddamn

I bet you thought
I was kidding didn't you

Picket lines school boycots
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
For my sister my brother my people and me

Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you'd stop calling me Sister Sady

Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
I don't trust you anymore
You keep on saying go slow go slow

But that's just the trouble too slow
Desegregation too slow
Mass participation too slow
Unification too slow
Do things gradually too slow
Will bring more tragedy too slow

Why don't you see it why don't you feel it
I don't know I don't know
You don't have to live next to me
Just give me my equality

And everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddamn
That's it

In "Mississippi Goddamn," Simone shifts between using "goddamn" as an expletive that comments on "Mississippi"-- e.g. "everybody knows about Mississippi, god damn it"-- and a noun that captures Mississippi as an existential state: "the Mississippi Goddamn." Simone does not want us to choose-- she wants us to linger in the space between the two meanings. The two meanings intensify one another. The more we understand the Mississippi Goddamn as an existential hell, the psychic space of the blues-- Simone beautifully weaves lyrical fragments from Robert Johnson and Howlin' Wolf around journalistic detail, shards of personal anguish, and political calls to action-- the more we understand "goddamn" as a malediction as well as a fatalistic curse. Malediction, Avery Gordon notes, speaking of other existential hells (several generations descended from the torture camps of the Jim Crow south, as Mumia Abu-Jamal and others have demonstrated; Gordon points out that one reason it took so long for officials to react to the horros of Abu Ghraib was the ordinariness of the torture and humiliation in the context of American carceral culture), is one of the tools prisoners use when power apparently deprives them of every means of resistance.

As I listen to Rev. Wright, I hear distinct echoes of Simone's "goddamn." It is "goddamn" as existential condition and malediction retooled to confront the culture of idiotic self-celebration, patriotism, and historical amnesia that seized the American media in the weeks and months after 9/11, the retreat of middle-class, white America into an infantile desire for innocence and ignorance. The beginning of an adult, intelligent, and productive conversation about race in America, begins, I think with white people listening closely to Simone and Wright's "goddamns," relinquishing defensiveness and ideological certainties and smug self-confidence.

Neoliberal Grotesque

2008-01-30T21:35:00.000-08:00

Here's a bit of writing I did a couple of months back that might be of interest to readers of this blog:

Towards the end of season 2 of The Wire, viewers are given a rare glimpse into the internal mechanisms of globalization. Baltimore stevedores’ union boss Frank Sobotka is sitting in a darkened conference room, surrounded by executives in suits, watching a presentation on the future of the docks. With a slide show on the futuristic Rotterdam port on screen (a mosaic of multicolored but otherwise identical shipping containers surrounded by computerized cranes), a pitch man hypes the port of the future:

“To bring goods to an exploding global economy, and to deliver those goods faster, cheaper and safer, modern robotics do much of the work in the world's largest seaport, Rotterdam. Moving cargo is a traditional strength of the Dutch who shuttle more freight and fewer man hours than any port in the world. And now, the Dutch have modeled the future of cargo management, completely containerized cargo arrives and departs on ships a third of a mile long, 24 hours a day with short turnaround. Smart card technology provides greater security and improved accountability with no need for unreliable human surveillance.”

By the end of the session, Sobotka recognizes that the container technology spells the end of the port work that his family has done for generations. In a meeting later that afternoon with a high-priced political consultant that Sobotka has hired to lobby the state legislature to dredge the pier to encourage more ship traffic Sobotka explodes in a fit of frustrated anger. “After the horror movie I seen today… Robots! Piers full of robots!... My kid’ll be lucky if he’s punchin’ numbers five years from now… it breaks my fucking heart that there’s no future for the Sobotkas on the waterfront.” The irony, as the show’s viewers are all too aware, is that the port union will soon be brought down by another “horror movie” staged in the shipping containers that go through the Baltimore ports: the death by suffocation of twelve Eastern European women, who were being illegally smuggled in a shipping container into the United States to labor as sex workers.

In this double-sided “horror movie” of the shipping containers, The Wire provides an excellent example of what might be called the “neoliberal grotesque.” The “neoliberal grotesque” is the contemporary corollary of the “proletarian grotesque” that Michael Denning, following Kenneth Burke, identifies as the hallmark of the 1930s “cultural front.” Whereas the “proletarian grotesque” was primarily constituted by works in the peasant and Fordist-Taylorist grotesque modes— Tobacco Road and the Grapes of Wrath and Dorothea Lange and “Strange Fruit” on the one hand; Pins and Needles and If He Hollers Let Him Go and Diego Rivera’s murals on the other—the “neoliberal grotesque” feeds on the contradictions, anomalies, and oxymorons of the culture of globalization.

The Wire, for instance, draws on many of the features that Tim Zaniello identifies as hallmarks of the “cinema of globalization”: the “planet of slums” connecting the inner city of Baltimore with the blighted landscape of post-Perestroika Eastern Europe, migrant and undocumented work, human trafficking, digitalization, and outsourcing and offshoring, and deregulation. Tellingly, Zaniello’s list of themes includes “containerized shipping’ as a separate category. The producers of The Wire play on the essentially terrifying quality of the shipping container as a physical object and as a symbolic bearer of meaning. While grotesque objects are often examples of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the “carnivalesque body” (in Mary Russo’s words, “the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process, and change”), mass-produced objects like containers can also fascinate and horrify precisely because they come to represent their mass-produced-ness, interchangeability, ubiquity, anonymity, and viral tendency to multiply, like the clones of science fiction films. As David Harvey notes, the absence of central planning in free market capitalism makes “redundancy” or over-duplication itself a species of the grotesque.

The container represents the triumph of reification, the perfection of the technology of making-invisible the human processes of exploitation and violence at the heart of global capitalism. In The Wire, it is only by virtue of a series of accidents that the twelve women are ever discovered; no one in the police administration wants to recognize the deaths as a “crime,” because it might mean adding a dozen unsolved murders to the statistical tally of annual murders. The shipping container, it seems, is the perfect example of what Giorgio Agamben calls “homo sacer” or “bare life”—the juridical condition in which one can be killed, but not murdered. At every turn the forces of capital and the state work to discourage the investigation of their deaths. In the season’s conclusion, we see the culprits escape into the sunset. The process that brought the women to Baltimore in a shipping container, we are led to believe, will only intensify in coming years.

This unhappy ending is not gratuitous cynicism. It is in fact central to the formal advantages that the “grotesque” offers to artists working in times of profound social crisis. As opposed to the narcoticizing effects of other mass culture forms (with their characteristic tidy resolutions of conflicts), the grotesque artworks do not allow audiences to feel easily finished with the experience of observing them. Mark Fearnow notes that the “grotesque” works by transforming “vague anxieties and discordant fears… into forms in which they are represented and mingled with comic elements.” “Thus reified,” Fearnow notes, “these cultural ‘nightmares’ are rendered less frightening but remain troubling and disruptive of an easy acceptance of ‘reality’; the grotesque object instead holds those who perceive it in a horrified fascination holding the terror at bay.”

The historical origins of the “grotesque” as a generic term lie in late-fifteenth century Rome, wherein workers found a Roman grotto “filled with paintings of absurdly conflated plants and animals.” Since then, critics have applied the term to any instance of contradiction in a work of art. Fearnow writes:
The word ‘grotesque,’ taken up enthusiastically by Renaissance commentators, rapidly grew from a narrow referencing of one set of Roman paintings to a whole ‘type’ of art and then to an overarching critical idea because it provided the linguistic tool to describe not just an ingredient that they had noticed in art, but also moments of their own experience. In Renaissance Europe, the word described the countless instances of incongruous juxtaposition that occurred as an old ‘mentality,’ based in the philosophical assumptions of Christian dogma and the practical acceptance of ecclesiastical power, gave way in erratic stages to a new mentality rooted in notions of science and temporal power.

From early modernity to the early twentieth century, the grotesque occupied an important place within artistic movements, such as Romanticism, that attempted to come to terms with the challenges and dislocations of an emerging capitalism and industrial order.

The 1930s saw the rise of the most important revival of the grotesque in the twentieth century. Michael Denning regards Kenneth Burke’s 1935 address to the American Writers’ Congress as a pivotal moment in the Left becoming self-conscious of the value and centrality of the grotesque as an aesthetic category. Burke argued that the “grotesque is the poetic form most appropriate to moments of crisis and transition, a form in which ‘the perception of discordances is perceived without smile or laughter.’” Denning makes a powerful argument that the arts of the 1930s are populated by radical experiments in the grotesque. Billie Holiday’s recording of “Strange Fruit” is Denning’s most powerful example of the oxymoronic-as-radical-aesthetic-trope: the contradiction between the pastoral imagery and lilting, “Southern” music, and the stark depiction of a lynching victim swinging from a tree. This impossible juxtaposition does not produce laughter, as do most literary uses of discordance. Burke distrusted humor, which he saw as conservative in nature; the grotesque, on the other hand, with its denial of laughter, “tends to revolutionary.” The grotesque way of seeing, in Denning’s view, forced the listener to “confront the reality of racist violence in a more powerful way than could be achieved via techniques of documentary sincerity.” “Strange Fruit” demonstrates the power of the “grotesque” as means of wrenching audiences out of the “repose and distance of the ‘aesthetic.’”

For Fearnow, the Depression-era grotesque was a dead letter by the early 1940s. He points to 1941’s toothless film adaptation of the stage version of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road as a critical moment of the decline of the grotesque. Denning sees a much longer trajectory, and scholars of the African American Popular Front argue for the persistence of the proletarian grotesque well into the 1950s and 1960s. For our purposes, the most interesting question is not so much when the “proletarian grotesque” began to fade as when a “neoliberal grotesque” began to emerge. Like Raymond Williams’ “key words,” the emergence of clusters of which “reflects the emergence of new social forces or the acceleration of older ones,” the becoming-grotesque of certain objects or practices is a telling indicator of changes within a given social formation.

Here, space permits only a brief list of artistic tendencies and areas of interest that might constitute the beginning of a theory of the “neoliberal grotesque.” While it is difficult to properly periodize a phenomenon as amorphous as the “neoliberal grotesque,” it seems likely that it began in the mid-1970s, grew in significance in the 1980s and 1990s, and emerged as a fully-formed aesthetic project since the turn of the millennium. While the “neoliberal grotesque” surely encompasses the many of the works discussed by scholars such as Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek in their attempts to sketch out a theory of postmodern cinema—especially sci-fi blockbusters and disaster movies—it is something more than just another gloss on postmodernity. For one thing, the “neoliberal grotesque” thrives on ironies and contradictions produced by the interconnectedness of north and south, whereas the Hollywood films seen as paradigmatically “postmodern” tend to draw on traditional imperialist logics: the freewheeling pastiche of past forms and exotica, or narratives based on anxieties surrounding alien threats.

For another, the “neoliberal grotesque” is often the product of “real” legal, technological, and political changes, requiring no exaggeration or sleight-of-hand on the part of cultural workers. Changes in intellectual property law resulting from GATT, TRIPS, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for instance, have made blurred logos, faces, and license plates a commonplace on “documentary”-style television, a vision of a grotesque world in which the commons is so infiltrated by capitalist proprietary claims that swaths of the visual field need to be preemptively disfigured in order to be represented at all. The photos of Abu Ghraib, no less than the work of filmmakers and musicians, are examples of the “neoliberal grotesque.” Beyond the culture of violence and incarceration that produced the perpetrators, the global imperial project that sent them to Iraq, and the normalization of torture that allowed the crimes visited on the prisoners to remain unpunished for so long, these images were produced by and for technological means unavailable even a decade prior: shot on digital camera, emailed between perpetrators and other viewers, and choreographed, it seems, for the characteristically narcissistic digital technological forms of the internet age—the myspace page, photo album, and ipod.

In the United States, “slasher films” of the modern horror genre (following the model of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and the birth of punk, heavy metal, and hip hop music contributed to the growth of working-class artistic interest in gore and violence to the body as core aesthetic concerns. By the mid-1980s, subcultures in the American South had emerged around “death metal” and ultra-realist “hardcore” hip hop, both of which pioneered new “grotesque” sonic resources (the guttural singing of death metal vocalists, the low frequency bass rumbling of Miami hip-hop, the “screwed and chopped” warping and splicing of records by Houston “screw” DJs) and prized lyrics celebrating the carnivalesque body. By themselves, however, these works are not quite self-consciously “grotesque” in the sense used by Denning and Fearnow, or in the way that The Wire often succeeds in being. Since the turn of the millennium, however, a number of musical artists, often drawing on these sources, have begun to produce musical articulations of the “neoliberal grotesque” that match and often transcend the “proletarian grotesques” of the 1930s in impact: for example, Maya “MIA” Arulpragasam.

The daughter of Tamil leftist activists who relocated to London in the 1970s, MIA specializes in weaving together odd juxtapositions. In a recent interview she declared: “My shit is third world… It’s about Africans running around with AK-47s, wearing a bootlegged Prada shirt and listening to my Baltimore club mixtape.” It would be difficult to imagine a better example of “neoliberal grotesque” than this ensemble of images. MIA writes about the life of poor and undocumented immigrant workers in England, mixing slogans from old school hip-hop records, revolutionary slogans, brand names, and dancehall reggae exhortations, all delivered in a defiantly “ethnic” and female vocal style. Like Polly Styrene of the 1970s punk group X-Ray Spex, MIA relishes quick glissandos to the dog-whistle range, a defiant shriek that destabilizes the traditional expectation that the structural role of the female singer (especially a female signer of color) is the seduction of the male listener.
The beats that lay under MIA’s songs, often constructed in collaboration with specialists in “neoliberal grotesque” regional music styles (“Balto” Baltimore hip-hop and Bollywood film music) frequently make use of markers of indigenous resistance—horns and parade drums—and “digital distortion,” the crackling and erratic fuzz that results from scrambling the ones and zeros in computer software. MIA notes that her style also serves as a critique of segregation within the London club scene, which replicates in miniature the artificial taste distinctions that capitalism loves to insinuate to grow niche markets and aspirational lifestyle brands: “If you like dancehall you have to hang out with Jamaicans and go to a dancehall club… then you have to go to a gay club to hear your electro trance shit, then you have to go to a Bengali club to hear that stuff.”

As much as the capitalist music media attempts to blunt the radical edge of MIA’s music (Si Hawkins’ suggestion that “Maya has certainly come a long way since the days of representing her music solely through a revolutionary aesthetic... she is still eager to identify herself with the unprivileged but with success, she has broadened her world view” is typical of the discomfort that committed political art tends to invite among music writers), the centrality of the “neoliberal grotesque” in her artistic vision protects her music from easy cooptation. It is also sufficiently threatening to the American state to generate concern about her as a security risk: for over a year, she was denied entry to the United States, apparently for security-related reasons. As one of the few popular musicians who dare call attention to the manifold contradictions of neoliberalism from a defiantly subaltern perspective, MIA’s experiments in the grotesque speak to possibilities for a global leftist popular culture at once celebratory and powerfully resistant.

If (a) Twee Fails....

2008-01-11T14:48:00.000-08:00

My brother's blog alerted me to some controversy regarding Juno's status as a legitimately "indie" film. While considering matters cinematic is outside my ken, I will echo others who claim that the search for "authenticity" in indie cinema is a fool's errand and that allegations that Juno is derivative are overstated (and poorly formulated, even if true: don't we turn to indie cinema for "more of what we know we like" in the first place?). Anyways, Juno occupies a completely different affective universe than Napoleon Dynamite, with its refusal to attend to anything but the surfaces of suburban anomie, and Ghost World, which purports to celebrate the eccentricity and intelligence of teen girls but ultimately reverts to the misanthropy (and misogyny) of the source text (Dan Clowes's Eightball comic book). Juno, owing I think entirely to Diablo Cody's script, is genuinely celebratory of the genius of teen girls and their creative responses to the hell of adolescence. In this light, it has more in common with Weetzie Bat and Heathers and Buffy and Veronica Mars than latter-day arthouse movies.

The main problem I had with Juno was the music. The film is anchored by songs by Kimya Dawson, of the group the Moldy Peaches. Dawson's songs are cloying, faux-naive, smug, and cutesy. The generic term for this style of song is "twee," which is wielded as a badge or pride or term of opprobrium by lovers and haters, respectively. Although I never pursued "twee" music as a music purchaser with much focus or intensity, I have always liked it as an aesthetic orientation: radical in its own way, a forceful challenge to the masculinist ickiness of so much indie rock. I would certainly include one "twee" single, Thee Headcoatees' "My Boyfriend's Learning Karate" among my favorite rock songs ever. The wikipedia entry on "twee" is fascinating: it suggests that while "twee" represented a challenge to rock sexism in 1980s Britain, it was also one side of an aesthetic war in the rock press between partisans of "black " (Public Enemy and other militant hip-hop artists) and "white" ("twee" bands featured on NME's C86 compilation) music. And it would seem that "twee" is aggressively white... until we recall that its "rebellious sentimentality" is open to all sorts of unforeseen appropriations and scrambling of racial logics, as in the case Chicano toughs in present-day California who worship "twee" godfather Morrisey.

The problem with Juno is that it is overrun with "bad" "twee." Its badness resides in two aesthetic features that have always lurked as the potential ruin of "twee": sonic banality and lyrical self-absorption. "Bad" "twee" has recently taken over commercial music. That horrible Feist song, that horrible i-phone song, that horrible Regina Spektor person... on TV commercials, every hack composer has brought out the glockenspiesl and ukuleles. Nearly every ad now has a banjo playing a grating two note melody and a couple of seconds later, a predictable repeating countermelody joins in. It is not surprising that these tunes favor music's most anodyne form, the round (to quote MA, "I don't care if summer is a-fucking coming in!") .

On top of the melodic banality, the lyrics of Dawson's songs are terrible. They lack in ambiguity, surprise, or local detail. They seem at once self-indulgent and aloof. They require an investment in the singer's psychology that vitiates the wonder that pop songs ought to deliver. It is no surprise that Dawson has worked with Third Eye Blind and a guy from The Spin Doctors, or was part of something called the "anti-folk " movement. What the fuck? How can you be anti-"folk"? Ironically, the worst part of "folk," as I imagine the anti-folkers imagine it, is distilled and refined in the music of Dawson: the narcissism, the faux-populism in the disdain for technique and sophistication (as against the particularity and pleasure in musical performance characteristic of almost all vernacular musical traditions), the crappy harmonizing, the love of the wince-worthy lyric followed by the knowing stare and nod at the audience...

Between the success of Juno and the evidence of recent TV-viewing, "bad" "twee" is only growing in power. Let's kill it.

Blogging: An Infantile Disorder

2007-03-21T22:08:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody!

Sorry I have not written much since Christmas. I am especially appreciative to those of you-- Carl, Paula, Nick, John, and Sandy-- who have written nice and helpful comments. I hope to produce more pages on the Wu-Tang Clan for I Hear A New World over the next few months, and I will definitely write about Merle Haggard one of these days. Thanks so much for commenting... I really appreciate it, even if I have a somewhat Butoh-esque way of showing it.

No surprise, I have been deeply immersed in matters scholastic. Enjoyable but harried. So much so that now I can only communicate in Mickey Spillance sentence frgments. No time for verbs.

This quarter I took a great class on the Communist Party and anti-communism (left and right) in America, and a more or less standard, though nevertheless still deeply helpful, US-history-boot-camp class on Reconstruction and the Progressive era. The communism/anticommunism class had two highlights: 1) it finally rid me of my anxiety that someone, in the supermarket perhaps, would ask me what a "Shachtmanite" was and I wouldn't be able to provide an adequate answer. Now I totally can. 2) It also spurred further thinking about the Popular Front and American music, some of which I hope to develop here when I have the time. Maybe I will do a little of that right now...

The Popular Front was the period between the mid-1930s and the end of WWII, when the Comintern changed directions from its ultraleftist stance of the late 20s and early 30s(which eschewed all cooperation with socialists, social democrats, and liberals)and urged Communists to join the political mainstream in their respective countries. Folk musicians, popular culture workers like cartoonists and Hollywood film studio employees, muralists, proletarian novelists and politically-charged theatre artist were crucial members of the Popular Front coalition. For a long time afterwards, (and for the most part, during the 1930s and 40s) the anti-Stalinist Left regarded the Popular Front as politically opportunistic and culturally stunted. Trotskyists especially hated the limits placed on the creative imagination by "socialist realism" and folk cultism.

For younger US history and American Studies types, this negative impression of the Popular Front seems dated; since the publication of Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Age of the CIO they have mostly regarded the late 30s as the highpoint of intellectual and artistic convergence with left-wing working-class politics. There are some problems with this revisionism (especially for folks sympathetic to the left-wing anti-stalinists who felt that it was important to fight against the Popular Front's fealty to Russia, especially after a lot of Stalin's crimes started to become known and even more especially after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact), but for the most part I think that Denning's work is undeniably amazing. By downplaying the salience of partisan infighting (which is always the story of national lefts)Denning is able to reveal broad affinities between left-wing artists, intellectuals, and political leaders. This interpretive gesture not only sheds light on the power of cultural production within social movements but also indicates a way for contemporary artists and intellectuals to forge links to a broader struggle for a better world.

One project I have been playing around with is a kind of sequel to Denning's work: what happens to the Cultural Front in the age of the AFL-CIO? As many younger scholars of the Cold War-era Left are discovering, state repression didn't stop oppositional thinkers, activists, and artists from working, it just made their lives much more difficult. For whatever reason, their influence on the 1960s political left and cultural avant-garde seems to me really fascinating. A couple of examples, both of which came out of a long and free-wheeling discussion with an emeritus faculty member here, who was part of the group that helped found the Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1960s:

1)The first stirrings of the New Left in Ann Arbor, Michigan, developed in a creative bohemian subculture that included both young socialist activists, experimenting with their freedom from the ossified political culture of New York but still connected to the labor movement because of their proximity to Detroit, and experimental musicians like Gordon Mumma, who were developing, along with visionaries like Alvin Lucier and Robert Ashley, an alternative to the cul-de-sac of academic composition;

2)In February I had the great pleasure of interviewing Henry Grimes. Grimes is a bass player who played with Sonny Rollins and Lee Konitz while in his early twenties, worked with Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and Pharoah Sanders in the 1960s, appearing on many of the most cherished albums of the free jazz era, and then seemed to disappear for many years. Since 2003, he has been playing in public again, which is one of the really happy stories of the last few years. Grimes recorded an incredible LP for the ESP Disk label in 1965 called The Call, which was the product of an intense period of mutual collaboration with a trio that shared an apartment in New York near hotspot Slug's Saloon. The clarinetist with the Grimes trio was Perry Robinson, and as I re-listened to The Call in preparation for the interview, I became very fascinated with his wonderful, serpentine lines, and especially the way that Robinson and Grimes played off and against one another. Nevertheless, I had never thought about looking into Robinson's biography or his other recordings. As it happened, when I was talking to my informant about the SDS and the New Left, he told me that he had been friendly with a famous Popular Front composer, who traveled in the same circles as his parents, CP members who taught high school until they were blacklisted. As it turned out, this composer was Earl Robinson, who wrote the Paul Robeson's showpiece, "Ballad for Americans," perhaps the sine qua non Popular Front musical composition. Quickly it became apparent that Perry Robinson was Earl Robinson's son. For whatever reason, these direct links between the Popular Front and 1960s free jazz, the SDS and the Sonic Arts Union, seem fascinating, and would no doubt seem even moreso when contextualized within what I imagine are dozens of other similar examples.

What led me to thinking about blogging about this, oddly enough, was the recent coverage of Austin Texas' least likeable megaevent, SXSW. I agree wholeheartedly with Nick Hennies-- musicians want to make money, and anybody that tries to make them feel bad about that is a dick. If a corporate sleazefest means that somebody is going to send old friends or new friends to your town for fun and music-making, then we probably ought to see it as the equivalent of photocopying band fliers at an evil office job. But it would be very different if instead of embracing corporate love, SXSW-- which is as much a project of municipal generosity and, especially, largesse on the part of Austin musicians, service employees, and residents as it is of corporate support-- could be about different values. Austinites provide a "good time" and "authentic vibe" for corporate fuckmongers, and they get little or nothing back. Imagine if Austin bands began to organize a broad union of bar staff, hotel workers, and ordinary music fans, and threatened a general strike of SXSW 2008 if certain demands are not met: for instance, wage increases for workers and a drastically increased minimum wage for bars and "cool" stores like Book People and Waterloo; municipal provision of health care benefits; provision of corporate-free zones for performances and dissemination of information about the activities of the sponsors of SXSW; and abolition of admission fees to SXSW events. Most radical would simply be the demand to "open the books," so that the people who actually finance SXSW could see where money is being made and how. Even if none of it worked, it would be an amazing difference to use SXSW to raise critical consciousness rather than... what? Having everybody be happy to put their lives on hold and sacrifice their souls so that Lily Allen and a bunch of Sy Sperling-clone record company stooges will grace Austin with their presence? Who needs it?

Divine Mathematics

2007-02-14T10:49:00.000-08:00

For ultra-quixotic, and therefore probably somewhat embarassing, reasons, I penned some lines about the Wu-Tang Clan, which I thought I would share with you, my people. Since a computer crash eightysixed an earlier and loopier version of this post (best line that no longer makes sense: "don't despair karma, you are not what they say you are!") I am going to indulge my laziness and leave titles un-italicized. You can sprinkle some peccorino romano or rub fresh basil on them if you wish...

“I verbally assault with my tongue…” Goodbye Short 20th Century

In 1999, Sonic Youth released a record called Goodbye 20th Century. It was a multilayered joke. Not only was the Gregorian calendar making its way queasily to a centennial jump (to say nothing of the possibly-apocalyptic-millennial-lurch, with its own doomsday computer virus and survivalist shopping sprees), but Goodbye 20th Century also marked Sonic Youth’s tribute to a musical genre whose name was days away from becoming obsolete. “Twentieth-century music” was the term people used in the twentieth century to refer to music written in the twentieth century. In a perfect exemplification of the process that Karl Marx called “reification,” by 1999, nine decades worth of resistance to bourgeois complacency-- twelve-tone spirals, abrupt tape splices, droning and burbling analog synthesis, inside-piano gimcrackery-- seemed to cohere in a set of aural clichés. The twentieth century had become a brand, and its music a sonic logo, as recognizable as the dun-ding-dun-dong that every resident of the twenty-first century automatically knows to associate with the Intel Corporation.

The correlation of twentieth-century and ultra-contemporary, however, was sort of terrifying, in its own way. The unmistakable implication seemed to be that the end was nigh. The world would not survive the twentieth century. Like Tim LaHaye and Hal Lindsay, the nutbag authors of Christian-apocalypse-pornography bestsellers Left Behind and The Late, Great, Planet Earth, new music enthusiasts seemed to feel that there would probably be no twenty-first century to embarrass them.

1999 was nevertheless too late for an authentic Goodbye 20th Century—it should have come years earlier. In 1993, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, (Jewish exile from the same flaming Europe fled by my grandparents and lifelong Communist), completed The Age of Extremes, an obituary for the “Short 20th Century” that began in 1914 and ended in 1991. “There can be no serious doubt,” Hobsbawm wrote, “that in the late 1980s and early 1990s an era in world history ended and a new one began.” For those of us who didn’t spend the subsequent decade or so riding razor scooters around the awesome office parks of dot-com startups, it was easy to see the world after 1991 like Hobsbawm: “an enormous zone of political uncertainty, instability, chaos and civil war.”

In 1993, the Wu-Tang Clan released a record called Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) which, in retrospect, seems like a proper Goodbye 20th Century, a farewell to the brutal decades between World War I and Operation Desert Storm. Appropriately, it is a blues record, albeit one very much of its time. The blues tenor of Enter the Wu-Tang becomes more clear if we keep in mind Ralph Ellison’s beautiful rendering of the blues as metaphysics: “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

The record opens up with a kung-fu movie sample-- a hyper-caucasian voiceover artist reading Shaw Brothers boilerplate doggerel-- that sounds like it was recorded with a handheld cassette player held up to a television: “Shaolin shadowboxing and a wu-tang sword style.” Soon it will become clear to me that martial arts cinema mythology, cosa nostra trivia, comic book superheroes, Staten Island drug trade lore, five percent nation holy writ are all elements of an occult and inscrutable language in which the Wu-Tang Clan encode their messages to the world. Like Lee “Scratch” Perry and Sun Ra, the Wu-Tang Clan speak in a language meant to confuse and mislead outsiders like me; nonetheless, it seems all the more pleasurable the more it leaves me scratching my head and feeling like an idiot. The young Dominican-American novelist Junot Diaz once said that the reason he leaves so much untranslated Spanish in his fiction is to give Anglo readers the sensation of what it’s like to be an outsider to a dominant culture. Unlike the bourgeois MCs of recent years, the Wu-Tang Clan do not speak the lingua franca of luxury goods and imported automobiles… there is no opportunity for the false solidarity of product loyalty… but rather an invitation to estrangement, the first step towards critical consciousness…

The group begins what will be the first of many chants: “bring the mothafuckin’ ruckus.” “Wu-Tang killer bees.” “Clan in da front.” Chanting, of course, is something people do in groups, an activity in which an individual identity is subsumed in the voice of a greater collective body. And what the Wu-Tang Clan do—why their music is so powerfully radical—is provide a glimpse into what kind of power a group might have. Or, in other words: politics.

The first thing one confronts when listening to the Wu-Tang Clan is the difficulty of separating individual voices—one volley of distorted syllables and surreal references seems to bleed into the next. The front cover art—the group in ninja garb and white masks-- reinforces the seeming intentionality of this bleeding of identities one into the other. The more one listens, the more one becomes attuned to the complexities of sonic difference. Making the entire affair all the more wonderfully disorienting is the proliferation of nicknames and noms de guerre, RZA the razor, “The sharpest motherfucker in the whole clan… razor sharp,” GZA, “the genius,” Raekwon, “the Chef,” “Lex Diamonds,” Method Man, “Johnny Blaze,” Ghostface Killah, “Tony Starks,” Inspectah Deck, U-God, Masta Killa…

Of course, this creative renaming is one of the chief characteristics of the blues—think of, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bukka White, The Masked Marvel, Black Ace, et al... Robert F. Diggs, “RZA” once noted that he and his cousin Gary Grice, “GZA” changed their names because they “had no choice,” a process that Clyde Woods calls a “blues transformation”: “Back in the ‘80s, I lost it. I became a problem for the world. I wasn’t living righteous… And we changed, both of us. We had no choice. It was either that, go crazy, or go starving.”

The Wu-Tang Clan member most firmly in this tradition was the late Russell Jones—“Ol’ Dirty Bastad,” “the Bebop Specialist,” “Osiris,” “Big Baby Jesus,” “Dirt McGirt,” “Freeloading Rusty”… Like Peetie Wheatsraw, the Devil’s-Son-In-Law, or Robert Johnson or Angola Prison bluesman Robert Pete Williams (whose “I’ve Grown So Ugly” would have been the ultimate Ol’ Dirty Bastard cover), Jones’s damaged-lung and spittle-encrusted trickster/badman lines loom like gargoyles over the proceedings. RZA described his cousin in words that might have been penned to describe other outlaw bluesmen like Robert Johnson or Charlie Parker: “In every kung-fu movie, there’s always the dirty bastard, the dirty rat; somebody who, no matter what he does, does wrong. Even when does right, his intent is to do wrong. Well, that’s Dirty in real life. He’d rather do it to a girl that got a guy than a girl without a guy.”

"I've had a rough night, and I hate the fucking Eagles, man"

2007-02-07T22:07:00.000-08:00

Lately I have been finding all sorts of weird mp3s on my hard drive that I have never gotten around to listening to. Tonight I decided to listen to some of them, and I stumbled upon a single called "Union Man" by a group called the Cate Brothers. The blog that posted this track did not provide much information about it... so, for whatever reason, I had the idea that it was that rarest of all entities, a 70s soul single that directly references trade unions or the labor movement.

The music is really pretty awesome-- its layered textures remind me a little of the Ohio Players, and the guitar playing is impressively unhinged. The lyrics voice a protest against a "union man" who is calling for a strike, when the singer wants to earn some money and pay the bills. I was disappointed that this one rare union-related track was not more pro-labor; on the other hand, I totally understand the frustrations of workers who try to make ends meet on strike pay, and African Americans especially have good reason to be totally frustrated with the American labor movement. Especially during the George Meany/Lane Kirkland years, the AFL-CIO was a pretty awful institution, so a critique of the "union man" is not without its merits... especially if that "union man" is the satin-baseball-jacket-and-pinky- ring wearing local boss, rather than the rank-and-file worker seeking a measure of workplace democracy and maybe a little job security or health insurance. Most men and women in American still want to be that kind of "union man" or "union woman" and many more would no doubt join them in that aspiration if the corporate anti-labor propaganda machine wasn't so well-funded and tenacious.

But, as it turned out, the Cate Brothers were not an African American group, but a white soul/funk combo from Fayetteville, Arkansas. That town has the dubious honor of sitting at the epicenter of contemporary American union busting: Wal-Mart HQ is in nearby Bentonville, and Wal-Mart cofounder Bud Walton used to live there. Is this a cosmic coincidence? Or something more sinister. I am going to try to find out.

The Cate Brothers are no longer very active. But Wal-Mart has moved on in its search for musical compradors, anyways. Now, before I go on, I urge you to have a seat. You should definitely take a moment to prepare yourself for the unfathomable ickyness of what I am about to tell you. Wal-Mart has signed a one-year contract to be the exclusive distributor of Don Henley and The Eagles' next album. I don't even know how to grasp the extreme yuck... ecch... Wal-Mart... Eagles... Wal-Mart... Eagles... Could anything be worse? Maybe Bed, Bath, and Beyond and Mike and the Mechanics? But let it be known that Henley is fighting mad about folks questioning his decision to team up with enviro-criminals Wal-Mart. And Glenn Frey, is, if I remember the video for "The Heat Is On" correctly, totally ripped. He could kick your ass. Henley you could probably take, but as soon as he started singing "The Boys of Summer" you would be mortally weakened... and then he would start crooning that "End of the Innocence" song and you would be dead. Like some mystical Bruce Lee chi-ball action. Mark my words. The Eagles will fuck you up.

Fatigue and Barbarism Converge

2007-02-03T18:59:00.000-08:00

Are weird juxtapositions cool or lame? I don't even know anymore. But I have been thinking about them lately.

Our friend Becky stopped by and played us "The Slack Album," the latest chapter of the Jay-Z "mash-up" saga. You probably remember Danger Mouse's "The Grey Album," which was a clever and surreal crosspollination of Jay-Z's "The Black Album" and The Beatles' "White Album." Well, some wiseacre named DJ N-Wee decided to do Danger Mouse one better and splice "The Black Album" with Pavement's "Slanted and Enchanted." I was mostly entertained by the result. On "13 Jackals, Allure - The Lonesome Era," for instance, the oddness of the original's fuzz-guitar line is ramified by its imbrication in a hip-hop loop. It was a nice reminder of one of the original appeals of Pavement: the fearlessness with which they embraced trashy sonics and formal awkwardness as aesthetic virtues.

Other tracks on "The Slack Album," however, seem to illuminate the very ordinariness of Pavement's musical vision. The strummed clusters of "Here," meant to evoke laughs when situated aside Mr. Hova's rhymes, provide instead a horrible sense of deja vu. For you, it will likely be different. For me: Songbird Music guitar store on Queen West in Toronto in 1998, 81 fellows with clumpy hair playing Neil Young sliding triads against chiming open high E strings on overpriced Fender Jazzmasters through overpriced Hi-Watt stacks. I'm not sure music has ever been worse. Like, The Three Irish Tenors? Probably better.

With weird juxtapositions on the brain, I paused to consider TW Adorno's essay "Valery Proust Museum" (brought to mind by a call for papers in my inbox) and an interview with Texas hip-hopper Pimp C (in AllHip-Hop.Com) that Cogburn was kind enough to send me, even though I owe him 500 emails and 3000 hours of phone catch-up time. Cogburn that is, not Pimp C. Or Adorno. If only I had a friend named Pimp C to whom I owed emails and phone calls! Adorno, even in his current state, would be too high-maintenance to maintain regular correspondence with.

Pimp C's answer to a question about Pro Tools recording software is one of the favorite things I have ever read:

"Do I like Pro-Tools? I like some things about it, but I feel real nervous knowing my songs are still in some motherf**ker’s computer and I can’t even get my s**t out of there when I leave. That s**t is some bulls**t designed by people that like to steal records." As Cogburn likely predicted, this insight sent my intellectual property-addled brain a-reeling. Not only does Pimp C make fascinating connections between uneven property relations, the materiality/ontology of recorded music, and conflicting notions of ownership, but he also points to emerging battles between producers and studio bosses in hip-hop.

On a related note, Pimp C observes that the use of Pro Tools has introduced palpable differences in the sound of hip-hop:

"Do I think that all studios having that computer s**t has cheapened the quality of the music? Of course it has, records don’t sound like they used to bro. There’s too much technology involved and you can hear it. Go listen to some of those old records that we were doing in the studio with SSL boards and a two-inch tape machine. You can hear the difference between that s**t and what these n****s are making right now. The game is popcorn, it’s like comparing something that was cooked in a microwave to something from a gas stove. It might be the same ingredients and even the same recipe, but it don’t taste quite the same in the end. It’s gonna to go back to the real and people are gonna figure it out. It’s all about finding a happy medium between the technology and the old way of doing things. Some will perfect that and some won’t, some just don’t care."

Speaking of weird juxtapositions, "Valery Proust Museum" is Adorno's meditation on the museum and the museumification of culture; and what is a museum but a temple of unintentional weird juxtapositions?

"Museum and mausoleum," Adorno notes, "are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art. They testify to the neutralization of culture. Art treasures are hoarded in them, and their market value leaves no room for the pleasure of looking at them" For Adorno, the presentation of music is increasingly becoming museum-like: "In efforts to retrieve music from the remoteness of the performance and put it into the immediate context of life there is not only something ineffectual but also a tinge of industriously regressive spite."

Adorno pursues his analysis by contrasting the views of Paul Valery and Marcel Proust on the museum. For the poet Paul Valery, Adorno says, the modern museum sucks the "feudal" delights out of art-viewing. From the "no smoking" signs to the "tumult of frozen creatures each of which demands the non-existence of the others" the museum provides disorientation and anomie, not pleasure and edification. "One does not know why one has come," writes Adorno, "in search of culture or enjoyment, in fulfilment of an obligation, in obedience to a convention... Fatigue and barbarism converge."

Of great interests for our purposes is Valery's comparison of the overhwelmed eye of the museumgoer and the comparatively fortunate ear of the music listener. Notwithstanding Charles Ives, it is true that "no one can ask (the ear) to listen to ten orchestras at once." Nevertheless, the effects of museumification afflict music as well as the plastic arts. The presentation of culture in museums and concert halls weakens our ability to attend to any one work in particular and discern its unique qualities. Adorno detects in Valery a radical Marxist critique of the corrosive political economy of art. Rephrasing Valery's argument, Adorno waxes eloquent on the deadly business of art in the age of capitalism: "Whether artists produce or rich people die, whatever happens is good for the museums. Like casinos, they cannot lose, and that is their curse. For people become hopelessly lost in the galleries, isolated in the midst of so much art... Art becomes a matter of education and information... Education defeats art."

Proust's thoughts on museums, like those of Valery, are motivated by nostalgia. But unlike Valery and his elegy for art displayed within the private artistocratic home, Proust objects to the new bourgeois fashion for art as "trivial decorative display," hung in the dining room to be enjoyed during a meal. Museums for Proust are not the depressing institutions hated by Valery; on the contrary they are spaces of sublime revery. The "masterpiece observed during dinner," Proust wrote, "no longer produces the in us the exhilirating happiness that can be had only in a museum, where the rooms, in their sober abstinence from all decorative detail, symbolize the inner spaces into which the artist withdraws to create the work."

Despite the differences between Valery and Proust, Adorno finds a common thread connecting their thoughts on museums: "they share the presupposition that works of art should be enjoyed." For Adorno, of course, nothing should be enjoyed, except perhaps for Webern bagatelles and run-on sentences. But enjoyment for Valery and enjoyment for Proust are two different things. Valery is interested in art as it captivates the viewer in real time, art that demands "absolute, unwavering concentration"; and since the age of these works is over, there is nothing left to do "but mourn for works as they turn into relics."

Proust, on the other hand, values the retrospective over the immediate. As Adorno writes, "because nothing has significance for him but what has already been mediated by memory, his love dwells on the second life, the one which is already over, rather than on the first... In a famous passage he glorified inferior music for the sake of the listener's memories, which are preserved with far more fidelity and force in an old popular song than in the self-sufficiency of a work by Beethoven."

One of the continuing appeals of Adorno is the sustained negativity of his writing... not in terms of being a "bummer," but in the logical sense of refusing the false resolution of a bogus synthesis. Putting Valery and Proust in tension with one another is not a project undertaken to prove a point: for Adorno, it is the effort of laying out and explicating the contradictions and dilemmas of the contemorary crisis of culture and humanity that is in and of itself productive.

PS: Here are the two orphans left after the editing of this post:

"Gold fronts didn't originate in Texas. My aunties and s**t from Louisiana have golds in their mouths. People in the South have been wearing gold in their mouths for years."

"The only relation to art that can be sanctioned in a reality that stands under the threat of catastrophe is one that treats works of art with the same deadly seriousness that characterizes the world today."

More Thoughts On Area Code 615

2007-01-23T18:07:00.000-08:00

Thinking back to the post a few weeks back about Charlie McCoy and the Area Code 615 loop at the heart of Bubba Sparxxx's song "Jimmy Mathis," I have discovered a good interview with Area Code 615's late and much missed pedal steel player Weldon Myrick that sheds a great deal of light on the group's origins and creative process:

"In the late '60s there was an influx of artists from New York and LA who were digging country sounds... Some of the guys in the companies thought that some of the Nashville studio folks should get together and do an album. Elliot Mazer got us together, and Wayne Moss had a little studio out in Madison. There was nine of us , and we would go in and work on ideas and songs. A good majority of the ideas came from Charlie McCoy and Wayne. We would work all day on one song, changing this and that. It took us 17 sessions to get that first album together." This work process represents a remarkable change from the usual production routine in Nashville-- a level of creative freedom and mutual input that is audible, I think, in the music that the group created. For working musicians who still struggled to get by on studio wages, the sacrifice of time and money that the collective creation process represented is pretty amazing, too.

According to Myrick, the group shopped the demo around, and ultimately sold it to Polydor, who paid retroactively for studio costs and agreed to finance another album. The William Morris Agency signed up the group and apparently had "big plans" for them. Myrick recalled that none of the group's members wanted to give up the seniority they had gained in the Nashville studio system, and so the touring and other commitments that being a full-time concern would have entailed.

I have also been trying to further explore the meaning of Charlie McCoy's harmonica within the symbolic matrix of Bubba Sparxxx's music. Two new ideas have come to mind. First, when musing on why I felt the urge to include the example of DeFord Bailey, the Grand Ole Opry's harmonica player (and sole African American performer)of the 1930s, I did a little more legwork, and recalled that Bailey had been unceremoniously fired by Opry boss George D. Hay in the early 1940s. The details behid Bailey's firing are murky, and they are at least partially related to internecine fights over BMI and ASCAP affiliation during ASCAP's wartime recording ban. Even Stephen Hawking would have a hard time figuring out the intricacies of that conflict. That is, if he studied antiquarian pop music history instead of astrophysics. Given that he does study astrophysics, I guess I shouldn't be surprising that he would have a hard time figuring out the BMI and ASCAP war. But I am still disappointed.

But another element of the story is that the wildly popular DeFord Bailey never spoke on air nor was ever identified by the Opry's announcer as black. The harmonica playing thus embodied a kind of racial slippage or indeterminacy, related to but different from the racial indeterminacy at the heart of the Opry's blackface duo Jamup and Honey.

As Louis Kyriakoudes notes, "DeFord Bailey's presence on the early Opry stood as an unintended acknowledgement of the biracial elements of old-time music. Bailey was central to the Opry—his harmonica performances were among the most popular on the program—and the radio did not directly indicate his race. But Hay refused to accept him as an equal member of the opry, referring to Bailey as 'a little crippled boy... [who] was our mascot.' He typically required Bailey to play alone and restricted him to a limited repertoire until he was fired, ironically, for not learning new tunes."

I also forgot to properly contextualize the harmonica and Charlie McCoy as part of the late 1960s construction of a defiantly southern country music in Nashville. Bluegrass music and honky tonk country had maintained an uneasy coexistence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, faced with the challenges of rock and roll on the one hand and countrypolitan on the other. Nevertheless, while both honky tonk and bluegrass enjoyed a "hard shell" status in contrast to the "soft" sounds coming out of Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley's studios, they were very different forms. Not only was bluegrass acoustic and honky tonk electric, but bluegrass maintained a rigid sense of moral self-discipline, while honky tonk explored the nether regions of modern anxiety. It was in the context of the electricification of bluegrass in the late 1960s, best represented by Jim and Jesse and the Osborne Brothers that the harmonica became firmly ensconced in "Nashville country music" as we now know it. The bleed-over into the construction of Nixon-era whiteness and George Wallace-ite southern conservativism is unmistakable. Between the Osborne's "Rocky Top" and Jim and Jesse's paeans to the organic community of southern textile mill towns, it is not hard to see how the "new" sounds of late 1960s country would map on to new values and politics. Or perhaps, sometimes a harmonica is just a harmonica?

More Thoughts on Bubba Sparxxx

2007-01-20T21:15:00.000-08:00

I thought I might do a little bit of work on the theme of Bubba Sparxxx's music as the staging of a particular kind of public event: a ritual of racial reconciliation. We are by now familiar with other (mostly non-pop music) media versions of these events, such as the famous 1996 Oprah Little Rock Nine reunion. Oprah coordinated a televised meeting of seven of the nine now-grown black children who were barred from entering a Little Rock, Arkansas high school in 1957 by racist white mobs and Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus, and a few of their penitent white tormentors.

It isn't hard to find other recent examples of these rituals, many of which are arranged to mark anniversaries of traumatic moments in the long struggle for civil rights for blacks in the United States. I wonder if there is a difference between these rituals, which aim to resolve outstanding historical grievances, and others that emerge from more or less current or contemporary outbreaks of racial violence. We can think of the Ted Koppel "America in Black and White" televised town hall meeting (which PBS aired as part of its "P.O.V." series in January, 2003) staged to reconcile black and white citizens of Jasper, Texas as a prime example of this second category. Jasper was the site of the 1998 death-by-dragging of James Byrd, a black resident of the town, by three white men in a pickup truck. (This incident also provoked Christian Marclay's brilliant video piece "Guitar Drag," one of the finest "political" artworks of recent years).

It seems that the recent media coverage of "ghetto fabulous" parties held by white students at southern universities should be understood in light of this genre. In fall 2006, some University of Texas law students held such an event, at which, according to the AP story, "partygoers carried 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor and wore Afro wigs, necklaces with large medallions and name tags bearing traditionally black and Hispanic names". Austin, which always seemed like a pretty racially fucked-up place to me when we lived there (despite its mostly unearned and inflated reputation as a liberal haven) has had a long tradition of racist frat culture. The same AP story cited above concludes with a reminder that in 2004, UT had to institute sweeping changes to rehabilitate its reputations after a rash of racist incidents on campus were reported, including the egging of a Martin Luther King Jr. statue and "fraternity parties where blacks were portrayed in Jim Crow racial stereotypes."

Just this weekend, Fox News has been hyping a similar story, but more explicitly massaging the "reconciliation" angle. Students at Tarleton State University (in Stephenville, Texas) held a racist Martin Luther King day party, at which they rehearsed the most cliched and degrading stereotypes of black culture: fried chicken, gang sign flashing, Aunt Jemima costumes, malt liquor, ad nauseum. Within hours, the story changed from outrage at the behavior of the undergrads to footage of black students publicly forgiving the offending partiers, and awkwardly hugging repentant revelers. The implicit message, of course, is that it is the responsibility of black students to help heal their racist classmates; any footage of students who might have felt that 4 minutes was not long enough to move from anger to conciliation was left on the cutting-room floor. In regard to these "ghetto fabulous" parties we should recall Michael Rogin's eloquent analysis of racial mimesis as psychic surgery. "Blackface," Rogin wrote, "heals" America's racial division "in allowing whites playfully to expropriate blacks under conditions of hierarchical, interracial harmony" ('Democracy and Burnt Cork': The End of Blackface, The Beginning of Civil Rights," Representations 1999, 6).

The most potent example of collegiate race hatred is, of course, the case of Duke lacrosse players accused of sexually assaulting an African-American stripper hired to entertain at an off-campus party. It is now apparent that the DA royally screwed the case up, and the media spin has thus been of the backlash "poor white boys" variety. There will be no conciliatory group hug in Raleigh-Durham. Whatever else eventually comes out in the wash, we will be left with the bitter image of big (northeastern prep school) men on (a southern) campus enjoying the sexual performances of poor African-American strippers, about whom they said some of the most degrading things I have ever read.

In this light, three features of Bubba Sparxxx-as-purveyor-of-racial-reconciliation stand out. First, Sparxxx articulates a shared sense of southern "enjoyment" that crosses racial lines and heals historical wounds. Implicit in Sparxxx's music and public image is the notion that southerners "enjoy themselves" in a unique way, and that whites and blacks can overcome history through collective participation in this culture of enjoyment. This faith in the emancipatory power of shared cultural participation was at the core of the Coen Brothers's O Brother Where Art Thou and the vogue for Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music
upon its CD reissue. Recall that the blind white Mississippi disc jockey in O Brother was unable to distinguish between white and black musicians, and that one of the pleasures of the Anthology is the beguiling racial indeterminacy of so many of the artists. It is not surprising that Sparxxx used O Brother's opening chain-gang escape scene as a motif in his video for "Deliverance."

Of equal importance, however, is the second feature of Sparxxx's work: his creative use of history, broadly conceived, as a crucial tool of utopian imaginative work. This is not peculiar to Sparxxx: from Atlanta hip-hop duo Outkast's speakasy fantasy Idlewild to Virginia rapper Missy Elliot's evocation of a sepia-toned past in the video for "Pass the Dutch," southern hip-hop writ large is marked by an interest in creative reneogtiations of history.

The final dimension of Sparxxx's conciliatroy project is his articulation of southern white working-class identity. Not simply another version of mimetic "blackface," Sparxxx's persona speaks to desires for a white working-class identity resistant to (or at least unsullied by) the reactionary "whiteness" that has dominated the American imagination for centuries. There is a profound sense in Sparxxx's music that this work is preparatory to a final racial reconciliation between southern blacks and whites. Vh1's brilliant "The White Rapper Show" seems to be erected on similar foundations.

The million dollar question, however, is this: where are the women in all of these rituals of racial reconciliation? The answer requires a whole separate post, which is forthcoming. Even the most cursory analysis would nevertheless reveal that women are not merely absent from the efforts by southern white men to work out their anxieties and guilt. On the contrary, they are central. The exploitation of women, black and white, seems to be at the core of these efforts to repair the historic antagonism between southern whites and blacks. For that reason, tragically, the net benefits of the work of Sparxxx and his fellow travelers, which could be profound, are more likely to be negligible.

Tired of Beating Our Heads Against The Wall and Working for Someone Else, Part I

2007-01-12T20:12:00.000-08:00

Since I wrote my response to Jody Rosen's James Brown obit in Slate, I have had some time to reflect further on James Brown and his work and what he might have meant for American culture. I feel no need to modify or retract any of my previous observations, but I would like to flesh out some of the themes that were not fully developed and perhaps offer some additional thoughts.

Seth Sandronsky recently wrote a moving testament to Brown's music as a soundtrack to the civil rights revolution (on the ever-indispensable mrzine.org website), a tocsin of the "race, class, and gender struggle for a new society." A letter writer, Richard S, (who runs the promisingly-titled blog "commie curmudgeon") thoughtfully responded by pointing out that Brown "was a major advocate of 'black capitalism,' he was proud to be a big businessman, he supported Richard Nixon, he ran his bands in a strictly hierarchical manner and fined band members for any slip-ups, and he was an admitted wife beater." Taking issue with Sandronsky's reading of "Say It Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud" (from which the title to this post is taken) as a Tronti-esque workerist anthem, Richard S. admits that he finds it hard "to reconcile these facts with the idea that James Brown was a great opponent of the alienation of labor and played a major part in a 'race, class and gender struggle for a new society.'"

As far as I understand the historical record, both Sandronsky and Richard are right. For many African Americans in the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, Brown's music (along with that of many other R&B artists) did fuel aspirations for revolutionary social change. If he had done nothing else but oversee the recording of "Funky Drummer," Brown would have been an important figure in the intersection of black music and politics, since that song launched a thousand hip-hop tracks (although by that logic, Billy Squier and Kraftwerk would also be honorary Deacons for Defense).

Unlike Jody Rosen, Sandronsky does not overexaggerate the success of the movements that sought to acheive this change, or Brown's role in their limited successes. One reason that I was so annoyed by the James Brown obit in Slate was that it described his acheivement as "having made the world funky," thereby affirming the neocon interpretation of the Civil Rights movement as a successful fait accompli by 1966 or 1967. Blacks could vote; the world was funky; and just as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner's Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy would be moved to transcend their old-fashioned resistance to the interracial marriage of their daughter by encountering a group of free-spirited youths frugging in the street, so America could overcome its legacy of entrenched racism by trading James Crow for James Brown. The net effect of this kind of bad history is the rendering-absurd of more radical manfestations of the civil rights movement and contemporary claims regarding persisting (in many cases deepening) inequalities between blacks and whites in the United States.

Richard S. is correct, however, in cautioning against extending this interpretation to somehow mean that Brown's music articulated black workers' frustrations and aspirations to build a more meaningful and authentic existence. Leaving aside the unsavory details of Brown's personal life (which certainly make him an unattractive figure, but don't necessarily mitigate his political significance... the same accusations could certainly made against someone like Huey Newton, who is nevertheless considered a talented and influential, if deeply flawed and problematic, political leader by most historians), we should focus on the presence or absence of "work critique" in the music of Brown.

Like Richard S, I agree that Brown's treatment of his musical collaborators was loathsome. In fact, like many bandleader entrepreneurs of postwar pop music, from Buck Owens to Buddy Rich, Brown built his persona and performances (as well as his profit base) on control, public humiliation, and exploitation of the musicians who worked for him. However we interpret this (and I think one possibility is to read Brown's performance of control as parodic, and thus in certain ways radical), we should not proceed from one isolated set of lyrics to a wholesale appraisal of Brown's depiction of workers and work. Brian Ward reminds us that massive pressure was required on the part of civil rights leaders to convince Brown to lend his voice and resources to the movement.

In Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (another must-read recent American Studies-ish history of African American music), Ward writes that Roy Wilkins had to "virtually shame" Brown into endorsing the NAACP from the stage of the Apollo." Even after he tentatively accepted responsibility to support the civil rights movement, he mostly carried it out by penning toothless songs like "Don't Be A Dropout" and orchestrating publicity stunts like handing out free Christmas meals as a tie-in to his single "Santa Go Straight To The Ghetto.” Richard S. is right to point out as well that Brown's commitment to black capitalism, materialism, and a macho-essentialist vision of "blackness" was unwavering. From Amiri Baraka to Larry Neal, movement intellectuals frequently confessed feelings that ranged from mixed to hostile in regard to Brown.

As it happens, it was miserable to work for Brown. As Brian Ward and Cynthia Rose attest, Brown's employees were treated very badly. Cynthia Rose, author of Living in America: The Soul Saga of James Brown, one of the best mass-market pop music books ever written, recounts the litany of rumors that circulated about Brown as taskmaster:

"James took all the credit for the compositional triumphs of many associates. James enslaved his retinue by claiming that, if they left him, he'd see that they never worked again. During his second, late '80s spell in prison, many of Brown's most well-known ex-employees have underscroed his three decades of creativity with horror stories of financial extortion, woman-beatin, and--latterly-- drug abuse."

Fred Wesley's discussion with Rose of working for James Brown is frankly terrifying: "James was bossy and paranoid... I don't see why someone of his stature would be so defensive. I couldn't understand the way he treated his band, why he was so evil."

In American culture, overridden by several different "labor metaphysics," even suggesting that life might be more than beating one's head against the wall and working for someone else is nevertheless a radical gesture. For African Americans, caught between an internally contradictory racist ideology that depicts them as both shiftless loafers and superhuman workhorses, the critique of work and the work ethic is a powerful substrate of cultural resistance. If we know where to listen, we can hear this resistance in every instance that cultural workers push against the arbitrary power of their bosses... but we are not likely to hear it in the exhortations of those very bosses, no matter how much we might want to.

Compare and Contrast

2007-01-12T20:02:00.000-08:00

Stone Fox Chase

2007-01-09T21:15:00.000-08:00

I got word on the line-up of the hip-hop scholarship panel at which I am presenting in March; it looks mighty great. I have been doing some messing around with my paper about Bubba Sparxxx over the past few weeks; maybe I will present some of the tangential musings occasioned by this research here at I Hear A New World.

Although I generally hate playing "find the sample," I have been intrigued by the history of the harmonica loop that undergirds Bubba Sparxxx's "Jimmy Mathis": a rave-up called "Stone Fox Chase" by the obscure 1960s instrumental group Area Code 615.

I discovered the geneaology of the "Jimmy Mathis" sample, strangely enough, while the Bubba Sparxxx project was completely on the back burner. Over the holidays I became obsessed with hearing Area Code 615 while catching up on some american studies-ish music history books that have been on my list for a while. At the top of that list was Peter Shapiro's Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. (By the way, this book is amazing. I encourage everybody, even folks who are not especially interested in disco, to read it. The other book I read [some of ] was Scott Saul's Freedom Is, Freedom Aint: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, which is also good, although the title made me hopeful it might be more about free music and less about hard bop.)

Shapiro reports that "Stone Fox Chase" was one of the staples of DJ sets in the pre-Saturday Night Fever years of gay New York disco. According to Shapiro, DJ Ray Yeates was fond of spinning the record at the Tenth Floor, a pioneering gay "clone club" of the pre-AIDS Gotham sexual underground. Shapiro provides a description of "Stone Fox Chase" that immediately made me bolt up and run to my computer to confirm via wikipedia that I had not accidentally overdosed on raw-sheep's-milk stilton or mescaline and dreamt it up: "an utterly bizarre record made by Nashville's most famous session musicians that sounded like the backwoods family in Deliverance jamming with the percussionists from the Last Poets records."

My researches confirmed that Area Code 615 did in fact exist. After I tracked down their collected works, I feel comfortable asserting that they had the best idea for a band ever: Nashville "A-Team" studio pros cut loose on laid-back, vaguely afro-cuban pyschedelic country instrumentals in the patchouli haze of late-1960s Music City. Ever fixated on hot pedal steel music, I was particularly moved to droolage by the fact that Connie Smith's amazing steel player, Weldon Myrick, held down the steel chair in the band.

The centerpiece of the band, however, was harmonica player Charlie McCoy. Normally I hate the harmonica, but Charlie McCoy is an exception-- his playing is gritty and aggressive and rooted in the ornamental language of southern fiddle music. The rest of the group--fiddle great Buddy Spicher; guitarists Wayne Moss and Mac Gayden; and drummer Kenny Buttrey, who played on Blonde on Blonde and Tonight's The Night-- are insanely great. The trade-off between bluesy, fuzz-laden southern rock guitar licks and squeaky clean country picking is consistently arresting... something like Grand Ole Opry cut-to-commercial cues as perfect minimalist/nostalgia furniture music.

Were we to not know the Nashville psychedelic studio experiment and disco heritage of "Stone Fox Chase" (which would be easy, since it is more famous as also the theme song to English rock variety show "The Old Grey Whistle Test"), our understanding of the meaning of Charlie McCoy's harmonica loop might be unduly straightforward. Likely, while creating the tracks for "Jimmy Mathis," producer Tim "Timbaland" Mosely sought an evocation of the reclaimed whiteness at the core of Sparxxx's weltanschauung. There certainly is much to recommend the "Stone Fox Chase" harmonica sample. Its appropriateness for the song derives from the racial semiotics of the harmonica: like so much of the material of popular music, a racial semiotics rooted in timbre, phrasing, and articulation.

Using an overtly twangy sample, such as a pedal steel guitar or fiddle, would signal too much a straightforward "caucasian"-ness that might seem retrograde or silly. Using samples too close to the materials of funk and soul music would defeat the purpose of forging a conciliatory and authentic "white" southern hip hop voice and sound-palette. The humble harmonica, connotative of nostalgic southern Americana (the wikipedia entry notes that Abraham Lincoln, Billy the Kid, and Wyatt Earp were all marine band tootlers...that's so American its almost, I dunno, Soviet) and long-linked with itinerant ramblers in national mythology, works to reinforce the rural proletarian valences of Sparxxx's persona.

At the same time, the style of overblown diatonic harmonica playing on "Stone Fox Chase" is a very African-American-coded sound. As I listen to it more, it occurs to me that McCoy's harmonica loop calls to mind most, at least in relation to my own musical memory, the 1960s white blues revivalists John Mayall and Paul Butterfield, and their models, Little Walter and Rice Miller. The prewar history of the harmonica had its own racial enigma: DeFord Bailey, an African-American harmonica player who played exciting train songs on George Hay's original Grand Ole Opry, often performing on the same bills as blackface minstrel acts.

In conclusion: something about tracing the migration of "Stone Fox Chase" from the mixing boards of a Vietnam-era Nashville music studio to the imaginary New South of Bubba Sparxxx via the Tom of Finland pleasure palaces of 1970s New York seems to powerfully undermine my reflexes to think about the coding of sounds as fixed and obvious. That's good!

Psyched to Promote Environmental Consciousness!

2007-01-09T00:44:00.000-08:00

Who is Fall Out Boy? All I know about them is that their bass player is a rubbery-faced sort of punchable-looking guy* who shows his penis on the internet. Anyways, they are "psyched to promote environmental consciouness" by shilling the Civic Hybrid for Honda on the new Honda Civic Tour.

I tried to find out more about environmental consciouness and/or Fall Out Boy by going to the Honda Civic Tour website, but there was surprisingly not much there. So I went to FOB's website, which was also surprisingly free of content. Then I was directed to a site called www.absolutepunk.net. "Finally," I thought, "a punk website that is absolute! I abhor the partiality, nay the very fragmentaricity of all of those other punk websites!"

Well, absolutepunk.net was a big letdown. It didn't even seem to be about punk music at all. It is owned by "Indieclick," and owned by "3jane digital holdings, inc" which has "built many of the addictive community and social networking sites driving the second boom in Internet media including the original SuicideGirls site, Grab.com, Makeoutclub and many more." None of these sites promote environmental consciousness either, unless paeans to the awesomeness of the Nintendo wii system or the opportunity to play Diner Dash or Diner Dash 2 have some secret green agenda I cannot detect.

Okay, I know that this is sort of beating a dead horse, but can we just make a mental note to remember that when those "poptimist" people call us snobs for believing that there is something at stake in distinguishing between musicians who are stooges for capitalism and those who at least try not to be stooges for capitalism, we should point out: some of these douchebags actually play tours that are all about loving the Honda Civic, and that is, not to put too fine a point on it, I don't know... fucking lame?

* It occurs to me that much of my life has been spent sorting out various types of punchable-looking men. The Fall Out Boy guy is in the same category as the swarthy guy in Fast Times in Ridgemont High who gets Jennifer Jason Leigh's character pregnant, or maybe halfway between him and the unctuous noneck date rapist-vibe of a Joe Francis. But then he has that psychopathic thousand-yard blank stare of a latter-day Jared Leto, which is always a tip-off that I am in the company of someone who is going to start talking about their dreams for 55 hours, but also a bit of the shit-eating grin of JC Chasez, which always makes me think that someone is going to be molested before the evening is over, and somehow I am going to have to watch football.

The Cannibal Corpse of MOR Southern Rock?

2007-01-05T00:13:00.000-08:00

Comment round-up: thanks to Paula and Nick for two VW-related apercus. Paula reports that the early demise of her VW station wagon may have been the result of a vengeful abrahamic god... and Nick suggests that our shred metal band, The Long Telegram, play a VW-sponsored tour without ever leaving the car. Excellent idea! Apparently, a band called the Eagles of Death Metal were just kicked off the latest Axl Rose tour, so there is actually space for us on an appropriately epic scale arena tour, where we could drive out onstage, and then never emerge from the car... we should get in touch with WAR's management. I don't know about the Eagles of Death Metal, but I feel confident that at very least we are the Loggins and Messina of Glam.

I have been investigating the very welcome phenomenon of blogs with links to winrar-archived rare and out of print records. Church Number Nine has some outrageously great things for the free jazz fan. And Orang Aural is also well worth a visit... and I will even recommend it as a source for the rare John Zorn radio hour, which has, among other things, some of the best James "Blood" Ulmer excerpts that can be heard with human ears.

Speaking of James "Blood" Ulmer:

Also, my comrades the Reveries are the subjects of a great cover feature in this week's Eye Weekly. This on the heels of a glowing review for Eric Chenaux's wonderful Dull Lights record in the Wire... could the world be coming to its senses?

J/B

2007-01-02T13:09:00.000-08:00

Decoding Jody Rosen's James Brown obit: Rosen's text in black, commentary in green.

"He Made The World Funky" (Terrible headline. The world did not get "funkier" during James Brown's career. After the 1960s, it got crueller and more sadistic and blissfully neglectful of the suffering of its working-class populations. Brown, a hypercapitalist musical dictator, became a hero to the post-"Blues Brothers" fraternity bond traders of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and gleefully assumed the role of Reagan White House court jester with his "Rocky IV" set piece "Living in America" (Ivan Drago was definitely not funky). We get a hint too of the hagiographic fallacy inherent in Rosen's understanding of popular music and its heroes. Why did "he" and not Big Bill Broonzy and the Staples Singers and the Meters and Ike and Tina and Sly Stone and the thousands of other African American participants in the making of R&B and soul and funk "make the world funky"?)

"In the spring of 1965, James Brown went into a Charlotte, N.C., studio to cut a new record. (Like the insanely grating hollywood biopic obssession with primal scenes and Rosebud traumas, mainstream music writing is bedeviled by a tendency to streamline diffuse cultural moments into single pivotal moments.) The song's lyrics were little more than a laundry list of dance crazes, but the music was eerie and unusual—a jittery blues vamp, with oddly accented beats and horns darting and honking in the vast, empty spaces between whip-crack snare hits. "I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums," Brown would recall in his autobiography. Sure enough, the guitar sound was heavily percussive, clanking like a sledgehammer striking a rail spike. Brown flubbed a couple of lyrics during the recording, but when he heard the playback he decided, correctly, that the piece was too good to warrant a second take. "When I saw the speakers jumping, vibrating a certain way, I knew that was it: deliverance," Brown remembered, adding, in the understatement of all-time, "I had discovered that my strength was … in the rhythm." (How convenient that the memoirs of a notorious megalomaniac are trusted as an authoritative source... and that the creative contributions of the anonymous musicians who created this music are absorbed within Brown's "deliverance.")

"The song was called "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," and for once it's not glib to say that the rest was history. With "Brand New Bag," Brown created funk and laid the groundwork for disco, hip-hop, techno, and virtually every other style of modern popular music that has come since. He taught the world to wring percussive noise from every instrument—to hear drums everywhere—and to treat every song as the occasion for a riotous party. And he embarked on his most fertile period, a decade that produced dozens of the hottest records ever made: "I Feel Good," "Sex Machine," "Brother Rapp," "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose," "Super Bad," and "Mother Popcorn" (my personal vote for funkiest song in the universe), among many others." (Not glib? According to whom, Matt Lauer? Even the most traditional "great man" historian would bristle at the reductionism of Rosen's historiography. In popular music, as in most fields with rapid shifts in style and technology, innovation tends to be collective and social, not the product of individual geniuses. That's why so many "geniuses" feel the need to rewrite history after the fact, claiming the mantle of innovator-heroes in their autobiographies. And dare I risk being pedantic by mentioning that even if we wanted to attribute innovation to individuals, those individuals should be Jimmy Nolen and Earl Palmer and James Jamerson and Bootsy Collins and Zigaboo Modeliste and Bernie Worrell and the Horny Horns as well as James Brown? And why does that "my personal vote for funkiest song in the universe" line bother me so much? Is it because "vote" is awkward, "universe" an adolescent stab at coolness, and the fact that plebsicites on the canon of funkiest songs among yuppie music writers, and funk itself, seem so mutually exclusive?)

But Brown's achievement is larger than his own oeuvre and the genres that it begat. Flip on the radio virtually anywhere on earth today, and you will hear the sound of the Brown Revolution, the blare of propulsive, polyrhythmic dance music. Beats have conquered the world, even the West, where polyphony was born and melody and harmony have traditionally held sway. No other musician—not Louis Armstrong, not Elvis Presley, not Bob Dylan—can claim so central a role in this momentous cultural shift. "Make It Funky," James commanded, and from Boise to Berlin to Bangkok, they have. (Okay, come on, this is nuts... Even Thomas Friedman and Niall Ferguson would be embarassed by this vision of cultural imperialism as artistic achievement. Is this not the clearest articulation of a capitalist aesthetics, a value system that prizes above all the conquest of new markets? Again, it is unclear why James Brown should be given credit for this spread of "beat music," and why the syncopated music of most of the world, which had been around for a long time prior to the advent of notation-based artistocratic folk music, and mostly survived its distortions of musical culture just fine, is not seen as the triumphant cultural force, rather than American pop music. Finally, the alliteration is nauseatingly cutesy.)

"The obituaries that have appeared in the wake of Brown's death yesterday at the age of 73 have sketched the milestones and curiosities of his life: his hardscrabble childhood in Georgia, where he was raised by an aunt who ran a brothel; his rise through the chitlin' circuit; his marriages and arrests; his big hits, black pride anthems, and strange fondness for Richard Nixon. And his nicknames: "the Godfather of Soul," "Soul Brother No. 1," "Minister of Super Heavy Funk," "the Hardest Working Man in Show Business," "Mr. Dynamite." No one who ever saw Brown in concert could doubt that he earned those titles. Even in his dotage, he led a band as tight as any in the world and executed his signature shimmies, slides, and splits in dance shoes buffed to a high gloss.

Brown's showmanship merged the fervent emotionalism of the black church with pure showbiz—flashy clothes, vaudevillian theatrics, sweat-drenched movement, and a pompadour flamboyant enough to inspire Al Sharpton (and countless pimps). He was the model for all pop performers who followed him. After Brown, even the whitest white boy felt compelled to shake it a little onstage. (Perhaps Brown popularized his own version of gospel emotionalism plus showbiz, but he certainly did not originate this conjugation. In fact, black preachers had this combination down many years prior to Brown's breakout as a megastar. Rosen's love of "great man" narratives compromises his discussion of Brown's significance here, too: what were the thousands of anonymous jook joint blues performers, the honkers and shouters of the jump blues bands, T-Bone Walker, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard if not originators of stylized, sexually provocative performance styles? Why is Brown's personal style singled out as a sartorial watershed, when just about every history of African American style and beauty culture recognizes multiple lines of influence and inspiration in the development of hairstyles and pimp chic? And this whole, "After Brown, even the whitest white boy felt compelled to shake it a little onstage" line is racist in at least two ways: 1) rhetorically, placing this line at the end of the paragraph seems to indicate that whatever the significance of Brown for African American culture, his real importance was his impact on "white boys"; and 2) the idea that "white" and "black" are appropriate shorthand for "squareness" and "funkiness." Finally, "shake it onstage" is embarassing writing, and many "white boys" didn't shake it onstage, even after the advent of James Brown.

The world is a quieter and duller place now that Brown will never again stride the boards, although you can relive the excitement by playing the volcanic Live at the Apollo (1963). That record, by far the best live album ever made, (Come on: why is everything in rock critic world about the "best of all time"? Along with "who did it first?" it is such an intellectually degrading framework for thinking about art) is a good place to begin listening, along with the Star Time box set, which includes most of the big hits. But digging into the Brown discography is the task of a lifetime. He made at least 70 albums, and there are brilliant moments on all of them. His earliest recordings, from the late 1950s, prove that his raw-throated ballad singing would have made him a legend even if he'd never found the funk. ("the funk"?) (Hunt down his 1959 debut Please Please Please.) He recorded jazz standards and gospel testimonials and disco, rap, showtunes, instrumentals, and dozens upon dozens of hilarious numbers like "For Goodness Sake, Look at Those Cakes" and "Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto"—which I suppose you could call novelty songs, if the grooves weren't so seriously ferocious. ("Seriously ferocious"? What did this guy do before writing for Slate? Compose ad copy for Don Cherry "Rock Em Sock Em Hockey" tapes?)

The relentless groove was Brown's specialty, and he proved its pleasures were as profound, its mysteries as rich, as any that art has to offer. He worked hard to refine his craft. Earlier this year, critic and occasional Slate contributor Douglas Wolk gave me an extraordinary collection of MP3s he'd compiled of nearly every single ever produced by James Brown. Listening to these hundreds of songs by dozens of artists, it becomes clear that Brown is a bandleader and musical auteur on par with Duke Ellington. Like Ellington, he presided over a steady cast of players (including, among other greats, bassist Bootsy Collins, saxophonist Maceo Parker, trombonist Fred Wesley, and drummer Clyde Stubblefield), composed to their strengths, and kept pushing the music into new territory. Listen closely, with a good pair of headphones, and the thousand pointillist details of Brown's genius open up to you: the shifting accents and registers, the variations in dynamics and attack, the disconcerting spaces and silences, the beats piled atop beats. But, of course, that genius is never more apparent than when the headphones come off and you lose yourself in the steamy blur of a packed dance floor. (This is by far the most annoying tendency of new school rock critics-- when all else fails, go for a weird reference to dancing that makes everybody uncomfortable. Thanks, Sasha Frere-Jones, for popularizing this pathetic cred-grab strategy... and I thought that interminable UI set I had to sit through before US Maple played at the Rivoli was going to be the worst thing you ever did to me).

A subtler, often overlooked achievement is the words that Brown wrote and sang. He was capable of writing traditional pop lyrics, but by the late '60s, straightforward narratives and confessions were largely replaced by a surreal flow of catchphrases and exhortations that gushed out over the inexorable (Fuck you: inexorable-- you've got to be kidding me) beat: "Give it up or turn it a loose"; "Gimme some air!"; "Take it to the bridge!"; "Mama, come here quick/ Bring me that lickin' stick"; "Hit me!"; "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud"; "Sometimes I feel so nice/ Good Lord!/ I jump back, I wanna kiss myself"; and, passim, "Unh!," with which Brown proved, again and again, that in pop music, sound is sense, and that a single well-placed, wordless guttural can carry more meaning than a thousand poetaster's stanzas. Of course, in between grunts, Brown slipped in some worldly wisdom. To wit: "Get up offa that thing, and shake 'till you feel better/ Get up offa that thing, and shake it/ Sing it now!" In other words: Dancing is joy's end and its means. As philosophies of life go, it's not too shabby, and it's the best user's guide to James Brown records that I know. (Far be it from me to suggest that a vision of social emancipation and collective struggle against inequality might be a less "shabby" philosophy of life, and that Brown's resistance to linking his music more forcefully with the Civil Rights movement and Black Power might have merited some comment. Rosen's final sentence sucks, too: a philosophy isn't a user's guide, and "that I know" sounds like the formulaic wrap-up that desperate teenagers reach for when trying to conclude bar mitzvah speeches and college admissions essays).

Insecure Men with Money Like Guitars, Apparently

2006-12-30T12:45:00.000-08:00

I tried not to notice this trend. But then I looked at the Restoration Hardware catalog at the in-laws (for those whose travels do not bring them into contact with boutique furniture emporia, RH is neither a place to buy a screwdriver, nor a source of powdered wigs and ruffs for consumers who are particularly excited by the overthrow of Oliver Cromwell by the Stuarts in the late 17th century, but a cousin of the upscale aspirational lifestyle home decor palaces Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel... places at which it is also surprisingly difficult to buy pottery, crates, or barrels), and couldn't help but notice that among the overpriced geegaws on offer in the back pages was a Fender stratocaster and amplifier. Huh?

Insomnia has also brought me face to face with the prominent place given to guitars in infomercials. The ghastly yet fascinating Zorro impersonator Esteban has been peddling a guitar/amp/dvd package on every channel, leaving a "z"-shaped imprint on my gray matter that will never heal.

Bowflex, a company I had previously assumed was a money-laundering front for the Genovese crime family or the Trilateral Commission, on the basis of its tireless advertising in the back pages of the New York Times sunday magazine, along with the other undoubtedly fake products ("European style beret"; "one-lane endless indoor swimming pool"; "The St. Thomas More School"), is another late night advertiser that uses guitars. Well, they don't sell a very 400 lb. guitar, which I might actually buy, but they do use a peculiar bald man with a goatee to sell the Bowflex home gym. The ad begins with the bald-goatee man by his home gym, talking about how much he likes muscles, and how his muscles have helped him realize his dream of rocking out with a hot rock band with his shirt off, even though he is 49 years old. Then we see footage of him on stage at a nightclub, shirt off, fender bass slung around his knees, looking for all the world like a genetic splice of the children's toy where you drag magnetic filings on the bald man's head to give him different beard/hair combinations, and Spinal Tap bassist Derek Smalls.

Finally, there is the new Volkswagon ad, where you can plug a matching guitar into the dashboard and rock out. Yep, they give you the guitar. The Germans have lost their shit!!!! Free guitar? WHAT THE FUCK???!!! You spend 50 grand, and they give you a free 75 dollar "axe" made by toddlers in a chinese sweatshop? Is this the scenario that plays out in the R&D guru's brain: "Um, I don't know honey, the Acura has a longer powertrain warranty and passenger-side airbags..." "But this VW is the one endorsed by John Mayer! On the commercial it almost seems like the car enables you to play the main riff from Stevie Ray Vaughan's 'Pride and Joy' and wince meaningfully!" "You're right. Not buying the car with the guitar would be sort of like selling out on our rock and roll values..."

I am not a violent man, but if I ever showed up at a gig, and someone in the other band had a Volkswagon guitar ("yeah, its cool, I bought a VW and it just came with this guitar!") I would punch him. As Sara Silverman is fond of saying, for a jew to buy a VW is like the "opposite of FUBU." No jury would convict.

My Christmas Present to the World: Japanese Videos A-Z

2006-12-23T23:49:00.000-08:00

Once when I was a child, I went over to my friend's house sometime in December. His father was what my mother would call a "chnyuck," a word for which there is no exact English equivalent, but which means something like an "overbearingly pompous religious person who is constantly trying to one-up all of his other coreligionists with his superior knowledge of the arcana of religious ritual and law." Really, Judaism is the only religion that would need such a word. Anyways, my friend's dad decided that he would no longer say "Christmas," because even mouthing the words "Christ" might seem to indicate that he secretly believed that Jesus was the reason for the season. So, he pronounced the name of the yuletide holiday "Eccccchhhhhhssss"-mas, taking care to inflect the guttural "ch" sound with extra hostility and bile.

Here are some Japanese music videos. Happy "Ecccchhhhhssss"-mas, everybody!

Kaoru Abe:

The Boredoms:

"Country Road" from Studio Ghibli's Whisper of the Heart:

Deerhoof:

Enka:

Fushitsusha:

Ghost:

Hijokaidan:

Incapacitants:

First video that comes up when you type "j-pop" into youtube:

Kan Mikami:

Les Rallizes Denudes:

Sachiko M

Nobukazu Takemura:

OOIOO:

Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O & Escapade:

Quicksilver Messenger Service; people in Japan seem to understand that John Cipollina was a much better guitar player than Eric Clapton; for god sakes, he was a better guitar player than Pablo Casals was a cello player:

Ryoji Ikeda:

Solmania:

The Mops:

Cyber-Gagaku???

Blue Cheer, "Summertime Blues" from Vincebus Eruptum; people in Japan seem to understand that Blue Cheer are better than the Doors:

Japanese Ventures cover band; people in Japan seem to understand that the Ventures are better than the Beatles:

Merzbow:

The guitarist from Loudness plays a guitar that looks like an "X":

Otomo Yosihide

Trailer for Seijun Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter (with great music, too):

Comments Return from the Dead; Zorn's Dilemma

2006-12-22T00:17:00.000-08:00

Hey I just recovered all of these great comments that have been lingering in some to-be-moderated file... Apologies to dbr, mzn, and johnny too bad, who I hope will keep reading even though their comments have only just published. Check the Lessig piece especially for dbr and mzn's very thoughtful comments to my mostly ranty critique of LL.

Johnny Too Bad asked me what I think of John Zorn and Masada re: elitism and their musical construction of jewish identity four months ago, and I guess a response is better late than never.

I feel really conflicted about Zorn. "Spillane" was the first out record I ever got, in junior high, and it permanently rearranged my brain cells. Seeing him on "Night Music" with the kneehigh striped socks and leather jacket doing the whole squeaking/skronking/muting against the inner thigh alto thing was a revelation when I was a freshman in high school. Between interviews with him in music magazines and his curating at the Knitting Factory and Tonic and Victoriaville and the records he put out on Tzadik and Avant, he is probably the individual through whom I learned about most of the music I like. I also remember the Zorn concerts I have seen very fondly, partially because his personal charisma is so strong.

But musically, I must say that I hate just about all of his music. I hate the quick-change cross-genre stuff, hate the game pieces (although mostly because the groups that recorded them in the post-parachute period were so awful... all of that digital reverb and gutless han bennink-lite drumming, and macho berklee horn playing), hate the quasi-Ligeti string music (more than all the other stuff combined), and really hate the whole way that "radical jewish music" is correlated with minor scales and modal ostinatos in Masada.

Also, what's with the seeming need for every male American "eccentric musician" to embrace hyperoverdocumentation and egomania? It's really creepy and Ayn Randy. Like, knock it off.

But, that said, I saw Masada in Jerusalem with my mom when I was 19 and it was really nice. As I think about it, the big problem at a technical level really is that he does the whole Duke Ellington/ICP thing of writing for the voices and talents of particular musicians, and at the end of the day, the musicians he likes don't appeal to me... I just never want to hear Joey Baron or Wayne Horvitz or Dave Douglas or Bill Frisell-with-electronic-effects or most of the other people Zorn seems to love. With the exception of Marc Ribot and Otomo Yosihide and Zorn himself in his extreme duck call solo improv persona, the whole Tzadik stable seems kind of really bad. But Zorn blowing his crazy noise? I still think it's a good sound.

Personal Best

2006-12-14T12:41:00.000-08:00

Inspired by the very thoughtful annual lists compiled by Nick Hennies, I am going to provide my growing readership (hoping to get it up to 4 by 2009!) with an edifying glimpse into my year as a music consumer.

I don't think I bought 10 CDs of newly produced music this year, so I will have to list music that I heard for the first time in 2006. But then, I don't have much to say about most of these records in particular... so here is my edited list.

9. Harry Pussy "Fuck You" Tour Only 12" (1997)

Throught the magic of filesharing, I have been able to catch up on a lot of the underground American, Japanese, and NZ noise that I missed the first time. I basically enjoy a lot of it, but the fact that I have an old computer without a hi-speed USB connection, and an ipod that is always at 29.9999 GBs with irreplaceable Ernest Tubb bootlegs means that I delete most of it. Of course there are a few things that one finds that are absolutely life-changing, such as the music of Harry Pussy. It is basically the antidepressant I have always dreamed of. I swear it would make even otherwise unthinkable tasks, like getting a flu shot or going to Burlington Coat Factory fun.

I don't believe they are on youtube so here is some caroliner rainbow,another one of the reasons to go to the barricades to protect p2p music swapping:

8. Mats Gustafsson "Solos for Contrabass Saxophone" (Table of the Elements 10", 2004)

Whoa... what a great record.

The video below is not Mats. It appears to be some sort of kung fu comedian. Speaking of which, Jackie Chan's "Drunken Master" was on TV the other day, and was as incredible as I remembered. Especially when the kung fu council holds an earnest council debating the pros and cons of drunk boxing.

Nevertheless, kung fu man is demonstrating the massive contrabass saxophone. More or less phallic than a tenor saxophone. Is hugeness emasculating? Are sumo wrestlers considered sexy? Or sexless? What about Gerard Depardieu? Prediction for 2007: massive backlash in hipsterville against manorexia. Oddly enough, kung fu man seems to have a Swedish or Norwegian accent. One doesn't always think of the martial arts as a scandivian phenomenon.

7. Scorpions "Lonesome Crow" (1972)

Until I got totally plastered with a Franciscan friar in full habit at a local Olive Garden-knockoff last Friday night, drinking beer with Tetuzi Amkiyama at Ginny's Little Longhorn with Cogburn in June was the hands-down winner of the best clashing cultures alchohol night of 2006. Akiyama and I had a great conversation about critically neglected 70s rock guitarists, (my personal obsession, shared I think by Aaron Russell, is always Uli Jon Roth) wherein he hipped me onto the pleasures of early 70s UFO, Pink Fairies, and Scorpions. "Lonesome Crow" is just an utterly sublime fucking record. Thanks, Tetuzi!

6. Judee Sill "Heart Food" (Geffen, 1973)

I am prety sure that I am the last passenger on the Judee Sill boat. I did hear this record in "soundscapes" record store on College Street when it was first reissued, but it was ruined for me because the manorexic guy who worked there started frothing at the mouth about Sill's "crazy life"-- you know, that toxic hipster disease of fetishizing "outsiderness"-- talking about how she had been a "prostitute" and a "jesus freak." God, what a bunch of fascists those dudes are, yes? Once again, the magic of the electronic potluck party allowed me to get lots of Judee Sill for the first time. Besides Mother Hen's eponymous lp, "Heart Food" is probably my favorite singer-songwriter music of the 1970s. And Buddy Emmons, my favorite pedal steel player ever, plays on it. Was Jim O'Rourke responsible for the Judee Sill reissues? How much of my musical taste since 1997 has been subtly shaped by JO'R? Why does this make me sort of uncomfortable?

5. Mastodon "Blood Mountain" (Warner Bros., 2006)

Yeah, everybody loves Mastodon. For good reason. They really are quite heavy.

Urgh, DragonForce I had such high hopes for you on the basis of this video. I really hoped the band would be just these weird sounds and guitar faces. Unfortunately, your music is terrible. But I cannot hate any guitar hero named Herman Li. On the contrary, I must love him.

1. Eric Chenaux "Dull Lights" (Constellation, 2006)

Of course this is the best record of 2006. It is off the chain.

No youtube of Eric so far as I know. So here is a movie that I think he would like. I am sure that Atticus books wouldn't mind a few minutes of Steeleye Span either, right? In my dreams, one day Eric and I will tour the world under the name The Zambellis.

Reading Lawrence Lessig Makes Me Nauseous

2006-12-12T00:16:00.000-08:00

Right now, I am: 1) finishing up a paper on music and intellectual property for my policy history seminar; and 2) quietly delighting in the death of evil fuckwad Augusto Pinochet. The connection? Among my researches, I have forced myself to sit down with some books by Lawrence Lessig, which I always thought I would enjoy, but find instead that I want to chuck violently at the wall.

As it turns out, this putative champion of freedom speaks from one of the most antidemocratic and repressive world-views ever. Lessig's jeremiads, as welcome as they may be for those of us who also hate the FCC and Hillary Rosen, derive from a free-market evangelism indistinguishable from that of the Milton Friedman-trained "Chicago Boys" who helped Pinochet and others wage their prolonged and deadly class war against the Chilean people. No thanks, Larry.

So, to backtrack: the goal I set for myself for this paper was to write about music and intellectual property and not mention napster, digital copyright issues, or "piracy." Instead, I am trying to look at attribution and exploitation, issues related to popular music as a form of collective work. My long-range interest is tracing the development of the idea of the employer's "shop right" in the creative output of session and studio musicians, which contradicts in many ways the abstract legal rationale that gives composers copyright in the first place.

This project represents, in one way, an attempt to bring my own personal history as a musician to my scholarly work. It is only very recently that I have come to realize that most of my life as a musician has been as a guitar-playing "sideman," not an "author" or "songwriter." I like coming up with parts for songs, writing little riffs, sometimes playing solos. Even in my forays into musical territory both more "out" (free improv) and more "in" (learning country pedal steel), I have been atttracted to a more or less homologous role. I like playing guitar in bands. I like hanging out with people who play music in bands. Incidentally, I tend to hate gesamtkuntswerk-crafting "geniuses" (which, amazingly, is what the Supreme Court of the United States has tended to require if you want to argue that your work is worthy of a copyright monopoly). That is probably neither here than there.

Whenever I have mentioned my philosophical opposition to the very idea of intellectual property to the lawyers in my extended family, they have typically responded: "but don't you feel bad if someone steals your music and you don't get paid?" In the past, I have found this something of a conundrum; in retrospect I can't imagine why. I never get paid for my music anyways. I am not an author or composer. On the other hand, most pop music (including, I think, that to which I have contributed guitar parts) gains its quality and substance from the collective contributions of many different performers, none of whom get any royalties or compensation (even when the parts they play are totally integral to the song, as is the case with Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale," whose keyboard player is finally suing for a cut of the royalties). My view of whether anyone can "own" permutations of musical materials held in common (such as "my" guitar parts, or "Elton John's" melody line) is simple: nope.

So, my concern is not to start a campaign to get royalties for session players, but to link the observation that the real authors of pop music don't get paid to the fact of widespread popular resistance to copyright to a larger agenda of capitalist critique. To wit: private property is stupid, let's make a better society not ruled by the whims of the market and the values of accumulation, acquisitive inidividualism, and liberal "equality." This is where Lessig's politics seem to jibe so weirdly with his "free culture" agenda. Besides the fact that his bio proudly trumpets his having clerked for heinous conservatives like Richard Posner and Antonin Scalia, Lessig's writing is rife with alarmingly wrong free market nonsense. Additionally, his books are written in that distinctively icky management literature Hudson News paperback style that tips you off that you are in the intellectual universe of Good To Great and Who Moved My Cheese?

I will have more damning evidence soon, but here is a soupcon of Lessig to tide you over. The background details are unimportant, except that you should note that the "farmers" discussed by Lessig had both ancient common law and nineteenth-century legal precedent on their side, and that they were, seemingly with a lot of justification, protesting airplanes that were flying over their land and driving their chickens crazy; notice the embarassing business jargon, the atrocious mixed metaphors, the pragmatist "common-sense" justification of technological change as an autonomous force demanding unquestioning obeisance, and the portentous cape-twirl at the passage's end:

"The Wright brothers spat airplanes into the technological meme pool; the idea then spread like a virus in a chicken coop; farmers... found themselves surrounded by 'what seemed reasonable' given the technology that the Wrights had produced. They could stand on their farms, dead chickens in hand, and shake their fists at these newfangled technologies all they wanted... But in the end, the force of what seems 'obvious' to everyone else-- the power of 'common sense'--would prevail. Their 'private interest' would not be allowed to defeat an obvious public gain."

Holy fuck that is dumb thinking and bad writing.

Forever to Return

2006-11-10T14:24:00.000-08:00

I am excited to report that my first ever paper proposal for an academic conference on pop music has been accepted. I will be talking about New South hip hop, Bubba Sparxxx, whiteness, and working-class culture at a very cool hip-hop panel at the PSA 2007 conference in Oakland in March. Also Cowboy Troy. And Chingo Bling.

You can find below the long and shaggy splattercore brainstorm that I had to trim down for the 250-word version. I will probably be developing my ideas in public about this paper right here. Any input, suggestions, or violent rebukes would be most appreciated. I am looking at you, El, MZN, nhennies, and elkanikkole!

“To See You Coming Round”: ‘New South’ Hip-Hop, Working-Class Iconography, and the Politics of Racial Reconciliation”

Of all of the developments in American urban working-class culture since World War II, it would be hard to point to a more creative, innovative, and commercially successful phenomenon than hip-hop. With several notable exceptions, however, the working-class character of hip-hop has been relatively marginal within both the discourse of hip-hop fans and discussions of hip-hop in the mainstream media.

This is, in part, a function of a widespread tendency to mentally link "working-class culture" to a set of contradictory images: a distant sepia-toned past of lunchpail-toting white workers in industrial cities, and simultaneously, a "country" version of rural gemeinschaft. In contrast, from its origins in the South Bronx of the 1970s to the media circus surrounding the so-called “rap wars” of the early 1990s, hip-hop has been conceived of as primarily a product of African Americans in deindustrialized coastal inner cities. The well-documented shift in post-WWII political economy, in combination with racist appeals by right-wing demagogues to white workers, served to strip African American and Latino inner-city denizens of working-class identity in the white imagination.

Students of American working-class formation (and deformation) have been increasingly drawn to the theme of “southernization.” For these scholars (notably Bruce Schulman, Matthew Lassiter, Gary Gerstle, Steve Fraser, and Tom Frank), the rightward turn in American politics since the late 1950s can be explained, albeit in contradictory ways, by the rise of conservative politicians drawing on a highly mediated, neo-populist version of “red state” working-class culture. Along with this articulation of southern culture by the Right, depictions of the South in television, film, and popular music work to link “working-class,” “white” and “southern” in the national popular consciousness.

It is therefore or great interest to note the rise of a cultural trend that is inscribing a powerful and autonomous version of the African-American southern experience over the redundant cliches of the “Blue Collar Comedy Tour” and Ford F-150 truck commercials: southern hip-hop music (referred to as “dirty south” hip-hop by practitioners and fans). Artists such as Master P, Ludacris, Outkast, Missy Elliot, Pharrell, Lil Jon, Nelly, and Paul Wall, hailing from cities like New Orleans, Atlanta, Virginia Beach, St. Louis and Houston, have produced much of the most innovative and popular music in recent memory. Additionally, a number of fascinating hybrid negotiations of diverse southern working-class cultural traditions can be seen as products of this cultural moment: white performers, like Bubba Sparxxx of La Grange, Georgia, and crossover acts like the African American “hick-hop” rapper Cowboy Troy and Mexican-American rapper Chingo Bling, both from Texas.

As the examples of Bubba Sparxxx, Cowboy Troy and Chingo Bling suggest, the emergence of “dirty south” culture signals a powerful strain of resistance to reactionary “southernization” by southern musicians, countering hackneyed depictions of southern life with ones more subversive, complicated, or troubling; indeed, it may point to a tradition of such contestation going back many years.

This paper explores the multiple and contradictory meanings of this contestation, focusing on the ways in which musical evocations of racial reconciliation figure in the recordings of southern hip-hop and crossover performers. By looking to the internal logic that guides lyrical content, vocal delivery, use of samples, and thematic conceits, as well as to the self-presentation and reception of artists such as Bubba Sparxxx, a complex and contradictory picture of the politics of racial reconciliation in new southern hip hop emerges. Drawing on the Lacanian interventions of Slavoj Zizek, as well as the Marxist tradition of cultural critics such as Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson, and Michael Denning, this analysis identifies an emancipatory interracial class politics that can be discerned in the shared conception of a unique southern "mode of enjoyment.” It also finds some troubling resonances with neoconservative versions of racial reconciliation, and a highly problematic gender politics that privileges a cross-racial “mode of enjoyment” predicated on the sexual exploitation of women.

Exhibit A:

"As a Chevrolet promotion, Troy, Gretchen Wilson and Big and Rich released "Our America" as a free, time-limited download on July 1st, 2005. They also performed the song live at the Boston Pops concert on July 4, 2005. "Our America" combines "The Star-Spangled Banner" with a rap version of parts of the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of independence, Pledge of Allegiance and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. The song peaked at #44 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart, and appears as a bonus track on both Big & Rich's Comin' To Your City and Gretchen Wilson's All Jacked Up albums" (Wikipedia).

Fake News

2006-09-11T15:51:00.001-07:00

FF and I have moved to southern california. PhD program begins in 2 weeks. Spent the afternoon in LA's little tokyo yesterday, drooling over j-pop album covers and purchasing stuffed studio ghibli creatures. The season 4 debut of "The Wire" on HBO last night was incredible. Overall status report: very happy.

Guitar Center in LA on Suday Afternoon is Unpleasant

2006-09-11T15:51:00.000-07:00

So, we went to the Guitar Center on Sunset yesterday to buy a 5-guitar stand. Wow. What a racket! To enter the music instrument retailer megalith, you need to traverse a threshold covered by a giant red awning that screams "Rockwalk." Yikes! We thought it was a theme restaurant, like Rainforest Cafe, but without the mist. But probably with the same over-seasoned fries. Isn't that like the only thing on the menu of every theme restaurant? (NB: I wish that theme restaurant that all those supermodels opened a few years back was still in business. I would totally eat there.)

On the other hand, a very cool young gospel piano player from Baltimore who I met on one of our plane rides this summer told me about using the Guitar Center's comparatively mellow keyboard room to practice before gigs, thereby solving his lack of instrument problem. Subversive uses of big box hellzones spring eternal!

America's Got Talent! That's Why They Hate Us.

2006-08-25T19:31:00.000-07:00

(The following post was written in spasms when I had time to log in during our summer travels; discrete threads are highlighted in different hues).

August has been a month of visiting with parents and in-laws. Under such conditions, a person sometimes does things he or she wouldn't otherwise do... such as 1) watching eleven consecutive hours of late-night Hee Haw reruns while battling insomnia in Ocean City, Maryland (very inspiring: not just Roy Clark's absurdly great jazz-country picking and Grandpa Jones's clawhammer banjo, but also the ample Connie Smith and Buck Owens performance footage, and, of course, the animated donkeys), 2) musing on the nuttiness of heritage, cultural pride, and religious orthodoxy... and 3) becoming invested, to an unholy degree, in the finale of "America's Got Talent."

So, I find myself now fighting the urge to move from computer nook to TV-room sofa to see the remaining half-hour of "AGT." But I need to wrap up a post on the Montreal dissident-jewish musical group Black Ox Orkestar. For now, my wafer- thin work ethic appears to be winning in its David-Goliath match against my gargantuan trash appetite.

I have been putting off completing this post (partially) because I lost the inspiration that originally fueled it: a radio interview/solo acoustic performance with/by Black Ox Orkestar frontman Scott Levine Gilmore. Montreal radio station CKUT's archives allowed me to find it once, but not again, and I have not been able to locate in printed interviews exactly the quotes or sentiments that got me thinking about making a post about Black Ox Orkestar in the first place.

So, I broke down and watched the final half-hour of "AGT." First, in a blatant attempt to fill two hours of "suspenseful" television prior to revealing the contest's winner, the producers scheduled the Blue Man Group, whatever that is, to play a music/theatre piece. They played "Baba O'Reilly," by The Who, as it turned out.

First, two of the blue men, outfitted with pvc octopus tentacles and Gap mock turtlenecks, started playing the opening motif of “Baba O’Reilly” on tuned plastic bottles. Then another blue man assaulted a lidless piano, stood on its side, with an oversized mallet, to sound the "exciting" chords that signal the beginning of the "rock song" part of the tune. Then a full rock band started playing a faithful cover of “Baba O”Reilly,” making redundant, in my opinion, the banging on plastic bottles and Steinway whack-a-mole. At some point, the blue men hit oil drums with big sticks and lots of paint splattered all over the stage. What a mess! Hope the Blue Man Group have a mop!

As many rock fans know, the intro to "Baba O'Reilly," and the middle-8 fiddle hoedown, were inspired by 1970s New York minimalist composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The scene they started, at venues like the Kitchen, also helped give birth to the performance art craze that swept the New York theatre and gallery scene, which, in a rhizomatic orgy of repressive de-sublimation in the coked-up and cash-flush 1980s led to the Broadway-ization of the most cheesy elements of the 70s avant-garde-- multimedia spectacle and muscular polyrhythm-- in the shows of the Blue Man Group, and finally to the Las Vegas-atization of "Baba O'Reilly" on "America's Got Talent" by the Blue Man Group. The only upshot of this postmodern, snake-eating-its-own-tail "Baba O'Reilly" mise-en-abyme, you ask? It makes even more pathetic a certain obnoxious art-guitarist/poseur bragging, in a a magazine interview several years ago, about the brilliance of his decision to do a 30-minute, Boss delay pedal-ified version of "Baba O'Reilly" when opening for Fugazi a few years ago, thereby “heroically” bringing the minimalism to the ignorant rockers and thumbing his nose at the “elitism” of the new music crowd. What can I say? I am not above petty gloating. If Loren MazzaCane Conors ever gets tired of having his music ruined by said provocateur, the latter need not panic. The Blue Man Group may be interested in collaborating.

Tween yodeler Taylor Ware, my choice to win "AGT" got the royal shaft. Instead, Bianca Ryan, an appallingly ordinary girl with a terrifying, Jessica Simpson-esque "big" voice took home the million dollars. Ecch.

Watching “AGT” did connect to some of the thoughts I have been processing while putting off writing about Black Ox Orkestar. Taylor Ware’s yodeling immediately struck me as wonderful in a way that Bianca Ryan’s ostensibly equivalent talents did not. First, the wild ululations of the yodel communicate pure joy in the capacities of the body to produce weird and miraculous sounds; Bianca Ryan’s slick melismas demonstrate the perversions of musical technique produced by the tragic historical process of music’s subordination to narrative and spectacle. (Just to be clear, we are against the tragic historical process of music’s subordination to narrative and spectacle. Very against it!).

Second, the yodel (making its way from alpine mountain cultures to the Appalachians via the waves of immigration of working-class Swedes and Germans to the United States in the nineteenth century, where it was transformed by contact with African American [and other ethnic] vocal traditions, and finally transformed into the signature proletarian vocal effect in the country music of the 1930s and 1940s in the music of Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and Bill Monroe), testifies to the persistently polyglot, mestizo, and creolized character of America’s working-class cultural traditions. While Bianca Ryan’s consonant-crushing Mariah-isms may seem to represent a black-white cultural synthesis, it reflects more the material trace of racism visited on the bodies of African American performers. Forced to pander to white audiences, or “prove” that they were as “civilized” as Europeans, African American musicians from the Fisk Jubilee singers to Whitney Houston have subordinated local traditions to the fascist requirements of bel canto and Tommy Motolla. Nothing much good can come out of white kids paying tribute to this heresy… it would be like Jay-Z or P Diddy inspiring young rich white kids to be more into becoming CEOs and driving German luxury cars… wait, that probably has happened.

The yodel and the gentrified gospel crystal-shattering high C— are there equivalents of this dichotomy in other cultural traditions? I am not an expert on too many local musical cultures, but I have a hunch that most “folk” musics are marked by a similar dynamic, though each example is no doubt unique. Take British Isles folk music. There, the conflicts between various interpreters of traditional musical culture were waged between three principal antagonists: 1) Tory nationalists, wishing to bury the traumatic memory of class struggle under the idiocy of “glorious past” nostalgia (not coincidentally, “AGT” featured a couple of yankee exemplars of “Riverdance”-style bufooneery, step-dancing, and fiddling jigs, and juggling Shamrock Shakes ; 2) British CP traditionalists, who excavated amazing amounts of archival material occluded by Tory provincialism, but imposed too-rigid aesthetic rules of engagement, including a ban on guitar accompaniment (it was seen as evidence of creeping Americanism); and 3) 1960s and 1970’s folk revivalists, such as Martin Carthy, Dave Swarbrick, The Watersons, Maddy Prior, June Tabor, Dick Gaughan, Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, etc.—who were able to forge a much more heterodox and demotic style by incorporating influences such as ragtime blues guitar and the post-Beatles/Stones group sound among other sonic elements.

This folk revival shattered any consensus regarding what an “English” voice might be, and decentralized the process by which music was considered authentically “English.” Of course, there is no such thing as authentic “English”-ness, or authentic anything else-ness, for that matter. Nevertheless, a common aesthetic bound the output of the revivalists—not some ugly Spenserianism like “Anglo-Saxon DNA” but rather an approach to life. The English folk revivalists found in the Child ballads and musty papers of Cecil Sharp a legacy of class feeling preserved over centuries (even from the nascently capitalist Elizabethean and Tudor-Stuart periods that generated what EP Thompson called “class consciousness without class” among the peasants and freeholders of the countryside, in bread riots, charivaris, rough music, fence breaking, etc.). This class feeling is the through-line that connects lyrics to performance practice, stage banter to fan culture.

In our age of class amnesia, we have to remember this crucial motor of cultural struggle. Classes make culture differently from each other. This is not determinism, nor base-superstructure sophistry. We know what aristocrats do when they make culture: lavish festivals of wealth destruction, what Bataille called depense, the burning up of vast stores of surplus value in concert halls, operas, symphony orchestras, and Sotheby’s auctions. We know what the bourgeoisie do when they make culture (when it is not somehow adapted, borrowed, or filched from aristocrats or the working-class). It is all around us, sometimes wonderful (Curb Your Enthusiasm, possibly J Crew) but mostly awful (everything else). Its spaces are uniformly unpleasant, its values nauseating. Of course, from sitcoms to stock-car racing, pop music to Hollywood, ethnic eateries to sneaker-design, we can find amazing and delightful (as well as tedious and degrading) cultural commodities pioneered by working-class visionaries, adapted by bourgeois business practice for mass production and distribution, and refiltered through chains of consumption. But can anyone think of a bourgeois cultural product or social practice that is worth liking? From CNBC to golf-course gated communities, “successories” to Dockers, the Land Rover to Josh Groban, Eddie Bauer to Jonathan Franzen, isn’t it all kind of icky?

Bringing us back to Scott Levine Gilmore’s presentation of the aesthetic issues with which Black Ox Orkestar contend. Not only do BOO take aim at the mind-numbing banality of mainstream bourgeois culture (which ought to be the decisive criterion for indie-ness, what should separate Jim Jarmusch and Deerhoof from Ed Burns and Coldplay), they negotiate the legacy of post WWII North American “cultural Jewishness.” Once, Jewish culture in the United States was highly variegated—working-class Jews of Eastern European descent occupied an entirely different cultural universe than the assimilationist and Americanized German immigrants of the nation’s big cities. Even within the Ashkenazic subcultures of New York, Montreal, and Chicago, Jewish identity was not unitary—one might identify as Litvak and Gallicianer, socialist or anarchist, observant or anti-religious, in a way that would not necessarily lead to feeling connected to “Jewry” as a collectivity. At the same time, a shared “minor language” (Yiddish), union culture, political disposition (antifascism), and perhaps a common hostile attitude towards the powerful and uniformly anti-Semitic WASP elite united Jewish proletarians—by appealing to class feeling in a manner not dissimilar to the folk music of the British Isles. I was not at all surprised, then, to hear Scott Levine Gilmore joke that BOO think of their project as a kind of Jewish version of Pentangle, the English group that perhaps epitomized the 1960s folk movement’s creative re-appropriation of British Isles roots music.

We need not review the tragic world events that nearly wiped out the Yiddish leftist culture to which BOO hearken, nor consider the tangled history of Zionism in America… but simply acknowledge that, with few exceptions, the Jewish culture in which I and others born after 1967 were raised is very different from that of the Popular Front-era Lower East Side. As Gilmore noted in his interview, Hebrew has replaced Yiddish as the Jewish language taught to youngsters. Israeli folk culture has replaced more Eastern European variants as the common heritage passed on by the mainstream Jewish ideological apparatus. Politically, Cold War realism mixed with robust Zionism is more or less dominant throughout North American Jewish communities, although liberalism regarding social issues remains dominant. The Yiddish theatre, press, and music scenes have all but disappeared.

While there has been a Klezmer revival over the past 30 or so years, it has been a problematic renaissance. Like Wynton Marsalis’s vision of jazz, it is beholden to elite aesthetic standards, ossifying klezmer in a safely dead museum culture.

Like bebop and bluegrass, klezmer has become an unholy temple of excess technical finesse and reverence to past masters. Finally, “klezmer” itself is a cultural construction. As Scott Levine Gilmore noted, its elevation, along with music from the Jewish cantorial tradition, and Israeli folk music as the music of the Jews is arbitrary and ideologically loaded. On their two recordings, Ver Tanzt and Nisht Azoy, Black Ox Orkestar eschew these fixed genres and build their own capacity to re-imagine an alternative Yiddish past (and future). By bringing back the leftist political edge of prewar Yiddish culture, particularly in the original and fiercely partisan lyrics, and daring to forge a truly folk music out of diverse archival materials, Black Ox Orkestar intervene in a most hopeful way in the renegotiation of cultural identity in North America. I am not always convinced that their music finds a satisfactory resolution of the Hava Negilah syndrome (deferring to the clichéd idea that there is still a hard kernel of Jewish-ness in harmonic minor scales, weepy rubato phrasing, and nervous group extemporization), but this is likely my hang-up, not theirs. There oughtta be a hundred Black Ox Orkestars. The world would be a much better place.

It Wouldn't Do You Any Harm

2006-08-03T19:08:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make: I love first songs on albums-- so much so that one might suspect that I haven't listened all the way through a lot of records I supposedly like, which may or may not be true.

Here is a partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of fifteen "first songs" that I like more than I could possibly like any of the subsequent songs on the respective albums on which they appear:

1) "You Aint Goin Nowhere," The Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo
2) "Only Shallow," My Bloody Valentine, Loveless
3) "Come All Ye," Fairport Convention, Liege and Lief
4) "My Old Drunk Friend," Freakwater, Feels Like The Third Time
5) "Chasing a Bee," Mercury Rev, Yerself Is Steam
6) "Breadcrumb Trail," Slint, Spiderland
7) "Idle Hands Are the Devil's Playthings," Palace Brothers, There Is No One What Will Take Care of You
8) "Brand New Love," Sebadoh, Smash Your Head On The Punk Rock
9) "The Wagon," Dinosaur Jr. Green Mind
10) "Skip Steps 1 & 3," Superchunk, No Pocky for Kitty
11) "Running With The Devil," Van Halen, Van Halen
12) "Teenage Riot," Sonic Youth," Daydream Nation
13) "Tangled Up In Blue," Bob Dylan, Blood On The Tracks
14) "Shepherd O Shepherd," Martin Carthy, Sweet Wivesfield
15) "Straight Outta Compton," NWA, Straight Outta Compton.

I am not sure what I think I have accomplished by making such a list.

I started thinking about this topic while listening to a few new music acquisitions. I recently located a copy of a recording by Chris Newman (no relation) called New Songs of Social Conscience/Six Sick Songs/London (ReR, 1998). My friend Martin had this CD in his collection when I was his roommate in Toronto a few years ago. When Martin played it for me and my friends we totally flipped out. Only a crazy nutjob could resist the charms of Chris Newman's music.

New Songs of Social Conscience falls loosely in the category of radical British singer-songwriter music sung by "marginal" voices-- vocalists older or craggier or more out of tune or ethnic or deranged than are usually heard on mainstream radio (we could think of Ivor Cutler, Hugh Metcalfe, Marianne Faithfull, Terry Hall, Polly Styrene, Johnny Rotten, Shane MacGowan, Mark E Smith, MIA and Lady Sovereign as all connected to this lineage, albeit in very different ways). Newman sings songs with lyrics that are powerfully idiotic, distilling bits of cliche, nonsense, and cafe conversation into a schizo vernacular of which Judge Schreber or Artaud would be proud.

He notes that the songs are are "built of everyday material, 'nothing special' taken out of context, 'nothing special' put on a pedestal. Not the exception. No escapism. The always & everything material. Potentially anything from this potential anything I build my work. Material which occurs to me without censorship. I have no preconception as to what a song is ´meant´ to sound like. This material, having been collected in the net of my head is then compiled, but not in a collage-type way - I loathe collage - but in a way which spreads the material onto time, spreads its meaning along the line of time. In singing the songs I do not try to be a singer but rather a singing self; in the way the material is a potential anything, I am here a potential anybody, a potential anybody put up on a pedestal."

Newman sings in a way that reminds of the great tradition of marxist postmodern queer English irony (cf. Derek Jarman), though I don't know if he identifites as marxist or queer or postmodern or English or ironic. This position gives the artist a particularly flexible relationship with the fetish objects of "high" and "low" culture, which are revealed to be identical and co-extensive: Shakespeare, opera, the flotsam and jetsam of aristocratic decadence, the Royal Family, etc. As the wonderful Toronto queer subculture of Queen Elizabeth drag queens (brought to the wider public by Scott Thompson on The Kids in the Hall) demonstrates, the slippage between class and gender positions engendered by the simultaneous embodiment of radically contradictory personas is tremendously powerful. Newman provides a great musical corollary: one moment, he transmits his melodies in an elfin, lisping, baby-doll voice; the next he stretches a syllable over an absurdly ambitious operatic melisma which his hoarse and wheezing pipes are totally incapable of navigating.

Nowhere is Newman's genius more evident than the first song on New Songs of Social Conscience, "It Wouldn't Do You Any Harm," which is another example of a first song that totally rules. Michael Finissy, whose English Country Tunes was another major inspiration for me and my friends back in the days of pre-millenial musicking, provides the piano accompaniment: jaunty, rhythmically precise hockets based around seemingly arbitrary segments of the major scale. Newman intones the first lines with a slightly demented intensity, undercut by the sweetness of the melody line and the indisputability of the senitment expressed: "It wouldn't do you any harm to give some money to that old lady/It wouldn't do you any harm to give some money to that old lady/She has none, but you have some/So give some money to the female bum/Give your money to the female bum."

Finissy's piano part returns, reiterating the opening phrase. We think we might be in the realm of music hall novelty, but the song takes an abrupt turn, as if following an errant impulse-- oh, maybe I should write this kind of song, rather than that?-- and Newman begins pondering aloud when it is possible to say whether it is one or two, something about water running... and then the music returns to the main motif. Newman regains composure, and announces, "Excuse number one, excuse number two," and repeats the first verse. The same odd "chorus" recurs four more times: "slow consumption of soup... my head is a drain... give your dog a university education... answer your own question... taking a shit at the Musee D'Orsee... don't let your penis touch the sink" (that's all I got... but what incredible lyrics, no?) The "Excuse Number One" and verse repeat a few more times, too, no longer a pop song, more the endless, circular "round" of the madman... and with each iteration, we become less sure we know why the singer is telling us to give money to the female bum, if the singer is the female bum, of if there even is "a" female bum. At the song's end, Newman repeats the clunky mantra as a coda: "But these psuedo-intellectual feelings we/you must overcome and give your money to that bum."

New Songs of Social Conscience engages with another English tradition: the embrace of simplicity and melodic infantilism as a means to critique capitalist culture. After pioneering various strategies of collective soundmaking in the Scratch Orchestra and Portsmouth Sinfonia, composers like John White, Howard Skempton and Gavin Bryars developed an incredible corpus of deceptively simple melodic music. This impulse came from a variety of sources, not least of which was a global "melodic turn" on the part of socially committed composers who recognized in the advanced serialism of Stockhausen, Boulez and Babbitt an inherently elitist and reactionary politics.

Cornelius Cardew's late 1960s polemic Stockhausen Serves Imperialism was the key text articulating the rejection of Cold War mandarin experimentalism, although ironically he devoted a lot of time to critiquing John Cage rather than the indisputably odious Stockhausen (in the final analysis, Cage was probably an ally, if a highly iconoclastic and libertarian one, of the socialist avant-garde). John Cage was likely also the signal influence on the new weird melodicism (especially his Erik Satie-derived readymade "Cheap Imitation").

In the 1970s, Cardew turned, as Ruth Crawford Seeger and others had before him, to a much more literal musical engagement with working-people's struggles. Much to the chagrin of most new music lovers, the songs he wrote were pretty bad. As a rule, the songs that trained composers write for working people to sing are pretty bad. I am not saying they shouldn't do it (though a fairly unappealing Leninism underlies the notion that academic composers should write songs for the people), but we must face the facts. The proof of the pudding is in the eating; the proof of the horribly earnest composed protest song is in the wincing.

This is where the simple melodic music of the other Scratch Orchestra's alumni comes into play. John White's Fashion Music, Howard Skempton's accordion pieces, and Gavin Bryars's odd simulacrum of jazz lounge music in 1-2, 1-2-3-4 confront issues of aesthetic accessibility and commercial mediation by engaging listener's faculties ignored by agitprop music (which taps mainly into empathy and sentimentality): wonder, negative capability, creative dissonance, imagination, etc. I think of this music (and more modern versions, such as the music of Chris Newman, Michael Finissy and Victoria School composers Martin Arnold, Alison Cameron, and Stephen Parkinson), as not so much a critique of Cardew in folksonger mode as a gentle reminder that stimulating new kinds of perceptions can be just as "political" as naming the enemy.

Trumpet of Sedition

2006-07-20T15:41:00.000-07:00

I just got the new/old Wire magazine (their website shows a new issue already out), which I do every month, because, when all is said and done, I really like the Wire magazine. This month I was curious to read the review of David Borgo's Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (Continuum), which sounds like the kind of book I would enjoy. Unforunately, it seems like another missed opportunity to properly contextualize improvised music. According to the reviewer, Borgo opts for a very safe focus on the "music itself" that skirts socio-political pressures on creative production.

Sometimes a piece of improvised music demonstrates so powerfully the embeddedness of music within social processes that one wonders how anyone could stick to old-fashioned text-analysis myopia. Such is Mazen Kerbaj's "Starry Night," a brilliant piece of music recorded during the recent IDF air attacks on Lebanon. Kerbaj is a Lebanese trumpet improvisor who lives in Beirut. Along with many of the most interesting contemporary trumpeters (Axel Dorner, Franz Hautzinger, Greg Kelley), Kerbaj specializes in small sounds, breathy noises, and back-pressure/metallic resonance-sourced sustained tones. In interviews, Kerbaj has discussed the impact that military sonics had on his developing musical imagination growing up during Lebanon's long civil war.

It is one thing, of course, to hear links to traumatic aural memories in the extended techniques of improvisors or composers (many of the barely-there extended techniques favored by European improvisors-- breathy white noise, bowing of the wood and tuning pegs of string instruments, etc.-- are also common in the politically committed music of composers like Luigi Nono, Helmut Lachenmann, and Helmut Oering), and another to listen to an mp3, transmitted via fiber optic cable from Beirut to Baltimore to Texas, of a hushed and contemplative trumpet improvisation interrupted at unpredictable intervals by the sound of bombs exploding.

Because the trumpet is an instrument played with the breath, and because Kerbaj's breath is more present in his playing than most (classical technique in fact tries to remove the breath, that material trace of human subjectivity, from the trumpet's sound, even though synthesizer designers have to replicate it via added noise so that simulated trumpets sound authentic), the stakes of a duet for trumpet and Israeli Air Force bombing civilians are high. Already over 300 mouths have stopped breathing. CNN and The New Republic and the United States Congress would have us believe that this is something about which we ought not care.

The trumpeter's breath somehow communicates to us something that the voice (allegedly the ne plus ultra evidence of the subjectivity of the Other), speaking language, English or Arabic or French or German, could not. We who live in the world of improvised music have grown used to hearing the sound of breath and bow-hair and electronic static over the last few years. It's possible that some of us have forgotten how rare a luxury it is to expect an hour (or five minutes) of uninterrupted silence as a precondition for music-making...

If power of the bureaucratic State to circumscribe creative production was the spectre that loomed over the international artistic community in the 20th century, the new phantom haunting our musical lives may well be the permanent-emergency State. It will not issue edicts and black out encyclopedia pages... it will maintain a constant ambience of volatility, threat, and menace... Will we make the same kind of music when we don't know when the bombs will fall?

There is something remarkable about hearing Kerbaz persist in his practice amidst terror and catastrophe, an aesthetic overlay that brings a clarity and poignance-- a poetics of witnessing-- to his music that I am not sure I have heard before in a recorded improvisation. It should spur us to solidarity with the War on Terror's victims of "collective punishment" and to outrage and revulsion towards those who would condone displacement and brutalization and murder.

Totality, dude

2006-07-18T18:59:00.000-07:00

The Marxist tradition gives us many useful terms, but we are too often guilty of using the same three over and over again. "Totality" is one term that gets less play than it should. It helps us focus on the real difference between Marxist political economy and the bourgeois variety, and it additionally helps us name a crucial aspect of alienation, which most of us experience as a response to the degradations visited by capitalism on the human spirit.

Martin Jay wrote a great book on this topic called Marxism and Totality. He distinguishes between "normative totality" (the idea that fullness, completeness, and integration are goals to which individuals and societies should strive) and a second, for lack of a better term, "methodological" conception of totality. "Methodological" totality is an intellectual imperative: it derives from the insistence that social scientists and philosophers can hope to gain an "adequate understanding of complex phenomena" only by appreciating their "relational integrity" (23-24). When we examine a complex phenomenon such as contemporary bourgeois society, we should insist on treating all of the seemingly disparate and unconnected elements, of which it is made up, as parts of a whole (24).

How does "totality" help us understand anything about music? Well, let's distinguish between the spheres of production and consumption. "Normative" totality maps nicely onto the activity of listening to music, while "methodological" totality helps us understand the processes by which music is made, performed, recorded, and distributed.

Rock writers like Simon Reynolds have long treated the "listening" part of music as connected to "totality" in the realm of "bliss" and "jouissance"-- that is, music as a kind of sonorous envelope, chora, or womb in which the listener feels complete, integrated, and bathed in powerful feelings. Deleuze's notion of the ritornelle should be viewed within this framework, not as some flaky, metaphysical-poetic croissant. Music works on the model of the lost child in the woods walking in a circle, singing herself a little tune that repeats itself infinitely. As such, a space is created that forms a real enclosure (the return, the round) superimposed on heterogeneous space (the forest). The enclosure of the ritornelle is like the science fiction trope of the enlosed space (the phone booth, the closet, etc) that seems tiny from the outside, but infinitely vast once one enters inside its walls. Instead of the existential fragmentation that characterizes everyday life, then, we experience in music a sense of wholeness, plenitude, and abundant affectivity.

Turning to the sphere of production, we can think about totality in an entirely different way: as an alternative to the ethos of acquisitive individualism that prevails in capitalist culture. Capitalism encourages us to pursue our own self-interest, and ignore collective social responsibility. An ideological corollary of this ethos is a belief that politics, culture, economics, religion, etc. are all discrete and unconnected. For the capitalist, the sum of society's parts never add up to a whole. As Margaret Thatcher once said, "there is no such thing as society, only individuals." This is one reason that totality is only ever present in the conservative imagination as a paranoid fantasy of coherence-- conspiracy theories about the Trilateral Commission or jewish bankers or evangelical insistince on the orderliness of chaotic world events as signs of the coming Rapture.

Capitalism's hacks-- Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, George Gilder-- have always been consistent about one point-- a collectivity of individuals narrowly pursuing their own self-interest in a market society will always result in the greatest good. For capitalism, the only totality that matters is the market, which is properly the subject of theological rather than scientific inquiry.

Leftists err, however, when they identify market-worship as the only ideology of capitalism. It is, arguably, the central belief-system of speculative finance-capitalists and hedge-fund managers, and others that 19th century populists and socialists used to group together as parasites on the wealth produced by labor. But for the rest of the billions of people who work under capitalism, the market is secondary to a more elementary deity, which might be best identified with the Lacanian term "the Big Other": the symbolic order, in toto. The hidden hand, supply and demand, "politics", Jesus, the Federal Reserve, the American Way... an oozing mass of confusing and contradictory forces. Understanding how the whole thing works seems as daunting as figuring out why tornados happen, and assuming that this knowledge will be helpful in making decisions in one's daily life is obviously crazy. We divide labor in our society, and others are supposed to know about economics and tornados. We leave the thinking to the Big Other, while we do our work, live our lives, etc. (which, incidentally, is also justified in the name of the Big Other).

Marxism takes aim precisely at the assumption that economics is primarily a technical science like meteorology, inaccessible to all but an expert class of technocrats. The reason is this: human history (virtually irrelevant to making sense of natural phenomena) reveals the hidden secrets of capitalism. Tracing the transition from one economic form to another exposes the continuity of themes in economic life: class exploitation and struggle, protection of forms of property and the development of legal superstructures, and conflicts over the distribution of the surplus produced over and above the demands of subsistence. Within this framework, we can indeed think of totality as a sum of social processes, not a mystical chaos as unknowable as the flows of numbers and symbols on LCD stock tickers.

If we accept the insights of Marxism, we can no longer accept individual self-interest as a rational basis for a just society. I cannot pretend that the seller of goods with whom I deal as a buyer is somehow a different individual than the person with whom I deal as a neighbor, a friend, or even as a seller of my own goods. As artists and musicians and music-lovers, at some point we have to stop pretending that economics is akin to the weather, something that somebody else will interpret and tell us about... and take stock of the material processes and relationships that make us rich or poor, powerful or powerless, productive or burnt-out. We should go one step further, and situate our activities and survival strategies within the singular totality of Western capitalism. What is nice about this totality is that while total, it is also plastic and volatile. As the man once said, people do make history, if not under circumstances of their own choosing.

Having sufficiently buried the lead, I can now reveal it: to the degree that we subscribe to a competitve, individualistic, opportunistic ethic, we, as experimental artists and musicians are making a bad kind of history. The "devil takes the hindmost" attitude among avant-garde musicians is utterly counterproductive.

The mandarin fallacy. This is especially true when we think of ourselves as some sort of elite class of cultural saints, deserving of support and patronage from wealthy individuals and institutions. We should insist on differentiating between the social contexts of free improvisors and jazz musicians and rock bands, visual artists and composers, the academically affiliated and the not academically affiliated. Experimental/improvised music is domain of those who either lack or have chosen to reject conventional training in music production. This is a politically charged choice-- the renunciation of musical skill as an exchange-value, and the recovery of a process of music-making outside the power relations of capitalism (even the power relation that says: hold your drumstick like this, sing your song with this kind of vibrato, subordinate creative impulses to the demands of received forms, etc). It is what I like most about improvised music.

But it also means that I have chosen to foresake financial compensation for my music, (since audiences are rarely larger than 30, it sucks to charge more than 5 bucks, and usually there are between 4 and 8 performers who need to be paid, plus expenses, venue rental, gas, strings, picks, dinner out and wear and tear on instruments) in exchange for the possibility of a more authentic interaction between me and my listeners. Because the music is demanding, and is by nature set up to fail a lot of the time, I appreciate the attention of listeners who tune in. At times, I think that this attention is all the payment I can really expect from people... which is fine, except for the fact that one needs to eat and survive and all the rest.

Anticipating the question that pesky Mr. Lenin always asks, here is what is to be done: improvisors should ally with working stiffs, not art-elites. We should accept that music-making is an activity we do alongside working for a living, not a vocation that will somehow become financially viable in the not too distant future. We should acknowledge that so long as we all live under capitalism, the majority of people who work must work jobs that are idiotic, brain-sucking, and for the benefit of others, and that therefore hours should be limited, paid vacation-time should be ample, and health-care should be universal. My desire to play an improv show is not different than my co-worker's desire to attend a model-train convention or go hiking with her kids.

Since American capitalism is currently staying afloat via the capture of employee benefits for the sake of profitability (plus a huge debt to overseas lenders), musicians are well-situated to make common cause with others who recognize this taking for what it is: class struggle. But as capitalists acheive record profits by stealing pensions and ramping up workweeks to Dickensian levels, a terrible alternative lurks: that we musicians will look to this new class of aristocrats for handouts, instead of joining the fight against the radical redistribution of the social product to a tiny fraction of property-owners. If that happens, we will truly be the court jesters of the new barbarism.

Screwed Down in H-Town

2006-07-15T15:43:00.000-07:00

Since I figure that all who would want to read this post have likely done so, I am going to put it in the witness protection program. From now on, it will be living as Mike McCormack, a systems analyst in Bangor, Maine. Wait, am I not supposed to reveal that information?

Revise and Re-Submit 2: Jews Choose Confusing Ruse

2006-07-12T14:24:00.000-07:00

Another example of the "transference" tendency (Jewish artists coping with the catastrophe of the Holocaust by creatively engaging with radically evil personae) noted in the previous post on Lemony Snicket and Gene Simmons? Why not!

Today's subject?: Scott Ian(Rosenfeld)'s 1980s thrash/hardcore band Stormtroopers of Death.

I recall seeing a review of SOD's album "Speak English or Die!" in Guitar World magazine when I was 13. The band name and title terrified me. At the time, I knew a little bit about about neo-nazi oi bands like Skrewdriver (talk about irony: the name of the most antisemitic genre of music ever, "oi," sounds like the universal Ashkenazic expression of resigned disgust) from other kids in junior high who would go on to embrace skinhead/white supremacist ideology more sincerely in high school, and I was freaked out to discover that heavy metal was a place I could expect to encounter xenophobia and racism. Shortly thereafter, Axl Rose sang about "immigrants and faggots" on the G'n'R Lies record, and Sebastian Bach wore an "Aids Kills Fags Dead" t-shirt at a concert. Except for the speedy instrumental variety, I was done with heavy metal.

At around the same time, Public Enemy started attracting attention for their vaguely antisemitic lyrics. It is no wonder that I abandoned the typical antisocial musics (rap, metal, punk) of adolescence for a while around my Bar Mitzvah (punk I was already wary of because I had been many times to the punk head shops on Yonge Street-- their booming business in swastikas and German iron cross pendants unsettled me, and I didn't know how to make sense of songs like the Sex Pistols' "Belsen Was a Gas" which made light of concentration camps).

So, in the 8th grade I started searching out alternatives to adolescent anomic musics: delta blues, bluegrass, bebop, whatever. It took a while for the aversion to heavy metal, rap, and punk to wear off, and, to be honest, I am not sure it ever has. For example, now I make exclusively instrumental music (or collaborate with lyricist/vocalists who write sensitively about their feelings in a manner that could offend no one, save perhaps for Ted Nugent). And not just any kind of instrumental music, but a kind of instrumental music that is devoid of literal meaning and narrative, deliberately esperantic, inclusive and utopian. I can't say that my attraction to this form of creative expression was not motivated by early traumatic encounters with aggressively particularistic music.

OK. Let's transition to the next point: I don't think that sticking with my 13-year-old's aesthetic framework is useful. Condemning aggressively particularistic music for its biases and petty hatreds gets us nowhere, especially if our ids remind us we sort of like objectionable music while our super-egos command us to resist its charms. We live in a world full of evil and pain, and we shouldn't ask culture to be a refuge from engagement with difficult topics or an oasis of contradiction-free, pre-authorized party line pablum. Finally, we shoudn't neglect the vitality of "transference" as artistic strategy. Snobby culture critics tend to deny that popular music performers and listeners have the intelligence to neogtiate this strategy. These critics are pretty cavalier with their evidence, or, more precisely, they muster no evidence whatsoever besides haute-bourgeois disdain for pop culture consumers.

Let's return to Stormtroopers of Death. SOD was a thrash/hardcore side project that Scott Ian started to supplement the more metallic music of his main band, Anthrax. According to the wikipedia entry on SOD, the inspiration came from sketches that Ian scribbled while killing time in the recording studio. In the tradition of so many American Jewish comic book artists (who more or less dominated the comics biz in the postwar era), Ian created a character who embodied radical evil : Sargent D. While SOD singer Billy Milano did not take on the voice of Sargent D, the band seemed to channel his psychopathic militarism and bloodlust.

How offensive were SOD's lyrics? Pretty offensive. For instance, "Speak English or Die":

"You come into this country
You cant get real jobs
Boats, and boats, and boats of you
Go home you fuckin slobs
Sellin hot dogs on the corner
Sellin papers in the street
Pushing, pulling, digging, sweating
Where you come from must be beat

You always make us wait
You are the ones we hate
You cant communicate
SPEAK ENGLISH OR DIE!!!!

You dont know what I want
You dont know what I need
Why must I repeat myself,
Can't you fuckin read?
Nice fuckin accent
Why cant you speak like me?
What's that dot on your head,
Do you use it to see?

You always make us wait
You are the ones we hate
You cant communicate
SPEAK ENGLISH OR DIE"

Now, of course these are hateful and obnoxious words... but we are not evaluating here whether we want to have SOD as keynote speakers at the Porto Allegre World Social Forum. The key point is that the status of the voice that delivers these lyrics is unstable. If Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits can sing "in character," why can't SOD? And the voice that is channeled is not one with which we would imagine short, skinny, heavy metal musicians (by the 1980s a thoroughly "nerd" subculture, as Will Straw noted in his seminal essay on metal fandom) named Rosenfeld and Milano. In fact, we can imagine the grandparents of Rosenfeld and Milano being taunted with these very nativist slurs, and that the memory of this racist intolerance (which incidentally compromises America's nauseating self-congratulation vis-a-vis its history of openness to immigrants) inflected the world-views of young Rosenfeld and Milano as they grew up in the 1960s and 1970s.

We can leave it at that, and still have a productive re-contextualization of SOD. It is possible that the impulse to embody the hateful intolerance that, a generation earlier, tormented their ancestors in the United States is straight-up Stockholm Syndrome. Or, like the Israeli producers of Rambo movies, the editorial board of Commentary, Antonin Scalia and Carmella Soprano, SOD simply reflect the trend of once-victimized ethnic Americans jumping at the chance to identify with a conservative movement that happens to include them in the "us" rather than the "them" (gays and lesbians, Arabs, urban African-Americans always, etc.) against which ideological battle is waged. Perhaps SOD predicted this trend with their screed "Fuck the Middle East," which sounds like a distillation of every prejudiced morsel of bloodthirsty orientalism I ever heard from Zionist counselors at summer camp. I am still unsure whether Rosenfeld was sending up the idiocy of anti-Arab hate-mongering, or slumming in its sludgy waters...

I will conclude with a final thought, one which my training in anti-racism makes me hesistant to even contemplate. Is there anything valuable in art that minimizes the hurtfullness of racial intolerance by mocking it or otherwise making it ridiculous? I recall a moment in a video of Norman Finkelstein's recent lecture at Yale, where he was assailed by angry students who asked questions along the lines of: "antisemitism is on the rise in France-- how can you justify doing scholarship that endangers Jews?" Now, Finkelstein seems like a complicated guy, and I am not sure I like all of his tactics, but I have great respect for him on a lot of levels. His response, which seemed more off the cuff than usual, was to point out that "anti" sentiment is universal in pluralistic societies (and, one might add, very difficult to measure). Should we be concerned with the inevitable presence of antagonisms based on difference, or with the real crises that bring about death and misery for millions of people?

And should we not be interested in the process by which a banal antagonism (such as the vaudeville racism of stereotypes and caricatures) becomes the fuel for a pogrom or a mass slaughter? Clearly, the accepted wisdom regarding this continuity-- that is, the idea that ideology and action form a seamless continuum-- proved itself to be an aid to genocide in the 1980s and 1990s, not a means to prevent it. Samantha Power is very effective at showing this in her book A Problem From Hell. She notes that Clinton et al's belief that "ancient hatreds" were at the root of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans or Rwanda or the Congo stymied efforts to prevent catastrophe (when Western diplomats and NGO agents on the ground were desperately trying to convince the State Department that rapidly changing, non-predetermined conditions over which the US government might have exerted influence, but didn't, were about to escalate into mass murder).

From this we might conclude that "ancient antagonisms" ought to be taken less seriously-- indeed, that the banalization of petty racism might be an effective tool in the fight for a more just and egalitarian society. From Mel Brooks to the Marx Brothers to Jerry Lewis and beyond, we can certainly see a strain of this banalization in American comedy. And in the work of certain European satirists, such as the slavic band Laibach and the brilliant Russian/British/Jewish comedian Sascha Baron Cohen, we can behold a less timid approach to underminining the power of racist symbols and attitudes.

I have no idea whether SOD can be included in this category, and more research would definitely be needed to figure out the ramifications of their "politically incorrect" gestures. It is conceivable that they were merely irresponsible jerks who congratulated the bonehead prejudices of other irresponsible jerks. But maybe not.

Revise and Re-submit

2006-06-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

The Race is Off: Butcher Jazz, Part 2

Can we make sense of jazz and machismo without thinking about race, the term that is conspicuously missing in John Gill's controversial screed in Paris Transatlantic? Probably not. We should start by recognizing that writing about jazz has long been preoccupied with the ways that white male musicians (and music fans) engage with black culture as a way to work out their identity-related anxieties, which in turn shapes their enactment of masculinity and class as musical performers or aesthetes.

Because what is at stake is the resolution of a specifically gendered crisis, it is easy (but wrong) to focus exclusively on the troubling sexual dimension of white males' identification with black culture: i.e., the way they enjoy fantasizing about temporarily inhabiting "black" personas, from Stagolee to Shaft to Shaq to Snoop, presumably as a means to escape the emasculating constrictions and Victorian residue of mainstream white culture. Equally important is the way that jazz culture offers an appealing intellectual and political alternatives to establishment groupthink. If this point is perhaps obvious, it does tend to get lost in the shuflfle.

A few years back, Robert K. McMichael wrote a great article about this topic (Robert K. McMichael, "'We Insist—Freedom Now!': Black Moral Authority, Jazz, and the Changeable Shape of Whiteness,'" American Music, vol. 16, 1998) looking specifically at the historical conjuncture of the 1960s-- the African-American "freedom jazz" movement and Southern white "massive resistance"-- as a significant moment of racial realignment.

McMichael provides an excellent summary of the complexities of jazz ca. 1920-1960 as a laboratory of cross-racial solidarity: "The integrationist subcultures of jazz clubs and other social spaces housed various kinds of cross-racial interaction between audience members and musicians, creating potentially important sites of resistance to racism." It is hard not to find many aspects of this phenomenon encouraging-- a celebration of hybridity, mestizization, or even the rejection of white identity advocated by scholars like Noel Ignatiev and David Roediger. The continuing engagement of white musicians with the rich and wonderful legacy of black music can only (one hopes) encourage cross-racial solidarity and understanding. It certainly couldn't hurt, right?

Not necessarily. McMichael notes that "much of the cross-racial interaction in the jazz scenes still reverberated with long-standing elements of racism, especially primitivism." For reverberated, we can substitute "reverberates." What McMichael means by "primitivism" here is the expectation, on the part of white audiences, that African-American artists will comply with racist stereotypes, and perform a "noble savage" routine still cherished by some white liberal listeners (now that jazz is no longer mainstream, "world music" has replaced it as the "primtivist" genre of choice).

A few years ago, a friend told me about a free jazz group from Alberta, Canada in the 1970s (made up of white fellows who were fanatics for the radical black music of the Black power era, and who surely thought of their enthusiasm as an expression of politcal solidarity with the civil rights movement and its legacies) who adopted the Art Ensemble of Chicago's practice of wearing elaborate costumes, but going one step further by also corking up in full blackface (!!!). Talk about a ne plus ultra demonstration of the aptness of the title of Eric Lott's history of blackface, Love and Theft.

Less inflammatory, but perhaps no less offensive, we know of many white jazz musicians/fans who find inspiration in the alleged sexual heroism of jazz heroes like Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, and many others . If fans and admirers do not typically attempt to replicate the precise boudoir antics of these icons, they do nevertheless relate libindinally to something in the jazz persona... in a way they do not with Lawrence Welk, Bill Monroe, or Angus Young (or white jazzers like Paul Desmond, Joe Pass, or Bill Evans). Where is this racial cathexis made visible? At very least, in the bragadoccio, the use of hipster jargon, and a particular "jazz" version of on-stage male bonding.

But let us not linger too long on the possible unseemliness of white jazz fandom. Like everything else under the sun, the politics of race and music are deeply contradictory... we should try to find the radical/utopian strain within the sketchy mimesis. While a certain racist libidinal investment charges some aspects of white participation in jazz, it accounts for only a fraction of the desire that sustains the interaction with the music. Equally significant (and frequently neglected) is the investment in African American artistic culture as an idealized intellectual and social milieu. I am not thinking of the familiar and banal denial of prejudice on the basis of inclusive musical taste (e.g. Gareth Kennan on BBC's The Office denying his homophobia by bragging about his record collection: George Michael , Pet Shop Boys, etc., and then immediately confirming it by referring to these artists with a British anti-gay slur).

We might recall another point raised by McMichael, who notes that the free/artist-centered jazz of the 1960s arose at the same time as the civil rights movement linked "blackness" with moral authority, political commitment, and spiritual integrity. Since the post-1960s backlash, the majority racist culture has tried to deny that African Americans have a purchase on these values, while profiting off of a commercial culture that peddles their very opposites to citizen-consumers: a Cold War/Neoliberal Globailization/War on Terror political "realism" that denies the grievances of victims of racism/international capitalism/US foreign policy in the name of strategic interests, the hidden hand of the market or domestic security; cynicism about grassroots activism and electoral/parliamentary bourgeois politics; and spiritual drift, New Age eclecticism, or servile obedience to religious leaders. With one hand, then, the majoritarian culture degrades the values linked with the Civil Rights movement and by extension, African Americans; simultaneously, with the other hand, it smuggles in a white, conservative, reactionary "values bloc" (Pro-Life, anti-gay, etc.) to supplant the activists of the hated 1960s in the national imagination.

We must keep this in mind when we confront the problem of "butch" jazz and the racial mimesis of white participants in jazz culture. In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, participation in out-jazz subcultures provided white musos with a link to a resistant organic intellectual tradition, and access to a culture of collective enjoyment outside of (and viral to) the anomie of the suburban Galleria.

Which leads to the final point: the history of cross-racial interaction within the out-jazz tradition frustrates any simple binary distinction between "butch" neo-primitivism and intellectual engagement. What remains to be explored (in a future post) is neo-primitivism as intellectual engagement within the African-American avant garde tradition. Stay tuned!

Butcher Jazz?

2006-06-16T16:37:00.000-07:00

(Explanatory note: this post touches on issues related to contemporary improvised music, a genre that I participate in as a performer and of which I have been a fan for some time. Prepare, therefore, gentle reader, for some hopelessly nerdy insider talk).

Sometimes one stumbles across a piece of criticism so mind-bogglingly off-base that the only logical response is perverse admiration. Such is John Gill's meditation on the butch-ification of jazz at the hands of younger-generation practitioners (which appeared in the November 2005 edition of the online journal Paris Transatlantic). It would be difficult to summarize exactly what Gill is getting at, and it remains a possibility that I am too obtuse to get the irony, if that is what it is, embedded in his writing.

Dwelling on the outrageous wrongness of Gill's thesis would be a waste of energy, I think, and we should take the opportunity to consider whether a different take on the (sometimes very provocative and suggestive) themes that he raises might be more productive. To put it simply-- do current trends in jazz (and perhaps, by extension, free improvised music and experimental music more generally) reflect a narrow preoccupation with "butch" musical and performance tendencies, at the expense of other less macho possiblities? Does this trend stem from a streamlined and selective (as well as phallocentric) historical narrative of jazz(and/or free improv/experimental)music, and has it or could it introduce "butch"-biased distortions in jazz/free/out historiography?

More specifically, have things gotten better or worse, friendlier or chillier for queer musicians and female performers in these milieus over the past few months/years/decades? Finally-- and this is the question Gill avoids formulating explicitly, for the same reasons, no doubt, that pedestrians tend to avoid jumping in snake-infested lakes of quicksand that are also on fire-- can we make any correlations between "hard" and "soft" musical tendencies and the performance of gender and sexuality?

The emergence of a new "butch" jazz/free/out music has been on the radar for a few years. Following the principle that nobody likes a dialectical negation of a negation like a lazy music journalist, we could have guessed that the vogue for quiet/self-effacing/personality-dissolving music over the past 5 years would be declared moribund right around January 2006. The way would thus be cleared for a macho/aggro/butch revival, ensuring new niche markets for signed and numbered limited-edition CD-Rs.

What trend for quiet/self-effacing/personality-dissolving music over the last 5 years, you ask? Well, some time around the year 2000, "blowing" (feverish, often lyrical, expressive improvising, frequently performed by a whole ensemble at the same time) was declared "out," and something else was understood to have replaced it.

What exactly this "something else" was is still a mystery. Many called the new thing "quiet," but the vogue for contact-miking small sounds (often by musicians who were exploring electronics and amplification for the first time, and were thus not used to controlling volumes) and laptop computers (same deal) meant that the music was actually quite a lot louder than the acoustic jazz/improvised/out small-ensemble music it was meant to replace/supplement/critique. Some called it "lower-case," which pointed to the interest in "microscopic" aspects of the audible world, although since many groups in this scene were large assemblages of droning electronicians (notably Keith Rowe's MIMEO), it would not be accurate to use this label indiscriminately, either.

Others chose more focused appellations: "onkyo" for new Japanese improv, which centered around a community of musicians who dramatically restricted their sonic palettes (by using post-fluxus instrumental strategies such as "empty" samplers, no-input mixing boards, etc) and explored silence/non-intentionality/modesty/space in distinctive and exciting ways; "minimalism" and "reductionism" and god knows what other names were tacked onto the music coming out of London, Berlin, Vienna, Boston, Chicago. It was/is an exciting/infuriating/confusing time, especially for folks like me who feel that silence and small sounds are integral parts of the old european impro-jazz tradition, not a new challenge to orthodoxy. The distinctions made regarding old guard vs. new school improv seem in retrospect arbitrary and ahistorical, often articulated most forcefully by musicians trying to carve out a market niche, get on the right festival invite lists, or compensate for the excesses of their bebop-jock youths. No matter. An incredible amount of great music got made. Maybe people will continue to make it.

To tie this little recap to the overall theme of this post, one of the great things about this movement has been its openness to female and non-butch/sensitive-flower male improvisors. The list of important and inspiring female improvisors who have found a home within this scene is amazing and inspiring, especially as a reversal of the "sausage party" tendencies of improv scenes past: Annette Krebs, Kaffe Matthews, Andrea Neumann, Brigitte Uhler, Sachiko M, Ami Yoshida, Sabine Vogel, Angharad Davies, Liz Tonne, Maria Chavez, to name just a few. While I have no data on the friendliness of improv scenes to queer/bi/tg performers, it is true that the new cultural climate has at least encouraged some male improvisors to abandon the warrior/viking/lothario posture favored by some musicians of yesteryear.

Nevertheless, the butch aesthetic has been on the upswing. Gill's bete noire, Mats Gustafsson, has recently been working a lot with a hard-rocking band called The Thing, which plays ecstatic free jazz and covers of tunes by PJ Harvey and the White Stripes. Anthony Braxton (he of the cardigan sweater collection and radical dweeb persona) de-butches with hirsute hardcore boyband Wolf Eyes. Sensitive Japanese guitar manipulator Tetuzi Akiyama embraces blazing ultra-amplified boogie guitar music to great acclaim. Boston quiet trumpetmaster Greg Kelley has been heard in many loud psych/rock bands playing with Shure SM57-in-fist. One-time crackle-and-glitch maven Kevin Drumm releases a slew of mximaliest metallic noise records. Australian small-sound/drone guitarist Oren Ambarchi collaborates with heavy music merchants Sun O))). The list could surely be extended further...

There is nothing wrong with any of this, in my opinion. For one thing, much of this activity appears to be distinctly complementary to traditional improvised music projects, or indicates that the performers involved have shifted from improvised to compositional or rock endeavors. The only real danger that I can see would be a rollback of gains made during the "quiet" music revolution. If musicians are encouraged to show up at gigs with the most obnoxious, aggressive, or antisocial materials they can muster, a great many performers and listeners will feel (rightly, I think) alienated. There are deep links between musical style and the social dynamics/norms of interaction and self-presentation that communities encourage. Inasmuch as quiet/contemplative/listening-oriented improvised music opens space for dialgoue and reflection, so can "macho" practices encourage hierarchy, posturing, and tolerance for the creative legitimacy of stomping all over others' feelings and personal space.

Nevertheless, Gill is dead wrong about the politics of musicians like Mats Gustafsson. Gustafsson has always been very vocal about the signal importance of Peter Brotzmann's Machine Gun in his decision to become an improvisor, and his approach to intense laser-focused saxophony can be heard in sparse settings as often as in hardcore blowfests (can any contemporary improvisor of his generation claim as many fabulous small-sound/small-group recordings-- his duos with Paul Lovens and Gunter Christmann, not to mention the seminal Gush albums, the solo records, up to the extremely life-affirming set of "blues" duets with David Stackenäs from last year?) Surely we can let at least one improv dude be a handsome athletic guy with a bit of charisma and stage presence, no? I will personally guarantee that the rest of us will remain vigilant in maintaining social awkwardness, male pattern baldness, and mismatched socks as the de facto mode of self-presentation in the impro-world.

God of Thunder, meet Count Olaf: Evil, Transference, and Jewish Aesthetics

2006-06-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

Ever since a dear friend hooked us up with tickets to the sold-out Lemony Snicket reading here in Austin last fall, I have been thinking about Jews and art and evil and transference. Lemony Snicket is the alter ego of writer Daniel Handler, who are collectively responsible for the massively popular "Series of Unfortunate Events" books. Handler/Snicket (who self-identifies as a Jewish writer) taps into a rich tradition of Ashkenazic melancholy and gallows humor in these books, inspired partially by stories he heard as a child of family members' flight from Nazi Germany... Rather than present escapist fantasy or wish-fulfillment diversions like so many other kids writers, Handler/Snicket elicits pleasure by satisfying his readers' appetites for horror and catastrophe. He warns his young readers to resist reading about the endless unspeakable disasters that plague the books' protagonists, the luckless Baudelaire orphans, (most caused by a evil, obssessive predator, Count Olaf) and then, of course, ruefully delivers the bad news...

Besides his incredible anti-reading/performance in Austin, which concluded with an extraordinary accordion-driven sing-a-long (a tune by Stephen Merritt about the audience's collective death at the hands of Count Olaf), two things got me very interested in Handler/Snicket. The first is that a fully formed and quite radical ethics informs his books. When NPR's Terry Gross asked if Count Olaf was not perhaps too evil, Handler replied something to the effect of: "He is. Let's get him." The second is that this engagement with "real evil" comes via an act of creative transference-- here meaning an identification with or adoption of the features that we despise in our adversaries. In a revealing throwaway comment, Handler revealed that the name Lemony Snicket was a pseudonym he used originally when he was doing research on far-right white supremacist groups, whom he did not want to give accurate personal information.

I was reminded of this during Vh1's aweomse "Metal Month," now sadly over. During a feature on KISS, I got to see a remarkable 1974 clip of Gene Simmons on the Mike Douglas talk show, which is even more mind-melting in its full form:

Gene Simmons was born Chaim Witz in Haifa, Israel... and as his fellow panelist (does anyone know who she is? She looks so familiar...) kibbitzes, he could not hide his "nice Jewish boy" interior under his demonic regalia. Do we not find here another example of Jewish transference in Simmons's attempt to make himself into "evil incarnate"?

Okay, what's the connection between Witz/Simmons and Handler/Snicket? Well, besides the obvious one-- two Jewish-American artists who assume pseudonyms and flamboyant alter egos to work out their fascination with radical evil-- they both select counter-intuitive names and personas. Lemony Snicket is the tragic Jewish writer with the ridicuolous WASP name who stands in for the tragic Jewish writer... Chaim Witz chooses to embody the demonic as a fire-breathing bat decked out in the clip above in garb eerily reminsicent of the skull and crossbones of the 1930s KKK offshoot Black Legion, but calls himself Gene Simmons-- of all the names in the world, he chooses the one that sounds most like a B'nai Brith vice-president? This is a joke, of course, but also psychologically/ideologically significant... as if Simmons needed to Judaize his satanic alter ego...

To further complicate matters, the KISS image-system included some overtly Third Reich elements. As a child, I was simultaneously drawn to and very disturbed by something about the KISS logo-- later I figured out that this was a function of the Waffen-SS logo embedded in the KISS insignia. At the time, of course, I didn't not realize that Gene and Paul were as Jewish as Streitz's matzohs... but even if I had known, the question remains. What were they doing borrowing this Nazi iconography? I don't mean this as an accusation-- it is really more a technical curiosity. Was this intentional? Accidental? Some sort of creative exorcism by indentification/simulation, maybe?

An interesting note: apparently, the "SS" on KISS records is forbidden in post-WWII Germany, so Deutsche metalheads get a modified logo on their their copies of "Alive" and "Destroyer."

I think Lacanians would have interesting things to say about this. Anybody know any?

Bad Music

2006-05-27T16:55:00.000-07:00

Here is a dumb axiom that is nevertheless useful. Different kinds of music help us understand different kinds of theory; conversely, different kinds of theory help us understand different kinds of music. Misapply the wrong kind of analytic framework to the wrong kind of examples and you end up with a big old mess. This is one of the reasons that a lot of the recent TV-related academic/fan-culture crossover books put together by university presses and hi-brow publishers (e.g. Buffy and Philosophy, The Sopranos and Philosophy, Home Improvement and Philosophy, etc.) have been so disappointing. Almost every chapter witnesses the authors applying the wrong theories to the wrong examples and predictably producing lame excurses that must warm the hearts of those stodgy eggheads who have always denied the validity of serious thinking about popular culture.

Music is subjected to fewer of these embarassments than TV and movies, but once in a while it too gets washed in an unwelcome Ivory Tower soapbath. Case in point: the anthology Bad Music: The Music We Love To Hate, edited by Christopher J. Washburne and Maiken Derno, and published by Routledge in 2004. Since I have been very interested in "bad music" and approaches to its production and study for a few years now, I have to admit that I bring an agenda to my criticisms. The study of "bad music" is, to my mind, least productive when it takes place within the broader acadmic discourse of taste cultures, canon formation, and adherence to/deviation from common practice norms... and especially when it fails to critique these foundations of bourgeois aesthetics. Of course, we need to keep in mind the tensions and oppositions between, say, "in tune" and "out of tune" or the effects produced by standard versus unconventional instrumental techniques, to make sense of "bad music." Ultimately, however, "bad music" should alert us to the purely ideological nature of taste. A sincere engagement with "bad music" ought to demystify the hidden but powerful cultural codes that direct our ears to appreciate only a very narrow swath of pre-approved musical pleaures.

Jacques Attali's work on the political economy of music, though massively problematic, is useful here. So-called "outsider" music, european free improvisation, "American Idol" auditioners like William Hung, The Shaggs, Jenks "Tex" Carman, Sun Ra, Joseph Spence, C Newman, Jandek. What could they all have in common? Well, I tried to get at this a few months back in a short piece on Keven Federline and Derek Bailey... and came to the conclusion that the "correct" theoretical cognate of "bad music" was "difference," that shibboleth of nineties philosophy. Who doesn't like difference?

To take an Attali-an tack, bad music reveals the "channelization" of desire necessary to produce capitalist musical culture. Why do we all "want" to listen to the same voices, the same song forms, the same recording quality, the same "stars"? Because of a violent process of exclusion, of which we are reminded forcefully when we hear the errant strains of Dot Wiggins' guitar or Kan Mikami's voice. And when we are made aware of the technology of perfectioneering (such as the voice-correction on Cher's "Believe" a perfect audio analog of the visibly airbrushed abdominal "definition" on Mariah Carey's torso), we are similarly made privy to a "secret" that undermines the entire imaginary investment process.

Back to Bad Music, the book. Since my main criticism is of the classic "begging the question" variety ("why has your interest in 'bad music' not led you to reject your fealty to normative musicological discourse?"), it isn't fair to condemn the authors for missing the point. I will try instead to highlight some fertile areas that are missed because of methodological tunnel vision.

One especially frustrating chapter will serve as the focus of discussion here. It considers the "badness" of country music, and tries to link the popular perception of country music as "bad" with country's presumed instantiation of "whiteness." Because I am fascinated by the implication of some of the other chapters (especially those that take up the question of the relationship between bad music and the contemporary avant garde) but too lazy to engage them here, I hope to return to them in a later post.

The author of the "country as bad music" chapter does not go much beyond pointing out the alleged "guilt by association" of country music (a term that is used without differentiation between sub-genres, regional variations, more and less commercial variants, and recorded vs. live and amateur vs. pro performance): its links, in the popular imagination, with white supremacist politics and southern social conservatism. Instead of looking to the contradictory production of "white" aesthetics within the vast swath of country music that people claim to find "bad," the author avoids considering country's musical qualities-- what people write and play and sing and listen and dance to-- seriously. It would indeed be fascinating to explore the peculiar contradictions of a white-dominated mass culture aimed primarily at white consumers that nevertheless maintains great scorn for "white" aesthetics, which I believe is arguably the case with country music (at teast in regard to certain semiotic elements such as "twang," nasality, close harmony, and perhaps even the waltz and 4/4 shuffle beats).

Similarly, instead of examining why country music haters associate it with a set of practices that are actually quite rare within country music (exaggerated drawls, idiotic lyrics about impossibly bathetic life circumstances, 3 chord songs, etc. which are found mainly in comedic mass-media products like Hee-Haw and the Blue Collar Comedy Tour), but which appeal to a nasty metropolitan ideology that conflates poor whites with backwardness and political primitivism, the author looks to marginal figures like Johnny Rebel and David Allan Coe, country singers who did produce patently racist material for the southern record market.

Most country fans, and I would guess all but a very few country haters have never heard this music (all of Johnny Rebel's music and those songs of Coe's that are racist, which is a small part of his output, which for the record, I find very uninteresting) or dislike it intensely. I base this conclusion on a discussion thread on a forum for country music practitioners and afficianados to which I belong concerning Johnny Rebel. Very few of the discussants had heard of Johnny Rebel, and all expressed revulsion at his music.

This lack of familiarity with fringe country racists is certainly true of the great mass of country indifferentists-- folks who don't care much one way or another about the music of Nashville and Bakersfield and Kentucky and Austin, but nevertheless find certain aspects of country music "bad" which country musicians and fans consider "good." It is this dissonance which we should probe, and it is indeed this dimension of musical "difference" that makes bad music fascinating.

We should recall that primal scene of most of the music enthusiasts I have met: a confrontation with a musical performance that generates the following thought process (the names are, of course, totally arbitrary). Is is it that she does not know how to sing like Celine Dion? Is she trying and failing? Or does she actually prefer singing like Alice Gerrard, Jandek, Ami Yoshida, or whoever? Did that guitarist fall asleep during his lessons? Is he somebody's cousin? Has he failed to respond to learn the sounds that land you the gigs in the pit band at Busch Gardens or in Paula Abdul's touring band? Does he indeed intend to make that plinky choked note, that out of tune bend, or that scratchy noise, because that is how music sounds right to him? Once this process has worked its magic, life tends to never be the same again... which is one of music's great subversive ploys...

To conclude: the project of thinking through the micro-aesthetics of "bad music" could help us understand many aspects of both "pop" and "out" music that remain mired in conceptual ooze. Why "bad" expressive preferences go in and out of favor within the musical mainstream, or gain and lose semiotic charge as expressions of "whiteness" or "blackness," "maleness" or "femaleness," "healthy" or "sick," "sane" or "crackers" is of great significance... We should try to figure it out, no?

Materiel World

2006-05-23T19:21:00.000-07:00

The challenge that faces us when we want to think seriously about modern music concerns the "textiness" of songs, records, scores, etc. There is enough dissonance and contradiction within this theoretical area to keep aesthetic philosophers busy for a long time, and to keep the rest of us awash in drool and eye-glaze...

I am sure we will return to get impaled on the horns of these dilemmas in time (especially regarding matters intellectual property-related), but for now I merely wish to clear a bit of ground for extra-textual analysis, or, if you will, to think about re-inserting musical production and reception in the material world. Or, more precisely, the historical materialist world... you know, the obsolete, old-fashioned theater of class struggle, complete with alienated labor and exploitation and commodity-fetishism and all the other nostalgic residue of mass production that was supposed to disappear in the awesome nineteen-nineties technotopia.

Have I misspelled the title of this post? Well, not intentionally, at least. I have used the term "materiel," which denotes military supplies, weapons, artillery, etc. to underline the violent social relations that are required to keep our fantasy machines and virtual prostheses rolling off of production lines and neatly stacked on the shelves of Target and Toys 'R' Us. I was reminded of how little we know about this violent underbelly in a striking quote excerpted in a discussion thread concerning a piece by Michael Steinberg on the uses and misuses of the concept of "genocide" on the fantastic mrzine.org site. I have not reached anything like a clear idea about whether "genocide" ought to be retained as a legal category within international jurisprudence (I have only read enough to conclude that I have grave doubts about its status), and I have no expertise on the events debated on this thread... but I couldn't believe what I was reading when I encountered this statement from journalist Johann Hari, regarding the Rwandan invasion of the Congo:

"Oh, and the reason why this invasion was so profitable? Global demand for coltan was soaring throughout the war because of the massive popularity of coltan-filled Sony Playstations. As Oona King, one of the few British politicians to notice Congo, explains as we travel together for a few days, 'Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms.' "

This link between catastrophe in the Congo and the selling of phantasmic imaginary aggression in the rich countries of the West suggests to me that behind the screens of virtuality, the violent destruction of real human bodies continues to be a precondition. Not only is coltan a key component in Playstations, but it is also used widely in cellphone circuit-boards and inside the guts of many personal computers and no doubt many other gadgets... Playstations and other video game units are increasingly important media of musical transmission... surely the acousmatic dimension of video games contributes to the construction and perpetuation of the fantasies to which gamers gain access when they fire up the various high-ticket cubes and boxes... and cellphones may be the most significant new addition to the technology of sound communication since the radio...

Nevertheless, my interest in this story is not so much motivated by the obvious salience of this story to these phenomena as to the more general theme of the marketing of affect: how feelings become saleable commodities. It is certainly true, as many commentators such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have insisted, that this category of production (literally, the production of feelings, as in the luxury "care" sector, the production of arousal in the porn industry, the imperative to produce a sense of well-being and comfort on the part of many service employees) has become increasingly dominant in the contemporary international economy.

And who are the original affective workers par excellence but musicians... from the baroque composers who pioneered the theory of the "doctrine of affections" to the environment coordinators and feeling-modulators of the Muzak corporation, from the twinkling of the Nordstrom's pianist to the punk rock screamer whose voice delivers access to a "structure of feeling" that liberates the preteen listener from the confines of suburban desperation.

I would not want to suggest here anything but the significance of music-making as affective work, and to remind myself that in mass-reproduced forms, the process that intervenes between a whisper leaving the lips of a singer and entering the ear of a listener is sometimes a murdered body politic.

2006-05-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody! This is the inaugural post of my new blog, which will focus on the politics of music, the music of politics, the fetishism of commodities, the negation of the negation, and possibly the all-new negation of the negation of the negation, which could, on a sad note, cause your computer to explode, or worse, fill your toolbar with dancing GWF Hegel smiley faces. My intention is to update this puppy on a fairly regular basis, but we will see how it goes. Failing all else, I will try to upload some new writing every weekend...

I have borrowed my title from Joe Meek and The Blue Men's 1960 recording of the same name. This remarkable document, sometimes called the first concept album, combines just about every fathomable class of discrepancy from classical norms-- out of tune melodies, massive overcompression, errant rhythms, all manner of noises and odd effects-- in order to manifest Meek's powerfully singular musical vision. This affirmation of difference, not Meek's kitschy but nevertheless appealing conjuring of alien civilizations, is the lesson I wish to draw from "I Hear A New World," and the rationale for taking its title as our moniker.