To support a moratorium on violence, sound

Transcription

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“You cheated, you lied; you cheated, you lied,” sings Leonard Cohen, almost
inaudibly, over the long fade of “Memories,” a characteristically ambivalent
track from his shambolic 1973 album Death of a Ladies Man. These lines,
lifted from a canonical doo-wop hit, are ostensibly directed at a high school
flame, two-and-a-half decades after the fact, for failing to be true. The wounds
over the furtive, frustrating efforts to achieve some sort of sublime contact
at a high school dance remain fresh for the man in his 40s singing the song.
But he might just as well be singing about old songs themselves, the ones that
promised more than he ended up getting. His jaded disappointment can’t
fully conceal how stunned he continues to be that the yearning so palpable
in love songs never quite translated into a lasting unity, that listening to those
songs yields only a fleeting connection that’s already dissolving into a dubious
memory before the record ends.
This mix of shock and disappointment inheres throughout Death of a Ladies
Man in the ironic — some might say disastrous — pairing of Phil Spector’s
wall-of-sound production with Cohen’s dissolute tales of adult sexual
desperation. The failure that haunts every song on the album is also the failure
of the four-chord progressions which once promised him utopia from every
jukebox in Montreal. Bitterness has become inseparable from nostalgia.
This issue of New Inquiry, like Cohen’s Death of a Ladies Man, is about music
and failure, about utopias posited and dissipated. But its point is not to
argue that music makes nothing happen or that it is everywhere and always
mystification and temporary escapism. We’re big enough fans of pop music to
know that sometimes the promise of happiness is not always betrayed, that its
potential for constructive negation is more abundant than Adorno imagined
it could be — even as taste is turned into capital and social media makes selfconsciousness about pleasure a full-time job.
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But pop has had more than enough glib defense briefs filed in its
name since Adorno and Horkheimer arraigned it on charges of mass
deception. There’s room for writing about music that acknowledges both
sides of Fredric Jameson’s observation that “within the restored Utopian
meaning of cultural artifacts ... the will to domination perseveres intact.”
Music will always be capable of overwhelming us, but what we make of
that, alone or together, is never predetermined.
In the opening essay, Rob Horning links social-media-engendered
pathologies of compulsive “oversharing” to the confessional songwriting
of the 1970s and of the Mamas and the Papas’ leader John Phillips
in particular. Tim Barker and Beth Lesser examine popular music
in the social context of the 1970s, uncovering connections between
country music and labor militancy, dancehall and electoral violence.
Kendra Salois looks at contemporary global politics through the lens
of Moroccan hip-hop, while Whitney Erin Boesel probes the limits of
Spotify’s promise of “all the music, all the time.” Robin James and Leah
Caldwell explore the underbelly of the beat, through French theorist
Jacques Attali to contemporary “party rockers” LMFAO. Tavia Nyong’o
takes stock of Frank Ocean while Willie Osterweil asks whether punk
rock has, at long last, failed. Finally, Greil Marcus offers a brief comment
questioning the very meaning of the words music and failure when
joined together.
The point of looking at music and failure is not to revel in cynicism or
absolve complacency through defeat but to acknowledge that music
nurtures despair as often as it redeems it. It instills feelings of exclusion
with every moment of inclusivity it inspires (Why does everyone like
this song but me?). Recognizing this is essential before we can really
hear anything, before we can really surrender to what we think we are
hearing.
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The Failure Addict
by rob horning
John Phillips mastered the art of serial
disappointment by sharing it compulsively. This makes
him a harbinger of the social-media age
“At best Utopia can serve the negative purpose
of making us more aware of our mental and
ideological imprisonment … therefore the best
Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively”
dissolute, Phillips had always seemed more
interested in romanticizing failure and squandering talent than applying his ample supply
of it with any consistency. Even in his chartruling heyday, he seemed perversely, persistently drawn to themes of disappointment,
betrayal, and regret (albeit cleverly masked
by resplendent harmonies and catchy melodies). The Mamas and the Papas’ hits are preoccupied with ennui, broken relationships,
and futile fantasies of escape: California
dreaming on such a winter’s day.
The first Mamas and the Papas album, If
You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (1966)
went to the top of Billboard’s album chart and
spawned several hits, including “Monday,
Monday” and “California Dreamin’,” which
have become durable folk standards. And al-
— Fredric Jameson,
Archaeologies of the Future
It takes a special kind of self-absorption
to believe that your failures will fascinate—
a need to be loved not for your talents but
despite them. John Phillips, founder of the
Mamas and the Papas—the 1960s quar
tet that rode a string of deceptively sunny-
seeming radio hits to become icons of h ippie
hedonism—exemplified this species of celebrity narcissism. Gifted but irretrievably
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again, and joked with Howard Stern that he
was “just trying to break in the new liver.”
More disturbingly, his daughter Mackenzie
Phillips alleged, in a 2009 tell-all bio and
on Oprah, that she had had a decade-long incestuous relationship with him after they had
started using drugs together.
Phillips’s own sordid memoir, Papa
John, published in 1986 after he was convicted
of drug trafficking, is appallingly unreflective.
It’s more of a memory dump that ends
up coming across as an elaborate dodge,
a winking copout. Phillips takes palpable
pleasure in narrating his sexual and chemical
exploits—including his needle sharing with
Mackenzie—and then tacks on an obligatory
mea culpa at the end. But the memoir mostly
reads like just another symptom of his
peculiar malady—the overwhelming selfpity, the same lacerating melancholy and
compulsion to romanticize disappointment.
Phillips consistently presents himself as
powerless to do anything but register his own
selfishness, as if it were an inevitable fact. He
habitually flees responsibility and refuses to
consider what causes his flight. Instead he
seems to expect, pathologically, that he will
be forgiven totally for all his transgressions.
He doesn’t go in for trying to justify his behavior; all he can muster is the implicit excuse of hedonism, typified by such passages
as this: “The France was as elegant as you
could get. We had our own wine stewards
and did our best to consume as much of the
dope as possible. We swam, read, sunbathed,
drank, and I stayed high the whole time.”
Sometimes he adds a dash of hippie lebens-
John Phillips, at photo shoot for his first solo album,1970
ready, on the group’s second album, rushed
out later that year to capitalize on the band’s
momentum, Phillips was exuberantly singing, “I can’t wait to let you down.”
To become addicted to failure, you must
first achieve some modicum of success to
give it kick. Only then, when there are stakes,
when there are strangers to disappoint, can
you search in earnest for the one transcendent, spectacular failure to rule all failures,
the one that can provide the enduring consolation all addicts seek, the repetition and the
pre-emptive depredation that will seize back
a sense of agency from the pointless inevitability of death. By 1970, Phillips had secured
a lifetime’s worth of success and spent much
of the rest of his life in its fading halo.
The music Phillips made after the Mamas
and the Papas’ demise did little to affect his
reputation, which was instead destroyed by
two tabloid items. At age 57, after years of
self-confessed and well-publicized drug addiction, Phillips received a liver transplant.
Months later he was photographed boozing
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the failure addict
philosophie: “The dope was out on the tables,
solution, Phillips seems like a spectator to
in vases and bowls, and money never seemed
his own memories. He sounds as if he’s tryto change hands. That’s how I wanted it in my
ing to convince himself that his trip through
house. We were there to share and party. And
life was gloriously frenetic even though he
the partying never let up.”
seems passive in the face of overwhelming
Throughout Papa John, it’s clear that
fame. Notoriety unleashed appetites that
Phillips had no particular aspiration to
made his old ambitions into afterthoughts,
express the utopian ideals of the 1960s.
rationalizations. Unexpected attention on
After all, one of his signal achievements
an unfathomable scale seems to have permawas to trivialize the countercultural youth
nently disoriented him, made all his choices
movement by writing “San Francisco (Be
seem, finally, arbitrary.
Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” In
his memoir, he buys into the hype about
himself retroactively—the voice of the
love generation. Yet in warmly recounting
Though I knew the Mamas and the
the generosity of the scene, Phillips seems
Papas’ music from oldies radio, my personal
to forget that the money had to come
fascination with Phillips began in earnest in
from somewhere. The square record2001. I had dropped out of a Ph.D. program
buying public ultimately fueled his drugthat I had somewhat arbitrarily enrolled in,
consumption spree, and they didn’t really
moved home from the west, and worked only
get to share in the piles of pills at the Bel Air
when one of the half dozen temp agencies I
parties. All they got is the second-hand aphad enrolled with could get me an assignment.
preciation of his lifestyle as it filtered out in
Several of these at least put my English degossip magazines, self-referential songs, and
grees to appropriate use by having me alphaautobiographies.
betize files. After 13 years away from home, I
Phillips’s publisher perhaps encouraged
was back in the town I grew up in. Before I left
him for commercial reasons to offer sensaschool, I’d had a falling out with a close friend,
tionalistic details—he claims to have had
and he emailed to tell me that I was a coda threesome with Warren Beatty and Jane
dled, pseudointellectual
Fonda; he says he turned
phony who would never
down an invitation to
Phillips
consistently
amount to anything and
party at 10050 Cielo
presents himself
who would probably live
Drive on the night the
out the rest of his days in
Manson family showed
as powerless to do
his mother’s basement,
up and murdered evanything
but
register
where I was now, in fact,
eryone—but in running
his own selfishness
living.
through his litany of dis10
ROb HOrning
a nightmare but, perhaps worse, a banal,
spiritless malaise.
As is typical with Phillips, he masked
misery with musical red herrings: in this
case, a languid country-rock sound supplied
by the Wrecking Crew, top L.A. studio musicians of the period. On the album, Phillips
doesn’t hesitate to transform the potentially
embarrassing details of his personal life into
frank songs—perhaps the most egregious
example is “Let It Bleed, Genevieve,” which
recounts his skin-popping heroin use with
another woman while his girlfriend was upstairs having a miscarriage. Phillips seems
to find this tell-all approach irresistible, pitilessly recounting his foibles as if putting the
memories up for sale in song excuses his
behavior—as if the right blend of self-pity,
oversharing, and callousness could achieve
true pathos.
At the time I was entranced by this sort
of brazen self-revelation. To me, “John, the
Wolf King of L.A.” was about a very recognizable kind of depression, in which you can
conceive great ambitions for yourself and
even recognize the means for fulfilling them,
but then you balk at the effort it would take
and withdraw instead into various fantasies
and feints. I identified with this to an unwholesome degree. The song on the record
that I found most devastating was “Topanga
Canyon,” a deceptively easygoing track that
relocates the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting
for My Man” to the fabled artists’ enclave in
the mountains outside Los Angeles. In place
of Lou Reed’s restlessness, Phillips is laconic;
instead of gritty urban squalor, there’s sun-
I didn’t think all that much of Phillips or
the Mamas and the Papas—they seemed of
a piece and interchangeable with, say, Three
Dog Night—until I came across Phillips’s
1970 solo album on a Usenet newsgroup.
Self-titled but generally known as “John,
the Wolf King of L.A.” after a poem on the
back cover by his girlfriend at the time, the
record is saturated in narcissism, with lyrics
confronting self-inflicted failure in the midst
of decadent excess. It is shot through with
cynicism and references to junkies, letches,
hangers-on, and a whole host of post-1960s
casualties trying to put together the pieces.
It suggests that the California dream the
Mamas and the Papas had so effectively
evoked wound up dissolving not even into
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the failure addict
soaked ennui. The song is about an apathetic
addict, and it should be hard to summon
much sympathy for him, but the chorus
somehow allows drug addiction to evoke
and emblemize broader failures, serial selfdisappointments:
You are left waiting for something to happen.
Today, for me, that means scanning around
the different places online where someone
might send some indication that they have
noticed me, send some message that tells me
I exist—one that says, Everyone thought I was
smarter.
Oh, mama, I’m in deep water,
And it’s way, way over my head.
Everyone thought I was smarter
Than to be misled.
The 1970s were halcyon days for the
As Phillips waits for his man in fruitless anmusic industry. Margins at the major labels
ticipation, he is crushed by the sense that
were apparently fat enough to let them codthose who have cared about him have been
dle rock royalty wrestling with their egos and
waiting in the same way for him—waittheir growing irrelevance. After the Mamas
ing for him to achieve something definite,
and the Papas’ breakup and that lone solo resomething he can’t say he is incapable of but
cord, Phillips’s intermittent efforts to make
something he nonetheless can’t bring himnew albums yielded nothing but a disarray
self to ever accomplish, something on the
of unfocused, unfinished masters. Still, he
order of the everyday business of life, in all
must have managed enough flashes of brilits humdrum plainness and contingency. Or
liance and charm that his friends in the busiperhaps something even more insignificant,
ness kept staking him. Listening to those
like a dissertation on 18th century literature,
recordings now—released posthumously by
the disorganized notes for which I had in a
Varese Sarabande—you vicariously experibunch of yellow legal pads that I could no
ence the thrill of Phillips’s heedless burnlonger bring myself to open.
ing of entertainment-industry money and
You don’t have to be a junkie to apprecireckless destroying of brain cells in the futile
ate what the song’s getting at. Anyone who
search for a creative spark.
has ever felt oppressed
A lot of delusion
by the feeling of being
must have went into
Phillips
pitilessly
ordinary will recognize
those late-period rethat sort of despair, the
cordings. At some level,
recounts his foibles
sense that the strategies
everyone involved must
as if putting the
one has chosen to make
have known that these
memories
up
for
sale
life seem special have
efforts were not going
turned out to be traps.
to return him to artistic
excuses his behavior
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ROb HOrning
respectability after years of drug-addled disrepute. On an song called “Pussycat,” from
aborted sessions with Mick Jagger and Keith
Richards, Phillips pours out his heart for the
dancers at his favorite strip club, with whom
he clearly empathizes. Right at home in yet
another habitat of broken dreams, Phillips
confesses his intimate familiarity with the
scene and sheepishly admits that if he had
“a million hearts to give,” he would give one
to all the girls who work onstage. A booming backing vocalist repeats the line—“If I
had a million hearts to give” (listen here)—
bringing the song to a complete halt, as if to
upbraid us with the magnitude of the wish
Phillips just expressed: That he deeply feels
the pain of those compelled to expose and
exploit themselves for a jeering or indifferent universe of spectators, and he wishes he
could comfort them. He wishes he could
comfort himself. But then the song lurches
back into its insouciant rhythm, undermining its own poignancy. It is a microcosm of
Phillips’s entire career.
I sometimes find myself humming that
line when I find myself online reading something on a social-media site that seems awkwardly personal. I think of it too when I
am checking the page views of a blog post
I wrote or looking at how many Twitter followers I have. Do I really believe I have something to give to anyone out there who could
be reading? Do I just have to put more of my
heart in it? Do I secretly believe, despite my
frequent complaints about social-media selfabsorption, that each new Twitter follower
actually proves that I did have another heart
to give? I find that my attitude toward what
I am doing on the computer is frequently
marked by this vague mixture of shame and
prurience.
Facebook can seem at times an enormous simulacrum of the Pussycat Lounge,
full of voyeurism and cynical, semi-professional exhibitionism, but obviously the divide between performer and audience that
structures the flow of money, power, pity,
and contempt in strip clubs has been largely
obliterated online. Instead, there is the ambiguous simultaneity of consuming and producing spectacle, of performing the self, of
spectatorship as performance, in a medium
that immediately allows you to substitute
yourself for any performer with broadcast
responses of your own. This stew of contradictory and self-negating impulses makes
up what now often gets described simply as
sharing. It’s sharing when we confess something; it’s sharing when we link to someone
else’s work; it’s sharing when we simply express approval for something; it’s sharing
when a social-media service automatically
announces some action we took. Online we
all have a million hearts to give.
Dissipated celebrities like Phillips are well aware of the vicarious potential
of their own decadence. An audience’s demands for transgressive fantasy seem to impose themselves on celebrities without their
knowing quite what they are facing. The ce13
the failure addict
lebrities end up violating all these bourgeois
norms (fidelity, prudence, thriftiness, hard
work, punctuality, etc.) out of compulsion
more than pleasure. Their boundless notoriety makes the illusion of their absolute
autonomy all the more intoxicating, while
in truth they have no more control than the
rest of us. They merely confront a different
set of limits. They seem forced to adopt decadence or peculiarity as a kind of defense,
an escape from the mania that inadvertently
fuels it further. The more remote they become from ordinary life, the more intriguing
they become and the force that pushes them
further out into inexplicableness becomes
more and more powerful. If they give in to
it, they achieve a kind of pure celebrity that
no longer has the pretense of a connection
to any sort of achievement. Hence the disproportionate infamy of figures like Lindsay
Lohan, as well as any number of reality-TV
stars.
From the start Phillips fashioned a failed
utopia in his music—co-opting the spirit of
optimism in the 1960s youth scene while
subtly undermining it with his lyrics—and
he continued to live it out through an unbroken series of ethical and moral lapses. Yet his
trajectory suggests how the looming entropy
that haunts everything can be transformed
into an ego cocoon insulating us just enough
to carry on, to continue making things, to let
us see inevitable failure as a glamorous and
indulgent kind of success. Phillips can’t ever
give himself over completely to the pretense
that pleasing an audience is more important
or more powerful than repeatedly trying
and failing to purge his own demons. There
is nothing but friction in his kind of sharing.
I wonder whether he is a harbinger of
what microcelebrity may do to the rest of
us. The internet’s intricate connectivity supplies us an ever-flashing promise of fame,
even though it may end up fleeting or slight.
Anyone’s social network can make them feel
stalked, hounded. Being able to realistically
aspire to this kind of fame, on any scale, does
more to make failure seem seductive than
it does to motivate concrete accomplishments. Being talented is insufficient when
one can become notorious. Indeed, in a culture of entrepreneurial self-fashioning, mandatory sharing, and ritualized backslapping,
failure may come to seem the true measure
of accomplishment. You can revel in your inadequacy because you know you have transcended it. It has become part of your brand.
With sharing becoming frictionless,
the stakes of self-revelation must be raised.
It’s no longer enough to imagine others
are interested in our everyday mundanity
to posit a close connection. With so much
automatically or thoughtlessly shared, we
now need to share our failures to feel as
though we have “really” shared something.
Only when something humiliating or grossly
self-indulgent is revealed can we conjure the
old intimacy. Like many other flameouts of
his generation, John Phillips already lived
with that reality, entombed in ambient
surveillance and the nebulous collective
demands of remote yet omnipresent fans,
and he behaved accordingly. We are catching
up to him. n
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Rank and File Countrypolitan
by tim barker
When country musicians tried to protect the integrity of their
genre in the 1970s against the likes of John Denver,
it wasn’t merely aesthetic protest but an organized labor movement
Charlie Rich stands on the stage of
the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville. In
his hand, he holds an envelope containing
the name of the winner of the 1975 Country Music Association Award for Entertainer
of the Year. (Rich himself received this recognition the year before.) As he begins to
speak—“haltingly,” the Los Angeles Times will
describe it later—he drops the envelope to
the floor. Having retrieved it, he holds it up
for all to see. Then, without a word, he takes
out his cigarette lighter and sets the card
on fire. “The award goes,” he announces as
flames consume the envelope, “to my good
friend John Denver.”
What just happened? As in Hawthorne’s
Scarlet Letter, when the townsfolk will forever
dispute the meaning of Dimmesdale’s revelations on the scaffold, the matter remains contested. If you ask Rich’s son, who administers
a website devoted to his father’s memory, it
was an unfortunate accident: Rich had reacted poorly to (legitimately prescribed!) medication. But for nearly everyone else, another
interpretation of the stunt has proved irresistible. In their view, Rich was protesting the
encroachment of lightweight pop-country
into the Opry, a hallowed venue whose continuous country radio broadcasts since 1925
made it almost as old the genre itself. I would
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tim barker
go one step further. Rich’s rebellion at the
1975 Country Music Awards was an act of
radical working class self-assurance, best understood in the context of the forgotten labor
history of the 1970s.
Despite caricatures of a navel-gazing
“Me Decade” which saw American workers
smoothly integrated into a totally administered society, the 1970s were marked by levels of labor militancy that rivaled the Great
Depression and the tumultuous periods after both world wars. Strikers set single-year
records for records for work stoppages, authorized or not. The liberal consensus established by the 1960s—Keynesian economic
management, high union density, and near
full employment—gave workers an unusual
willingness to resist their bosses (and some-
times their union leaders) at the points of
production. As economist Michal Kalecki
had predicted decades earlier in “Political
Aspects of Full Employment,” tight labor
markets meant that “the social position of
the boss would be undermined, and the selfassurance and class-consciousness of the
working class would grow.”
“The class war in the long 1970s,” writes
historian Aaron Brenner, provoked “military
intervention on several occasions...dozens of
anti-labor injunctions, hundreds of arrests
[and] numerous calls for anti-strike legislation.” Charlie Rich, for his part, was not invited
back to the CMA Awards, and never received
another nomination from the organization.
The culture industry interpreted the envelope
burning as a cry of “take this job and shove it.”
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rank and file countrypolitan
Rich’s onstage protest was the equivalent of
iting membership to the rank and file would
individual industrial sabotage. But rank-andexclude the moneychangers and middlefile resistance to the CMA produced somemen whose votes the artists blamed for the
thing less ephemeral, if less remembered,
Newton-John embarrassment. (Only 2 of 30
than this flaming fuck-you. In 1974, the same
members of the CMA board at the time were
year the United Mine Workers of America
entertainers, and none of its 13 officers.)
struck to win the best contract in their history
Labor militants in the 1970s were notable
and the socialist president of AFSCME told
for transcending bread-and-butter economic
striking municipal workers to “let Baltimore
issues to raise matters of workplace control
burn,” the Association of Country Entertainand quality of life. Exemplary of this trend
ers organized to protest the CMA. The induswere the series of strikes, both wildcat and
try’s offense: passing over nominees like Loofficial, which rocked GM’s Lordstown comretta Lynn and Dolly Parton to name Olivia
plex between 1972 and 1974. At Lordstown,
Newton-John Best Female Vocalist.
workers were forced to assemble more than
Newton-John was a controversial choice,
100 cars an hour. The strikers (some of
not only because, like Denver, she played
whom, the media loved to point out, looked
a watered-down pop style of country. She
like hippies) “voiced hatred of the assembly
was a literal and figurative foreigner, born
line itself and questioned the necessity of the
in Britain, raised in Australia, and painfully
capitalist division of work.” Though Lordunversed in the lore of country music. Upon
stown became the most famous case, similar
coming to America, the story goes, she said
demands for autonomous and meaningful
she wanted to meet Hank Williams, whose
work were voiced in many industries.
death had legendarily taken place on New
There is something of this spirit in the
Year’s Day, 1953. More crucially, NewtonACE, whose star-studded membership—inJohn refrained from publicly identifying hercluding Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, and
self as a country singer. This was too much.
Roy Acuff—wasn’t exactly concerned with
After the 1974 awards ceremony, a midnight
wages and hours. (Musicians’ unions already
meeting was held at the
existed to deal with
house of country singthose issues.) The disers George Jones and
sident country singers
The dissident
Tammy Wynette. The
were staking a claim to
country
singers
were
result was the ACE. The
control the conditions of
staking a claim to
ACE would be different
the industry they worked
from the CMA in only
in, and demanding digcontrol the conditions
enrolling those who
nity commensurate to
of
the
industry
they
made their living as singtheir crucial role in the
worked in
ers and musicians. Limproduction process. The
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tim barker
CMA, after all, originated as a management
strategy to transform country music—and
its audience—into commodities attractive
to advertisers. In the 1960s, historian Diane
Pecknold writes in The Selling Sound: The
Rise of the Country Music Industry, an increasingly well-organized Nashville establishment
sought to “revise popular understandings of
the Southern migrant and the working class”
and the country music they loved. A country
awards show akin to the Oscars and Grammys
were part of this “cultural redemption of the
country audience”—in other words, a standardization of that audience which effaced integral regional and cultural differences.
“We are the vehicle of country music,” said
ACE member Billy Walker. “We have to have
a place for our voice to be heard.” According
to a statement issued by 50 founding members, the ACE’s “primary purpose will be to
preserve the identity of country music as a
separate and distinct form of entertainment.”
Speaking more bluntly, chairman Bill Anderson told the press “Our gripe, if we have one,
is that these people want to come in and take
our music away.”
The formation of the ACE was a daring
attempt to take on the “big money [that]
prostituted our business”, but the organization’s existence was brief and troubled. Although they publicly disclaimed hostility
to the CMA, the dissidents were perceived
by management as recalcitrant workers and
dealt with accordingly. Billboard, in ostensibly “journalistic” coverage, accused ACE
members of hypocrisy for not having been
active enough in the CMA or for being unsupportably poppy themselves. ( Jones and
Wynette made albums with strings-addicted
countrypolitan producer Billie Sherrill, as did
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rank and file countrypolitan
Charlie Rich.) Such vague but ominous pressure from an industry organ constituted the
rough equivalent of a capital strike. Famous
artists backed out and later played down their
initial involvement. The CMA also made an
effort to contain dissidence by diversifying
its board to include more performers. By the
mid-1980s the perpetually underfunded organization shut its doors.
These twin tales, it must be admitted,
form a dialectic of defeat. The ACE was a failure, and unions have never recovered from
the neoliberal counteroffensive already underway by the late 1970s. In 1986, around
the time the ACE met its demise, the Lordstown factory celebrated its 20th anniversary. Against a backdrop of plant closings and
layoffs, chastened labor leaders joined management to “celebrate years of relative peace,
saying the strikes of the ‘70s are a thing of the
past.” But Alan Jackson and George Strait’s
awards-show performance of “Murder on
Music Row,” which charges “the almighty dollar” with the “kill[ing] country music,” shows
that televised industry galas remain an active
terrain of conflict. And Great Recession-era
actions—a three-day strike at Lordstown in
2007, the recent Chicago teachers’ strike, and
especially the Republic Windows and Doors
sit-down strike—though pale by comparison
to the wild 1970s, at least suggest that failure
doesn’t have to be forever. n
By stressing the historical simultaneity of the ACE and the rank-and-file revolt of
the 1970s, I don’t mean to suggest the country stars explicitly understood their struggle
as labor activism. But if we can still believe
in such a thing as the zeitgeist, it is clear that
the two phenomena were different manifestations of the same impulse. Both stories,
lost to historical amnesia, seem completely
foreign today, examples of faded defiance
among so-called middle Americans. Each
narrative also belie liberal perceptions of
country music and the white working class
as incorrigibly conservative. (One need only
look at the New York Times’s man-bites-dog
shock at encountering “irate longhairs, not
on college campuses, but among blue collar
workers” to see what I mean.) Through ignorance of working class culture, and outright
snobbery, many upper-middle class Americans understand blue collar and red flag as
mutually exclusive loyalties. The hollowness
of this judgment is shown by the history of
working class struggles in the 1970s.
20
The Sound and the Fury
By Beth Lesser
When political factions divided Jamaica,
sound systems were caught in the cross-fire.
The 1970s brought a whole new atmosphere to the dancehall. Politics began
to creep into every aspect of life in Jamaica,
including music. “In the ‘60s, when we celebrated our independence, when we came
out of the colonial era, it was really nice,”
explains producer Clive Chin. “After that 10year stretch that just went past unnoticed,
like the turn of a page—everything just
started changing. People became more selfconscious of who they are, what they were
defending. The music started to change as
well. Then, you had certain Jamaican artist
picking up the team of the socialist system,
where they would sing about Joshua, ‘Better
Must Come,’ and things like that. There was
a big change. The rock steady, which had that
sweet melody, went by and more political
and social material came into effect.”
Both “Better Must Come” by Delroy
Wilson and “No Joshua No” by Max Romeo
were written in reference to Michael Manley,
leader of the People’s National Party (PNP).
In 1972, Manley had been elected with 56%
of the vote. Appealing to the downtrodden
and disenfranchised, Manley had sought
out the help of musicians in his campaign,
like singer-producer Clancy Eccles, who re-
An excerpt from Rub-a-Dub Style: The Roots of
Modern Dancehall
22
beth lesser
political involvement, the PNP began a
campaign to co-opt the Rastafarian movement by incorporating Rasta symbols,
ideas, and music into its campaign. Manley
portrayed himself as the Biblical Joshua
and carried a stick he referred to as the ‘rod
of correction’. Claiming the rod has been
given to him by the Emperor Haile Selassie,
Manley courted the Rastafarian vote with
considerable success.
But the euphoria of his election victory quickly dampened. Many had climbed
aboard the Manley bandwagon, believing
that change was possible. But when faced
with continual interference by the U.S. and
its allies, the only change that came was that
the rich got richer and the sufferers suffered
more. Jamaica was indeed, as Prince Far I put
it, “under heavy manners.”
During the ’70s, life in Jamaica was much
the way it was described in so many songs
from the period. People were suffering. Jobs
were scarce, wages were low, and essential
goods were in short supply. In 1980, inflation
was running at 28.6%, with unemployment
at 27% with an estimated 50% for young
people, according to a 1986 Heritage Foundation report. The economy was unstable
and factories were closing because the lack of
foreign exchange made it impossible to buy
parts and raw materials from abroad. The
middle class was leaving as quickly as they
could find a way around the restrictions on
taking money out of the country. Because of
the import controls, store shelves were bare
and something as simple as a can opener
Clive Chin
corded several songs in support of Manley
including the crucial “Rod of Correction.”
He also organized the traveling Bandwagon
shows that took Manley’s message to every parish. Singers included Bob and Rita
Marley, Junior Byles, Dennis Brown, Judy
Mowatt, Scotty, Marcia Griffiths, Tinga
Stewart, Brent Dowe, Max Romeo, Derrick
Harriet, and Ken Boothe.
Although true Rastafarians eschewed
23
the sound and the fury
close proximity to Cuba was a concern, and
the U.S. did not want to see communism
spread. As Mark Wignall noted in the Jamaican Observer, “At a time when Cold War tensions were being played out right across the
globe between the U.S. and its NATO allies
and the Soviet Bloc and its satellites, Michael
Manley’s political direction placed Jamaica, a
small island in America’s backyard pond (the
Caribbean Sea), in the cross-hairs of hostile
U.S. policy action.”
The CIA, according to ex-agent Phillip
Agee, began processes of destabilization in
Jamaica. Guns began coming into the country. “In the period leading up to the 1976
general elections, violence took off in earnest. It was then no secret that new guns had
come upon the Jamaican landscape, and it
was argued that the firepower of the JCF [ Jamaica Defense Force] was inferior to those
of the gunmen aligned to the political parties,” Wignall reported. The inevitable result
was an escalating arms race between the two
opposing political factions — the PFP and
the rival Jamaica Labour Party ( JLP) — in
which many innocent lives were lost.
Michael Manley
could run you $25 Jamaican in the supermarket. The music industry suffered also under
import controls. Coxsone Dodd had to stop
repressing his material in Jamaica and Jojo
Hookim of Channel One had his import license reduced, making it hard to get parts for
his jukeboxes and gaming machines.
In the ’70s, life proved so difficult that
many Jamaicans, including Clive and his
family, moved to the U.S. DJ Dennis Alcapone was one of the many who, like the
Chins, abandoned the country. “At the time,
Jamaica was just turning violent [because
of] the political situation. Guns were firing
in the dance.”
Manley was a strong supporter of Third
World solidarity and aligned himself with
Cuba and other revolutionary governments,
setting off alarms in Washington, still shaking from the Cuban Missile crisis. Jamaica’s
Garrisons, Communities,
and Political Violence
Throughout the ’70s, politically
inspired violence affected everyone. “You
get up this morning and you wonder who
you know was killed,” recalls producer Dudley Swaby, a.k.a. Manzie. “Every day, I know
somebody who was killed. Or if I didn’t know
them, I know of them or know about them.”
24
beth lesser
a time in the middle ’70s when the sound
couldn’t play at all. Because it was political
administration and violence against leaders
and opposition. No sound. 1975, 1976. No
sound couldn’t play.”
Violence and poverty weren’t anything
new to the streets of Kingston. For decades,
people had been fleeing the hard life in the
country for the hope of better employment
opportunities in the city. But when they arrived, they soon discovered that the infrastructure wasn’t there. The farmers arriving
daily in Kingston found that there was neither affordable housing nor land on which
to build for themselves. So many made their
homes squatting on what came to be known
as capture lands or in shantytowns where
the dwellings were mere shacks of cardboard and zinc.
These lawless lands appealed to the politicians, who would go in with favors and buy
control of the area. Or they could take down
the whole thing and build up their own community to replace it. Public housing schemes
became a powerful tool to manipulate the
people. Once built and filled with party supporters, that area could be counted on as a
loyal constituency. From 1962 and 1972, Seaga “built Kingston West into a fortress, with
a centerpiece in Tivoli Gardens”—Concrete
Jungle—“Jamaica’s first government housing
scheme, which he built on the bulldozed site
of the then Kingston dumps and a dreadful
area named Back o’ Wall,” Philip Mascoll reported in “Jamaica: The Guns Of Kingston”
in the Toronto Star. Tivoli Gardens, which
came complete with schools and health care
Squidley Ranking on Gemini Sound
By the 1976 election, Jamaica was on the
brink of an outright civil war. The contest between Manley and JLP leader Edward Seaga
pitted two determined men, and battles were
being fought on the street of downtown
Kingston. Travel around the city became
perilous. Sound systems had to stay within
their own neighborhoods. Dancehall DJ and
producer Jazzbo recalls, “Before that we used
to play seven nights a week. But there was
25
centers, supplied first jobs and then dwellings for supporters of Seaga.
Such neighborhoods, once connected to
a particular party, became known as garrison
communities. In the Corporate Area, they
cropped up all over—Rema, Arnett Gardens,
Olympic Gardens, Wareika Hills in East
Kingston, Tel Aviv, Payne Land and Southside—all to insure a good turnout for the
party at the ballot box. It was in these overcrowded ghettos that trouble started. Often
communities were only a few blocks wide,
making it hard for opponents to avoid each
other. Many songs dealt with the reality of
having to live inside a war zone. For example,
Sugar Minott used the metaphor of crossing the border to talk about his spirituality
in “Can’t Cross the Border” and Barrington
Levy’s ‘Be Like a Soldier’ talks about defending your area. As Sleng Teng singer Wayne
Smith put it, “In Jamaica, in those times, you
know seh, if this side is PNP and this side is
Laborite, most of the politicians would pay
some guys over there right now to intimidate
those people to vote for us. Kill them! Do
anything! But make them vote for us.”
The reach of politics extended into the
daily lives of even those who never gave political parties a second thought. “They used
to label you in them time there,” recalls DJ
Ranking Trevor. “Cause the second owner
[of the sound] was a politician from Jungle,
one of the top guy, Tony Welch. But because
I was sparring with them, they start label the
sound and label me, say me is a PNP. You
have to be careful, cause in those days, those
guys want to kill anybody.”
On May 19, 1976, a tenement building on
Orange Lane, where PNP supporters were
meeting, was set on fire. The gunmen blocked
the exits and prevented firemen or police aid
from reaching the conflagration. Rumors
blamed both sides for the tragedy. No one
trusted anyone anymore, and no place was
completely safe. Manley declared a state of
emergency and 500 people were detained.
“In that time it doesn’t matter what,” Selector and producer Jah Screw agreed. “If they
think that you are ‘leaning’. Because it takes
nothing to think you are leaning to the next
side. You have be careful if you’re wearing
green [the JLP color]. You have fe be careful
if you wearing orange [the PNP color]. It was
easy to get branded.” And, of course, “If you
were branded PNP”, Welton Irie remembers,
“you couldn’t go into JLP areas and vice versa.”
Sometimes choosing a side was the only
way to stay safe. Smith, a resident of the Waterhouse district—known then as Firehouse
on account of the rampant violence—recalls,
“When I was growing up, my grandfather was
JLP and my grandmother was PNP. So, you
have the PNP people in the area used to drive
round in the cars with the [megaphone] and
say, ‘Wayne, junior, leave out of Waterhouse!’
And then the JLP would come and say we
must leave too—me and my brother Junior
and my brother Christoph fe leave.”
Pressures on Sounds
The vast majority of sounds were
apolitical and carried entertainers of every
social, political, and religious group on the
26
beth lesser
island, united under music. However, no matter what an individual DJ’s opinions may have
been, circumstances sometimes called for
him to bring politics into his lyrics, like when
the sound was performing in an area with a
party affiliation. Jah Screw explains, “When
you was in an area, sometimes you have to
take the chance and ‘big up’ somebody in that
area, because you have to do it. You have to
send out requests to everybody. You have to
send out to Jim Brown. You have to say, ‘Big
up father Jim Brown’, Claudie Massop. If
you’re in his area you have to say something.
When you reach up a Jungle, you have to say,
‘Yes, Mr. Welch.’ You have to.”
It was expected, and it worked. Political
lyrics were well received because they were
specifically local and aimed at the particular
community. Zaggaloo, the selector for Arrows, recalls, “We keep a couple of dance out
in Ashanti Junction and it was like that—political. I was even talking to Sluggy Ranks and
I tell him, ‘When you singing, try sing anything that’s talking about what’s going on in
the community and you will see how your
song really reach out to more people than
anything else.’ ”
Going with the leanings of the area they
were playing in at times meant coming up
with some incendiary lyrics. Ranking Trevor
recalls, “I don’t know how I do it all those
years, cause so much guys did wan’ kill me.
We had so much politician song, like you
say, ‘Two sheet of Gleaner fe go bu’n down
Rema”— the neighborhood Wilton Gardens. “Cup a cup fe go clap Up Massop’”—
Claude Massop, the Tivoli Gardens strong-
Sammy Dread
man. “That way the other side wan’ kill you!
That’s what we used to DJ. You have certain
rhythms that you put lyrics on. Father Jungle
Rock [became] Concrete Jungle Rock. But
the guys them used to stay down a Rema love
it. They used to say, ‘Uuhhhh! If I get a hold
of Ranking Trevor, gonna blow off him head!
But he’s one of the greatest DJ. Him bad.’ ”
Sound systems came under tremendous
pressure to play out in support of one side
or the other. Jah Screw remembers having
to cancel a prebooked date to take the sound
down into Tivoli Gardens when one of the
27
community leaders insisted. “Guys used to
You are a singer. Go on in back!’ So them time
come to us and put gun to our head to go
there, me did a try. But me breddah say, ‘You a
and play,” Arrows owner, Sonny, remembers.
singer, you cool.’ ”
“That was before the peace treaty. We just say,
In the ’70s and ’80s, music was the one thing
‘Okay, no problem, you name the dance and
that could cross borders and unite Jamaicans.
we’ll be there.’ ”
People loved their music, and the artists and
The pressure was on individual DJs,
the sound-system personnel received the best
too. DJ Crutches, who had carried Arrows
celebrity treatment a ghetto could offer. Singer
through the ’70s, was forced to leave in 1980
Anthony Redrose moved from Spanishtown
“due to political friction.” Zaggaloo explains,
to Waterhouse and found that, despite the bad
“Crutches couldn’t play the set no more. Bereputation of both areas, as an artist, he was safe.
cause the area where the sound come from,
“In those days nobody na kill no singer. And nothey said it was a PNP area. They accused
body na shoot no singer. Them love you. From
Crutches of putting up JLP posters and it
them find out a you can sing and a you sing that
caused a conflict where they had beat him up
song there, them honor you. From you sing
and they threaten his life.”
songs, you can go anywhere. Safe passage. And
Singer Sammy Dread was once the victim
you no need nobody to walk with you.”
of a kidnapping. “Those times, I used to sing
But some openly politically active mubut I never really used to go and hang out besician died for their allegiance. In “Don’t
cause of how the politics was going on. Early
Shoot the Sheriff: An Overview of Rastafarone Sunday morning, three gunmen juke me
ians and the Legal System” Geoffrey Alex
down and take me to Rema and was going to
Domenico lists some:
kill me.” Luckily, someone who recognized him
Mickey…Simpson was stabbed
as a singer arrived in time and they let him go. In
to death after getting involved in a
the 30 years since, he hasn’t set foot in Jamaica.
‘neighborhood dispute.’ Dirtsman,
Still, singers and musicians were largely
a dancehall star, who lived in a PNP
stronghold, was shot after refusing to
considered politically exempt. “Most of my
publicly endorse the party. Pan Head,
little friends them get dead,” Smith recalls.
another dancehall star, was killed
“You have Tower Hill man a come over to Wain an incident disguised as robbery.
Nothing was
terhouse, pure shot a fire
taken from him …
that night there. While the
Massive Dread was
In the ’70s and ’80s,
shot them a fire, me come
shot for publicly
music was the one
out and me say, ‘Me live
speaking out
against the political
around here so me have
thing that could cross
authorities. All
to defend around here
these performers
borders and unite
too’. So, my brother look
lived in soJamaicans
called “garrison
pon me and say, ‘No, man.
28
beth lesser
communities.” These are ghettos
controlled by political gunmen who
are loosely linked to Jamaica’s two
main political parties, the JLP and
the PNP. None of these murders have
been solved.
the neighboring districts of Jungle (Arnett
Gardens) and Rema (Wilton Gardens), both
hardcore garrison communities of Trenchtown. Leroy Smart’s song, “Jungle and Rema”
(Well Charge, 1977) made the two neighbors
famous all over the world. When the leadPeace Treaties
ers of the two neighborhoods proclaimed a
cease-fire, the whole area celebrated at a peace
In 1976, despite the worsening economy,
dance where Papa Roots played. Ranking
Manley was returned to office with a subTrevor recalls, “The famous Claudie Massop,
stantial majority. But the violence didn’t stop.
and the famous Tony Welch, they were on the
Smith, who lived in the politically sensitive
front line and some guys must have fire some
area of Waterhouse, recalls, “That time there,
shot in the crowd. One gunshot fire and, for
it wicked, wicked. Worst, worst, worst! Even
the whole week, it’s pure gunshot. The peace
one time, when me come out of Tubbys and
break up for a couple of months until you
me run, me a see some people come down a
reach the real peace.”
fire gun, a fire gun and a come ina our turf.
The real-peace movement also began at
One of the persons was a pregnant girl. She
the grassroots level. Jah Wise watched the
was firing a gun. And some of the man them
peace process begin by his home. “Peace just
from over our side now, shoot, shoot, shoot.
start one night. My corner, Beeston Street,
And then she get a shot ina fe her chest. All
me just stand up. Everybody come across and
them a do is take her up and throw her in the
people say, ‘Peace.’ The west—Beeston Street,
truck. And keep on coming!”
Regents Street, Oxford Street. Everybody say
People were growing weary of living in
‘peace’. And I wasn’t sure. I take a little walk
fear, and the public pressure for peace was
and I can’t believe it. I walk right over to Duke
growing stronger daily. To support a moratoReid’s studio and see if everything is alright.
rium on violence in a particular area, sound
Peace was there. Then dance start keep.”
systems began crossing the borders to play in
A decision was reached to hold a concert
territories previously verboten. For a brief peto officially proclaim the peace. The One
riod, the treaty would
Love Peace Concert
hold and people could
was held on April 22,
To
support
a
walk freely between
1978, at the National
moratorium on
two warring comStadium, with Bob
munities. One of the
Marley headlining.
violence, sound systems
best-known
downJacob Miller sang his
began
crossing
town Kingston peace
“Peace Treaty Speneighborhood borders
efforts was between
cial.” Dillinger dee29
lyrics and patterns that still hadn’t reached
very far “out a road.” Jah Wise began to travel with Tippertone into areas he had never
been before. Ranking Trevor, then a DJ with
Socialist Roots recalls, “The way how it get
so united, we have some politicians from the
other side following the sound now! Them
time there, we just learned about General Echo. That’s the first time I hear Tappa
Zuckie and General Echo.”
The peace idea struck a chord all over Jamaica. For the week ending April 11, 1978,
the Daily Gleaner’s Top 10 hit parade included three songs about peace, two of which
were specifically about the peace treaty. At
No. 4: “Peace Treaty Special,” by Jacob Miller. At No. 5, “Tribal War” by George Nooks
on Crazy Joe. No. 10: “War is Over,” by Dillinger, on Joe Gibbs.
But DJ Trinity, who recorded the song
“Western Kingston Peace Conference,” remembers peace time mainly for its brevity. “It never last. You know, politics come.
The whole thing just stir up back. It was
just for a time. It was a nice little time, but
it just come and just gwaaaann, and you
have Claudie Massop dead and then Bucky
Marshal go ‘way a foreign,” he says. “Cause
most of the big politicians dem didn’t like
peace cause them know that when peace
and people come together, then people get
smarter. They use it to divide the people. It
never last, as I say, because corruption, violence, cause they prefer that. Because once
you live [in] violence, them get stronger
than before. So it didn’t last long. But it was
a good thing.” n
jayed “The War Is Over.” Trinity appeared
along with Peter Tosh, Big Youth, Dennis
Brown, Ras Michael, and others. The high
point of the evening was when Bob Marley
was joined onstage by political rivals Manley and Seaga and, in a dramatic moment,
joined their hands together in a forced display of unity.
But even before the big concert, sound
systems had been holding peace dances all
around Kingston as part of the burgeoning
movement to end the bloodshed. It was a
very exciting time for dancehall. While the
truce was in place, it allowed people to cross
borders and learn about new deejays with
30
31
Jihad Against Jihad
Against Jihad
by Kendra Salois
For Muslim hip-hop artists, essentialization
can become the price of success.
“Is rap the battleground between Muslims?” asked the American journalist. I
watched as her subject, a Casablancan emcee named Soultana, shifted her gaze into the
middle distance, her face expressionless. We
all went silent.
The journalist, a specialist in Iranian and
Lebanese politics, was visiting Casablanca to
give a talk. I had arrived a few weeks before
to spend a year doing fieldwork for my dissertation on Moroccan hip-hop and neoliberalization. I helped the journalist arrange a
day of interviews with Moroccan emcees for
a chapter of her next book, on responses to
Islamist extremism from the Muslim world.
As we sat in the lobby of her downtown hotel on that 2009 afternoon, she introduced herself to the four artists interviewed that day with
the same message: She was inspired by hiphop in the Arab world after she heard DAM,
a pioneering Palestinian-Israeli group. DAM
was “giving the kids something besides Molotov cocktails and suicide bombs,” she said.
Rappers were the only people speaking truth
to power in “these closed societies” across
the Middle East and North Africa (MENA),
she said. And their music was the only thing
keeping at-risk youth, kids from slums where
Islamist mosques provided services and social
ties, from joining violent extremists.
That’s why she wanted to spend a chapter of the book on the stories of hip-hop artists from across the region—to capture the
voices of what she called “the jihad against
the jihad.”
As Soultana and I discussed alter, the em32
kendra salois
cee was both familiar with and wary of the
journalist’s hoary characterizations. The assumptions that all the countries of the MENA
region were the same, that all populations of
those countries reacted to their governments
in the same ways, that all those governments
were identically authoritarian had made her
visibly uncomfortable. Most important, the
question suggested that there were only two
kinds of Muslims, invoking an Orientalist
logic of difference, a clash-of-civilizations
discourse caricaturing Muslims and their
political positions vis-à-vis “the West,” that’s
still alive and well in the U.S.: In this corner,
weighing in at 800-pound-gorilla, violent
fundamentalists; in this corner, weighing in
at the size of USAID, pro-Western moderates. I’d never experienced this before: a narrative usually mobilized when talking about
Muslims was here directed at a Muslim, in
unvarnished form. Jihad! For or against? Go!
Jihad is usually translated as “struggle” and
has historically been applied to both “big”
things—the struggle to become the best Muslim you can be, the struggle to get ever closer
to God—and “little” things, like the struggle
against the everyday injustices of this world.
The journalist’s use of the term reflects only
the latest and most politicized understanding, popularized by a tiny but vocal number
of violent extremists, and adopted wholesale
by a well-funded Western commentariat.
It’s not that there weren’t grains of truth
behind the journalist’s question—about the
authoritarian Moroccan government, say, or
the presence of Islamist mosques in Casablanca’s shantytowns. But they were Mo-
roccan grains of truth, rooted in Moroccan
histories, and not mere iterations of some regional rubber stamp. Yes, some voices in the
Moroccan public sphere do reject hip-hop
based on a nationalist or culturalist aversion
to “Western” musics; some others do maintain that listening to hip-hop, like listening to
most music, is forbidden by Islam (haram).
(The debate over whether music made with
anything but male voices and drums is appropriate for Muslims dates back centuries.
In Morocco, only a distinct minority take
this position; the rich diversity of music
from across the country and the importance
of Sufi worship practices, which sometimes
use singing and music, factor into that.)
Still, wanting to converse in good faith, the
emcees interviewed that day were reluctant
to simply dismiss the journalist’s questions.
But answering the question “Is rap the battleground between Muslims?” at all seemed to
endorse the question’s premises.
It is a testament to her gracious upbringing, but also her acute awareness of the power imbalance built into the interaction, that
Soultana did not laugh in her face. Instead,
she withdrew. After that endless moment of
silence, she answered: “Maybe.”
As that exchange taught me, if a Muslim
artist reaches a certain level of visibility, eventually she will be asked to choose a side in a
discourse whose terms she can’t control. Just
answering the question—just being a hip-hop
artist, and a female hip-hop artist at that—
puts you in the “moderate,” “reasonable”
camp. E
ssentialization, even with the best of
intentions, becomes the price of success.
33
jihad against jihad against jihad
But by answering “maybe,” I think Soultana was imagining a different battleground—
one with Moroccan poles of authority and
points of contention, not one in which the
actors’ Muslim status was overdetermined
by U.S. narratives—even as she understood
the journalist’s aims. Hip-hop artists definitely weigh in on ongoing battles over what
it means to be young, Moroccan, Muslim,
and “modern.” However, the “battlegrounds”
that most concern Moroccan hip-hop artists
and their fans are the social and economic issues they observe on a daily basis—increasing inequality, desperate poverty, high youth
unemployment, police brutality, clandestine emigration, corruption. Emcees often
frame these as social problems with ethical
dimensions; the oldest musicians I met in
my research, pioneers of Moroccan hip-hop
like Barry, al-Kayssar, and Casa Crew from
Casablanca, H-Kayne from Meknes, members of 19-Contre-Attack from Salé and of
Fez City Clan, and others now in their late
20s and early 30s, often describe themselves
as “teachers,” as “advocates” exhorting fellow
citizens to know and use their rights.
Frequently Muslim faith is the frame
through which emcees’ critiques are articulated, and national identity is the terrain
on which many issues are fought. But if, as
outsiders to these debates, we take Muslim
belief and practice as a condition of possibility for hip-hop practitioners’ social
and musical work instead of fetishizing Islam or Arabness, we can free ourselves up
to learn from them. If we listen closely to
the spectrum of statements hip-hop artists
are making, we can hear ethically informed
responses to the transnational economic
order that did not singlehandedly create
Morocco’s crises of unemployment or rising inequality but continues to intensify
them. Behind the sweeping changes that
both hip-hop artists and their detractors
worry about stand neoliberalizing policies enacted over the past 30 years But not
everyone has the means to educate themselves about these policies, which is where
emcees say they come in. As Soultana said
in that interview describing why she makes
“conscious,” socially committed hip-hop,
“you know that reality nowadays, it’s something—you can’t see it.”
The 1980s and 1990s were characterized by dual transitions: On one hand, the
Moroccan state was slowly liberalizing the
economy in adherence to structural adjustment requirements; on the other, it was
moving from decades of political violence
and repression under King Hassan II to the
more subtle and variegated methods of managing the population used today. Morocco
accepted its first of three loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1983
near the beginning of a wave of structural adjustment programs that, according to David
Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism,
marked for developing nations the Westernled shift from the pro-Keynesian economic
policies of the 1970s to the neoliberal economic policies of the 1980s. Morocco’s requirements under the IMF loans were like
other structural adjustment programs of
that era. It has to open capital and consumer
34
kendra salois
markets, increase foreign direct investment,
privatize state-owned industries, deregulate,
lower taxes on enterprise, shed public sector
jobs, cut domestic subsidies and price controls. The country quickly became something of a poster child for adjustment, as it
followed through on all of these initiatives,
many of which extended into the 2000s.
Moroccan hip-hop emerged in the early
1990s alongside the first effects of these neoliberalizing policies. As a foreign form first
brought to the country through Moroccans’
travel on historically carved routes to Europe and the Francophone world, the hiphop my interlocutors make has always been
simultaneously about local priorities and
translocal connections, about repping your
derb (street) to your city and your city to the
world. First learning from friends and family
abroad, then satellite television, and finally
today’s Internet-based social media, practitioners—musicians, dancers, graf artists and
fans—have honed their craft through countless hours of research, listening, watching,
and practicing with their peers. Today, not
only Casablancans but youth in all the major Moroccan cities and many smaller towns
across the country, create and socialize within a thriving hip-hop network with its own
stars, its own stylistic battles, its own venues
for publicity and performance.
So how does one write to a U.S. audience
about the music of a demographic caught in
an essentialist trap (the either/or of “jihadists or non-Jihadists?”) without reinforcing
one narrative or another? Especially when
that music tackles head-on the specters of
violence animating that trap? In my dissertation work, I attempted to walk a fine
line. Starting off inquiring about musicians’
and fans’ relationship to Islam would just
brand me as another American researcher
obsessed with the religion, unable to see
through any other lens. Youth fall along a
35
wide spectrum of piety, and regional, ethnic, educational, and class-based differences can affect how they express their faith,
and of course people can become more or
less devout as their circumstances change.
But in a context where Muslim faith is often conflated with Moroccan identity, taking Moroccan hip-hop practitioners’ words
and actions seriously means attending to
the role their faith plays not just in their
personal lives but how they and others invoke it in the public sphere.
ties, known as al-Sirat al-Mustaqim (“the
Straight Path”), organized and carried out
the attacks. As more information about the
bombers emerged, it became clear that all of
the young men were from a bidonville (“tin
town,” after the corrugated aluminum that
forms the roofs of these tiny, one-room dwellings on the outskirts of the city), where few
to no services were provided by the state. The
first of their kind in the country, the attacks
generated instant and widespread condemnation from across the political spectrum.
The attacks also generated a string of responses from local hip-hop artists. Over the
years since, some of the best-known soloists
and groups throughout the country have
produced songs about the bombings or
their aftermath. Each has taken its own musical approach, but all reject the notion that
Islamic doctrines or values permit such violence, casting the bombers’ actions outside
the pale of religion. “16/05” is the only song
about the bombings to go beyond expressing outrage to imagine the voices of actors
in that event. Don Bigg stages a dialogue
between an unnamed security official and a
would-be bomber in which the bomber gets
to tell his own story.
A spare, acoustic piano opens the song,
giving the impression of a still, open space in
which sound radiates in all directions. Into
the solemn expanse a burst of white-noise
breaks.
Patrol two to center. Come in, barks a voice,
far away on the other end of a hand-held transceiver. Come in. I’m here, on the spot … Moulay Youssef, Boulevard Moulay Youssef. Come
What do we say, for example, about Casablancan emcee Don Bigg’s “16/05” from his
2009 album Byad u K7al (White and Black)?
Bigg makes an argument about poverty, radicalism, violence, and citizenship here that
deserves close attention.
On May 16, 2003, 12 to 15 young men
staged a coordinated suicide bombing in
downtown Casablanca. The targets included
foreign-owned restaurants, a branch of the international Golden Tulip hotel chain blocks
from the downtown train station, and a Jewish cultural center. Forty-five people died,
including 10 bombers. Initial news reports
from the BBC and the Guardian noted that,
though no group had come forward to claim
responsibility in the first few days, the coordinated attacks might have been carried out by
a group with ties to al-Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb known as Salafiya Jihadiya. Later reports suggested that a group with unknown
36
kendra salois
in. No one answers him. After capturing one
of them we are in the possession of hand-made
explosives. Patrol two, come in, Center—we’re
starting interrogations now.
Bigg begins the first rapped verse of the
song in an unfiltered sonic present. Doubled
by himself at a lower register throughout,
supported by the entrance of spiky percussion and a low, muted bass line, his voice
sounds nearer to us than the patrolman on
the transceiver.
erage 18-year-old, balancing rebellion with
Muslim practice, who would rather play Xbox
than deal with his impoverished neighborhood school—living in poverty with images
of others’ material success all around him.
He loves hip-hop but dismisses the leading
Moroccan artists H-Kayne, Fnaire, and (of
course) Bigg, preferring the wealth and glamour of rapper-turned-CEO Jay-Z and New
York legend Fat Joe. Akon is an apt figure for
the story Bigg is telling; Akon was born in the
U.S. and spent his childhood in Senegal, is reportedly Muslim, and is blindingly successful
in the U.S. and on the African continent. He’s
living our narrator’s dream.
In the next eight bars, the space where the
chorus of this song ought to be, we hear instead from the security official again, speaking directly with the voice in our ear. He does
not rap; he sputters. Plenty of words are censored in the original recording.
I want to present myself to you
Eighteen years old and always skipping
school
I always have whisky on ice in the fridge
Between my classes I think: crises of
money and school curriculum
MTV on TV and my beard is wet [from
ablutions before prayers]
Doting on the Top Models passing on TV
My icon is Akon
My motorbike’s broken down, he drives a
Ferrari
I’m online circulating
Pictures of Jay-Z in the Maybach, a clip of
Fat Joe’s “Lean Back”
What a plan! What a life! What a tongue
Born with a spoon of shit between [my]
teeth
The stolen Xbox CD GTA was fucked up
He brought the original from the
secondhand market
I don’t listen to Bigg, I don’t listen to
H-Kayne, I don’t
Listen to Fnaire, there’s no rap in Morocco1
What [expletive]? Help me out, I want
to ask you—why do you want to blow
yourself up? Why do you want to blow
yourself up, and in front of the American
Center? …Why would you make chaos
in the country? Everything lives in
chaos [already]… Are you Moroccan or
aren’t you? Are you Moroccan, or aren’t
you?…Respond! Tell me why. Why?
Tell me why. Why? Go on then! Go on,
burn yourself [expletive]!
This interrogation is already not going well.
Instead of telling us what he’s doing on Boulevard Moulay Youssef, a posh section of
downtown Casablanca, Bigg’s unnamed suspect describes himself succinctly—your av-
Within the frame of the story, the interrogator is a seemingly unprepared negotiator in
a dangerous real-time situation. Outside the
frame, he acts as the voice of common wisdom,
making rhetorical points contemporary listen37
They said to me, “you crazy or not? Why,
what for?”
I said I can make money at it, I’ll become
a high-up official, man
They killed me with memorization until
I nearly suffocated
I changed direction, decided to suck up
to them
Two hours later I came running from
those outrageous people
I fled from the shit, I found myself with
the police [Bigg says “al-boul,” which
means “piss,” but could be short for
“police”—“al-bouliss”]
They threw me in the sea, they threw me
in prison
Fuck it—I said “I’m finishing the path”
My voice is hoarse [literally: “I have no
more saliva”] and people, how come
you still don’t understand?
Fuck, if I had blown myself up, I’d never
have seen that jail
ers expect to hear in what is, by now, a wellworn argument. “Are you Moroccan or aren’t
you?” he repeats. The logic is evident to both
characters and to listeners: Your allegiance is to
a specific fundamentalist sect, not this nation;
you must not be a “real” Moroccan.
The official’s last word in this tirade is a
vicious double-entendre. “Go on, t7arrag!”
he blurts, using the verb that means “to burn
(oneself),” but which, in common parlance,
evokes clandestine emigration to Europe.
Upon arrival on Southern Mediterranean
shores, émigrés from the African continent
burn or destroy their citizenship documents
in case they are discovered by immigration
authorities. Many don’t make it to Spain,
however, and are sent back to Morocco (subSaharan migrants are then deported). While
the literal meaning is an especially cruel
thing to say to a young man just caught with
a bomb in his backpack, metaphorically, it’s a
bit like “Love it or leave it.”
But our bomber is already familiar with
this kind of judgment and rejection. In the
next verse, he describes how his poverty
leaves him unprotected from economic and
political violence.
Bigg’s character dreams of becoming famous as a rapper but is rapidly disillusioned.
His lack of connections and capital defeats
him at every turn. Despite his assertion, his
friends know that finishing his baccalaureate
(equivalent to a high school diploma) won’t
guarantee economic mobility. Any listener
who has visited downtown Rabat on a weekday over the past few years will recognize a
reference to the breadth and depth of the
problem of diplomés chômeurs, unemployed
university graduates who protest the lack
of jobs in the public sector and whose daily
I gave rap everything and it didn’t give
me nothing
Unemployment and prison made me
powerless, my rap must be my
homeland
In order to get on the radio and the
television
I need to have a Lebanese ass [i.e., be
a sexy Lebanese singer]
I decide to ignore it, I say I’ll finish my
studies
1. This translation was helped immensely by Sarah
Hebbouch, a graduate student in Cultural Studies at
Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fez. Any
remaining mistakes in translation or interpretation
are fully my own
38
kendra salois
I’m tired of asking you, of screaming
and giving speeches
I want to arrive, like the sons of the
bourgeoisie
When I hear the national anthem I
don’t shiver
Even if the maghreb is my country I
don’t kneel
When I hear the speeches, I shiver
My country is apparent in the midst of
all these struggles
If I’ve set off a bomb between my
ribs, I’m now suffering because of it
demonstrations in front of the Parliament
building have been a feature of national news
for nearly a decade. The character hints that
he was kidnapped and tortured by police,
and this is the last straw. Worn down by his
helplessness, he resolves: “fuck it—I said,
‘I’m finishing the path.’ ” Bigg delivers this
verse so that the word on the fourth beat of
each measure is emphasized; here, the word
triq (path) falls on that fourth beat, and silence hangs in the air until the middle of the
next measure, when he resumes speaking.
Static noises erupt under the last two lines,
shifting us back to the sonic and personal space
of the man on the transceiver. He’s not interested in socioeconomic analysis. The security officer’s responses demonstrate that, to him, conceptions of properly Islamic behavior must be
at the heart of the matter. “There is no Islam in
this,” he says. Next, he attempts to explain that
the attacker is being taken advantage of, that
the bomber’s presumed religious motivation
makes him a pawn in Islamists’ games. “This
is all just politics, you know what I mean?” he
protests, to the sound of the other’s dry laugh.
Last, he tries another tactic, a reminder of eternal punishment: “To what place are you going,
now that you’re going to blow yourself up?”
None of it matters. The last verse dramatizes Bigg’s argument most clearly: Palpable
economic disparity intensifies the pain,
hopelessness, and vulnerability of poverty,
and the state—the nation—has a responsibility toward the poor.
The last several lines are delivered in a fashion much closer to prose than rap. The percussion, strings, and the multitracking on Bigg’s
voice drop out of the track, leaving him sounding smaller, alone but resolute. It’s as if the
character has finished his prepared speech and
extemporizes something even more personal.
I didn’t come to say “I’m going, I want
to blow myself up”—
Maybe I want to explode in order to
say I want to be somebody
And I want Morocco to give me real
citizenship
Not just some blue paper from the
civil office [i.e., a copy of his birth
certificate]
If I had followed those bearded men,
it would be a mistake
But if you say I became a terrorist
because of religion,
Then maybe their plan succeeded after all
At first glance, this song is the perfect foil
to U.S. and European narratives of “Muslim
rage.” Look, a rapper, that most Westernized
of musicians, who blames violent extremists
for taking advantage of pious young men’s
desperate poverty and luring them to terror-
I want to present myself to you
I’m at the end of my rope
39
ism! Clearly this calls for more high-profile
aid and more low-profile drone strikes.
But Bigg’s protagonist knows—better
than his interrogator—that the question
“Are you Moroccan or aren’t you?” is a false
choice. Citizenship isn’t a word, a birthplace,
or a piece of paper, he argues; it’s the promise
of employment and the safety of his person.
Whether this young man gets to participate
in society, to be “a Moroccan” in a practical
sense, was decided long ago. But instead of
Salafist Islam, hip-hop culture is his refuge,
his “homeland” (watan), where he can speak
as if he has the rights and protections enjoyed
by the more affluent. In a world in which he
has no control, in which he is barely visible,
the bomber’s one strategic act was to choose
the available framework of “terrorist” to carry
out an irreligious decision. In a painful twist,
he realizes with his final line that whether he
dies as a result of his bomb or his sentencing,
his story will still not be his own; it will still be
used to fuel a narrative of dangerous Islamist
extremists—one that aids the goals of both
the extremists and the state that hunts them.
lying in the intersection with a ratty pillow beneath his head. A police officer was leaning over
him, hand outstretched. I thought he had been
hit by a car until I realized the officer was trying
to convince him to get up and walk away. The
man refused. He had no sign, no clear agenda;
they both looked drained, as if they’d been discussing some implacable problem. I watched
as the police officer shrugged, retreated to the
sidewalk, and started waving onlookers away.
The man curled around his pillow and let the
cars drive around him.
In the past few weeks, U.S. media have
erupted with discussion of the small but effective groups of protesters who attacked U.S.
and European embassies in order to protest
the Innocence of Muslims trailer. The clash-of-
civilizations narrative, always lurking, sprang
to life again with shameless enthusiasm, putting those who would defend against it in the
same familiar rhetorical box. (It is genuinely
beautiful that ordinary Libyans gathered to
tell the world they were sorry for Ambassador
Stevens’s death; it is genuinely sad that they
and we accept that it takes English-language
signs and counterprotests to make us think
this is true.) Thankfully, many have taken to
social media to rehumanize the dehumanized
Muslim other through humor, shaming, and
stone-cold logic. But the institutionalization
of the response, justified as it is, reifies our
tired discussions of the moderates-vs.-fanatics
trope even as the content of the responses successfully skewers the “fanatics” side.
Most of us, including many journalists, academics, and commentators, realize how sensationalist and simplified these discussions are.
In the last few months of my fieldwork, I
rented an apartment in downtown Casablanca,
in a neighborhood filled with fading Protectorate-era landmarks, down the block from a busy
roundabout. One day traffic was slowed to a
crawl on the artery leading up to the circle. As
I reached the corner, from the sidewalk, I saw a
man, shabbily dressed with a deeply lined face,
40
kendra salois
And many of us have long since chosen not to
support with our dollars magazines that pick
fights, or news media that wanly circulates the
resulting “controversy” instead of condemning
it. But until there is no outlet making money
and generating hits by trolling the Arab Spring,
or by describing every new outrage as the latest
in a long-standing decline—until those trying
to ride an egregiously offensive and discredited
narrative to fame have no means to do so—we
have to continuously repudiate such gestures
even as we watch our own thinking for the return to easy essentialisms.
Even more broadly, we have to make a genuine effort to see things through a frame in which
the U.S. and our narratives, our expectations,
our “national interests,” are not the center of the
conversation—and keep seeing them that way.
Decentering the neoliberal paradigm through
which the “developed” world continues its
economic, and therefore political and military,
dominance under the guise of “free” market integration needs to be part of that work.
Artists and ordinary folks in Morocco don’t
have the same luxury; the stories they tell about
themselves to the wider world and increasingly
within their local worlds are structured by narratives from Europe and North America about
Islam and Arabness out of necessity. Once, this
could be attributed to their status as a Protectorate of the French. Today it can be seen in the
state’s constant reinforcement of its position as
the “stable,” “moderate” Islamic nation in the region, and the feedback loop between that reputation and economic success (like the growth
of tourism). Such is our postcolonial condition,
in which what Anibal Quijano calls our “coloni-
ality of power” thrives.
Hip-hop artists, as members of a transnational tradition dedicated to critical commentary on one’s own culture, often respond
to this condition far more eloquently than I
have here. In “16/05,” Bigg’s character feels
the gap between not just his life and those of
the Moroccan “bourgeoisie” but also those of
the “developed” world. Media glorifying the
local and global haves on the other end of that
gap is all around him—including the famous
rappers he loves.
In a situation reminiscent of W.E.B.
DuBois’s observation regarding African-
Americans at the turn of the 20th century, Moroccans live a kind of “double consciousness.”
As (mostly) Muslims who (mostly) claim Arab
descent, they know with DuBois how it feels
“to be a problem.” As a result of decades of colonial domination and “developing nation” status,
Moroccans always have to be able to read the
local through the eyes of “the g lobal”—which
generally means the global North. Youthful
hip-hop practitioners work the uncomfortable,
uncharted space between using a form identified first with African-American resistance and
second with American cultural dominance to
critique their nation’s evolving role in the economic and geopolitical order. They refuse to let
their nation and its citizens off the hook by subscribing to neoliberal beliefs about the transnational market’s essential separation from the internationally interdependent state. Instead, like
the most trenchant critics from the U.S. hip-hop
tradition, they insist that economic violence is
within the state’s monopoly on violence, and
economic inequality is political inequality. n
41
Loving the Alien
by Robin james
The mainstreaming of electronic dance music and
the assimilation of non-Western music into hipster taste hierarchies
owes more to biopolitics than beats
Socialist economist Jacques
Attali’s 1977 book Noise: A Political Economy of
Music (translated in 1984 by Brian Massumi)
offered a structuralist “political economy of
music.” In the U.S., this explicitly political
analysis of music made a splash in “new” or
critical musicology, which was then in its
infancy. (Attali published a revised version of
Bruits in 2001, which has not been translated
into English.)
In Noise, Attali tried to account for the hypercommodification of music and our resulting alienation from musical creativity and pleasure. His theory of “composition”—defined as
“an activity that is an end in itself, that creates
its own code at the same time as the work”—
offers a quasi-Marxist notion of a m
usical
u topia that would allow music makers to escape the alienation of their labor and pleasure
in commodities and enjoy the creative process
unrestricted by predetermined rules or outcomes. In an interview with Fredric Jameson,
Attali describes composition as what happens
when “the common people themselves in
their creativity and narcissism, who seek their
own pleasure and satisfaction—yes, narcissism
is the right word here—…want, in short, to
liberate themselves.”
Attalian composition seems like a mishmash of different philosophical concepts:
there’s a little bit of Herbert Marcuse’s idea of
“narcissistic” eros liberated from the performance principle (the imperative to repress
and sublimate desire in productive labor),
43
robin james
Deleuze’s concept of the plane of composition (macro-organizational rules emerge
from the bottom-up, instead of being applied
from the top down), and a little bit of Kant’s
categorical imperative (work and workers as
ends in themselves). It basically involves doing whatever you want for its own sake, with
no predetermined purpose or program restricting your creativity. And this is, in Attali’s
mind, what liberation sounds like.
Liberation from what, though? Attali
explicitly frames composition as the liberation from late industrial capitalism—that is,
from mass reproduction. But now, in the 21st
century, the so-called developed world has
already exited the age of mechanical mass reproduction and moved on to a neoliberal service and information economy. So Attali’s notion of composition sounds overly idealistic
and dated at best, if not also philosophically
and politically problematic. Writing in Mute,
Flint Michigan argues that “Attali has difficulty developing ‘composition’ ... beyond individualist dimensions.” If everyone is composing for him or herself, Attali’s project doesn’t
leave much room for collective resistance.
As unsatisfying as Noise’s political claims
may be, its musical analysis is much more interesting—even and especially for thinking
about politics. According to Attali, radical
upheavals in 20th century Western art music foreshadow a more fundamental social
transformation in which “representation”—
his term for the general epistemic paradigm that grounds both classical political
economy and tonal harmony—“gives way
to statistics, macroeconomics, and prob-
ability,” or in other words, to “repetition.”
Though Attali offers repetition as a neoMarxist account of the regime of mechanical reproduction, it may work better as a
theory of the Foucauldian order of neoliberal
biopolitics—that is, the statistical maximization of life and minimization of risk or randomness. Foucault and Attali are talking about
the same thing—biopolitical n eoliberalism.
Foucault just does it in terms of power, and
Attali in terms of economic models.
As Foucault puts it in his 1976 lectures
(collected as Society Must Be Defended), biopolitical neoliberalism—“the power to ‘make’
live and ‘let’ die”—uses statistics to optimize
the life of some (privileged) groups, intensifying their access to “life” by deintensifying the
access of others. For example, in North Carolina, state employees with a low body mass
index can opt for better health-care coverage
than “obese” employees, who are eligible for
only the most basic plan. Quantitative instruments, Foucault argues, manage the intensity
of life to minimize unpredictable, nonstandardizable phenomena, because these drain
efficiency and impede optimization. If all a
population’s deviances can be standardized,
then they can be co-opted as contributions to
privileged groups’ quality of life.
Take, for instance, yoga and Zumba—
examples of what philosopher Sandra Bartky
calls beauty-industrial complexes. Abstracted from the South Asian and Afro-Caribbean contexts on which these practices more
or less draw, they can be presented as fitness regimes, easily incorporable upgrades
to (Westernized, generally feminine) bour44
loving the alien
geois lifestyles. They’re about burning calostatistics to manage outliers—whatever
ries, raising heart rates, increasing strength,
can’t be controlled for, whatever breaks the
inches of muscle gained or fat lost, and so
curve. “The administrator in a repetitive soon. Instead of talking about cultural differciety” is tasked with “managing chance,” Atences like Hindu vs. Western philosophitali argues. In a 1983 interview, Attali goes
cal approaches to the body, we talk about
further, arguing that “the aleatory can perexercise and weight loss. Yoga and Zumba
fectly well be conceptualized in a profoundbecome middle-class women’s regimens for
ly systematic way: indeed, in modern times
self-improvement, segments of the service
it becomes the fundamental component of
economy that cater to them.
all theoretical systems.”
For Foucault, biopolitical neoliberalism
Attali connects this statistical managereduces everything to statistical data and then
ment of chance to the administration of life.
uses this data to distribute “life” to the average
In the political economy of repetition, he
and above average, and away from the belowargues, “the study of the conditions of the
average and the nonstandardizable deviants.
replication of life has led to a new scientific
As he puts it in Society Must Be Defended, bioparadigm ... Biology replaces mechanics.”
political neoliberalism is “the power of regularBy 1977, the “developed” economies of the
ization” that monitors “aleatory events.” In the
West were transitioning from a manufaccase of yoga and Zumba, the practices aren’t so
turing economy to a service one. Instead of
much commodified as data-fied, to measure
“making things,” as Jack Donaghy would say,
the degree to which they intensify life. The
we work on ourselves, on our quality of life
point is to cultivate an above-average level of
... or rather, less privileged people get paid
fitness and a ttractiveness—to exceed the averto work on more privileged people’s fingerage without breaking the curve (e.g., by exernails, hair, muscles, houses, diets, children,
cising to the point one’s body no longer conpsychological health, online dating profile
forms to recognizable gender ideals).
picture, standardized test scores, and so on.
Like Foucault, Attali treats the biopoIn Foucault’s terms, Western economies
litical management of risk as neoliberalism’s
shifted from the mechanical reproduction of
defining feature, only he
commodities to the biouses the term repetition.
political intensification
Though Attali some(stockpiling) of life. In
Biopolitical
times frames repetition
such societies, success is
neoliberalism
as copying or looping,
not measured by having
he puts more emphasis
more stuff, but by havdistributes life to
the “statistical organiing, as Rutger Hauer’s
the
average
and
zation of repetition.” A
character in Blade Runabove average
repetitive society uses
ner says, “more life.”
45
robin james
ior obeys specifiable, abstract, ineluctable
functional laws.” These avant-garde compositions define a system within which chance
operations occur, but they do not allow for
entirely asystematic events. It’s sort of like a
Magic 8-Ball toy: In any given shake, any one
of the collected “answers” could appear, but
you’ll never get a response not already programmed into the toy.
A similar process of containment is at
work with xenomania, Simon Reynolds’s
term for hipsters’ taste for ever more exotic
non-Western pop musics—their “appetite
for the alien,” as he puts it. Reynolds argues
that the Internet, with its “infinite choice
plus infinitesimal cost” has created a context
in which “nomadic eclecticism” is the “default mode for today’s music fan.” Here, the
Internet—both in the way its architecture
manifests global power dynamics, and in the
mp3 format shuttled around on file-hosting
sites—controls for “randomness.”
Though Reynolds claims that “all those
Analogue Era deterrents and blockages have
now been swept aside by the torrential everywhich-way data flows of Web 2.0,” the Internet is not a level playing field. It, like everything else, is affected by Western hegemony.
Xenomania is the flow of musical data from
(post)colony to Western metropolis, and the
direction matters. (We don’t call it x enomania
when they appropriate us, do we?)
The Internet doesn’t make music into a
global free-for-all; there is no actual randomness here. Rather, it standardizes musical,
cultural, and geographic deviations so that
Westerners can more easily and efficiently
So while Attali says in Noise that the problem with repetition is “proliferation” and “an
excess of life,” he frames composition as a solution to a different problem: namely, “alienation” or “exteriority,” the result of commodification and a feature of the society of
mass/mechanical reproduction. His concept
of composition thus misses what is most innovative about his theory of repetition, the
move from mechanics to biology, from commodities to life-intensities.
Composition, then, is not a very compelling response to biopolitical neoliberalism.
What’s a better one? To figure this out, it
helps to examine some actual musical practices to theorize political responses to neoliberalism as it plays out in current approaches
to making and listening pop music.
To explain how administered repetition
appears in music, Attali refers to the “management of chance” in mid-20th century avantgarde art music. In John Cage’s work, Attali
argues, “even if in appearance everything is
a possibility for him, on average his behav46
loving the alien
plunder the cultural resources of the so-called
Third World. The mp3 format makes the colonial expropriation of global pop particularly easy. Western DJs can plug an mp3 file right
into Traktor, Ableton, or P
roTools—they
don’t need the ethnomusicological expertise
to deal with sounds that aren’t immediately
assimilable to Western musical rubrics, like
quarter tones, which don’t exist in Western
music and which Westerners can’t generally
recognize. As mp3s, songs are predigested for
these programs, which can quantize them to
Western grids with the click of a mouse. The
mp3 is like a one-way musical Babel Fish.
“Third World” musicians and audiences still
have to learn to navigate globalized Western
pop, while xenomaniacal Westerners get a
cheat code.
The need for this cheat code, or what
Reynolds describes as the “thirst for fresh
musical stimuli,” is actually a specifically neoliberal imperative. For the neoliberal subject,
the point of life is to “push it to the limit,”
closing in ever more narrowly on the point
of diminishing returns. Philosopher Shannon
Winnubst calls this sort of neoliberal hunger
game “the biopolitics of cool.” According to
Winnubst, the neoliberal subject has an insatiable appetite for more and more novel differences: “difference…becomes a manifestation of cool rather than a repressed other.”
By transforming alterity this way, the
neoliberal individual demonstrates its success: “I, too, can do the hot new thing, and
I can do it both better than you, and better
than those people with whom it’s originally
associated.” Niche non-Western pop genres
become supplements Western hipsters use
to demonstrate that they are “winning” at
life, the avant-avant-garde. Xenomanical hipsters instrumentalize non-Western music in
order to show that they are always ahead of
the curve.
Jeffery Nealon calls this “the logic of intensity”: Pleasure comes not from assimilating
difference (“eating the other,” as bell hooks
puts it), but from optimizing one’s individual
capacities. This logic of intensity works like a
synthesizer, regulating the frequency (the rate
at which a sine wave cycles from peak to peak,
or valley to valley) and amplitude (the height
and shape of a peak or valley) of an audio signal. This is what Attali means when he claims
in Noise that “the synthesizer ... can be seen as
the statistical instrument par excellence.”
Biopolitical neoliberalism monitors or
“synthesizes” the intensity of life. In biopolitics, life’s intensity, like a sine wave, closes in
on a limit without ever reaching it. Politically,
neoliberalism maintains social stratifications
by making sure privileged groups are on the
edge of burnout (the upper limit of intensity), while marginal groups are teetering on
the brink of death (the lower limit). Adjust
the frequency beyond a certain point, and
the sound wave becomes another pitch entirely. Similarly, in order to prevent any upset
in the overall, population-wide “balance” of
privilege, the intensity of each individual’s
life needs to remain, like a sound wave, within
the statistically defined minimum and maximum appropriate to one’s social position.
Biopolitical neoliberalism manages populations like an audio equalizer manages dif47
robin james
ferent signals, maintaining an optimal balance among all signals by keeping each individual one within a narrowly defined range
of intensity (e.g., so the treble and bass levels
are consistently proportional). Upsetting
the balance of intensity, letting people experience life above and/or below their prescribed levels, means distributing privilege
and oppression in ways that undermine hegemony (patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.).
minishing returns. EDM-pop songs make that
affective experience of privilege a mass-market consumer product. This is why people like
it: It mimics the feeling of winning.
So how, exactly, does EDM-pop create
in sound the edge-of-burnout effect? This
is where Attali’s idea of repetition pays off.
Conventional pop is organized harmonically: increasingly stronger dissonances develop
to a point of crisis; attenuated dissonance
then assimilates back to consonance. (This
conforms to the “eating the other” model
mentioned above). EDM-pop, by contrast,
intensifies repetition to the limit of aural perception; the climax or musical “money shot”
comes when this limit is reached or crossed.
For example, the repetitions of a musical event—a word, a drumbeat—will be
exponentially increased (eight notes, to sixteenths, to thirty-seconds). This is an intensification of frequency. Amplitude can also be
intensified by using effects and synth patches. For example, in gabber, a genre of hardcore techno, the bass is modified so that it’s a
square wave on the attack, instead of a regular, curved sine wave. Most EDM-pop songs
will combine both: There will be an increasingly dense rhythmic texture, accompanied
by pitches and timbres that, in Dan Barrow’s
words, “soar.”
Because this is an issue on failed utopias, let’s take two dystopian tracks as our
examples. First, LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem,” whose video parodies zombie apocalypse stories. The main “soar” starts where
the female vocalist enters with her “get up”s
(around 4:25 in the video), and ends when
Neoliberal approaches to music aren’t limited to hipsters. With the rise
of electronic-dance-pop, they have become
mainstream. EDM-pop applies the statistical
logic of biopolitical neoliberalism—Attali’s
repetition—to pop songwriting. Aesthetically, it takes experiences usually reserved for
privileged groups—that is, being so ahead
of the curve you’re almost burned out—and
uses this as a model for musical pleasure.
Songs are structured so that rhythmic and
timbral intensity are pushed to the upper
limits of either/both our sensory wetware
and the musical hard/software.
Riding the crest of burnout is associated
with privilege. Hegemony reproduces itself
by distributing resources to privileged groups;
thus, privileged people get to lead the most
intense lives, lives of maximized (individual
and social) investment and maximized return.
Experientially, privilege means being so busy,
overcommitted, and invested in your life that
you’re always at risk of hitting the point of di48
loving the alien
the chorus returns (around 4:55). The female vocalist’s part is a simple, clear distillation of the logic of intensity. She says:
time, by tarrying with burnout or, more important, zero intensity (what philosopher
Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”), EDM
lets listeners experience what feels like risk,
indulgence, and excess but is actually very
tightly and carefully controlled. All excess,
all deviance, is always already accounted for
in the statistical, asymptotic logic of the sine
wave. Take the bass too low, for example,
and it just sounds like percussive clicks, not
a pitch. As Attali argued, what seem superficially like chance events are the products of
careful management, which ensures against
the emergence of actual chance occurrences
or nonstandardizable deviances.
Neoliberal hegemony manages chance.
No longer a matter of the alienation Attali
sought to remedy, it co-opts (standardizes)
deviation rather than oppressing or repressing otherness. How, then, do you resist it? Is
there any room for real deviation, and if so,
how do you put it into practice?
What counts as deviation depends on
what level of intensity hegemony has assigned you in the first place—what frequency range your life is tuned to sound.
Producing—getting behind the glass, in

front of ProTools—is thus a more useful
metaphor for resistance than Attali’s composing. Production is also tends to be a more
collective endeavor than composing, a collaboration of knob-tweakers, engineer, and
performers. Resistance involves a collective
project of rejecting the presets, digging into
the advanced settings and modulating frequencies, tweaking amplitudes, and retuning the mix. n
Get up, get down, put your hands up
to the sound (x3)
Put your hands up to the sound, put
your hands up to the sound
Get up, get up, get up, get up; Get up,
get up, get up, get up
Get up, put your hands up to the
sound, to the sound,
Put your hands up, put your hands up,
put your hands up, put your hands up
Ever smaller chunks of text are repeated at
increasingly higher rates. Similarly, in the
second half of the line of “get ups,” you’ll
hear a synth that rises in pitch, soaring us
to the last “put your hands up.” The same
thing happens in Rihanna’s “We Found
Love,” whose video is about dystopian postindustrial Britain. The main “soar” begins
right after the repetitions of the titular line,
“We found love in a hopeless place” (1:44
in the video). The percussion lines become
increasingly more rapid (from eighth-note
triplets to sixteenth notes), and several treble synths soar upward in pitch as their timbres are modified. This all leads up to a big
hit (2:00 in the video).
In both songs, rhythmic and timbral intensity are pushed to the limit. Riding the
crest of auditory or machinic burnout, these
songs mimic, in music, the generalized affective experience of privilege in neoliberalism.
Listening to this music, people get to feel
something like privilege, even and especially if they’re not privileged. Yet at the same
49
50
Everybody Have Fun Tonight
by leah caldwell
LMFAO’s music provides an endless party
with no real cause for celebration, turning fun into a
forced march through the hyperreal
“On the edge of oblivion
And all the world is Babylon
And all the love and everyone
A ship of fools sailing on”
do it with, and where, they could have been
a branding sensation at least as successful as
American electro hip-hop duo LMFAO, the
savvy purveyors of patented Party Rock.
On April 23, 2012, the crowds at the
Marquee nightclub inside the Cosmopolitan hotel-casino in Las Vegas celebrated the
homecoming of LMFAO frontman RedFoo.
For the previous few months, LMFAO had
been on a world tour, and now Sin City’s
animal-print-clad prodigal son had returned
for a one-night performance. RedFoo and his
crew took the stage at around 1 a.m. “Sexy
— Wang Chung,
“Everybody Have Fun Tonight”
Wang Chung would perhaps still be big
today if they didn’t leave it at “Everybody
have fun tonight.” If they described in detail what this fun entailed, what you had to
wear to have it, who you were supposed to
51
leah caldwell
ladies, let me see them titties bounce!” he
yelled. Every few minutes, cannons shot out
confetti. The screeching of gym-coach whistles preceded the trainlike entrance through
a side door of hired women wearing fishnets and neon, perched on men’s shoulders.
“#Pandemonium,” one Twitter user wrote of
the show. But the night’s performance was
a well-oiled routine, the result of a year of
repetition. On nearly every Monday night of
2011, RedFoo hosted “Party Rock Mondays”
at the Marquee.
The show opened with LMFAO’s hit
“Party Rock Anthem.” “People lost their
damn minds when they heard it,” my friend
Veronica, who attended the show at my request, told me. “Like their faces melted off.”
Though the bulk of the “Party Rock Anthem” is forgettable—“Party Rock is in the
house tonight / Everybody just have a good
time”—its staying power rests in its screeching synth hook, which heard once can go on
repeat in your head for hours.
This hook—which marks the periodic
release of built-up tension throughout the
song—has become the glue of countless remixes, and upon its initial activation and subsequent reprises in their live performances, it
cues LMFAO to “shuffle,” which is their version of the Running Man. In the song’s video,
the earth is infected with a party disease after
exposure to the “Party Rock Anthem,” leaving all of humanity mindless and able only
to shuffle. Fittingly, LMFAO calls their fans
“shuffle zombs” or zombies.
LMFAO is acutely aware of how their lyrics, performances, and products create a parallel reality. The band describes its music as
instructional, a how-to-party-rock guide, and
its performances offer no shortage of cues to
52
everybody have fun tonight
perform various party actions. The night at
Party Rock has little meaning outside the
the Marquee included calls to take shots (folnetwork of LMFAO-branded products
lowing the performance of their song “Shots”)
and lyrics. But the group was not the first
and incitements to shout “I’m in Vegas Bitch”
to brand “Party Rock.” Once, Party Rock
(after performing “I’m in Miami Bitch”). Blowwas the trademark of Ruby Records Ltd.,
up zebras and foam party fingers were passed
a Canadian record label that produced
around, and many in attendance were dressed
decade-themed compilations of 1960s rock
in neon Party Rock uniforms.
with titles like Cruisin’: 1969. Its trademark
How did this happen? How was this parexpired in 1984, and Party Rock became an
ty disease incubated? RedFoo was born Steunowned signifier until 2008, when LMFAO
fan Kendal Gordy, son of Motown founder
snatched it up and divested it from its earliBerry Gordy, and made the rounds as a DJ at
er history. The group then set out to create
Los Angeles clubs. Then, in 2006, he formed
its own system of meaning for the term that
a band called Sexy Dudes with his nephew
did not rely on history or the present. Party
Sky Blu, born Skyler Austen Gordy. Upon
Rock is now LMFAO’s official, trademarked
telling Sky Blu’s grandmother the name of
brand and has come to represent everything
their band, she responded, via online chat,
from the duo’s fashion sense—neon, animal
“LMFAO.”
print, and spandex—to its party ethos, what
“I’m in Miami Bitch”—the group’s first
RedFoo describes as a mix of Halloween and
single—is a slow drone of a song set to a
New Year’s.
beat meant to evoke a bouncy jaunt down
LMFAO’s is a peculiar, insular world
a Miami avenue. LMFAO wrote the single
where they evoke the “New 80s,” their phrase
before setting foot in Miami for the muchfor a time of perceived prosperity and frivolhyped
Winter Music Conference, yet the
ity where you can “lose your mind.” The group
song projects how things would play out once
is keen on marketing not just their albums
Party Rock arrived. One lyric imagines: “I’ve
or countless cross-branded products but an
got a plan, what’s your cell? We playing naked
entire immersive party experience. With the
Twister back in my hotel.” RedFoo explained
endless party supplements and staged enviafter arriving in Miami, “We actually brought
ronment, the show at the Marquee was less
a Twister board, and we
like a party than a simuplayed the first night.
lacrum of a party: the
Party
Rock
is
now
Because it’s something,
careful work of LMFAO
LMFAO’s official,
now it’s in a song, it’s
to simulate larger-thansomething that we do,
life party moments. The
trademarked brand
it’s not weird.”
nonstop confetti never
and
has
come
to
Like LMFAO’s idea
marks a climax, just the
represent its ethos
of Miami, the idea of
continuation of an epic
53
leah caldwell
up.” LMFAO are the victors of the downturn,
not because of its members’ particular talent
but because of their marketing and financial
savvy. RedFoo appeared on CNBC’s Money
Market in August 2011, decked in a drooping
jersey to explain his stock portfolio: Apple
and producers of Apple components. Five
months after his Money Market appearance,
RedFoo released his own Apple product: the
Beat Rock DJ app that allows for automatic
beat synchronization.
But behind LMFAO’s endless marketing
and relentless self-promotion is a palpable
sense of insecurity and an acknowledgement
that their time is limited. Selling the all-
encompassing party is a survival technique
for the duo—they know they must fight to
maintain relevance in an era where attention is scarce. Sky Blu summed it up: “It’s like
Monopoly. We’re still the same players playing Monopoly except now we’re winning the
game. And now we’re in ‘protection’ mode,
and there’s ‘let’s get more’ mode. You know?
We own these properties so let’s put some
houses on them so when people walk by, you
know? And by properties we mean ‘Miami,’
‘I’m not a whore’ and so on.”
LMFAO’s second album, Sorry for Party
Rocking, brings Party Rock full circle by rehashing all the signature tropes. The music
video for the album’s eponymous single is set
in an otherwise quiet suburb where the Party
is taking place. Inside the party house, there
is a breakdance circle, a party crew decked in
cheetah patterns, and funnels. RedFoo collapses after partying so hard and is taken away
on a stretcher. An iPhone falls from his limp
party with no real cause for celebration.
Commodification and the creation of a
simulacrum go hand in hand, and LMFAO’s
world is no different. RedFoo, a former day
trader and the brains of the LMFAO enterprise, has noted that theaters make their
money not from movies but from “$9 popcorn.” With label Interscope’s assistance, he
has set out to master the art of hawking the
$9 popcorn. Case in point: His signature
Party Rock Frames go for $9.99 on the Party
Rock Clothing website.
The financial system might have failed
others, but it has brought about the right
conditions for LMFAO’s Party Rock world to
flourish. “We have been able to go against the
recession grain,” RedFoo boasted in 2010.
“You know, the economy is going down, and,
like a salmon swimming upstream, while the
economy is going down, LMFAO is blowing
54
everybody have fun tonight
hand; the camera zooms in to show us his
interaction, and they institute a regimen
Beat Rock app on the screen. The prominent
of “fun” through things like party hats and
display of the Beat Rock app—like the clothumping club music. But LMFAO’s efforts
seups of the labels of Cîroc vodka—doesn’t
to build a party simulacrum on a mass scale
seem like a clunky, out-of-place product placeinverts the effects of the carnivalesque, leadment. The appearance of alcohol brands and
ing not to a suspension of norms for a peitems from LMFAO’s clothing line is natural,
riod of liberation but instead normalizing a
even reassuring. They suggest that maybe LMcommodified pseudo-liberation that cannot
FAO’s is not some distant universe but just an
be terminated and precludes the possibility
enhanced yet attainable version of our own reof catharsis. The LMFAO party simulacrum
ality, like the Disneyland of parties.
at their performances masks the way our
Baudrillard’s Disneyland remains the ulordinary lives have become an endless, joytimate simulacrum: “a real without origin or
less elaboration of the same party principles:
reality”—in other words, a hyperreality. Acwant more, consume more, no amount of
cording to Baudrillard, Disneyland exists to
confetti can be too much. The ethereal, careconceal the fact that our “real” surroundings
free nature of the party is over and the days of
beyond Magic Mountain are “no longer real,
the nonstop, numbing Vegas party are here.
but belong to the hyperreal order and to the
At the Marquee, LMFAO’s party simuorder of simulation.” The LMFAO party works
lacrum helped some reach a palpable peak:
the same way. Just as people go to Disneyland
“Tonight we are young, so we set the world on
to immerse themselves in a fantasy world,
fire,” was one Twitter user’s nihilistic cry, quotpeople go to an LMFAO concert to get lost in
ing a song by the band Fun that appeared in
a “party” experience that supersedes the avera Chevrolet commercial. Yet the disjunction
age party both on scale and spectacle. The duo
between reality and the epic party simulation
may as well have taken cues from Baudrillard
resulted in uncanny moments. During the
when creating Party Rock: “It is no longer a
show, a bouncer approached a man in a busiquestion of imitation, nor duplication, nor
ness suit wearing sunglasses and forced him to
even parody. It is a question of substituting the
pop out the lenses. RedFoo is never seen withsigns of the real for the real ...”
out his trademark oversize lens-free glasses. It
One might argue
wasn’t clear whether the
that all parties to some
bouncer’s actions were
The
LMFAO
party
extent exist somewhere
the enforcement of some
between the real and
LMFAO party code
simulacrum has
the artificial, since they
or the Marquee’s dress
become an endless,
are a departure from the
code, or whether it made
joyless
elaboration
of
everyday, they suspend
any difference one way or
some norms of human
another. n
empty craving
55
56
Spotivangelism
by whitney erin boesel
Spotify claims to make music “social,” as if it hasn’t
always been. In the meantime, it strips us of the sense of control
that can come from listening
In an apparent triumph of the viralmarketing success to which all social services
aspire, certain friends of mine have put a
surprising amount of effort into trying to get
me on the social music-streaming service
Spotify, which describes itself on its website
simply as “all the music, all the time.” They
have no financial stake in the company and
receive no direct reward for recruiting new
users, yet they are pushing it on me as though
they’re receiving kickbacks
Spotify is free if you are willing to put up
with occasional “radio-style” advertisements,
they tell me. It facilitates music discovery. It
has a vast catalog—I thought some of my favorite bands were too obscure to be in Spo-
tify’s library, but when I played musical ‘GoFish’ with a friend, a majority of the albums I
named turned out to be there. And of particular relevance to me, music on Spotify isn’t
lost if your hard drive fails. When my iPod
broke, the Spotivangelist choir came out in
full-force SSATB crescendo to sing Spotify’s
praises. (Nothing stirs cloud fanatics to action quite like hardware-induced data loss.)
The failed hard drive, I was told, was “a sign
that you just need to get a Spotify account
and give up on ownership.”
Spotify itself doesn’t mind if you want
to own music; in fact, in the event that “all
the music” doesn’t include all of your music,
Spotify users have the option of uploading
57
whitney erin boesel
local music files to create personalized libraries even more vast than the one on offer by
default. Spotify trumpets that if you join its
service, you will “never again need to switch
between media players.” If you put all your
music in Spotify and accept Spotify as your
one true source of sonic stimulation, you too
can be delivered from the darkness of juggling devices and applications.
Switching back and forth between VLC,
iTunes, and my record player has never made
my list of major frustrations, however, so this
seemed less like a perk and more like a sneaky
way to chain me both to Spotify and to my
computer: Do not step away from the screen …
there are no songs outside its soft glow. My
friend countered that, for $9.99 per month,
Spotify’s “premium” service both eliminates
advertisements and allows users to stream
music from their smartphones. “But I want
my music even when I don’t want the Internet,” I protested, “and sometimes I drive
where there isn’t cell-phone reception!” Ah,
but Spotify had already thought of this; the
“premium” service, my friend informed me,
also includes offline access to saved playlists.
It seemed resistance was futile.
But why was I resisting? By rights, I
should be some kind of Spotifanatic. Music
is a huge part of my life, and I discover almost
all my new music through friends. And perhaps the biggest difference between Spotify
and other music streaming services like Pandora, Rhapsody, or satellite radio is its “social” component. Spotify is deeply integrated
with Facebook, which enables Spotify users
to send music to their friends via an inbox
and to “scrobble” (broadcast) their listening habits on Facebook through so-called
frictionless sharing. By default, Spotify posts
automatically to users’ Facebook profiles
each time they create a new playlist in order
to “save them time” (so Spotify says). “Otherwise you’d have to manually publish each
new playlist you create.” (I would?)
Music has always been social in the obvious sense that we generally create, perform,
and listen to it with other people. Even in an
age of recordings and personal music players,
music remains language, community, affinity, identity, currency, and certainly cultural
capital: You are what you listen to.
Yet in Spotify, music becomes “social” in
the Silicon Valley sense; it becomes something to drive the free labor that fuels all
Web 2.0 machines, the spark that keeps a
startup in eyeballs and eardrums, in attention
and income (from both advertisers and subscribers). Music is “social” because it can be
harnessed to inspire networks of people to
keep supplying clicks and credit cards and to
make sure their friends keep doing likewise.
Those saved, offline-available playlists that
will accompany a Spotify user anywhere she
goes—yet which disappear the moment she
cancels her subscription—are part of Spotify’s subscriber-retention strategy, a last hook
in users should network effects and peer
pressure fail.
Arguably, the Spotivangelists are incentivized to recruit friends because network
effects improve their own experiences of using the service, but I doubt any of my friends
are truly that anxious to know what I listen
58
spotevangelism
to at every moment or to share music with
advertisements, being chained to a computme in ways that don’t involve file transfers or
er, depending on Internet access, or perpetuco-listening. I’m also not that eager to broadally performing my musical tastes—from the
cast what I listen to at every moment. When
pretentious to the perfectly d isgraceful—in
I told one Spotivangelist friend that I had no
some kind of Bourdieusian hell, why have I
desire to perform my listening for others, he
remained intent on resisting? It mostly boils
agreed wholeheartedly. He claimed to use
down to issues of control. In Edited Clean
Spotify “antisocially” by turning off automatVersion: Technology and the Culture of Conic publishing and by delinking Spotify and
trol, professor of digital cultural studies RaiFacebook as much as possible.
ford Guins examines ways in which users of
I later wondered what he’d meant by that,
newer media technologies are offered “emand poked around Spotify’s settings to see
powerment” through “control,” which in turn
how much “delinkage” can be accomplished.
is made available through arrays of choices.
In doing so, I found a lot of boxes to uncheck:
Though Guins’s focus is censorial practices
No, don’t show what I listen to on Facebook.
in newer media, many of his ideas are appliDon’t automatically publish my new playlists,
cable to Spotify as well. He explains that conand don’t publish my Top Tracks or Top Arttrol technologies are “designed to advance an
ists. Don’t share my activity on Spotify Social
ethos of neoliberal governance” and draws
(which Spotify’s FAQ unhelpfully defines as
on both Deleuze’s work on control and Fou“all the features of Spotify that help you share
cault’s work on governmentality to show that
music with friends”)—but as soon as I un“choice is imagined as an active, autonomous
checked that one, Spotify warned me I would
action … an enabling action for regulated
no longer receive recommendations from my
and disciplined freedom: the
paradoxical
friends. “Are you sure?” it asked, and suggestlogic of choice in the era of control.” Choice
ed I try listening in “Private Session” mode
functions as “a preferred surrogate strategy in
instead. That way my antisocial tendencies
neoliberal societies for the presumed limitawill expire once I log out of Spotify or after
tions and restrictions of regulation,” and exsix hours of inactivity. It
ercising our freedom of
seemed Spotify would
choice encourages us to
grudgingly allow me to
see “regulatory practicMusic has always
keep my guilty pleasures
es of self-management
been
social,
but
from my friends, but not
as licensed freedom, not
with Spotify,
without trying to stir up
as dominating.”
a little self-doubt and
In other words, when
music becomes
guilt in exchange.
offered the ability to
social
in
the
Silicon
So if Spotify doesn’t
choose from a vast array
Valley sense
necessarily entail hearing
of options, the freedom
59
whitney erin boesel
and empowerment we feel in making a choice
discourages us from paying attention to what
has structured the choice itself, and this fits
well with a political ideology that asks us to
believe that we are all autonomous individuals
with no one but ourselves to blame (or credit) for our failures (or successes). To borrow
Deleuze’s highway metaphor from “Having
an Idea in Cinema,” we’re encouraged to see
the lone car on the empty road as a symbol of
freedom and self-direction. We’re not encouraged to think about how the range of possible
routes is predetermined because the car can
only go where the state has decided to build
roads. We can choose from what has been
made available to us, and we’re encouraged to
see that choice as freedom without thinking
about what isn’t available to us and why.
Spotify promises “millions of tracks, any
time you like … Just help yourself to whatever you want, whenever you want it”—a seemingly infinite array of musical choices, the ultimate in musical freedom. The site further
asserts that the service’s dream “is to have all
the music in the world available instantly to
everyone, wherever they are.” All the music,
all the places, all the people: what a vast and
beautiful utopian soundscape!
What more could I want if Spotify is offering me everything? Spotify promises the
world of music at my fingertips, as well as
the ability to seamlessly give, receive, and
circulate music with my friends, and all this
without having to track down albums, organize files, or engage in any other drudgery that comes with maintaining a music library of one’s own. Why duplicate the labor?
What sense does it make for me and all of my
friends and so many more strangers to carefully curate the same albums over and over
again when Spotify can do it all once, and our
music-labor can be limited to typing in one
credit-card number each? Why take up space
on each of our hard drives and why each bear
the risk of loss in the event of file corruption or hardware failure (and poor backup
strategy)? Ownership is a burden, but access
is liberation; music is safe in the cloud. Spotify offers freedom not just from labor but
also from loss, the promise that music will
never again be taken away by the vicissitudes
of technology. All the music, all the time, always, no matter what.
But of course, it’s not that simple: “All
the music” is really just Spotify’s (admittedly
large) catalog plus whatever one has chosen
to upload as local files, and the catalog piece
of that equation disappears if one makes the
choice to stop using Spotify. This looming
threat against leaving is a problem for me, because it highlights the ways in which Spotify’s
infinite array of choice offers not empowerment and control but the forfeiture of those
things. Far from freedom, it feels like being
trapped: You can leave, but you can’t take it
with you. A part of me would be at Spotify’s
mercy, held hostage by the synergy between
my emotions and sound.
Technically speaking, there’s nothing to
stop a disgruntled user from using her Spotify playlist as a file-acquisition to-do list before quitting the service. But there is a time
price to rebuilding a music library, and frequently an economic price as well. Though I
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spotevangelism
realize my relationship with music is already
at the mercy of hardware manufacturers, software developers, and others (to say nothing
of vinyl pressers, turntable cartridge makers,
electric companies, and the power grid and
all of the rest of our modern infrastructure—
and musicians!), I’m wary of getting into a
position from which I might have to calculate what either my love of music or my sense
of right and wrong is worth in time, money,
and frustration. I’m still clinging to ownership because for me, having files on my hard
drive does a better job of preserving illusions
of freedom and control.
What would happen if one day, after
months or years of using the service, I decided
I wanted to leave Spotify? Maybe I’d be sick of
paying for their service, or perhaps they’d do
something policy-wise that would anger me
to the point of no longer wishing to support
them (with money or with attention). In that
hypothetical future moment, I would find myself trapped between principle and passion; I
would be forced to choose between betraying
either one or the other, and both seem too important to sacrifice. My “choice” would be to
keep driving down the spoiled Spoti-Highway
or to total the car by driving off the road, the
missing albums and broken playlists like so
much twisted metal and shattered glass.
to access is supposed to liberate us, enable
greater sharing of resources, fuel human
creativity, create more prosperity, and lead
to greater equality. What we so often forget to ask, however, is who controls access?
Who builds the highways?
The “more” I want, and that which Spotify can’t offer me, is this: I want to have (and
hold, and send) my music files without contingency, without ongoing dependence on an
intermediary. I want to share music with all
my friends, whether or not they’re on Spotify; I want to share all my music, whether or
not it’s on Spotify. I want to take that album
I just discovered and copy it to a flash drive
and send it across the country, and I want my
friend who receives those music files to be
able to share them, remix them, convert them
to a different format if he so desires, keep that
music in circulation. I want the band that recorded the album to pile into a decrepit gearpacked van, tour into my friend’s town, and
find a cluster of people eager to come to their
show, buy their merchandise, offer them
crash space. I want us all to be able to build
our own roads.
Many people would call this anarchistic
circulation of music files “piracy,” which is
precisely the sort of behavior Spotify is supposed to curtail. The story is that listeners get
increased ease of use and musicians get paid
for their work. Everyone wins. But the title
of a blog post by Dan Reitz says it all: “Spotify? Not much better than piracy. Sorry.”
And as self-identified “blue-collar musician”
Derek Webb points out in his essay, “Giving
It Away: How Free Music Makes More Than
In a certain technoutopian view of
the future, we are headed toward a post-
property world. The shift from ownership
61
whitney erin boesel
Sense,” Spotify offers him neither meaningful revenue nor meaningful connection with
his fans. It’s relationship over time, Webb
says, that generates most of his income from
music. If as few as 20 percent of the people
who now receive his music free of charge
purchase subsequent releases from him in
the future, he’s done quite well for himself.
Spotify, however, inserts itself as an intermediary in the relationship between Webb and
his fans: The fans pay Spotify for access to
Webb’s music and so feel as though they’ve
done him no harm, but Webb receives a paltry sum from Spotify and, more important,
receives no information about who or where
his fans are. “So please buy my music … or
take it for free,” Webb says, “but this only
works if we work together.” In this sense,
Spotify is music made antisocial. The highway connects listeners to Spotify, but Webb
walks on the shoulder without a map.
tempted, even hypnotized, by the shiny veneer
of Spotify’s too-perfect world, what I’ve most
been struck by is everything that isn’t a part
of Spotify. It turns out that in the Spotilibrary
plus local files equation, the local files are the
more significant piece. Local files are the second-class citizens of Spotify Nation: You cannot send them to your friends, and you cannot
scrobble your local listening habits with them.
Social though Spotify may be, you must enjoy
your outcast songs alone.
Though Spotify promises to make musical community—and social capital—so
easily available, these perks are only accessible when you stay on the Spoti-Highway.
You’re welcome to pull over and go for a hike
through the wilderness (if you really want to),
but you’ll be going on that hike by yourself.
Being on Spotify also isn’t as social as
I’d imagined it would be. Joining Spotify
does not automatically trigger an inbox full
of tracks pinned to excited messages about
how awesome an obscure new band is, even
when your friends have spent weeks pushing
you to sign up. It feels neither like receiving
A few days ago, I took the plunge and
a flash drive in the mail nor like taking turns
signed up for a free 30-day trial of Spotify
at a turntable for hours on end. I thought
Premium (ironically, for the purpose of this
succumbing to Spotification would be like
essay). In that time, I have indeed discovered
walking onto a digital version of that summer
two bands I probably
porch where my favorite
wouldn’t have encounfriends listen to (and arFar
from
freedom,
tered otherwise; I’ve disgue about) music late
covered a couple of othSpotify feels like being into the night, but it’s
ers through looking at
more like lurking outtrapped:
You
can
what my Spotifriends are
side some of my friends’
leave
but
you
can’t
listening to. But where I’d
windows to peep at what
feared being d angerously
they’re playing, and then
take it with you
62
spotevangelism
quietly skittering off through the bushes. The
truth is that while Spotify may be “social,” it’s
not very personal.
One friend says that scrobbling is “donating your taste to a generalized other,” but I
still feel like a creepy stalker every time I click
on his (or anyone else’s) activity in my feed;
social discovery sans dialogue remains deeply disconcerting. Perhaps I’m thrown, too, by
the experience of becoming a “generalized
other”—one of many who will weed through
someone’s stream of songs, rather than a
specific friend to whom particular albums
are sent. It feels as though Spotify stands between my friends and myself, just as it stands
between Derek Webb and his fans.
There is something to be said for sharing
music, to be sure. But there’s also something
to be said both for the labor of sharing intentionally, and for the range of possibilities
enabled by scattered, messy, redundant local
storage. Spotify makes music social, but on
its own terms. It offers enough music to keep
us sated and docile (and paying), pacified by
infinite variety and miraculous ease of use,
while it builds highways that ultimately serve
its own interests—by connecting all of us to
itself rather than one another. There is nothing surprising about this; Spotify is a business, after all. But a business is not a utopia,
and it is not a substitute for direct connection
to the people and places that make the music
you love. I still prefer to cobble my own roads
in the world outside Spotify’s garden.
And I know, I know: There’s an irony
here. I cling to the chaos of my local music
(both analog and digital) in much the same
way that analog purists cling to the messy,
dirty authenticity of their vinyl-only collections. In some ways, I refuse to give up local
ownership of my digital music files for the
same reason others once railed against digital
music most generally.
For me, digital and analog have never
been mutually exclusive. The house I grew
up in had a turntable and also a cassette deck
and also a CD changer, all stacked atop a giant speaker cabinet powerful enough to turn
any of these formats into window-rattling
walls of sound. (Thanks, Dad.) What records
and tapes and CDs—and yes, even local mp3
files—have in common is that, for all their
different aesthetics and affordances, they are
formats that leave me in control of how, and
when, and with whom I use them. A record
doesn’t complain if I loan it to a friend (any
friend) for a weekend; an mp3 is happy to
be emailed or copied to a thumb drive or
even burned to disk so that it can be played
through an older car stereo. Music files in
any of these formats will do what I ask of
them until the physical media that hold
them degrade or until the digital encodings
that carry their messages become corrupted.
I am in control.
But files in the privatized, corporate
cloud are different. Just as local files can’t
get on the Spoti-Highway, Spotify files can’t
get off the Spoti-Highway. Spotify remains
in control, no matter what—and in doing
so inserts itself not just between musicians
and fans, and not just between individual
music enthusiasts, but between me and the
music itself. n
63
That Oceanic Feeling
by Tavia Nyong’o
Channel Orange isn’t Frank Ocean’s coming out.
It’s a tidal wave crashing down
Nineteen-year-old
Christopher
Breaux fell hard for another straight-acting
boy who wouldn’t love him back, confessing his love in a car parked in front of the
girlfriend’s house. Like many a millennial,
he took to Tumblr to share his feelings
about a love he described, with portentous
adolescent drama, as “malignant.” But the
queerest song released so far by the artist
now known at Frank Ocean hasn’t been
an ode to boy-on-boy love and lust but a
corrosive satire of “traditional” American
marriage in the era of Kim Kardashian and
Newt Gingrich. If hip-hop is the CNN of
the ghetto, then “American Wedding” aims
to be its TMZ as well, replete with celebrities and courtroom hijinks, muscle motors,
and divorce settlements, with Ocean rue-
fully rubbernecking at all the car crashes en
route to the good life.
“American Wedding” has attracted the
proprietary attentions of paleo-rockers the
Eagles, whose radio staple “Hotel California” the track is based on. But the real story
here isn’t about the sampling wars. It’s about a
scapegoat generation struggling to find a path
through the crumbling infrastructure of the
American dream.
It has been said that while liberals won the
culture wars of recent decades, the right won
the political and economic ones. The absurdly elevated status of “marriage equality” as the
ne plus ultra of gay rights is a symptom of this
unhappy dispensation. Who wants equality,
after all, on such threadbare terms? Sensing
a bait and switch, Ocean takes down love,
65
tavia Nyong’o
soul songcraft, as the early demos on the fancompiled Lonny Breaux Collection prove, but
his writing on Channel Orange makes his preceding material for other artists seem like throat
clearing. On “Sweet Life,” a sharply observed
reverie of black-picket-fence California dreaming, Ocean sardonically queries his pampered
date: “So why see the world, when you got the
beach?” He elongates “world” to contrast with
the punched out “beach” in a way that tells us
everything we need to know about his mournful acceptance of life’s cruel optimism. “Sweet
Life” makes the extended parable of parental
neglect on “Super Rich Kids” almost superfluous, except for the self-conscious scene setting
it adds—mixing substance abuse and class
snobbery into a potent cocktail of something
called “upward mobility”:
American style, in merciless couplets like:
She said, ‘I’ve had a hell of a summer,
so baby, don’t take this hard
But maybe we should get an
annulment, before this goes way
too far.’
Like Pretty Woman in reverse, “American
Wedding” descends from true love to crass
commercial exchange, reminding us on the
outro that “we been some hustlers since
it began.”
But this deconstruction of romantic comedy is done in the name of a different, murkier ideal of love, a redemptive love that won’t
quite fit into the comforting melodic or narrative resolution of pop culture. We heard strains
of such a love on Ocean’s performance at the
2012 VMA awards, where he delivered an assonant, astringent version of “Thinkin Bout
You,” the opening track on Channel Orange. He
wonders if his beloved is willing to “think so
far ahead, cuz I’ve been thinkin’ bout forever.”
But such a horizon can clearly no longer find
expression in the shelf-worn sentiments of “till
death do us part.” The ass-backwardness of the
Eagles’ litigious response to Ocean’s meditation on love and commitment is best captured
by NCWYS in the SoundCloud comments to
“American Wedding”:
We’ll both be high
The help don’t stare
They just walk by
They must don’t care.
This is the way Ocean inherits the past: not
by respecting tradition, or Don Henley, but
by staring down the foreshortened horizons
and complacent inequality that the frantic
pursuit of wealth or happiness brings.
Not that Ocean is lecturing, mind you, although Sierra Leone, sex work, global warming, and the hijab all make appearances in
his rapidly expanding oeuvre. He is singing
over the soundtrack of history, blunting its
force with tried and true teenage tactics of
insult, grandiosity, and desperate need. At
24 he isn’t quite old enough to know that he
If you older people think that the
younger generation is out of control
and doing everything incorrectly then
you should absolutely love this song,
but you don’t.
Ocean is a practiced journeyman of pop66
that oceanic feeling
shouldn’t care, which is why he can gloat over
modern Las Vegas, centered on a woman
“expensive news” on a pricey widescreen one
dressing for her job as a stripper, while her
moment, and say “my TV ain’t HD, that’s too
man looks on, waiting for her to “hit the
real” in another. His is a realism that needs
strip” and “keep my bills paid.” But the song
to be able to blur out of focus when it’s too
is a far cry from big pimpin’. “Pyramids” is
intense or not intense enough, and the drugs
drenched in delusions of the good life in a
come in handy. But so does channel surfing;
“top floor motel suite,” cruising on empty
on Channel Orange television is his angel of
confused for the upward mobility that is
history, a flickering window onlooking the
now as rare as water in the American desmounting wreckage of the past as he is blown
ert. Ocean has a heartfelt respect for his Afinto the future.
rocentric queen—“we’ll run to the future
Despite his Tumblr post comparing the
shining like diamonds in a rocky world”—
intensity of same sex love to “being thrown
but the feeling tone of “Pyramids” is closer
from a plane,” the theme of Channel Orange
to Janelle Monáe’s “Many Moons” than Miis less sexual orientation than chemical dischael Jackson’s “Remember the Time.” That
orientation. Recreational substances surface
is, where Jackson celebrated an image of a
frequently, often as a metaphor for a relapast in which we were kings and queens,
tionship gone wrong. Or is it the other way
Monáe and Ocean take a fish-eye view of a
around, and addiction is now the core, comsociety where a multihued social apex rests
mon experience a generation is struggling to
atop masses of brown, black, and beige bodgive sense to, turning to romantic clichés like
ies “working at the pyramid,” like the slaves
“unrequited love” in a search for a more fawho built the original ones.
miliar, respectable language for it?
Where CNN anchor Anderson Cooper
Frank’s oceanic feelings on Channel Orjustified his belated coming out in terms of the
ange crash in waves that obliterate distincreporter’s obligation not to get in the way of
tions between gay, bi, or straight. Some of
the news, Ocean knows better. A black boy is
the ostensibly straight songs, except for
always getting in the way of the news. At 18 he
their pronouns, feel suspiciously same-sex.
fled Hurricane Katrina for Los Angeles. But as
And when heterosexuality is foregrounded,
Fred Moten put it, “I ran from it, and was still
it never resolves any
in it” pretty much sums
confusions, it only proup the black experience
The
theme
of
Channel
duces new ones. The arin America. Channel OrOrange is less
tistic showpiece of the
ange starts in a similarly
album, the ten-minute
fucked-up atmosphere—
sexual orientation
long “Pyramids,” is an
“A tornado flew around
than
chemical
afrofabulation of anmy room”—and ends
disorientation
cient Egypt and postwith “Forrest Gump”
67
tavia Nyong’o
Frank Ocean takes the stage, alone
perhaps the most oddball musical portrait
of same-sex love since “Johnny Are You
Queer?” A three-legged race featuring Tom
Hanks’ dimwitted but fleet-footed hero and
Christopher Breaux’s beau, “Forrest Gump”
boils Hollwood sap down to a lubricious
bump and grind:
But don’t confuse Ocean’s approach for
pastiche or retromania, despite his affection
for old cars and the vocal stylings of Prince,
Stevie Wonder, and Donnny Hathaway. Just
when you think he is recycling the familiar,
he gives you something incredibly raw and
real. On his first appearance on broadcast
television, Ocean scaled the national-media
echo chamber down to a backseat taxicab
confessional, sharing a universal angst at a
human level rarely captured by the contemporary celebrity coming out, with its strict
protocols for explaining the murkiness of
desire away:
my fingertips and my lips
they burn from the cigarettes
forrest gump
you run my mind boy
running on my mind boy
“Forrest Gump” is rhythm and blues as dark
camp, nostalgia repurposed by a generation too
young to remember, a generation whose cultural thefts seem premised on the awareness that
anything original they create could be stolen.
He said Allah Hu Akbar
I told him don’t curse me
Bo Bo you need prayer
I guess it couldn’t hurt me.
68
that oceanic feeling
“Bad Religion” leaves it unclear whether
it is his taxi driver’s effusive piety or his own
devotion to the cult of true love that is more
stunning. Confusing spirituality with a therapy designed to sand our sharp edges into
shape for this world, Ocean is awestruck in
a way that has little to do, in the end, with either Islamophobia or homophobia.
Rather, “Bad Religion” finds a pivot point
in the “and” of Freud’s Civilization and Its
Discontents, the book where Freud psychoanalyzed the oceanic feeling of cosmic oneness felt by natural mystics and prophesied
that our adjustment to society would only
ever leave us frustrated and unhappy. “The
price we pay for our advance in civilization,”
Freud warned, “is a loss of happiness through
the heightening of the sense of guilt,” and
“Bad Religion” has plenty of guilt to spare.
But it also never fails to convey the sense of
striving and resilience Freud grudgingly acknowledges when he notes, “We are never so
defenseless against suffering as when we love,
never so helplessly unhappy as when we have
lost our loved object or its love. But this does
not dispose of the technique of living based
on the value of love as a means to happiness.”
Blown from New Orleans by the unnatural calamity of racist and economic neglect,
separated from his beloved by lack of reciprocation, Ocean never stops striving for “the
technique of living based on the value of
love.” Whatever, wherever that may be. Even
a curse, after all, probably couldn’t hurt him.
When Ocean, on his Tumblr, greeted us
as “human beings spinning on blackness,” he
invited us into that cab alongside him, but also
onto the edge of that oceanic feeling of cosmic
oneness that Freud could only associate with regression, so convinced was he that satisfaction
was something all humans left in the womb.
But spinning on blackness needn’t be just
an image for depression, addiction, burn out,
or malignancy. It could also be Ocean sidling
up in an undercommons of prayer and malediction, where the singular soul brushes up
against the dark night of the universe. Maybe
that’s why a conventional coming out, with its
endless reiterations of the transparently obvious and anodyne, seems beside the point.
Frank Ocean isn’t like you or me; he isn’t even
much like Christopher Breaux any longer. n
69
Reviews
Punk Isn’t
By Willie osterweil
Punk: An Aesthetic is a beautiful,
excellently curated book of punk photographs, zines, posters, album covers, and
ephemera. It focuses on 1976-77 but
features a broad collection of proto- and
post-punk artifacts. As is chronically the
case, it gives too much space to Malcolm
Mclaren and the Sex Pistols. It costs $55
and is too large to easily shoplift. It is not
a book for punks.
In the past decade, punk has seen an
upsurge of scholarly, journalistic, and
popular interest. Most of the punk rockers who aren’t dead have had successful
reunion tours. There have been, for instance, movies about the Ramones, the
Minutemen, Joe Strummer, the Sex Pistols, and the Germs, along with The Other
F Word, a documentary about famous
punk-rock fathers. There is now an Encyclopedia of Punk, A Cultural Dictionary of
Punk, and a whole shelf worth of oral histories and “untold stories.”
Punk is officially overdetermined and
overhistoricized. Any buck that can be
squeezed from it has been, and then a
couple more bucks have been squeezed
Asking “What is punk?” is the
wrong question. The answer
inevitably makes itself wrong
Punk, An Aesthetic
Rizzoli 286 pages
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Willie osterweil
by handwringing over all the buck-squeezing.
Among the object and artwork donors for
Punk: An Aesthetic are Cornell and Yale Universities. Everything is recuperable. Fuck it.
Let’s move on.
What can you do with a beautiful punkrock coffee-table book like Punk: An Aesthetic? You could flip through it and wistfully
imagine an authentic cultural moment no
one was ever actually privy to. You could cut
the binding and turn it into a sweet collection
of posters and collage material. You could
buy it, show it off at a party once, and put it
away. You could pore over its contents and
crib inspiration for looks, songs, manifestos
and band names. You could light it on fire and
throw it through a window, although a brick
is cheaper and more suited to the task.
To its credit, Punk: An Aesthetic doesn’t
pretend to be anything it isn’t, which can’t be
said for many of the books that have been released about punk in recent years (at least six
books claim punk as a full on “revolution”).
And it really is lovely, a wonderful collection,
touching on the garage scene of the ’60s and
the hardcore ’80s but focusing heavily and
pleasurably on the situationist/anarchist/
negationist aspects of punk. A lot of circled
A’s and propaganda, as well as a number of
fliers, news stories and letters by concerned
citizens, police and Christians complaining
about the menace to society. But the book
tells you its project from the outset: Punk is
something particular, punk is an (ultra-leftist,
DIY, liberatory) aesthetic.
To this end, Kugelberg writes in his opening essay: “The legacy of punk is simple: the
immediate implementation of D.I.Y. grassroots
culture among the young. No distance. Form a
band, start a blog, become an artist, a DJ, a guitar player, an editor.” Nice stuff, all, but far from
a liberatory slogan in 2012. What precarious
worker in the “creative” fields isn’t expected to
have a D.I.Y. cultural product or three on her
résumé? What are Etsy, Kickstarter and Bandcamp if not ways to capture D.I.Y spirit and
transform it into respectability, into a job?
The takeaway, as in most other assessments of punk rock, is that punk, real punk (as
opposed to its commodified byproducts), is
innately liberatory, counterhegemonic. Punk
is about freeing oneself from cultural malaise and consumerist stultification through
an aesthetics of negation and DIY practice.
Despite its deep recuperation, some ambient
punk spirit still animates rebellion in those
who pick up its mantle.
But punk can’t help but be a dead thing, a
museum of gestures and affects, made glossy
and “historically significant,” shot full of aesthetic meaning and thus deprived of any aesthetic force. “What would it be like to see this
flier on a telephone pole in my neighborhood,
having no context for it?” the book wants you
to ask, yearning, nostalgic for a time before
you were born.
The inescapable cliché: punk rock changed
my life. My first friend in college was made on
the basis of a Screamers T-shirt (the famous
image of Tomata Du Plenty’s exploding head
which graces the cover of Punk), and I’ve
been in punk bands since I was 17. Punk led
me, via Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, to the
Situationists, who in turn led me to theory
71
punk isn’t
and politics. But none of this has to do with
some innate nature of punk rock. Punk fandom leads just as often to a lifestylist romanticising of abjection, stupidity and poverty,
and not a few neo-nazis were made in Skrewdriver mosh pits. The only thing Nazi punks
share with anarchopunks is a certain shared
aesthetic sense, at least to the extent that aesethetic refers to a style (of music, dress or personal expression).
The problem with the whole enterprise is
that “What is punk?” is the wrong question.
The task of historical definition is always a
murderous one. To define is to kill, to limit
possibilities to a tautological set of outcomes
that always prove the definition. If punk is
negation, then Nazi hardcore isn’t punk or it’s
just right-wing negation or it’s the exception
that proves the rule. When Crass sang “Punk
became a fashion just like hippy used to be/
And it ain’t got a thing to do with you or me”
in 1978’s “Punk Is Dead,” a song that is punk
as fuck, they’re rejecting punk as a holistic,
defined space. “Movements are systems and
systems kill.”
The move that Crass rejects, the systemic
definition and historicizing of punk, began
immediately upon punk’s appearance and has
relentlessly dogged the concept since: I know
punks born 10 years after that song’s release
who hate Crass for saying “Punk is dead.” Of
course, Crass now follows Cornell University
on the list of donors for Punk: An Aesthetic
and is suing Anarchopunk.net for sharing the
band’s albums.
This points toward the futility of trying
to carve out what punk innately “is” and the
emptiness of an aesthetic that can be defined
and contained: the museums sell lots of tickets to exhibits full of warmed-over Situationism and proclamations of dada uncapturability. The question that actually interests me is,
What can punk(s) do? Or rather, how? Because, dead as a doornail, it keeps stumbling
around the cultural landscape, zombified and
full of rage.
This question would have had an easy answer a couple years ago (“Uhh…nothing?”).
As A.M Gittlitz notes in “Pussy Riot’s U.S
Tour?”: “The days of the Fraternal Order of
Police suing the Crucifucks, Tipper Gore taking on the Dead Kennedys, and black metal
goblins burning churches are long past. Punk
is now no more a social threat than some leftist
fringe group selling poorly designed newspapers.” Punk is totally safe, a terrain not of social
contention but of cultural consumption, and
as such, it is the perfect moment to sell expensive books claiming that punk is revolutionary.
The dozens of books like Punk: An Aesthetic that attempt to capture and foreground
a particular form of negation as essential to
punk actually perform a sacralizing function,
making it something whole, holy. Beautiful
glossy reprints and loving scans of collage
ephemera tossed off at a particular moment
in 1977 attempt to make something lived and
immediate into something worth “serious”
consideration, canonical—taking into full account the religious origins of the word canon.
But, as Gittlitz argues, the reappearance
of popular protest in the Global North, and,
more directly, the international firestorm provoked by Pussy Riot, have changed the stakes
72
Willie osterweil
and possibilities for punk’s deployment. Pussy
Riot’s radical, public performances perform
exactly the opposite thing from these books.
authoritarian action. The anyone-can-do-it,
loud, atonal attack of Pussy Riot uses certain
punk techniques and strategies but rejects
or ignores just as many others. If punk is to
be good for anything beyond a certain form
of aesthetic consumption, we’ll need fewer
books and more Pussy Riot shows.
What urgent and helpful thing is there possibly left to say about ’70s punk rock? Perhaps
just this: If you haven’t heard these albums
yet, stop reading and immediately download:
Buzzcocks, Singles Going Steady; Dead Kennedys, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables; Flipper,
Generic Album; Gang of Four, Ramones, Ramones; Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blank
Generation; Talking Heads, ’77; Television,
Marquee Moon; Wire, Pink Flag; X, Los Angeles; and X-Ray Spex, Germ-Free Adolescents.
Plus you’ll definitely want: Bad Brains, Bad
Brains; Black Flag, The First Four Years; the
Damned, Damned Damned Damned; Devo,
Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo; Feederz,
Ever Feel Like Killing Your Boss?; the Germs,
(MIA); Minor Threat, Complete Discography;
the Raincoats, the Raincoats; the Slits, Peel Sessions; the Undertones, The Undertones. Also,
consider: Angry Samoans, The Unboxed Set;
Big Black, Songs About Fucking; the Circle
Jerks, Group Sex; the Cramps, Bad Music for
Bad People; Crass, Stations of the Crass; the
Heartbreakers, L.A.M.F; LiLiPUT/Kleenex;
Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime; Patti
Smith, Horses; Snatch; the Wipers, Youth of
America. I’m leaving out a hell of a lot, but if
you had to choose between ever reading another word about punk or listening to these 32
albums, it’s a no brainer. n
What was once scandalized,
forbidden, subaltern, rises from its
rightful caste hidden and below and
speaks in the very locations of its
oppressing power. Who are these
women, these punks, to perform, to
pray, to protest in sacred locales? To
desecrate is one of punk’s existential
tasks. The smashing of sacred relics
conjures society’s most archaic
reactions: in this case, imprisonment,
public shaming, flogging, concerns of
Satanism, witchcraft, hysteria.
While I strongly disagree with the notion
of punk having an “existential task,” I think
that profaning and making ridiculous the serious and the holy is one of the things that punk
did best when it first appeared, and it continues to be capable of it now. It cannot do so,
however, without a desacralizing of “punk,”
a rejection of the narratives trapping it into a
holistic space, even if that space is to our desires: liberatory, insurrectionary.
There are such a thing as bad questions,
questions which enforce a particular kind of
answer, and, as such, are not really questions
at all. “What is punk?” is best suited to the kind
of answers beloved by booksellers, museum
curators and booking agents. Punk, as Pussy
Riot has shown, can instead be approached
like a tool box, a chaotic collection of signs,
gestures, attitudes and aesthetics that can be
deployed pell-mell to bring the opaque, inexpressible currents of desire and freedom into
contact with the communicable ends of anti73
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When last we spoke, and when I say “we” I mean me�this is, as we know,
a one-way discussion due to the obvious time constraints of the end times
�I had touched upon the topic of “less is more,” but now I think we
should concentrate on the corresponding concept of “more is less.” I can
hear the naysayers now: “obvious and obviouser.” Well, let us not forget the
fate of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, or we might suﬀer from the very reflex
named for him. Dr. S had the obvious idea that doctors should wash their
hands before giving gynecological examinations as so many pregnant
women were dying from infected vaginas. He was ridiculed and then fired
from his clinic; the other doctors felt that they weren’t the type of people
who needed to wash their fiddling fingers before sticking them into people,
but most important to them was the fact that they had never previously
washed before an operation, so why should they start now? They couldn’t
think outside the box or apparently in the box either.
We must avoid the Semmelweis reflex at all costs or leave ourselves open to
a similar fate to that of poor Ignaz, who finally went quite insane and was
committed to an asylum where he died of puerperal sepsis, “childbed
fever”�the very condition that he was trying to save the young mothers
from. Hey irony, not cool at all. Now that I think of it, I’m not sure there is
much need for any irony at all as our days dwindle.
I don’t want to focus too much on the negative. I think it is incumbent on
anyone who wants to have an enriched and enjoyable descent into
apocalypse to look on the bright side of life. Search for the joy, in your own
life and in the culture at large. Look around and see the best in mankind.
I’ll get you started: Earlier this month there was an auction of some of
Elvis Presley’s private belongings. It was a great success, not only for the
auctioneers but for humanity itself. Elvis’s bible went for almost $100,000
more than twice what was expected, yet the unwashed and soiled
underpants that Elvis wore under that white suit he wore in Vegas never
even reached it’s reserve bid of $12,000. We are better than that. Sure, we
have wars waging all over the world, and Arab Spring has lost some of its
charm coming into chilling autumn, but there is progress towards peace
happening every day. Just this week the Afghan authority released a
pamphlet trying to cut down on “green on blue” violence, the attacks on
NATO forces by the local army they are training. This pamphlet explains
that neither a hearty pat on the back nor being asked how your wife is by
an American are excuses to kill someone. Baby steps.
As we try and seek this joy around us the “more is less” philosophy can
help. For example, when reading the newspaper, don’t try to take in every
twist and turn of every story. Find some tidbit that shines a light. For
instance when I read this headline “German Student Attacks Hells Angels
with Puppy” I didn’t question what this world has come to that someone
would use a young dog as a weapon. But rather, I’m glad that the young can
look at an old problem in a new way. I’m sure everyone will be happy to
know that this young man managed to make his escape on a bulldozer after
his canine-throwing defense failed, but most important to this story and to
our very well-being, the puppy is now in safe hands. Okay, here’s a headline
from Norway to work on yourself: “Driver Swerves to Avoid Moose, Hits
Bear Instead” See what you can do, but most important, have fun with it.
See you when I see you.
It’s time to stop searching for the right answers and try and figure out the
right questions ... next time.
xxxxx
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