disco jesus

How much do I love that idea?
Maybe Madge has still got it.

poptimism

Of course, when I say "real talent" I don't mean rockstars, necessarily, or rock bands. In terms of pop cultural idioms, rock probably has the least potential of all for making a comeback or having anything new to say. It's disappointing to realize that grime is probably one of the only idiom-like movements I was able to get excited about for a minute or two, and that it's already kind of imploded under the weight of such anticipation and the pressure of being the only new thing out there. I notice that a real problem some music bloggers seem to have with my point-of-view is that to take such pains to deny rockism is to somehow promote "empty-headedness." The implication seems to be that to tease out everything (classism, racism, sexism, etc.) that's latent in the notion that (often) anthemic, guitar-driven music is the only truly "great" music is to leap headlong into an abyss where there is no way to recover any sense of personal aesthetic without starting a culture war.

While I understand the sincere motivations behind this kind of slippery-slope mentality, it seems, again, to be very naive. Haven't we been "before the law" in regard to our personal aesthetic preferences for decades now? Probably since academia took deconstruction and mistakenly thought you could perform it on an institutional level without severely botching it in the early 80s. If the 90s taught us anything, shouldn't it have been that while we're all welcome to like whatever it is we literally take a liking to, we should be able to cough up a few words explaining why? Especially if we're holding up our preferences as some kind ideal? Critics of all kinds, in their role a public intellectuals (maybe some of the few remaining of this species), or at very least as journalists, shouldn't have huge reservations about this. If nothing else I think "Merrittgate" has opened up a "dialogue", and what can be bad about that? Only ego over-involvement could cast this sort of discourse in a negative light.

Get well soon, Kylie.

ai ai ai

I realized today that the reason the rockism flame wars (fanned by John Cook of Slate then characteristically latched onto by the Times long after it was over) are so annoying is because both sides are essentially wrong and right, and both are equally guilty of letting their respective rhetorics get dangerously inflated. Stephen Merritt is not a racist because he dislikes OutKast, but I do question the level to which he's informed himself about contemporary chart-topping hip-hop if OutKast is the best example of nu-minstrelism he can cite.

What about Lil Jon and crunk? To my tastes, Lil Jon's brand of crunk is lighthearted and beat-happy in all the right ways. But I think his performance of his own blackness relies on a fantastical sort of fetishized "ghetto" where everyone's grill is iced, everyone has a white Escalade and a .22. This seems far more potentially negative and damaging to race relations than OutKast's more straightforwardly "smart" self-presentation. Black identity in a lot of recent hip-hop has fallen into a sort of self-parody (as "marginalized" cultures are wont to do--Larry David, anyone?) to no other end but white entertainment. I think most people, including Merritt's accusers, would admit that this, if it's true, is more problematic than OutKast's sort of charming revisionist historico-futurism. We all know I'm a sucker for retrofuture, but isn't the general consensus that OutKast is one of the few top 40 hip-hop bands that has a pretty sophisticated aesthetic despite occasional lapses into too-easy "booties and bling" lyrical conceits, rather than vice versa, as Merritt suggests?

I can't help but find it much more offensive that Stephen Merritt's so off-target when he had such a valid point to make than that he admits he can't get into hip-hop, or that he finds an old Disney tune catchy. When he admits to liking "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah"", is it really any different than when people still use the idiom "the pot calling the kettle black" even though it has racist origins? In degree only, I should think. Admitting that a racist tune is successful because it's good speaks more to the fact that the racists are insidious BECAUSE they are often clever, and that racism in the media can, like any propaganda from any era, be very subtlely persuasive and burrow its way into unconscious minds unnoticed.

Another aspect of the argument I find amusing is that I was arguing with my avid hip-hop fan friends about nu-minstrelism as early as 2001, so Merritt hardly seems like an iconoclast, if he is the gadfly here. People who are shocked by his suggestions are astoundingly naive, and make exactly the intellectual errors they're accusing Merritt of making. I'd be more interested in hearing someone address the construction of "ghetto" as the new blank canvas upon which our collective-Id is projecting its needs and finding surrogate satisfaction. Grand Theft Auto? San Andreas? They actually sold the soundtracks to these games. Hip-hop has been repackaged as a lifestyle in order to bracket it off, zap it of some its real subversive power, make it a fetish object so it can be used to make money off the ones with all of it, the 18-35 year-old caucasian males. This is the same thing America's always done with any subversive display of female sexuality. It's eventually reclaimed by men as "theirs" via condescension: "aren't girls cute when they're angry?" or "it's awesome that girls are so 'slutty' now?" Britney is a feminist as long as she's wearing elementary school drag and appealing to a rape/pedophilia fantasy. Black men are still seen as "sex apes", which is ok as long the average white boy can join in on the action. Through games like Grand Theft Auto, and I suppose I would argue a lot of top 40 hip-hop, white boys get to feel a part of this secret homosocial community where "masculinity" reigns unfettered, black men and their communities, then, being more "savage"--or at least more "primitive"--and in touch with aggressive drives (which are, of course, a sort of biological mandate, which excuses them). They roleplay life in the "ghetto", where cars mysteriously explode in the background and no one thinks twice as they watch someone beat a prostitute to death with a baseball on the street. Because they can't do it for real, and probably can't even admit to themselves that they'd want to, they get off on it so easily.


In the end, the reason why the witchhunters in this debate are so wrong even when they're "right" is because, of course, they're acting as if rockism and racism are things that one can subscribe to by choice. Personally I'm starting to understand "rockism" in much the same way people understand "racism"-- as something we all participate in, wittingly or not. This means that for an individual to deny personal racism is missing the point of what racism is, a cultural condition, something from which we cannot awake (the way history was the nightmare from which Stephen Daedalus "could not awake" in Ulysses) even though we have to continue to try. Rockism is something like a Derridean aporia, in that it's one of the near-paradoxical contradictions that is built into the very fiber of what we've held up as great popular music from its inception. Authenticity is the spectre that will always haunt or rock/pop ideals--what kind of art form so concerned with the cult of personality, with iconography and subversion wouldn't be haunted by this idea of the romantic rockstar hero who shits gold? Why wouldn't we have legends, and prevailing idioms, that eventually become standards? The issue for me is that it's getting so boring to work in the old idioms the old heroes created. It's sounding canned--rock or pop or hip-hop, I don't care. Boring. The Bloc Party, for instance: decent, safe, bland 90s-aping "indie" "rock" with tons of mid-range and midtempo ballads. Yawn. Annie? Kinda catchy indie-metapop? Uhh, no thanks. M.I.A. came close to being interesting, but buckled under the weight of her premature blog hype and embarrassing use of third-world politics to make a fashion statement that's been around in one form or another since the early 19th century.

For a while, hip-hop had promise because it was so fresh-- the dust hadn't yet settled on its brand of self-policing normativity. Now we've seen the hip-hop meta-narrative emerge and we're bored. The terrain is not only mapped out, but thoroughly explored and even colonized.

Let's be our own heroes. Let's make music no one's ever heard. I'm sick of songcrafters in the old idioms, I'm sick of stolen punk "attitude" standing in for Bowie-caliber uebermensch charisma. I love pop and hip-hop, but I, like Stephen Merritt, am sick of teendiva "girlpower" anthems and black men making fun of themselves. I realize that because post-modernism is a condition, we all inevitably think through a nostalgia that can be stifling to the creative impulse at best.

But I know there is still real talent out there, somewhere. We can only hope there are people with vital, new, exciting things to share, lying in wait ready to give me something I can get behind and even (if I were to cut back on opiates) feel.

maybe this isn't DOA

Thanks to my finals recently ending, I may actually have the requisite amount of time and boredom at work to update this again. Post-secondary education should not get in the way of blogging. Nor should one's job or career.

new weekly feature!

From now on, every week, probably on Thursday or Friday, I'm going to pick out something that's played out. Just as an FYI.

This week, via GawkerStalker, further proof of my hypothesis that leggings are now played out like Kanye West, and perhaps the sole necessary antecedent to this proposition:

I spotted Atoosa Rubenstein at a new low-budget sushi place on 57th and 8th around 2:00pm today, eating with a grey-haired older man and acting very concerned. When her phone rang it played "Golddigger" by Kanye and Jamie Foxx.

Enough said. Hurry up and go to that Blackbook photo op, Kanye, so I can see past you to look at Juelz Santana.

that new shit

So the Times and other trendspotters (for example MTV, left) tell us that "leggings are back." Having spent the better part of 2001 furiously cutting the feet off my tights (among other things) while my girlfriends did the same, I find this amusing. What will they tell me next?? That people do a shitload of meth in the mid- and southwest? Thanks, cultural arbiters, for being ahead of just about no one but, umm, my grandma.

There really is no aura anymore.

We have been asking ourselves ever since, 'what could possibly come after the orgy - mourning or melancholy'? Plainly, neither this nor that, instead an incessant face-lifting of all the episodes of modern history, of its processes of liberation (of peoples, sexes, dreams, art and the unconscious - briefly, of all the constituents of the orgy of our times) under the sign of a premonition with respect to an apocalyptic end to it all.

Thanks, Baudrillard. I think that post on Gawker about leggings being "in" might just be such a premonition. If not, this livewire post about the Olsens-cum-muslims will do.

it's only rock and roll, but...

I must admit, after reading about Pete Doherty's heroically cracked-out feats this week, I have newfound respect for his clearly innate skill for mixing completely incompatible drugs and not only surviving, but maintaining a conversation. In all my misspent youth I never once witnessed anyone mix crack with ecstasy, or even make a depraved joke about wanting their worst enemy to do so-- forget about adding smack to the equation.

At this point, everyone rolls their eyes and screams "stop cluttering the internet with this trash!" But there is something interesting going on here. It seems patently ridiculous to write Doherty off as just another reincarnation of Sid Vicious, to me. First, Sid nodded off almost compulsively (Nancy came in handy here, she usually was there to slap him awake)--he was always very present in his addiction. Truly incapacitated by it. He was completely checked out of reality, in a way only junkies can be.

Pete Doherty not only doesn't nod off, he actually shows up for his court dates. He doesn't have that junkie tunnelvision droopy-eyed blank stare, or that throaty monotone going, ashen as he is. He makes it to (most of) his gigs, plays an instrument, writes songs-- even if he has to vomit publically doing it. Where Kurt Cobain had his Sid Vicious impression spot on, down to details like the evil controlling girlfriend/puppetmaster, Pete Doherty built his junkie identity around dating a real legend, the original "heroin chic" ingenue. He is Hedi Slimane's muse. His look is a perfectly executed pastiche of the costumes worn by nearly every legendary junkie-rockstar. By all accounts he's a lovable, affable twat in the end, (ok, he did kick that reporter, but even Bjork's done that!) unlike spit-in-your-face Sid or fetally-positioned-sobbing-in-the-corner Cobain. He claims to have tried dope because he had a "romantic vision of taking opium," referencing and at the same time equating himself with Byron and Keats.

Somehow, Doherty has managed to aestheticize himself out of his own addiction. I would say the interesting thing about Doherty-- the reason he's a phenomenon even though we've seen this story play out a million times-- is that he's the first rock star to *perform* his addiction in this way. Doherty is in junkie drag.

so fucking zen

I could've been wrong about Ian McCulloch being the target of Adam and the Ants on "Stand and Deliver." Apparently, Adam himself liked the Bunnymen. Even better, then, that they could absorb that sort of contradiction. (We love your music, but ditch the trench coat!) I only end up respecting people who can face the fact that, let's say, "the way up and the way down are the same way" without getting too flustered about it, or navel-gazing too long and hard. (Boring! Make something or go home.) No self-righteousness entailed, I swear: I only half-respect myself when I manage to do the same.

zzz

Music writing just seems too located in the frontal lobes for me, these days. It's not limbic enough. I want to hear something and care about it for no particular reason again. I'm not asking for MTZ activation, just some kind of unknowable pleasure, like I used to feel.

For a while, I entertained the thought of being a neurosurgeon. Anyone who knows me is probably terrified to envision me brandishing a medical license of any kind. But I was fairly good at getting to the hippocampus in a sheep brain without damaging it, using only a few slices, during dissections in my anatomy class. (My experience with a cadaver, I'll admit, sent me on an 8-year vegetarian bender.)

The architecture of the brain is everything. It evolved in layers. Buried below even the limbic system (which makes drugs and sex and having babies feel good) is our reptilian brain, where fear and aggression are seated, also found in fish, amphibians, and of course reptiles. It's what leads biologists to believe that humans most originally evolved from some sort of aquatic creature. In other words, we emerged, dripping wet, of vaguely imagined morphology, out of some primordial sea goo, angry, and fighting for survival in the unlikeliest of circumstances.

I don't know where I'm going with this except to say that I woke up grumpy this morning and now I'm scapegoating evolution, the head injury I incurred a couple of years ago, and the genetic hand I've been dealt. And my amygdala for being hyperactive at random intervals.

This remix of "Cherry Coloured Funk" from the Otherness EP by the Cocteau Twins makes me want to take a nap forever. Here's another great EP track for good measure.

language and fascism

Last weekend I learned that if you make a crappy recording of someone talking, and can't quite make out what they're saying, you can boost four specific frequencies to make the recording more intelligible. Those frequencies happen to be the ones where consonants are heard-- consonants, then, being the key to the intelligibility of language. This explained why I can read through French with relative ease yet I don't think I'll ever be able to follow spoken French. It also got me thinking about German and how everything in German seems conceptually very clear even when it arguably isn't, thanks probably to its abundance of consonants and consonant-endings.

Speaking of German, I keep running into this notion of fascism=art, or "art might as well be fascism", everywhere, lately. Having a highly developed aesthetic immediately brings you before the anti-fascist tribunal. The way post-punk is now widely considered a bastion of modernist tendencies toward fascist adherence to formalism and sincerity of purpose. The way Germans are always fascists in American cinema. The way Arnold Schwarzenegger is Austrian (like Hitler!) and appeals to fascist chic as blatantly as David Bowie did in that car in London.

This idea is everywhere this week. Even on Vh1's superfluffy programming. Make it stop!

I love Germans and hold them in no way solely responsible for modernism. They just happened to be the best at it.