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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 cant 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 thats 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 Spectors wall-of-sound production with Cohens 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 Cohens 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. Were 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. Theres room for writing about music that acknowledges both sides of Fredric Jamesons 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 Spotifys 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 Nyongo 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.

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 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 Papasthe 1960s quar tet that rode a string of deceptively sunny- seeming radio hits to become icons of h ippie hedonismexemplified this species of celebrity narcissism. Gifted but irretrievably
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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 winters day. The first Mamas and the Papasalbum, If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (1966) went to the top of Billboards album chart and spawned several hits, including Monday, Monday and California Dreamin, which have become durable folk standards. And al-

ROb HOrning

John Phillips, at photo shoot for his first solo album,1970

ready, on the groupssecond album, rushed out later that year to capitalize on the bands momentum, Phillips was exuberantly singing, I cant 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 lifetimes 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
9

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 onOprah, that she had had a decade-long incestuous relationship with him after they had started using drugs together. Phillipss own sordid memoir, Papa John,published in 1986 after he was convicted of drug trafficking, is appallingly unreflective. Its 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 exploitsincluding his needle sharing with Mackenzieand then tacks on an obligatory mea culpa at the end. But the memoir mostly reads like just another symptom of his peculiar maladythe 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 doesnt 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-

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 hes tryto change hands. Thats 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, its 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 retroactivelythe 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 didnt 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 Phillipss publisher perhaps encouraged was back in the town I grew up in. Before I left him for commercial reasons to offer sensaschool, Id had a falling out with a close friend, tionalistic detailshe 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 mothers basement, up and murdered evanything but register where I was now, in fact, eryonebut in running his own selfishness living. through his litany of dis10

ROb HOrning

I didnt think all that much of Phillips or the Mamas and the Papasthey seemed of a piece and interchangeable with, say, Three Dog Nightuntil I came across Phillipss 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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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 doesnt hesitate to transform the potentially embarrassing details of his personal life into frank songsperhaps 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 behavioras 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 Undergrounds Waiting for My Man to the fabled artists enclave in the mountains outside Los Angeles. In place of Lou Reeds restlessness, Phillips is laconic; instead of gritty urban squalor, theres sun-

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:
Oh, mama, Im in deep water, And its way, way over my head. Everyone thought I was smarter Than to be misled.

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 existone that says,Everyone thought I was smarter.

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 himwaittheir growing irrelevance. After the Mamas ing for him to achieve something definite, and the Papas breakup and that lone solo resomething he cant say he is incapable of but cord, Phillipss intermittent efforts to make something he nonetheless cant 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 nowreleased posthumously by the disorganized notes for which I had in a Varese Sarabandeyou vicariously experibunch of yellow legal pads that I could no ence the thrill of Phillipss heedless burnlonger bring myself to open. ing of entertainment-industry money and You dont have to be a junkie to apprecireckless destroying of brain cells in the futile ate what the songs 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 lineIf 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 Phillipss 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
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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. Its sharing when we confess something; its sharing when we link to someone elses work; its sharing when we simply express approval for something; its 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 audiences demands for transgressive fantasy seem to impose themselves on celebrities without their knowing quite what they are facing. The ce-

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 musicco-opting the spirit of optimism in the 1960s youth scene while subtly undermining it with his lyricsand 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 cant ever give himself over completely to the pretense that pleasing an audience is more important or more powerful than repeatedly trying
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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 internets intricate connectivity supplies us an ever-flashing promise of fame, even though it may end up fleeting or slight. Anyones 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. Its 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 wasnt 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 speakhaltingly, the Los Angeles Times will describe it laterhe 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.
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What just happened? As in Hawthornes Scarlet Letter, when the townsfolk will forever dispute the meaning of Dimmesdales revelations on the scaffold, the matter remains contested. If you ask Richs son, who administers a website devoted to his fathers 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

tim barker

go one step further. Richs 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 1960sKeynesian economic management, high union density, and near full employmentgave workers an unusual willingness to resist their bosses (and some17

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.

RAnk and file countrypolitan

Richs 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 trys offense: passing over nominees like Loofficial, which rocked GMs 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 Years Day, 1953. More crucially, NewtonACE, whose star-studded membershipinJohn refrained from publicly identifying hercluding Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, and self as a country singer. This was too much. Roy Acuffwasnt 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 musicand its audienceinto 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 audiencein 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 ACEs primary purpose will be to
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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 organizations 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

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.

By stressing the historical simultaneity of the ACE and the rank-and-file revolt of the 1970s, I dont 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 Timess 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.
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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 Straits 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 actionsa three-day strike at Lordstown in 2007, the recent Chicago teachers strike, and especially the Republic Windows and Doors sit-down strikethough pale by comparison to the wild 1970s, at least suggest that failure doesnt have to be forever. n

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 pageeverything 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
An excerpt from Rub-a-Dub Style: The Roots of Modern Dancehall 22

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 Peoples 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-

beth lesser

Clive Chin

corded several songs in support of Manley including the crucial Rod of Correction. He also organized the traveling Bandwagon shows that took Manleys 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
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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

the sound and the fury

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. Jamaicas
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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 Manleys political direction placed Jamaica, a small island in Americas 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. 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 didnt know them, I know of them or know about them.

beth lesser

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

a time in the middle 70s when the sound couldnt play at all. Because it was political administration and violence against leaders and opposition. No sound. 1975, 1976. No sound couldnt play. Violence and poverty werent 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 wasnt 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 GardensConcrete JungleJamaicas 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

the sound and the fury

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 overRema, Arnett Gardens, Olympic Gardens, Wareika Hills in East Kingston, Tel Aviv, Payne Land and Southsideall 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 Cant Cross the Border and Barrington Levys 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.
26

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 doesnt 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 youre 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 couldnt go into JLP areas and vice versa. Sometimes choosing a side was the only way to stay safe. Smith, a resident of the Waterhouse districtknown then as Firehouse on account of the rampant violencerecalls, 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 toome 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

beth lesser

island, united under music. However, no matter what an individual DJs 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 youre 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 thatpolitical. I was even talking to Sluggy Ranks and I tell him, When you singing, try sing anything thats talking about whats 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 dont 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 bun down Rema the neighborhood Wilton Gardens. Cup a cup fe go clap Up Massop Claude Massop, the Tivoli Gardens strong27

Sammy Dread

man. That way the other side wan kill you! Thats 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 hes 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

the sound and the fury

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. well 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 couldnt 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 Dont 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 MickeySimpson 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 hasnt 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

the neighboring districts of Jungle (Arnett Gardens) and Rema (Wilton Gardens), both hardcore garrison communities of Trenchtown. Leroy Smarts 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 didnt 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, its 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 westBeeston Street, truck. And keep on coming! Regents Street, Oxford Street. Everybody say People were growing weary of living in peace. And I wasnt sure. I take a little walk fear, and the public pressure for peace was and I cant believe it. I walk right over to Duke growing stronger daily. To support a moratoReids 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

communities. These are ghettos controlled by political gunmen who are loosely linked to Jamaicas two main political parties, the JLP and the PNP. None of these murders have been solved.

the sound and the fury

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

lyrics and patterns that still hadnt 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. Thats 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 Gleaners 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 didnt 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 didnt last long. But it was a good thing. n

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
32

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. Thats why she wanted to spend a chapter of the book on the stories of hip-hop artists from across the regionto capture the voices of what she called the jihad against the jihad. As Soultana and I discussed alter, the em-

kendRA salois

cee was both familiar with and wary of the journalists 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--vis the West, thats 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. Id 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 thingsthe struggle to become the best Muslim you can be, the struggle to get ever closer to Godand little things, like the struggle against the everyday injustices of this world. The journalists 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. Its not that there werent grains of truth behind the journalists questionabout the authoritarian Moroccan government, say, or the presence of Islamist mosques in Casablancas shantytowns. But they were Mo33

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 journalists questions. But answering the question Is rap the battleground between Muslims? at all seemed to endorse the questions 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 cant control. Just answering the questionjust 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.

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. narrativeseven as she understood the journalists 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 basisincreasing 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 Sal 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
34

are making, we can hear ethically informed responses to the transnational economic order that did not singlehandedly create Moroccos 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, its somethingyou cant 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. Moroccos requirements under the IMF loans were like other structural adjustment programs of that era. It has to open capital and consumer

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 todays Internet-based social media, practitionersmusicians, dancers, graf artists and
35

fanshave 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

jihad against jihad against jihad

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 in voke it in the public sphere.

What do we say, for example, about Casablancan emcee Don Biggs 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

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. Im here, on the spot Moulay Youssef, Boulevard Moulay Youssef. Come

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, Centerwere 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.
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 motorbikes broken down, he drives a Ferrari Im online circulating Pictures of Jay-Z in the Maybach, a clip of Fat Joes 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 dont listen to Bigg, I dont listen to H-Kayne, I dont Listen to Fnaire, theres no rap in Morocco1

erage 18-year-old, balancing rebellion with Muslim practice, who would rather play Xbox than deal with his impoverished neighborhood schoolliving 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. Hes living our narrators 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.
What [expletive]? Help me out, I want to ask youwhy 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 arent you? Are you Moroccan, or arent 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 hes doing on Boulevard Moulay Youssef, a posh section of downtown Casablanca, Biggs unnamed suspect describes himself succinctlyyour av37

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 listen-

jihad against jihad against jihad

ers expect to hear in what is, by now, a wellworn argument. Are you Moroccan or arent 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 officials 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, migrs from the African continent burn or destroy their citizenship documents in case they are discovered by immigration authorities. Many dont 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, its 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.
I gave rap everything and it didnt 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 Ill finish my studies 38

They said to me, you crazy or not? Why, what for? I said I can make money at it, Ill 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 policeal-bouliss] They threw me in the sea, they threw me in prison Fuck itI said Im finishing the path My voice is hoarse [literally: I have no more saliva] and people, how come you still dont understand? Fuck, if I had blown myself up, Id never have seen that jail

Biggs 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) wont 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 diploms chmeurs, unemployed university graduates who protest the lack of jobs in the public sector and whose daily
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

kendRA salois

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 itI said, Im 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. Hes not interested in socioeconomic analysis. The security officers 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 bombers 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 others dry laugh. Last, he tries another tactic, a reminder of eternal punishment: To what place are you going, now that youre going to blow yourself up? None of it matters. The last verse dramatizes Biggs argument most clearly: Palpable economic disparity intensifies the pain, hopelessness, and vulnerability of poverty, and the statethe nationhas a responsibility toward the poor.
I want to present myself to you Im at the end of my rope 39

Im 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 dont shiver Even if the maghreb is my country I dont kneel When I hear the speeches, I shiver My country is apparent in the midst of all these struggles If Ive set off a bomb between my ribs, Im now suffering because of it

The last several lines are delivered in a fashion much closer to prose than rap. The percussion, strings, and the multitracking on Biggs voice drop out of the track, leaving him sounding smaller, alone but resolute. Its as if the character has finished his prepared speech and extemporizes something even more personal.
I didnt come to say Im 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 mens desperate poverty and luring them to terror-

jihad against jihad against jihad

ism! Clearly this calls for more high-profile aid and more low-profile drone strikes. But Biggs protagonist knowsbetter than his interrogatorthat the question Are you Moroccan or arent you? is a false choice. Citizenship isnt a word, a birthplace, or a piece of paper, he argues; its 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 bombers 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 extremistsone that aids the goals of both the extremists and the state that hunts them.

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

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 theyd 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 Stevenss 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.

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 declineuntil those trying to ride an egregiously offensive and discredited narrative to fame have no means to do sowe 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 conversationand 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 dont 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 states 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 coloni41

ality of power thrives. Hip-hop artists, as members of a transnational tradition dedicated to critical commentary on ones own culture, often respond to this condition far more eloquently than I have here. In 16/05, Biggs 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 himincluding the famous rappers he loves. In a situation reminiscent of W.E.B. DuBoiss 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 lobalwhich 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 nations 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 markets 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 states monopoly on violence, and economic inequality is political inequality. n

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 Attalis 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 compositiondefined 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
43

topia that would allow music makers to esu cape 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 satisfactionyes, narcissism is the right word herewant, in short, to liberate themselves. Attalian composition seems like a mishmash of different philosophical concepts: theres a little bit of Herbert Marcuses idea of narcissistic eros liberated from the performance principle (the imperative to repress and sublimate desire in productive labor),

robin james

Deleuzes 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 Kants 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 Attalis mind, what liberation sounds like. Liberation from what, though? Attali explicitly frames composition as the liberation from late industrial capitalismthat 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 Attalis 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, Attalis project doesnt leave much room for collective resistance. As unsatisfying as Noises political claims may be, its musical analysis is much more interestingeven 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 harmonygives way to statistics, macroeconomics, and prob44

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 biopoliticsthat is, the statistical maximiza tion of life and minimization of risk or randomness. Foucault and Attali are talking about the same thingbiopolitical 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 neoliberalismthe power to make live and let dieuses 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 populations 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) bour-

loving the alien

geois lifestyles. Theyre about burning calostatistics to manage outlierswhatever ries, raising heart rates, increasing strength, cant 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 womens 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 arent 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 ttractivenessto exceed the averto work on more privileged peoples fingerage without breaking the curve (e.g., by exernails, hair, muscles, houses, diets, children, cising to the point ones 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 Foucaults terms, Western economies litical management of risk as neoliberalisms 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 Hauers the average and zation of repetition. A character in Blade Runabove average repetitive society uses ner says, more life.
45

robin james

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. Whats 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 Cages work, Attali argues, even if in appearance everything is a possibility for him, on average his behav46

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. Its sort of like a Magic 8-Ball toy: In any given shake, any one of the collected answers could appear, but youll never get a response not already programmed into the toy. A similar process of containment is at work with xenomania, Simon Reynoldss term for hipsters taste for ever more exotic non-Western pop musicstheir 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 todays music fan. Here, the Internetboth in the way its architecture manifests global power dynamics, and in the mp3 format shuttled around on file-hosting sitescontrols 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 dont call it x enomania when they appropriate us, do we?) The Internet doesnt 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

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 roToolsthey dont need the ethnomusicological expertise to deal with sounds that arent immediately assimilable to Western musical rubrics, like quarter tones, which dont exist in Western music and which Westerners cant 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: differencebecomes 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 its originally associated. Niche non-Western pop genres
47

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 ones 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, lifes 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 individuals life needs to remain, like a sound wave, within the statistically defined minimum and maximum appropriate to ones social position. Biopolitical neoliberalism manages populations like an audio equalizer manages dif-

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.).

NeolibeRAl approaches to music arent limited to hipsters. With the rise of electronic-dance-pop, they have become mainstream. EDM-pop applies the statistical logic of biopolitical neoliberalismAttalis repetitionto pop songwriting. Aesthetically, it takes experiences usually reserved for privileged groupsthat is, being so ahead of the curve youre almost burned outand 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 youre always at risk of hitting the point of di48

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 Attalis 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 eventa word, a drumbeatwill 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 its 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 Barrows words, soar. Because this is an issue on failed utopias, lets take two dystopian tracks as our examples. First, LMFAOs Party Rock Anthem, whose video parodies zombie apocalypse stories. The main soar starts where the female vocalist enters with her get ups (around 4:25 in the video), and ends when

loving the alien

the chorus returns (around 4:55). The female vocalists part is a simple, clear distillation of the logic of intensity. She says:
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, youll hear a synth that rises in pitch, soaring us to the last put your hands up. The same thing h appens in Rihannas 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 theyre not privileged. Yet at the same
49

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 placewhat frequency range your life is tuned to sound. Producinggetting behind the glass, in front of ProToolsis thus a more useful metaphor for resistance than Attalis 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

50

Everybody Have Fun Tonight

by leah caldwell

LMFAOs 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 Wang Chung, Everybody Have Fun Tonight Wang Chung would perhaps still be big today if they didnt 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

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 Citys 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

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 mens shoulders. #Pandemonium, one Twitter user wrote of the show. But the nights 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 LMFAOs 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 forgettableParty Rock is in the house tonight/ Everybody just have a good
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timeits staying power rests in its screeching synth hook, which heard once can go on repeat in your head for hours. This hookwhich marks the periodic release of built-up tension throughout the songhas 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 songs 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

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 Im in Vegas Bitch to brand Party Rock. Once, Party Rock (after performing Im 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 LMFAOs official, trademarked telling Sky Blus grandmother the name of brand and has come to represent everything their band, she responded, via online chat, from the duos fashion senseneon, animal LMFAO. print, and spandexto its party ethos, what Im in Miami Bitchthe groups first RedFoo describes as a mix of Halloween and singleis a slow drone of a song set to a New Years. beat meant to evoke a bouncy jaunt down LMFAOs 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: Ive or countless cross-branded products but an got a plan, whats 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 its something, careful work of LMFAO LMFAOs official, now its in a song, its to simulate larger-thansomething that we do, life party moments. The trademarked brand its not weird. nonstop confetti never and has come to Like LMFAOs idea marks a climax, just the represent its ethos of Miami, the idea of continuation of an epic
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leah caldwell

party with no real cause for celebration. Commodification and the creation of a simulacrum go hand in hand, and LMFAOs 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 Interscopes 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 LMFAOs 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
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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 CNBCsMoney Marketin August 2011, decked in a drooping jersey to explain his stock portfolio: Apple and producers of Apple components. Five months after hisMoney Marketappearance, RedFoo released his own Apple product: the Beat Rock DJ app that allows for automatic beat synchronization. But behind LMFAOs 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 duothey know they must fight to maintain relevance in an era where attention is scarce. Sky Blu summed it up: Its like Monopoly. Were still the same players playing Monopoly except now were winning the game. And now were in protection mode, and theres lets get more mode. You know? We own these properties so lets put some houses on them so when people walk by, you know? And by properties we mean Miami, Im not a whore and so on. LMFAOs second album, Sorry for Party Rocking, brings Party Rock full circle by rehashing all the signature tropes. The music video for the albums 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

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 applike the clothumping club music. But LMFAOs efforts seups of the labels of Croc vodkadoesnt 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 LMFAOs clothing line is natural, riod of liberation but instead normalizing a even reassuring. They suggest that maybe LMcommodified pseudo-liberation that cannot FAOs 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 Baudrillards Disneyland remains the ulordinary lives have become an endless, joytimate simulacrum: a real without origin or less elaboration of the same party principles: realityin 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, LMFAOs party simuorder of simulation. The LMFAO party works lacrum helped some reach a palpable peak: the same way. Just as people go to Disney land Tonight we are young, so we set the world on to immerse themselves in a fantasy world, fire, was one Twitter users 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 wasnt clear whether the that all parties to some bouncers 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 Marquees 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
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56

Spotivangelism
by whitney erin boesel

Spotify claims to make music social, as if it hasnt 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 theyre 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 catalogI thought some of my favorite bands were too obscure to be in Spo57

tifys 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 isnt lost if your hard drive fails. When my iPod broke, the Spotivangelist choir came out in full-force SSATB crescendo to sing Spotifys 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 doesnt mind if you want to own music; in fact, in the event that all the music doesnt include all of your music, Spotify users have the option of uploading

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, Spotifys premium service both eliminates advertisements and allows users to stream music from their smartphones. But I want my music even when I dont want the Internet, I protested, and sometimes I drive where there isnt 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
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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 youd 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 goesyet which disappear the moment she cancels her subscriptionare part of Spotifys 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

spotevangelism

to at every moment or to share music with advertisements, being chained to a computme in ways that dont involve file transfers or er, depending on Internet access, or perpetuco-listening. Im also not that eager to broadally performing my musical tastesfrom the cast what I listen to at every moment. When pretentious to the perfectly d isgracefulin 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 hed meant by that, newer media technologies are offered emand poked around Spotifys 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 Guinss focus is censorial practices No, dont show what I listen to on Facebook. in newer media, many of his ideas are appliDont automatically publish my new playlists, cable to Spotify as well. He explains that conand dont publish my Top Tracks or Top Arttrol technologies are designed to advance an ists. Dont share my activity on Spotify Social ethos of neoliberal governance and draws (which Spotifys FAQ unhelpfully defines as on both Deleuzes work on control and Fouall the features of Spotify that help you share caults work on governmentality to show that music with friends)but as soon as I unchoice 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 doesnt choose from a vast array Valley sense necessarily entail hearing of options, the freedom
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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 Deleuzes highway metaphor from Having an Idea in Cinema, were encouraged to see the lone car on the empty road as a symbol of freedom and self-direction. Were 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 were encouraged to see that choice as freedom without thinking about what isnt available to us and why. Spotify promises millions of tracks, any time you like Just help yourself to whatever you want, whenever you want ita seemingly infinite array of musical choices, the ultimate in musical freedom. The site further asserts that the services 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 ones own. Why duplicate the labor?
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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, its not that simple: All the music is really just Spotifys (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 Spotifys 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 cant take it with you. A part of me would be at Spotifys mercy, held hostage by the synergy between my emotions and sound. Technically speaking, theres 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

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!), Im 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. Im 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 Id be sick of paying for their service, or perhaps theyd 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.

In a certain technoutopian view of the future, we are headed toward a post- property world. The shift from ownership
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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 cant 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 theyre on Spotify; I want to share all my music, whether or not its 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 friends 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

whitney erin boesel

Sense, Spotify offers him neither meaningful revenue nor meaningful connection with his fans. Its 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, hes 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 Webbs music and so feel as though theyve 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 Spotifys too-perfect world, what Ive most been struck by is everything that isnt 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 communityand social capitalso easily available, these perks are only accessible when you stay on the Spoti-Highway. Youre welcome to pull over and go for a hike through the wilderness (if you really want to), but youll be going on that hike by yourself. Being on Spotify also isnt as social as Id 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 wouldnt have encounfriends listen to (and arFar from freedom, tered otherwise; Ive disgue about) music late covered a couple of othSpotify feels like being into the night, but its ers through looking at more like lurking outtrapped: You can what my Spotifriends are side some of my friends leave but you cant listening to. But where Id windows to peep at what feared being d angerously theyre playing, and then take it with you
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spotevangelism

quietly skittering off through the bushes. The truth is that while Spotify may be social, its 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 elses) activity in my feed; social discovery sans dialogue remains deeply disconcerting. Perhaps Im thrown, too, by the experience of becoming a generalized otherone of many who will weed through someones 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 theres 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 interestsby 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 Spotifys garden. And I know, I know: Theres an irony here. I cling to the chaos of my local music (both analog and digital) in much the same
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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 CDsand yes, even local mp3 fileshave 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 doesnt 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 cant get on the Spoti-Highway, Spotify files cant get off the Spoti-Highway. Spotify remains in control, no matter whatand in doing so inserts itself not just between musicians and fans, and not just between individual music enthusiasts, but between me and the musicitself. n

That Oceanic Feeling

by Tavia Nyongo

Channel Orange isnt Frank Oceans coming out. Its a tidal wave crashing down

Nineteen-year-old Christopher Breaux fell hard for another straight-acting boy who wouldnt love him back, confessing his love in a car parked in front of the girlfriends 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 hasnt 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 rue65

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 isnt about the sampling wars. Its 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,

tavia Nyongo

American style, in merciless couplets like:

She said, Ive had a hell of a summer, so baby, dont 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 wont quite fit into the comforting melodic or narrative resolution of pop culture. We heard strains of such a love on Oceans 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 Ive 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 Oceans meditation on love and commitment is best captured by NCWYS in the SoundCloud comments to American Wedding:
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 dont.

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 lifes 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 addsmixing substance abuse and class snobbery into a potent cocktail of something called upward mobility:
Well both be high The help dont stare They just walk by They must dont care.

Ocean is a practiced journeyman of pop66

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 isnt quite old enough to know that he

that oceanic feeling

shouldnt 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 aint HD, thats 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 its 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 queenwell 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 Mones Many Moons than Miis less sexual orientation than chemical dischael Jacksons 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 Mone 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 clichs 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 Franks oceanic feelings on Channel Orjustified his belated coming out in terms of the ange crash in waves that obliterate distincreporters 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 roomand ends disorientation cient Egypt and postwith Forrest Gump
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tavia Nyongo

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 Breauxs beau, Forrest Gump boils Hollwood sap down to a lubricious bump and grind:
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.
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But dont confuse Oceans 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:
He said Allah Hu Akbar I told him dont curse me Bo Bo you need prayer I guess it couldnt hurt me.

that oceanic feeling

Bad Religion leaves it unclear whether it is his taxi drivers 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 Freuds 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 couldnt 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
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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 neednt 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 thats why a conventional coming out, with its endless reiterations of the transparently obvious and anodyne, seems beside the point. Frank Ocean isnt like you or me; he isnt even much like Christopher Breaux any longer. n

Reviews

Punk Isnt
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 arent 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
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Asking What is punk? is the wrong question. The answer inevitably makes itself wrong

Punk, An Aesthetic Rizzoli 286 pages

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. Lets 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 doesnt pretend to be anything it isnt, which cant 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 As 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
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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 isnt expected to have a D.I.Y. cultural product or three on her rsum? 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 cant 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 clich: 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 Plentys exploding head which graces the cover of Punk), and Ive been in punk bands since I was 17. Punk led me, via Greil Marcuss Lipstick Traces, to the Situationists, who in turn led me to theory

punk isnt

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 isnt punk or its just right-wing negation or its the exception that proves the rule. When Crass sang Punk became a fashion just like hippy used to be/ And it aint got a thing to do with you or me in 1978s Punk Is Dead, a song that is punk as fuck, theyre 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 punks appearance and has relentlessly dogged the concept since: I know punks born 10 years after that songs 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 bands albums. This points toward the futility of trying to carve out what punk innately is and the
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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 (Uhhnothing?). As A.M Gittlitz notes in Pussy Riots 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, canonicaltaking 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

Willie osterweil

and possibilities for punks deployment. Pussy Riots radical, public performances perform exactly the opposite thing from these books.
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 punks existential tasks. The smashing of sacred relics conjures societys 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

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, well 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 havent 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 youll 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. Im 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, its a no brainer. n

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When last we spoke, and when I say we I mean methis 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 werent 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 couldnt 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 feverthe very condition that he was trying to save the young mothers from. Hey irony, not cool at all. Now that I think of it, Im not sure there is much need for any irony at all as our days dwindle.

I dont 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. Ill get you started: Earlier this month there was an auction of some of Elvis Presleys private belongings. It was a great success, not only for the auctioneers but for humanity itself. Elviss 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 its 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, dont 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 didnt question what this world has come to that someone would use a young dog as a weapon. But rather, Im glad that the young can look at an old problem in a new way. Im 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, heres 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. Its time to stop searching for the right answers and try and figure out the right questions ... next time.

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