Towards a Communist Futurism... But What Kind?

From Twitter: @strawfordthomas

There seems to be a small confluence of sorts taking place on the left right now. I say "seems" because it may very well just be a series of coincidences, but if the surrealists believed in ascribing deeper meaning to coincidences then I figure I can roll with it too so let's go ahead and call it a "confluence." Said confluence appears to be around issues of technology, specifically its role in constructing a fully emancipated communist society.

To be sure, this discussion is as old as the socialist ideal itself, and certainly played an important role for Marx. It was, after all, the productive forces thrust into existence along with capitalism that made abundance possible and communism along with it. And any web search of the phrase "communism and technology" will yield any number of ongoing discussions on the topic, from Reddit forums to videos of the legendary Ray Kurzweil stating that the goals of communism will be achieved through technology and the open source movement (in front of a screen overflowing with corporate logos, at which we might direct our ironic snickering).

Kurzweil is of course no serious radical, admirable though his idealism may be. What seems to be putting the discussion about technology and the radical transformation of society further toward center stage, however, is that large swathes of the young and growing radical left itself are engaging in serious and creative ways with it. Jacobin, undoubtedly the most important publication on the American socialist left right now, just published its technology issue (which I am very much looking forward to reading). And just this past Wednesday, The Guardian ran an article on "Fully automated luxury communism" from VICE's  Brian Merchant. 

Again, it could just be coincidence; one shouldn't ascribe too much meaning to a simple proliferation of articles, but nor should be ascribe too little. What the content of these articles points to is the ideological and material overlap of the oft-repeated "millennial" generation: that this young set of workers has not only been systematically screwed over the past six or seven years, but happens to be the most educated in history. They are also, significantly, the first generation to come fully of age in the midst of the palpable everywhere-ness of the internet. The older ones among them probably even remember the debates around peer-to-peer file sharing that came about in the late 90's and lasted through most of the 00's, along with the broader questions that such debates raised: whether culture should be free or considered "a right," why the entertainment industry was willing to bankrupt people out of sheer self interest, so on and so forth. We shouldn't beat around the bush here: an educated, tech-savvy populace that is systematically shut out from "the wonders of capitalism" is potentially a very dangerous one. That's been at least theoretically true for a while; the difference now is that growing segments are starting to realize this.

Merchant's piece in The Guardian is worth reading. The following segment distills its basic thrust:

Located on the futurist left end of the political spectrum, fully automated luxury communism (FALC) aims to embrace automation to its fullest extent. The term may seem oxymoronic, but that’s part of the point: anything labeled luxury communism is going to be hard to ignore.

“There is a tendency in capitalism to automate labor, to turn things previously done by humans into automated functions,” says Aaron Bastani, co-founder of Novara Media. “In recognition of that, then the only utopian demand can be for the full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated.”

Bastani and fellow luxury communists believe that this era of rapid change is an opportunity to realise a post-work society, where machines do the heavy lifting not for profit but for the people.

“The demand would be a 10- or 12-hour working week, a guaranteed social wage, universally guaranteed housing, education, healthcare and so on,” he says. “There may be some work that will still need to be done by humans, like quality control, but it would be minimal.” Humanity would get its cybernetic meadow, tended to by machines of loving grace.

Sounds absolutely great to me, and for a few reasons. The first is that any straightforward grappling with the notion of "future" on the part of the left has to be seen above all else as positive. It is certainly preferable to the neoliberalism's cultural non-choice between soporific nostalgia and apocalyptic dystopianism.

The second is that such speculation rescues socialism from the pernicious latter-day images of calloused throngs of deprived, gray-suited workers shuffling between sparse hovels and drab, dirty factories. It's not for nothing that these stereotypes have themselves been comfortably amalgamated into popular dystopia. That so much of the technology giving us easy access to movies, music, information and culture is manufactured in massive monuments to hyper-exploitation in the last economic superpower to dub itself "communist" (and laughably so) reveals how intertwined these two tropes are.

Jacobin's technology issue

All of these are among the reasons that we at Red Wedge have put such a premium lately on the importance of utopia in the radical imagination. It's why Ytasha Womack's commentary on the burgeoning Afrofuturist movement was an essential part of our Black History Month online issue, and why Jase Short has been so prolific in his blogging on sci-fi and speculative fiction. The desire to speculate is not an idle one; the ability to imagine is not just a side-effect of what it means to be human. Both are central to humanity and to our capability to have any kind of culture or society in the first place -- let alone a society worth living in. Technology can, will and should be a central part of this discussion. 

Merchant, Bastani and the British anti-capitalist group Plan C (also briefly profiled in the piece) all locate threads of FALC in radically imaginative works as varied as The Grundrisse, the books of sci-fi authors Iain Banks and Kim Stanley Robinson, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and even Star Trek. But perhaps the best part of Merchant's piece is the closing, in which Bastani locates the urge for luxury in the materialism of Migos' "Versace":

Consider the Atlanta rapper Migos’ hit song, Versace, he says. “You get these music videos the kids love, where it’s completely outlandish, luxury everywhere. The story of capitalism is that if you work hard and play by the rules you can get this, which is obviously bullshit.

“But if you say, well look, if you want this, what you need to do is seize the means of production. We need to get automation and make it subordinate to human needs, not the profit motive. It’s about seizing the bakery rather than stealing the bread.” With robots presumably kneading the dough.

The point is notable because it doesn't resort to the tired and moralistic anti-materialism that many of us are used to hearing from liberals and austerians alike, but rather puts the focus on distribution of resources. Luxury as such is not the crux, but rather the question of why so few should have so much of it at the expense of everyone else. It's a point that runs parallel to some of the central foci of debates around technology and ethics: ideally, technological progress should liberate rather than emiserate, make people more independent rather than reliant, and transform their labor from an abstract mechanism of profit into something truly rewarding and artful. "Luxury for all" may not get at the most immediate needs of a contemporary workers' movement, but it absolutely ignites our imaginative urge for liberation. It is the 21st century version of "We Want Bread, and Roses Too."

* * *

There is a certain sense, however, in which Merchant's piece leaves me wondering.  There is no reason to think that Bastani and other FALC proponents are indifferent to ecological devastation; Merchant's article doesn't mention climate change, but that may be because it's on an altogether different topic.

Altogether different, but inextricably related and very urgent. Nothing animates dystopian anxiety nowadays quite like the specter of climate disaster. Animations are being created that reveal how many of our modern cities will be underwater should all the ice finally disappear. News that both ends of Antarctica may be disintegrating make such videos seem less like speculation and more like the long-term weather forecast. A liberated, communally controlled technology may be able to hedge against the worst effects of this (maybe constructing massive retaining walls around New York and Sydney, Johannesburg and Tokyo) but this would of course be an act of survival. Luxury doesn't factor into a sinking city -- or at least one that's aware of its sinking.

The idea of a communism characterized by massive skyscrapers and steel beams zig-zagging this way and that as flying cars dart through them with not a single green-space in sight doesn't seem so much pie-in-the-sky as straightforwardly unappealing to me. I have no interest in traipsing through a "cybernetic meadow." This is admittedly an aesthetic preference, but there is a political dimension to it as well: that of the need to bridge the metabolic rift that capitalism has created between humanity and ecology.

One need not counterpose a technologized "luxury communism" with a sustainable ecosocialism; this rejoinder isn't meant so much as an argument as a supplement. In fact one might say that neither can be fully realized without the other. Maybe that's why the relationship of Marxism to ecology is so often as misunderstood as its relationship to technology.

So much of the anti-capitalist imagination grapples with these twin misunderstandings. It is not for nothing that William Morris wrote his novel of quasi-pastoral utopianism News From Nowhere partially as a rebuke to Bellamy's Looking Backward. While both imagined a world in which labor was fully and creatively realized, it could be argued that neither were able to imagine past the apparent irreconcilability of industry and nature.  

From Morris' News From Nowhere

A reading of Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed reveals how hard some have chewed over the concept in a more contemporary setting. On the one hand the reader is presented with a society as preoccupied with not living beyond the planet's means as it is with the shunning of private property: fully equal and apparently liberated on almost every level, but also forced to live incredibly simply and primitively. On the other is a "propertarian" society, rich in almost every material sense of the term, technologically advanced yet profoundly hierarchical and exploitative. That the planet of (relatively) primitive communism is in actuality a de facto colony of their advanced propertarian counterparts isn't due to Le Guin's lack of imagination so much as it is her acknowledgement of how many stumbling blocks stand in the way of resolving the contradiction.

Even in Womack's piece on Afrofuturism, the role of technology is treated with a great amount of suspicion, and understandably so: "While the futurist of the early 20th century hailed all technology as progressive, Afrofuturists do not. In fact, race is referred to as a technology. The creation of race -- an effort to justify the transatlantic Slave Trade and create a caste system defined by color and enacted through law and violence -- is explored as a technology in Afrofuturism. "

And yet, even as this same contradiction has never been fully overcome, its two sides cannot help but butt up against each other in radical history. Any serious reading of Marx yields its own examples. Those short years after the Russian Revolution, before it was squashed by civil war and Stalinism, saw an all-too-brief example, when the Soviets began to re-conceive the relationship between urban development and the preservation of large tracts of land. Concepts taken for granted in ecological science today -- such as that of the "biosphere" -- were first seriously theorized in this environment. This was in loose tandem to the futurist imagination of Mayakovsky, Burlyuk, Matyushin and others that was unleashed by the revolution. How the futurists' romanticized visions of technology might have dovetailed with the socialist order's attempt to live sustainably with nature is a question that can only be left to the imagination.

We must, however, at least attempt to imagine. Contemporary capitalism's boosters naturally pose today's order as being capable of sustainability (hoping as they do that we don't notice how destructive profit is to the planet) but in doing so it essentially betrays its stunted, nostalgic vision. Here's what Alyssa Battistoni says about it:

A “green economy” can’t just be one that makes “green” versions of the same stuff, or one that makes solar panels in addition to SUVs. Eco-Keynesianism in the form of public works projects can be temporarily helpful in building light rail systems and efficient infrastructure, weatherizing homes, and restoring ecosystems — and to be sure, there’s a lot of work to be done in those areas. But a spike in green jobs doesn’t tell us much about how to provide for everyone without creating jobs by perpetually expanding production. The problem isn’t that every detail of the green-jobs economy isn’t laid out in full — calls for green jobs are meant to recognize the fraught history of labor-environmentalist relations, and to signify a commitment to ensuring that sustainability doesn’t come at the expense of working communities. The problem is that the vision they call forth isn’t a projection of the future so much as a reflection of the past — most visions of a “new economy” look a whole lot like the same old one. Such visions reveal a hope that climate change will be our generation’s New Deal or World War II, vaulting us out of hard times into a new era of widespread prosperity.

The same goes for urban life itself as it does for economic development. Here's Battistoni again, this time in an article for Jacobin's previous issue on imagining the socialist city:

Just as the scope of the metropolis stretches beyond city limits, urban politics are bound up not only in struggles over zoning or development, but in the resources that fuel city life and definitions of property and ownership that have evolved in the context of corporate labs and factory farms.

The question before us in the twenty-first century is: how to extend the much-touted right to the city to everyone — human and nonhuman inhabitants alike? ... [T]he architecture of the future can’t do it alone. Reclaiming the city while simultaneously reinventing it will require challenges not only to the privatization of public space and rising real estate values, but to the privatization of life and protection of intellectual property rights.

From the "Luxury Communism" Tumblr

This invoking of Lefebvre's "right to the city" goes beyond mere prescience. David Harvey's description of the concept consciously links the reinvention of urban life with the process of collective reinvention of the human experience. What might such a reinvention look like? Would the removal of the profit motive from the urban experience also ease the tyranny of the clock over our lives and allow us to -- as we did prior to industrial capitalism -- sync our own rhythms with those of the earth itself? Would we want to? Would it even be a conscious decision? How would technology aid in this endeavor rather than hinder it?

What role would technology -- particularly biotechnology -- play in the reestablishment of the commons; not just in the urban sense but in a broader ecological framework? Would the ultimate realization of our right to the city mean the final dissolution of the divisions between town and country as well as humans and nature? To what degree does our estrangement from labor parallel our estrangement from what we produce? Must those boundaries be done away with before we can ultimately and in turn do away with the boundary between labor and leisure? Does the technological bridging of the metabolic rift hold the key to "work" simply becoming "art" and vice versa?

I have zero answers to these questions. Preferences? Sure, but they're little more than daydreaming and aren't really germane to the point at hand. What does seem relevant is that, even as Marxism's relationship with technology and ecology have each been historically tense, and even as the meta-relationship between each has itself been fraught, they are all nonetheless unavoidably crucial to a world where we are free to create what we are meant to create. 

Sigma Alpha Epsilon vs. Broke Phi Broke

And so it begins. Many of us knew it would almost as soon as the news broke. It is, after all, about as inevitable as it is ridiculous, and it's very, very, very ridiculous: the blaming of Black culture for white racism. That's a blunt description but it's certainly apt when it comes to what transpired on MSNBC's insufferable Morning Joe earlier this week. Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and guest Bill Kristol think that Waka Flocka Flame is a hypocrite for canceling a performance at Oklahoma University after the video leaked of the university's Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity singing about how "there will never be a n*gger SAE" and that the brothers would sooner see said "n*gger" "hanging from a tree."

Brzezinski seems confused as to whether Waka Flocka's songs are actually songs. Kristol appears bothered that major corporations are allowed to profit off of these songs (as if he ever had any problem making money of the tripe he peddles as original thought). And Scarborough wants to remind us that the majority of people who buy hip-hop records in the US are white; therefore they couldn't possibly hear such awful words at home but rather are being corrupted by amoral, violent, depraved rap artists.

Never mind that mere days after the SAE story broke and the frat was rightfully kicked off campus, a 2013 video leaked of the frat's house mother brazenly and happily repeating the n-word into a camera phone. So, in fact, yes these kids had heard the word "at home," and it's likely they heard it on a regular basis. 

Not to be outdone, Rush Limbaugh then had to chime in defending the Morning Joe crew. Using the same basic logic, he insisted that if the exact same words had been performed by Kanye West, "it'd be a hit." Limbaugh is clearly hoping that nobody questions the basic veracity of the notion that he understands anything about popular culture. Perhaps I'm wrong and he actually does, but if so then it seems to me he would have to go out of his way to prove it. That, however, would require pause for reflection, which seems more and more to be approaching the status of cardinal sin in the realm of media punditry.

This line of "reasoning" coming from Limbaugh, Brzezinski and others is nothing new. Don Imus used it in 2007 when he was rightfully pilloried for calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos," claiming that the term "didn't originate in the white community." Imus was later suspended and fired by CBS Radio, but his attempt to deflect the blame was taken up by several other talking head types, to the point where even moguls like Russell Simmons felt forced into demanding their own labels start applying stricter standards to their artists' language. Imus, naturally, ended up back on the air and in syndication within a year.

But really, this whole logic is about as old as American racism itself. As many others have pointed out, the vile bigotry spouted by these frat boys took root well before the existence of hip-hop or even recorded music. Sigma Alpha Epsilon — founded at the University of Alabama in 1856, when the question of slavery was just about coming to a head in the United States — is the only still-active fraternity in America with roots in the Antebellum South. The imagery of lynching these troglodytes so gleefully invoked is a brazen and frankly stomach-turning reminder of the kind of systematic violence that enabled the perpetuation of the slave system. It seems reasonable to assume that such violence has likely been manifested in the frat's culture in one way or another and more or less continuously from day one. 

Place this in the context of what Lindy West describes in her piece in The Guardian: that frats (or at least the oldest, whitest ones) aren't just for rich kids who need to pay to have friends. They are an institutional expression of America's deeply entrenched class system, which necessarily means they can't help but be saturated with the white supremacy so central to American capitalism. It is therefore easy to grasp why some are so quick to defend them, to let them off the hook, to forgive their racist behavior (along with the misogyny, the hazing, the queerphobia that still somehow manages to be vaguely homoerotic) and to furthermore suggest that they be shielded from the influence of a depraved and irresponsible underclass.

This kind of anxiety about the cultural reach of the unwashed masses has been applied in a historically unique way to Blacks. The American establishment's regard of Africans and their descendants has always bestowed upon the latter's cultural expressions a kind of sub-human, quasi-mystical power that, if left unchecked and allowed to corrupt the hearts and minds of well-meaning white folk, would potentially overrun the alleged decency and civility of European life. Upon witnessing the gathering of slaves for the purpose of communal song and dance in New Orleans' Congo Square in the early 1800's, British architect Benjamin Latrobe expressed a kind of wary amazement mixed with fear of such "savage" displays. After abolition, when the music of former slaves began to really penetrate America's nascent popular culture, it was looked at with a similar suspicion. Blues was "devil's music." Jazz (along with reefer) was in the early 1900's perceived by many a white citizen as one of the Black man's most pernicious weapons, capable of almost hypnotic powers over the white listener (particularly women).

And what exactly has comprised this noble white culture so worthy of protection? There is little likelihood that Limbaugh singled out Kanye for this reason, but it's a telling example nonetheless. Longtime Kanye fans will remember the series of skits peppered throughout Late Registration based around the foundation of a fraternity just for poor Black students: Broke Phi Broke. The humor of the skits derived from the absurd lengths that the brothers would go to in order to find pride in their own destitute situation, but it also got at more than that. Music writer Mickey Hess described the tracks as illustrating "a contradiction at the core of contemporary American life: the need to belong, to fit in, with your fellow humans versus the Darwinistic mad grab at material things, success in the latter being the very definition of success in our culture." That a college fraternity provides such a potent site for this kind of examination of American capitalism is not a coincidence. Most of the kids who pledge frats like SAE aren't the kind who see a contradiction between the need to belong and the materialistic mad grab — mostly because they've never had to sacrifice for what they want, let alone what they need to survive. Indeed, their whole notion of belonging is entirely predicated upon their ability to accumulate and possess.

Any sane society would see such people, along their rituals and gatherings, as inherently parasitic, an unnecessary hangover from an era that was pathetically trying to ape the traditions of a useless and needlessly entitled aristocracy. The quickness with which Morning Joe, Kristal and Limbaugh are rallying around SAE, the brazenness with which they are trying to shift blame, shows that this is sadly not the case. Jon Stewart is correct in pointing out the utter hypocrisy in demanding that Blacks "pull their pants up" while refusing to make similar demands of responsibility on white kids, but what he's describing is essentially the dynamic of one of America's oldest culture wars. 

Update: An article at Slate (but originally appearing at Inside Higher Ed) went up just a few hours after this post, and is highly recommended for readers who want to get a glimpse of the depth of the racism that exists at SAE. A few highlights that bear mentioning: The racist chant at Oklahoma is hardly new, and goes back at least to circa 2000 at a university in Texas. Several college chapters have been disciplined or causes outrage for everything from blackface to flying Confederate flags to throwing parties that mock inner-city people of color. The frat's "love" for music apparently goes back to the aftermath of the Civil War, when two members wrote a song claiming that SAE had “entered, met and held at bay its rivals in the North.” This was one of the songs that gained them a reputation as "the singing fraternity."

New Track and New Words From BLXPLTN

A look at BLXPLTN second album. Written and performed by BLXPLTN. Produced by Autry Fulbright and Elliott Frazier. Released by Wolfshield Records.

BLXPLTN are probably one of the best and most original bands to come out of the large, diverse-yet-disparate Afropunk milieu over the past year. Not quite punk rock, not quite industrial, not quite IDM, the band label themselves "futurepunk." This is both fitting and of obvious interest for anyone tiring of art and politics that use retreads of the past as a rote blueprint. While I certainly wouldn't call BLXPLTN's music utopian, their sound and outlook see utopia's mirror opposite, dystopia, not as some warning but something very much already in existence in the here and now. That's a subtle difference from the way in which popular culture tends to treat the subject of dystopia, but a fairly powerful one if you ask me. Add the lyrics to that equation (a fairly blunt tying together of the racism faced by Muslims and Arabs and that faced by Black people) and there's a real sense of an intersectional attempt to grapple with the notion that there can and must be something beyond the repressive impasse of "post-racialism."

A few more of their thoughts on that matter can be read in their recent piece for Huffington Post's "Black Voices" blog. I won't restate what they've already said, but I will say that what struck me most as someone preoccupied with finding the organic connection between politics and musical expression was the way in which the group naturally progressed from their own need for emotional and creative catharsis into a forum of collective struggle. The way in which the group ties the criminalization of Black human beings to the subsequent scapegoating and co-optation of Black art and culture is equally deft:

There is a tangible shift when one realizes he or she is not alone. For us, stories of police brutality, institutional injustice and inherent racism aren't just something to glance over in the news feed; this is every day of our lives. The boot that pushes down on your back is the same boot that pushes down on ours. The only hope we have is in standing together against an unjust, inequitable system. Perhaps that's why the music of rebellion touches us in a different way. The dismantling and reimagining of these systems takes bodies. Bodies organizing, bodies marching, bodies put in harm's way. This frenzy of protest parallels the organized chaos of a punk show. The black body is a beautiful thing, yet it is feared rather than revered. To that end, can we say the same for black music?

Absolutely a worthwhile read.

Two Somethings On the Death of Shaimaa El-Sabbagh

There is something magnetic in the poems of Shaimaa El-Sabbagh. I say this even though the lyricism of most translated work tends, in my view, to fall flat. Different languages are built differently, with different grammatical constructions and syntactical idiosyncrasies available for poets and wordsmiths to play with. This wordplay, as well as the fun and beauty it potentially invokes, can often be, well… lost in translation.

This isn’t the case with El-Sabbagh’s poetry. Whether this is a testament to her own skills or the translation abilities of Maged Zaher I can’t really say, though I suspect it’s both. In any event, the two poems that have been released to an English audience since her death five weeks ago on January 24th at the hands of Egypt’s security forces have proven to possess a real pull.

There is an unavoidable sense of anxious tension running beneath the fluidity of the words, a sense that the achievement of real and unabashed beauty requires Herculean strength. “A Letter In My Purse,” the poem translated by Zaher and posted at ArabLit.org the day after news of her death broke, accomplishes a subtle, sly humor by personalizing a lost or stolen purse:

I am not sure
Truly, she was nothing more than just a purse
But when lost, there was a problem
How to face the world without her
Especially
Because the streets remember us together
The shops know her more than me
Because she is the one who pays

It’s an off-kilter kind of poem, honoring an inanimate object that uniquely seems to synthesize commerce and emotional attachment. A comment on gendered commodity fetishism? Perhaps, in a glib way. Given that Sabbagh was a Marxist we can reasonably surmise that she was at the very least aware of that axis when she wrote the poem. But more than that, it’s a peek into how our own routines and attachments twist our feelings and thought-processes into the most absurd kind of torture.

In “I’m the Girl Banned from Christian Religion Classes,” there is a distinctly more aggressive, defiant tone at play. Sabbagh’s words find violence in the mundane:

I’m the girl banned from attending Christian religion classes, and Sunday mass
Although I am a witness to the crucifixion of Jesus
In Train Station Square at the height of the morning
Even then, all the windows were open and the blood was racing the cars on the asphalt
The eyes of the girls were running in Heaven, catching the forbidden rocking chair.

The useage of religious iconography -- particularly Christian iconography -- is somewhat puzzling. According to the New York Times article on her death, Sabbagh was raised by conservative traditionalist Muslim parents, and she is reported to have frequently rebelled against her upbringing. This would prima facie rule out the possibility that the Christian imagery is intended as a jab against religious repression -- or at least any such repression which with she has direct experience.

Far more likely is that the imagery of crucifixion is deployed as a tool to communicate both outsider status and martyrdom. The two themes seem to weave together tighter and tighter through the short poem, bolstered throughout by the energy of someone refusing to be cowed by anything or anyone. There is a sense here of the woman who, upon being told “smile baby” by a lecherous passer-by, responds with daggers in her eyes. Moreover, that this kind of refusal is both secretly and collectively shared.

It bears mentioning here that Sabbagh was part of a poetic milieu somewhat on the fringes of the Egyptian literary scene. Her use of language was hardly conventional, neither coming off as plainspoken nor conforming strictly to the abstract. According to the NYT piece:

She became one of a small group of published Egyptian poets working in the avant-garde style of free verse but using popular, colloquial Arabic. Rejecting the grand and overtly political themes favored by the previous generations, she focused instead on the details of everyday life. Her generation “stopped doing noisy politics,” said Maged Zaher... “There is politics, but it is not sloganeering.”

Sabbagh apparently had a passion for giving the colloquial its intellectual due. Her Masters degree from the Academy of Arts in Cairo was in folklore. She researched the traditions of small villages and towns up and down the Nile Delta, many of which have been dwindling for some time. Friends in the Socialist Popular Alliance Party of which she was a member called her “the voice of the revolution” for her skill with leading chants, and reading her poetry it seems that her words were intended to lend the same kind of uplift.

* * *

There is something stark in the treatment of Shaimaa El-Sabbagh’s death. Just two-and-a-half weeks before she was gunned down in Cairo, the Charlie Hebdo shootings had taken place. All of a sudden we were barraged by vociferous messages defending freedom of expression (including artistic expression) from tyrannical violence. Yet here was a poet slain by police with impunity. Western leaders had little to say.

We can rationalize this if we like, or pick away at the crude parallel: There was only one killed in Cairo compared to twelve in Paris, and there’s no proof Sabbagh’s killer targeted her because of her writing; they did it because they were a cop and it’s the cops’ job to dole out violence at the behest of a repressive state apparatus. But the rationalization most likely to run through the head of any president or prime minister tempted to say anything about her killing was probably that, unlike the Paris killings, the death of Shaimaa El-Sabbagh was carried out at the hands of a government supported by the West. There’s very little political cache in supporting artists’ and writers’ right to life when they aren’t targeted by your scapegoat du jour.

Note: Red Wedge will be publishing two of Shaimaa El-Sabbagh's poems this weekend for our International Working Women's Day issue.

Philip Levine, Time and Work-Discipline

After the death of Philip Levine late last week, there were plenty of people sharing this video online of the late Poet Laureate reading one of his best-known poems at AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington:

It’s a good video because in seeing Levine read his own words, you get the sense that he was a lot like his poetry: plainspoken, patient, sensitive, a little bitter even but not so bitter that listening to him becomes a struggle.

It is also a good video because Levine’s poetry is something of a time capsule. The imagery in “What Work Is” comes from a bygone era. Levine was from Detroit, the once proud citadel of American auto that is now the poster-child of industrial decline and economic devastation. The factories he describes are barely there anymore, and the third shifts are pretty much gone too.

At the same time, there is a familiarity to it, something that makes the poetry seem relevant even though few young listeners will ever see the inside of an auto plant. The point of view that Levine writes from -- that of a worker waiting on the hiring line in the vain hope of being picked for the day -- isn’t one engulfed by the monotonous, foreboding rhythms of the assembly line. The rhythm at which he speaks, punctuated as they are by tense, anticipatory pauses, is the rhythm of the shiftless, desperate idler. That’s a rhythm of life understood by anyone who has understood un-or-underemployment for any real stretch of time in their life.

Compare this with some of the verse quoted in E.P. Thompson’s essay “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism.” Early on he quotes the work of Augustan era poet Stephen Duck, “The Thresher’s Labour”:

Week after Week we this dull Task pursue,
Unless when winnowing Days produce a new;
A new indeed, but frequently a worse,
The Threshall yields but to the Master’s Curse:
He counts the Bushels, counts how much a Day;
Then swears we’ve idled half out Time away.
Why look ye, Rogues! D’ye think that this will do?
Your Neighbours thresh as much again as you.

“This would appear,” says Thompson, “to describe the monotony, alienation from pleasure in labour, and antagonism of interests commonly ascribed to the factory system.”

It is interesting to contrast this stanza, with its tight, almost tyrannical rhythm filled with resentment and exhaustion, and the work of Levine’s unemployed laborer, who in essence resents “his brother” for being wracked and run ragged on a daily basis. The man with all the time in the world but nobody to sell it to hates the man whose time is violently stolen from him.

Why bring up this difference? Because between the two there is a sense of the dual character of labor and therefore in turn the dual character of what made Levine’s poetry important. It is that tension between an abstract and cruel freedom and an exhaustion that still somehow feeds you that made his poetry matter. As Marx said, the only thing worse for a worker than being exploited under capitalism is not being exploited. We know the rhythm of deprivation and indolence. We know the rhythm of being exploited. We also, unfortunately, know the rhythm of being exploited and still not having enough food in our stomachs. It’s worth asking what our rhythms will be when our basic needs and our souls are both nurtured. Sadly, I don’t think any working person even has the framework to suss that out.

Adding To the Noise? Random Thoughts on Kanye, Beck, Beyonce and the Grammys

The fear about writing something on last weekend’s Kanye-Beyoncé-Beck incident at the Grammys is that it will just add to the noise. I’ve gone back and forth about whether to say anything at all, but there are some things I’ve noticed about this manufactured controversy that haven’t been brought up. Little moments like these are, when all is said and done, incredibly ethereal. It doesn’t take long for them to just drift into the ever-expanding iCloud of pop culture trivia: it’s there, it exists, but it’s far from weighty. Still, they often present "teachable moments," at least when the air is still pregnant with them. And there are three things merit saying before this particular moment is finally filed under “yesterday’s news”:

What Kanye West did at the Grammys on Sunday was ultimately harmless. That there are actually outlets who think otherwise speaks to the utter banality of entertainment media. Banality is never devoid of ideology, however. Yes, there is racialized paternalism in the rhetoric over Kanye’s “misbehavior,” as there always is. And yes, said paternalism has gotten more and more transparent given that: a.) it’s long ago come to be thought of as “typical pop star behavior,” and b.) it’s come to be particularly expected from Kanye. (One turgid example of this scolding pattern is to be found in the public admonishments of Shirley Manson, who apparently either doesn’t know or just doesn’t care how racialized it is to call the behavior of a black man “savage” and label him as entitled.) In fact the only thing that’s “unexpected” from the little 60 second incident is how mild it was. All he did was walk up to the stage, shrug, smirk and walk away. It was essentially a joke to the audience and the media alike. Fudging this into later off-hand comments about creativity -- which Kanye has since clarified and back-pedalled -- is lazy. So is talking about his “ego” in the context of an industry that is built on papering over the essence of alienation with shallow concepts like “genius.”

The joke worked because it was easy to have the rest of us in on it. Others have described Kanye’s walk-up as a moment when he basically communicated to us “I don’t have to say it, do I?” And he didn't, because we all knew who the other, clear shoe-in nominee was. Does this mean that Beyoncé was better than Morning Phase? What does “better” even mean? Ultimately, it is incredibly difficult to do a one-on-one comparison between the two because they are from different genres and were trying to achieve very different things aesthetically. And it should not be forgotten that the National Academy of Arts and Sciences is not a neutral actor in all of this. Those sharing memes insisting that Beck is somehow demonstrably “better” than Beyoncé are frankly oblivious. I would recommend folks read this post at “Culture and Shit.” Not all of it is as precisely worded as I might prefer, but it does make a prescient reminder that on an anthropological level, music has been and to a certain extent continues to be a collective and collaborative mode of expression. The special class of artistic geniuses, standing alone on a pedestal and gracing us with their exquisite creations, does not exist. That Beck played all or most of the instruments on Morning Phase while Beyoncé worked with a team of songwriters and other artists to make her self-titled album does not give one artist or the other any greater merit.

What Beyoncé definitively had that Morning Phase did not was a massive impact on the cultural conversation as a whole. It was talked about more, blogged about more, dissected more and found its way into the popular vernacular more. “I woke up like this” is a meme. It would be wildly off-base to say that Bey is the one singular reason that “feminist” became a buzz-word of 2014, but it we also can’t deny that one of the main manifestations of the idea and word in pop culture came via the discussion of her songs and her performances. And yes, Beyoncé out-sold Morning Phase by at least four-to-one and charted much better. We can cynically say that both this and the greater impact among pop culture came thanks to the fact that Beyonce had better marketing than did Beck, but this still begs a big question. On what valence did the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences decide that Morning Phase was a better album? If it’s not sheerly sales and market-share, then fair enough, though we’d be naive to say that’s not NARAS’ primary concern as a trade and industry group. If general cultural impact isn’t a factor, then fair enough again, but we’re then left with a question about whether NARAS gives much of a damn about its own relevancy past what it’s merely able to buy. Maybe the vote got split, but this also poses the questions as to who thinks Pharrell, Sam Smith or the terminally Wonderbread Ed Sheeran has had as big a cultural impact as Beyoncé’s album. Even Beck, to his credit, thought something smelled fishy.

Analyzing and understanding this isn’t “a distraction.” Yes, a lot of us easily tire with talking about popular culture, based on the fact that it’s spectacle, it’s lesser than “real art,” we think that too many of us use it as a substitute for having a solid analysis of how racism and sexism work in our daily lives. Fine. Nobody’s twisting anybody’s arm to be part of the conversation. Moments like these may not fundamentally reshape the contradictions of capitalism. And there certainly does come a point when talking about them becomes circular and therefore at the expense of other issues (my instincts tell me that we’re about to reach critical on that scale if we haven’t already). But there are also those among us who are probably bending things too far in the other direction by labeling it all a distraction. Both seem to me to fail Base and Superstructure 101.

My sense is that what leads to dust-ups like these being discussed into a dead-end isn’t that they’re being discussed per se, but that they’re being discussed too much on the terms laid out by the culture industry, media, et al. We can place the lion’s share of the blame for that at the door of the culture industry itself, which doesn’t even want to admit that it’s an industry, let alone that it does fit into and is impacted by a much broader economic and political infrastructure. In the end, the crux is that music’s essential character as a collective activity can never really live in harmony with structures like NARAS, which keep themselves relevant by bolstering the “genius” perception of creativity.

Yes Kanye-Beck-Beyoncé-gate is barely even a crack in the edifice, but when the gaping chasm of American race has opened as unavoidably wide as it is right now, even small cracks can’t stand alone. The challenge for a left that wants to be both sharply relevant and culturally engaged is to rebuild a framework that can explain moments like these without either minimizing or overblowing them. Seems to me that’s a necessary step if we ever want to collectively rush the stage at the Staples Center and announce that NARAS has been placed under popular control.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go return this soapbox. It’s rented.

Farewell Fred...

It’s difficult to overstate what a loss the death of Fred Ho is for jazz, for music, and for the nexus of art and revolution. He had been frank about his prognosis for some time and was quite open about the fact that he had a very limited amount of time left. Still, this comes as a shock.

The sophistication Ho brought to the table when he conceived of integrating his radicalism into the aesthetics of his music was second to none; easily on the same level as Mingus, Roach, Shepp and other radicals throughout jazz history (though it’s only fair to point out that Ho himself understandably bristled at the very term “jazz”). The above composition — a tribute to Muhammad Ali — illustrates this as well as any of his compositions. One fears that with his death, one more link between that history and a future for the political avant-garde has been severed.

There’s more to say, and I certainly will. But in the meantime it is worth appreciating the staggering breadth of Ho’s work. Not just countless albums but a roster of stage operas, a handful of books, even a few art exhibitions on his own idiosyncratic style of dress. Not many artists of any genre can really claim this much and have it be so consistently stunning.

RIP Oderus Urungus

There’s one headline I never thought I’d write. Not because one actually thought Dave Brockie — the man who spent the past thirty years known better to the world as the malevolent Scumdog Oderus Urungus — was actually immortal. But simply because if anyone were to ask me, I’d guess that Gwar would have ended somewhere down the line when the group’s members called it quits well before any of them died, the outlandish characters retired in some way that wrapped up the squealingly fun mythos and left a compendium of solid thrash metal behind.

Maybe the end of the Gwar saga would have been a return to their home planet. Maybe the characters would have all died in some hilariously gory episode. Or maybe climate change would have finally melted Antarctica and drowned the Scumdogs’ Earth base. Now we’ll never know. Because in real life, Brockie is dead of some boringly natural cause.

Make no mistake, this is probably the biggest loss for heavy metal since at least the death of Slayer’s Jeff Hanneman last year. Of course, Gwar always had an impressive array of excellent musicians through its various lineups over the years, people who were always able to seriously shred even underneath the schlocky costumes. We were never allowed to forget that at the end of it all this was just good thrash. But it made a difference that the consistent center of it all, balancing the shock and the rock, was Oderus: magnetic, disgusting, hysterically funny.

Former Gwar bassist Mike Bishop (a.k.a. the original “Beefcake the Mighty”) described Brockie: “He was brash sometimes, always crass, irreverent, he was hilarious in every way. But he was also deeply intelligent and interested in life, history, politics and art.”

Thirty years ago it was still possible to talk about “shock rock” in a way worthy of the title. Nowadays, not so much. Want to see someone get their flesh ripped off? Why pay for a ticket to a Gwar show when you can just watch “The Walking Dead”? Given that, it’s rather impressive that Gwar have managed to stay at least somewhat relevant since the early ‘90s, well after the whole concept of shock rock started to lose its potency. I have no special insight into why that is, except to say that maybe Brockie was able to keep it up for so long because he understood that there’s actually something very heady and artistic behind it all.

There’s a story told about Alice Cooper and Groucho Marx, who believe it or not used to hang out before the latter’s death. Keep in mind that back in the ‘70s Cooper’s music and performances legitimately horrified uptight conservative Christian types. Marx, however, according to Cooper, “came to the show and said, ‘Oh, vaudeville.’ Before that everybody said ‘shock rock,’ and ‘theatrical rock’ and ‘glam rock.’ When Groucho said, ‘vaudeville,’ I said, ‘Wow, that’s exactly what it is.’”

On some level, Brockie understood this. Today, Cooper is himself a conservative and I’d imagine that there are plenty of Tea Partiers out there who think nothing of listening to Ozzy or Metallica. How do you manage to shock the senses in the midst of this? Well, part of it has to do with keeping the satire and fun front and center. Anyone who thinks that this is substantively different from vaudeville or burlesque needs to come back to Earth. Part of Gwar’s charm has always been that they seemed to be poking fun just as much at the self-serious darkness of metal itself just as much as those who were outraged by it.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s it seemed that every daytime talk show had its “offensive music” episode, pitting concerned parents against over-the-top musicians. Marilyn Manson appeared on “The Phil Donahue Show.” Oprah Winfrey had on Ice-T. In 1997, just as the moralistic “Satanic panic” was starting to run out of gas in the mainstream, Gwar appeared on Jerry Springer. As if to prove that the outrage at the spectacle had itself become spectacle.

That’s the crux of it all; that in good art and good music, seriousness is often found in the most irreverent behavior. Some might call this a rather postmodern takeaway. I happen to think it’s just an essential element of any non-realist artistic outlook going all the way back to Dada and even before. What distinguishes the two views is that the latter has at its very core a kernel of genuine, unmanufactured sincerity from which the sendup grows. It’s not the slimy costumes or gory performances that are absurd; it’s that we live in a time when things like this can flourish organically, when bombs can drop and people cheer but fake blood and urine at a concert can whip up gaggles of suburbanites into a frenzy.

Is this to say that there aren’t elements within popular culture that progressives, feminists and anti-racists shouldn’t have legitimate grievance with? Of course not. I’ve written quite to the contrary elsewhere. But those types of songs are made of a notably different stuff than when a band puts out a song called “Bring Back the Bomb” at the height of Bush’s war in Iraq, intended to use its gleeful ultra-violence as a way to comment on what in a way already exists.

But I digress. What needs to be said here is that Dave Brockie was a hell of a musician and artist. There was a simple understanding and genuine showmanship that he always brought to the music; an understanding too often swapped out for behemoth budgets and jumbotrons. Even at the height of their success, I’d argue that Gwar have been tragically underrated. One doesn’t have to like metal to appreciate this, but it certainly fucking helps you feeble human.

Update: Since this post was first written it was released that Brockie died of a heroin overdose, not "some boringly natural cause."

Second update: The Gwar saga continues! And it is now fronted by a female! All hail Vulvatron!

Ruminations on Sochi

I must admit right off the bat that I didn’t watch a single event of the Winter Olympics. I don’t really have an excuse as to why except that I’m not a particular fan of winter sports. As a cultural entity, though, the Olympic phenomenon is impressive. There is something truly jaw-dropping about an event of this magnitude being built on such flagrant corruption, ecological devastation and outward violation of human rights even as it is designed to inspire feelings of warmth and international cooperation.

Through a western lens it may be easy to say that Russia was exceptional in this regard, and indeed the price-tag for Sochi was astronomical. But every Olympics brings with it both an unacceptable amount of corporate and governmental fuckery and an incredibly fawning and manipulative sense of perceived ownership: the pretense that these are “the world’s games.” In the society of the spectacle, the Olympics are pretty close to a cultural lodestone, bridging the chasm of alienation that can allow the logic of empire and corporate hegemony free reign.

As such, it’s plenty rewarding when the mask slips. On the lighter side of things, the Internet seems to love (in that oh so ironic way that only the Internet is capable of) the police choir performance of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” And there’s no denying that the sheer awkwardness of the video induces a certain morbid delight. Again, there’s a potential to look at the whole thing through west-colored glasses and simply remark on how tone-deaf and lacking in self-awareness it is, as if the Russians had no idea how kitschy it comes off.

The kitsch, of course, is the point. And therein is the tragedy. This, dear readers, is what has become of the Red Army Choir. That’s not an exaggeration. The MVD Ensemble (the official name of this police choir) is one of only two choirs in Russia with the official right to claim the name, and goes back to the late ’30s. There’s undoubtedly something to be said about the fate of Stalinism and Zhdanovism here: an aesthetic that was forged in an incredible self-seriousness, borne of a consolidated roll-back of the gains of the Russian revolution, now itself twisted into doing odd covers of dance songs at the Olympics.

What was the point of including “Get Lucky” in the opening ceremony? An attempt to show that despite the repression the Russian government still knows how to have fun? A way to — much like the Sochi games themselves — that the post-Soviet Russia is just as culturally relevant as ever? God only knows. But the crux about kitsch is that if you put it in the midst of an event like the Olympics, no matter how much you try to bring the crowd “in on the joke,” no matter how much you wink-wink and nudge-nudge, folks still end up a bit weirded out. Perhaps it was the knowledge that even while this police choir was inside showing they know how to have a good time, actual cops were just outside arresting LGBT rights activists.

That’s where this same slip-of-the-mask can become horrifying. Papers and magazines were eager to hop all over the frenzy of (maybe, sort of?) Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina being arrested again. No matter what differences the two may now have with the rest of the group (it’s admittedly difficult to keep one’s anti-capitalist cred when meeting with Samantha Power) there was something quite exciting about seeing footage of the bright dresses and neon balaclavas streaking through the gray gloom of repression. And none of it made the footage of Nadia and Masha being literally whipped by Cossacks less shocking.

At the risk of falling into the kind of Russophilia that can be all too irritating and prevalent among much of the Marxist Left, there’s something between these two incidents — one just plain awkward, the other outrageous in its brazen violence — that seems to illustrate the tragic and turbulent aesthetic history of the country.

On one hand we have a kind of performance art strongly reminiscent of the austere and abrasive art-forms that rose up in the years before the revolution and would briefly flourish in the years following the Bolsheviks’ rise to power. It’s not hard to find the influence of constructivism and suprematism in Pussy Riot’s practices. The image of a Cossack in full dress uniform abusing them with a whip just amplifies the sense of historical deja vu.

On the other hand, the cultural order that the Cossacks are seeking to protect: the calcified, pained ghosts of Zhdanov, now in the employ of a system they may have once feebly tried to shun, trotted out for an official event and hoping to hide behind a cloak of irony that is so thin it may as well be invisible. 

I believe these are the kinds of moments, to paraphrase Luxemburg, in which we catch a glimpse of the sand laying underneath these fifty billion dollar complexes.

On White Thugs Like Michael Dunn and the Scapegoating of Hip-Hop

What exactly does Michael Dunn know about rap music? I’d be willing to bet damned little. If the Florida prosecutors wanted to really embarrass the man who murdered seventeen-year-old Jordan Davis, they’d ask him to name the artist he and his friends were listening to. It was, after all, a dispute over loud music that set the series of events into motion. But my money says that Dunn couldn’t tell you the name of five rappers off the top of his head.

This hasn’t stopped Dunn from playing the hip-hop card in his attempts to curry public support. If anyone out there wants to put themselves through a stomach-churning ordeal, then head on over to the website his family set up. It includes this little gem in Dunn’s ownwritten statement:

While I don’t know for sure what caused Jordan Davis to react to violently to such a benign request [i.e. to turn down the music], I blame “Gangsta Rap” music and the thug culture that goes along with it for influencing violence. The driver of the SUV, Tommy Stornes, aka “Killmeace”, is a producer of “Gangsta Rap” music videos. He had a few songs on YouTube (since removed). At least one depicts pulling someone out of their car and shooting them, along with the requisite denigration of women. While Jordan Davis has no arrest record, he was not keeping good company – especially for a young man at such an impressionable age. 

Attempting to refute any of this to those who might support Dunn is a futile effort. Not because there’s any real veracity to the culture warrior linkage between music and violence; there isn’t. It’s futile because it is such an ingrained part of the narrative used by those touting the cause of an endangered white America. Everything about Michael Dunn says that this is a man who has thoroughly assimilated the belief that his America is under attack.

Vero Beach, the Florida enclave where he lived and ran a successful small business, is one big gated community — the kind of development designed deliberately as an exclusive outpost withdrawn from the mythical depravity of urban culture. Obviously a proud gun owner, he also defends the state’s “Stand Your Ground” laws on his website as a bulwark against the “increase in violence this country is experiencing.” Other pages on the site compare Dunn’s first degree murder case with that of Kevin Williams, a man currently facing second degree murder charges. Williams, of course, is African American; the implication being that society is letting Black men run amok as good, hard-working, law-abiding white people are left to fend for themselves. Putting a button on Dunn’s blame for rap culture, he further argues:

I would offer that, rather than rail against the ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws, people take a look at the violence and lifestyle that the “Gangsta Rap” music and the “thug life” promote.The jails are chock full of young black men – and so are the cemeteries. Gun laws have nothing to do with it. The violent sub-cultures that so many young men become enthralled with are destroying an entire generation. Root cause analysis says to correct the behavior. The black community needs to do a better job of selling worthwhile role models.

Again, this is the boilerplate of the culture war, with the creepy suggestion to “correct the behavior” essentially revealing the strong Jim Crow paternalism that’s always been at the heart of such nonsense. And yet ironically, Dunn’s site also declares that the issue at play wasn’t the volume of the music. This is quite obviously an odd claim to make given that a fair amount of space is devoted trying to deflect the blame from himself to the very same culture that supposedly isn’t really an issue.

The recent trial itself — which has now ended in a hung jury on the most serious charge — has likewise put lie to Dunn’s insistence that “it wasn’t about the music.” His own girlfriend, who was with him at the time, testified that when they pulled up to the convenience store that night, Davis’ friend’s car blasting its beats, he sat and grumbled about “that rap crap” and “thug music.” 

Seeing that there was no gun in the teenagers’ car (as Dunn originally claimed) and the fact that there was no real threat to his life despite some heated words being exchanged, it’s difficult to say that the music wasn’t at least something of a factor in his feeling justified in unloading his gun on the car next to him.

Which begs the question: Why is a man like Michael Dunn so threatened by rap? 

Bluntly, for the same reason that George Zimmerman thought that Trayvon Martin’s sweatshirt made him a threat. As I wrote in an article on Davis’ murder in 2012:

Parallels have rightly been drawn between Davis’ murder and that of Trayvon Martin this past February. Both involve apparently unarmed, seventeen year old Black males, profiled by an armed, white self-appointed vigilante.

And, significantly enough, both involved some kind of cultural marker so often used in racist America to deem Blacks a “threat.” In Martin’s case it was a hoodie pulled up over his head. For Davis, loud music is evidently enough to signify you as a potential murderer.

Invoking Emmett Till, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry put it succinctly: “Then, it was a whistle at a white woman. Now, it’s a hooded sweatshirt or music being played loudly from a car.”

Michael Dunn and others like him feel threatened by rap because the racism of “post-racial” America is one that is probably more reliant on such markers than in Till’s time; cross-burnings and calls for open segregation don’t fly like they used to. In their place we talk about pathologized behaviors and “a culture of violence.” This stands in marked contrast to the way that people like Dunn are described; rarely do any media talking heads describe him as well-off or privileged. Instead he is talked about as “successful” while he describes himself as hard-working. 

Of course, beneath all the rhetoric, Dunn’s defense is a crock of shit through and through. But that doesn’t mean justice will be served for Jordan Davis any more than it was for Trayvon Martin. The very music that supposedly “isn’t an issue” may, in the minds of a great many white, anxious, middle-class Americans, be the exact reason that Dunn deserves to walk.

For thirty years conservatives have painted hip-hop culture as some sort of dangerous weapon. If only that were so on the night that Dunn asked Davis’ friends to turn the music down; the teenager might still be alive. But unfortunately for him a gun in the hands of an insecure white man is much more dangerous than any music can possibly be.

The Dialectics of Macklemore

I’ve been reticent to say much of anything about Macklemore, and for admittedly precious reasons: as a white male, I didn’t want to come off as presuming to speak for anybody in the communities most impacted by the terms of the debate. The other — probably more relevant — reason is that I simply think his music is boring. 

But now, in the wake of his performance at last night’s Grammys and his winning four statues, the controversies about both him and “Same Love” have reemerged. It seems clear that this song has for better or for worse become one of the most emblematic of the past year. Progressives and radicals are once again debating what the popularity of a song like this means, raising issues from appropriation to straight up plagiarism. 

To be clear, both sides of this debate have valid points; what seems missing from the debate is a more unified view that takes each into account. Doing so might give culturally-minded radicals a better idea of the relationship between audience and industry, and (most importantly) how the latter should be approached and opposed. So, in order, a few obvious observations. 

The popularity of gay-friendly songs in mainstream music is important. The performance of a song like “Same Love” on the Grammys telecast, as well as its existence on the radio, the charts and television is an expression of the contemporary push for queer liberation. It has positive knock on effects. Please note the wording here: I do not say that the song itself is an expression of the fight for queer lib (that really would be akin to saying that straight white folks are in the best place to express this struggle) merely that its existence — the allowance for songs like these to take a place as high as they have — is a reflection of this struggle. As we venture further into the superstructure we can see how this becomes at best more mixed, but it is worth taking stock the broadest implications of the song. It definitely means something that this was what was broadcast into millions of homes on Sunday night:

It is naturally riven with all the self-congratulatory spectacle of the music industry. But its message — problematic though it is — likely made it to some far-flung places where young people may not have access to supportive communities.

China Mieville, science fiction author and Marxist, recounted this in his talk on “Guilty Pleasures” at Socialism 2012, which directly relates to this particular conversation:

I was talking to a gay friend, and I was excoriating “Will & Grace” on the grounds that it’s crap and an appalling piece of queer minstrelism and, you know, really grotesque and so on and so forth. And he said to me “all true, but if it had been on when I was fourteen years old I would have felt a lot less lonely.”

This is prescient. Young LGBTQ people still deal with all of the realities of growing up in a society that remains virulently queerphobic: the isolation, the alienation, the shunning by family members and friends that can take a real toll. And this is to say nothing of violence; real, horrifying and quite common. Should the line be then that that working class queer folk should “consider themselves lucky” that these songs are out there? Of course not. But nor should we assume that a songs like these don’t make a difference in the emotional lives of ordinary queer kids. Saying definitively that hearing a song like this on Top 40 radio will save a young person’s life may be perhaps glib and melodramatic, but it would also be glib to dismiss such possibilities off-hand.

Macklemore does not shape the terms on which he enters the fray of political advocacy. Those terms, given that he is a recording artist, are shaped primarily by the record industry. That promoters have felt comfortable pushing singles such as these is, again, a sign of progress that should neither be overblown nor discounted, but there are no doubt countless strings that come attached.

Those strings are in the form of race and sexual orientation. It may say something that powerful personalities in the music industry see a song such as this as worth lauding. But it says just as much that they see a song such as this being performed by a straight, white artist as worth lauding too. This is just the nature of the music industry, and goes far beyond Macklemore’s reach.

That being said, he does have more agency than one might prima facie believe. Most artists such as him will at one point or another come up against the resistance of their record label, who may or may not be comfortable with putting out songs such as his. Not Macklemore. He owns the label that released his album, which has by now gone Platinum. This doesn’t mean that he’s now a millionaire; there are plenty of expenses he likely has coming his way particularly because he’s the owner of a label that has a grand total of one big-selling release on its roster, but questions about whether he’s giving any money back to the cause carry a bit more weight than if he were on some big label that was keeping him in debt well after his second release. Nonetheless, there are far more powerful forces that have been a defining influence on the shape of the music industry: distro companies, other major labels, radio stations and communications companies, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Unless he is somehow appointed head of NARAS tomorrow, Macklemore is playing their game.

The way that Macklemore has gone about explaining his stance against homophobia has been intensely problematic. There are two layers to this. First, he has frequently pitched his criticisms squarely in the context of hip-hop. It can be heard clearly in lyrics like “If I was gay, I would think hip-hop hates me.”

A theorist or activist he most certainly is not, but when one takes into account the ways in which hip-hop constantly has a double standard applied to it (just look at all the energy spent on criticizing Kanye’s misogyny while letting that of the Pixies off the hook) much of what the rapper says leads into some rather unsavory directions. This is from Wikipedia (and yes, you may now start to howl about how amateurish I am for “citing” Wikipedia):

Macklemore explained that the song also came out of his own frustration with hip hop’s positions on homosexuality. “Misogyny and homophobia are the two acceptable means of oppression in hip hop culture. It’s 2012. There needs to be some accountability. I think that as a society we’re evolving and I think that hip hop has always been a representation of what’s going on in the world right now.”

There is no “position” on LGBTQ lifestyles in hip-hop. At least certainly none that is hegemonic. Misogyny and homophobia are “the two acceptable means of oppression” not just in hip-hop culture but everywhere. Hip-hop is not the reason that queer kids are being assaulted and killed on the streets of New York and Moscow. Hip-hop is not the reason that women are cat-called, harassed and sexually assaulted. It is a multi-faceted, endlessly diverse art-form that spans poor communities of color across the whole planet, and it brings with it the baggage of society just like rock, pop, electro, dance, punk and every other style. The idea that hip-hop specifically has a “homophobia problem” smacks highly of those who blamed the Black community for the passage of Prop 8. Whether this is how Macklemore intends his words makes little to no difference — it is how they will be spun.

America’s cultural legacy is built on stolen Black culture, and this is not being acknowledge nearly enough in the mainstream. This is where the second level comes up: the criticisms of queer rapper Le1f. If Macklemore did indeed rip off the beat for “Thrift Shop” from Le1f, then it doesn’t bode well at all for Macklemore.

This past year has been a rough one as far as race and music are concerned. Of all the number one singles, not one was recorded by a Black artist. Awards shows have similarly snubbed artists of color all year. Because, you know, post-racial society and all…

Macklemore’s own public ideas on race have over the past year appeared, to be honest, rather mixed. He texted Kendrick Lamar to apologize to him for winning the best rap album Grammy (not an expression of racial ideology per se, but many have rightfully pointed out that Kendrick’s far superior song likely didn’t win because its author is Black). He dedicated his American Music Award to the memory of Trayvon Martin. He also has yet to utter a word about stealing Le1f’s beats, and has appropriated Mexican imagery and used Black women as props in one of his videos. In the context of this, statements coming from this Black, queer rapper cannot be brushed aside so easily in this. Particularly because there has long been a thriving queer subculture in hip-hop generally.

None of these factors — pointed to by many a commentator — exist independently; in fact, they depend upon each other. The promotion of a pro-gay song may be a signal of progress, but it’s progress that the establishment needs expressed in as narrow a way as possible. Piecemeal, incremental, and without letting on to the fact that different types of oppression always reinforce one another. Social movements may puncture the bubble of the entertainment industry, and may do so quite often; a fundamental change, however, requires it all to be turned on its head by collective power that puts everybody in, nobody out.

Those who focus on the positives of Macklemore’s success without acknowledging there are some serious shortcomings both in how he presents himself and is presented are implicitly saying that the struggle is almost over. Of course, it’s not. Far from it in fact.

Likewise, the side of the argument that speaks only of Macklemore’s skewed take on race and of how problematic his conception of straight allyship is forget that there is a whole edifice of power that he as an individual artist is powerless to change.

Both are dismissive of the ways in which the music industry, in its clumsy attempt at granting some form of concession or progress, may have also opened the door for cultural radicals to push a broader, more egalitarian-minded and artistically nuanced aesthetic. In order to do that, however, we have to speak of the contradictions in the same breath. If we can pull that off we may find ourselves capable of building something akin to a more radical counter-culture.

Case in point: Angel Haze’s version of “Same Love.”

A woman of color who outwardly rejects any label of sexual orientation, taking the beats of a white artist to tell her own story — which, I would argue, is notably more emotional and effective. The music industry has no idea how to handle her; they basically sat on her debut until she went rogue and released it online in defiance.

This is what it comes back to. It is all, if I may of course use a rather hackneyed paraphrase, bigger than Macklemore. It’s about how much room there is to build a culture that actually does speak for all of us. Perhaps the raging debate about the significance of this moment means that we’re a couple inches closer to that. Which isn’t to deny the thousands of miles we still have in front.

Monday in B-Flat

"I can pray 
    all day 
    & God 
    wont come.

But if I call 
            911
        The Devil 
            Be here

        in a minute! "

                   -- Amiri Baraka (RIP) 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Pussy Riot

The Russia that Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina have walked into as free women isn’t all that different from the one that existed when they were sent to prison a year and a half ago. Those differences that do exist aren’t in substance but in scale, and those are quite pronounced. If there were any question as to whether this was still Putin’s country when Nadya and Masha were sentenced, there can be no misgiving today.

When footage of Pussy Riot’s guerrilla neo-riot grrrl performances first began to spread around the world, their entire aesthetic teemed with the liberation that seemed at hand. According to members the collective first formed on the very same day that Medvedev handed power back to Putin. They and the democracy movement that brought thousands onto the streets of Russia’s cities for several weeks were born on the same day. The aggressive, primitive sound was undeniably one of riot; the colors of the dresses and balaclavas bold and garish, dynamic shapes stampeding through staid symbols of unchecked power. 

Radical arts writers and cultural activists are sometimes accused of exaggerating just how greatly power overextended may fear free artistic expression; there was no need exaggerate the way in which the Russian state cracked down on Pussy Riot after the events at Christ the Savior Cathedral. Nor was there any need to embellish the cozy relationship between Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Some may quibble or turn their nose up at how “crude” these songs and performances were, but in the end they did exactly what good art is supposed to do: they illuminated the corners of corruption that the establishment would rather remain shrouded.

Contrary to what Putin’s supporters were likely expecting, these illuminations didn’t end after Nadya, Masha and Katya went into prison. The world has had confirmed that Russia’s prisons are little different from the Stalinist gulags. The virulent anti-feminism that runs through Russian society has become much more common knowledge. While some of Pussy Riot’s more fair-weather establishment supporters have fallen away after the initial upsurge around their sentencing died down, their radical credentials have been burnished. Nadya’s correspondence with Slavoj Zizek is odd and disjointed but nonetheless fascinating; she ends up coming off as far more erudite and insightful than he. Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin’s documentary provided us with some background to the women’s political and artistic journeys, as well as a glimpse into Russia’s large actionist-inspired art scene such as Voina. Western modern art scenes have lost track of the gratification and possibility that exists in the disgust of bourgeois sensibility; Voina and Pussy Riot thrive off of it.

This isn’t to say that power can merely be embarrassed into relinquishing its grip. We would all love to believe that Masha and Nadya’s freedom will mean a return of the brash public performances. The deliberately nicknamed "Pussy Riot laws," ordinances which in practice make it a crime to show support for the group, make such a development unlikely. And of course any notion that a punk performance can literally drive Putin from power is way off base. It’s not just that Putin himself remains in power. Given the setbacks for the democracy movement (there are no longer tens of thousands pouring out on the streets), the continued marginalization of the Russian left and a steadily tightening grip on power, it’s difficult to picture a world stage where Pussy Riot continues to play as prominent a role as such.

In particular one worries of Nadya, Masha and Katya being used as political pawns in the maneuvers of global empire. So far they’ve been successful in dodging attempts at co-optation, but there can be little doubt that in relation to Russia the West sees the cause of sexual liberation — in which many of Pussy Riot’s members have participated — as a political football in their jockeying with Russia and Putin. To these same powers, Putin’s vicious anti-gay laws aren’t so much an opportunity for principle as they are for PR. Dave Zirin’s recent piece at TheNation.com rightfully pointed out that Obama’s choice of hockey player Caitlin Cahow and tennis great Billie Jean King (both out-of-the-closet members of the LGBTQ community) to lead the official delegation at the upcoming Sochi Olympics is worth celebrating, but is also a transparent power play against an imperial rival from an administration that has dragged its feet on meaningful pro-gay legislation every step of the way. 

It’s the same logic that ultimately forced Putin’s hand to release Pussy Riot in the first place. Naturally there’s little genuine concern or sympathy in the decision to grant amnesty to Nadia and Masha along with the 30 Greenpeace activists locked up two months back. Bad press in the run-up to Sochi is the kind of thing a politician as shrewd as Putin can’t brook, and for obvious reasons; in fact it’s rather surprising he’s taken this much.

Nadya and Masha show no signs of being dragged into support of either Putin’s supposed beneficence or the West’s designs. Nadya’s words upon her release reveal her to be as defiant as ever:

[R]eleasing people just a few months before their term expires is a cosmetic measure… This is ridiculous. While Putin refuses to release those people who really needed it. It is a disgusting and cynical act.

She also is currently urging a boycott of the Sochi Games. The embarrassing interview with Ksenia Sobchak also reveals that Nadya and Masha have as little tolerance for the capriciousness of pop culture as they did when they went to jail.

Will it matter though? Putin’s regime allows even less leeway for dissent than it did before. Even if a wily gang of balaclava’d gender-fuckers could be seen out in public without being targeted by cops and regime loyalists alike, the likelihood they would be able to go through with any of their anarchic open-air gigs seems slim. I hope I’m wrong, and there are certainly those closer to the situation who can speak on it better than I, but the backlash against any urge toward liberation seems to be quite potent and orchestrated from the top.

Pussy Riot and similar artistic experiments of their nature — radical, confrontational — inevitably come up against a limit at one time or another, and that limit is roughly along the same parallel as how much on-the-ground power is being exerted by a movement with similar values. Nadya and Masha’s quizzical and frankly troubling comments that they would like to see ex-oil-tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky run for president likely reflect what appear to be diminished horizons for radicals.

Russia isn’t the only place where this limit is being felt. More broadly, 2013 was a rough year for the uprisings that surged onto center stage in late 2010 and early 2011. And so it was for much of the music and art that was in turn inspired by them. Tunisia’s rap scene, which came to international prominence after the arrest of El General during the initial days of that country’s revolution, continues to face harassment from police and in some cases criminal charges. The fall of Ben Ali has over the past three years presented more challenges for the left to push things forward in the face of the troika government’s repression. 

It would be wrong, however, to be impressionistic about all of this. While the news from most countries has been overwhelmingly grim this past year, the conditions of social and economic instability persist — perhaps more sharply than ever. Paul Mason’s recent column on the Guardian's website expresses well what this means:

The networked character of modern society makes country-specific unrest predictions pointless. There is, in reality, one political entity that matters. Right now it is more unequal than it’s ever been; its core economic model is destroyed; the consent of its citizens to be governed is eroded. It is the world.

Yet another reminder that the greatest world events share much in common with the best art. Both are unpredictable, chaotic and loud. And they have the ability to seize even the most cynical imaginations at a moment’s notice.

Always a Radical

The whitewashing of Nelson Mandela has begun. In the extreme examples it’s the most reprehensible knuckle-draggers of the right invoking his legacy. Rick Santorum is claiming that he stands in the tradition of Mandela while fighting against the Affordable Care Act — even while his home state tries to push voter apartheid. Rush Limbaugh, despite his long history of smears against Mandela (he once thought it was scandalous that Mandela was in league with communists) is now claiming that really, in his heart, he was a conservative.

Again, these are only the most extreme examples. But even the supposedly liberal accounts are doing their best to sidestep the very real struggles and sacrifices that had to be made by Mandela and the movement against South African apartheid. In fact, little is even being said about apartheid itself, brushed aside by rhetoric about reconciliation and non-violence. Even though Mandela himself had a fairly ambiguous relationship with the tactic of non-violence.

We should remember — as the above video, quite controversial at the time, reflects — that the fight against apartheid against South Africa was supremely militant. It was uncompromising; the right-wingers hated it. Ronald Reagan favored “constructive engagement” over boycott and sanctions even while the great majority of South African blacks were demanding otherwise. Mandela was frequently called a terrorist by mainstream politicians, and was on the US terrorism list until 2008! 

In short, the fight to end legalized racism was, again, a revolutionary situation. Artists United Against Apartheid are one of the great unsung (pardon the sickening pun) heroes of music. To this day I really don’t believe that they’ve gotten enough credit for what they did; rallying big-name musicians of all genres from rock to rap to soul and jazz to say that they refuse to play in South Africa. It was an artistic expression of, in the words of project co-founder Danny Schechter, “about change not charity, freedom not famine.” 

It needs to be noted that the group was musically pretty out there too. The song above isn’t pop, it isn’t rock or rap; it’s a fairly abstract piece. And yet it’s no less impassioned for that. The single that AUAA really put their weight behind was the famous “Sun City,” which was likely just as much out of political expediency; this was the song that delivered a concrete, unequivocal declaration by saying that they wouldn’t giving into the pressures of the white South African regime’s attempts to skirt the cultural sanctions then in place.

The song above, in contrast, is somewhat more of a meditation, albeit one whose chaos matches the high stakes of the struggle itself. Encapsulated in the thudding beats and tense instrumentation is the unrelenting resolve against the most barbaric of obstacles — both of which come into relief in the sound clips sampled into the composition. 

At the time this song was released (1985), Mandela was still in prison; he wouldn’t be released for another five years. Some on the ultra-left might criticize him for the role he played in the somewhat conciliatory negotiations that would most importantly end the legalized segregation that plagued his country, but he was also, in the words of Gary Younge, "never a revolutionary, always a radical." He was someone who understood the stakes of the struggle before him, spoke and acted accordingly. He didn’t just understand that power concedes nothing without a demand, he lived it.