In its Right Place: Critique in the age of Spotification

The Dialectic of Spotification

In the age of Spotification, music has been decommodified in appearance. Of course even at the height of commodification it retained its use value “aura”; its metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties have always/already been there. But it is now a time in which music serves a different social purpose. In a sense, to play on Marx’s “collective labourer”, there is an emergent “collective listener”, predicated upon the actuality of a veritable ‘end-of-an-era’ in a specific form of cultural production, the high era of popular music. With music now serving a more instrumental function with the collapse of leisure time and the sort of “comeback” of television in he last 25 years amongst the intelligentsia (and the concomitant decline in the quality of popular music), the collective listener is that which takes music seriously, not merely as something in the background.[1] Yet this collective listener, like the collective labourer, is produced by and socially reproduces the capitalist social property relation.

Wounded Tribune from Born Again Labor Museum — *Wounded Tribune* from Born Again Labor Museum

The commodity, after all, may no longer, for the vast majority of listeners, be a physical compact disc or vinyl record,, rather, it is now the user’s data — given away for free to the towers of platform capitalism, in exchange for access to the kind of bootlegs that once took teenaged nerds years to track down. You are no longer buying a physical good, you are selling your soul to the devil, but it’s the devil you know —if you can see through the lines. But the salient point in the age of Spotification is that, hypothetically speaking, all the music that has ever been recorded, all the books that have ever been written, are but a click away. Yet this is dystopian — in the sense of the snake in the Garden of Eden. Can we find a way to bite the apple without being Epstein’d by the coil of the snake?

Music and cultural production being – effectively – decommodified can be seen as contestable. Some would even say this argument is ideological or fetishistic, setting up a straw person fantasy. I think this is a reductionist positions that ignores the unique use value inherent in cultural artifacts, yet my point here is much more direct. For someone with an internet or wireless connection and a moderate degree of ‘tech savviness’, any film or music recording ever made is accessible more or less free of charge, hence seemingly outside of the circuit of commodities. It is true that by having internet or wireless access, the subject is operating within the sphere of commodities but the critical point being made is akin to arguing that if someone has sex with their partner in a rented apartment, to see that sex as anything but a masked commodity is ideological, as after all, rent is being paid. Those that make the point that audiences become commodities are conflating the dual value inherent in commodities, and by extension human subjects. To an advertiser, an audience may be a commodity, but that doesn’t, in turn, implicitly mean the end-user consumes a commodity when they listen to an effectively free song, any more than someone who accidentally glimpses a billboard. Shop-lifting and bank-robbery occur outside the legal-juridical framework of capitalism. So does illegal downloading. Spotify, in turn, can be seen as akin to, well, the radio.

What I mean by Age of Spotification is pretty simple. Spotify – streaming services, playlists, self-made and self-created context – is the predominant means with which music is experienced today. Even those who are “music people” and go to concerts stick by Spotify – which can be seen as essentially archival, but the sound quality is such that it is like the equivalent of a bespectacled person visiting a museum and giving up their glasses. And this lack of the appreciation for something as discernable as sound quality has an effect, going back to the first days of the iPod, as to how music is mixed, produced. It is “brickwalled” – with very little dynamic range. Dynamic range, to be technical and nerd-boyish, is actually as important as proper lighting is to a painting – it is the range between quiet and loud that the encoding quality of compressed streaming digital files, let alone computer speakers, simply can’t handle. To put it another way, if you have the capacity to do so, listen to War Pigs by Black Sabbath on vinyl or compact disc, then play it on Spotify. Hear the difference?

Lest I sound like an old man shaking a newspaper at the kids, the proverbial Principal Skinner thinking the kids are wrong, or Grandpa Simpson yelling at a cloud, I am situating my own standpoint from the get go in order to provide some degree of knowledge of my own critical standpoint.[2]

The Age of Spotification flows directly out of the rise of digital recording and reproduction, starting in the eighties with the music industry’s great con, the cheaply produced compact disc meant to replace the unionized skilled labour embodied in a vinyl record. The digital age followed the general exhaustion of mainstream rock, country, and rhythm and blues music as form in the early eighties, as subcultures like Punk, New Wave, Hip Hop, Disco and regional scenes started creating their own miniatures of their an ego-ideal of the sixties counterculture, even if that ideal was refracted through “conscious opposition” and even distaste.

Critique of the lack of critique

I’ve searched high, I’ve searched low, I’ve even searched to and fro, but I just can’t find, I just can’t find critique. What I mean here by critique is not a general statement. Marxist theory is in an interesting place, trying to come to terms with actually existing barbarism. Before us is the blind barbarism of climate change, the rise of the far right inside and outside of the state, the emergence and perhaps very real resilience of the Trudeau/Macron/Buttigieg style of extreme centre 2.0 politics, as murderous as the Trumps but appealing, and handing selected crumbs, to different constituencies. The rent is too high. Kids are being put in cages and concentration camps are being built from Kashmir to Texas to China. As the blues singers used to say, it’s enough to make a grown man cry.

But then what am I looking for when I say I’m looking for critique? I have a running joke with a comrade that this or that is “undertheorized”. A meal, a subway station, a street corner. It all can be said to be undertheorized. Marxism isn’t a theory of everything but the Bob Fisk aphorism holds true, vulgar Marxism can explain about ninety percent of reality. But what if we are not merely vulgar? What if we attempt to truly draw a mode of cultural analysis out of the Marxist tradition that, while not different than those that have come before, makes use of different concepts for different objects of analysis. In particular, the soundtrack to all of our lives is music, and yet unlike other cultural forms there is insufficient critique. Critique helps us make sense not only “what we like” but why we like what we like, and how what we like or dislike or respect is or isn’t a crystallization of a given set of social relations.

I submit that there is insufficient critique as the form under analysis – the golden age of popular music in general, “classic rock” in particular – seems to have reached its end point. Yet in a sense, while it has, it can and is revisited in the age of Spotification, of the absolute annihilation of genre, of form. There can no longer be “pastiche” in the Jamesonian sense when the original component parts of the pastiches of high postmodernity are no longer seen as distinct. When Beck mixed alt-folk and hip hop, it was novel. When people do it now, it is normal, after all, that’s what Beck or Outkast or Ween or Phish did. Chuck Berry did a pastiche of country music and jump blues. But then when the Stones covered him, it was no longer a pastiche.

Now that we have achieved a critical distance from the end of the hopes of the long sixties, the punk and postpunk era, the golden age of Hip Hop, even the 90s are an object of nostalgia, we can specify, with the end of the album-as-form, the end of music before the age of Spotification. One of the greatest charms, brought out as we will see in the unlikeliest of places, such as YouTube “reaction videos” and fan-based internet discussion forums, is the end of genre. The end of genre brings more passive listening for some, but a rediscovery of genre in an historical sense for others. It is in that rediscovery that we find critique. But we first must give up this bullshit idea that critique is nothing more than opinion.

Roses on Toast

Recently Shuja Haider wrote of the phenomenon of the “jazz guy”, tracing the archetype of this know-it-all-who-actually-doesn’t-know-shit to those bullshit ravings of Jack Kerouac, the most disposable of the Beatniks. Jazz guys don’t really like jazz but rather what jazz signifies as mediated through middle-brow paeans to authenticity. Where there is mellifluous improvisation the jazz guy think composition, when there is meticulous, if jarring composition, the jazz guy thinks improvisation. The jazz guy hasn’t discovered or refuses to discover the proper way of listening to jazz – or music at all for that matter. Between the ravings of a jazz guy and the syncopatophobia[3] suffered by Adorno, I’d take Teddy’s harrumphing any day of the week.

Jazz is an outlier in terms of what it signifies, at least as it pertains to musical sensibility. There is no discernable and attractive jazz subculture that has sunk roots, perhaps since the fifties. Jazz culture is highly individualist in spite of the communist aesthetic of the greatest jazz music – when it is greater than the sum of its parts and the music plays the band. It is not that jazz musicians (a category that now highly overlaps with experimental and even punk music scenes) are individualists, it is the overriding image of the culture as full of “jazz guys”. Know-it-alls.

Of course you find these people “talking a lot but not saying anything” in any given subculture. The social industry, the age of spotification, and the rise of internet-driven news and cultural consumption has produced “jazz guys” everywhere. Opinions no longer have to be informed because to demand so is “elitist”. Context is not only unimportant but besides the point. Fan service is everything. Sometimes fan service entitles artists to ‘experiment’ – that is to say, to be faux-transgressive and/or to be truly transgressive, indulged by one’s fans, to jump the shark like the anti-homophobe turned Christian fundamentalist Kanye West.

The very idea of qualitative assessment of cultural artifacts, especially popular cultural artifacts, is taken by some, including many on the Left, as elitist or, at best, formalist. Yet in response we get either a blind subjectivism that implicitly accepts the bourgeois notion of culture as independent of politics, neither up or downstream. Or we get an “I liked it but….” And within the context of the social industry, this is the dominant means with which any assessment beyond subjectivism is solidified, through a narrow – liberal, socialist or culturalist standpoint – a misinformed, “jazz guy” derived qualitative assessment sneaks back in. But it is often comically incorrect or predicated upon mystification, New Age, conspiracist or both.

For many Leftists, qualitative assessment is identitical with the problematic notion of “taste”, in turn mediated with the “I liked it but...” standpoint, except when it is a part of the canon. In the case of reactionaries in the canon, like Morrissey or Pete Townsend or Neil Peart, for that matter, there is suddenly much more of a sophisticated approach. Someone can be brilliant and reactionary at the same time, indeed sometimes their brilliance is directly related to their reactionary quality, and the hauntology of this experience is what makes it morbidly fascinating along with its technical brilliance. Or maybe it’s just Johnny Marr, as Morrissey solo sucks anyway.

In the case of Townsend and Peart, or Ray Davies, there is sometimes denial or complication of their work, right down to the justifiably ambiguous lyrics to “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. To restate the obvious, one can be both brilliant and reactionary at the same time. What is more, one can be both revolutionary and reactionary at the same time depending on the polysemic quality of one’s work. As I’ve written elsewhere, the anthemic realism of Springsteen and the west coast lefty aggro-funk of Rage Against the Machine have often been used to pump up the crowd by reactionary politicians. The libertarian Republican friend of Dick Cheney/Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow wrote the great and objectively left-wing “Throwing Stones”.

There is a politics to “taste”, to be sure, what is genuinely considered by the ages to be grand form. Why do social democratic magazines take on the look of high-tech beyond the surface value of appeal? Why did so many poets and medievalists go into the early O.S.S. (precursor to the CIA) and why are we not shocked to learn neocons are literary and cosmopolitan intellectuals? From James Jesus Angleton to Richard Perle, medievalists who grew orchids were a fixture in deep state circles. It also goes with the form to represent itself differently with regards to its own self conception. If we believe there should be a Nobel Prize, which is questionable, then Bob Dylan’s was well deserved, as Bill Crane and I discussed in these pages. But it was also in keeping with Dylan’s well-cultivated mystique, rooted in an admitted youthful admiration for the IWW among other things, that Dylan trolled the Nobel Prize ceremony like a young man ostentatiously declaring solidarity with Lee Harvey Oswald.

George H.W. Bush was known to be a Leonard Cohen fan. Cohen is a critic of power, precisely the kind of power represented by George H.W. Bush. Yet perhaps we can compare Poppy digging Lenny and the Mafia’s reported love of Mafia films. The degree to which the elite is cultured has always reflected the culture of their opposition and fed off of it. That this is inevitable not only does not render it problematic – this is a huge problem with the very idea of co-optation in cultural production. Rather this is to see culture as a zone of contestation that, in periods of intensity, as in the Harry Lime principle[4], one cannot be neutral.

Yet if one cannot be neutral, one must avoid instrumentalism as with John Halle’s Kenny G obscurantism. A lot of Marxists, even those who work, write, or predominantly engage in the sphere of culture, reject the concept of “meaning” or bildung. Perry Anderson, in spite of his love of the Stones, excoriated E.P. Thompson for his incorporation of utopian themes, implicitly accusing him of replicating, by way of Morris, a separation between the sphere of the romantic and the sphere of the practical. Yet these are necessary internal relations within the real life of sensuous human beings who, as social animals, crave both bread and roses. It would seem that the instrumentalists always want the roses and bread to be brought at once.

Don’t Forget the Charm

In a short but telling passage in the introduction to the Grundrisse, Karl Marx extemporizes as to the non-coincidental relation between art and the level of “development”, as in socio-economic development, but goes deeper to examine the prevailing social ontologies that produce these forms. He argues that in contrast to mere historical analysis:

The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model…A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm?[5]

I see Marx’s use of the word ‘eternal’ as a challenge – to himself perhaps, but clearly to aesthetes in general (Marx and Engels were certainly aesthetes) – to keep in mind the autonomy of that “eternal charm” of what Marx elsewhere calls “spiritual production” or what Benjamin calls aura. It is not enough to say that a mode of production impacts the form, the vessel containing the affective qualities that constitute great art, as the content of this type of art – it’s ‘charm’ can only be seen as transhistorical if it has developed greatness, which we can’t reduce, conceptually, to a sort of subjectivism. The problematique of the relationship between a world artistic culture and the capitalist mode of production is not unrelated to questions of interconnectedness as a whole, of the very possibility of human globalization. Of equal, if not greater importance to criticism, it can only provide so much understanding of art’s purpose beyond crystallizing a mode of production and what either ruling or popular classes anoint as great and good.

Artistic production, broadly conceived, predates capitalism, while different forms have had different relationships with a given mode of production or another, and with capitalism we have the separation of art from craft. Modern ideas of Art and critique, as Terry Eagleton points out, developed in a combined sense, not towards any specific goal except to be as free as possible from the fetters of monarch, noble, capitalist or commissar. There can be no socialism in capitalism. But there can be, due to the historically unique and under-theorized role of the artist, relatively disalienated labour, production, and consumption of art in all historic modes of artistic production. Art is a glimpse beyond the realm of necessity, production. This is what Anderson opposes in spite of himself. The subterranean utopian component of art is a glimpse of free and developed human liberation underlying sincere socialist theory and practice. This was certainly true of Marx — the humanism that dare not speak its name. Or as Trotsky, no doe-eyed idealist put it: “All the emotions which we revolutionists, at the present time, feel apprehensive of naming – so much have they been worn thin by hypocrites and vulgarians – such as disinterested friendship, love for one’s neighbor, sympathy, will be the mighty ringing chords of Socialist poetry…”.

This is akin to Ornette Coleman’s ideas in regards to the inherent democracy of music – art as the emanation of popular will as instantiated and crystallized by the artist. As I pointed out in my first piece for Red Wedge, Coleman was as illuminating when theorizing his own project as he was in the project itself. Indeed, the man was so on point that no less than Jacques Derrida comes off as humbe in an interview he conducted with Coleman in 1997. After an awkward mouthful attempting to make Derridean sense of improvisation’s dialectic of repetition and rupture, Coleman tells Derrida, “Repetition is as natural as the fact that the earth rotates”. Derrida clearly seemed interested in Coleman’s dictum of “harmolodics” which decenters the specificity of tone. Decentering tone, however, was grounded in what Coleman referred to as “punching the C”.

Every musician has their own “movable C”, understood as a tone, a note, a timbre, a sound that was related to another tone, note, timbre – that is to say, a sort of determinate negation. It is through this “hidden C” – this implied structure (a phantom rhythm instrument playing in the key of C) that, to Coleman, roots the democracy of musical production and play. That repetition, that ideational presence of structure in a seemingly formless void is always-already present when sound is produced, or when social time is measured in a sense that sound becomes what we know as “music”. This is perhaps why one of the most satisfying moments for listeners of improvised music – jazz, rock, bluegrass or post-rock – is the segue or the re-entry of improvisation back into the chord pattern and metre of the composition being explored — the reappearance of the syncopation. The syncopation that confused Adorno exists in seemingly un-syncopated space, only to reappear like it never left.

To the old mystics like Bohme or Heine, beauty in art is the emanation of the Absolute Idea through an object. In other words, art exists for art’s sake. Marxist cultural criticism cannot dispute this, but we thus are given an assignment to ascertain what is ‘art’s sake’. Certainly we need to see the historical, political, and economic context in which art is produced, but we also need to have a materialist conception of beauty, that is to say, what gives us a glimpse of that “realm of freedom” where ‘the free development of each is the free development of all’. Capitalism is a social metabolic order in which the infinite production of surplus value, that is to say the theft of historical time, stands in stark contrast to the participation in art.

Music is a parcelized period of measured time full of sound that, depending on regional, cultural and other factors, takes on a certain form or ‘genre’. A song ‘reclaims’ time in the same way that labour is alienated through stolen time. In other words, aesthetic objects are certainly commodities, yet, they are also, in Alain Badiou’s terms, “essentially finite” and the “creation of an intrinsically finite multiple”. [6] Their use value is non-disposable insofar as memory, like energy, cannot be created or destroyed, and the labour that goes into their creation, as well as the aura, can never be entirely subsumed.

Even by Jeff Bezos.

Once More on the Rock Aesthetic/No Sugar Tonight

There is a moment in Cameron Crowe’s underrated rock movie Almost Famous in which the great rock critic Lester Bangs, played by the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, turns to the Cameron Crowe character and opines that he’s a cool kid, too bad he missed rock and roll. And Bangs, who spent a lifetime making this point, was articulating what rock music developed exogenously, as a form, the era had ended. Corporate capital was in the process of rapid subsumption of localized industries. Marketable rebels like Jim Morrison were taken as “cool” canon despite their mediocrity (granted, they had a great organ player), while the Guess Who, an original and independent Canadian singles band with no pretense of high art were dismissed by taste-makers as fluff. The Velvet Underground were finished, as were the Beatles. The Stones may still have been around but they were part of the system (albeit with a few masterpieces left in them). Dylan had seemingly hit the middle of the road. Localized scenes coalesced into entities that preserved something, notably the Grateful Dead, for whom to this day, the music never stopped.

This did not, however, happen in a vacuum. As I’ve written elsewhere, when it comes to organization, whatever its merits, the sixties New Left had trouble relating to the social forces that were producing the soundtrack to their lives. Those who were producing that soundtrack were on the same time, in a conscious way, imbibing the emergent counterhegemonic common sense, the emerging collective listener. Case in point, when Bob Dylan was asked, in 1965, why he no longer wrote protest songs, he famously stated that all his songs were protest songs. Yet the development of “rock music” proper, is perhaps one-sidedly yet historiographically not inaccurately dated to Dylan’s electric performance at Newport. In taking a direct articulation of a heated political conjuncture, one in which one could believe in and support the revolution, but not see yourself as an activist, you played guitar. At the same time that the Grateful Dead didn’t claim to be political, but payed the rent and played benefits for the Black Panther Party and were introduced by the likes of Bob Avakian. Their friends (and comrades), the Jefferson Airplane made politics more explicit – sixties veterans have told me that their songs “Volunteers” and “We Can Be Together” were the first references they heard to “revolution” in a positive sense, affirming their beliefs, as opposed to seemingly denouncing them like John Lennon.

Likewise, in New York, Detroit, and Cleveland, cities in which diverse working class social movements were on the move, music – and cultural production generally speaking – was inseparable from the zeitgeist, what Hunter S. Thompson called “the great wave”. Thus the development of new forms of critique were co-constitutive with the new rock music that was developing. The term “progressive rock” once had political connotations, exemplified by the surprisingly far-left early work of Genesis. Robert Christgau described the critical movement of the time (himself, Ellen Willis, Patti Smith, Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus) as “too political for the hippies, too hippy for the politicos”. A bridge between the camp in what I have called a “missed encounter”. On the other side of the pond, New Left Review writers – using pseudonyms – debated the “rock aesthetic”. Perry Anderson called live rock music the first communist art form, breaking down the barriers between performer and audience, a collective social production. While engaging with the Rolling Stones in particular (Tariq Ali writes in his memoir that Perry was quite the “frenetic dancer”).[7] Anderson is at a loss to provide any analysis of the form itself, perhaps due to his critique of “desire” in his polemics with E.P. Thompson. In response, David Fernbach, the great translator, thinks Anderson’s approach is well and good, but lacks an axiology or set of concepts specifically for popular music, in following Peter Wollen’s ground-breaking work on cinema.

My ongoing theoretical work involves engaging in analysis of the continuities and discontinuities of socialist politics and cultural production in general, music in particular. This analysis, in its scaffold form, can be envisioned like two lanes on a highway, in which two cars are roughly travelling the same speed, and sometimes come close to being side-by-side, and at other points, almost get into serious, even fatal collisions. Yet they are always different cars, even if likely attempting to travel to the same destination. Yet most of the time, one is ahead of another. But before one can even arrive at how and why these cars swerve, one must identify the topography of this highway, its onramps and offramps. As the dialectical social theorist Tony Smith points out, analysis must be “extensive enough to allow the relevant internal relations and dynamic processes to be grasped, yet not so extensive that irrelevant considerations enter the picture”. The trick here is not merely the former, what qualitative differences and similarities arise out of quantitative shifts. It is also to identify precisely what considerations are irrelevant, and then, in turn, question their irrelevancy.

It is nevertheless, useful, heuristically, to envision the Left and sixties cultural production as two cars on the highway, travelling within the appearance of lockstep, abstracting away what can be seen from a closer vantage point, the potential accidents, encounters, dead ends and pit stops. As will be expanded upon, this will situate the beginning of the journey of music, if temporarily, being not just for the Left but of the Left. On one hand, there is the formation of the Students for a Democratic Society in the United States, and the founding of New Left Review and other anarchist, communist and Trotskyist initiatives in the United Kingdom. On the other hand, we have the concatenation of hybridizing musical forms contingently combining to constitute what we now see as rock music on both sides of the Atlantic. The equivalent in this case would be variously, the Beatles performing on the Ed Sullivan show; Dylan going electric; the Acid Tests in the Bay Area; Warhol’s Factory. All of these latter points seem inexplicably intertwined with the former. Both were concerned as much with authenticity and integrity as they were with substantive and qualitative impact.

As the journey picked up speed, we can thus set off the marker of 1968. In some parts of the world, notably Paris and Prague, there occurred an uptick in genuine militancy, militancy outside of the control of social democratic or communist officialdom. Yet this militancy, for those in English-speaking countries in particular, one could only gaze at these events, bewildered why a similar turn was not occurring on the homefront. This in turn is inextricably intertwined with the psychedelic shift in rock music, and not merely in the popularization of drug use – after all, many artists and fans did not partake at all – rather. It is a shift from an aesthetic of figurative and linear art to fractal, chaotic, experimental, affective practices. In 1967 and 1968, the era of militant, and in some places (Vietnam, South and Central Africa) military, struggle against capitalism and imperialism, this could not be discursively framed in a simple four chord song with a verse/chorus/verse structure. Rather it had to be implied sonically, by allusion, by double meaning, a practice common in what we now know as classical music.

Finally, this lock-step journey enters into a period of entropy, with the aforementioned ultra-left or ‘work within the system turn’ in the United States, strongly differentiated from the relative sobriety of the British Left. Likewise, the shift in British rock music and British artists, even those living in the United States, towards a sense of reflectiveness and attempting to use music to interpret what they could clearly see as a failure. John Lennon, as will be seen, was quite scathing about the failure of the Beatles. One can take Lennon further and be quite scathing about Lennon’s treatment of women. In the United States, however, rock music degenerated, overdetermined by the growth of hippie capitalism into a ‘lifestyle’ divorced not merely from radical politics but from any sense of Bohemianism aside from a joint or a psychedelic tapestry. In the United States, unlike in Great Britain, it is those artists, who, either by disavowal in the case of Bob Dylan, or a continuing Sisyphean labour of culture as in the case of the Grateful Dead, that we can illuminate the missed encounter by discovering the exceptions.

Thus, from the vantage point of the end of the era, we see all the presuppositions, aesthetically and politically, for the period of political and cultural degeneration that occurred through the seventies. Such degeneration provoked aesthetic and political responses from both the right and left, culturally and politically speaking, but always with a degree of distance. This degeneration led aesthetically, to punk on the one hand and singer-songwriter ‘easy listening’ ‘California rock’ on the other. Or to put it in slogan form: “Neither Damned nor Eagles”. Politically speaking, it marked both the defeat of a perhaps incoherent, but nevertheless historically important wave of social, antiwar and labour struggles. To put it simply, the highway became two highways, and what appeared to be two cars, became four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so forth. Counterculture became a market niche, and in turn, was salami-sliced by entertainment capital into “subcultures”.

The fluidity of the long sixties, configurationally speaking, is that, on a grand level of generality, an operatic one, as it were, nothing was irrelevant. It was the age for which Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village”, and just as capitalism was the first set of social property relations that contained internal tendencies towards universalization, so too did American popular culture. It was an age in which even geopolitical boundaries didn’t stop the Stones from playing a one-off gig in Warsaw to screaming members of the Polish Communist Party youth who ostensibly were never supposed to have even heard their records. Thus we need to fill in the primary contradictions, what is it that, even in 2017, captures our imagination and often political enthusiasm? Why do generation after generation of young people listen to the Beatles and the Grateful Dead? Why is it the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era that provides an unspoken template to nearly all protest politics? The answers cannot be articulated in simple matter of fact terms. The questions themselves, assume what needs to be explained.

The disbursal of the American counterculture occurred, after all, contemporaneously with the disbursal of the New Left. And both, in their nooks and crannies, stayed alive long enough to establish historically important political or cultural initiatives, against the current. On the other hand, some others moved towards increasing isolation and adventurism, followed by a right turn, as portrayed memorably in Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air, Mike Davis’s Prisoners of the American Dream and in many of Ellen Willis’s essays.[8] Interestingly, many musicians who turned Left in the sixties maintained Left politics. Yet we can witness a general shift in the cultural common sense between 1970 and 1974 through the prism of that weathervane of an artist Neil Young. In 1970, in the face of the Kent State massacre, Young wrote and, then recorded (with David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash) “Ohio”, in which he calls for “getting down to it…should have been done long ago” – the point emphasized by Crosby’s improvised calls of “How Many More” over the final chorus. In 1974, Young, with Crosby on rhythm guitar to boot, wrote and recorded “Revolution Blues”, one of his great hard rock songs, but one in which revolution – and the hippy generation – are a Charles Manson fantasy to fear, straight out of Quentin Tarantino’s reprehensible “Make Hollywood Great Again” movie Once upon a Time in America.

Stepping back to the future, we are now in a period, at least in the United States, in which “the Left is on the move” (perhaps). How deep or how shallow is too soon to tell, and dependent to a large degree on how the Sanders phenomenon shakes out – one is stuck with dual fears of either a Syriza-like ranks-closing amongst some Leftists, or a widespread demoralization of the tens of thousands who have come to identify as socialists. And like in the last wave of the Left (and the one before, in the era of the Cultural Front), culture is responding to the conjuncture, albeit in a sort of combined and uneven sense. Cultural development of course is non-coincidental with political development – thus, on the level of cultural innovation, it can be argued, at least within the realm of music, that the long sixties made more of a cultural contribution than a political one if only in that the limited telos was not only reached but became an iron wall. What is more, unlike the various forms that came out of either the thirties, or especially the punk era, at least some of the art – primarily improvisational music – coming out of the long sixties, had a built-in inoculation against being instrumentalized against the social forces from which it has a point of origin. Reactionary improvisation is oxymoronic.

The Future’s Here, We Are It, We are on Our Own

In 2000, Radiohead put out one of the last great records of the last high water-mark in rock music history, Kid A. Appearing on the visually striking double ten inch vinyl (as well as on of course CD), Kid A was a departure from the classic psych/prog/epic notes on Ok Computer. One track in particular that everyone remembers is “Everything in its Right Place”. The lyrics are sparse, but one imagines the plaintive Thom Yorke bemoaning the very idea of a “right place” for anything reminding the narrator of sucking on a sour lemon for eternity. Eternity is sour, but it has a strange and charming core. The lyrical repetition overlays a sad, plaintive, yet oddly satisfying and even joyous drone, beyond analogue and digital. The whole point of this auditory critique is that this idea is monochromatic, there are two colours in Yorke’s head. Speaking personally, I associate Radiohead’s run of albums from The Bends through to the Kid A/Amnesiac set with my (uneven and imperfect) politicization. To this day, when I think or hear about a political victory, I am in the Montreal Forum in 1998 with my friend Alexa, hearing Yorke and the crowd proudly and unironically crowing that “This is what you get when you mess with us”.

Yorke’s complaining about everything being in its right place is in contrast to the recently departed Randroid Neil Peart’s lyrics for Rush’s “Closer to the Heart”. Philosophers, and ploughmen, each must know their part, to mould a new reality indeed. Platonism as prog, Proto-Jordan Petersonism is Toronto’s worst export, but Peart, later to call himself a “bleeding-heart libertarian” sure played mean drums. And this salami-slicing, these subdivisions, is what has happened to the music market as the mass listener of the 90s was once again segmented from counterculture to subcultures often mediated by class and purchasing power. Music may be decommodified, but access to appreciation beyond capitalist realism is uneven. And the hegemonic ideology of “everyone has their own taste” has created a contradictory disbursal of taste-making.

Music-writing has become wretched, with the exception of the aforementioned Haider and precious few others (many, I will add, on these pages). Pitchfork achieves the sin qua non of the origin of the separation of (consumer) subculture from (affective/experiential) counterculture with its ingroup inhouse style and ostentatious denial of its cultural importance. The role of it and other allegedly “alternative” publications (with some notable exceptions, notably OKPlayer), is far more noxious than the star-making role of the critics bemoaned in the seventies. After all, in the seventies, Queen could make it big in spite of some critics missing the point.

The standard criticism that does survive is often attacked. Lana Del Ray got a bad review and may have incited the cancellation, doxing and general bullying of a music critic. Engagement with contentious cultural artifacts – films like The Joker or The Irishman, for example, those with texture and ambiguity is avoided in favor of taking a side, and if a side is taken, it is done so uncritically and without any real reasoning. It is based on pedantry or declaration of deviationism. This all has material consequences for criticism, and this in turn has material consequences for developing a modality of critique, with an audience for one, one that is needed in the age of Spotification.

To refer once again to Almost Famous, there is a beautiful moment in which the Crowe character, after seeing his sister leave the alienation and repression of their suburban household, finds that he has been bequeathed her record collection. He ruffles through it and marvels at the gorgeous album covers, plays a record, and a whole continent of being, of desire, of being glad to be alive, of disalienated social time, is exposed to him for the very first time. And it is the dissolution of genre and decommodification of music in its classical form that has both provided an immense qualitative deterioration but, as hinted at above, in understanding that the era of classic rock music is over, it is now open to analysis, to discovery of something entirely new. Out of that something new, new forms we have yet to imagine, of sound, of object, of critique, shall emerge.

One unique feature of the social industry, a YouTube trope, is the response video. In particular, there is a subculture online of predominantly African American young people who make “response videos” to their first time hearing an important classic rock song. At first, one thinks, it’s a trope, white people are tuning in to see black people listen to their music. And certainly that is there, but it does not have to be seen as inherently any more problematic, than being interested in what others see in music, or in cultural production in general. With this being said, classic rock response videos are an intrinsic part of African American social media culture, and without having any information beyond observation and “the google”, I presume that it is rooted in sharing the videos and discovery of classic rock music among each other. Never mind that classic rock music has always been multiracial – if often coded “white,” in the same sense that Hip Hop, jazz – or country and folk and so on have never been strictly “white” or “black music”.

A stunning thing about these videos, essentially a young person hearing a song for the first time (on YouTube or Spotify) is the repeatedly pausing, often to give a reading of its lyrics or instrumental passage. And it is the kind of stuff that, if you are aware of the acts under investigation, seemed obvious to you as a kid. But references to police repression in Pink Floyd and their aural attributes will obviously stand out specifically to specific listeners. At any rate, there's a structural homology between the experience of music and the attempted experience, in some attempts, that a reviewer gives an audience. The description and form of the review often tries to repeat the aesthetic experience of the appraised work. The pinnacle of this approach is in some ways the response itself. This response is entirely dependent upon paying attention.

One of the most astounding of all the YouTube music critics is a woman who goes by the moniker of India Reacts, who has a Toshiru Mifune-like ability to convey emotion with her face. She tends towards singer/songwriters and in particular, Neil Young. Indeed her analysis of Young, an admitted lifelong favorite of mine, is frankly as original as anything I’ve ever encountered on his body of work. In one video, she responds to his “Southern Man”, an angry rocker about the American south that I always thought was a bit of a throwaway. Its lyrics and heart were in the right place, and the guitar solo was great, especially live, but the lyrics were underdeveloped.

Yet India Reacts responds viscerally to the lyrics, in particular the verse about “Lily Mae” who has a “black man” who is about to be lynched. She realizes that this set of lyrics is about “miscegenation”, having a white partner, she is visually affected by Young’s emotional delivery of the lyrics. Yet it is the guitar solo in which we find her analysis most rewarding. It is one of those great staccato Neil Young solos, the dut-dut-dut on a single string, bent, flanged, repeated. To India Reacts, this immediately conveyed the whip of the slave master. I had heard this particular song probably hundreds of times and never realized that – perhaps even unconsciously, Neil Young was channeling a slaver on his Les Paul. The video itself, and her other videos on Neil Young, Lou Reed and others are as politically powerful as they are genuinely entertaining, especially for those that are familiar with the music under analysis.

It is here, in the belly of the beast of the social industry, in the age of Spotification, that we find critique.

Endotes

[1] In the 90s, the intelligentsia had Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Homicide and the X-Files on television, but its dominant mode of cultural communication was film and music.
[2] A stance of partiality and emotional connection enhances the critical work, for example, of Edward Said on classical music, Ernest Mandel on detective fiction and so on.
[3] Adorno’s writings on jazz betray a fear of syncopation, as implied in the work of Mark Abel, who points out Adorno’s failure to discern the endogenous as opposed to exogenous development within non-European music. I would add, however, that perhaps jazz’s syncopation reminded Adorno of the syncopated marches of fascism – hence Syncatophobia. See Abel, M. (2016), “Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time”, Chicago: Haymarket.
[4] “Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” – from Graham Greene’s screenplay for Carol Reed’s The Third Man, 1948.
[5] Marx, K (1981) Grundrisse. London: Penguin Classics, pg 110-111.
[6] Badiou, A. (2005). Handbook of Inaesthetics. Translated by Alberto Toscano. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pg 10/11.
[7] Ali, T. (2005). Street Fighting Years: A Memoir of the Sixties. London and New York: Verso.
[8] Willis’s best cultural analysis is collected in Willis, E. (2011) Out of the Vinyl Depths. Edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Jordy Cummings is a cultural critic based in Toronto. He is an editor at Red Wedge. Social media splash image from the Born Again Labor Museum.