jane dark's sugarhigh!

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months. As a special feature today, we bring you a portion of the book's index

politics: of grunge, 87, 129, 139; of punk rock, 76–77, 79–80, 86, 87, 139, 155n6; of rap/hip-hop, 30–35, 36, 43, 128, 139; of rave culture, 54, 58, 65, 128–29, 134–35, 138–39. See also antagonism, sociopolitical; communism, collapse of; confrontation, sociopolitical; democracy; Fall of the Wall

“Polly” (Nirvana), 83, 85

Pop, Denniz, 102

pop music: Adorno on, 7, 94, 118; antagonistic discourse canceled in, 121, 131–32, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139; antagonistic discourse preserved in, 121, 138–39, 140; belles époques in, 92, 93, 97, 106, 108, 118, 119, 133, 158n38; and boundlessness, 95, 97, 105, 118, 120, 130; contemporaneous with Fall of the Wall, 3, 11–12, 18, 54, 91, 94, 106, 108–9, 113, 116; and dominant mode, 92, 101, 104; and emergent mode, 92, 93, 101, 130, 132; excess in, 97, 108; and gender, 95–97, 98, 103, 160n4; as groundless celebration, 132–35; historical change registered in, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 17–19, 20, 93–95, 109, 118, 127, 132, 135, 140; ideology of, 8, 20, 100, 118, 136, 138; metageneric status of, 92, 93, 108, 127, 130; musical structure of, 95, 104–5, 107; narrative in, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100–101, 121–22, 132, 136; and neutralization, 132–33; scholarly examination of, 97; Swedish, 102, 104; and teenpop, 17, 101–4, 106, 134; and timelessness, 7, 17, 93, 98, 100, 118, 119, 120, 130. See also charts, pop music; market relations, in pop music; videos, pop music

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months

The mournful ballad “Nothing Compares 2 U” was composed around 1985 by Prince, making it an unlikely candidate to bear the impress of another time. Sinéad O’Connor’s version five years later spent a full month at the top of the Hot 100, equaling the year’s best chart performance and eventually winning MTV’s award for best video of the year; the song and its popularity were part of the air of 1990.

If there is a novelty to O’Connor’s reading of the song, it lies in its pointed monotony. Experience at an impossible distance, in another world. Nothing happens. Though not entirely lacking modulations of intensity, the vocal confines itself to a considerably narrower range of expression than any of Prince’s recorded versions. The video drives the point home, consisting almost entirely of a tight close-up of O’Connor’s pale face against a black background as she sings with minimal expression; a black turtleneck exaggerates the effect. As befits a song tracking emotional catatonia after love gone wrong, the affect is at once excruciating and excruciatingly flattened: an architecture of dry ice presented as a song. This arrives in shocking counter to O’Connor’s famously wide-ranging and passionate voice, as well as to her well-earned reputation as a political scourge. Beyond the nicely-detailed sentiment of the lyrics, the song is the tension between singer and performance. Perhaps some of the general satisfaction was seeing O’Connor in such a humble (or humbled) mode; this may speak at least in part to why the song would be the only true hit single of O’Connor’s lengthy career.

That offers only a social reason for the song’s success. But there is another way to describe the matter, intrinsic to the song and the particularity of its distant, echoey keen. This is in the attenuated shock of realizing that the song is beautiful anyway — that beauty is possible even in this death-in-life, this world where nothing can ever happen.

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months

Cobain’s self-doubt, even self-contempt, is everywhere inescapable; it lodges in his clotted howl whether he’s forming words or not, and even when he assays a love song. But the sensation is not just in the sound: “I need an easy friend,” begins the band’s first great tune, as if he’s already abandoned any standards and hates himself for it. This is the indelible “About A Girl”; its sweet nothings only get worse from there. “I’ll take advantage while you hang me out to dry,” he announces, not particularly surprised at either party’s failings. No outside world intrudes on the song’s resentful, obsessive romance; it’s not a room with a view. Even in this catchy, inviting melody (reputedly written after a day of listening to the Beatles), the scene is stained. It spreads across the entire 1989 debut Bleach, and Cobain knows it. “Is there another reason for your stain?” begins the chorus of the opener, “Blew.” This stain is not remarkably ambiguous; the chorus ends “Here is another word that rhymes with shaaaamme!” The refrain of “Floyd the Barber,” one of multiple songs to dabble in disgust about the body, is nothing but “I’m ashamed” (or “I was ashamed”) repeated thrice, the final vowel drawn out again.

Doubt, fixation, resentful need, self-loathing, shame. This is the elixir: profoundly angry introspection. One of the Nirvana’s triumphs is to find a sound for this, unsettling, immiserated, but at the same time immensely agitated. It’s punk rock turned outside in, not anti-social but a-social. For punk’s antagonistics, an agonized self; for outward confrontation, immiserated retreat. For negation, sheer negativity. The surrealistically morphing image sequences which will become a lyrical mainspring also convey the deformations of an interior landscape: “And the car, twist, mouth, fear, yeaaah!” yells Cobain in the metal sludge of “Paper Cuts.” Later: “My whole existence is for your fears.” It’s a wonder there can be a you at all; it is no one outside his head.

For a moment of disgusted litany in “Downer,” the dissatisfaction with social engagement becomes explicit: “Sickening pessimists, picketing masses, separated communists, apocalyptic bastards.” Farewell to all of that. Cobain was unhesitating about the music’s psychologized nature: “The early songs were really angry. But as time goes on the songs are getting poppier and poppier as I get happier and happier. The songs are now about conflicts in relationships, emotional things with other human beings.” To which he added, “Sometimes I try to make things harder for myself, just to try to make myself a little more angry.” One trusts his claims about happiness are driven in part by a guilty need to explain the band’s popularity along some other axis than that of commercial accommodation. Regardless, this location of the source of grunge’s furies – entirely attuned to the personal rather than social – is telling enough. In the album’s most traditionally punk-styled track, “Negative Creep,” a brief flicker of social rage immediately makes the inward turn: “I’m a negative creep!” whines Cobain upward of a dozen times. At first this is followed by “…and I’m stoned”; shortly this is replaced with a wordless moan.

If “shame” is the keyword that won’t dissolve in Bleach, “creep” is the keyword that survives grunge’s duration. “Negative Creep” stands between Mudhoney’s 1988 “I’m a creep yeah I’m a jerk” and, in the last days of grunge, Stone Temple Pilots’ “Creep” and Radiohead’s first hit, also called “Creep.” That Radiohead didn’t turn out to be a grunge act at all only proves the point. Later, Thom Yorke would direct his spectral falsetto toward more aestheticized abstractions better conjoined with the band’s longueurs, most famously in the dystopian fantasia of OK Computer. But in 1993, Radiohead was compelled to fit itself into grunge’s mold, enough so that they would be derided as “Nirvana-lite.” And it was clear how this could be done: “I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo,” sang Yorke, echoing Mark Arm almost exactly.

This then is Bleach’s position: at the corner of creep and shame. The coordination of these two is the first brute truth of grunge as an achieved structure of feeling: the unceasing and unstable encounter with one’s own undesirability, one’s own failings, one’s unsuccessfully hidden or managed aberrations. This may be grunge’s last truth as well — that which, once lost, leaves nothing behind it.

In the opening sequence of Frost/Nixon, one of Frost's team notes that he was no political thinker, but he understood one thing better than anyone around him: the power of television. This sets the stage for the film's closing exchange between the two principals, oceanside at San Clemente. Asking about Frost's predilection for the high life, Nixon inquires if he really enjoys those parties?

Frost: 'Course.

Nixon: You got no idea how fortunate that makes you, mmn, liking people, being liked, having that, uh, facility...that lightness...and charm. I don't have it. I never did. It kind of makes you wonder why I chose a life that hinged on being liked. I'm better suited to a life of thought, debate, intellectual discipline. Maybe you should have been a politician and I a rigorous interviewer.

Frost: Maybe.

And so it is hard to take the close of Frost/Nixon as a meditation on the power of the medium. Indeed, as soon as one recognizes it as fantastical conversation between Nixon and Blair, it is hard to take as anything other than a meditation on the changing of political modes. Nixon and the ghost of Thatcher take their positions as the last serious politicians, however flawed and devious — inverting the film's proposed moral stance almost exactly.

If there is anything striking historically, it is that the role of the last authentic politician of the US, sculpted from gray gravitas, is Nixon rather than Thatcher's usual twin, Reagan. But of course this must be, as there is no way to rescue his political legacy from his longer career as an onscreen performer, and no real desire to do so. And Nixon, after all, is the towering figure of director Ron Howard's emancipation; the last broadcast of the Watergate hearings ended four days before the release of American Graffiti...

Martin Luther King, Jr. noted about the Watts riots: “This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.”

The clarity of this assertion is certainly a sort of exaggeration in response to the media insistence on the concept of the "race riot." To the extent that it is a corrective, it means to counter the willingness to delink race and class, to render the antagonism as at once essentialized and contentless, in so far as there is no immediate remedy for the fact that people are of different races.

As such a corrective, King's claim doesn't mean to swap one kind of riot for the other, but to restore the linkage — reassert the inseparability of the two. And surely it is hard to argue that, in some cases, race has been the axis along which the most blatant and brutal forms of dispossession have been conducted, and along which corresponding antagonisms have expressed themselves.

This perhaps provides some systemic-historical sense to the election of Barack Obama. Certainly the explicit political claims of the election (on the military, the economy, health care, torture and remaining substantive issues) are nowhere now believed by serious people, if they ever were. The unequal devolution of economic misery stemming from the depression continues apace, and is likely to reach the kinds of levels where open conflict is to be expected — and one might reasonably expect this to express itself again along racial faultlines, given the core constituencies of the unwanted reserves of the ever-smaller industrial army. One might almost forecast, without any satisfaction, a Long Hot Summer of 2010.

And yet Oakland, one of the historic foci of such conflagrations, seems uneasily pacified — charged by a legitimately joyous sense of overcoming and a sense of obligation, but still with the full recognition that at a non-symbolic level the government is not serving the interests of the city's main population. As a result, that population seems magnetized into a kind of static ambiguity by the election of the first president of color, and, one suspects, neutralized as a site of open struggle. This peculiar situation is the specificity of the moment, and part of its core uncertainty — it is in this sense that the election is indeed historically unique.

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months

If the images of Berlin were best able to condense the experience of historical culmination into a symbolic unity for in the West — if “the Fall of the Wall” became the pop moment par excellance for the Anglobal narrative — the events have no greater claim on world-historical significance than those that unfolded in the vicinity of a quite different architecture. The events in Beijing might be distinguished from those in Europe in part because, more seemingly exotic from a physical and cultural distance, they availed themselves even more of ideological misrepresentation.

The foundations of the occupation and the massacre of the occupants in Tiananmen Square have been widely and conveniently misrecognized, with help from many sides. Predictably enough, Fukuyama requires that the drama follow the same script as every other: “The revolutionaries who battled with Ceaucescu’s Securitate in Romania, the brave Chinese students who stood up to tanks in Tiananmen Square, the Lithuanians who fought Moscow for their national independence, the Russians who defended their parliament and president, were the most free and therefore the most human of beings.” The leveling of these various confrontations is striking, and none moreso than the inclusion of the “brave Chinese students.”

Much is left unthought in this. Consider the occupation’s own iconic image, surely one of the most reproduced images ever; it provides a complex but signal formula for this reduction, this unthinkability. It does so in part by its very simplicity. A man stands before a Type 59 tank — a line of them, in fact. It is June 5, 1989; the bloody suppression has already begun. In the video footage we see him move repeatedly to block the cavalry line’s progress, waving his shopping bags to do so. This last gesture has a kind of total pathos. Man vs. tank, shopping vs. totalitarianism. It is too good to be true, but it is entirely true. Shortly he clambers onto the lead tank, has a word with the driver, and is eventually absorbed back into the crowd. But in the picture we do not see the crowd nor the driver; just the man in his work clothes posed against — importantly — multiple tanks.

It is easy enough to register this as a heroic moment of a single, fragile body against the amassed power of the state, literally faceless. This is very much the suggestion of Time magazine, which named the “Tank Man” as one of the “100 Most Important People of the Century” (a Hot 100 of humanism, as it were).

One lone Everyman standing up to machinery, to force, to all the massed weight of the People's Republic — the largest nation in the world, comprising more than 1 billion people — while its all powerful leaders remain, as ever, in hiding somewhere within the bowels of the Great Hall of the People.

The vision of the individual resisting totalitarian power is well-suited to the liberal promise that its own machinery is in fact nothing but individuals, increasingly free from the dictates of centralized power and ideology; the converse of this is that the individual asserting himself stands thereby always for liberal democracy, poised against the coercive state. Because this photograph and not another — say, of the thousands occupying the vast, open commons in the center of Beijing — comes to stand for the entirety of what happened, we are disallowed from seeing the events of Tiananmen Square, of China in 1989, as a conflict between groups. Simultaneously, we are asked to recognize this as a confrontation of one idea, liberal democracy, against another, totalitarian Communism. This is the received meaning of the picture — a meaning only reinforced by its capture within the matrix of worldwide democratic revolution proved in Berlin five months later. As an image of courage, the picture is inarguable. As a map of political antagonisms, it is something else altogether.

The scholar Wang Hui, who was one of those students in the occupation, argues in persuasive detail that the protests were not pro-democratic confrontations with a repressive Communist government — and moreover, that these categories simply don’t work in the Chinese context. The occupation was rather an attempt to pull Benjamin’s emergency brake on the government’s headlong race down the capitalist road and into the global market.

The 1989 social movement originated out of a general protest against the unequal devolution of political and economic power, out of dissatisfaction of local and Beijing-based interest groups with the central government’s policies of readjustment, out of internal splits within the state, and out of the conflictual relations between the state apparatus and various social groups.

What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands (democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict, and the only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu Yao-Bang, was immediately granted). This makes the violence of the State's reaction seem even more inexplicable. It is likely, however, that the disproportion is only apparent and that the Chinese leaders acted, from their point of view, with greater lucidity than the Western observers who were exclusively concerned with advancing increasingly less plausible arguments about the opposition between democracy and communism.

Thus the surpassing strangeness of the annexing the Tiananmen Square resistance to the story that climaxes with “the Fall of the Wall.” However much such a consolidation is the inexorable logic of the image-event, it provides as well a sense of its vanishing internal contradictions, condensed into granules within the otherwise homogeneous texture of a unified meaning: the historic victory of capitalism over socialism. And exactly because China’s social movement of 1989 was suppressed with blood, this required (if illusory) meaning at the end of the story was confirmed. As Wang himself puts it, “The two most important events at the end of the twentieth century were the failure of Eastern European socialism and the reorientation of China toward the global market through its “socialist reforms.” They brought to a close the Cold War conflict between two opposing ideologies.”

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months

By some accounts, Manchester is the rightful home of rave. So it’s claimed in the 2002 Michael Winterbottom film, 24 Hour Party People, a morbidly antic faux-documentary of Manchester’s musical history that takes its title from a song by native sons Happy Mondays. The story begins, inevitably, with the apostolic moment of the Sex Pistols’ 1976 show at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, and the tiny audience of disciples who hold the seeds of the city’s musical flowering: The Buzzcocks, Joy Division/New Order, Morrissey of the Smiths, Simply Red, the producer Martin Hannett, and Tony Wilson — the lattermost a television host and incipient music mogul whose character, despite his somewhat haphazard mien, serves to give some order to the film’s stumbling narrative.
The real Wilson even had a theory which situated 1989 in an implicitly Oedipal cycle of rebellion and repression.

I was 13 in the school playground when the Beatles happened, I was 18 and went to university when the revolution in drugs happened, and I was 26 and a tv presenter with my own show when punk happened. And then I happened to still be alive when I was 38 when Acid House happened. Because it's a 13 year cycle... 1950 - 1963 - 1976 - 1989... my big ambition is to be around for 2002 when the next thing happens.

I saw Malcolm McLaren last week in Los Angeles, and his theory at the moment is that it will never happen again. He's saying that there are now so many avenues open to music that there's just no chance. I said to him, “Just like fucking Lenin, right? There's a continuous dialectic going on until you've had your bit. As soon as you're in charge, that's the end; no more world revolutions.”

Such a commingling of utopia and hedonism would pervade the sensibilities of rave culture, along with the effects of Ecstasy and the corresponding need for unregulated spaces where this new world could be invented — an invention that extended beyond club hours. “That whole period just felt so special because no one had a clue what we were doing,” recalled Mike Pickering, one of Hoot’s DJs. “The authorities didn't have a clue. We used to come out of the Haçienda when it finished and go back to the Kitchen in Hulme, which was just two old council flats knocked together.”

In the end, the city’s best-known contribution to rave would be the “baggy” sound developed by the live bands of “Madchester,” named for “loose-fitting clothes, a loose-minded, take-it-as-it-comes optimism, a lose-limbed dance beat descended from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.” Foremost among these were Happy Mondays and Stone Roses, distinct but for their birthplace. Predating the Second Summer of Love by a handful of years, the Mondays nonetheless found their likeness and logic there. They attempted literally to flesh out rave’s promised pleasures: a sound system both for and of wasted lads, for whom the demented excess of the party was the only tolerable end, and better endless. The Roses might be described as musical history’s attempt to reaffix acid house to the guitar band; while their monumental self-titled 1989 album felt to many like a culmination of rave’s ascent, it appears equally as the wellspring of a later phenomenon, that of Britpop.

Both acts are nonetheless attempts to grasp the moment, and figures through which the subculture tried to do the same. For the Stone Roses it was “the perilously vague creed of “positivity””; Happy Mondays endeavored to embody the shambling hedonism peculiar to the brief age. Both of these are aspects of rave’s set of ideals. Nonetheless it would be a mistake to seek the ideological moment in any given band, any given song, just as it would be a misrecognition to accept any singular origin city as cradle to the rave.

Manchester, once the foremost industrial city in the Western world, stands in complementary relation to London: one a massive, stolid national city representing domestic values; the other a world city, gleaming, vital, but with an international character viewed with suspicion in the provinces. This is caricature, of course, but it gets at the dynamic. London’s cultural crossroads provided the global materials and laboratories to develop acid house as a style, but in 1988, with “rare groove” having its night in the clubs, going raving was one option among many. In Manchester, to invoke Thatcher’s iron phrase, there was no alternative; the city’s post-industrial ennui and cheaper spaces provided the conditions for the rave party to develop as a concrete phenomenon.

As it happened, acid house parties – raves – would realize and then consume themselves in a renegade auto-da-fé that took place in neither city, in no city at all. But that is getting ahead of the story.

In both The Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing (the first half of which constitutes a reformulation and clarification of the basic claims of L20C, in light of some rather dull criticisms), Giovanni Arrighi — following Fernand Braudel and the Annales School — indicates that the procession of world-system hegemons isn't merely cyclical but follows an obvious and dual secular trend (with an external limit, namely the globe). Firstly, each hegemon has succeeded in aggregating a larger portion of the known world into its reign. Secondly, from the Italian city-state to the United Provinces to the British nation-state to the US continent-state, each hegemonic power has started from a larger initial position.

The correlation is clear; the causation perhaps less so, and Arrighi does not take this question as a central study. Certain passages, however, offers some insight into the question and underscore its importance; for example, the analysis of the "internalization of protection costs" (which unfolds as the efficient coordination of business and military pursuit in the form of the modern nation). Moreover, the question takes on considerable significance in light of Arrighi's innovative aligning Marx's formulae of reproduction (CMC, MCM') to the possible "logics of power" (TMT, meaning Territory-Money-Territory, and the converse, MTM). What then is the crucial relationship between territory and valorization?

Certain answers present themselves — perhaps too plainly, as in the simple and non-explanatory fact of starting from a broader base, or the somewhat more suggestive case of the greater availability of natural resources. Such accounts, however, provoke too many counterexamples and moreover, do not follow from the terms of analysis that Arrighi himself produces.

Taking the current regime as the most indicative example, the most satisfactory answer should be found in a parallel issue of "internalization": the internalization of heterogeneity in the labor market. The US capacity for flexible modifications and improvements in its productive forces, such that they outstripped every nation on the globe in the century leading up to the empire's peak around 1973, has much to do with natural resources, and with space for populations. But it has also much to do with the variegations within the industrial-agricultural spaces of production; the different kinds of resource available; and the historically peculiar federalism that conditions inter-regional relations and exchanges.

This set of conditions allow for a famously mobile labor force, now heading south for agricultural exploitation, now north for factory industrialism, now west for extractive booms — and this is only the most caricatural picture of labor-pool vectors over the last two centuries, which from some perspectives verges on the chaotic, from others moves with the sharp clarity of a school of tetras in a slow-motion aquarium. Be that as it may, the US economy has long been characterized by its ability to reallocate labor to take advantage of shifting productive centers and newly arisen differentials in the value of labor. Of great significance to us here is that these shifts, which follow regional imbalances, happen within national borders — the friction of the passport, or even the friction of strong confederacy, is absent. In short, the nation is spacious and loosely-aggregated enough to generate regional imbalances in relative value of labor to the production process, but coherent and tightly-aggregated enough to take advantage of these imbalances swiftly and efficiently in an ongoing process of internal labor market arbitrage.

This presents the nation able to pursue such an arrangement a dual advantage: such a situation allows both for the greater development of internal productive forces in advance of international aspirations, and as well providing something like practical training in how to take best advantage of differentials — by the time it is leveraging disparities in national markets, it has for itself already a structure developed toward these ends.

Another way to phrase this situation is that the US gains from starting with its very own core-periphery relation as an early engine of growth, and from this position moves to orient the core-periphery relations of the globe (this might be seen as the global history of the American civil war). Both confront the same internal — that is, logical — limit, which is the tendency toward eventual homogenization of both national and world space. Indeed, it is useful to consider various national and international political interventions not as moving the economic/political sphere toward increasingly organized domination, but rather pursuing the rather distinct goal of maintaining the equilibrium between tight and loose aggregation which will maintain (and even produce) heterogeneity of markets.

This is a version of Andre Gunder Frank's "development of underdevelopment" argument — though his account, per world-system theory and its Annales inheritance, goes toward a description of interlocking international positions. But it is exactly this tradition which then opens up puzzles around the nation-based accounts of hegemony in the Braudel/Arrighi narrative of long centuries. It is toward considering this problematic that these remarks are directed, toward recognizing that the logic of core and periphery operates both within and between states, and thus can help to align the progression by which the nation form and the international order expand in parallel.

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months

Numerous Five Percenter and Nation of Islam-influenced emcees circulated through hip-hop in the eighties and after. What bears most directly on our story is not so much that such figures existed, or played a role in hip-hop’s development, but rather their increasing salience over the second half of the decade — the fact that there was a desire, a market for such representations and polemics. This desire was by any measure encompassing. By the end of the eighties, hip-hop style meant Afrocentric commitments, fashions, and rhetoric — and, crucially, this style was neither apolitical nor vacantly “positive” but embraced a consciously confrontational politics. Public Enemy was both producer and product of this sea-change, more intimately bound up in its workings than any of its cohort. Their intensity approached the millenarian: “Countdown to Armageddon, ’88 you wait.” By 1989, Chuck could claim with considerable authority, “Public Enemy is the official voice of the rap world, Black youth, oppressed youth and yes, many white youth in the western world.” At the end of the year, leading pop music critic Robert Christgau saw them as almost pure cause, and was specific about the effects wrought: “they have actually instigated a species of leftish Afrocentrism among kids who three years ago thought gold chains were dope.”

Public Enemy achieved this reputation in part because of their insistence in articulating the new politics as a historical development — as a supercession of rap’s early ethos, that of partying and self-celebrating proclamations (self-empowerment as contentless desire, one might say). Their supercession preserved the earlier tradition within itself, even while turning it upside down. The most well-known example is the inversion of a Beastie Boys title from 1986, “"(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)"; it returns as Nation of Millions’ closing track “Party For Your Right To Fight.” “Bring The Noise” at once celebrates Run-DMC’s formative role in the genre (“Run-DMC first said a deejay could be a band”) and announces why their spirit is no longer adequate to the situation. This is again achieved through inversion of source lyrics: “Never badder than bad 'cause the brother is madder than mad.”

Inversion is a suggestive effect, as if the restructuring of the tradition toward anger and conflict was a way of setting hip-hop on its feet so as to address actual conditions. This political mode of confrontation is not identical to Black Nationalist aspirations, but is consistently aligned with them. The same song from Nation of Millions hazards the cry of what should rightly follow rap’s formative “Old School” years: “Farrakhan’s a prophet and I think you ought to listen to — what he can say to you, what you ought to do.”

Such progressions, keeping faith with rap’s roots while growing toward the most radical social engagements, made Public Enemy both the figures and figureheads par excellence for hip-hop’s political turn, as did the group’s deftness at addressing overlapping but varied audiences. This was achieved in part by the interplay of Chuck’s role as a prophet of rage and the more wayward, everyman charms of sideman Flavor Flav; and in part by the insistent scale-jumping from street scene to allegorical narrative to historical lesson and systemic analysis, all of which allowed the group, in one of its most well-known passages, to “rock the hard jams, treat it like a seminar — reach the bourgeois, and rock the boulevard.”

The couplet marks the time. It offers two pairs, and insists on the necessity of both: aesthetic success must accompany political content as a pedagogical necessity, and communication must cross lines of class, race, and geography to exceed subcultural status. This double synthesis, then, is the program for a political art. This is the measure of Public Enemy’s achievement, rather than articulacy or militancy as such. That is, their significance lies in their realization of an explicitly social-political, confrontational problematic in relation to an aesthetic form that expressed the same problematic otherwise: a total work that solicits engagements and generates affects in multiple ways.

Neither “realization” nor “total” here is meant to indicate a perfectly coherent program, much less a triumphal artificing of an ideological position. If the group was one day making nationalist demands, on another they were taking aim at economic structures while distancing themselves from the Nation’s theological strain; e.g. 1989’s “I follow the Nation because Minister Farrakhan and the Nation show us economic self-sufficiency in America and that's my sole use for this information.”

Article in the Grey Goose yesterday concerning the upcoming anniversary of what is in China mostly referred to as "June 4th," and here as the Tiananmen Square massacre. The main themes:
• the relative success of the state propaganda machine at suppressing the history and impulse ("government corruption and censorship"; "China’s government has made it abundantly clear that students and professors should stick to the books and stay out of the streets");
• the fact that most today support the Communist Party for cynical reasons ("flocking to the Communist Party, but seldom driven by ideology")
• and how in general that moment of political insurgency has passed in China ("a historical blip, a moment too extreme and traumatic ever to repeat"; "But a majority of students seek party membership not as an ideological statement but rather as a means to a better job")

The most pervasive sense of the essay isn't even presented as a claim, since it is one of the article's presuppositions: that the events of 1989 were a "pro-democracy protest" ("in 1989, students from Peking University were again massing in the center of Beijing, demanding democracy"; "And if a student today proposed a pro-democracy protest?"; "But whether democracy still inspires them is a more complex question"; "many students supported democracy in theory but did not want to risk their futures to fight for it"; and on and on.

But this is a curious thing. Versions of the word "democracy" come up twelve times in the mid-length article. Versions of the world "capitalism": none. Well, perhaps we are meant to think that the events of 1989 and since are truly about political philosophy. Except that the issue of economic distress is ubiquitous: "the economic grievances that helped ignite protests in 1989," "student discontent could rise if the current economic crisis clouds their futures"; "competition for good jobs is fierce." Indeed, the word "job" comes up five times.

The article, that is to say, presents a bunch of students who are motivated to political action against a repressive Communist state (or not) because of factors directly pertinent not to communism nor to democracy but to capitalism. This is a perfectly clear code: neither "Communism" nor "democracy" can be understood in this context as "political" or "ideological" positions, but as economic forms, and "democracy" is substantively a substitute term for capitalism.

This gets us to the contradiction: the students and professors supposedly yearn for democracy, or would if they could get away with it — and yet it is the ills of capitalism that are proposed as the catalyst for this yearning. And this should remind us of the truth of June 4th, which is that it was in part a rebellion against a nominally Communist state (convenient for conservative ideologues, and New York Times writers) that was racing down the "capitalist road" — in short, it was a rebellion against the devastating and inequal leap toward the "democracy" of capital.

But there is no reason to take our word for it. Here is a passage from one of the student participants in the June 4th movement, now a leading international scholar:

The 1989 social movement originated out of a general protest against the unequal devolution of political and economic power, out of dissatisfaction of local and Beijing-based interest groups with the central government’s policies of readjustment, out of internal splits within the state, and out of the conflictual relations between the state apparatus and various social groups.
— Wang Hui, China’s New Order (Cambridge: Harvard, 2006), 63.

As we approach the anniversary of an event, let us not memorialize but actually remember it, with some attempt at clarity, accuracy, and honesty as to the goals and occasions for that particular form of collective life.

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months

....Certainly that is the sense of the video for “Wind of Change”: all news is one news.

The role of the music video in pop music’s imbricated empire around this moment is a profound and puzzling one. Profound because MTV had become in some regard the most crucial venue for pop music; certainly it was the most powerful marketing instrument. And puzzling for much the same reason, given that the video form requires that music to be something in addition to being music — that it pass through a different medium altogether. One can easily see how such a passage could be of use: pictures had been selling pop for generations. But the image’s arrival at the absolute core of the pop music market is nonetheless curious.

Many hands have been wrung over this issue, mostly to the effect of bemoaning the allegedly new requirement that bands be visually appealing rather than musically apt. Despite the evident tradition of image-based marketing, this account of a changed circumstance is difficult to resist; there can be no doubt that MTV’s ascent shaped marketing plans from Los Angeles to London. This ascent began in earnest in 1983, with the so-called “second launch” and entry into major standard cable markets; it steepened in 1986, when the channel opened itself up to a broader range of music (most markedly along racial lines; before that moment, an obdurate cultural apartheid had obtained) and began engendering exclusive agreements with the major labels. By the end of the decade, the road to Number One passed through MTV’s studios — and it was there that pop songs did much of their communicating. This must be reckoned with: there is scarcely a song mentioned in this book that did not have a corresponding video clip in some way suggestive, persuasive, rhetorically loaded.

That said, a more nuanced history of the MTV is needed: of its rise, and the proximate causes and effects. It’s striking, to work backward, that within just a few years, MTV would to abandon the video format altogether and willingly abandon its position as musical kingmaker. In 1992, MTV began airing The Real World, the “reality show” which supplied the dominant format for what would swiftly become, in effect, the world’s most successful documentary network. Music clips ebbed, eventually vanishing altogether.

Why it might be the case, then, that the visual form of the pop song, the pop song as image, should reach its zenith exactly in this historical passage, when pop music was undergoing the upheavals this book considers, before shortly receding? This is a substantial question, but can only be an aside to this book’s inquiry into those changes themselves. The correlation is nonetheless suggestive. Specifically, it suggests the possibility of a shared source that exists beyond the genealogy of pop music in and of itself. To state it plainly, this parallel development proposes that MTV’s domination of the image was less a cause of musical changes (as the purist hand-wringers would have it) than an effect of something else entirely, as we will propose the changes in pop music are effects: the outcomes of a historical dynamic which has a great and particular use for the congealed and singular image-event into which all meanings are bound to collapse.

"Poets have been writing about money and about capital for a long time.

"This distinction is significant: by “writing about money” I mean something like the poetry that deals with personal economy, with having and not having, observational accounts of possession and dispossession.

“Poetry about capital” designates, for me, an attempt to find a poetic that’s adequate to political economy and particularly the systematic characteristics of the circuits of capital, defined in the first instance as value in motion, a form of value which requires a certain life-world and set of relations to move and increase.

"This later is the poetry I’m most interested in, and committed to. And as I suggested, it is an ongoing poetic activity, as captured in exemplary fashion by Chris Nealon’s forthcoming book, The Matter of Capital, which traces this lineage and this struggle across the 20th century into the present.

"What must be striking for us on this occasion is thus not that such poetry exists but that we’re talking about it. As a matter of habit, this poetry is reflexively marginalized, dismissed, ignored — particularly as it tarries with reputedly utopian-slash-apocalyptic Marxism, so thoroughly discredited and allegedly so distant from the real world to which poetry remains obligated.

"This is true until something goes really wrong in the economy, crisis, catastrophe, and then we have these punctual events: “Poetry & Economics.”

"It’s not that poets are suddenly turning to this set of concerns — well, a few are, and they deserve our sympathy — but something more akin to the adage about a stopped clock being right twice a day. Except in this case the adage is stood on its head: the poetics of capital have been ticking away, and periodically the circuit of capital stops — and suddenly that poetry seems reasonable, relevant and timely. And in that way the poetics of capital is right twice a century.

"This momentary situation conforms exactly to the situation in the broader social sphere: the sudden sayability and intelligibility of certain ideas, certain positions that had seemingly been banished from polite conversation. Here I do not really mean the hysterical and symptomatic derangement of the word “socialism” — but the spectre of Marx, and more generally, the willingness to discuss capitalism as an open topic, as something with frailties and finitudes.

"This crisis, endlessly intertwined with the crisis of US hegemony, entered its terminal phase first with the political spasms following 9/11, and now with the economic collapse from which no real recovery is imaginable. But it is of an older vintage, and has been in motion since the signal crises of the declining rate of profit and the massive image-defeat of the Vietnam war, both around 1973. The belle époque of 1989-2001 provided a contingent and largely cosmetic diversion of this trajectory.

"It is ironic, therefore, that this is something like capitalism’s 1989. Not its historic end, but the discrediting of the idea at a global scale. It is no longer able to administer even its own most basic percepts. Consider, for example, the Geithner-Summers PPIP, which is the scheme for buying up what we have been calling “toxic assets.” The fundamental curiosity of this plan is its thoroughgoing admission that the price signal, the truth and virtue of capitalism (per no less than Friedrich Hayek), doesn’t work. Obviously “the free market" has required and benefited from endless regulation and tinkering, but it has always had the conviction at least to claim it believed in itself. PPIP forthrightly renounces the belief that the worth of commodities is set by the operations of the market place — capitalism’s sine qua non, without which it is hollowed out.

"How then can we return to the question of poetry? This is a particularly puzzling question when we are being told, not just poets but everyone, not to think structurally. Exemplary here is, say, Nassim Taleb and his Black Swan story. For a long time we have watched the ascent of quants in the world of finance — Katy will know more about this than I do. Even if we start with 1973, we can trace the lineage from Black-Scholes-Merton to John Meriwether’s “young professors” (first at Salomon and then at Long Term Capital Management) to David X. Ni’s Gaussian copula. And each one of these eventually fails catastrophically, and indeed is bound to. Taleb intuits this correctly, though his quasi-historical metaphysic is off: he thinks that because unprecedented things are unprecedented and still exist, precedent-based models — which they all turn out to be — should be abandoned.

"One of his mistakes is to think the failure of the quants is in their inability to foresee the unforeseeable. That’s not quite right. It turns out that the quants, with their increasingly complex modeling of the larger financial structure, are great dialecticians — their models don't simply fail, they help drive the financial system pitilessly toward that failure, toward the very conditions in which the models no longer work. So Taleb’s intuition is well-tuned in at least one way; this risk-pricing thing has to stop (though I would argue this is not simply because it’s dangerous to the financial system, but because it’s at heart a series of arbitrages which distribute wealth with increasing disparity). But Taleb himself is unable to think this thought at a truly structural level: he can’t depart the world of risk intrinsic to markets themselves, and ends up with what Chris Nealon calls “a theodicy of volatility, and a kind of apotheosis of the genre of financial advice-writing.” Taleb's account of financial risk as a transcendental truth that is always with us is historically inept and ideologically blindered; financial risk may we be inevitable within the present dispensation of commodity capitalism, but that dispensation had a beginning and will have an end. There are other structures.

"One of the ways in which poetry has been for a long while modeled is as a kind of humanism that can stand against the quants. But it must stand against the Talebs, too. That is to say, it should not be at the work of simply naming and counterbalancing some extraordinary distortion or swerve within the logic of capital’s value; it should be more prepared than the quants or Taleb to think structure, to decipher the value form and insist that it change.

"My suspicion is that poetry, with its unique linguistic position from which to think relations of parts-to-whole even as they transform themselves — what I call “structure in motion” — is well-positioned to think at the structural level, at the level of political economy, of value in motion, rather than the phenomenology of money (I actually take narrative to be better-adapted to that pursuit, and hip-hop too). Not that all poetry should turn to this structural thought, but that one shouldn’t be surprised when poetry does make such turns, and should see this as poetry’s way of being adequate to history, of being of its time, which is finally all that we might ask."

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months

This loss of narrative has presented itself earlier, most evidently in songs that try and fail to make a story of the times. But of course the sense is everywhere in the music this book has considered: in the triumph over time; in the exstasis; in the absolute, empty domination of the present moment; in the inability to imagine what might come next, and the lack of an urgency to do so. We have scarcely had occasion to mention the best-loved song by British alternative pop act The Sundays: “Here’s Where the Story Ends.” The lyrics are opaque, as if the story already can’t quite be recalled. “It’s a little souvenir of a terrible year,” choruses Harriet Wheeler, hiding nothing and everything. The song is from 1990; we never discover what the “it” is.

Narrative failure, it scarcely needs to be said — the end of story — is another way of naming the thought which is “the end of history.” This is the very sense in which Fukuyama’s proposition deserves attention as something more than mere neoconservative wish fulfillment. It is the pop flipside, the form taken within the public imagination, of Guy Debord’s less catchy descriptions: “The spectacle, being the reigning social organization of a paralyzed history, of a paralyzed memory, of an abandonment of any history founded in historical time, is in effect a false consciousness of time.”

For Fukuyama this abandonment of any history founded in historical time is an overcoming; for Debord, what must be overcome. For both it is the situation. The question before us, finally, is not whether pop music understood this situation; by now this book’s opinion on the matter is obvious. Rather, the question is whether pop music was able to have more than a triumphal sense of how things stood around 1989, as the new conjuncture was coming into view and asserting its absolute quality.

How then can this conjuncture be described? At one reach we have mantras and codes; at another, theoretical conceptions. Between these, there are something like facts. These include the replacement of almost all Eastern European governments with bodies above all not Communist; the disintegration first of the Eastern bloc, and then of the Soviet Union; and then the turbid chaos of the Russian Federation, turning its shambling bulk toward the global market. In skewed parallel, the People’s Republic of China refashions itself from Deng Xiaoping’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” into a furnace of state capitalism. This all seems of a piece with the popular wisdom, the linear narrative in which the last actors rise up against the failed promise of socialism — against themselves if necessary — and in favor of the democracy of the market. This happens everywhere and at once.

What does the pop version get wrong? For one thing, the cycle of governmental conversion starts earlier, and is not as unidirectional as one might suppose; South Korean protests “finally brought down the authoritarian Cold War government in the “Great June Uprising” of 1987.” The deposed government in question was of course not communist but a military-corporatist state. This is comparatively minor example of the inconsistencies that vanish in the dust of the Wall’s demolition, but a suggestive one. The coherence of the global events in 1989 is in many ways a perspectival effect, a function of one’s aperture. Signal in Fukuyama’s vision is the need at claim at once an Archimedean stance overlooking all of history, and an aggressively framed reading of specific political changes in the latter portion of the twentieth century. The story of Chile, for example, indicates the crudity and misprision of his line of reasoning. Fukuyama declares, without inquiry, the three-stage sequence of the overthrow of Allende’s socialist government by Pinochet’s US-orchestrated military junta, in turn displaced by a “popularly elected government” in 1988, as simply another confirmation of the last remaining narrative. In so doing, he offers an elective blindness to the obvious fact that Allende was himself democratically elected; that there is no intrinsic contradiction between socialist policies and popular elections; and that the victory of the Concertatión party in 1988, as Fukuyama composed his account, took place within a narrative of fracture within, and in turn against, the Southern Cone neoliberalism exported and installed by he beacon of liberal deomocracy, the United States.

The gross inadequacies and factual embarrassments that come from the reduction of history to a single vector cannot, as already suggested, be laid on the stoop of that Fukuyama, that beautiful symptom. Nonetheless, the illusory coherence of the events of 1989 requires careful attention herein, in so far as pop both wrestled with that very illusion, and even purposed to draw out the incoherence and insufficiency of the monolithic official story.

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months

George Michael’s “Freedom ‘90” does not of course concern world events; its providential name was required to distinguish itself from the earlier Wham! song “Freedom.” It nonetheless manages to crystallize the feeling of the post-Wall moment without taking a stance regarding it, through its sense of unbounded duration as liberation, its formal evocation of the sudden absence of barriers — and its sense of this as something potentially intrinsic to the music, to the truth of pop.

The lyrical niceties of the song are not hard to parse. As commercial autobiography, its opening gesture summons the familiar conversion from seeming to reality: the maturation from contrived pop star to real artist. In Michael’s case, this clichéd story of integrity found must ghost for his gradual and more problematic self-revelation as a gay man, after having acceded to being marketed as “every little hungry schoolgirl's pride and joy.” The lyrics work this double-shift with charming concision, including strategically ambiguous cliché (“sometimes the clothes do not make the man” and so forth) and directness (“when you shake your ass they notice fast; some mistakes were built to last”).

The limits of this narrative are shaken by an irreconcilable vector: the song’s unabashed pleasure in the very pop it claims to have exposed and outgrown. This happens transparently if surprisingly in the lyrics: “Heaven knows we sure had some fun boy, what a kick just a buddy and me,” he sings, referring to his supposedly abject days in the germ-free duo Wham! “We had every big shot good-time band on the run boy, we were living in a fantasy.” That this delight is casually tied to a male-male bond — that is, to the confessional’s half-hidden truth — is one of the secrets the song yields; this shortly finds a place in the song’s larger irony, wherein the main thrust of the lyrics is contradicted by the structure and melody.

“Freedom ‘90” is an anomalous length for any pop song, much less one that spent 40 weeks in the Hot 100. And yet its length does not turn out to be an occasion to vanquish the superficial felicities of the three-minute song, and indeed it has little interest in outgrowing the category of “pop.” As a musical construction, the song goes about the very opposite; it’s machined to appeal as broadly as possible, from its shuffle-beat and handclaps to its gospel chorus and series of major key resolves.

The salient quality of “Freedom ‘90” thusly is its very excess of hooks. Everything about the song speaks of this surfeit, from its sheer length to the simultaneous presence of not one but several globally famous fashion models in the video to the brand new vocal melody improvised around the chord structure during the closing fade — as if to suggest infinite invention, limited only arbitrarily and for the moment. This pleasurable excess is the song’s logic. Against the masculine-coded renunciation of pleasure which historically defines the “mature” rejection of pop (which is for women and children), the song poses the truth of pleasure as the excess within pop — a rhetoric less than opaque regarding the song’s shadow narrative of queer sexuality as unrecuperable excess and freedom at once.

The song finally proposes not freedom from, but freedom through — if it is transcendent, and it certainly feels that way, it does not seek to transcend pop but simply to explode bounded pop for the unbounded, without prohibition or border.

As econoblog readers will know, Emmanuel Saez has won the prestigious, Nobel-forecasting Clark medal for an economist under 40. Per Economic Principals,

His most striking finding has been to confirm the widespread intuition that income inequality has been increasing – that one of the key regularities of post-World War II economics had fallen apart. It was in 1955 that Simon Kuznets, then of the Johns Hopkins University, observed that inequality in developing countries tended to describe an “inverted-U,” rising substantially for a time as workers moved from farms into industrial cites, then steadily diminishing as output grew and gains from increased productivity were more evenly distributed.

Saez demonstrated that the “U” had decisively turned right-side up — that inequality has been rising steadily for thirty years instead of falling. Working backwards from tax data to infer household income back to 1913, when the income tax was established (modern government income surveys came into being only in 1960), he found that families making up the top ten percentile of the income distribution had been steadily increasing their share of all income since the 1970s.

But still: huh? What puzzles us here at sugarhigh! is the how Saez's findings are revelations, or even news. This information — that there is an increasing inequality of wealth distribution in the U.S. — is common knowledge. Not an "intuition" which has finally been verified; it's been part of a statistically based and structurally sound series of accounts in a dozen books from the last decade. And this is listing only what's on the bookshelves here at headquarters.

For one blindingly obvious example, see David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism, which perhaps suffers from being published on the obscure Oxford University Press. This book, and numerous others, lay out the data with formidable clarity, and also succeed in locating the surging disparity (as both outcome and cause) within a narrative of economic change which begins about 35 years ago ("since the 1970s," just like Saez's breakthrough).

The whole news event of this prize, then, is on par with granting the latest Fields medal for long division. What to make of this? Is the fact that the guild of professional economics doesn't know the extant scholarship relevant to their own field more shocking than the fact they are just reaching these easily reachable and socially fundamental conclusions out now? Or is the oddest element the hubris whereby knowledge can't be true — despite empirical evidence — until a guild member says it? In any case, welcome to reality, economists: you are making any attempt to take seriously your institutional field rather challenging.

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months

“Learn not to play your instrument,” Kurt Cobain wrote in his notebook in 1990, a slogan handed down from indie rock dogmatist Calvin Johnson...

Nirvana’s rollercoaster ride had yet to begin when Cobain copied out the “Calvinist” (as was said of Johnson’s followers) negative formula. If he was pushing back against the metallic lineage by way of testing exactly what grunge’s inheritance might include, he was echoing the other main genealogical line by insisting on grunge as a kind of punk reformation. “Learn not to play your instrument” consciously lays claim to a 1976 invocation that became one of punk rock’s formularies: a crude diagram and a few words in the British fanzine Sideburns. “THIS IS A CHORD,” it reads in scrawl over a quick rendering of fingerings for an A, E, and G. “THIS IS ANOther. This IS A THIRD.” And then the underscored conclusion: “NOW FORM A BAND.”

The imperative logic is straightforward enough: Anyone can do it. Don’t bow down before the band; be the band. Don’t wait. Don’t get stuck at home practicing scales. Raw power is enough. Urgency is enough. Anything more might just make things worse.

This rhetoric of the amateur is historically ambivalent (and not simply becausethe punk/D.I.Y. community’s real advances in inclusion, predictably enough, failed to dissolve imbalances of access and participation). Even if punk’s rejection of technocratic specialization offers a romantic solidarity with manual labor, the gesture mirrors in part the deskilling of the work force. In the stagnating economy of seventies Great Britain, this becomes a problematic identification with wage rollbacks and Labour’s “social contract.” Nonetheless, the formulary is an early calculation of punk’s social aesthetics. It pre-exists the more explicit social polemics that would follow (especially in the U.K.), which Jon Savage has eloquently argued come from Rock Against Racism, “The organization that had inserted the Left discourse into Punk.”

The distinction is not so easy to draw as Savage suggests, however. Sideburns’ diagram has a “Left discourse” and more kernelized within it, not polemical but material. Training and technique aren’t purely abstract barriers to entry; they bear the concealed ideological payloads of the moneyed middle class, of bourgeois dauphins with their home lessons and fab gear — barriers that implicitly do all the traditional work of exclusion along lines of class, race, gender.

The diagram, and the aesthetic form it commands, do not overtly express a political position. But neither do they offer a mere system of style (though one is never surprised when things end that way). Rather, the formulary takes part in the dialectical formation of politics and style, each giving definition and direction to the other. As we have seen in Chapter One, the logic of amateurism, with its low-cost conversion of consumers to producers, has — regardless of express rhetorics — a political potential within it, as surely as it has a sound.

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months

[....A peaceful revolution, revolution without conflict, might be seen as the soul of rave’s social desire.]

Such a desire carries with it its own contradictions — contradictions that were managed with idealism and Ecstasy consumed in varying doses, without much clarity concerning which came first. It’s worthwhile to attempt to catch this dual development in flight; rarely has a subculture’s self-identification been so thoroughly identified with a single drug. The reverse is true as well; one of the most comprehensive studies of what is more formally known as MDMA (and less formally as E, XTC, or X) usage was conducted through the British dance music monthly, Mixmag.

The Greek ekstasis — as is often mentioned — means “standing outside oneself.” This state certainly aligns with the drug’s capacity for offering social intimacy, the escape from one’s own restraints into the unity of the crowd. It gets at well at complementary and less-remarked sensations, such as the occasional feeling of ecstatic alienation from one’s ego, the paradoxical experience of euphoric melancholy that can typify especially the later portions of the E trip (as opposed to the obliterating elation of “coming up”). A strikingly beautiful orchestration of this feeling forms one of the era’s earliest masterpieces: Electribe 101’s “Talking With Myself,” its title reverberating with this curious late-night affect. Echo is the name we have for literally talking to yourself. Echo, delay: these are ecstasy’s digital analogs, a sound at once there and not, standing outside itself.

Electribe 101 spanned the period at hand and scarcely more, forming in 1988 and disbanding in 1992 with a second album unreleased. The group arranged itself in the disco tradition of studio whiz-meets-exotic-diva, with the former role filled by four electronic composers from Birmingham, and the latter by Hamburg-born Billie Ray Martin. Raised in London and Berlin, she would go on to considerable acclaim under her own name; nothing would even approximate that first single, released in 1988 and carried into London on a Balearic breeze. The five-note vamp that opens the song is borrowed from Lalo Schiffrin’s “Mission Impossible” theme, as is much of the music that unspools beneath Martin’s echoey longing. Her voice is beside itself. “And if it’s alright with you, I’ll just talk with myself — I never was the one to leave you mad,” she begins. “And when the light’s shining down on you, you sure look tragic too.” But the song’s melancholy, its sense of something having been lost, is itself at a distance — held at bay by the beauty of Martin’s voice, the heavy delay forming an invincible sheath. “The stars so bright and the light shine down and everything blows all around, it’s a wonder world and a perfect time for loving tonight.” The song finds the deep contours of the ecstasy trance’s faraway-near, filling your head even as it sounds ten thousand miles away.

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months

Straight Outta Compton’s decisively-title “Gangsta Gangsta” is a resumé of the tropes which would come to define the gangsta genre: “Takin niggaz out with a flurry of buckshots”; “Homies all standin’ around, just hangin’ — some dope-dealin’, some gang-bangin’”; and perhaps the most durable phrase, the t-shirt ready axiom “Life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money.” This last supplied an inside-out objectification. Gangsta offered up the figure of the violent Black youth as a character to be consumed (from a safe distance); in turn, that character was increasing required to objectify the world around him. This defensive objectification would become gangsta’s other structuring principle: cartoon materialism, aligning with black-on-black violence to dominate rap’s lyrical content.

If this seems a volte-face from Black Nationalist rap’s demand for economic self-sufficiency, this is not entirely the case. Hip-hop remains “a cultural form that attempts to negotiate the experience of marginalization, brutally truncated opportunity, and oppression within the cultural imperatives of Africa-American and Carribbean history, identity, and community.” The particular focus on having things, on possession and dispossession, remains constant. What flips is the stance toward these fixed desires: from the tribulations of living in a land where the property and power are always elsewhere, to the long folktale of getting these things. The song remains the same, but for the shift from a confrontation with economic brutality to a phantasmatic identification with same: Get Rich or Die Tryin’, per gangsta’s unerring instinct for the truth of capitalism.

The emergent nonetheless must shadowbox the fading dominant. The chorus of “Gangsta” locates the song in relation to rap’s political mode, concluding with a conscious rebuttal of high-flown rhetoric: a sampled woman’s voice concludes, "Hopin’ you sophisticated motherfuckers hear what I have to say.”

The phrase is telling. Gangsta’s anti-sophistication is an unassailable principle. Rhymed couplets are the order of the day — not so much simple as actively signifying simplicity, and thus a kind of authenticity. This reality effect is matched by musical loops substantially less complex than those of the Bomb Squad, less technique-heavy than Rakim’s DJ/producer Eric B. This is not to say that Compton’s production (by Dr. Dre and DJ Yella) is unambitious — rather, it returns to the verities of hook, bassline and beat, in transit from New York’s uptown hustle to a slower funk more attuned to Southern California’s boulevard car culture. No hip-hop at the close of the eighties can escape the police siren: “Gangsta” begins with it. Against the Bomb Squad’s multifaceted use of such sounds, here the siren is reduced to a single, literal meaning: crime.

But to let “Gangsta” tell the whole story of Compton is to elide its moments of external confrontation, not yet entirely sublated into the new worldview. Thus “Fuck tha Police”: a six minute document of fury. The outlaw thrills of “Gangsta” and Compton’s title song are largely missing; instead, the track proceeds from an agitated, agitating loop punctuated by a periodic shriek which quite evidently summons the Bomb Squad style. It begins where “Boyz” ends, in the courthouse — but here the drama unfolds in the funhouse mirror, as the white cops stand accused. Ice Cube is the first to testify:

Fuck tha police comin’ straight from the underground
Young nigga got it bad cuz I’m brown
And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority...

Fuckin’ with me cuz I'm a teenager
With a little bit of gold and a pager
Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product
Thinkin’ every nigga is sellin narcotics

The narrative/metanarrative in which Lawrence Kuttner/Kal Penn kills himself for the satisfaction of marginal participation in White House quasi-politics allows him to stand for the Democratic electorate as a whole.

The experience of confusion and even betrayal that one's culture crush has sold his or her song to a commercial (most recently Joanna Newsom for Victoria's Secret), an experience which the progressive music fan encounters more than once on the route to majority, is simply practice for the practice of liberal voting. The speedy sequence of rationalization is the commitment to a lifetime of repetition, to the endless circuit of fantasy.

So we guess this is the part where we find out what "relief aid" really means

Pirates commandeered a United States-flagged container ship with 20 American crew members off the coast of Somalia on Wednesday, the first time an American-crewed ship was seized by pirates in the area.

The container ship, the Maersk Alabama, was carrying thousands of tons of relief aid to the Kenyan port of Mombasa, the company that owns the ship said.