Wednesday, August 15, 2007
WHAT'S THIS LOOK LIKE A HOLIDAY INN
Maybe if I hold your hand you will understand.
Dick Cheney: Iraq Shuffle
I had prepared a 1,000-word post that would answer, after a fashion, a question from an esteemed reader. A while back, I posted the following: "Here's the thing. I write all the time about both politics and music on this blog, and I've clearly devoted my career to the latter over the former, but what's at stake in these issues is, I'm sorry, a whole lot more important than the loss of some really great bands." This reader wrote in to ask, "Wondering how it is that you came down on the side of music rather than politics for yourself, particularly as you go on to catalogue the various ways you find politics to be more important than music."
Well, shit. Like I said, those 1,000 words were going to answer that, tie in all kinds of bullshit ways that people treat discourse (political and musical) as if the symbols that compose language didn't also stand for a real something, and then eventually totally explain how this means we need a new, crazy way of approaching language to match the medium of our time-- that we need, like Finnegan's Wake, or Super Furry Animals, to transcend language. I think at some point I actually tried to address dude's question.
A song for the young believers, who woke up and found themselves neither.
The Standells: Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White (via Dennis Cooper)
Then this happened. I mean, I'll probably put up most of my previous, aborted post sometime (actually, I accidentally posted a draft of it, so there's probably a copy floating out there in a Google cache somewhere). But one of my daily reads, Bob Somerby's Daily Howler, posted this following exchange regarding young Atlantic blogger Matthew Yglesias:
SOMERBY:
YGLESIAS: This is what I've referred to as the "hack gap" and it seems to me that it's very important. The nature of two-party democracy is that elections are decided by the small minority of the public too confused or too ill-informed to realize that there are persistent, substantial differences between the two federal political parties. As a result, the issues (or, more likely, pseudo-issues) that are most important in deciding elections tend to be the issues that are least important in substantive terms.
Due to this unexplained “hack gap,” pseudo-issues tend to decide our elections. We’ve been discussing such issues forever. But guess what? As we continue, we learn that Matt doesn’t want to waste his time on these decisive pseudo-issues. Darlings, the lovely shall be choosers! Matt would rather spend his time working on things that he finds “interesting.” The gentleman wants an “appealing” way to spend his valuable time:
YGLESIAS (continuing directly): As a writer, though, I'd rather spend my time writing about things that I think are important or at least interesting. Harping away on haircuts, Bykofsky's appalling column, the way George W. Bush lied to the American public about what kind of cheese he likes on his cheesesteak (really!), etc. doesn't seem like an appealing way to spend my time. But the fact that the right has an army of people willing to pretend that this sort of thing is the most important thing in the world is a massive, massive impediment to having sensible policies about national security, taxes, health care, global warming, etc.
Darlings! Haircuts and earth tones decide our elections—and, thereby, the fate of the world. Their pre-eminence is also “a massive, massive impediment to having sensible policies about national security, taxes, health care, global warming.” But so what? Matt would rather spend his time writing about the things that are interesting! Writing about things that decide our elections “doesn't seem like an appealing way” for Matt “to spend [his] time.”
Let's see here. I also think this stuff is vastly important! I have also said as much, on my blog! So why the hell am I doing what I do, then? Is it because I love it, love the music, and the writing, and the writing about music (not so much music about writing, though there's not enough)? Is it because it's easier for a twentysomething smart-ass to find an outlet for music writing than political writing? Is it art for art's sake? Is it because I'd never want to end up in Washington, D.C., and I invent stuff like that as an excuse? Is it because I'm a big goddamn hypocrite?
Why won't you recognize how psychedelic I am / And love me?
Josh Ritter: Me and Jiggs (from 2002)
Then again, what the hell are you doing? Is that part of my rationalization process? Is this one of the five stages of grief? Why would I be sad? Lil' Wayne's so mother-fucking high he could eat a star! Lil' Wayne was in the New Yorker! Dick Cheney was against invading Iraq before he was for it ("How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? ...Our judgment was, not very many"). Wait, does that mean I'm rehabilitated?
Why would a seashell illustrate Jens Lekman's homelessness? Where are all the homeless in this town? Why don't you ever run into Chicago-style crazies on the subway? Why has nobody called Michelle Rhee on her unverified credentials and apparent falsehoods? Why is nobody talking about the fact that other countries have much better health care, for much less money, than the U.S.-- the equivalent of a BMW that was half the price of a Hyundai? Why isn't everybody talking about the Tough Alliance? Is it because Josh Ritter actually sings in the inspired Dylan-esque torrents other critics write of hearing in Lil' Wayne (true!) and Jack White (words are meaningless, and regrettable), or is it because he doesn't have a punk pedigree? Is everybody reading Deerhunter's blog every day? Is there a Santa Claus? What's the Soft Pink Truth about the Shocking Pinks?
Um yeah but posting about Justin Timberlake is interesting and appealing to me. There was an article in the New Yorker about head trauma making people obsessed with music. Let's rationalize it that way. "My mind is on another continent." One blink for yes, two blinks for no, sweet dreams, sweet cheeks. Yours truly.
I'll never be free of memories.
Anonymous Keyboardist: Hot for Teacher
EDIT: a crygasm so powerful, it encompasses us, as a group, and we too are caught up, brought to a cathartic peak, and we all... release:
P.S. Oh hey, I forgot to mention, my Dizzee Rascal review ran in Spin.
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2 comments:
Well, more insightful point be damned, but music and politics aren't mutually exclusive and a lot of times my music writing is a lot more incisive as social/cultural commentary (and political commentary) than anything I've written about politics. But I also read about politics more than writing about it (just as plenty of political writers probably listen to music but feel no real urge to write about it...different strokes.)
Really just wanted to respond to this: Is it because it's easier for a twentysomething smart-ass to find an outlet for music writing than political writing? Is it art for art's sake?
Well with you it's rarely art for art's sake, though art for art's sake is OK, too. And I think it's much easier nowadays to find an outlet for politics than music -- all of my friends that are into politics are currently getting paid to blog, whereas I'm ecstatic if I ever see a dime for music writing, and certainly don't expect it. I usually treat payment for music writing as a kind of trophy more than a source of income. (I also don't actively look for freelance work, but I'm also probably more cynical and lazier than my friends.)
I wonder if I can just leave my entire original post here in the comments, for fun. Maybe consider this a rough, flawed outtake rather than part of the offical, erm, discography:
JOHN EDWARDS: This is all—just to be clear about this. You remember the Swift Boat stuff in the 2004 election? This stuff's not an accident. Nobody in this room should think this is an accident. You know, I'm out there speaking up for universal healthcare, ending this war in Iraq, speaking up for the poor. They want to shut me up. They want—that's what this is about.
Let's distract from people who don't have health care coverage. Let's distract from people who can't feed their children. Let’s distract from people who can’t pay for their medicine. Let's talk about this silly, frivolous, nothing stuff so that America won't pay attention.
They will never silence me. Never. I’ll tell you that right now.
EDWARDS: If we don't stand up to these people, if we don't fight them, if we don't beat them, they're going to continue to control this country. They're going to control the media. They're going to control what's being said. They do not want to hear us talking about health care for everybody. They don’t want to hear us talking about a fair tax system. You think these people who make $100 million a year, you think they want to pay their fair share of taxes? That’s why they hire all those lobbyists for in Washington, D.C. They hate listening to people like me. Well, I’ve got bad news for them. They’re going to have to listen to me for the next eight years as their president.
THE NEW YORK TIMES' ADAM NAGOURNEY: [L]istening to Mr. Edwards is often akin to reading the postings on an angry blog.
WTF! OMG! OOPS I CRAPPED MY PANTS!!! Somebody finally said it plain. When I read John Edwards' words (admittedly via the Daily Howler), I was reminded of, well, the Daily Howler, by Bob Somerby. Apparently, so was Adam Nagourney-- from the perspective of someone who has Googled himself and had his feelings hurt. Kiss-kiss!
I think I got into this with some vague notion of being a serious reporter. It happened when I ended up in a yearbook class after moving to a new high school two weeks into my sophomore year. My first article was about high school bands-- Baltic Avenue had a quirky indie-rock influence, Alternative Death took after Slayer, and freshman phenoms Chronic Avenue had a local radio hit with "Scottsdale Brat." (My senior yearbook, the one I edited, had a "Post-Modern" theme... of goddamn course I became a Pitchfork writer.) After the O.J. Simpson trial introduced me to CNN, the Monica Lewinsky debacle got me glued to news for real for probably the first time (my trite childhood Hogan Herald notwithstanding). I remember the outrage from Samuel Donaldson or Brit Hume, whom I then believed were sober and serious-- c'mon, I'd just learned about Watergate. I remember the sense of righteous indignance when Bill Clinton's carefully worded denials turned out to be "misleading"... when the DNA came back, when the definition of "is" changed. I perused one Wall Street Journal editorial and I was done, dudes. I still considered myself more in agreement with Clinton's policies, but I believed that he ought to resign based on some abstract notion. If he had, Al Gore might be President.
All this somehow landed me at a free, 15-person (or so) summer journalism institute at Arizona State University the summer after 10th grade, sponsored by the Arizona Republic. I got first-hand experience of the reportage industry and a crash course in all the AP Style and grammatical points most people get by without in the blog age. And I got a crush on a girl, so I went back the next year, why not? I wrote for the Republic's high school youth-generated page, "Alt." I became a person who would go on to write self-indulgent blog posts that also do have a point, I swear, kind of. So of course I went to journalism school. I wrote a bit for the student papers, but grew tired of the edits and the story assignments. I did take an arts journalism class in a grad-school year, thought I was even good at it-- Chicago Tribune arts and entertainment editor Scott Powers always complained (correctly) that my ledes were "off the top of [my] head." At least they weren't pulled out of the air.
We've reached an amazing point for music and the dialogue around it, but because there's so much of this stuff it's easier than ever to get distracted by trivia. We don't listen to our favorite albums as many times as we once would. Who has the time? So a song that basically amounts to one gorgeous hiccup and a terrible Jay-Z verse seems "just about perfect"-- OK, what if didn't have Jay-Z and also had better lyrics and maybe wasn't so repetitive, like a product jingle? So you see fewer people in concert T-shirts, don't you-- they've got what they want people to think they like on their Facebook or MySpace pages. Lots of Tom Waits and the Velvet Underground, huh? Is that a Dave Matthews bootleg under your bed? At least it's "The Lillywhite Sessions." ...Why do I become so incomprehensible when I say that people can fake an opinion, and that a fake opinion is worthless to a non-critic reader who actually seeks pleasure from music (rather than the most interesting opinion)? Or is everyone a critic now? This is why credibility matters, even though music critics and bloggers aren't reporters per se. And yet, alas, even smart, established critics don't get "any traction" from what I'm saying. (A useful argumentative tactic with people who get easily flustered-- tell them you don't understand them. Yikes, maybe nobody does.)
As we should now know, even though Clinton's behavior during the Lewinsky scandal was egregious, at least any political misconduct-- as opposed to personal misconduct-- was for the right reasons (he knew he was damned either way in the eyes of either the Washington establishment, not just the Republicans but also the press). What is it about blowjobs? Why does Chris Matthews still ask whether a First Lad Clinton would behave? Why did everybody act as if Gore said he "invented" the Internet, and why do they now rush to assure us that he didn't (but not tell us why we thought he did)? Why do they still talk about Naomi Wolf telling Gore to wear "earth tones," even though it's unclear what this means-- we all wear "earth tones" sometimes, and so had Gore forever-- and even though it was based on a "speculation" from Dick Morris, and not tell us that this was just a thought pulled out of the air by a pretty discredited figure? Yes, why Swift Boat? Why the Love Story canard, why Gore as growing up in a posh hotel, why windsurfing, "looks French," or "for it before he was against it" (this is how Congress works; everyone is for some things sometimes and and against them later, even President Bush)? Maureen Dowd either concocted or maliciously misheard "Who among us doesn't love Nascar?"; Kerry never said it, but many of us probably don't know that. Expensive haircuts? Gail Collins, shake your tangerine. Another Clinton shouldn't be president-- because we've already had two Bushes! And so on. My discovery that the very people who had inspired me to enter journalism were unprofessionally booing Al Gore at the same time they were manipulating me to fall for their beloved Bill Bradley, and then John McCain, came as a deep betrayal. Cleavage!
So with Rupert Murdoch buying The Wall Street Journal and CNN becoming "the most trusted name" in Paris Hilton news, and the Times and Washington Post in thrall to narrative and trivia, and let's not talk about the flat-out dishonesty on FOX News (on everything from global warming to the stock market to whether the Clintons are murderers), maybe I picked the right racket. A trusted reader asked me, a while ago now, why I decided to pursue my passion for music rather than my passion for politics, which can affect people in more fundamental, life-and-death ways. The real reason is probably that I art for art's sake, and a nut for pop, and because I apparently love the sound of my own voice echoing into the void, but I like to imagine another reason. I like to think that writing in-depth, in the most honest and appropriate way I can, about something as subjective and seemingly inessential as pop music. If you can help people see value where they might not have seen it before, if you can lead them to read and reason more interactively and critically, then might people not be better citizens? Probably not, I suppose, but it sounds good to me. Mostly I'm just a deranged fan, of music and music writing alike.
Even so, in a far more practical (and less pretentious-sounding) way, music writers are publishing articles that talk about much more than music. For inst, Tom Ewing's latest "Poptimist" column was about how every band gets one potentially misleading "Big Idea" by which non-fans know them. His example is the Smiths' supposed miserabilism, but one could just as easily write a similar article about how every politician only gets one narrative in the eyes of the Washington press: John McCain is a maverick, Rudy Giuliani is tough, Hillary Clinton is a conniving bitch, John Kerry is an effete flip-flopper, Al Gore is a pedantic liar. Any story that doesn't support these narratives tends to get disappeared, while other stories are fudged to bolster the narrative more clearly. Watch MSNBC, or read the Times; this isn't just Murdoch, though often the narratives come from the same RNC talking points. Chris Dahlen's latest "Get That Out of Your Mouth" asks why entertainers are so unwilling to take a clear stand on today's big political issues; one could just as easily ask why reporters still prefer to maintain a chimerical he said, she said "balance" in their stories rather than provide basic facts that might disprove one source's deceptive quote (for example, though Giuliani was baldly dismissing French healthcare the other day, nobody bothered to point out that the French have the best healthcare in the world, by one respected metric, or that even as he rails against Dems for expanding government, Nanny Rudy is proposing bigger government, too!). Or, to step outside U.S. politics for a moment, see Philip Sherburne's Ricardo Villalobos cover story in the latest issue of the Wire. Sherburne touches on the CIA-led coup that established Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the vibrance of the Chilean emigrant community, the perceived injustices of post-9/11 Homeland Security policies, and Villalobos's own bizarre, Fox Mulder-like paranoia. The truth is out there, in humble music typings at least as much as in the mass news media.
I also think it's important to be aware of the ways in which language orders our thoughts. Language is a system of symbols, of course, and not reality, but smarter people than I am have written about the ways it imposes its system of rationality upon us. Grasping that these symbols can have multiple meanings, or that a compellingly written passage might be "pulled out of the air" and have no actual substance (insofar as one can describe the pre-verbal thingness of something using words), is, I believe, extraordinarily valuable in helping us empathize with our fellow people as people. That's part of the genius of Finnegan's Wake (which I haven't read in its entirety, no, not yet), or Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising, or the Super Furry Animals' entire pan-lingual catalogue. For me, music, and the way I try to write about it, can sometimes feel like a small way of taking part in this effort. We're at a crossroads, in which some forces seek to pull us back into the pre-modern mists of torture and mysticism, while others of us remain stuck in a print- and TV-based set of distincly modern cultural assumptions that, as Marshall McLuhan would surely note were he alive, no longer seem to fit our postmodern predicament. Language is a game, but its antecedent, however indefinable ("There is no such thing as truth," Tom Waits says-- there is no spoon!-- but that's like saying there's no such thing as pi; perhaps I can't prove my existence to the nth digit, but whatever existence is, I have it), ultimately constitutes reality, truth, beauty-- a reality where people die in pointless wars, where people suffer for lack of proper healthcare, and some of the word game's best players look down from their privilege and say, "Let them eat trivia."
As a slogan, shit, I prefer E.M. Forster's epigraph from Howards End: "Only connect". But that described a way of escaping back to premodern communalism from a print-based, Weberian modernity. The media we use on our computer have ushered us into a different era, one I'm not qualified to describe or explain just yet. In today's world of ever more discretely segmented information via Google, cable TV, blogs, etc., where people only need to receive the set of symbols with which they agree and ignore any underlying truth, perhaps a better admonition would be "only transcend"-- transcend language, national identity, whatever patterns of thought isolate us from our fellow human beings. The rest is solipsism.
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