Ho, Burn!

I enjoy The Lumineers’ “Ho Hey,” even if the radio plays it a bit too often. And how could you not like it, really? It has a pretty melody, and it practically demands that you sing along. Then there is the sweetly melodramatic thematic content of the song: the forlorn, soulful, sensitive, artistic boy pining over a girl who has not chosen him. This is a difficult character to not identify with. Furthermore, even if we cannot write a song, we want to believe that we would be the kind of person that is capable of artistic expression despite everything. The song affirms a fairly universal, thus fairly platitudinous, stand for art against the crude materiality of our times. Anyone who has ever written a poem—everyone!—knows the feeling of the calling of art and of the elevated sense of self that comes with such a calling. Also, the song’s musicality has a kind of craftsman’s quality, the quality of organic, disinterested musicians being organic disinterested musicians that almost screams out THIS IS MUSIC. It seems to me that in most terms this song passes the bar for what some people would call “good” music.

But I like a song like “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps a lot more. First of all, “Disco Inferno” is more or less determined by its heavy bass line, a feature mostly absent in “Ho Hey” and which I straight up love. That bass line propels the song forward, gives it the joyous sensibility that contrasts so dramatically with its strange imagery. The song paints this weird picture of a catastrophic event: a skyscraper on fire, the fire rising, and people trapped on the rooftop. People catch on fire, they dance out of control, and the pleasurable thrill of the scene is too much for the song’s narrator, who then has “to self destruct.” Craziness. Then there is the terrific and unique blend of horns, strings, and rhythm particular to disco (fuck yeah disco!). I dig it the most. Nonetheless, the appeals to the artist and to art are not here. Nor is the sensibility of music as craft. The primary purpose of the music is to get you to dance, to entertain you, to make you burn. Unlike “Ho Hey,” this is not music one is supposed to sit and listen to, and it doesn’t ask you to sing along. Dancing is its imperative. Because it doesn’t require contemplation on the part of the listener nor does it feed the fantasies of art, “Disco Inferno” must seem to some people as not “good” music.

The issue for me here is not to get people who think “Ho Hey” is good music to think that “Disco Inferno” is as good. Foucault's discussion of the scientificity of discourse is relevant to this. According to Foucault, the point is not whether we can raise formerly subjugated knowledge, that is, marginalized or discredited knowledge, to the status of “scientific” truth. Instead, he argues, we should question the wish to see the status of truth and the power of truth conferred onto subjugated knowledge.  The desire to see something as scientific is the desire to invest it with authority. So I guess I don’t care if anyone thinks “Disco Inferno” constitutes good music; rather, I just want everyone to appreciate how The Trammps understand and convey the function of music. It does no good to argue whether the musical sensibilities of one genre are better than those of another, and anyone who engages in such an argument seeks only to establish some kind of cultural hierarchy. Music is more interesting and more important than the inequalities that it can be made to establish or maintain.

Thinking About Forever

This is in no particular order. My ex girlfriend is a distinguished professor at one of the world’s most respected universities. My ex girlfriend shacked up with some rich dude from eastern Washington then went to South Korea to teach English. My ex girlfriend is an aesthetician and the last time I saw her she worked at a fancy salon. My ex girlfriend has two cute kids, is a radical bike rider and a substitute teacher. My ex girlfriend is a lawyer that works on same-sex legal issues. My ex girlfriend married an Army guy and moved to Texas. My ex girlfriend is a psychologist and has her practice in the same neighborhood in east Portland where she grew up. My ex girlfriend is an intern at a crummy magazine. My ex girlfriend used to do commercials and I looked up an old ad of hers on Youtube. My ex girlfriend is a professional farrier. My ex girlfriend stayed in Los Angeles and raised a family. My ex girlfriend married a real estate agent and lives in the suburbs. My ex girlfriend models, sells fancy underwear, and we have started hanging out again because, apparently, we are not done making each other act crazy.

Frank Ocean sings, “I’ve been thinking about you/Do you think about me still/Do ya, do ya?” (also, this video is fucked up). We always wonder, don’t we? And sometimes the past feels safe and sometimes it feels raw, and sometimes I wish that there was only one past, one memory of lost love to hold on to.  Instead there is this diffuse network of affection, spread over some twenty years for me. I see their faces as we sit to dinner, hear them sleeping next to me while I read, smell them in my apartment after they have left for the day or for good. Trying hard to make a good impression with the family, buying presents out of joy or out of duty, jealousy over nothing, laughing hard with tears in your eyes, a head nuzzling into your side, the stupid argument that is the excuse for finally breaking up. I’ve been thinking about you. Do you think about me still?

“Or do you not think so far ahead?/’Cause I’ve been thinking about forever.” The forbidden thought. This is not a world of casual connections, otherwise the images wouldn’t last. But nonetheless it feels like a world of impermanent things. Perhaps this is the effect of the transitory quality of modernity. “All that is solid melts into air,” said Marx and Engels long ago. And for sure the bourgeois age is defined by the intensification and the quickened pace of temporal cycles. Whatever the historico-philosophical explanation for the sense of impermanence, it is the feeling of our moment. “Happy are those ages in which the starry sky is the map of all possible paths,” wrote Lukács in the greatest sentence in all of theory. Our age is very different. The past is a tangle of roads that converge very briefly on the present, then everything arrays before you, leading to nowhere in particular.

A Ballad for James

We run romantic toward these broken hearts, James. How long have I known you? It’s been almost 20 years since Jimmy introduced me to Joe, who introduced me to Don, who introduced me to you. You were all hair and glasses and an arrogant chin. You carried yourself like a person who knew things and made things. The first time I went to your place I was surprised by the perfect columns of books and fancy magazines. The floor of your studio apartment was crowded with stacks and stacks and stacks. It was like found architecture, if there is such a thing. It was like the ruins of the already read. It was like the profane world turned sacred since it was hard to imagine defiling one of those perfectly erected edifices by pulling out something from the bottom. I have never managed to give such objective shape to the things I care for. A cigarette always hung in your mouth, bouncing to the rhythm of your words. And how you talked! You are a few years older than me and in those days that made all the difference. I wanted to know as much as you did, be as clever and dapper. I’ve never managed your grace, James, though I did manage to find a living that made me happy. You seem to have never found that and I’m not sure I’ll get to keep it. Back then we would spend night after night drinking cans of Hamm’s, the cheapest beer in the bar—which explains my unending dislike for people who go on about enjoying “good” beer—and chasing them with bourbons that were sprinkled lightly with Coke in a bad-faith approximation of a cocktail.  I would lean back in my chair and admire your gestures; your drunken animation nimbused us with happiness. The shadows of the bar were your theater, and we were all pleased to be able to listen to you go on about anything. Then you would disappear for days, sometimes months. And I admired that also because I have never cared enough about happiness or desperation to commit to either for long stretches of time. After a while you would come back and pick up where you left off. All of that restless energy, James. Mine took a different form but it is essentially the same in meaning. But look at where it has gotten us. We fall in love knowing full well that we are not good at it. We look for those perfect disasters without ever really realizing that is exactly what we are looking for. All the sunsets fail to convince us that the blue sky won’t last.  I love a girl that has left and all that remains of her are my memories of her brown eyes, memories that I no longer want.

The Weeknd’s “Wicked Games” is the best song I have heard on the radio in a very long time. It begins deceptively with bravado then becomes a raw account of love, anguish, aimlessness, loss, desire, renunciation, hopelessness, desperation, and vulnerability. And the amazingly original quality of The Weeknd’s phrasing reminds you of the invention necessary to help cross the gulf between feeling and expression.  Maybe you and I will never create this kind of art, James, but at least we know the heartbreaks that make it possible.

Hip Hop and Capitalism

Kanye West’s “Clique” draws a familiar and tired contrast between white people and black people. White people, he says, save their money, they “don’t spend it,” or else they buy businesses. Risking Spike Lee’s judgment, West says that he would rather buy “80 gold chains and go ig’nant” with his money. In other words, white people hoard or invest their money, while black people are profligate with theirs and this fundamental distinction explains their relative position in the modern order. “Clique” implicitly suggests that proponents of black uplift, which Spike Lee represents here, encourage the community to be more responsible with their money in order to obtain relative autonomy within contemporary capitalist society. From this perspective, reckless black consumerism is an acceptance of capitalist conventions and ensures that the community will remain subordinate. I’m not sure that the song represents Spike Lee’s position accurately, but it does speak to a general judgment within and from outside African-American communities: the portrayal of extreme consumerism in hip hop is a blind acceptance of the principles of capitalism and contributes nothing to the liberation of black people from the power of capital, which is still controlled by whites in the North Atlantic homelands of the modern world system.

There is some truth to this, of course. But there is more going on in this song and in hip hop as a whole. “Blame it on the pigment, we living no limits,” raps West, thus suggesting that nihilistic consumerism is endemic to African-American communities. And if you equate, as most people do, capitalism with consumerism, then this sentiment, which is expressed often in hip hop, confirms the view that hip hop music affirms capitalist culture. But while there is an intimate relationship between capitalism and the market in which people buy commodities, these are not the same thing. Commodities, markets, and money exchange have nearly always existed but capitalism is a more recent invention—there isn’t enough room here to go into that history. More pointedly, while capitalism ultimately requires the market, consumerism and capitalism are motivated by contrasting logics. The market operates by people willingly transforming their money into goods for their own consumption. The market runs by money turning, as it were, into things. Capitalism works differently. The ONLY purpose of capitalism is to make capital productive, that is, to make money make more money. When fifteenth-century Genovese capitalists bought three tons of pepper from an eastern trader it was not to consume a bunch of pepper. Their purpose was also not to sell it as vendors in the market. In fact, if the profit was not to their liking, those Genovese capitalists would not sell the pepper to anyone at all but stock it in warehouses in order to raise prices. Their purpose was to transform the money they invested in the pepper into a lot more money by reselling it to other traders, who would then sell it to vendors who would finally bring the pepper to market. Those early Genovese or Venetian capitalists perfected the means through which initial monies, capital, could be used not for consumption or display but for the creation of more revenue, which could then be used to generate even more. Capitalism is thus ruled by the logic of accumulation. So while consumerism works by transforming money into things, thereby dispersing money, capitalism works by liberating money from things so that its primary purpose is to breed money, thereby accumulating wealth (Jay-Z’s verse illustrates his business man’s enjoyment of capitalist accumulation). That is why the economic zones that are most profitable (stock exchanges, financial markets, money markets) are areas in which capital is relatively independent from the commodities that people actually use. Those economic zones treat capital itself as if it were an actual consumable commodity rather than what it is, something that has an exchange but not a use value—dollar bills will only be good for starting small fires when the zombie apocalypse comes.

West’s and hip hop’s affirmation of excessive consumerism, then, is a sometimes ambivalent but always engaged resistance to the logic of capitalism. Against an economic system that values the accumulation of money, hip hop revels in the wasteful dispersal of money. Rather than the sober building of a nest egg, hip hop urges you to part with your money, to reject the notion that the primary incentive of making money is to make more money, to use money not as capital but as something that you can exchange for transitory joys in these short lives which are given to us. It is easy to disagree with the revolutionary financial irresponsibility of hip hop, but as one of the great expressive forms of the descendents of people who were once considered commodities by capital, whose lives were reduced to numbers on a ledger, it makes perfect sense to me.

Memory

In Absalom, Absalom!, Miss Rosa Coldfield stops her feverish remembering of the past in order to repudiate any belief in the objectivity of memory. Memory is nothing more than the body’s longing for what it has lost, she tells Quentin Compson, the young man that sits in her darkened living room listening to the tales of people long dead. Memory for Miss Rosa is desire deprived of its object. Everything we remember, according to her, is subjective and interested and part fantasy, or, in Faulkner’s beautifully crushing language, memory is worthy only of being called a dream. In Absalom, Absalom! this attitude toward memory makes perfect sense. Of all of its narrators only Miss Rosa personally knew the people whose stories she recounts, and by putting the negation of memory in her mouth, Faulkner questions the privileging of the experiencing subject. Language, not experience, insists Faulkner, allows you to know something. This idea is very appealing to literature people and our natural resistance to empirical facts, but I resist it. Like a stone, the past remains unmoved by the subjective remembering of people. There are many people but there is only one past. Though we may fail to remember adequately as individuals, this does not mean that all memories are the same, that they are all equally truthful or fantastic. Such thinking not only relativizes memory, it transforms the past itself into an act of the imagination. It turns history into fiction and doing so it misunderstands the fundamental ontological difference between the two.

Memory might be partial or incomplete but if it is to be truthful it must attempt to be faithful to the past. Many years from now, I will hear Ke$ha’s “Die Young” and I will picture you sitting in the passenger seat singing along ecstatically with your eyes closed, your head bouncing with its slight list to the side, and your hands out as if in supplication. I will remember your spiky hair, so different from when I first met you, and your glasses turning green in the sunlight, and your perpetually runny nose, and the way your woman’s smell mixes with the boy’s deodorant you put on. I will remember waking up to your face pressed against the back of my neck and your arm wrapped around my stomach as you slept and how that feeling defeated all ideas I might have had about getting up early and being productive. And while all of these things did not happen at the same time nor are all these reminiscences related to that silly song and its misleading representation of the triviality of youth and the hedonism of an inconsequential life, the truth of those memories, all compressed into my memory of you, will flood me with nostalgia, and it will remind me of how much I loved you when that song was first popular.