jane dark's sugarhigh!

he who fucks nuns will later join the church

GIven that the quarters of Saint-Denis were among the most insurrectionary during the French riots of 2005, and that the birthplace of Paul Eluard is physical home to the highest percentage of immigants in France and spiritual home to French hip-hop, we should like to wonder if the residents have earned the title Saint-Denistas?

the da vinci code

There is nothing about the scene of the museum visit which is not preparation for shopping (the daily itinerary of the culture tourist, ambling from the Carrousel du Louvre to the Galeries Lafayette, assures us of this). After queueing to get in, one enters the grand gallery and surveys the goods. Perhaps you've come to see some piece in particular, perhaps you're wandering; something captures the eye. You stand before it, contemplate, discern, deliberate. Your mind, as practiced as a fingertip reading Braille, runs itself over the surface of an imagined life which could accomodate such objects. You evaluate, make a judgment. All the while, a seemingly unsatisfiable cupidity builds in you. That's the basic problem with the Louvre, the sense of loss which makes it all so poignant: you can't buy that shit.

The flagship Apple Store has opened in the center of Manhattan, at the southeast corner of Central Park. If one recalls an open plaza there, between 58th and 59th at the foot of palaces, decorated with a fountain or two, fear not. The store is literally cavernous, for it's almost entirely submerged — an irony, in that this underworld seems meant for the people who float above the surface of the globe, cosmopolites whose digital cameras store images of Shanghai, Sao Paulo and Paris. Nothing marks the plaza but for a gleaming glass portal: a cube, joisted by geometry and chrome, empty but for a hanging sculptural logo. Inside, a spiral stair winds down to the business level, around the column of an open-platform elevator.

On the day the store opened, and the next and the next, the line to get in stretched the length of the plaza and around the corner, corraled by metal crowd control barriers.

If one has not been to France, or seen The Da Vinci Code (which opened on the same day as the Apple Store and opens and closes at the Louvre), we here at jane dark's sugarhigh! have prepared these visual aids for understanding Apple's semiotic system:

Here's the geometric glass entry portal...

...with the queue along the fountain-bedecked plaza in the center of the metropolis...

...awaiting the spiral stair/platform elevator that carries clients down to the action...

...and here's the plaza at night, with glass portal illuminated...

...while here's how it looks quand il pleut.

Apple, with its doxology of aesthetics-first, MoMAlicious industrial design, is the ideal candidate for this project. That's not to say the likeness of museum and store is a new one; after all, the already-condemned underground mall in the heart of Paris pointedly named its longest promenade La Grande Galerie, after the infinite hallway in the Louvre hung with Renaissance paintings (the very run in which The Da Vinci Code begins). The Louvre itself, understanding the condition of its captive crowd, has installed its own underground mall on the path from museum hall to Metro. Consider the cheek-by-jowldom of boutiques and galleries in the 19th-cenury arcades, or the overcome descriptions of the first huge department stores, as Stendhal syndrome leapt into the agora. This correlation cannot be said to have been discovered in the first place, any more than the freezing point of water can be discovered. It can merely be named. It's the expression of a general rule of the era, a basic relation; each specific case educates us in how the rule is followed.

What we might admire about the Apple Store is not the perfection of its likeness, but how that perfection seeks to overcome similitude, to finally collapse the museum and the luxury boutique into a single episode, one which doesn't risk the client getting lost in the museum until the shops have closed, which returns the aura of the singular painting to the singularish piece of couture — an episode in which you can buy that shit, and victory is assured.

axial ironies

Those who do know history are delighted to repeat it.

Those who do know history are condemned to repeat it with a smirk.

Those who would like to repeat history gain most from mystifying value.

poetics note

Thought experiment: imagine hundreds of physicists, in lectures and physics journals, recounting endlessly varied episodes — car crashes, swaying bridges, one tells of a cranky refrigerator his family had when he was a child, which they eventually pushed off the roof — to demonstrate the same few formulae over and over, which they all share and agree upon. Force equals mass times acceleration, simple harmonic oscillation takes the form F = -kx, heat cools. In fact, everyone reading or listening also knows these formulae that are being demonstrated with exemplary narratives, from which they can learn nothing and experience only cosmetic difference. This happens year after year; decades pass. Surely the publications and talks would just stop?

And yet, isn't the most popular poetry like this?

nights are warm and the days are young

Two things give us hopes for the forthcoming cinematic fete d'Antoinette. Firstly, the beloved Paper of Record has taken the lead in reading the film as, shock, a psychocryptoautobio(aquadooloop) of director Sofia Coppola. Here's Manohla Dargis:

Although early scenes of Marie Antoinette submitting to protocol — if she wants a glass of water, one servant announces her request and another fulfills it — do make her point, it soon becomes clear that the director is herself bewitched by these rituals, which she repeats again and again. The princess lived in a bubble, and it's from inside that bubble Ms. Coppola tells her story.

And then, via disingenuous averral, A. O Scott:

My earlier description of the courts of Louis XV and XVI could just as easily apply to 21st-century Hollywood, a parallel that, in "Marie Antoinette," is both transparent and subtle....It almost goes without saying that Ms. Coppola, daughter of Francis, is herself a child of Hollywood (as is Jason Schwartzman, her cousin). This is not to suggest that the film is veiled autobiography, but rather to speculate about why a movie about a long-dead historical figure should feel so personal, so genuine, so knowing.

The device of reading films as veiled auteurist memoirs is the result of a critical industry that has neither the time nor audience to favor engaging with the film in the way serious criticism might (that is, by assaying its own terms). Such an analytic can, true, offer up insights neither more nor less negligible than the movie in question, especially for the critic who understands that the box office star far more than the director has a determinate effect on a Hollywood film's final shape (there's really no way, e.g., to read Vanilla Sky as being about anything, unless it's about Tom Cruise's dotage/fading bankability).

However, for all its general inevitability, such a hurried and reductive strategy has specific histories. All too often it seems pointedly paternalistic. This isn't the first time Sofia Coppola has been subjected to such dross; witness the cheap criticisms of Lost In Translation, which brutally misrecognized the lead characters' orientalisms as the director's racism, rather than as a basic centerpiece of the film's characterizations (for a more complete account of this critical failing in the context of globalized Hollywood, you can download the essay "Another Green World"). The assumption is that the director finally has nothing to draw on but unexamined prejudices and personal life, and that these things moreover speak unconsciously through her, as she lacks the vision to modulate them. This may be true — but can one imagine the Times (or most any other site of reputedly sincere popular criticism) suggesting such a thing about Ang Lee, Clint Eastwood, or Bryan Singer?

All of which is to say: if that's the sharpest analysis my colleagues at La Dame Grise can conjure, one can be confident that there's more going on. Moreover, the second reason for our hope is that, in its strategy of setting a costume drama to contemporary pop music, and even staging a courtly dance to "I Want Candy," the film sounds like nothing so much as A Knight's Tale, a genially goofy film which among its delights features Paul Bettany as naked Geoff Chaucer, and a courtly dance that starts with nothing but a rhythm, footstomps, clanking (shades of Bresson's Lancelot), a spectral melody...all swelling into a choreographed pavane to Bowie's "Golden Years" — one of the most startling, pleasing moments of film this millennium, a true conjuration.

when i'm sixtyfive/strike another match

A good day to note the most notable thing about Bob Dylan's Chronicles. As the capstone on the edifice of the official Dylan narrative of genius recovered, the book is suposed to function as an example of his restored capacity to be insightful, ludic, witty and great.

How thoroughly it tracks the other story! The book, though presumably written "at one time," is astoundingly inconsistent — but the inconsistency is perfectly clear. The pieces concerning the early sixties are superb and charming, filled with off-kilter descriptions, lucid evocations, a steady stream of little revelations, and detailed recollections that seem able to illuminate what it is that we already know.

The parts concering the late sixties are less suffused in splendors of haphazard dailiness, but replace that with ferocity and splenetic willfulness -- sometimes a self-serving falsity that itself makes for great set-pieces — an inimitable sharpness buoyed by intensely interior refusal.

The rest is awful.

Nothing is more awful than the endless passage before and during his trip to New Orleans to record Oh Mercy, a seemingly endless sludgy meander spiked with howling clichés as, like the most pitiful hack bio, he goes thorugh the songs one by one, recounting how he thought them up and what they're really about, man. Amazingly, several of the songs just came to him, all at once! Wow! And the only potentially interesting digression, in which he feels revivified by an odd, forgotten picking style, devolves into dull, quasi-mystical ranting.

This, in stop-action, recounts the story of Dylan's genius in a way we recognize far better, stripped of the narcissistic Boomer fantasy of brilliance regained. It was there in 1960, it was there in different form in 1968, and it wasn't there after 1975. It didn't come back. His vision failed (as it must, as it must). His monstrous self-regard became ordinary. He stopped seeing the world in intereresting ways; he stopped feeling about the world in intense forms: the songs weren't so good any more. If the book supports any historical account, alas, it's this one — all too clearly. It's all over now, babies blues.

glass and irony

One supposes that Washington, District of Columbia, is least ironic of districts simply because it requires an incomprehensible avoidance of self-reflection to work for, in, or around the government and not notice you are a dupe executing a devastating business plan and calling it good works. Thus the cafe called Breadline serving the lunchtime needs of the laborers at the World Bank, deep within the vast volume of which we imagined was preserved the entirety of the Bretton Woods.

The inevitable encounter on an operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.

friends with money

In which Nicole Holofcenter, the Sex & the City hack with indie cred, conspires to make a film for Jennifer Aniston about how Brad dumped her, she was sad, but she ended up with Vince Vaughan, and no, really, she's okay.

clean

Gathering up a burger with fat onion rings at a restaurant counter after getting out of the stir. Swiftly and silently running her hand along the naked body of a barely-known overdose, having not had the chance to touch her boyfriend's dead body when he OD'd earlier. These are two things Maggie Cheung does in Clean, gestures slight but not furtive; neither does the camera linger over them, nor do they intrude on the conversations happening. They are barely events, off to the side of the dialog-driven story, but each of them wrapped up in a sensuality that always concerns not what's sensually there so much as that which has been withheld until that moment. These are tiny gestures of presabsence, awfully moving. But then, we could watch Maggie Cheung knit for two hours, and sometimes this movie (made in 2004, just now released in the US) isn't much more than that. It's enough.

Equally, we could equally watch Nick Nolte stare into space for an hour. Here he conjures up a striking performance, perhaps his best, much of which is just that: staring into space and calculating, figuring things out, waiting for the recoil he uncertainly expects from Cheung after each of his polite, hopeful rhetorical brutalities. They never come.

Cheung's struggle isn't with him; it's with herself. Specifically, it's between her face and her hair. From the first scene, her black bat-coif is an ugly, stylized exaggeration that, against all odds, overdoes her famous face. The hair, in fairly simple manner, is her bad blood, her stupid rock mythology to which she clings, as if to the possibility of winning; it's her junkie self. When, later in the movie, she puts on an orange watch cap, her face changes dramatically: wide, defeated, plain. The defeat is her victory.

The absurdity by which she goes to San Francisco to get clean can't even be processed; here at HQ, that little bit of the Eighties that we can recall involved a constant stream of friends with habits leaving the Bay Area: for home, Hazelden, Hawai'i, "the land." That the sound of Mazzy Star is the sound of getting off dope is equally hard to suppose. But this is all in the last few minutes of the film, some kind of bookend to the opening number, Metric's "Dead Disco," which we are perhaps supposed to dislike (not so; a slight, perfect song). Well — narrative. Well — French person's America.

Mostly it's the faces, the physical gestures, the endless miniature image-defeats, the melancholy of the sensual, the watching.

united 93

The order in which the vics die in slasher movies (as a general rule, the women die per facts of coiffure: styled blonde, straight blonde, styled brown, with straight brown for the survivor) is formulaic, which is to say, formed: a way the film presents its madeness, no less than a sonnet's rhymes. Plot, harmony, a lead character's unifying experience, a moral...really any form of self-consistency and stability that offers a clear line from start to finish is, by its very unrelation to lived experience, a distancing effect (similar arguments resonate with plastic arts).

This is United 93's appeal. As everyone notes, the basic events, and ending, are already known and unchangeable; for most critics, this is an even though — the film is affecting despite this limit. This is an error. The film is affecting because of this limit (which is different from saying that it gets its force from the story already in place). Because the external form is fixed, the film's internal progress is freed to be relatively jumbled. The choice to have no hero or even heroes isn't simply a compulsorily ethical one regarding the need to honor all the dead and respect their familes equally; it allows for a telling that presents coherence-systems far less than most feature films. There's no rooting, no tracking a single character, not much strategically-paced revelation of events; in recompense, actions and phrases come from all directions, shaky and disorganized, far from familiarities of pacing.

It may indeed be a general rule of real-time, of which this film is a kind of terminal case: real-time without order and control always threatens panic. United 93 induces panic quite successfully, and in inverse proportion to expressions of madeness. Don DeLillo, in the most eloquently ambivalent formulation of White Noise, sez "all plots lead to death." But isn't the opposite true: isn't plot indicative of one's power to give shape to that real-time unfolding which has no shapeliness but that it ends in the tomb? Isn't plot the expression of control over death?

For all the inevitability of reviews' describing the last shots of United 93, the film — so effective up until this point — betrays itself a couple minutes before. As the passengers and hijackers equally ready themselves for the onrushing confrontation, the film opts to deploy parallel crosscuts between the two groups, the latter frantically praying to Allah, the former just as frantically to their god. It is not simply that this gesture has a didacticism unike the rest of the film, but that it's exactly what Coppola would have done. As a gesture, it's cinematic; it's shapely, made. And with that small decision, the film loses its effect, returns us to ourselves, viewers. Perhaps this is necessary, if not inevitable; though the film is after something like human immediacy within the iconic spectacle of "9/11," one does well to recall that those events were as much a part of an image-war as anything else, that their immediacy was not — could not — be conceived of as independent from the sphere of symbol management.

edge of seventeen

Near-needless to say, here at sugarhigh!, we are interested in why this article needs to say "hourly workers" in the first sentence. It does limn the social basis of the dismay over Kaavya; perhaps we could all agree that copying over other books isn't a crime, were all copyists paid an equal wage.

thousand dollar idea

Conceived of last night in bar of a hotel called Furys, with Rod Smith, Mel Nichols, Tom Orange and Rob Hardies: a companion to the series of books on pop culture and philosophy, this one concerning instead pop culture and sexuality: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sexuality, Belle de Jour and Sexuality, Brokeback Mountain and Sexuality, United 93 and Sexuality, Straw Dogs and Sexuality...

"i just like it"

When a gentleman wishes to believe that "taste" is a magically self-formed capacity that doesn't bear the imprint of social relations, and could not possibly express the individual's relation to culture, he renders culture as an independent sphere which, closed off from lived conditions, is left as a spurious arena wherein the only task of the critic is to act as a professional product rater. That is to say, no matter which particular artists he champions, he embodies the ideology of the salesman with whom he shares a singular quality: a fervent commitment to "intuitive aesthetic judgments" which not only remain unexamined but must remain so, insofar as if they were actually discovered to exist, he would be out of a job.

stick it

The "Flashdance trope," though one would scarcely claim it originated with that film, involves a young artist/performer (almost always with an absent parent, generally dead) who specializes in an art form marked as whiter-than-white. After failing or bailing a juried audition, the hero has a chance encounter with a dark-skinned Other who practices a newer and more populist form of the art; the hero then incorporates some elements of this vitalist street style into their own routine and, racially hybridized, dynamic and democratic, wows the judges on the second pass.

Coyote Ugly rehearses this narrative with absolute schematic certainty: "Violet Sanford" (Piper Perabo), struggling singer-songwriter, bumming out on her rooftop, hears some hip-hop from the next dirty building over...followed immediately by the lthoughtful staring/lightbulb inspiration/late-night work montage around which the film turns. All of this makes the film's jubilant ending as baffling as any cultural text on offer: when we finally hear Violet's song, it turns out to be an utterly white-identified country number, sung onscreen by Leann Rimes and written by Diane Warren. This makes sense insofar as the film is less an adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's article about the New York bar Coyote Ugly than it is a Diane Warren biopic relocated to the East Coast. But it makes no sense in relation to the narrative of cultural mixing that the film so diligently sets up; the ending takes place as if that rooftop encounter, and the following montage, simply never happened. It's as if Jules, Jim and Catherine, in their final scene, drove off to In'N'Out Burger.

Stick It is more invested in the dynamic between female performer and panel of judges than either of these films, or any other film one might recall — it renders that scene not a crucial means toward the hero's future success, but an end in itself. This perhaps explains why the Flashdance trope must at once appear and be shuttled to a side narrative, and displaced from the unbearably white star (Missy Peregrym) to an already-nonwhite side player. The trope contains a central fact about this particular confrontation and its cultural payload, and so remains necessary; at the same time, the film's idea about what "success" would be is actually one stop more appealing, and so there's no room in the lead story for finally softening the judges' hearts to aesthetic miscegenation. For once, the movie has someting better to do than recapitulate the virtues of exogamy, and lands closer to "Bartleby" than "Rape of the Sabine Women."

ps: Hey Missy Peregrym — Piper Perabo called. She wants her stage-name designing algorithm back.

oh! revoir

Ten songs you won't regret stealing.

10) "This Time Tomorrow," The Kinks. In which they incidentally swipe the spaceship trope from glam rock, a few years too early. As seen in Les amants réguliers.
9) "Move With Me," Neneh Cherry. Ghostly, as if she already knew it was all over. Cherry remains one of the best narratives of circulation, in which the first person to balance rap and soul — that is, to understand the future of popular music — retires to a lifetime of very slow avant-funk, funded by her husband, who writes songs for the Spice Girls. I believe in miracles and words in heavy doses.
8) "Love Letters from Old Mexico," Leslie Satcher. Having written songs for Vince Gill, Reba McEntire, LeAnn Womack, Randy Travis, and Trisha Yearwood, she couldn't get arrested with her solo album, which is beautiful top to bottom (other than a misreading of "Ode to Billie Joe"); this song does as much with pronouns as John Ashbery.
7) "Pais e filhos," Legiao Urbana. For all the harm that "world music" has caused, it remains useful for certain things: Manu Chao, baile funk, and as a repository for certain kinds of very very happy major-key melodies that can't quite find a home in contemporary FM radio's series of niches.
6) "Thieves in the Temple" (Remix), Prince. Ultimate Prince can't do much for anyone who was alive in the Eighties; either you're already a Prince completist, or a lost cause. But here's the thing: all the vinyl is out in the garage, and who can be bothered, so the second disc of remixes provides easy access to, say, the extra verse in "Pop Life," the pointless additional hour of "U Got The Look," and the odd sparsity/demented seriousness of this track. A panic attack from when metaphors mattered.
5) "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," Hole. I know, let's cover Them's version! Sort of!
4) "Studio Hair Gel," Barcelona. Our friend put this on a mix for us. It seems to be some kind of Chicago in-joke. Also, apparently it's electroclash. Tell it to Candy-O.
3) "Double Life," The Cars. Or, in general, much on the implausibly superb and utterly erased second album, Candy-O.
2) "Trick or Treat," Shanté (née Roxanne Shanté). You want ass the cash is first — you got dead presidents baby I got a hearse in my purse. What did Greg Kihn say?
1) "Come una Pietra Scalciata," Articolo 31. Italian people do not like it when you explain to them that, simply because they have gone through the trouble to make terza rima possible via ending almost every single word in their language with an unstressed vowel, it is pretty much impossible for them to make convincing hip-hop. Even in the best case scenario, it ends up sounding like Bob Dylan at his most arbitrary. Which perhaps explains why the greatest Italian hip-hop song (discovered courtesy Greil Marcus) is in fact a cover of Bob Dylan .

how tall/how serious

The hot hot gossip is that trinational man of mystery George Stanley will be awarded the Shelley Prize (given with regard to "genius and need") at the annual ceremony of the Poetry Society of America (where he will most surely co-write an occasional pantoum with Maxine Kumin). Stanley being one of our most beloved poets, we congratulate him and wish him a lovely trip to New York for the event, and rather expect a travel poem to follow, perhaps a mixture of "A Trip in Ireland" and "How Was Calgary?" with a pinch of "My Trip to New York."

mission: impossible III

Cherie's "I'm Ready" — written by Kara DioGuardi, sung by Cherie, urgency courtesy of Foreigner — is as close to perfect as a pop song gets, and yes, that includes the Beatles and Nellie McKay. But the formal interest isn't its perfection. It's the possible relationship between its perfection and the singular fact of how few seconds there are in the song in which the melody isn't being sung: twelve seconds to the first verse (which turns out to be a lifetime); 0 seconds between verse and chorus; 0 seconds before chorus leads back to verse; less than two seconds between second chorus and bridge; 0 seconds between bridge and chorus, 0 seconds before the chorus repeats to outro. Once it starts, a total of two seconds that are not led by the vocal line.

Mission: Impossible III, by the same token, approaches being a perfect movie, in a way that makes perfectly cllear how much a perfect movie leaves to be desired. Someday, someone with a copy of the DVD will determine how many of this film's 126 minutes are not part of an action sequence — less than a dozen, one suspects. Perhaps an equally viable analogy is the format of a Squeeze song or Tom Waits' "Ol' 55," with a chorus so long, each part unfolding the next from what at first seems like a last gesture, that one despairs of ever arriving at its end, and gives onself over to the craven pleasures. In M:I:3, one can be certain that a long swing from one Shanghai megastructure to the next will lead into a long tumble down a canted glass face, a slide which is also a gunfight by the way, and leads directly to the grabbing of the macguffin and ensuing base-jump into a busy street, a quick game of human Frogger pursuing dropped item through traffic which inevitably shifts into the latest in car chase technologies...

Amidst all this activity, sugarhigh!'s favorite moment came when Tom Cruise descends dramatically into the Vatican's da Vinci-coded catacombs; we love it when movie stars sneak down there, and the fact that he does not run into Tom Hanks for a drawn out battle involving Israeli Army kung fu and laser cats is perhaps the least believable thing about the movie.

les amants réguliers

Philippe Garel was 20 in the May days of 1968; so too is poet François, the lead character in his '68 epic Les amants réguliers (2005). François just happens to be played by Garrel's son Louis, who a year or so before just happened to play one of the leads in wet dreamer Bernardo Bertolucci's film about the same historical occasion, The Dreamers. As if that intertext wasn't enough, somewhere in the middle of Les amants' three hours, a colloquy of stoned kid rock-throwers retreat to the crash pad of their trust-funded confrere to discuss culture. Have you seen Before the Revolution, asks one of another. No? At which point the speaker turns directly to the camera and enunciates, as if it were an elocution lesson, "Bernardo Bertolucci."

To which we can only say: take it outside, boys. Your pissing contest isn't amusing. We would love Les amants to have resurrected the Nouvelle Vague, to have restored dignity to the category "three hour French movie," or simply to have been better than the turgid anti-politics of The Dreamers. Perhaps it is better, if "better" means "less ridiculous" (though by the same token it's "worse," in the sense of "less hot"). Perhaps Garrel's idea — that the failure to disrupt regular life would come back to haunt the regular lovers a thousandfold — is at least an idea rather than a cheap insult. But the gap between what remains to be expressed, and what each film decides is expressive enough, is identical: Way Too Broad.

Michel Houellebecq's drooling, reflexive lampoonings of the soixante-huitards, aside from their Oedipal bathos, have what is either the critical acuity or sheer stupidity to rehearse the most basic distortions of the historical narrative: they present the entirety of the revolutionary desire as concerning personal liberties. In short, according to the way lots of people like to tell it, 1968 was about free love and a higher wage to spend freely on hash, not about toppling a government and revising daily life. We would hope that either Ber-nar-do Ber-to-lu-cci or Phillipe Garel could do better than that, could get at what might have been particular and resonant about that moment. Instead, the two seem simply to have flipped a coin by way of deciding which would tell their drawing-room tale of ruint romance in lurid color, which in somber b/w, as if those were the two approaches to history.

extensive/rock that meme

Without endeavoring to summarize the entire "is Stephin Merritt a racist?" discussion (one can find a recent note and an outlinked entry-point to the debate here and here), sugarhigh! offers a couple ancillary notes:
• It's interesting that the debate focuses on trying to ascertain some abstract truth about Stephin Merritt, as if that mattered at all. The soul of some individual you're unlikely to spend much time with: whatevs. What seems more fundamentally at stake is: does this possibility begin to explain something about Merritt's music and, far more importantly, about the extent to which people embrace and identify with it, despite its dullness? That is, is this an explanatory account, or just an insult?
• Somewhere around the heart of this lies what we see as a most fundamental issue about "taste," and what can be deciphered about ideology and social damage by tracing the chasm between someone's self-proclaimed beliefs and what seems to be revealed by their actual practices. But if we're going to do this, let's do this. No one thinks they're a racist, and as sugarhigh! can attest from asking strangers "what kind of music do you like?" reflexively for years, a vast majority of white people from metropolitan areas believe they have eclectic tastes, or enjoy "everything." This everything, as it happens, is a curious one: it never includes Too Short, or Christina Milian (or, for that matter, Toby Keith or Jessica Simpson).
• So, you are saying, there are two issues being conflated here: the racism implicit in the empirical preferences of some people who insist they're not racist, and the unstated opposition between "eclectic" and "pop" that renders the term "eclectic" as self-canceling — not just meaningless, but encrusted with a rather laden delusion. Indeed. This conflation, and the labor of spackling over the logical fissures of each portion, strikes at the heart of the basic problematic of taste as it regards mass culture in the United States (particulary when race is considered integrally with class). Stephin Merritt is just a cool test case: everyone believes they have self-determined, non-ideological preferences that are not only unbound but democratically virtuous; meanwhile, individual taste, when you look at someone's iPod, often turns out to be a map of exclusions — a map that is resonant with, if not isomorphic to, rather undemocratic histories.
• But why pillory poor Stephen? If the order of the day is to call bullshit on this phenomenon, there's a broader version we've been meaning to mention: the "playlist meme." Every now and then, someone sees fit to post a random list of ten or twenty songs generated by their digital music player. We understand this practice as meant to demonstrate the serendipitous collisions of songs that can be produced by randomizing; meant perhaps to archive a particularly pleasing set; and meant to celebrate the general excellence of the songs appearing. Swell. At the same time, let's remember these lists have two determinations: on the one hand, they are a "random" cross-section of the kind of music someone collects; on the other, they are a cross-section the person feels particularly compelled to share. They are, thusly, doubly representative of someone's empirical tastes. So let us love this empiricism, and invite everyone into the Merritocracy: if that playlist is all white people, well then, whatever it is that one thinks it is communicating about one's taste, and whatever one might claim about how that quality came to pass...