jane dark's sugarhigh!

wait, what?

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.

One common reading is that this award signals a progressive shift in the doxa of professional economists away from Chicagoan defenses of market capitalism as the source of common good, and surely this is to be desired. Moreover, the specific details and data the Saez provides will likely be highly useful as ground for further work.

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.

here are three chords (chapter three excerpt)

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.

better living through chemistry (chapter two excerpt)

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.

gangsta gangsta (chapter one exceprt)

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 dynamic of racial confrontation is straightforward enough, with moments of greater nuance (“don’t let it be a black and a white one, cuz they slam ya down to the street-top: Black police showin’ out for the white cop”). Inevitably, the lyric retreats from its brush with social realism into the myth of the Black superman (especially once Ice Cube yields the mic). Moreover, in the end the cops stand not as agents of an oppressive regime in a systemic confrontation — as one would expect in Black Power and Black Nationalist hip-hop — but merely as another set of thugs in the thug game, a kind of unjust interference to be dispatched with: “Without a gun and a badge, what do ya got? A sucka in a uniform waitin’ to get shot.” The hood is the night in which all cows are gangstas.

popular culture and electoral politics (notes from the first 100 days)

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.

pirates (ongoing)

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.

We do very much hope the pirates bust open some of those thousand shipping containers just in a fact-finding kind of way. It may turn out to be that knowledge of what's in there is more valuable than the contents itself — but this is not to dematerialize the pirate adventure, prioritizing information over goods. One of the great, simple reminders of this new age of pirates is that, even at this late stage, stuff still has to be brought to places. And often that voyage passes though the Straits of Malacca, or some other place that the face of imperial history has left immiserated enough to launch a thousand speed boats.

"as i have argued elsewhere..."

MoneyWatch is sponsoring a "blog war" between the well-respected economists Brad DeLong and Tyler Cowen, a liberal apologist and a Hayekian libertarian respectively. We here particularly admire DeLong's capacious historical knowledge, which outstrips even your most curious economists by a city mile. But what caught our notice is DeLong's initial entry in the debate, titled "The Stimulus Package: Like the Housing Bubble, Only Better," in which he argues that the Paulson/Bernanke/Geithner sequence of EESA, TARP, ARRA and especially PPIP should be understood as, effectively, rebubbling of the economy — which, he does more than imply, is a good idea because prior to the crisis, bubbles were pretty much all that was driving the US economy.

The novelty of this description is lost on us, exactly because this simply rehearses our analysis of six months ago, under the heading "apocalyptic capitalism":

There is perhaps something to be gained from recognizing the bailout as yet another credit bubble: money from future work to be made available now, but this time without even the choice to take out a mortgage or take home a flatscreen TV....

None of this can answer the question about what will be made, sold, purchased within the real economy as it is abstractly mortgaged against this present loan. More commodities, more houses? Ironically, what is on offer this month is apocalypse itself. Or rather, safety from it. We are getting nothing for 700 billion but promised protection against the threat of systemic failure, a threat issued hour by hour on the news, by politicians and economists. We are made to purchase the very insurance Mackenzie discusses, but may sell nothing onward. Apocalypse is merely capitalism’s last new line, the latest in use value, though we are compelled always to imagine that it comes from somewhere else, is someone else’s idea…

Of course, the apocalypse bubble is far more than $700b now. What is most vexing about DeLong having eventually understood this crucial element of the structural nature of the crisis is that he still shies from considering its historical implications. And though we have absolute faith that he makes his calculations with the welfare of real persons in mind, he arrives at mistaken conclusions because he is unable to locate the crisis systemically: as one driven by a dynamic that moves toward crisis with the same motion that immiserates the vast majority of its participants. And so he can only imagine what are essentially pro-cyclical solutions, and thus finally pro-misery as well.

Rght Here, Right Now (Introduction)

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

Looking across the career of the London band Jesus Jones throws into exacting relief one of the great mysteries: how it is that undistinguished figures can, in a given instant, leap beyond the possible and make something entirely true. Recorded in spring of 1990 but not released until 1991, “Right Here, Right Now” is one of the two songs most identified with the Fall of the Wall, at least in the Anglophone West. It is, more or less, perfect. It was as if they had been waiting for the moment all their lives.

That is what the song is about, of course: “I was alive and I waited, waited,” sings Mike Edwards, reaching for an exultant, befuddled falsetto. “I was alive and I waited for this.” This is the events of 1989, the sudden collapse of the global arrangements and antagonisms known as the Cold War. Behind the lead vocal, in the push-pull of instruments and microchips that organizes the musical track, a fanfare swells as it follows the melody into the chorus, the uplift of “Right here, right now, there is no other place I wanna be — right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history.” Apparently Edwards and Fukuyama had been reading the same books, though the singer has perhaps dog-eared as well a page of Joyce’s Ulysses.

It’s a compact track, almost exactly the fabled three minutes that define the classic pop song; two brief verses, lots of chorus. The mix of analog and digital sounds is itself a mini-essay of the state of Anglo pop just then, the balance of rock tradition and the insurgent forms of hip-hop and electronic dance musics. Appropriately, the lyric takes the world-historical convulsion not as a general wonderment, but as a specific problem for pop music. “Woman on the radio talks about a revolution,” begins the vocal, “but it’s already passed her by.” The line targets Tracy Chapman, the folk singer whose self-titled debut had reached Number One in both the U.S. and U.K. in 1988 — and particularly sets its sights on “Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution,” which encapsulated Chapman’s plaintive blend of progressive liberalism and acoustic guitar that would launch eight million discs. The second verse in its entirety aims its charge at Prince’s 1987 single “Sign O’ The Times” and that song’s catalog of hints that the end times are near. In “Right Here, Right Now,” Prince’s social Armageddon, like Chapman’s “revolution,” is a visionary leap lacking a real occasion, and so disingenuous. “I saw the decade end when it seemed the world could change at the blink of an eye,” runs the Jesus Jones report from 1990, “and if anything, then there’s your sign — of the times.”

That accounts for almost the entirety of the song’s two verses, but not quite. If Edwards seemingly hasn’t the chutzpah to name names as he fires shots across the bow of political pop, he screws his courage to the sticking place in the only remaining line of the song, the end of the first verse: “Bob Dylan didn’t have this to sing about — you know it feels good to be alive.” Fanfare, chorus.

It is easy enough to poke fun at the utopian whispers and creeping apocalypticism of the gloomy artistes, and the song doesn’t pass the opportunity by. But behind this there is an unspoken question that makes the song finally haunting: what does pop music do when it does have this to sing about? Pop music as we understand it: something not much older than the Berlin Wall, something which could be the Soviet Union’s grand-daughter. Having turned its 200-second attentions on a fairly regular basis to politics, to social change, to revolution, what does pop music do when confronted with an overwhelming surfeit of same?