jane dark's sugarhigh!

life in a northern town (chapter two excerpt)

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

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

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

As an account, it’s more nuanced than the local t-shirts that proclaimed “Woodstock ’69, Manchester ’89” (though, as we’ll see, the invocation of the hippie past was crucial to rave’s vision). Still, Wilson proposed his “13-year cycle” theory in the nineties; there’s little credit in being a prophet of what has already happened. Using a historically richer analytic in 1986, Wilson was a bit more able to see the future.

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

For all his seriocomic erudition, Wilson was most notable not as a wit but as founder of Factory Records and the Haçienda. The latter was a nightclub named from a passage in the estrangingly poetic utopian text, “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” by Ivan Chtcheglov — a novelty song of a manifesto for the Situationist International. In July 1988, following on the mild success of their Nude parties, Haçienda started a night called Hot, with a swimming pool on the dance floor and sounds imported from the clubs of Ibiza (along with music from locals like Gerald and 808 State).

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

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

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

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

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

in a big country

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

farrakhan’s a prophet and i think you ought to listen (chapter one excerpt)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

spot the contradiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the image-event (introduction excerpt)

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

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

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

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

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

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

introductory remarks (princeton, 5/13)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

cynically say the world is that way (chapter five excerpt)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

what you get for changing your mind (chapter four excerpt)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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