jane dark's sugarhigh!

"politics" through "pop music" (excerpts from the index)

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months. As a special feature today, we bring you a portion of the book's index

politics: of grunge, 87, 129, 139; of punk rock, 76–77, 79–80, 86, 87, 139, 155n6; of rap/hip-hop, 30–35, 36, 43, 128, 139; of rave culture, 54, 58, 65, 128–29, 134–35, 138–39. See also antagonism, sociopolitical; communism, collapse of; confrontation, sociopolitical; democracy; Fall of the Wall

“Polly” (Nirvana), 83, 85

Pop, Denniz, 102

pop music: Adorno on, 7, 94, 118; antagonistic discourse canceled in, 121, 131–32, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139; antagonistic discourse preserved in, 121, 138–39, 140; belles époques in, 92, 93, 97, 106, 108, 118, 119, 133, 158n38; and boundlessness, 95, 97, 105, 118, 120, 130; contemporaneous with Fall of the Wall, 3, 11–12, 18, 54, 91, 94, 106, 108–9, 113, 116; and dominant mode, 92, 101, 104; and emergent mode, 92, 93, 101, 130, 132; excess in, 97, 108; and gender, 95–97, 98, 103, 160n4; as groundless celebration, 132–35; historical change registered in, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 17–19, 20, 93–95, 109, 118, 127, 132, 135, 140; ideology of, 8, 20, 100, 118, 136, 138; metageneric status of, 92, 93, 108, 127, 130; musical structure of, 95, 104–5, 107; narrative in, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100–101, 121–22, 132, 136; and neutralization, 132–33; scholarly examination of, 97; Swedish, 102, 104; and teenpop, 17, 101–4, 106, 134; and timelessness, 7, 17, 93, 98, 100, 118, 119, 120, 130. See also charts, pop music; market relations, in pop music; videos, pop music

you better have some fun no matter what you do (chapter four excerpt)

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

The mournful ballad “Nothing Compares 2 U” was composed around 1985 by Prince, making it an unlikely candidate to bear the impress of another time. Sinéad O’Connor’s version five years later spent a full month at the top of the Hot 100, equaling the year’s best chart performance and eventually winning MTV’s award for best video of the year; the song and its popularity were part of the air of 1990.

If there is a novelty to O’Connor’s reading of the song, it lies in its pointed monotony. Experience at an impossible distance, in another world. Nothing happens. Though not entirely lacking modulations of intensity, the vocal confines itself to a considerably narrower range of expression than any of Prince’s recorded versions. The video drives the point home, consisting almost entirely of a tight close-up of O’Connor’s pale face against a black background as she sings with minimal expression; a black turtleneck exaggerates the effect. As befits a song tracking emotional catatonia after love gone wrong, the affect is at once excruciating and excruciatingly flattened: an architecture of dry ice presented as a song. This arrives in shocking counter to O’Connor’s famously wide-ranging and passionate voice, as well as to her well-earned reputation as a political scourge. Beyond the nicely-detailed sentiment of the lyrics, the song is the tension between singer and performance. Perhaps some of the general satisfaction was seeing O’Connor in such a humble (or humbled) mode; this may speak at least in part to why the song would be the only true hit single of O’Connor’s lengthy career.

That offers only a social reason for the song’s success. But there is another way to describe the matter, intrinsic to the song and the particularity of its distant, echoey keen. This is in the attenuated shock of realizing that the song is beautiful anyway — that beauty is possible even in this death-in-life, this world where nothing can ever happen.

i don't belong here (chapter three excerpt)

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

Cobain’s self-doubt, even self-contempt, is everywhere inescapable; it lodges in his clotted howl whether he’s forming words or not, and even when he assays a love song. But the sensation is not just in the sound: “I need an easy friend,” begins the band’s first great tune, as if he’s already abandoned any standards and hates himself for it. This is the indelible “About A Girl”; its sweet nothings only get worse from there. “I’ll take advantage while you hang me out to dry,” he announces, not particularly surprised at either party’s failings. No outside world intrudes on the song’s resentful, obsessive romance; it’s not a room with a view. Even in this catchy, inviting melody (reputedly written after a day of listening to the Beatles), the scene is stained. It spreads across the entire 1989 debut Bleach, and Cobain knows it. “Is there another reason for your stain?” begins the chorus of the opener, “Blew.” This stain is not remarkably ambiguous; the chorus ends “Here is another word that rhymes with shaaaamme!” The refrain of “Floyd the Barber,” one of multiple songs to dabble in disgust about the body, is nothing but “I’m ashamed” (or “I was ashamed”) repeated thrice, the final vowel drawn out again.

Doubt, fixation, resentful need, self-loathing, shame. This is the elixir: profoundly angry introspection. One of the Nirvana’s triumphs is to find a sound for this, unsettling, immiserated, but at the same time immensely agitated. It’s punk rock turned outside in, not anti-social but a-social. For punk’s antagonistics, an agonized self; for outward confrontation, immiserated retreat. For negation, sheer negativity. The surrealistically morphing image sequences which will become a lyrical mainspring also convey the deformations of an interior landscape: “And the car, twist, mouth, fear, yeaaah!” yells Cobain in the metal sludge of “Paper Cuts.” Later: “My whole existence is for your fears.” It’s a wonder there can be a you at all; it is no one outside his head.

For a moment of disgusted litany in “Downer,” the dissatisfaction with social engagement becomes explicit: “Sickening pessimists, picketing masses, separated communists, apocalyptic bastards.” Farewell to all of that. Cobain was unhesitating about the music’s psychologized nature: “The early songs were really angry. But as time goes on the songs are getting poppier and poppier as I get happier and happier. The songs are now about conflicts in relationships, emotional things with other human beings.” To which he added, “Sometimes I try to make things harder for myself, just to try to make myself a little more angry.” One trusts his claims about happiness are driven in part by a guilty need to explain the band’s popularity along some other axis than that of commercial accommodation. Regardless, this location of the source of grunge’s furies – entirely attuned to the personal rather than social – is telling enough. In the album’s most traditionally punk-styled track, “Negative Creep,” a brief flicker of social rage immediately makes the inward turn: “I’m a negative creep!” whines Cobain upward of a dozen times. At first this is followed by “…and I’m stoned”; shortly this is replaced with a wordless moan.

If “shame” is the keyword that won’t dissolve in Bleach, “creep” is the keyword that survives grunge’s duration. “Negative Creep” stands between Mudhoney’s 1988 “I’m a creep yeah I’m a jerk” and, in the last days of grunge, Stone Temple Pilots’ “Creep” and Radiohead’s first hit, also called “Creep.” That Radiohead didn’t turn out to be a grunge act at all only proves the point. Later, Thom Yorke would direct his spectral falsetto toward more aestheticized abstractions better conjoined with the band’s longueurs, most famously in the dystopian fantasia of OK Computer. But in 1993, Radiohead was compelled to fit itself into grunge’s mold, enough so that they would be derided as “Nirvana-lite.” And it was clear how this could be done: “I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo,” sang Yorke, echoing Mark Arm almost exactly.

This then is Bleach’s position: at the corner of creep and shame. The coordination of these two is the first brute truth of grunge as an achieved structure of feeling: the unceasing and unstable encounter with one’s own undesirability, one’s own failings, one’s unsuccessfully hidden or managed aberrations. This may be grunge’s last truth as well — that which, once lost, leaves nothing behind it.

frost / nixon

In the opening sequence of Frost/Nixon, one of Frost's team notes that he was no political thinker, but he understood one thing better than anyone around him: the power of television. This sets the stage for the film's closing exchange between the two principals, oceanside at San Clemente. Asking about Frost's predilection for the high life, Nixon inquires if he really enjoys those parties?

Frost: 'Course.

Nixon: You got no idea how fortunate that makes you, mmn, liking people, being liked, having that, uh, facility...that lightness...and charm. I don't have it. I never did. It kind of makes you wonder why I chose a life that hinged on being liked. I'm better suited to a life of thought, debate, intellectual discipline. Maybe you should have been a politician and I a rigorous interviewer.

Frost: Maybe.

The ironies interior to this sad peroration are, well, at about television-level. What makes it finally interesting is that David Frost is played here by Michael Sheen, previously best know to US audiences for his role in the The Queen — wherein he plays, natch, Tony Blair, politician of facility, lightness, and charm. The Queen closes with Blair's seizure of the national imagination after the death of Diana, possible exactly and explicitly because he understands the power of television, despite being a vulgarian lacking moral seriousness.

And so it is hard to take the close of Frost/Nixon as a meditation on the power of the medium. Indeed, as soon as one recognizes it as fantastical conversation between Nixon and Blair, it is hard to take as anything other than a meditation on the changing of political modes. Nixon and the ghost of Thatcher take their positions as the last serious politicians, however flawed and devious — inverting the film's proposed moral stance almost exactly.

If there is anything striking historically, it is that the role of the last authentic politician of the US, sculpted from gray gravitas, is Nixon rather than Thatcher's usual twin, Reagan. But of course this must be, as there is no way to rescue his political legacy from his longer career as an onscreen performer, and no real desire to do so. And Nixon, after all, is the towering figure of director Ron Howard's emancipation; the last broadcast of the Watergate hearings ended four days before the release of American Graffiti...

oakland: why not?

Martin Luther King, Jr. noted about the Watts riots: “This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.”

The clarity of this assertion is certainly a sort of exaggeration in response to the media insistence on the concept of the "race riot." To the extent that it is a corrective, it means to counter the willingness to delink race and class, to render the antagonism as at once essentialized and contentless, in so far as there is no immediate remedy for the fact that people are of different races.

As such a corrective, King's claim doesn't mean to swap one kind of riot for the other, but to restore the linkage — reassert the inseparability of the two. And surely it is hard to argue that, in some cases, race has been the axis along which the most blatant and brutal forms of dispossession have been conducted, and along which corresponding antagonisms have expressed themselves.

This perhaps provides some systemic-historical sense to the election of Barack Obama. Certainly the explicit political claims of the election (on the military, the economy, health care, torture and remaining substantive issues) are nowhere now believed by serious people, if they ever were. The unequal devolution of economic misery stemming from the depression continues apace, and is likely to reach the kinds of levels where open conflict is to be expected — and one might reasonably expect this to express itself again along racial faultlines, given the core constituencies of the unwanted reserves of the ever-smaller industrial army. One might almost forecast, without any satisfaction, a Long Hot Summer of 2010.

And yet Oakland, one of the historic foci of such conflagrations, seems uneasily pacified — charged by a legitimately joyous sense of overcoming and a sense of obligation, but still with the full recognition that at a non-symbolic level the government is not serving the interests of the city's main population. As a result, that population seems magnetized into a kind of static ambiguity by the election of the first president of color, and, one suspects, neutralized as a site of open struggle. This peculiar situation is the specificity of the moment, and part of its core uncertainty — it is in this sense that the election is indeed historically unique.

a little souvenir of a terrible year (chapter five excerpt)

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

If the images of Berlin were best able to condense the experience of historical culmination into a symbolic unity for in the West — if “the Fall of the Wall” became the pop moment par excellance for the Anglobal narrative — the events have no greater claim on world-historical significance than those that unfolded in the vicinity of a quite different architecture. The events in Beijing might be distinguished from those in Europe in part because, more seemingly exotic from a physical and cultural distance, they availed themselves even more of ideological misrepresentation.

The foundations of the occupation and the massacre of the occupants in Tiananmen Square have been widely and conveniently misrecognized, with help from many sides. Predictably enough, Fukuyama requires that the drama follow the same script as every other: “The revolutionaries who battled with Ceaucescu’s Securitate in Romania, the brave Chinese students who stood up to tanks in Tiananmen Square, the Lithuanians who fought Moscow for their national independence, the Russians who defended their parliament and president, were the most free and therefore the most human of beings.” The leveling of these various confrontations is striking, and none moreso than the inclusion of the “brave Chinese students.”

Much is left unthought in this. Consider the occupation’s own iconic image, surely one of the most reproduced images ever; it provides a complex but signal formula for this reduction, this unthinkability. It does so in part by its very simplicity. A man stands before a Type 59 tank — a line of them, in fact. It is June 5, 1989; the bloody suppression has already begun. In the video footage we see him move repeatedly to block the cavalry line’s progress, waving his shopping bags to do so. This last gesture has a kind of total pathos. Man vs. tank, shopping vs. totalitarianism. It is too good to be true, but it is entirely true. Shortly he clambers onto the lead tank, has a word with the driver, and is eventually absorbed back into the crowd. But in the picture we do not see the crowd nor the driver; just the man in his work clothes posed against — importantly — multiple tanks.

It is easy enough to register this as a heroic moment of a single, fragile body against the amassed power of the state, literally faceless. This is very much the suggestion of Time magazine, which named the “Tank Man” as one of the “100 Most Important People of the Century” (a Hot 100 of humanism, as it were).

One lone Everyman standing up to machinery, to force, to all the massed weight of the People's Republic — the largest nation in the world, comprising more than 1 billion people — while its all powerful leaders remain, as ever, in hiding somewhere within the bowels of the Great Hall of the People.

The vision of the individual resisting totalitarian power is well-suited to the liberal promise that its own machinery is in fact nothing but individuals, increasingly free from the dictates of centralized power and ideology; the converse of this is that the individual asserting himself stands thereby always for liberal democracy, poised against the coercive state. Because this photograph and not another — say, of the thousands occupying the vast, open commons in the center of Beijing — comes to stand for the entirety of what happened, we are disallowed from seeing the events of Tiananmen Square, of China in 1989, as a conflict between groups. Simultaneously, we are asked to recognize this as a confrontation of one idea, liberal democracy, against another, totalitarian Communism. This is the received meaning of the picture — a meaning only reinforced by its capture within the matrix of worldwide democratic revolution proved in Berlin five months later. As an image of courage, the picture is inarguable. As a map of political antagonisms, it is something else altogether.

The scholar Wang Hui, who was one of those students in the occupation, argues in persuasive detail that the protests were not pro-democratic confrontations with a repressive Communist government — and moreover, that these categories simply don’t work in the Chinese context. The occupation was rather an attempt to pull Benjamin’s emergency brake on the government’s headlong race down the capitalist road and into the global market.

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.

The social theorist Giorgio Agamben approaches this puzzle from the opposite direction; against Wang's enumerated specifics, he focuses on the lack of particulars.

What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands (democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict, and the only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu Yao-Bang, was immediately granted). This makes the violence of the State's reaction seem even more inexplicable. It is likely, however, that the disproportion is only apparent and that the Chinese leaders acted, from their point of view, with greater lucidity than the Western observers who were exclusively concerned with advancing increasingly less plausible arguments about the opposition between democracy and communism.

Whether Wang's variegated set of tendencies or Agamben's indeterminate "singularity," there is no position from which the Chinese events can be seen as a Manichaean political struggle.

Thus the surpassing strangeness of the annexing the Tiananmen Square resistance to the story that climaxes with “the Fall of the Wall.” However much such a consolidation is the inexorable logic of the image-event, it provides as well a sense of its vanishing internal contradictions, condensed into granules within the otherwise homogeneous texture of a unified meaning: the historic victory of capitalism over socialism. And exactly because China’s social movement of 1989 was suppressed with blood, this required (if illusory) meaning at the end of the story was confirmed. As Wang himself puts it, “The two most important events at the end of the twentieth century were the failure of Eastern European socialism and the reorientation of China toward the global market through its “socialist reforms.” They brought to a close the Cold War conflict between two opposing ideologies.”