jane dark's sugarhigh!

the pictures have all been washed in black (chapter three excerpt)

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

In the real public world, the tension between the genre’s ethos and its inconceivable economic and cultural success had already doomed grunge by 1991. This Malthusian authenticity trap threatens any art that launches its appeals or critiques from the margins of the excluded, the reviled. The sense of vindication with which grunge “broke” punk from the confines of subculturality into the core of popular culture was short-lived, and had been irresolvably contradictory from the start; the genre’s continuity with punk, incomplete as it was, still sufficed to render success as failure. The inward turn could no more coexist with Marc Jacobs’ grunge couture show in the Fall of 1992 than could the Mekons' bracing kapitalkritik. The difficult knowledge that Nirvana and company had ambivalently solicited such success only sharpened the trap’s silver jaws.

Cobain’s 1994 suicide was punctuation; the band’s 1993 In Utero, desperately abrasive and monstrous in tandem with a hermetic surrealism, made apparent by its popularity that grunge had forfeited the capacity either to repel or retreat. The album’s title, with its pathos-laden wish image of primal interiority, was clear enough; lead single “Heart Shaped Box” pressed the ambivalent fascination with supernal enclosure clearer still, while linking itself to the initial success-disaster of “Teen Spirit” by taking that song’s signal bent guitar note as the vocal device that begins the chorus of “Box.” But there was no way out, including going further in. The grimly beautiful ballad “All Apologies” admits this with its title, while the lyric itself becomes a catalog of Cobain’s tropes: “Married, buried” he repeats. Focusing the song’s messianic beam, he offers “I’ll take all the blame,” before returning to his original keyword, now rendered cinematic and dreamy: “aqua seafoam shame.” Inescapably, the shame now included the genre’s fate, and having wanted it. Released four weeks later, Pearl Jam’s album Vs. set a single week record for a disc of any kind, selling just shy of one million copies.

Forever T.S. Eliot to Nirvana’s Ezra Pound, Pearl Jam was burdened with the unannounced (and surely unintended) task of opening grunge to a still-broader audience — an effect achieved through the subtraction of bodily disgust and explicit sexual violence, as well as a smoothing of the guitar attack (in a way oddly redolent of classic rock and even the glam metal that grunge had overthrown).

personal essay in two parts

Part One: Gil Scott-Heron's "Johannesburg" is an objectively great song. I knew that when I was 14. For a mid-seventies protest song, the lyrics are unforgiving, but absent either the uplift or the reductive rage of contemporary political anthems. Phrase by phrase, it fills my adult self with admiration. The A part of the verse begins, "They tell me that our brothers are over there, awww, defyin the man. And we don't know for sure because the news we get is unreliable, man." The rhyme could be awkward but it's not, it's conversational and generous, and then he sings the B part of the verse, "I hate it when the blood start flowing, but I'm glad to see resistance growing," and it's so carefully balanced, "hate" vs. "glad," but not evenly balanced, with the weight of necessity on glad, where the resistance is.

The next verse repeats the structure: "They tell me that our brothers are over there, refuse to work in the mines; they many not get the news but they need to know we're on their side." And then the little lift into the B part, "Sometimes distance bring misunderstanding, amen, deep in my heart I'm demanding — " and then running into the chorus, really an extension of the verse, with its double-weight on the word word, because the song is about news, right? — "deep in my heart I'm demanding: somebody tell me what's the word, tell me brother have you heard, from Johannesburg, I know there's something happening tell me what's the word, sister mother have you heard about Johannesburg?"

But of course this is to ignore the song's invincible music, mostly piano and bass, very major and strolling with a hint of West Africa, resolutely upbeat and not a single misstep even in the minory bridge, "I know that their struggling over there, that ain't gonna free me. Yeah but we've all got to be struggling, if we wanna be free," and into the piano breakdown with the funky toms, African soul and in fact it's a dance song, really the whole song is a very particular dream: what if Stevie Wonder was a rad, an internationalist, but still perfect? Finally it ends, "What's the word?" "Johannesburg!" yells the crowd. And back to Gil, "what's happening in Johannesburg, LA like Johannesburg, New York like Johannesburg, Detroit like Johannesburg," and just as you think that's it, last seconds of the fade, "Freedom ain't nothin but a word — so let me see your ID, let me see your ID..." and it's over, four minutes and fifty seconds.

Part Two: Could I ever love something as much as I loved that song when I discovered it in 1977, two years after it was released? But the point was, we all loved it. We all danced to it, we waited the length of every party for it to come on, the same way we waited for "Sir Duke" and "Flashlight" and "Tasty Cakes," and "Reasons" for a slow jam, we smoked joints and drank terrible things, and when it was my year to make the dance tapes I spent hours thinking about where in the three hour sequence to place that song, what before and what after, and it was always late, it was always the right moment because the song itself could do no wrong, and at the end we all shouted "Johannesburg!" furiously with our fists in the damp air of somebody's parents' basement or once in a barn in New Hampshire.

This must have been pretty ridiculous. There we were, a tiny prep school of absurd pretensions and almost equivalent wealth, 125 students for grades 9-12, every year the headmaster would accept a couple black kids on scholarship, I was on a scholarship too but I was a white kid, we were almost all white kids who would start companies and clerk Supreme Court and if the headmaster took a real shine to you, you could get a summer job after graduation learning international arbitrage at one of his offices because he was also the head of Merrill Lynch, Charlie Merrill. And we all shook our fists, Johannesburg.

But I think there was something true about that. I think it worked, I think Gil Scott-Heron worked, I think every single one of us believed that what was happening in Johannesburg, as best we could tell, was an injustice and a travesty, and shouldn't be tolerated. No one reversed this verdict ever, I'd bet. The song convinced us without our thinking about it, convinced us of things we would have articulated passionately and poorly, about what it meant to feel this urgent solidarity with someone's fight but see that it was not your fight, not exactly, see that you might belong to it but it didn't belong to you, and if the song taught us that not every single thing in the world belonged to you, well, that was news to us.

annals of economics

Bred DeLong is a well-respected economist at the University of California at Berkeley, and a former member of the NBER; his primary "interest," according to his faculty page, is economic history. We mention his expertise because of the strange light in which it casts his most recent paper, "Get Ready for a "Jobless Recovery"" (full text at bottom here; it was also published at The Week, here).

As the title promises, the paper suggests that the climb out of "the Great Recession" will not restore the jobs lost on the way down (let us hold in abeyance the question of when and whether that recovery will come). It presents this claim as if it were, well, confounding or interesting. The rule of thumb in conventional economic circles dates from 1962: Okun's Law, indicating that unemployment swings will correlate inversely with GDP changes, at about a 1:2 ratio. The specifics don't matter so much as the gist, which is that as GDP rises, unemployment goes down. Recovery = recovery of jobs.

But it turns out that Okun's Law endured for all of two decades, and has been broken for longer than that. Since the downturn of 1979-1982, recoveries haven't included employment gains. DeLong offers a penetrating analysis, which — to summarize, though we encourage you to read his specific claims — goes like this: useta wuz, companies held on to skilled labor, identifying that as the core of their business; in general, they pursued a fairly rigid employment program, with long-time employees in fixed employment. For the last couple-three decades, however, companies prefer and take advantage of a far more flexible labor scenario:

Now, by contrast, it looks as though firms think that their workers are much more disposable—that it's their brands or their machines or their procedures and organizations that are key assets.

....Hence the start of the recovery is a business' last moment to slim down its labor force and become more efficient and profitable in the coming boom.

This claim is mind-boggling: not because it is so wrong, but because it is such a minor and fractured accounting of what a mountain of economic thinkers have known for years. This wondrous change? It's called "post-Fordism," or "flexible accumulation" or "the casualization of the labor market" or a host of other names describing different facets of the economic shift that takes place around the mid-Seventies. It involves, well, a shift away from fixed full-time employment and toward a labor force retained on temporary and flexible terms: a labor force whose stability, strength, and magnitude continue to wane in ratio to the increase in constant capital ("their brands or their machines or their procedures and organizations" in DeLong's phrasing that conceals more than it shows about the actual operation). This change is called the rising organic composition of capital, and is a driver of crisis; the crisis around 1973 was exactly the occasion for this new labor arrangement that took only a decade to reveal itself in employment cycles, and only 35 years to come to Brad DeLong's attention.

So the reasonable question, from the position of intellectual history, might be: why could a well-respected and quite knowledgeable (and moreover, relatively catholic) observer not see what was not only obvious but the subject of book after book? Here we can only conjecture, though it's easy enough to begin with the suspicion that DeLong simply doesn't like the periodization and has covered his eyes — if he did have to recognize it, he might have to recognize that the categories it uses are somehow relevant, useful, even descriptive of the actual situation. And then he would have to reckon with the accompanying analyses about neoliberalism, late capitalism, and etc. He might even be compelled to consider the possibility that value comes from labor time within the production process.

This cannot be allowed to happen of course, and so, rather than even allow such matters to threaten his consciousness, he chooses to blind himself to the most evident historical facts, which he is then compelled to discover with comic belatedness. Which is an at least somewhat salutary reminder of how ideologically-based are even the more progressive accounts of institutional economists: DeLong's blindness arises out of the imperatives of his situation just as surely as does Okun's Law, which of course appears as a permanent "law" exactly at the peak of the long postwar boom from 1948-73. Pure magic. What laws will be discovered next?

acid on the radio (chapter two excerpt)

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

The few acid tracks that grazed the charts were half-measures, mainstream conciliations — until December, when Humanoid charted with something altogether different. “Stakker Humanoid,” a spooky, minimal sprint with no hook beyond a momentary splice from the video game Berzerk, gave little ground to pop conventions or the spirit of one-off amusement. Gone were the full vocal lines of Electribe; gone the kitschy bricolage of S’Express, The Timelords, or for that matter Bomb the Bass and M/A/R/R/S. But moments from each of these found a unity in “Stakker Humanoid,” not a magnificent song but formally near perfect: a darkly reflective surface which held beneath it a sinuous energy that would flash forth momentarily — throw your hands in the air — returning straightaway to the depths, leaving the surface mutated. This was the new, without the novelty.

Nonetheless, contra Mark Moore, 1989 began with little more than signs and portents. In retrospect, it’s apparent that the nation was opening to dance music as a broader phenomenon — a sort of enabling condition for acid house’s growth beyond subcultural boundaries. Soul II Soul’s first hit, “Keep On Movin’,” peaked at Number Five; “Back To Life (However Do You Want Me),” began the summer at Number One. At the opposite end of the chart, “Voodoo Ray” snuck in at Number 40. The clearest harbinger of acid house’s breakthrough, however, wasn’t a dance track at all. The week after Voodoo Ray’s debut, the aforementioned northern folk combo Danny Wilson charted with “The Second Summer of Love.” After invoking The Dream Academy’s winter’s tale, “Life in A Northern Town,” the song turns sunny: “Ah the first Summer of Love was here when I was much too young; the first Summer of Love was clearly just a summer long.” The song is punctuated by the cheery chorus, culminating “there was love love all over the country, love all over the world.” Its lone minor-chord passage follows, marking to market as pop bands must: “Acid on the radio, acid on the brain; acid in the calico, acid in the rain.”

The song’s half-repressed anxiety of industrial competition wasn’t misplaced: the Second Summer of Love had finally arrived to the radio. As “Voodoo Ray” reached Number Twelve without major label support, Norman Cook (later known as Fatboy Slim) demonstrated his early grasp of lowest common denominator acid with “Won’t Talk About It/Blame It on the Bassline.” By the end of August, pop’s upper reaches were as consolidated as industry allows, under the smiley face flag. Lil Louis’ panting “French Kiss” was at Number Four; Betty Boo and the Beatmasters’ manic cartoon house, “Hey DJ/I Can’t Dance (To That Music You’re Playing)” was Eleven; deep house diva Adeva stood at 18 with “Warning!”; Detroit pioneers Inner City returned to the charts once again with “Do You Love What You Feel.” And “Ride On Time,” in only its third week, had climbed precipitously to Number Three. Studiously recreating the Rose Royce bass line of “Theme From S’Express” under an Italo-house piano sprint, Black Box built their diva hook from a Loleatta Holloway vocal sample — a shriek beyond ecstasy or agony, designed to blow through your head like a bullet train. This was unity as sheer domination, irrefutability with a disco beat. It occupied the top spot just as Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam” entered; by October they would be One and Two, and hold the high ground for another fortnight before starting to fade.

But the spell could not be broken. 808 State charted with “Pacific State,” co-written by already-departed member A Guy Called Gerald: a slightly jazzy return to the more minimalist manners of “Stakker Humanoid” from a year earlier, as was Orbital’s majestic “Chime,” recorded in December (“winter acid,” one might say). At the same time, Manchester’s rave bands arrived in the public consciousness. Stone Roses peaked at Eight with “Fool’s Gold”; Happy Mondays’ Madchester Rave On quite suddenly landed at Number One. Christmas 1989, and rave had finally unified the pop charts.

as nasty as they wanna be (chapter one excerpt)

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

The accelerated culture war on hip-hop starts, arguably, with the obscenity charges filed against a clerk for selling a 2 Live Crew cassette to a minor in 1987; it blossoms with 2 Live Crew’s 1989 album As Nasty As They Wanna Be, which generated a staggeringly extended and complex legal history — including a trailing suit for sampling practices. Taken together, these render uniquely apparent the unity of aesthetic, legal and cultural attacks.

Given the critical and legal pressure brought to bear on sampling in particular, it would be impossible to overvalue the fact that hip-hop’s Golden Age is the golden age of sampling as well. As Hank Shocklee describes the development of composition strategies over the decade, “Eventually, you had synthesizers and samplers, which would take sounds that would then get arranged or looped, so rappers can still do their thing over it. The arrangement of sounds taken from recordings came around 1984 to 1989.”

The struggle for aesthetic recognition which pursued traditional versions of musicality, and the new regime of expensive licensing which preferred artists supported by major corporations, had in different ways the eventual effect undermining rap’s character of reproduction-as-production — a material character inseparable, as we have seen, from its social content. The bond between musical production and the social base of disenfranchised and untrained artists had defined rap’s genesis, as well as the development of self-empowerment discourses, Black Power, Black Nationalism, and confrontation as a mode; the counter-revolution beginning in the late eighties had the effect of sundering this bond.

However, in understanding how these showdowns husbanded the shift from Black Power to gangsta rap, one notes that gangsta scarcely appeared as an accommodation to the culture war, and was in fact the recipient of renewed vitriol in the form of decency crusades. As we’ll see, the pivotal moments of the culture war in this period nonetheless had the effect of disciplining gangsta’s emergence in a specific and curiously narrow direction en route to becoming hip-hop’s house style (which it remains, in considerable and calcified degree, to this day).

more like a pop song (introduction excerpt)

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

...a meditation on the rather crude but not yet resolved question of whether pop music has much to tell us about what Jameson calls “the Real of History” — and if so, how so? To what, by the late 20th century, could popular culture testify?

Jameson’s own theoretical apparatus allows the pursuit of this testimony —in particular the claims made in The Political Unconscious and “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” He seems to have glimpsed in advance the situation of Fukuyama’s phantasmatic vision:

“....premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.): taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism.”

His failure to foresee claims about “the end of history” may indicate only that some hubris is beyond imagination.

Nonetheless, Fukuyama must be taken seriously, not least because of the purchase his narrative and slogan found in culture at large, the arena where pop becomes pop and circulates. Fukuyama’s version is more like a pop song, after all: a formula which seems at once to tell a total story and condense it into a slogan, a logo, an image. Is that not what the perfect chorus is for — in which “the end of history” becomes a hook so catchy and memorable, so improbably pleasing to repeat, that it spins around in globe in a blink? It seems finally a better explanation for the structure of feeling organized by any number of the songs this book measures, songs indexed inextricably to “1989.” It’s easy enough to believe that the “wind of change” blowing through the song of that title — the most famous pop song of 1989, or rather “1989” — is the last such wind ever, a perfection and culmination. This is a version of what pop music was always trying to convey; perhaps pop had been biding its time until 1989 came along to make sense of its sensibility.

Certainly, to follow the example, Scorpions had been waiting a good while. A perfectly successful concern, they had survived the years with the usual fraternal bickering, substance abuse, personnel changes, and a few international hits (most of them from the 1984 album Love at First Sting) since their formation in 1973. As suggested earlier, there is an account of no little interest in which the story of “1989” begins around this moment. Fukuyama tells part of it himself, with his usual focus on the political:

The current crisis of authoritarianism did not begin with Gorbachev’s perestroika or the fall of the Berlin Wall. It started over one and a half decades earlier, with the fall of a series of right-wing authoritarian governments in Southern Europe...

Jameson, as it happens, dates postmodernism to around 1973 in his essay, though working at the crossroads of culture and political economy — his periodizing facts are different. But the grand narrative of 1973 will have to told elsewhere; only bits and pieces are rifted through this present work. For the moment, suffice to say that after a decade and a half, Scorpions were well-positioned to capture what they would call “the magic of moment.” They were from the city of Hanover, in what was the English zone after the second World War. Lyricist and vocalist Klaus Meine, born in the year of the Berlin Blockade, had long experience writing for the Anglophone global pop audience (might one say “Anglobal”?) The band specialized in keening power ballads, with all the demographic traversal they imply — and they were comfortable, even happy, with clichés like “magic of the moment,” that find their best context in the cross-market, transnational pidgin of anglopop.

This pidgin is of course a site of endless compression, homogenization, emulsification of specifics into the the sheen of the general — a machine for cliché. But also a machine for slippage, and oddities. It is worth noting the ignored fact that there is no “The” in the band’s name. This is only one of the insistent mistakes revolving around the signal song of the events in question; another is the habit of pluralizing the title as “Winds of Change.” Apparently, at the moment there was only one wind — that would seem to matter. It rhymes with Fukuyama’s account of all changes as part of a single change, a single historical vector leading toward a unified terminus. All news is one news.