jane dark's sugarhigh!

the acid house revolution (chapter two excerpt)

sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September

[....]The genre’s formation was not entirely without a process. Hard upon importation, the Balearic sound ran up against “full-on acid house,” with its cry of “acieed!” and its “Acid Teds,” the young clubbing rabble derided by the cognoscenti. The Balearic style was identified with a kind of laid-back gentility and a jet-set cosmopolitanism; acieed with a more frenzied will-to-party, and devotees more local and lower-class. The globe and the street.

This offered a miniature of London’s character as a world city Cerberus: economic capital, cultural capital, global capital. It was the mutual pressure of Balearic and early acid house that drove the development of London’s social scene, and shortly an indigenous sound for acid house parties. While “acid house” swiftly won out as the genre’s trade name, and the idea of an “acid house revolution” entrenched itself in the public imagination, still the musical double-formation of London’s rave scene shouldn’t be abandoned altogether. Within it is preserved the dialectical kernel the center of rave’s development.

In 1988, this development was swift and accelerating. Club nights blossomed in size from the hundreds to the thousands. After Shoom’s success, the London clubs opened like gates at the Epsom Downs starting bell: Spectrum, the Trip, R.I.P. This last, originally an underground club night and then a relatively aboveboard and frenetically popular venue, captured in its name another peculiarity of rave’s doubled consciousness, not musical but explicitly cultural: an identification both with the supposedly engagé counterculture of the American sixties, and with an isolationist hedonism. At the time it was commonly held that the club’s name stood for “Rave In Peace”; in point of fact, it was an acronym for “Revolution In Progress.” It remains hard to decipher whether these two slogans were congruent or contradictory; and, if the latter, which carried the day. Journalist Sheryl Garratt’s memoir frames the early London scene: “Many were using acid as well as Ecstasy. This, the longer hair, Ibiza’s hippie past and the feelings of peace and love they felt they were sharing all invited parallels with the sixties, although without the radical politics.” In Reynolds’ summary, “For all the self-conscious counterculture echoes...acid house was a curiously apolitical phenomenon.”

But apolitics is a politics — a fact that is always with us. Perhaps more importantly in this present case, many of the denizens of rave’s growing scene believed it had a politics, and this matters. That “Rave In Peace” and “Revolution In Progress” could be understood as something other than contradictory is a useful first judgment on rave’s social substance (and perhaps a judgment on the sixties counterculture’s as well). A peaceful revolution, revolution without conflict, might be seen as the soul of rave’s social desire.

thinkin' of a master plan (chapter one excerpt)

sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September

....Of tanatmount importance, the project of Black self-empowerment aligns the teachings of both the Five Percenters and the Nation of Islam with rap’s early development as an art form. The material, technological conditions allowing for rap’s genesis were orchestrated by the use of consumer electronics (most famously the turntable) as tools for the production, rather than reproduction, of music. This development is of course inseparable from rap’s struggle to be recognized as a legitimate music. Such a sequence — new art made by non-professionalized performers, followed by a backlash which pretends to police not the social eruption but the terms of the aesthetic — is not a new story. In this case, the backlash has been as extended and contentious as it is racialized. Such a conflict can only be understood as an attempt to maintain the barriers of entry which this new material empowerment had battered down, effectively allowing artists from a previously excluded class and race position to produce material for mass culture (albeit still mediated by certain studio and radio demands). New form, new social access, new content.

Thus it was inevitable that the content of hip-hop would swiftly come to express the possibility, novelty and force of such self-empowerment, and so gather in the self-empowerment discourses circulating in the hip-hop and broader Black community. These discourses would equally mutate rap’s artistic structures in a way that encapsulates the dialectical development of ideology and aesthetic form — a development most apparent in formidably talented emcee Rakim (Rakim Allah, born William Michael Griffin, Jr.), who effectively reimagined the lyrical possibilities of rap on his first two albums with Eric B, Paid In Full and Follow The Leader (1987 and 1988 respectively). Stretching enjambed sentences across syncopated and densely rhymed lines, Rakim did for rap something on the order of what Bob Dylan had done for rock and roll. Beyond technical triumph, Rakim fashioned a new rhetorical machine, able to articulate extended ideas as persuasively as catchphrases. He was pleased to use both, to connect old-school hustles about moving the crowd with doctrinal rallying cries in a style that instantly rendered obsolete the end-stopped couplet and quatrain format of early rap:

From century to century you'll remember me
In history, not a mystery or a memory —
God by nature, mind raised in Asia,
Since you was tricked, I have to raise ya
From the cradle to the grave, but remember
You're not a slave
Cause we was put here to be much more than that
But we couldn't see it because our mind was trapped
But I’m here to break away the chains, take away the pains
Remake the brains, reveal my name…

Rakim’s formal revolution was thus also a revolution of ideas, or of the potential for ideas. The effect was to identify rap’s cultural power and Black Power explicitly, and to do so with a particular understanding: that the rhetoric of Black self-empowerment, now indistinguishable from eighties hip-hop, was not a bootstrapping self-determination but an oppositional stance, a Black nationalism based on a racialized theology.

what it means, how it feels (introduction excerpt)

sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September

This is not a history book. How could it be, when history famously ended in the year in which the book is largely set? Perversely, the events which magnetize this present study — the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Cold War for which the fall is absolute metonymy — are the very events said to have secured the end of history.

This, with a terminal but convictionless question mark (“The End of History?”) is the title of Frances Fukuyama’s essay published first in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, wherein is declared “the triumph of the West, of the Western idea.” If there was any doubt at that moment, while the Wall still stood and the border remained closed, it would not survive through the bestselling volume that followed, The End of History and the Last Man. In this account, the line from the French Revolution to the end of communism is the line from Hegel to Fukuyama himself. Hegel’s vision of the Grande Armee’s victory at Jena in 1806 as heralding “a new era of the spirit,” is realized in 1989’s global apotheosis of liberal democracy — after which, per Fukuyama, “we have trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist.”

That history didn’t end is by now not worth remarking. There is nonetheless a specter of actuality in Fukuyama’s analaysis, and it wants reckoning as something more than a straw man. We have trouble imagining. The participle is everything. For if we understand Fukuyama to have been making the more modest if still tragic claim that 1989 witnessed the end of historical thought, that the public imagination of the West has abandoned a conception of ongoing historical process, of alternative arrangements of daily life — then his suggestion is considerably less laughable. If Fukuyama’s description is fixed not to historical truth but to a condition of consciousness arising in a new situation, it swiftly reveals itself as worthy of discussion.

Implicit in this is the significance of popular culture: the great marketplace of the public imagination, and indeed the place where market and imagination struggle over consciousness, over what’s thought and what’s thinkable. “Pop music” is always at least two facts: the cultural artifact of the song and all that it communicates; and its popularity, its having been claimed by enough people to enter into mass culture. A song may communicate historical experience — including the experience of the end of history — in several different ways. But pop’s thinking is always also the thought of the audience, the choice of some songs over others, of selecting this and not that by way of trying to grab hold of the moment: what it means, how it feels.

bob dylan didn't have this to sing about (chapter five excerpt)

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

Pax Americana proved no more pacific than any other Pax. It was a picture of the world, but one with the power of fact; the picture was hard to shake. The Gulf War (not yet “the First”) arrived in the Summer of 1990; already, it seemed part of a different reality. In the ease with which American force brought the belligerents to heel, so distinct from Vietnam, the Gulf War seemed to confirm the new situation.

As a social matter, however, this conflict was not without its mnemonic character. At the Grammy Awards on February 21, 1991 — while the military mop-up slouched toward conclusion — Bob Dylan received a Lifetime Achievement Award. It was bound to be an odd occasion, not the least because of Dylan’s well-known recalcitrance in the face of such institutions. Moreover, despite the soft-focus generalities of “Lifetime Achievement,” it was a specific occasion designed for polemic; at the same time, there was a sense of Dylan as a revenant from a different historical milieu altogether (fostered in part by his ongoing turn toward music from earlier eras, previous centuries) — as being out of time.

He sang a song from 1963, “Masters of War,” tamping the melody into the tempo and collapsing the words into a glossolalic yelp. In the description of Greil Marcus, “It was an instantly infamous performance, and one of the greatest of Dylan's career. He sang the song in disguise; at first, you couldn't tell what it was. He slurred the words as if their narrative was irrelevant and the performance had to communicate as a symbol or not at all.” An artifact of the Cold War’s avatar as ascending disaster in Southeast Asia, it’s a song of absolute antagonism directed at its titular villains: “I hope that you die, and your death will come soon.” Twenty-eight years later, the song was surely his most timely and his most out of time; it was hard to say if he was trying to make it mean again through the performance’s distortions, or burying it for good. He followed this with a gnomic acceptance speech, as uncomfortable as it was brief.

Well, my daddy, he didn't leave me much, you know he was a very simple man, and he didn’t leave me a lot but what he did tell me was this, he did say, son, he said — he said so many things, you know? — he say, you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you and if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways. Thank you.

The odd peroration (borrowed from Psalms 27:10) is as telling as the performance and Marcus’s account of it, telling about what might and might not be possible at this belated moment. It is a study in not taking the bait: scarcely a new trick for the old dog. But there is something peculiarly of the moment within it — an adaptation to new conditions, to a changed world-picture. The song cannot suddenly lack antagonism; it is nothing else. But the Real of History, the new Real in its glory, can only be approached by symbol, by affect. It’s buried deep in the performance, sublimed out of the lyrics — as if their narrative was irrelevant — and unmentioned in the speech. Like the unmentioned occasion of the Gulf War, and the larger occasion of the end of the Cold War, the antagonism is still somehow present: as context and feeling, as a ghost and an absence. It cannot be represented directly. This should by now be familiar.

under redaction

no walls only the bridge (chapter four excerpt)

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

Like most of the great one-hit wonders, Deee-Lite had more than one hit: the band reached the top of the Hot Dance/Club Play charts five times. And yet, “Groove Is in the Heart” appears on the compilation called The Best One Hit Wonders In the World Ever.

As is often the case, the “one hit” is the band’s first; the following songs might be reckoned to have charted in part via momentum rather than their own deserving qualities. Given the number of exceptions, this cannot be an entirely satisfying account. An alternate (but not exclusive) explanation holds that the song is best remembered that can capture, store, and sell forward the feeling of the times; the distillation of singles down to single is in part a collusion between market and mnemonics. Cultural memory removes bad data: engaged in the operation of crafting a coherent image of an era, it is another name for ideology itself. “One-hit wonders” offer a peculiarly direct image of ideological action.

None of this is to say that “Groove Is in the Heart” is somehow a perjured song, aesthetic complicity with a beat. It is witty and original, genially madcap with lots going on — a soothingly surreal vacation on the dance floor. The song’s ideological kernel is most intelligibly described as post-competitive. Such a sensation is more unusual than it may first appear: by the time one encounters a single within the media space of mass culture, the song is already charged with competition. Having entered the arena of the Hot 100 (an abstract market space nonetheless located in the United States), the height of its climb is always at stake. This drama is intrinsic not to the song, exactly, but to the experience of the song. This is part of what’s meant by the suggestion that pop is always the dominant; songs confront each other as combatants, and to become truly pop is already to have bested a host of songs heard and unheard.

Inseparable from this is the expectation of a single’s fall — often more precipitous than its ascent, in keeping with the common understanding of pop music as something which exhausts its secrets (if it has any to its name) easily and entirely. Thus the dreamy universality of the pop song is always at odds with its fate as a cultural commodity, disposable as it is consumable, destined for its paradoxical fate on classic hits radio: oh yeah, remember when that song was timeless?

Such a tension is part of pop’s nature. The rare song that seems for a time to escape from the iron law, that endures as a hit for an improbable span, acquires a mythic sense in accord with having seemingly transcended the gravity of pop itself. The sublimity of “Groove Is in the Heart” lies in its mythic endurance, but also in the extent to which the song matched this market affect with its own, a song of such flirtatious unconcern musically and lyrically that it felt only reasonable it should elude the tensions of competition, float free — for a while — from the narrative rise and fall of the pop single...