Despite frequent editorials to the contrary, hip-hop is not dead, nor is it dying.  Hip-hop is as dead as jazz is: that is to say, there’s still great music being made, even if mainstream media ignores said music.  It’s also true that I won’t hold my breath for the next Bird, Monk, Ornette, or Trane to lay down a style-wide marker for before and after artist x, and just the same I am not expecting a new Chuck D or Rakim to make everyone in hip-hop pay attention and re-evaluate.  Hip-hop is either commercialized or underground, the former pernicious, the latter often as great as the Greats but rarely known outside of a tiny group of fans and, one has to think, not making a great living at it.

My wife borrowed this book from the library and then, half-way through or something, bought it.  Jeff Chang‘s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop was indeed worth the money, I discover, particularly when one buys a used copy.  It’s subtitled “a History of the Hip-Hop Generation,” rather than of hip-hop, and this it is, all for the better.

Chang excels at context, which to me is both the mark of a clear thinker and, completely related to this, the most important consideration in understanding anything in its social aspect.  Indeed the book, as much as documenting hip-hop itself documents the broadening context of the movement (of which I am prone to follow in its musical form, rap) which to my read can almost entirely explain hip-hop’s changing form and content.

The book begins in the 1970′s Bronx and Jamaica–the island nation, not Jamaica, Queens–and clearly documents that hip-hop’s originators were people totally abandoned by their governments and societies.  Particularly of value for the reader in the United States is the material on the Bronx, simply because public discussion of poverty in the United States has not really happened for some long time, certainly since Johnson’s Presidency.  As an aside, there is much talk under Obama and a real measure of action to shore up the beleaguered middle classes of which I am a part, all well and good, but totally ignoring the growing number of people this country has all but left for dead.  Chang documents how thoroughly the Bronx was targeted–not hyperbole–for destruction.  Urban planners, police chiefs, and the racist swine Daniel Moynihan are correctly fingered for the crime.

I was one of the white kids who got really turned on to hip-hop when Public Enemy put out It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.  I was a freshman in college when it came out, and I bought it that summer.  It’s hard for me to overstate how important Public Enemy was and continues to be for me.  I had grown up a massive Beatles fan, and had always wanted to know the feeling I’d read about, when Sgt. Pepper’s came out, when everybody was listening to it and talking about it, and when it seemed to lay down one of those cultural markers, like those of Bird and Ornette, of before and after.  It Takes a Nation was precisely that.  I had long discussions about it and, particularly the “Fight the Power” 12″ (which was the greatest single record I could remember being released) with my friends Greg and Ross.  I took Chuck’s advice and listened to Farrakhan, and like Chuck I took what was valuable and discarded that which was not.  I was a good white kid with good intentions before PE, but Chuck D put me on a better road than that.

I say this because I came to the book with opinions and expectations about N.W.A. in particular and “gangsta rap” in general.  I appreciated Chang’s depiction of the controversy Straight Outta Compton engendered, not so much in the mainstream media but within hip-hop itself.  I participated in these discussions, very much on the fringe of a tiny group, in college.  I wasn’t really one of the hip-hop crowd, but was close with some people who were (as problematic as that sounds) and I was indeed obsessed with Public Enemy.  That said, I remember feeling that N.W.A. was a betrayal, and voicing this to a friend who was himself from Compton and truly one of the hip-hop crowd.  I leveled all the appropriate criticisms, and my friend, while agreeing with all of my substantive points, said, “yes, but it’s real,” meaning simply that Ice Cube depicted things that were part of his world, though by no means things he was close to personally involved with.

Chang more or less takes the line my friend took, and that’s fair enough.  In recent years I will admit that my thoughts on “gangsta rap” have taken on a conspiratorial tone.  I think it was after reading Mike Davis’ City of Quartz years ago–don’t blame Davis for my errors–and digesting how thoroughly the various powers that were and continue to be in L.A. used gang violence as a pretext to implement genuinely genocidal policy in working-class black and brown neighborhoods, I over-conflated the beginnings of “gansta rap” with those policies.  Chang clearly demonstrates how thoroughly grass-roots N.W.A. were in their beginnings, and indeed I found myself having some sympathy for them and Eazy-E in particular as people who had dreams of doing something big but who were, because of where they were from, total underdogs.  Compton–and Chang makes this point explicitly–and South Central L.A. in general were left for dead in the 1980′s just like the Bronx was 10 years before.

What Chang misses in this, the only part of the book that I had any real prior knowledge about, or rather what he leaves out, is a contextual critique of “gangsta rap.”  I remember being furious at Rolling Stone’s one-star review of Public Enemy’s Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age, in which the idiot reviewer (significantly, I can’t find a link to the review online) called PE out of touch, because things had moved forward–not my opinion–with “gangsta rap.”  I did not have the language for a critique at the time, but in hindsight I do, and I wish Chang had pursued this line: we know that the big market for hyper-violent rap is white.  N.W.A. may have themselves, at least to begin with, been truly D.I.Y., but we have to put ourselves in the shoes of white media execs and ambitious white journalists with no personal stake in the future of positive hip-hop.  It doesn’t take an idiot to know that you will have an easier time selling a black musician who confirms white racist stereotypes to white people than you will a black musician who confounds them.  That is the contextual story of “gangsta rap,” and Chang doesn’t really pursue it.

That said, great read, and as far as I can tell indispensable if one wishes to understand the last quarter of the 20th century in the United States.

Although I’m blissfully alone,
I’m drawn to the phone
And I can almost hear it ring.
Just behind the front door
There’s one shrill voice or more
With my name loudly echoing.
The lipstick stains and my dirty hands:
How I keep searching the sheets for hair-strands.
It won’t be long until I hear these demands
That I’m sure are there waiting.
So dress me down and classify me as vile.
Confine my dwellings to a garbage pile.
I have my prizes and my face can still smile.
I’ve maintained my advantage.

My reactions are automatic
And my expression stays static
When I’m held up to the grill.
I’m giving proof to my belief
That as I’m given this grief
I further strengthen my iron will.
There have been times that I’ve found myself caught,
But after all of these things that I’ve bought,
To bring this total to a deafening nought
Would just leave me chagrined.
So shoot my head up with your slings and your needles.
Lay my dead body on a heap of dung beetles.
I am much smarter than the average bipedal.
I’ve maintained my advantage.

I’ll surely slip through their sight
And with each passing night
Their suspicions will keep unconfirmed.
That nasty thought in their brains
Is surely sure to remain
An unreproductive, though vicious, germ.
So box my face or cut me up with your claws
And then recite that long list of your laws.
I can retort without the slightest of pause
That I’m all but immune.
So call the cops or throw me into the deep,
But don’t call me an example of sheep.
Though I have hideous dreams when I sleep,
I’ve maintained my advantage.

If I remember correctly, this was the first tune I’d finished after the House Carpenters sputtered into non-existence.  I have never believed in divine intervention into human affairs, but this might be evidence of it if you wanted to demonstrate such a thing.  It helped me immensely after losing what to this day was the most important and beloved musical collaboration of my life that I wrote what was my best tune to date nearly immediately upon said collaboration’s collapse.

I imagine that one reason the tune turned out well is because I had literally nothing in my life at that point except a job hunt, which mentally I wanted to avoid.  Focus is as much a matter of circumstance as ability, though both play a role.  I had nothing to do except pay attention to the task of the lyrics, and I’d think that their simplicity–it’s a very, very simple tune–is a result of that.

Simple does not mean static.  A tune needs some sort of movement.  That said, while one can create the illusion of movement in a song by throwing a lot of stuff into the lyric, a better approach is to create a simple structure in which the pieces affect the meaning of each other, pieces taken not necessarily as actual verses but possible as ideas or themes in the tune.  This is to say, with concrete reference to this tune: there are three basic things happening:

1. We have a philanderer driven to philander.
2. We have a philanderer trying to hide philandering in order to continue philandering.
3. We have the mental result of this conflict, itself in two parts:

• A sense of superiority because of successful hiding of philandering.
• A sense of desperation because of the constant threat of failure to hide.

It’s a very simple vulgar dialectic, vulgar, I say, because dialectic is not as formulaic in either Marx or Hegel as people often present.  That said, we have thesis, antithesis–1 and 2 above–and then a synthesis (3, above) which is itself a new conflict, as seen in the bullet points.  The tune basically presents these four ideas, and it’s compelling because they relate to each other in a way that is both abstractly logical and also true to actual, lived experience.

To be sure, I didn’t draw up an abstract structure for the tune and then start writing lyrics.  All theory must derive from actual practice if it is to be of any value.  I first, as I nearly always do, started plunking out some little thing on my guitar and as I stumbled through it a little melody caught my ear and I went with it.  I do not remember for sure but nearly always I start the lyrics by jotting down crap that sounds (sort of) good with the melody and gradually, through all the crap, stumble upon a lyric that is (semi-) intelligent.  My wife and I went through a phase a few months ago in which we watched all of the Inspector Morse episodes.  One of the points of that character is that he stumbled to his conclusions, often making a mess of things but through a combination of what gets called intuition–really more a curiosity about things one doesn’t fully understand–and rational thought about things understood Morse would get his man, or woman as the case might have been.  So it is with me and lyrics.  There’s a lot of stumbling, but I have a very good sense of when things don’t quite yet fit and require still more stumbling.  I stop when things fit, which in the case of this tune produced what is, at the end of it, a very clear and logical structure.

I pointed out above that one does not begin with an abstract structure but rather with concrete screwing around with words.  I would stress this again.  The key to this or any of my best tunes is that each line holds up extremely well on its own.  This tune is, I’d say as an aside, me at my very best.  Understand that I don’t pretend it always works this well for me.  I like abstract painting almost as much as I do non-representational art, but writing a song is a different proposal than creating a painting.  We do not need abstraction on its own in a tune.  Popular song as a form is a social development, made as a means among other things to record real life for a community.  The stuff in a song needs to fulfill this purpose, even if it is a work of fiction.

I would also note, possibly seeming to the contrary but in fact not at all so, that one need not make every line of a tune a direct reflection of some larger theme or plot.  The final four lines of each verse illustrate this:

So dress me down and classify me as vile.
Confine my dwellings to a garbage pile.
I have my prizes and my face can still smile.
I’ve maintained my advantage.

The bulk of the tune deals with the protagonist and the various women with whom he philanders.  Here, the relationship changes, to an exchange between the protagonist and listener, with references that stand on their own.  “Garbage pile,” for example.  Again:

So shoot my head up with your slings and your needles.
Lay my dead body on a heap of dung beetles.
I am much smarter than the average bipedal.
I’ve maintained my advantage.

Slings and needles, referencing Hamlet to please the white hipsters who never got past their square schooling, and dung beetles have nothing to do with the actual plot of the tune.  The Yogi Bear reference (“smarter than the average bear”), infinitely preferable to me than that to Shakespeare, certainly ties directly to the protagonists sense of superiority but it does so with a reference totally unrelated to anything actually happening in the tune.

So call the cops or throw me into the deep,
But don’t call me an example of sheep.
Though I have hideous dreams when I sleep,
I’ve maintained my advantage.

Again: no cops are actually called in the concrete action of the tune.  That said, all of these little lines relate to things of real life, assuming to take one example that one remembers Yogi Bear.  This is the key to a good tune.  Everything needs to reflect real experience, however silly, banal, or deathly important.  Life is all those things and so a tune needs to be as well.

If memory serves, I felt as soon as I wrote this that I wished that it was the mid-1960′s so I could put this out as a single.  Obviously, I could have paid the money to press this as a single and actually nearly did, though I in the end didn’t bother because I well understood that the single had ceased to be a socially (and commercially, though this never has concerned me as I’ve never made money at music) meaningful form by the late 1990′s.  That said, I actually paid to have this and three other tunes mastered in a studio in Riverside.  The EP was to be called “Purim,” after a suggestion from my friend Jordan.  Once I did the math and realized that it was a financially idiotic thing to do, I didn’t print the thing up.

One of the great pleasures in my life is having gone to grad school but having not pursued an academic career. I would love to be sure an academic gig, but only if I could jump the ten years plus that I’m striving for tenure (or however long it might be, less or more) and go straight to the part where I’m so tenured I only have to worry about showing up for the few classes I’m asked to teach. That way, I could read whatever I want and have a ton of time to do it. As it stands, I have summer vacations, and for my entire teaching career I have read what I pleased, as I pleased to. No need to keep up with ever little detail in my field.

That said, I studied history in school because I liked it, and I can say that I like reading academic history more than histories intended for the general public, most of the time. I say this not to sound elitist, but because the best academic history operates on a much greater level of detail than popular histories, and I find that detail interesting. One of my big questions as a person is that of the relationship between general and specific.

A number of years ago a friend TA’d for a course in which the prof had assigned Carlo Ginzburg‘s The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries, which on my friend’s recommendation I purchased. I began reading it, liked it, got distracted, and gave it away with the rest of my library when I moved to Senegal. In the intervening years, however, I’ve thought about it quite a bit, and for my birthday I asked my parents each to get me some Ginsburg books. This one, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, I actually bought myself to round out the set, breaking my rule about not buying books any more. The library didn’t have it, I say in my defense.

The book is a series of articles, the contents of which I checked out before buying it, which seemed most interesting to me when they focus on what Ginsburg is justly famous for: documenting popular culture, witchcraft particularly, using sources hostile to the subject. One title explains the basic point: “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist.” We might actually as a general rule reverse the two and note the Anthropologist as Inquisitor, had not Vine Deloria already done so so beautifully. Ginzburg, however, is dealing with an extreme example of the basic methodological question in history, which is that of source material. Ginsburg uses inquisitorial records of heresy to examine popular religious belief. To do this, he needs to compensate for the inherent bias of the source material, in particular the tendency of inquisitors to understand statements of the accused as recitations of the Church’s notions of heresy–everything leads up to the Witches’ Sabbat–rather than as statements in and of themselves. Nor are the accused speaking freely. Everything the accused says is an attempt to on the one hand be credible to the inquisitor and at the same time innocent of capital crime.

This to me is a fascinating inquiry. As such, the most interesting–and without question, my primary concern to me in reading anything is whether or not I happen to find it interesting–articles in the book are the ones that deal with popular religion and methodology. Codification of eros in Titian is of abstract interest to me, but I’d rather have been told the point in conversation with someone over pints than have taken the time to read the article. I did so as a point of principle, having paid for the book.

Definitely not a starting point for Ginzburg’s work. The Night Battles or, I am told, The Worms and the Cheese are certainly worth anyone’s time. I have those both waiting near my bed to finish by summer’s end.

All of Danticat’s subjects are working-class.  I have a feeling–forgive the lack of citations: this piece is not that kind of project–that much of the critical response to this book in the United States viewed the stories in an essentially, if veiled, racialized view of the developing world and patterns of immigration.  I myself have been guilty of seeing some fundamental unity among people in developing countries: somehow, before moving to Senegal, I had felt like “the Senegalese” was actually a meaningful concept.  When I lived there, I came to realize that we had a) the Senegalese people, and b) the Senegalese elite, and possibly a c) Senegalese trying to enter the elite.  I had never been in such a classist society, or at least not for a long enough time to really notice.

Danticat focuses to my memory (I finished the book nearly a month ago now) almost no attention on race, despite the fact, of which she is certainly aware, that her work in this country is categorized racially.  I suppose this helps one understand the destructive absurdity of race in the United States.  Almost entirely focused on class (and gender, one could suggest, though I wouldn’t), she inevitably is categorized racially.  This isn’t to suggest that her book is not fundamentally reflective of a particular aspect of the Black diaspora–Haitian revolutionary consciousness plays a fairly significant role in at least one of the stories–but that white critical types tend to think that the Black diaspora is always about race.

The back cover stresses that Danticat’s protagonists tend to be woman, and in the last, longest story she covers one woman’s marriage, a rite of passage to be sure, from a sister’s perspective.  All this is marketing.  In my writing I tend toward male protagonists, and this is certainly a flaw.  I do this because I’m male and in my life I live as a man.  It’s not a surprise that I tend to write male characters.  Danticat tends to write about women.  None of this is to suggest that Danticat is not entirely conscious of the political implications of writing about women: she obviously is.  That said, were I to point to a particular theme throughout the stories, their class analysis comes to the fore, not at the expense of anything else to be sure.  I am sure, however, that Danticat gets very little attention for documenting the lives of working-class Haitians, and quite a lot for documenting the lives of Haitian women.  The two of course are the same people, just complex as all people are.

There are two points.  The first is that Danticat, because of who she is, cannot avoid in the market place the various labels that are inevitably applied to her.  Given the context, I assume that she embraces them as well she should.  A corollary to this point is that, just as sure as Danticat can’t avoid labels, they won’t be applied to me in terms of my identity.  Rather, I am labeled by what I do: “singer-songwriter,” which is basically factual.  That said, the second point: neither Danticat nor myself can avoid the political implications of who and what we write about.  Writing about anything has political consequences, and the start to dealing with this well is to be conscious of it.

Sometimes I feel the need to fall down from high finance
I call sick and start driving until I hit Baton Rouge
Where the hotels are cheap and the liquor is cheaper
I’ve never been a sound sleeper so I might as well cut loose

I got a pint of rye through my arteries pulsing
Soon my stomach’s convulsing in the bushes outside
I hit it again and that seller keeps selling
There’s no telling how many that stream down my throat

I’m gonna burn through every one of my father’s connections
And I’ll burn through my subordinates on call
As no prep school could hold me
There’s no point should one scold me
I’ll have it my way or no way at all

The parking lot’s all but empty and the insects are singing
With the moonlight ringing as it lights up the clouds
But I’m too drunk to deal.  I put my head on the wheel.
I’m surrounded by steel and the radio‘s too loud

Someday I’ll get transferred back to New York City
And when that call comes I don’t know what I will do
I might accept it politely or I might lose it completely
And cash out my trust fund until my trust fund runs through

I’m gonna burn through every one of my father’s connections
And I’ll burn through my subordinates on call
As no prep school could hold me
There’s no point should one scold me
I’ll have it my way or no way at all

I put on my rubber gloves and I light me a cigarette
I flick the butt on the bedsheets and I whisper my name
I burn down the highway.  There’s the radio reporting:
Half a city block in Baton Rouge gone this morning in flames.

This is one of four tunes I wrote in Autichamp, France, in draft form, in Summer 2008.  I then let them all sit on the shelf for a year as I worked on Adieu, False, Heart in 2009.  Following that, I began revisions as the spirit moved me, which as it turned out was nearly two years later.

This is probably the least sympathetic protagonist I’ve had in a tune for some time, which all the more necessitates the need for a sweet melody in a tune, which this one has.  One of the advantages of song is that a writer works with two media rather than one, which for example a prose writer works with.  Instrumental music operates, because it is non-verbal, at a deep level with people.  I play instrumental music in my classroom when I am not directly teaching (exclusively good jazz from Ellington and Basie at the earliest through Dexter Gordon‘s Blue Note recordings from the 1960′s–basically, if Rudy Van Gelder engineered it, I want to play it) and despite the number of students who scream that they want a song with words, the music does the trick.

The fundamental experience a listerner has to a song comes from the instrumental music.  Indeed, as many people have observed, at some basic level what the lyrics themselves are saying doesn’t matter: people respond the the sound of the words rather than their literal meaning.  This leads to an obvious problem: because people can have a wonderful musical experience listening to a song with words that are of little literary value but which are unobtrusive, writers don’t invest much attention in writing their words well.

I would qualify the observation above that other people have made (I can’t remember where most recently I read someone who made the point) that the actual meaning of words doesn’t matter in song, but rather the musicality of the words.  What I would say is that the meaning doesn’t immediately matter.  This is the trick.  In an industry that wants to sell a lot of stuff and quickly, the goal of the product is immediate impact.  Immediately, the words don’t matter, as long as you have them so people don’t confuse your product for something like, God forbid, instrumental jazz.  What happens, though, is that at some point, if you have words, people are going to start to think about them.  At that point, if they mean something, it gives another layer of meaning to the song, people stick with the song, and the song in its turn sticks with people.  Writing good lyrics is an investment in a song’s future rather than its immediate present.

As usual, I don’t make any particular claims about this particular tune at this point.  It’s still fresh.  That said, I’m pretty pleased about it.  Any tune that deals with the fundamental anti-social criminality of financial capitalism is OK in my book, even for just trying.

A note on my musical progress as I close: I’m off today (in three hours’ time) to Riverside for over a month.  I’m bringing my guitar, mandola, and laptop on which I record demos.  I expect to have few distractions and am cautiously optimistic I’ll be able to devote some serious time to writing.  I haven’t made any decisions about a next record, but depending on circumstances it will be either recorded in a semi-live setting with other musicians (that is to say, we’ll record basic live tracks to ProTools and then overdub) or I’ll do the one-man-band thing.  The tunes I have so far seem pretty good so I’m optimistic.

Get to a good library, get this book, and read it.

I was at a friend’s house and by my habit was looking at his bookshelf.  I grabbed  Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution as well as a copy of Nkrumah’s autobiography, and he told me to take them home, on the condition that I report back to him on the quality of the books: he had bought them but not yet read them, as many bookworms will do.  C.L.R. James passes the test.  The book is out of print, unfortumately, so get right and get a library card, which is my new modus vivendi as I’ve noted before.

Very briefly, the edition I read was originally published in 1977, the bulk of which was published as a fairly lengthy pamphlet in (according to the copyright) 1962, while Nkrumah was still in power, with additions from the period as he was, in James’ analysis, losing his footing.  James’ dedication of the text, to Nkrumah, whom he called Francis, is quite beautiful:

To FRANCIS

in never-to-be forgotten memory.  Like Cromwell and Lenin, he initiated the destruction of a régime in decay — a tremendous achievement; but like them, he failed to create the new society.

James is among other things one of a tiny few of true stylists of 20th century English prose.  He is most famous for The Black Jacobins for perfectly good reasons–i.e., you won’t read a better book–but, truly, should be required reading for anyone trying to get their prose in shape, myself included.  He’s also one of those examples of the colonially educated who mastered the language of the oppressor to a greater extent than any of the oppressors themselves.  I can’t imagine too many writers today, again including myself, who would bother using the correctly-accented “régime” rather than the lazy man’s “regime,” much less know that there is actually a difference.  James, of course knows that both history and language matter, and thus could not but acknowledge the history of the word as he wrote it.

James writes against an entire literature that posits decolonization as something that Europeans did.  Put so, it’s, I hope, obvious how idiotic an idea that is.  I’d note, however, that there is an analogous trend in US historiography that sees the end of slavery as the work of white people (witness California History Standard 10.3.4, which places the end of the slave trade in the unit on the industrial revolution) or the Civil Rights Act as Johnson’s achievment (witness Hillary Clinton’s campaign).  James begins his text with a discussion of “the Myth,” capitalized.  That is, the notion that there’s no way that Black people could actually make history for themselves.  His book, in addition to an analysis of revolutionary process and a very convincing defense from a Marxist perspective of non-violence, is an illustration of the truth that Black people and indeed all people make their own history, even if as Marx famously noted in the Eighteenth Brumaire that

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

In any event, James amply demonstrates that it was the mass movement in Ghana that required the British to leave.  Nkrumah’s role was to understand this and give it focus.  James’ dedication above places Nkrumah on par with Cromwell (interesting choice, and certainly not one expected by this US-educated reader) and Lenin, and his book absolutely justifies that assessment.  Truly, Ghana’s independence movement was in fact a revolution–not a term one finds in American textbooks in this context–and Nkrumah both a theoretician and practitioner of revolution on par with a Lenin.

I have to think that the broad denial of the term “revolution” to Ghana in our textbooks is part of a general tendency of the propertied classes to erase the idea of revolutionary change from the list of possible futures we face.  The materials we as teachers get to work with, textbooks and such, subtly categorize “revolutions” into two categories: the good and the bad.  The “good” ones are those of anglophonic whites: those of England such as it was and the United States.  Reports of revolutionary violence are minimized in textbook treatments of these subjects or dismissed as aberrations.  That both merely confirmed already-existing elites rather than replaced them exposes the agenda of the textbook writers: convince young people, the ones who might actually change things, that change is at minimum not desirable, more likely not actually possible.  The “bad” revolutions are portrayed as inevitable descents into bloodbaths: we see the French and Russian examples at their worst.  Students who because of their decent nature–that is to say, the very people who under capitalism are most likely to want to overthrow it–would gravitate toward thoroughgoing social revolutions are instead taught to revile the very notion of revolution, because they are taught to mistake revolutionary violence for revolution itself.  Ghana’s counter-example gives lie to this.

A worthwhile video, in two parts:

Part One:

Part Two:

As a postscript, I would note that I will get back to blogging about music on my next post.  Summer started, I relaxed and read quite a bit (have three more book blog posts to go until I’m caught up), and only just put the finishing touches on a new tune I hope to record tomorrow.  I’ll be in Riverside for over a month, and the focus there will be songwriting, as well as getting back into shape.

In my post on the book I read on capoeira I mentioned the comic Daytripper that I’ve been reading, and its referencing of Yemanja.  I noted that I’d found reference to a novel in which Yemanja loomed large on Wikipedia and that I’d gone to the library to find it, and it was there that I stumbled on the capoeira book.  This is that novel: I finished it on Sunday, June 14.

Jorge Amado‘s Sea of Death–I assume the title works better in Portuguese–did what I wanted, which was to get some better feel for Yemanja and learn something about a part of the world I know nothing about.  The novel takes form in a way I like: the plot to the extent that there is one is simple to the point of obviousness, and the ending completely predictable.  A structure such as this allows one to focus on what is happening in a given episode for what it is rather than as it relates to a larger plot.  Plot to me is about the least interesting device a writer can have, even if it is a useful one.  There was a Simpsons episode at the end of which the family tried to derive some meaning from the night’s events.  I can’t remember if it was Bart or Lisa who ended the discussion by saying “it was just a bunch of stuff that happened.”  I like my literature and song this way.

That said, the book was absolutely racially problematic.  I am not terribly familiar with Brazilian society or history, but I recall something of a dust-up a few years ago about affirmative action policies put in place in Brazil.  My impression was that white Brazilians, in of course a specific way but not at all differently than white Americans, found it almost totally impossible to acknowledge anything but the most obvious and explicit racism.  Amado is considered a leftist, and with good reason.  He was part of the Communist Party, though he left it, and certainly in this book the focus is on working-class people.

That said, the book absolutely is based on familiar racial categories.  The main character–male, too, as the novel, even when focusing on female characters has a palpably male point of view–is white.  There is an oversexed “mulatto girl” who aggressively seduces that male character to have a child and therefore “improve” her lineage, racially.  I can hear the post-racialists now: “but that is realistic–that’s how things were.  Amado was just showing it for what it was.”  #1: how the hell do you know unless you’ve somehow gained a deep insight into the Brazil of the 1930′s?  #2: while surely there were people who made such considerations, they are normalized or even naturalized unless the author somehow throws them into critical relief.  While there’s definitely no excuse for the oversexed mulatta–not my word, obviously–stereotype, the desire to “improve” her racial lineage could be disarmed and contextualized, and above counterbalanced by a non-white character who embraces blackness, however defined.  Then, instead of the only option being the desire to lighten, we see that that might be a historical choice.  And in any event, I would point out that I don’t know any people of color who want to be white.  In my experience–take it as you will–people want to be who they are but want racism to end.  It’s white people’s fantasy that people of color want to be like them.

Separated into a paragraph of its own, for emphasis: a) I don’t know any people of color who advocate for a post-racial society and b) every person of color that I know advocates for a post-racist society.  The only people I have ever met who advocate for a post-racial society have been white people.  A post-racial society: or, a society without black and brown people.

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I took on a new student for home instruction, and asked her what she wanted to read for English. She told me she didn’t like to read. I responded that that was nuts, and if indeed she was planning on going to college next year she was going to need to learn to love reading. She then said that, well, she had started this book her sister had, Jon Krakauer‘s Into the Wild. Fair enough, I said, and read it I did.

I was predisposed after a few pages to be unsympathetic to the protagonist, Chris McCandless. McCandless, for those who have neither read the book nor seen the film, was a well-off surburban white kid who went to good schools (Emory, no less, for college), who decided that society sucked and took off rambling on his own, eventually going to Alaska with few provisions, where he met his end.

The read was interesting, not so much for the subject matter–the most interesting parts of the book dealt with the people McCandless met on his way rather than any of the ostensibly primary figures–but my reaction to it. I started off with a great antipathy toward McCandless. As I read, that antipathy diminished noticeably, replaced by an increasingly intense antipathy toward the author, Krakauer. Never had this experience with a book before.

It’s probably not good to speak ill of the dead, but I need to begin with McCandless for my critique to make any sense. Interestingly, fairly early on in the book Krakauer, who had first wrote about McCandless in a piece for Outside magazine, details negative reactions to the subject of that piece. Fairly uniformly, they come from Alaskans who feel McCandless was nuts, stupid, or disrespectful at some level of the “wild” he went into, underestimating the difficulty of living more or less off the land in rural Alaska. None of these critiques is without merit at some level, particularly, I’d think the third.

McCandless thought that modern consumer capitalist (my words, not his) society is bunk, and he was right. He seems to have had some awareness–as far as I can tell from what Krakauer includes an intellectual awareness but awareness nonetheless–of racism, and intellectually, this is at Emory, he put himself on the right side of that discussion. The problem is that well-off, well-educated white people who think that the system is bunk have no right–read that, no right whatsoever–to do anything but get their asses right inside the system and try to help the people whom the system is screwing most egregiously. McCandless’ case is compounded that he was from a Washington, DC suburb and his father worked for NASA. McCandless very likely could have mobilized a lot of personal connections to get involved on the inside.

Krakauer suggests, based on some of McCandless’ last diary entries, that he had decided that his rambling days were through. It’s entirely possible, then, that he would have returned to the lower 48 and gotten down to the real work of trying to fix things. That said, it is a typically but no less unacceptably white (and upper/upper-middle class white) reaction to injustice to take off from discomfort and feel oneself free. That is to say, the typically white response (not exclusively white by any means) is a selfish one. Anyone studying race critically will tell you that while our racial system is obviously unequal, the privilege it doles out to whites is not freedom. White people think that they can be free by running away. We can’t, and that more than anything was McCandless’ mistake, aside from up and dying of it.

The villain of the story, however, is not McCandless, but Krakauer. His metier, part outdoor/part travel narrative journalist, is ripe for willful ignorance about all kinds of social relationships. Without doubt, his trade could be done well: I know a travel writer, but he thinks critically about his own position vis-a-vis his destinations and more importantly the people who live in those destinations. Going far away is, like everything else human, a social relationship. Krakauer has no clue about this. I knew this when I read the following lines, worth quoting:

McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos itself (66).

Those are the words of a lonely, lonely man. Which “women,” Krakauer? This is a man who can’t distinguish woman from woman. His choice of words in this case is way, way too revealing, not so much for the words themselves, but because he reserves archaic language for the points at which sex comes up. You don’t in his book, get “succor” from a well-earned beer after a hike or something, or get together with the gang for some “congress.” Why the change in tone, Krakauer? Uncomfortable? Jackass. There is, indeed, a pattern in the book. It gets better (i.e., worse) on 156:

The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman’s sex.

I honestly don’t know who to despise more: Krakauer or the editor who let that sentence get through. Regardless, these are not the words of a man who gets laid with any consistency, or at all. Women’s bodies–and this underlies the whole book–are in Krakauer’s mental universe, foreign. Just like the “wild,” so-called.

This is the thing. Getting out of a city is well and good, very good as a matter of fact, because as a species we did not develop to live with concrete and cars. Smarter people than me–or, at least, people with more time on their hands to cover it at length–have, however, amply documented the patriarchal tendencies of certain (large) swaths of the get back to nature movement, in addition to the white supremacist/colonialist tendencies, in the United States (my country and therefore my problem), all the way back to Muir, whatever else you will say about the man. You may be pleased that Teddy Roosevelt set up the park system, but you’d be wrong to imagine that his motives were pure, because they weren’t.

To Krakauer, “the wild” is away, somewhere to where one goes. It’s mysterious, forbidding, and other, just like a woman’s body (in his obviously screwed-up psyche). The problem is, any of these places that well-off white people drive their 4WD Subaru station wagons to for some communing with nature are, to some peoples, home.

“The wild” isn’t wild. It’s a system like any other, and as historians have demonstrated–as if this needed any proving if you paid attention to indigenous people–human beings peopled the entire globe by not later than 1000 years ago, and that’s a very, very late date. Some peoples lived more densely on the land than others. When Europeans from a relatively densely populated society come to places that are more sparsely populated, they see “empty space.” Ask the people to whom that land belongs (or vice versa, one might more properly say), and they’ll tell you that the land is not empty, not other, and certainly not wild. There are specific ways in any environment that human beings can survive without carrying their food or using rifle. To Krakauer, though, the land is everything minus the people. Very simply, this is to totally misunderstand everything one needs to understand.

A last gripe: Krakauer explains McCandless partially through the use of a long, autobiographical sketch. This is when I knew he was even more selfish than McCandless, by a longshot.

In my teens and twenties I indulged in fantasy.  Above all, I fantasized about a musical world which did not exist: one in which my aesthetic choices were widely shared.  I wrote a paper, in the ninth or tenth grade if I remember correctly, a what do you want to be when you grow up paper.  I combined a few of my musical heroes’ lives: like Fela Kuti, I owned my own club in which I hosted musicians as I pleased and made my own music when I wanted.  Like Kraftwerk, it was in Dusseldorf, which at the time to me seemed to be the center of musical experimentation in the world at that time.  I was young, obviously, with limited information.  Interestingly, I wrote in the paper that I had a partner in the venture, a good friend and brilliant drummer with whom I had gone to elementary school and with whom I had often set up my drum kit, to play improvisational duets.  I did a lot of that kind of thing in the eighth and ninth grades.  The key is that I imagined a life in which my music was widely-enough appreciated to fund my existence, a common fantasy among young musicians.  Obviously, real life has not turned out at all like that paper, in the one critical variable I had imagined.  I make my money in a day job, and make music when I can for whomever will listen.

Young people fantasize about a point in life where whatever it is they are doing ends.  Young musicians fantasize about “making it.”  This making it is more or less analagous to the (popular) Christian concept of Heaven.  You have no more problems, you feel no pain, and your whole existence such as it is is characterized by what is not there, as opposed to what is present: no negative things in Heaven.  So it is with the imaginary making it.  You don’t have to keep struggling to get people to show up to the gigs.  You have buzz.  This is a first level of making it.  Then, you don’t have to print up your own CDs (it was cassettes when I started doing it): some label asks, or even begs, you to sign on the dotted line so they can handle all the practical things involved with making and promoting your CD.  Better than the offer to sign is the “bidding war.”  Here, you’re the belle of the ball, and everyone wants to dance with you.  There’s a psychological trope in which the neurotic (or psychotic—I reject both concepts but the point here is useful) seeks some symbolic return to the womb.  The adolescent notion of making it is precisely this.  One imagines a future in which one is totally passive.  When one has made it in music, as it would be, there’s everyone else who has something to do.  The musician just sucks on an umbilical cord.

The problem with this fantasy is that it’s fantasy.  It’s entirely true that certain musicians’ careers take on a life of their own, so to speak.  We know that Bruce Springsteen does not have to work at his job, musician, anymore, if he doesn’t want to, from a financial perspective.  He does not have to call up his friends to get a sufficient number of people at the gig to avoid a nasty glare from the club or café owner.  It sounds great to me, but I’m not sure that this situation makes for great music-making.  It came up in our reading group last night—we are in a Marx reading group and are currently on the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844—that one of Marx’s critiques of capitalism is that it removes any sense of process from people’s consciousness.  He elucidated this idea best in the justly famous section on commodity fetishism in Capital, v. 1, but it can be seen as a developing line of thought even in his early writings.  It’s the process, of production of any sort, of imprinting ourselves through our labor onto the world, that makes things human.  The more we dissociate ourselves from process the more we dissociate ourselves from ourselves.  Indeed, I can’t think of any big-name musician whose work got better after she or he truly and finally “made it” to the point that never again would the musician have to sully hands with organizational details of production.  Those of us who haven’t made it in this sense tend to imagine that if only we could rid ourselves of the crap that goes along with making music in the industry, we could get down to making masterpiece after masterpiece, but in reality it shuts a musician out of precisely that process.

All of this said, every musician I know who does not have a career in music, that is, whose income derives from some other source, has done some sort of auto-autopsy to discover why he or she did not make it—so to speak—when others did.  Of course I have myself, and I’ve alluded to my train of thought on this blog.  The big reason that I don’t have a musical career is that I never worked at getting one.  I will confess that after I cut my first demo, still respectable after 20 years in its way, I couldn’t imagine that record execs would fail to see the quality of the tunes even if the performances were a little rough and the singing not ready for prime time.  That said, not once did I even send it off to a record label, as if that would have had some positive effect in any event.  Hence, no career.

The other reason I don’t have a career is my drumming.  Drums were my first instrument and even though I can’t play drums in my current home I still am more technically accomplished as a drummer than as a guitarist.  I have been told by more than one professional musician that I’m the best drummer they’ve ever played with.

I do not lack confidence in my drumming.  As soon as I started playing, in the seventh grade, I knew I had a unique, if by no means unprecedented, approach to the instrument.  When I started playing, Bill Bruford was my hero, obviously for good reason.  I listened to the second side of King Crimson’s Beat yesterday on my walk home from the station and was reminded again why I fell so in love with his playing.

From the start, I approached the kit not in terms of this or that beat or pattern, but as a musical instrument.  I would, as I noted above, often get together with other musicians and improvise in those first years I played drums.  I did so in the seventh grade with a flautist named Dion, who would run his flute through an amplifier.  In the eighth grade it was with a pianist named Jeff.  Playing in a duo, rather than a band, gave me the opportunity or perhaps responsibility to provide musical color in addition to timekeeping.  To this day, I feel like I color music with my drums as well as anyone.

Much of the credit for my playing goes to my drum teacher, Will.  He quickly realized that as a student I would have strengths and weaknesses, and to be sure as a drummer I have some serious liabilities.  What I did well was to approach the kit musically and without any sense of limitations about what should and should not be played except what I felt to be right.  My faults were that I refused to deal with reading except minimally, and that I rarely practiced rudiments.  He told me once, and told my mother, that I would have a very difficult time making a living as a drummer unless I took care of these problems.  I didn’t want to, and he didn’t insist that I did, for which I’m grateful.

Once I started playing jazz, I found players that were better than Bruford.  I was quickly drawn to Elvin Jones, possibly because the type of playing he did with Coltrane appealed to the wound-up eighth grader that I was.  I can actually approximate a lot of Elvin’s playing, up to I might say about 85% of it.  The thing is, and I found this out fairly quickly, it’s that last 15% that separates the truly phenomenal from people like me, at least in jazz.  I might be able to develop my chops close to the level of an Elvin, but doing so would require that I copy Elvin.  That was never my purpose.

I read an interview with Jack DeJohnette in the 10th or 11th grade–something like that–that really made an impression on me and set me free in a way.  He commented on Billy Higgins’ playing.  The interviewer if I recall had asked DeJohnette to name-check some of his favorite players and he mentioned Higgins.  It was as if the interviewer was a bit surprised.  Jack DeJohnette is among other things quite a technician and Billy Higgins most certainly was not, at least by jazz standards.  DeJohnette made a very, very deep point in response: Billy Higgins, he said, had absolutely enough technique to play what he heard.  That became my goal as a drummer, and once I developed enough technique to play what I hear–I was about 22 when I did–I stopped learning new technical tricks, with absolutely no regrets.  I can play what I hear.

Where I thought and still think I have something to contribute as a drummer is applying the musicality I have, developed in jazz combos, to rock music.  I say this, and it sounds much more cliched than it actually is with my playing.  What I’ve never wanted to do was play jazz licks in a rock context.  Much more interesting, to me, is

• using the drum kit for its musical color rather than just to keep time
• having a light touch on the kit, like drummers used to have
• listening to other players and responding to their cues in the moment
• playing a feel rather than a predetermined beat

All of these things endear me to other musicians when we play.  I tend to make the making of music exciting.  The music is less stiff when I’m on the kit.  We don’t repeat ourselves as musicians, even if we maintain consistency.

All this, and I’ve been dropped in the past few years from two separate bands as a drummer.  In the more distant past, I’ve been pointed out as simultaneously a fantastic player and a liability by industry types–a situation in which I was vigorously defended by the band leader (to my everlasting gratitude).  I have been called “too good,” though I reject the label to this day, given my very real limitations as a player and how good even a second-rate working jazz drummer actually is.

The problem is that I play like it’s 1967, or maybe 1968.  Even though Mitch Mitchell was never my favorite player, I suppose he’s the closest analogue to my own playing, which I’m absolutely happy about.  Terrible things happened–godawful, as far as I’m concerned–when people started close-miking drum kits.  The best miked kits by far can be heard on Rudy Van Gelder recordings.  Interestingly, I have been asked by any number of people how I get my drum sound, even before I had a ProTools setup.  I would tell them–this is for all my recordings, up through (not to) Chevy w/Balding Tires–”one SM57, placed above a well-tuned drum kit.”  Overhead miking means that the dynamics come not from volume knobs but from the drummer’s touch.  It’s vastly more effective than electronics.

Once people started relying on a mixing board to balance out the different parts of a drum kit, drummers started hitting everything harder, in the mistaken belief that a drum hit hard sounds better.  I don’t play this way.  I use light drumsticks, Regal or Regal Tip 7A’s, and I rarely break sticks because I don’t hit the drum too hard.  I leave some room to raise the volume should I need to emphasize it.  This is totally out of step with how people expect a drummer to sound today.

I play like an older drummer, which above all means I do not hit the kit on the mathematical center of a beat.  This is a huge problem in the era of drum machines and quantization.  There is an expectation that “one” will fall precisely on the center of “one” rather than a little before or after, to push or pull things, for feel’s sake.  As a result, the drumming one hears on record these days–and live, generally, because this is the expectation–is all beat and no feel.  A drummer with a lot of feel sounds foreign at this point, if wonderful to those who will listen.  I’ve always liked players with a lot of feel, and in rock this has meant that I’ve come to prefer a lot of less technically proficient players to technicians.  I’ll take Ringo and especially Charlie Watts over Neal Peart any day of the week.

What this has meant–and I blame no-one at all for it–is that I’m commercial poison as a drummer.  I know it, I’ve considered changing it, and I’ve decided to keep it.  I write this because in the past month for various reasons I’ve decided that my next project will have me drumming on it, and drumming in my usual way.