2010
What we’ve grown accustomed to is a split between leftist political commitments and the most vibrant, experimental dance music. No doubt this is an aspect of capitalist realism, and it’s no accident that I referred to Simon’s piece on hardstep in Capitalist Realism. In fact, it might well have been the case that the central concept of the book was triggered by Simon’s commentary on ‘keeping it real’ there:
What we’ve grown accustomed to is a split between leftist political commitments and the most vibrant, experimental dance music. No doubt this is an aspect of capitalist realism, and it’s no accident that I referred to Simon’s piece on hardstep in Capitalist Realism. In fact, it might well have been the case that the central concept of the book was triggered by Simon’s commentary on ‘keeping it real’ there:
“ In
hip-hop, ‘real’; has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music
that refuses to sell out to the music industry and soften its message for
crossover. ‘Real’ also signifies that the music reflects a ‘reality’
constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism,
and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police.’ Real’ means
the death of the social: it means corporations who respond to increased profits
not by raising pay or improving benefits but by what the Americans call
downsizing (the laying–off of the permanent workforce in order to create a
floating employment pool of part-time
and freelance workers without benefits or job security).
‘Real’ is the neo-Medieval scenario; you could compare downsizing to enclosure, where the aristocracy threw the peasants off the land and reduced them to a vagabond underclass. Like gangsta rap, Jungle reflects a Medieval paranoiascape of robber barons, pirate corporations, conspiracies, and covert operations. Hence the popularity as a source of samples and song titles of martial arts films and gangsta movies like The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction whose universe revolves around concepts of righteous violence and blood-honor that o predate the liberal, social democratic era. […]
The pervasive sense of slipping into a new Dark Age, of an insidious breakdown of the social contract, generates anxieties that are repressed but resurface in unlikely ways and places. Resistance doesn’t necessarily take the ‘logical’; form of collective activism (union, left-wing politics): it can be so distorted and imaginatively impoverished by the conditions of capitalism itself, that it expresses itself as, say, the proto-fascist, anti-corporate nostalgia of of America’s right-wing militias, or as a sort of hyper-individualistic survivalism.
In hip-hop and, increasingly, Jungle, the response is a ‘realism’ that accepts a socially-constructed reality as natural. To ‘get real’ is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you are either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers. There’s a cold rage seething in the Jungle, but it’s expressed within the terms of an anti-capitalist yet non-socialist politics, and expressed defensively: as a determination that the underground will not be co-opted by the mainstream.” [1]
At Day X1 I heard the predictable “Killing in the Name” [2] and the even more predictable “Sound of the Police”[3], alongside The Beatles, Madness, and – depressingly- The Libertines- and, most jarringly, “Another Brick Wall ( hearing “we don’t need another education” as we shuffled out of the kettle made for a suitably incongruous experience).[4]
But a video that Jeremy shot on Thursday suggests a possible convergence between post-nuum music and politics. [5] It is my belief that the UK music culture of the next decade will emerge from a stew of sound and affect in the kettles these past few weeks. Paul Mason dismissed the idea that the demo was exclusively populated by ‘Lacan-reading hipsters from Spitalfields}- but of course (we) Lacan-reading hipsters were also there, alongside the “bainlieue-style youth from Croydon, Peckam, the council estates of Islington.” In other words, this brought together working-class culture and Bohemia in something like the same way that art schools – so crucial to UK pop-art culture since the Fifties - used to. But with very good reasons from its own point of view- neoliberal policy has been hostile to this proletarian-bohemian cultural circuit. While Further Education and new universities have o precisely tried to make theory such as Lacan available to the working class culture- while also trying to engage with everything vibrant coming out of working-class culture – the policy has been to re-cement rigid class and cultural distinctions: philosophy for the bourgeoisie; “vocational’ courses for the masses.
pages 478-9
[1] Simon Reynolds, “Slipping into Darkness”, Wire, No 48, June 1996
‘Real’ is the neo-Medieval scenario; you could compare downsizing to enclosure, where the aristocracy threw the peasants off the land and reduced them to a vagabond underclass. Like gangsta rap, Jungle reflects a Medieval paranoiascape of robber barons, pirate corporations, conspiracies, and covert operations. Hence the popularity as a source of samples and song titles of martial arts films and gangsta movies like The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction whose universe revolves around concepts of righteous violence and blood-honor that o predate the liberal, social democratic era. […]
The pervasive sense of slipping into a new Dark Age, of an insidious breakdown of the social contract, generates anxieties that are repressed but resurface in unlikely ways and places. Resistance doesn’t necessarily take the ‘logical’; form of collective activism (union, left-wing politics): it can be so distorted and imaginatively impoverished by the conditions of capitalism itself, that it expresses itself as, say, the proto-fascist, anti-corporate nostalgia of of America’s right-wing militias, or as a sort of hyper-individualistic survivalism.
In hip-hop and, increasingly, Jungle, the response is a ‘realism’ that accepts a socially-constructed reality as natural. To ‘get real’ is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you are either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers. There’s a cold rage seething in the Jungle, but it’s expressed within the terms of an anti-capitalist yet non-socialist politics, and expressed defensively: as a determination that the underground will not be co-opted by the mainstream.” [1]
At Day X1 I heard the predictable “Killing in the Name” [2] and the even more predictable “Sound of the Police”[3], alongside The Beatles, Madness, and – depressingly- The Libertines- and, most jarringly, “Another Brick Wall ( hearing “we don’t need another education” as we shuffled out of the kettle made for a suitably incongruous experience).[4]
But a video that Jeremy shot on Thursday suggests a possible convergence between post-nuum music and politics. [5] It is my belief that the UK music culture of the next decade will emerge from a stew of sound and affect in the kettles these past few weeks. Paul Mason dismissed the idea that the demo was exclusively populated by ‘Lacan-reading hipsters from Spitalfields}- but of course (we) Lacan-reading hipsters were also there, alongside the “bainlieue-style youth from Croydon, Peckam, the council estates of Islington.” In other words, this brought together working-class culture and Bohemia in something like the same way that art schools – so crucial to UK pop-art culture since the Fifties - used to. But with very good reasons from its own point of view- neoliberal policy has been hostile to this proletarian-bohemian cultural circuit. While Further Education and new universities have o precisely tried to make theory such as Lacan available to the working class culture- while also trying to engage with everything vibrant coming out of working-class culture – the policy has been to re-cement rigid class and cultural distinctions: philosophy for the bourgeoisie; “vocational’ courses for the masses.
pages 478-9
[1] Simon Reynolds, “Slipping into Darkness”, Wire, No 48, June 1996
[2] Rage
Against the Machine : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXazVhlyxQ
[3]
KRS-One
[4] they
were protesting higher school fees.
[5] ‘Nuum
refers to the hardcore continuum or linear progression of hardcore (punk) music
said to have imploded in 2001/2. ’continuum’ refers to evolving political/cultural
contexts within which the music itself was produced
This proletarian-bohemian cultural circuit is precisely what I experienced first as an outsider in the 'high-class' suburban high school in St.Louis to which I was relegated when my Dad got a job at Washington University in the early Sixties. I became interested in 'The Beats' and was friends with the few genuinely working class kids in that school. Then, at the University of Vermont where I fell in with the Art School crowd, exactly the milieu he describes, a hearty mix of bourgeois and blue-collar folks. Subsequently, my association with "Jimmie T.' - of Fifties 'Battle of the Bands'; fame, who worked in a furniture factory throughout High School until he lost a major part of his thumb and then 'bucked the establishment' by opening a bar with (unheard of at the time) live entertainment patronized by this self-same proletarian-bohemian circuit- rockers, folk singers,students, workers,motor-cycle gang members and all the rest, and naturally the whole scene under constant surveillance and harassment by authorities who eventually succeeded in closing it down, which never stopped JImmie-T. from 'riding the circuit' until its final reduction, disruption and dissolution in 2001/2. There was even a little bit of it in Bernie's time, without question it enabled him to win his first campaign for Mayor of Burlington and guided the creation of the Youth and Arts Councils. But it wasn't long before ' proletarians' started to get the sense they were being screwed by the 'political correctness' of the 'progressive' administrations that followed him and now the politocrats with the Howard Dean, Madeleine Kunin seal of approval that run the city now.
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