You and What Army

TRUE SOUNDS OF LIBERTY: PUTTING THE MUSIC BACK INTO PROTEST MUSIC

     I recently reviewed Dorian Lynskey's workmanlike survey of popular protest music, 33 Revolutions per Minute, for the Wall Street Journal.   Here's a passage that I left out of the piece because it wandered away from reviewing the actual book.
    Protest music usually centers around slogans and literal sentiments: "This Land Is Your Land," "Fight the Power," "Give Peace a Chance."  But words aren't the only way to change hearts and minds; there's also the implicit, galvanizing power of music itself.   Post-punk bands like the Minutemen and Gang of Four wrote protest songs galore, and many of them were inspiring, but the real protest was built into the music itself — raw and idiosyncratic, it aimed to be challenging and provocative in ways that lyrics can never be.   Fugazi was like that too, embedding the idea of challenging preconceptions right into the music itself, and while the politically oriented Australian band Midnight Oil was a bit more conventional-sounding, their music was never less than galvanic, even in their quietest moments.
    As Lynskey remarks about mind-blowing sound scientists Public Enemy, "Don't just call for a riot, sound like a riot."  Of the Prodigy's "Their Law," he notes, "the sternum-cracking kickdrum is probably more articulate than any of the lyrics."  (Although it must be noted that that would hardly be a difficult feat.)  But those groups were hardly the first to exemplify that phenomenon — the Rolling Stones' 1968 "Street Fighting Man," writes Lynskey, "sounded like revolution and that's what mattered."
    Similarly, Bob Dylan may well have revolutionized more minds through his later, more gnomic imagery than with the literal messages he conveyed in his early protest songs, exemplifying John Lennon's exhortation to "free your mind instead."  Out of that, all kinds of things would happen, like ostensibly apolitical but formally radical rock musicians such as the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa inspiring Vaclav Havel to help foment revolution in the former Czechoslovakia.
    Music isn't just entertainment.  It is encoded thought, transmitted through rapidly fluttering puffs of air.  We receive it and decode it, and if it's good, it makes us think.  And thinking is the germ of progress.

ECCE HIPSTER: A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT TODAY'S YOUTH

    Several years ago, I noticed a whole lotta facial hair sprouting along Bedford Avenue.  To a middle-aged friend of mine, I confidently predicted that beards would soon be in style.  He scoffed, shaking his head, incredulous at my naivete: "Naw, that's a hippie thing.  No way."  But a few months later, he started growing a beard and still sports the most bountiful crop of face-fuzz of anyone I know.  Meanwhile, all the young dudes of Brooklyn have left him behind: they're now sporting mustaches.
    There's no question that the sprawling youth colony clustered around the L subway line is a significant bellwether — and boy, do they know it — although it remains to be seen whether it can engender anything more significant than fashion trends.  I think it will.
    I just read a book of essays, What Was the Hipster?, published by the journal n+1.  New York Observer senior editor Christian Lorentzen wrote a very sharp, funny piece, but for the most part What Was the Hipster? is full of high-falutin', hyper-educated discourse, academic concepts studded with exotic surnames like Bourdieu and Zizek.  I have never been able to fully comprehend stuff like that; all I have is a pragmatic take on the hipster phenomenon, which I will now offer to you, dear reader.
    A recurring theme in the n+1 book is the idea that no one ever cops to being a hipster.  Various writers offer theories about this but in my humble opinion they either aim far too high or (more often) don't really answer the question.  Here's the deal about why you don't admit to being a hipster: being a hipster means you have an intuitive grasp of what is hip — or, more precisely, what is about to be hip.  If you say you have it, you don't.  It's like saying you're cool. Or like saying you're lucky.  The very act of declaring so jinxes it, renders it false.
    Here's another recurring theme: Why does everyone hate on hipsters?  Well, the thing is, not everyone hates on hipsters.  A reality check: Most people out in the real world don't even come across them, don't know they exist, would not even recognize a hipster if they saw one.  The people who can recognize hipsters enough to dislike them en masse do so for one and sometimes two reasons.  One is that the arrival of hipsters in a neighborhood means that many of its residents will imminently be pushed out by rising rents.  And who could blame those people for hating hipsters.
    But for the other haters, hipsters are a living, breathing reminder that they are not totally hip (anymore).  And that can be hard to take.  In a culture that prizes being ahead of the curve, being unhip can be a source of shame, jealousy and resentment; there's a type of person who likes to feel that they are generating trends, not passively conforming to them.  It's a point of pride.  So those people lash out at hipsters, just as the hippies lashed out at the punks and, before that, the beatniks lashed out at the hippies.  In those cases, the older group insisted their bohemia was better.  I'm not so sure that's true this time — I get the feeling that deep down, hipster-haters wish they could be in the club.
   The thing is, to be in touch with the zygote of the zeitgeist (and I truly apologize for that turn of phrase), you need a lot of what hipsters have: free time and few obligations.  Hence the rationale – "I could still be hip if I didn't have a 9-5 job, kids and a mortgage."  Of course, you also need a very rarefied and prescient aesthetic, but then a lot of people think they have that.
    The class component — "fucking trust fund hipster!" — stems from the fact that affluence is one sure way to have enough free time and mental space to remain alert and receptive to the slightest cultural vibrations, rather than being distracted by the hurly-burly of, you know, making a living.
    It's a mistake, though, to dismiss hipster culture in toto.  Sure, there are tons of clone kids with their clown glasses, unflattering haircuts and awful Reagan-era thrift store clothes, living rigorously unexamined lives punctuated by fleeting, superficial allegiances.  But there's a lot of really, really smart, progressive hipsters too.  Like their more vapid confederates, they fully acknowledge that we are what we buy.  (I'm sure that makes some people hate on them even more, but it also happens to be true.)  The difference is, they're trying to figure out how to turn that to an advantage.  And actually, they may already have figured it out.  There's no sure way of knowing until we see how it plays out but I'm with n+1 co-editor Mark Greif: my hunch is that the fixed-gear bikes, the used vinyl LPs, the tribalism, the DIY ethic (cooking, clothing, music venues, etc.), the pervasive non-ownership of TV sets, and yes, even the beards, all forecast a larger move toward simplification and, in the broadest sense, economy.  As we reel from the devastating consequences of living beyond our means, those are clearly Good Things.
   I think the kids are all right.  And I'm probably correct — after all, I totally called beards.

OVERHEARD: AT THE FARMERS MARKET

The time:  Saturday morning
The place:  the Union Square farmers market
The players:  a man pushing his yammering toddler daughter in a stroller

Man:  Honey, you've got to be like a Democrat.  You have to be quieter.

THE REAL DISH ON THE GULF SPILL

       The spill in the Gulf reminds me of my roommate the summer after I graduated from college.  He put on a show of being enlightened but in the end fell into the usual macho postures.  One of them was insisting on cooking dinner — mainly because that way, everyone else in the house would have to do the dishes.
    See, doing the dishes was demeaning, womanly.  Cooking was manly for all the reasons that our most famous chefs tend to be men — you dominate people by making them eat what you've created.  And you really dominate them by making them clean up after you.  Sure enough, if someone else wanted to cook, this guy would magically disappear, or somehow get out of doing the dishes.  I never forgot it.
    And that's kind of what the spill in the Gulf is like.  It's real manly to go in and, uh, erect a rig and, uh, drill.  But even thinking about cleaning up after a spill?   That's woman's work.  It's passive, subservient.  You're not making something, you're just cleaning up after someone else's mess.  There's no glory in that.  Like so much of woman's work, it's thankless.  But, as we now know so well, it's got to be done.
      Another example of this dynamic is the invasion of Iraq.  Again, boys with their toys: they love to go in and blow up stuff with their missiles and planes and tanks, but put in zero thought about what to do in the aftermath — the doing-the-dishes part.  The woman's work.  Sure enough, it's a disaster, and just as surely, there is no glory in cleaning up after it.  It's just a shitty job that someone responsible has got to do.
    We've got to learn to do the dishes.  Otherwise, the mess is going to kill us.

THE HURT LOCKER KEEPS IT REAL ENOUGH

     The carping about lack of strict military accuracy in The Hurt Locker is bogus, clueless. Apocalypse Now was riddled with factual errors and it is one of the greatest war films ever made. Patton also has many mistakes, so does The Bridge on the River Kwai. Saving Private Ryan has tons of inaccuracies.  All war films do, and that has little bearing on their artistic quality.  That's because movies can never be completely factually accurate, nor do they need to be.  The point is to convey accurately some other kind of truth: emotional, artistic, social, intellectual.
    It's not fair to blame veterans advocate Paul Rieckhoff for the title of his Newsweek online article assailing The Hurt Locker for its military inaccuracies, but its headline — "When Cinema Verité Isn't" — does repeat his basic error: this simply isn't cinema verité.  It is fiction. 
    I understand Rieckhoff's point that less than 1% of Americans have fought in Iraq, and so most of us have little conception of how members of the armed forces conduct themselves there.  But it is not the responsibility of a filmmaker to micromanage every little detail of her work just to satisfy the exacting public relations concerns of a special interest group.  In The Hurt Locker director Kathyrn Bigelow's case, the responsibility of the filmmaker is solely to make a powerful movie that shows us something about why we make war.
    "The idea that you'd put yourself in so much unnecessary danger is not only irresponsible, it's reckless, and that's really not what our EOD [Explosive Ordinance Disposal] techs do," Rieckhoff complained to NPR.  But at least one military man strongly disagrees with Rieckhoff: Master Sgt. Jeffrey S. Sarver is suing the producers of The Hurt Locker because he believes the main character is based on him.  He even claims to have coined the term "hurt locker."  So much for lack of verisimilitude.
    But Rieckhoff is totally missing the point anyway; The Hurt Locker is a work of fiction designed to achieve a much larger goal than correctly illustrating military chains of command. Or as Jim O'Neil said to NPR, "You know, it's a movie, not a training film."  Jim O'Neil was a Navy bomb disposal expert during the 1991 Persian Gulf War; he now runs the EOD Memorial Foundation.  Even he gets what Rieckhoff cannot. 
    Let's leave the picayune trainspotting about rifle sights and incorrect uniforms to people who have no powers of imagination or sense of poetry — and instead enjoy the best movie of the year for what it is: a brilliant metaphor for America's addiction to war.

GETTING THE HURT LOCKER

     It's been really interesting to see how many people have completely missed the point of The Hurt Locker.   One film-fan friend of mine declared that the film is an "almost jingoistic America first video game-ish action film that promotes hyper-masculine individualism, celebrates stunted male adolescent irresponsibility, stereotypes Iraqi and Muslims and mocks genuine peace keepers."
    Well, yes, exactly.  But neither The Hurt Locker nor its director Kathryn Bigelow advocates those things. In fact, quite the opposite.  You see, the film is metaphorical.
    The key to understanding The Hurt Locker is to pay close attention to the quotation from American (anti-)war journalist Chris Hedges shown at the very beginning of the film: "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."  The line is from Hedges' book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which argues that, like some individuals, some entire societies are hooked on war.  That ought to be a big clue about where Bigelow is coming from.
    The Hurt Locker is an extended metaphor about America's addiction to war.  The bomb-defuser guy represents that addiction -- endless, foolish, irresponsible, probably insane but allowed to have its way. Like America itself, he is a war junkie.  The reckless cowboy approach has worked so far, but eventually, it will all blow up in our face.  We will o.d. on war.
    Read what my friend said again: "an almost jingoistic America first video game-ish action film that promotes hyper-masculine individualism, celebrates stunted male adolescent irresponsibility, stereotypes Iraqi and Muslims and mocks genuine peace keepers."  That's precisely how the Bush-Cheney administration approached the invasion of Iraq.
    I thought that was brilliant, but apparently, a whole lot of people, from my friend to Chris "I'm the Second-Craziest Man on Cable News" Matthews to progressive veterans' rights advocate Paul Rieckhoff, completely missed that crucial metaphor, so perhaps that is a shortcoming of the film.  Perhaps this is a problem with using tools like extended metaphor or irony in popular entertainment -- most people won't get it.  I'm reminded of Neil Young's bitter "Keep On Rockin' in the Free World," which was misinterpreted as a jingoistic anthem. 
    But I thought The Hurt Locker was great.  In fact, it was dead-on.

"NPR ROCK" AND THE DEMISE OF SNARLY, ABRASIVE

    About once every presidential term, I have a thought that's provocative enough to make the comments section in the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll.  This year, it was:

A lot of people sneer at so-called "NPR rock" for being wimpy or something, but it's a hoary cliché that underground music has to be loud, fast, and out of control.  Once upon a time, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied—look at the Velvet Underground droning about heroin while America tried to paste a fluorescent smiley-face over Vietnam; look at the Sex Pistols railing that "England's dreaming" in '77 while the Queen's silver jubilee distracted from rampant unemployment and racial unrest.  But in 2010, mainstream culture isn't complacent; it's stupid and angry.  So underground culture has become smart and serene.  That's not wimpy—it's powerful and constructive, a blueprint for kicking against the pricks.

      Look, I see the gaps in that argument, but I believe it's essentially true, and I wrote it with the hope that it would generate some discussion.  Sure enough, it's gotten a bunch of comments, and people have written some really wonderful stuff, so I figured I'd elaborate on what I was thinking.
    First of all, I wasn't referring to all the comfy, bland "adult indie" that's been kicking around for the past few years.  The music I'm talking about isn't mellow (instead see Deerhoof) or easy to get (instead see Dirty Projectors) or simple (instead see Sufjan Stevens).  It's challenging, it's smart, and it's truly progressive.  Why are those attributes significant?  Because some people are inspired by the things around them, very much including music.  To paraphrase (once again) noted American poet Dennes D. Boon, these bands could be your life.
    The bottom line is, there are many, many ways to make challenging, inspiring music — the idea that it has to be snarly and abrasive is old and tired, a relic of the summer of '77, as narcissistic as the boomers are with their saggy classic rock.
    The snarly, abrasive model was a function of several things.  For one thing, punk had to make a lot of noise to drown out Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Journey, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, etc., not to mention rapidly atrophying ex-rockers like the Rolling Stones and the Who.  For various reasons, it was pretty much all dudes, from the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, up through Black Flag and Minor Threat, and all that testosterone and adrenalin begat an aggro racket.  Secondly, punk's original DIY ethos meant that people with little skill were often making the music.  It's much easier to get a cool sound out of guitars and drums by bashing them at high volume.
    And all of that refracted back — that sound signified the sensibility, so when you heard snarly and abrasive, you knew you were hearing the underground.  But snarly and abrasive is now an institution, really cozy and hard to let go of.
    That sound holds very little countercultural force anymore; it's been thoroughly malled, co-opted ever since Green Day hit with Dookie or Monday Night Football played "Territorial Pissings" or stadiums full of sports fans bellowed "Hey! Ho! Let's Go!" and probably long before that.  And besides, some people who embrace the punk/DIY idea have learned how to play their instruments really well.  The pint is, it doesn't have to sound like punk rock to be punk.
    Yet some people still cling to the snarly, abrasive model, and it's not just the kids who attend the Vans tour. In a post about "beard rock" on her NPR blog Monitor Mix, Carrie Brownstein, former guitarist for the snarly, abrasive band Sleater-Kinney, wrote, "What we need is more contemporary rock music that addresses or mirrors the chaos, the gray areas and the uneasiness."  I strongly disagree — I think that's an antiquated and hidebound notion.  For one thing, music simply doesn’t need to be so literal.  Nor does music have to agitate in order to animate — ask Brian Eno, Bjork, REM, Meredith Monk, Radiohead, et al.  Chaotic and uneasy music was useful back when noisy bands from the Velvets to Nirvana yowled and hollered that something was wrong when not enough people would acknowledge it.  Here in the 21st century, we all realize that A Lot of Stuff Is Just Not Right. Now what?
    Bring on musicians like Sufjan Stevens, Joanna Newsom, Dirty Projectors and Grizzly Bear, among others, none of whose music sounds stereotypically punk in the slightest. (And if you're looking for ring-kissing, Dirty Projectors made an entire brilliant album about Black Flag's Damaged; obviously, they know who their grandaddy is.)  These musicians and their work exemplify some of the best aspects of our culture: intelligence, resourcefulness, original thinking, craft.
    Those qualities, as symbolized by the Obama victory, are the way forward and I don't care how elitist that sounds.  After all, look where stupidity and aggression have gotten us.  The so-called NPR bands are both the analogue and the harbinger of that progress.  That's why you're not going to get a lot of birthers grooving to Animal Collective; no one on their way to a tea party is playing St. Vincent on their iPod.  There's a reason for that: the music not only demands but — more importantly — inspires enlightenment.  So when Brownstein decries this stuff as "passive music that allows us to merely sit back," I say a hearty pshaw.  This music couldn't be less about being passive: it's about being engaged.  It's not agit-prop, it's something much, much better:  it's about being constructive in an intelligent, open-hearted way.  It's implicitly political in a world that is sick of the explicitly political.
      I'm writing this soon after Tom Tancredo suggested that people who don't know English should be barred from voting, after Sarah Palin suggested that the United States should void the Miranda decision.  This is the climate of destructive stupidity we're dealing with here.  In a world stuck in a pernicious feedback loop of proud ignorance and corporate mediocrity, intelligence and good taste are the true characteristics of the rebel.

WRITE YOUR CONGRESSPEOPLE ABOUT THE SUPREME COURT DECISION

    The Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to inject unlimited amounts of money into the political process is outrageous. The only way we can fight back against is for Congress to pass laws that will hamper the ability of big business to rig the democratic system. I hope you'll write to your Senators and Representative, either in your own words or borrowing from the letter I've written below. You can find your Congresspersons' addresses here.

Dear Senator/Representative,

    I'm writing to you today to ask you to do everything in your power to counteract one of the most disastrous and misguided Supreme Court decisions in living memory, the recent ruling that corporations can unleash unlimited advertising on political campaigns. The damage to our democracy will be as incalculable as the piles of money that big business will spend to influence elections and determine policy. This cannot stand.
    The notion that corporations are equivalent to people, and thus merit First Amendment rights, is patently absurd. But if we're forced to adhere to that concept, then let's make it difficult to abuse.  Here are some ways to achieve that:

1.  Just as commercial advertising is not allowed to make false claims, all political advertising should be vetted for accuracy by an impartial election commission before it airs. So no more swift boating.

2.  Congress should limit the amount of money any individual or corporation or union can spend on a candidate, in all forms combined, including, but not limited to: money run through a 527, campaign contributions, gifts in kind, etc.

3.  Congress should require the CEOs of contributing corporations to appear in the ads, acknowledging that their corporation approved and paid for the ad.

4.  Congress must pass new laws mandating that a) corporations disclose the existence and exact amounts of political contributions to all their shareholders, and b) shareholders approve all political expenditures before corporations spend money on elections.

    Please insulate our precious democracy from the Supreme Court's blatantly partisan manipulation of one of our most sacred and essential institutions: free and fair elections.

Sincerely,

CHRIS MATTHEWS: AMERICAN PSYCHO

    Tonight, Chris "I Love My Half-assed Witticisms So Much That I'll Repeat Them Ad Infinitum" Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball not only referred to Dick Cheney as "the troll under the bridge" for the kajillionth time, but he also reminded us, yet again, that he knows how to pronounce Dick Cheney's surname and don't you forget it.  The difference was, this time someone actually chided him about it.
     But first, a little of Matthews' usual Hollywood ass-licking: "I gotta tell you guys," Tweety crowed to the Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, "I got a call last night at my hotel, the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South" – nice plug there, Chris, that ought to get you the room upgrade you were clearly angling for – "because Polly Bergen the great actress, found out that's where I was staying because my wife mentioned it last night.  You're laughing, Clarence."
     "Mm-hm!" Page readily affirmed, amused by Matthews' unabashed starfucking.  "I remember her well!"
     Matthews finally got around to, you know, actual politics and wondered why the out-of-office Cheney still makes political pronouncements.  "He knows that every time he does," Isikoff shot back, "you'll do a segment on it, Chris, so why should he stop?"
    "Well, I'm the only guy that pronounces his name properly — it's Cheeny," Matthews replied with the smug piousness he habitually attaches to this topic.  "I guess that's why he likes it here."
     "And," Page slyly chimed in, "you get no credit for it, Chris."
     "Well," Matthews replied, utterly unaware he'd just had more piss taken out of him than a kidney patient, "I don't want any."  Aw, shucks.  Not to mention the fact that Cheney doesn't actually "like" Hardball at all — he's never appeared on the show.  If anything, Cheney just appreciates the fact that Matthews not only gives copious, automatic airtime to every self-righteous, hypocritical, intellectually bankrupt, borderline treasonous attack that Cheney makes on the President of the United States, but also still includes a photo of the disgraced former vice-president in the show's bumpers, as if he's still an active player on the political stage.
    And that wasn't the only Matthewsian headcase display of the show.  Earlier, Tweety proclaimed, "It is insane to have to fly to New York from Washington because of the stupid bureaucracy in this country.  We ought to get eminent domain and get a train between here and there."  Isikoff and Page stared at the camera slack-jawed and goggle-eyed, stunned that their macrocephalic host has apparently never heard of something called Amtrak.  How could an elite gentleman who is a favorite of renowned actress Polly Bergen, an accurate pronouncer of Dick Cheney's surname and a patron of the splendid Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South — for reservations click here (now do I get a free room?) — not know of this 39-year-old rail system?
    Chris Matthews is a nut.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: AMERICAN PSYCHO

     As noted previously, Chris "Second-Craziest Person in Cable News" Matthews is extremely obsessed with pronouncing Dick Cheney's name correctly. He's very proud of the fact that he knows the right pronunciation and you don't. And the other day, November 17th, he finally had a kind of grand mal fit about it.
    Matthews was in the middle of a conversation with regular guests Democratic party strategist Steve McMahon and former McCain operative Todd Harris about Cheney endorsing Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in her bid for the governorship of Texas, when Harris made the grievous error of pronouncing it Chainy.  Hilarity ensued as Matthews grew more and more incensed about Harris' mispronunciation.
     From the MSNBC transcript:

MATTHEWS: Why do you mispronounce—why do you mis—Steve—I mean, Todd, why do you mispronounce Cheney‘s name, on purpose or what?

(LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: You know...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: His name is Cheeny.

HARRIS: Yes, I know that. Well, I know that you pronounce it that way.

MATTHEWS: But why do you call him Chainy? Why do you call him Chainy?

HARRIS: Why do you call him Cheeny?

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: It‘s his name.

(LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: Yes. No. Well, I‘m not sure that...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: I don‘t understand why you go with the—you‘re going with some sort of other pronunciation.

    Every time it says "(LAUGHTER)," that's Harris trying to smooth over the fact that Matthews is a nutjob with OCD, chuckling in order to buy time for thinking about how to get past this insane line of conversation.
     A few minutes later, as they closed the segment:

MATTHEWS: We‘re going to help you with that pronunciation of the former vice president‘s name.

HARRIS: Cheeny. Cheeny.

MCMAHON: Cheeny. Cheeny.

MATTHEWS: Right. Thank you. Look it up. As we always say, look it up.