Bring the Noise

[Ralph Dumain]

At 02:46 PM 8/6/97 SAST-2, Rustum Kozain wrote:
>And who decided hip-hop is not worthy subject matter? That 
>dismissal leaves much to be desired. I can understand you being 
>influenced by Adorno's thought, but don't treat him like a god. His 
>dismissal of Jazz was an ignorant move - he didn't care to know more 
>about non-European music.

Hip-hop, that festering pimple on your smelly ass, is not jazz.

>But then, dismissing hip-hop is so typical of a certain breed of 
>Euro-scholar, where the traces of education's monastic history still 
>obtain. Your dismissal smacks of the despairing monk, resigned in his 
>cell, fretting over how the secular has tainted the divine and how 
>the dumb masses just don't - and never can - understand sublime 
>thought and the purer aesthetic.

You are a liar.

>A lot can also be said as to why critics dismiss things. But 
>central to this must be ignorance and loss of control. It is so easy 
>and tempting to dismiss something you do not know and understand as 
>unworthy. In this way you can hide your ignorance, denigrate someone 
>else's interests, claim the high ground and signal that the forefront 
>of revolutionary thought is really your own pre-occupations. All in 
>one simple move. And all this while staying true to Euro-male theory: 
>universalize your own pre-occupations, desires, anxieties and 
>voila!... radical thought that sets the agenda.

I'm sure you learned this attitude in grad school from some balding academic
of the 60s generation.  As if the good and bad of things had anything to do
with critics and professional intellectuals.

>David, as you admit, you do not know much about hip-hop. Is this then 
>why it is unworthy, because you do not know it? And if you speak 
>about it, by what authority do you do so? How did you form your 
>opinions about it? Since your dismissal is in form not much different 
>from white right anxieties about hip-hop and its perverse influence 
>on their American nation, I can only conclude that much of your 
>opinion is derived from the mainstream media. Now that's an 
>authority!

One could of course observe and interact with young people themselves, and
observe (1) how empty they are, (2) how little their own popular culture
addresses their real psychic needs, (3) how many of them themselves admit
that yesterday's music is far superior to today's.

>I agree, 'fun' is not going to start 
>a revolution, but this list is not called: 'Po-faced revoluionary 
>activities'. For God's sake, we're talking about cultural production, 
>not fomenting revolution.

I don't know who this David is, but wasn't that my point--the universal is
NOT social protest or revolution, but the quality of life or unalienated
humanity?  Do you think people's "fun" really satisfies them?

>So, when someone dismisses hip-hop because of its complicity 
>with capitalism, I want to know whether that more-revolutionary-than-
>them speaker is aware of his or her own complicities with capitalism. 

What does complicity with capitalism mean?  Merely that an art is
commercial, that it generates profit by circulating as a commodity?  Duke
Ellington made money, but does that exhaust his value?  Or does complicity
with capitalism mean promoting the same disease that one pretends to be
protesting?

> David, I can't speak for your 'exploited listeners', but I have 
>found immense educational value in hip-hop, in the sense that Marx 
>somewhere refers to the value of reading Dickens: giving one the 
>sense of the experience of poverty more than can a sociologist's 
>figures. 

Isn't this the very instrumental revolutionary attitude you just derided?
If you really knew poverty and what it does to the human mind, you wouldn't
write this twaddle.

>Now I have learnt a lot about that sense of how black youth 
>experience urban poverty USA style. And it is an aesthetic thing: the 
>power of the anger in much of hip-hop can act as an indicator to 
>explain, at least, the nihilism that characterise much of young black 
>life in America's cities. I am not suggesting that nihilism is all, 
>or that that is going to start the mother of all revolutions. But 
>then again, we're not talking about fomenting a revolution.

Sounds like you are.  You write like you think you are sophisticated but you
sound very naive to me.

>In 1980, I was but one of 1000s of students boycotting classes in 
>South Africa. Part of our 'alternative education' ocurred through 
>reggae music. Because this aesthetic thing interested me, I started 
>reading more about its history, more about the Caribbean, about black 
>people in Britain, and, eventually, about colonialism. Not with a 
>teacher or professor behind me. And for this reason I am not prepared 
>to simply dismiss popular culture outright. 

Yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

>The mere fact that it is 
>an aesthetic thing, normally more interesting than 'facts' or 
>'science', means that it has a pedagogical advantage to other forms 
>of knowledge. To youth, a far more gripping introduction to racism 
>and colonialism than Marx.

So sad.

>And this is the problem. We must stop treating our knowledge as 
>something religious. Marx is not god; neither is Adorno. The 
>Frankfurt School was not catechism where one learnt the one true way. 
>I can think of nothing more monkish, dour and pedagogically 
>ineffectual than insisting that only those who only read the 
>appropriate books, nothing else, and read them only in an 
>appropriate serious way, can join the company of true revolutionaries 
>and experience the sublime of really knowing the situation of 
>our suffering.

Amen to that.

Intellectuals are so shallow.  Fundamentally, there is no difference between
the classics or pop culture as objects of study.  When you bring your own
superficiality to whatever it is you choose to study, what difference does
it make?