Bring the Noise

[kellner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

Comrades:
The flap over rap/hip hop reminds me not only of the one-sided polemics
over Adorno's article on jazz but also a polarized response to disco and
punk that I experienced teaching graduate seminars on CT in the 1970s at
Texas. When we discussed the culture industry if someone mentioned disco
in a derogatory manner a section of the seminar -- same thing in my
undergrad class -- would attack them as elitists, defend its emancipatory
potential and the fight was on. When punk arrived, same thing: if someone
attacked it, others would go ballistic in its defense....

What I learned from these responses was that usually those most hostile to
something jazz, disco, punk, rap, whatever, knew least about it and
essentialized the form as something intrinsically evil, covering over
differences. [Parenthetically, I once drove past the Cotton CLub in NY
with Peter Marcuse and asked him if Herbert, Teddie and the boys ever went
to Harlem clubs and he smiled and shook his head no.... However, I once
asked Leo Lowenthal if the Institute boys ever went to the movies and he
smiled and said "All the time. Horkheimer loved to go to the cinema.]

In regard to Adorno's jazz critique, it is rarely noted that the critique
has force and relevance when applied to the crap jazz Adorno listened to
on the radio when he was researching CBS programming with Lazarsfeld. But,
as noted above, Adorno never heard the good stuff and thus generalized
excessively....

It's the same, I think, with punk and rap with critics generalizing from
the worst examples and demonizing the whole genre. I've written myself on
rap in my 1995 book MEDIA CULTURE and distinguish between the sexist/thug
stuff and Public Enemy, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Gil Scott
Heron and the Last Poets, and other good stuff--some also mentioned by
Rustum in his nuanced post which Ralph choose to trash....

I am NOT going to engage in a rap flame and indeed am leaving town for
Toronto on Friday but wanted to argue for a more differentiated discussion
of rap or any form of media culture without wholesale dismissal or
enthusiastic embrace as from today's cultural populists. And rap IS
appropriate topic for a list whose fathers were the first to develop a
critical theory of mass culture and communication in their critique of the
culture industry....

Cheers to all, DK


 Douglas Kellner, Dept of Philosophy, Univ of Texas, Austin, TX
78712 kellner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu  fax: 512 471-4806
Web sites: Postmodern theory= http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~kellner/pm/pm.html
Critical theory= http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/