Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

On Joshua Clover’s 1989

From the latest issue of The Progressive, here’s a teaser for my review of Joshua Clover’s new book 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About:

What can popular music really do? Can it topple walls, stop tanks, unleash hope and change? Or are those powers really just a mass delusion, simply another part of the sale? For centuries the question of culture’s influence has occupied poets, philosophers, even those disposed to the sordid arts of politics. At the start of a new decade, poet-philosopher-activist Joshua Clover finds them worth reexamining in his dense, provocative, wonderfully written little book, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About.

In 1989, the scope of global events suggested political change on a scale unseen since 1968. The new expansiveness in pop music seemed to sound out a perceptual change as well. Something new was happening in what Clover calls “the unconfined, unreckoned year,” but exactly what?

Forests of hagiographies have long since taken the riddle and blood out of 1968. 1989 presents a different kind of capstone, one that leaves the left in a quandary. For the 1980s were the decade that the North American left never wanted. They remain critically under-examined, as if they were better forgotten.

But in neocon narratives, those years are carried as if on a wind of inevitability. Borrowing Raymond Williams’s startling turn of phrase, Clover is interested in describing “structures of feeling.” And the feel of 1989 was captured by Francis Fukuyama’s wacky “end of history” thesis, in which he posited from cascading global events that history had finally collapsed into the eternal truth of “the Western Idea”—World Liberal Capitalism (itself the flattening of two different subjects, “liberal democracy” and “global capitalism”).

Intellectuals love “end of” narratives: “the end of liberalism,” “the end of Black politics,” “the end of irony.” But these stories, even when nostalgic and ridden with regret and loss, are almost always rigid and triumphal. Clover takes this as a given. To him, the fact that history did carry on after the Fall of the Berlin Wall is barely worthy of comment (although this means he also misses an opportunity to cite the lyrics of Soul II Soul’s fine ’89 hit, “Keep On Movin’ ”).

But the popularity of certain “end of” narratives fascinates him, because they capture a mass consciousness, “a way of knowing.” Clover links the functions of pop music and what might be called pop history. So OK, it may be true that we live in an age of iPod isolation where smart pop criticism has retreated into microgenre formalism and an age of tabloid capitalism where the cult of celebrity eclipses even the most fashionable forms of materialist analysis. (These phenomena may be better known by their names “The iTunesification of Everything” and “The Cornel West Dilemma.”) But Clover doesn’t allow the reader to sweep all of that into a dustbin called “false consciousness” and walk away from the masses. Instead, he wants to clarify the real stakes of culture.

Clover is an acclaimed poet who may be best known for his music and film criticism. He is also an 89er who was shaped indelibly by the left movements of the era—from anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity to the AIDS crisis and anti-racism to the anti-corporate globalization movements. (Most recently, he has been a key faculty leader in the broad movement against the University of California’s budget cuts and fee increases.) But Clover holds serious doubts about pop music’s ability to “herald a new political awareness,” the notion—to borrow (and tweak slightly) Jacques Attali’s famous dictum—that music can be prophecy…

+ Buy the magazine or subscribe here.

+ Buy the book here.

posted by Jeff Chang @ 5:46 am | 1 Comment

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Why You (Still) Can’t Get CSWS On Amazon

First thing to say is that work on these two books has been kicking my ass. I’ll admit it has been easier to tweet than blog. I’ll also want to say that it sucks that this is the topic to get me back up on the blog, since I still have some much better posts I’ve been trying to get up in a while.

But since I know many of you have been trying to get a copy of CSWS this week in paperback or for the Kindle, especially since semesters have been starting back up, I thought I should try to give a brief backgrounder on what’s going on.

In essence, the publishing industry is now publicly through what the music industry went through about a decade ago when technology began catching up with it. Distribution has changed drastically, a development accelerated by the Amazon Kindle and these past two weeks by Apple’s iPad. There’s so much more that needs to be said about this but I need to beg off for now. I think the right time will come soon.

Specifically, here’s what’s up. My publisher St. Martin’s Press is part of one of publishing’s Big Six Companies. (Yes, Chinatown scholars, the Six Companies…) It’s an imprint of Macmillan. On the other side is Amazon. What Amazon has done is to reduce the distribution chain to…pretty much Amazon. And it has begun to act as a publisher in recent months, trying to strike deals with authors directly.

Publishers have been up in arms–over a range of issues, not least of which is Amazon’s threat of poaching, but the one important frontline to this is the fight over pricing. Amazon has priced e-books at $9.99 and publishers want more. For years, publishers have received an average of $25 for hardcover titles. (Hardcovers are released at least a year or so before the titles move to paperback.)

E-books eliminate paper costs and distribution costs, so prices should be lower. (Royalties are another frontline, and an important question…for another post.) But many also believe that Amazon has been taking an L on each e-book sold in order to advance market share for the Kindle. Publishers can’t abide that for long. (Check how they reacted last year to the price wars involving Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target…)

And after the introduction of the iPad two weeks back, discussions intensified over pricing. Apple offered the Six Companies a range between $12.99 and $14.99. Macmillan went to Amazon and demanded the e-book prices be raised to the equivalent. Amazon balked.

Macmillan then told Amazon it would treat its e-books similar to the way it treats paperbacks–it would offer them at a much later date than the hardcover releases.

Amazon went nuclear. Last Friday afternoon they retaliated by pulling all of Macmillan’s titles in all editions from their website. (more…)

posted by Jeff Chang @ 11:22 am | 3 Comments

Friday, January 1st, 2010

PANEL :: California University of Pennsylvania

California University’s Annual Hip-Hop Conference
Panel Discussion
5pm-7pm
More details to be announced…

posted by Jeff Chang @ 4:23 am | 0 Comments

Friday, January 1st, 2010

LECTURE :: New Jersey City University

“Hip-Hop and The Colorization of America”
New Jersey City University
University Lecture Series

Hepburn Hall, Room 202
4:00 – 6:00 p.m.

posted by Jeff Chang @ 4:19 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Nas + Damian Marley Distant Relatives Event To Be Webcasted Saturday

We just got news that the big event on Saturday with Nas, Damian Marley, DJ Kool Herc, DJ Red Alert, U-Roy, Rakim, King Jammy, Pat McKay and Waterflow (moderated by Sway Calloway) will be webcast live!

Just go here at 7pm EST on Saturday.

More info on the event here.

posted by Jeff Chang @ 10:20 pm | 0 Comments

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Palin, Hawai’i, and Idaho :: A Retreat Into Whiteness Addendum

From Sam Tanenhaus’s piece on Sarah Palin in this week’s New Yorker:

Palin, though notoriously ill-travelled outside the United States, did journey far to the first of the four colleges she attended, in Hawaii (Jeff note: The school she attended was Hawai’i Pacific University on Oahu.) She and a friend who went with her lasted only one semester. “Hawaii was a little too perfect,” Palin writes. “Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls.” Perhaps not. But Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, gave a different account to Conroy and Walshe. According to him, the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” In any case, Palin reports that she much preferred her last stop, the University of Idaho, “because it was much like Alaska yet still ‘Outside.’ ”

Palin’s discomfort is easy to understand. Race is often the subtext of populist campaigns; their most potent appeal is to whites who are feeling under siege by changing economic and cultural conditions. Palin’s strength with this constituency can only have grown since the last election. It’s the reason that her bus tour is passing through the small cities and towns (Fort Wayne, Indiana; Washington, Pennsylvania) where the 2008 election might have been won. Already, she has drawn thousands of fans, some pitching tents overnight in the hope of receiving an autographed book. She is avoiding major cities in the Northeast and on the West Coast, a pointed assertion of her contempt for metropolitan élites. When McCain asked if Palin’s husband was prepared for the rigors of a national campaign, Palin assured him that he was, and also that they were the couple for the job: “We felt our very normalcy, our status as ordinary Americans, could be a much needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington, D.C.”

A final note to add: Palin was introduced at the RNC by Hawai’i Governor Linda Lingle, the first Republican to be elected to that office in over 30 years. Lingle had moved to the islands from California during the ’70s. There has been no mention of any Wailuku date on Palin’s book tour.

posted by Jeff Chang @ 7:52 pm | 1 Comment

Monday, November 30th, 2009

The Retreat Into Whiteness

houses

Here’s a preview of a new piece I pulled together for ColorLines that reviews Rich Benjamin’s flawed but important book Searching For Whitopia.

It also engages Hua Hsu’s already classic piece, “The End of White America?”, which will likely prove to be one of the most influential pieces of writing by the end of the coming decade. All of this stuff is ground that I’m trying to cover in Who We Be.

Anyway, here’s a big old dose of the article:
(more…)

posted by Jeff Chang @ 2:20 pm | 0 Comments

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Andrea Lewis, 1957-2009

Is it me or are we really taking it this year in the Bay?

I’m saddened to learn of Andrea Lewis’s sudden passing.

I’d known Andrea through community organizing and progressive media circles for a long time. For many years, she was the voice of morning radio here on KPFA. She brought humaneness and humor to every topic she touched.

Andrea was like a warm cup of tea, easing you into the day while getting your brain working and heart beating. She represented exactly what the best of this community is about.

We miss you, Andrea. You, Gina, Ron, and everyone up there—your laughter lingers. Our love always.

There will be services next Tuesday, November 24 at 6:00pm at the First Unitarian Church of Oakland.

posted by Jeff Chang @ 4:51 pm | 0 Comments

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Who We Be :: A Preview In The Believer!

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Apologies for not being as up as I should be. Lots to write about in the coming days–including 2009’s landmark year for graffiti books and the new movement around cultural policy taking shape. But here’s what I’ve been up to lately…

I’ve been hard at work on the new book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America, and am proud to announce that the new issue of this month’s The Believer features a preview of what’s coming in the book. It’s a piece I’ve done about the great cartoonist Morrie Turner, whose 45 years of work are on exhibition through November 19 at the SF Public Library. Check that show out, and go find the mag.

In the meantime, BIG shouts to Ed Park, Andrew Leland and the amazing Ms. Gabrielle Zucker. Here’s a taster:

The night of Barack Obama’s victory, eighty-six-year-old cartoonist Bil Keane called his old friend Morrie Turner, himself a sprightly eighty-four. Turner was working on his strip Wee Pals in the office of his tiny bungalow in South Berkeley, leaning over his drafting desk, its surface worn to the curve of the wood grain, tracing and embellishing the pencil outlines in India ink on Bristol board. A Law & Order rerun played in the background. Inking a strip to the natter of a TV program: for Turner, these were familiar rhythms, warm comfort for forty-three years. At that moment, the last thing he wanted to hear was the news….

More bites here!

posted by Jeff Chang @ 3:03 pm | 1 Comment

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Is Hip-Hop Grown Up?

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Where’s the Geritol swag bag, son?

The annual VH1 Hip-Hop Honors and this BBC article featuring my friends Joe Conzo and Nick Conway prompted TheRoot.com’s editor Danyel Smith to ask some of us if we had any opinions on the topic.

The great Noz, of Cocaine Blunts fame, weighed in. And so did Jozen Cummings and I. Here’s an excerpt from that short piece…

Ten years ago, I wrote a piece on hip-hop nostalgia. I was against it.

(Hey I said it was a short piece!) To read the whole thing, click here.

posted by Jeff Chang @ 9:56 am | 2 Comments

Feed Me!

Revolutions

ApSci :: Best Crisis Ever
Puts the “icey” in “crises”…
BLK JKS :: After Robots
The big rock sound of new South Africa
DJ Zinc :: Crack House EP
Brilliant new directions for the master…
General Elektriks :: Good City For Dreamers
Musical wizard behind QP and Honeycut beats the sophomore slump
Joe Gibbs :: Anthology Back In Time
Uptown top rankin’
Joyo Velarde :: EP
QP’s First Lady’s long-awaited debut is musically lush, emotionally layered, all you longed for
Kid Cudi :: Man On The Moon : The End Of The Day
A moody masterpiece from Mr. Solo Dolo
Molina Soleil + Aju :: Shine Flow
Brilliant new EP from the underground, prod. by DJ Icewater…don’t miss it!
Quantic Y Su Combo Barbaro :: Tradition in Transition
Will Q. in Colombia…easy candidate for one of the best albums of the year
The Feelies :: Crazy Rhythms
Perpetual nervousness = Great music
The Feelies :: The Good Earth
One of the best indie records of the 80s finally gets reissued
Various Artists :: Supa Dupa
After a landmark year, here’s the primer on the UK’s future Grime, Bassline + Funky for all playing catch-up…
Vijay Iyer :: Historicity
Post-hip-hop jazz or post-jazz hip-hop? Either way, pure genius.
Wale :: Attention Deficit
Long-awaited isn’t always up to mixtape heights but good enough to rep DMV…