1989

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Joshua Clover’s fun new book, 1989, features a blurb from Luc Sante, author some years back of the instant-classic, Low Life. 1989 has some similarities to Low Life–both are about culture and politics–but Clover is much more explicit in making his connections, whereas Sante left most of his implications unsaid. I read Low Life when it came out, and I immediately felt: This-book-is-awesome-and-I get-it-but-nobody-else-will. I think, actually, that just about everybody who read Low Life had that same reaction, which is what being a “cult classic” is all about.

1989 was a bit of a nostalgia-fest for me, at least in the chapter about rap. (I’m not really familiar enough with the other musical styles of that era, so the other chapters were harder for me to follow. I read Cauty and Drummond’s “The Manual” (another cult classic, I think) several years ago but only had a vague sense of them and I’ve never thought of taking their music seriously as some sort of cultural indicator.)

I remember when I first heard Straight Outta Compton, how dense and echoing the sound was, an intensity comparable (in my view) to the movie Salvador.

Clover starts his chapter talking about Public Enemy, and certainly P.E. had a denser sound than the nursery-rhyme rapping of Run-DMC, LL Cool J, BDP, etc. (which, for that matter, had some sort of continuity with the cartoony voices of Eazy-E and, later, Eminem). But N.W.A. really sound different than what came before, even setting aside the messages in the lyrics.

On page 7 of his book, Clover talks about music, or cultural products in general, being timeless or time-bound:

Moreover, pop music does not itself aspire much to history or historicity. Contrarily, it hangs quite a bit on the hook of timelessness–on making time disappear for three or four minutes, a brief shelter from the wind of change.

This reminds me of my theory about the book, Deliverance, which in many ways is not time-bound at all–with very slight changes, the story could’ve taken place 100 years earlier–but in other ways, is all about time and change, given that the plot gets set into motion by the planned damming of a river.

To return to my first point above, my impression is that Clover, in his book, does not have the confidence in his readers to just say what he wants to say; he feels the need to spell things out, to make all his motivations explicit. (See, for example, his overview of the book on pages 13-16.) The funny thing is, a look at his blog suggests to me that Clover trusts his online readers a lot more.

I’ve noticed similar issues in targeting to different audiences. Here at the Mother Blog, I can be as obscure as I want, secure in the knowledge that my readers will go along with me, or at least trust that I know what I’m talkin bout. When I post on 538, though, I need to spell out ever step of every argument, or else the commenters jump all over me. And when I write books, I go on and on about what I’m doing and why. This makes the books clearer, I think, but perhaps interferes with the narrative flow. Like Clover, I just don’t have the courage to write in an unadorned Sante fashion and let the readers get what they want.

Other things:

– Page 10: Is it really true that MTV no longer shows videos?

– Page 134: Clover talks about the transition to bling and the dot-com boom, which reminds me of an almost-forgotten period in the mid-90s in which we all were cheering on culture heroes Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Bill Gates as the bestest, mostest people in the world. A time for the celebration of record setting.

– Page 137: I know that “misprision” doesn’t reallly mean “sending someone to jail for a crime they didn’t commit,” but I confess that I can never remember what it actually does mean. Perhaps this is one of those words that’s best avoided.

Finally, what’s so important about music? There’s something funny about serious, politically-minded scholars analyzing pop music so seriously. I think the key is that music hits us in a different place than anything else does; it’s really an independent input in our lives. Whatever else I happen to be thinking about or doing, music is always running in my head. And I’m not even a particularly musical person. So I can see why Clover wrote this book, even though there still seem to be a few links missing in the connection between the music and the politics.

P.S. My earlier Clover thoughts: Is a 65-hour story better than a 3-hour story?

14 thoughts on “1989”

  1. Is it really true that MTV no longer shows videos?

    I think this has been basically true since about 1990. Replaced them with tripe about fantasy versions of being 19 years old.

  3. Lemmus: The person who wrote the article to which you linked appears to be ignorant on the recent literature on the topic. In particular, I recommend he read this recent review and Ma href="http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/rational_final6.pdf">this more technical article.

    As I wrote a couple years ago on an earlier post on this, I don't mind if people don't want to vote, but I think it's pretty obnoxious to go around telling others not to do it. It's also a bit counterproductive, given that your readers are presumably likely to agree with you on the issues.

  4. Can't resist commenting, even if it is off-topic.

    I vote because
    (i) I want to express my political opinions. That's also why I "waste time" participating in opinion polls and "waste time" talking politics with friends and family.
    (ii) I am part of a group, and one of the things that group does is voting for specific candidates/ballot propositions. Not voting is saying I don't want to be part of that group.

    The same question could be asked wrt participation in a large rally (large being more than a few dozen participants). Why do teabaggers bother showing up at their rallies? The rally itself wouldn't be hurt if one person doesn't show up. The teabaggers want to express their opinions and be part of their group.

    It's silly to characterize it as "irrational" to vote unless your vote will change the outcome of the race.

  5. Actually, MTV does show videos. I swear. It happens very early in the morning, from around 4am-8am; it's called AMTV. It's actually pretty delightful. They have cute little identifier spots with hip people waking up, bleary eyed, and they show the national weather map to a breezy pop ditty. It's pretty great. Your regular horrible programming starts at around 9am.

    Andrew, I assume by "musical person" you mean someone who writes or plays music regularly, but keep in mind that there do exist people who don't even LISTEN to music. Now, _that_ is a person who is not musical.

  6. I can't resist responding to your comment, because I should be working (or, better still, sleeping). Regarding the voting-for-the-group motivation, you might want to take a look at the paper by Carole Uhlaner that we cite in our linked article. I don't want to overstate the importance of the scholarly literature, but in the case of voting, there's some excellent stuff out there (also the work of James Fowler and others, I'm not just talking about my own papers), and it's really sad that only the simplest (and, in my opinion, wrong) views have leaked out to the general educated public. I'm trying to improve this on my blog–and it helps that larger-circulation blogs such as Marginal Revolution spread the news also. Maybe by the time I retire, the idea of rational voting will become commonplace.

    Elissa: I firmly believe that a person such as myself who can't make music (aside from drumming, tuneless singing, etc.) can't understand it in the way that a practitioner can. In general, I think it's hard to understand a system that you can't perturb. George Box made this point in one of his books, probably Statistics for Experimenters. I guess I should find the damn quote and make a blog post out of it. Or if you can find me the quote, I'll write the blog for it.

  7. How much pop music aspires to historicity depends on the level of hysteria in the society generally. During the 1967 – 1971 period, or the 1989 – 1993 period, there was a generalized social panic — identity politics, feminism, etc., were widespread, unlike now where they're mostly held by academics.

    When there's a larger social hysteria, pop music and pop culture generally tries to update itself to keep in pace with the times. Times they are a-changing, My generation, Let's talk about sex, Date rape, Fight the power, and so on.

    During the troughs of the cycle, you get ahistorical music, like Billy Idol saying who cares about your dopey Baby Boomer generation. It's about retreating from the larger society and being left alone to have some irresponsible fun. You saw this in the late '70s and early '80s, as well as 2003 – 2006.

    So I don't see 1989 in the context of the fall of communism, but rather as the start of the most recent peak of the social hysteria cycle (the peak-peak was 1991 – '92). Looks like the period is one human generation — around 25 years — which means we're due for one in the middle of the next decade… brace yourself for more "socially conscious" pop culture.

  10. Nope, there wasn't. Identity politics and the hardcore Civil Rights people were gone, feminism was dried up, AIDS hadn't happened so no one was shouting about homophobia yet, and in general there was no feeling like the world was going to end.

    By social panic, I mean exactly what I said — what you saw from roughly 1967 to 1971 and again from 1989 to 1993. There was none of that in the late '70s and early '80s.

    As a consequence, pop culture of that time was not making annoying calls to "hear the voice of a new generation," bla bla bla.

  12. I was 19 in 1989. I also think, on balance, life in the US has gotten worse for most people since then (just look at the median income numbers) and the culture has stagnated.

    I should be nostalgic for the period, but I honestly have no nostalgia at all. I remember some decent movies coming out around then, and better music, but have no urge to revisit the period. Maybe my view is just colored by the fact that I think the country just stagnated afterwards.

  13. Yes, I am aware that not only is the person ignorant of some of the literature, but is also one of your favourite persons. I thought I could provoke you into a rant of previously unheard of rantiness. Apparently not.

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