{"id":110410,"date":"2017-05-02T09:56:38","date_gmt":"2017-05-02T13:56:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110410"},"modified":"2017-05-04T14:02:38","modified_gmt":"2017-05-04T18:02:38","slug":"who-the-fuck-knows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/02\/who-the-fuck-knows\/","title":{"rendered":"Who the Fuck Knows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Covering music in Drumpfjahr II.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

From the cover of YG and Nipsey Hussle\u2019s \u201cFDT.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

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Whatever else you were doing the last three weeks of November, chances are you weren\u2019t sleeping enough. Chances are you felt trapped in the same nightmare that had been waking most of us up all year. To fend that nightmare off, I\u2019d phonebanked and canvassed for Hillary, although not enough, and\u00a0published my first\u00a0Village Voice\u00a0<\/em>piece in a decade urging readers to pitch in<\/a>\u2014or at least see through the sit-this-one-out dodge and the third-party scam. After the nightmare came true, I spent long breakfasts splitting hairs with my obsessed wife, called and emailed many old friends, and tried to figure out how to cover music while devoting my working hours to Twitter and Talking Points Memo<\/em>. The only thing that cheered me up was my daughter\u2019s new kittens.<\/p>\n

My gig with\u00a0Noisey<\/em><\/a>\u00a0requires me to find three or more albums worth praising each\u00a0Friday, but I file earlier\u2014which meant I\u2019d written my\u00a0November 11\u00a0post<\/a> before the election proper, a dilemma I finessed by saving up five artists of seventy-five or older, all explicitly on the left, including the unbowed eighty-eight-year-old communist Barbara Dane. I\u2019d stockpiled\u00a0Tanya Tagaq and\u00a0Pussy Riot<\/a> for a post-election fallback. After that came the Tribe Called Quest comeback keyed to the rallying cry\u00a0\u201cit\u2019s time to go left and not right<\/a>,\u201d and after that Southern progressive Mose Allison, dead exactly a week after electoral Kristallnacht, and his anti-imperialist\u00a0\u201cWestern Man<\/a>,\u201d plus\u00a0old music master Hoagy Carmichael<\/a>, who I informed my readers was a liberal Republican back when there still was such a thing. And then I ran out of propaganda and had to ease up.<\/p>\n

If rock criticism is to be a political calling, which has always been my angle, that\u2019s obviously not because it\u2019s a fountainhead of protest songs. In fact, many rock critics look askance at explicitly political lyrics, which I think is pretty stupid, without denying that some political lyrics are also pretty stupid. Thing is, to quote the recantation of the devout contrarian Simon Reynolds in the politics-themed eleventh and final issue of\u00a0The Pitchfork Review<\/a><\/em>: \u201cWhy was I so down on the idea of preaching to the converted? When history is against them, the converted need to have their morale maintained, their spirits kept stalwart.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it can\u2019t end there, and it shouldn\u2019t begin there, either. Ultimately, to insist that rock criticism be political is first to insist that the humans who make and enjoy music are embroiled in politics whether they like it or not\u2014and whether they know it or not. And second, it\u2019s to remain aware that formally, the musical upheavals of the fifties, and many that followed, were demotic, so that a class component was built into the form. No wonder rock and roll had things to tell us about oppressed African Americans and the young white seekers who dug them; and then also about hippies and punks and hipsters and other politically simpatico bohemian riffraff whose class status is murky; and then gays as of disco, defiant to militant blacks as of hip-hop; and, most saliently in the past decade, though with many earlier pioneers and with crucial origins in punk, women.<\/p>\n

So when, in subsequent weeks, I predicted that the Smithsonian Folkways label was doomed<\/a>, or observed that the Sheer Mag advisory\u00a0\u201cSo\u00a0hold fast to the ones you love<\/a>\u201d \u201csignifie[d] more acutely in this ripped-apart time<\/a>,\u201d or pinpointed\u00a0Johnny Rodriguez<\/a> nailing Woody Guthrie\u2019s \u201cDeportee<\/a>\u201d on a Highwaymen comp, or isolated the one-hundred-second interlude when the Phoenix party rappers Injury Reserve \u201cdispatch anti-black bias, anti-Native American bias, consumer fetishism, global warming, and the trans bathroom perplex<\/a>,\u201d or even when I characterized\u00a0Populous\u2019s \u201cBrasilia<\/a>\u201d as \u201ca multilayered, multivocal urban showcase worth building in the right savannah<\/a>,\u201d I was sticking to my lifelong critical-political program by locating music in a social context. That\u2019s why I began researching Trump-era music coverage, seeking out similar subversions in the year-end lists with which every mag brands itself\u2014in\u00a0Rolling Stone<\/em>, where hidebound music coverage has underwritten progressive political coverage for decades; in its usurper\u00a0Pitchfork<\/em>, which has slowly earned our musical trust while making a principle of covering nothing else; and in\u00a0Noisey<\/em>, an online descendant of\u00a0Creem\u00a0<\/em>with the Oral Roberts dropout Eric Sundermann as its Dave Marsh, the brash punk Dan Ozzi its Lester Bangs, and the extreme-metal feminist Kim Kelly its Jaan Uhelszki.<\/p>\n