Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
#NoDads Is Our Principal Of Solidarity
To claim as the origin of #NoDads a certain text, or set of texts; an incident or event, a philosophy, is impossible. This simple phrase is a buoy, tossing around in the contrary seas of the universal and the particular, the systemic and the experiential. The stuff that it is made of has seemed, so far, to float, and this is all we know for certain.
The "origin" itself could seem to be an antithetical concept, something necessarily obviated by an embrace of this phrase, a (not so) simple extension of the parental role into the immaterial realm. But origins are never quite that. Their place, in language and in the arts, always finds itself occupied by the texts that find themselves woven of the stuff they're claimed to predate, before they could have known that this is what they were. No origin slips through without precedents, and no precedents content themselves as such; and certainly no text will sit silent and let itself be hermeticized. The relationship can never be father-child, between an origin and that which came of its origination; no, the text is always a virus, its woven cloth catching and unraveling, making all of what pretends to be itself into its own.
In 2006 Teairra Marí was posed to be Rihanna. Unfortunately, Rihanna happened. Marí now holds a semi-faceless presence, a precarious position at the bottom of the charts, being neither as marketable as Rihanna nor possessing her own fan-army, like her recent collaborators Gucci Mane & Soulja Boy. But before she was struck down, she struck out, with a single.
No Daddy is neither origin nor predecessor, neither of nor outside, #NoDads. They meet in the breath of a voice, in the slippage of the syntactic clarity. For where No Daddy structures itself as a revolt against a deterministic reading of the absence of the patriarch, #NoDads is an embracing of that absence's ineluctability. But from one, the other, and from the other, one; and so it is that No Daddy, despite striking long before the iron was hot, makes the right notes ring out, and holds them in suspension that we might see our own strikes before they happen.
And so I offer, here, a close reading of No Daddy, both song and video, in the hopes that things might become clearer. #NoDads is nothing, as yet; a simple phrase, one that finds itself displacing parts and occupying them, mutating certain cells within the whole and metastasizing their meaning. There will be no exegesis, not for now at least, not until the words take hold, the meme reproduced unto death; until then, we have only the power of creation, of adding meaning where it did not yet exist. And it is from within this non-origin, this perfect accident of an antecedent, that the words can be sprung to clear the space that is needed.
The video opens cold, with what is revealed to be a (day)dream sequence, of Teairra Marí confronting her mother about her new stepfather. It is, presumably, a recollection that serves as a prelude to the events of the video, but this is not entirely clear; it could, just as feasibly, be pure fantasy. A reading of the events of the video could be twisted one way or another depending on which stance one takes on this question; I will say, for the record, that I lean towards it being used as a recollection, but that either interpretation can lead comfortably to my reading, I think. The significant difference (barring the wildly boring reading in which the whole video itself is just Marí continuing to fantasize) turns on the gap between an actually pre-existing antagonism and a potential antagonism. In the case of the latter, the individualistic/voluntaristic threads would necessarily be pulled through more firmly, which I think is obviated by the moves toward solidarity and autonomy that the rest of the song/video seems to privilege.
If I might be allowed to skip ahead here, in order to further this argument and also note a certain thread that doesn't become clear immediately and, when it does, no longer seems to have any explicit relevance, another reason to disbelieve the supposition that Marí is idly (day)dreaming, or reacting to a potential antagonism, is the way that the narrative structure of the video incorporates the Dad Figures.
There are only, to my count, three Dads in this video; the stepdad in the opening sequence, the teacher that is introduced immediately afterward, and the Principal. By the time the video really kicks into gear, the Dads are (once again) absent, and the authority figures that are being struggled with are primarily female. Further, of these three Dads, none puts up any sort of fight - the stepdad merely parrots the mother and gets punched, the teacher shouts impotently and is pelted by paper, and the principal immediately succumbs to Marí's companion's seduction. If this video - and, I might self-servingly add, #NoDads - was about elevating a potential antagonism and working through it, then it would, presumably, be structured around that antagonism, and resolve with that antagonism. Because it is not the case that No Daddy or #NoDads describes, exclusively, a goal - it is not that an absence of Dad(dy)s is desirable, but that it exists.
The classroom in which she has this dream is in a state of revolt. The teacher gesticulates wildly, screaming at the girls who are throwing wads of paper - or doing their makeup - at him, complaining from his position of authority, stationed in front of a chalkboard covered in rules, that he is being prevented from enacting that authority properly.
The teacher's rant is intercut with shots of Marí dancing in front of another chalkboard, this one covered in lyrics to the song she has not yet begun singing. This seems, fairly obviously, to be a playful inversion of the teacher's authority, in that it places Marí in a similar visual space but with certain key differences; namely, the words on the chalkboard change from rules to exhortations of dispossession & solidarity, and the lack of a podium or classroom remove both the mediation and subject/object relationship out of which authority arises. The juxtaposition of the teacher's wild gesticulations in front of his blackboard against Marí's fairly understated dancing also underline the disjunction of this visual metaphor. On top of this, the different demeanors that Marí effects, sitting in the classroom versus dancing in front of the blackboard, the one exasperated and antagonistic, the other self-possessed to the point of taunting, seem to indicate a working knowledge of the influence of both performance and structural positioning in the role of ongoing antagonisms.
That this consciousness of role-playing occurs during the stage-setting period of the video, between the "history" that the (day)dream represents and the insurrection that the video will shortly detail, along with cuts that make explicit where we are (such as the sign that establishes that we are in the "Wainwright School for Girls”) and who we (as viewers who are intimately tied to Marí's perspective) are opposing, is no accident; it even further embellishes the ways in which the established authorities of the school are merely actors. It is precisely this dialectical engagement with the arbitrary nature of authority that the video, and #NoDads, revolves around.
So when the teacher ends his rant with an upset, "Miss Thomas," (the biographical Mari's surname) "speak!" there is a bitter irony to his legitimation.
This irony is no hipsterization, however. And neither is it the reduction to the Imaginary, or a deference to the Big Other in some reductive psychologizing Lacanian fantasy. For while it is the case that the hyperbolic figure of authority is called upon to legitimate the voice of dissent, it does so precisely against the backdrop of a telegraphed appropriation of said dissenter for whom the privileges of the hipster or the analysand cannot exist. For both of these subjects come into being only in the presence of certain sets of social, economic, and cultural structures, and are defined by certain modes of reaction towards them. In the case of the hipster, this includes a combination of racial and sexual privilege which are valorized under the sign of social capital according to certain rules of rejection/negation; in the case of the analysand, it is the capacity to enter into the quasi-auto/theocratic environment which rejects/defers the messy circuits of exchange in favor of a purified structure of the mind, which it then works through.
Marí - and let's be clear here, we're talking about the fictional construct of Marí that the text of the song/video presents holistically, despite certain feints the text makes towards opening out onto the biographical subject, because no one believes them and no one is meant to, at least insofar as they gesture toward the cynical position that posits the fractured celebrity as a singular whole - does not occupy either of these positions. The autocracy of the classroom is ironized not as a cynical (and, therefore, universalizable) exemption, but according to the conditions of its reproduction. Which is to say, the exhortation, "speak!" tastes bitter because it is a speech act intended as both accession and curse, and yet we know that it is spat at a subject who both has no prior experience in the reproduction of the social structures that she is being cursed into (through the lyrics of the chorus and the (day)dream sequence) and who (therefore) does not even possess the capacity to reproduce that system properly (through the sequence in which she dances in front of the altered chalkboard).
This first chorus also introduces two important visual elements. The first is the replacement of the chalkboard sequence with a different extra-narrative sequence, in which Marí dances in front of yellow lockers in the hallways of the school with four back-up dancers. The second is the revelation that Marí brought some really rather pretty brass knuckles with her to class.
The first verse, also taking place in the classroom that finds itself in a sort of nascent-revolutionary state, is fairly rote, lyrically; it establishes Marí's authenticity, claiming that she has navigated special hardship, that she identifies herself primarily with her stance against authority ("I'm the type who don't give a damn about rules"). Its vague-specificity ("I was forced to survive on the streets / make my own way to eat / gotta do what I gotta do") that serves as a way of opening out doubly, serving either as an invitation for the listener to insert themselves into the the position of the narrator, or for the narrative position to be read biographically, to be followed up on to create the larger mythology of the pop singer. This opening out, however, as I've just stated, operates within the universe of pop music and celebrity. It is not, therefore, a lacuna within the text, but an invitation to overdetermine it however you'd like to. This distinction is crucial because, well, broadly, if you fail to grasp it then you are likely to wind up with an incredibly stupid reading of pop music, but specifically because it operates in the context of this video as a strong argument for avoiding the aforementioned reading in which the whole thing is a "mere" fantasy. Because the specific form this invitation to overdetermination takes is one in which the songs vagueness is asked to be read as being linked to determinate forms of struggle which it itself refuses to provide.
The verse, of course, does more than this, however. Its return to the extra-narrative space of the chalkboard dance sequence, in conjunction with its emphasis (while in the classroom) on foregrounding Marí's brass knuckles signifies that this is the moment in which it sets the terms of antagonism. Marí's singing "Been through so much" and "I'm the type that don't give a damn about rules" in front of the chalkboard might be read as a sort of stump speech, campaign promises from a candidate equipped (as we see within the narrative) for revolutionary violence. But these vagaries are, ultimately, more empty description than empty promise, and it is a strange fact of the video that, within the classroom, Marí is often decentered, with shots focusing on the girl brushing her hair, or the girl preparing another paper missile to pelt the teacher with.
That this subtle visual decentering takes place over ostensibly personal lyrics is negatively mirrored in the following prechorus; the lyrics shift from her individual story to words of solidarity and advice, while the visuals shift, in the first half, purely to the two extra-narrative spaces in which Marí dominates, and in the second half to Marí getting ejected from the classroom.
If these first four sections of the video, from the teacher's rant to the first prechorus, maintain the visual continuity of the classroom, then it could be said that this ends the first movement of the video. Marí's ejection thus completes the stage-setting portion of the video as the lyrics move for the first time from the individual narrative that they have so far made their focus to something less personal. But first, something must be said about that second extra-narrative space.
The sequence in which Marí dances in front of the yellow lockers prefigures scenes which we have not yet seen in this video, assuming we are taking it in in a linear fashion. Because, unlike the sequence in which Marí dances alone in front of the chalkboard, the set used in this dance sequence is recycled for the sequence in which the students at the Wainwright School for Girls take to the streets, so to speak; there are going, shortly, to be lots of semi-anonymous feet sprinting past these lockers, not just Marí and her dancers. But this sequence is still extra-narrative; even after the girls have begun running past these same lockers, this coordinated dance sequence still surfaces. That is, even after this space becomes subsumed within the narrative, given a particular location with respect to one of the three main staging locations (the classroom, the principal's office, and the cafeteria), it continues to operate as a space that exists outside of the narrative structure of the video.
Aside from being a visual trope, anchoring the space of the video firmly within the pop/R&B music tradition which dominated at the time of the videos release, this sequence functions as a sort of pivot point, by way of its shared space, between the spaces and actions of the video, and its mutilated temporality. There is an argument to be made, I think, that this sequence can be read as a sort of vanguard, as those who act before the time is right in order to guarantee the right time arrives, and also that it can be read as a sort of holdover, as those who continue to act even after the failure/success of the revolutionary moment. This is why it must remain outside of the narrative logic of the video, and also why it must be connected to it. As opposed to the chalkboard sequence, which posits a detourned and dethroned authority, the lockers and back up dancers signify a return to pop, and its degraded universal.
As Marí is kicked out of the classroom, there is an echo of the earlier invocation to speak; here again, this impotent authority figure is given some semblance of his power back, if only in order to facilitate that which was already predetermined to happen. For Marí was never not going to start singing, just as she was never not going to escalate this antagonism. But there is still that vestige, that performed deference, that qualifies and constitutes her actions.
With the second chorus, we finally exit the classroom and return only to the chalkboard. The opening shot, of the ejected girls' feet marching through the hallways of the school, seems a bit strange; it recalls 80s films about high school, when the cruel, popular girls enter the scene. The lyrics that overlay this visual, "I ain't had no daddy around when I was growin' up / That's why I'm wild and I don't give a (Huh)," also create a sort of dissonance. They aren't describing what you would expect to be hearing in that sort of filmic moment, but they aren't entirely divorced from it either; the "mean girls" characters are almost invariably the ones that end up (either sympathetically or humiliatingly, depending on whether the film tends more towards sentiment or cynicism) acting the way they act precisely through the revelation of "Daddy Issues."
The utility of this framing is immediately realized, of course, in the narrative, as the two girls who aren't Pop Stars distract the principal by flirting with him in order that Marí herself might sneak into his office. But, to linger for a moment on that shot, because it bubbles up out of the moments that precede it, and is subsumed by those that follow so elegantly, that it becomes something quite strange.
Those shots, of Marí and company walking through the hallway in formation, draw on the extra-narrative locker sequence with the backers; they draw on the (day)dream sequence with Marí's posture that seems so prim as to contain the potentials of an explosive violence; they draw on the performed assumption of power that the chalkboard sequence details. At the same time, they draw on this trope, of the bristling power of potential violence that operates by performing its own restraint that the "popular girls" signify.
This chorus, of course, also shifts the #NoDads content of this video from one in which it is explicitly antagonistic, as in the first chorus, if tacitly legitimated by who it intends to antagonize, to a more autonomous position. That lingering sense that the teacher still maintains some symbolic authority, in that he can act Marí into doing what she will do anyway, and thereby retain at least the position of authority if not uncontestedly enact its powers, is here destroyed. For that symbolic authority to maintain any credibility, in the absence of its ability to assert violence, it must at least be able to negate the possibility of retribution. With Marí's sneaking into the Principal's office at the end of the chorus, however, we see that this is precisely what is no longer going to be the case.
This second verse is, I will say it straight, my favorite part. And so I will lay absolutely bare how I see the sequence that it describes.
What is happening is that Marí, having seized the means of distribution, makes an announcement in solidarity with sex workers. The result of this, as shown in the shots of the girls in the hallways and classrooms eyeing the PA system approvingly, is an insurrection, in the form, at least initially, of a wildcat strike.
Now, couching it in these terms is obviously leaning in a certain interpretive direction, an indication that the interpreters center of mass is, perhaps, a bit closer to the spleen than the appendix, so to speak. But then, it seems incredibly difficult to disagree that this is, quite literally, what we are watching. No matter the language you choose, there is a stoppage, an exeunt, of those caught up in the moment of the dissolution of the status quo.
And it is here that the spaces of antagonism become articulated, that the particular classrooms in which this message strike home become visual, and so, according to the logic of the spectacle - for this is a music video, we must remember, a condensation and production of the spectacle, a product that is not bought or consumed, never itself exempted from the circuits of exchange because it never unfolds outside of exchange - and so become real. The computer lab, the tennis court, the science lab, the track. These are the four sites in which the seed of rebellion that Marí plants takes root.
The computer lab, where knowledge becomes digitized and commodified; where this school of girls can learn to type quickly, efficiently, can reproduce the pool of secretary. The tennis court, where physical fitness can double as the internalization of modes of social reproduction, where the ungainly accident of observable exhortation can be honed to a minimum of a grunt, while still keeping the physique and mannered form in proper 'shape.' The science lab, with its beakers and microscopes and candy-colored chemicals in dishes, that holds up the dual promise of progress (and all the wealth associated therewith) and a vestigial mysticism, that worst kind of academicism, that lets one peer through microscopes at possibilities, apportion them through eye-droppers, but never get close enough to play in; that give these girls the scent of what might better their situation, but never taste it. And the track, with its lone stretching figure seeming especially symbolic, almost transparently so, just taking a break from running in circles to hear what she needs to hear to sprint somewhere else, towards this new community of solidarity taking shape.
With the third chorus, the wildcat strike begins in earnest. The reintroduction of the chalkboard sequence anchors the scenes of the girls abandoning their posts, sprinting through hallways past lockers, some of which look suspiciously similar to those in which the extra-narrative dance sequence took place. When the chorus winds down, and Marí steps out from behind her seized means of distribution, leading the girls past the blue lockers that seem (according to the shot structure) to be leading toward the yellow lockers that were danced in front of - and the fact has been established that the girls are not just refusing their labor, not just sprinting through the halls, they are actively striking, barricading the teachers into classrooms - then, well, then we have come to the point we've been building to so far, with only one revelation still in the wings.
It is, of course, this spatial convergence that the camera is urging us toward that is itself the final revelation. The final space.
If the visuals that accompanied the previous prechorus articulated the spaces of antagonism, then this chorus is the process of collapsing them into each other. As the objects of the antagonism take flight into a communal space, the spatial alienation resolves itself; no longer are these girls atomized, broken into arbitrary groups of commodified instruction (it would be hard to believe that the “Wainwright School For Girls” was anything other than a private school, but even if it wasn't, well, if you don't believe public schools are in the business of commodified-knowledge-production/distribution, then I'm pretty shocked you've ever heard of me and made it this far), but instead are, again, escalating the antagonism, not by addressing them individually, but instead by converging them all, in space.
If you have guessed, by now, that the final revelation, the collapsing antagonisms into a unified space, that occurs at the end of this bridge, either by my own language so far or by watching the video, is an occupation – specifically a closed or locked-down occupation – then we're on the same page. Here it is, in its full glory; a pop song, about the absence of the patriarch, which tracks a path of rebellion through the wildcat strike, inspired by seizing the means of distribution (the PA system) and making an announcement in solidarity with sex workers, to an occupation of the only means of reproduction that the school possesses – the cafeteria.
Schools are themselves the premiere sites of reproductive labor within contemporary capitalism. They are social factories, as the saying goes, whose nominal goal, the egalitarian dissemination of knowledge, is only of course a cover, or at best an ideal, which provides a moral cover for the real work of socialization which goes on there, the reproduction of systems of class power. #NoDads, of course, has this particular function as its central concern, the father having always been the symbol not of the fact of reproduction, but its labor; this labor is itself almost always relegated to the women, being most often thought of as housework and birth, but it has always been the figure of the father who carries out, primarily, what we might call immaterial reproductive labor. The absence of the dad is the absence of the coercive and exploitative relation of the reproduction of the social.
Insurrection must follow these lines of flight. From the classroom, where the father-teacher rages at his unperformable authority, which crisis we must facilitate; to the hallways, where the atomized might meet in the synchronized, (dis)ordered stomping of feet toward a goal that perhaps none quite yet know; to, finally, the cafeteria, where the real production of reproduction, both the simple fact of eating, sustaining the body, and the complex fact of the network, where the biopolitical administration of class difference can be enacted through self-management, and where, having both experienced and enacted #NoDads, a community of bodies can be created.
The single most important visual component of the third and final prechorus is the reintroduction of the second of the extra-narrative sequences, the dance in front of the lockers. This is where, as I said earlier, it becomes incontestable that this sequence is in fact extra-narrative; the girls sprinting in front of these same lockers do not encroach upon the sequence, even though at one point there is a cut directly from the girls running to the dance sequenced. And as I mentioned before, I believe the importance of this sequence is its status as a pivot point.
As the occupation of the cafeteria begins in earnest during this prechorus, the return of this pivot point is crucial. What makes the two extra-narrative sequences extra-, of course, is a sort of atemporality - they both exist outside the time of the narrative. The chalkboard sequence also exists outside of the space of the narrative, however, which places it more as commentary, a sort of eschatological projection, than the other sequence.
That which occupies the same space, but is disjunct from time; in other words, a tradition. As I've said, this sequence is what anchors No Daddy to the tradition of pop/R&B videos of the particular moment in which it was made. And so it is that the simple juxtaposition that the video revolves around becomes fully realized.
It is the relation of pop, with its insistence on the bodily, on the disruption of the disembodying of taste, to the direct action, with its insistence on disruption, on the immediate embodying of politics, that is being juxtaposed. And it is done so under the sign of absence of the figure of immaterial reproductive labor.
This is the universality of pop, that it is timeless and of space, as though it were itself a tradition, as though it were itself a history. Its space, though, is always constructed, is always a set, is the club that never quite has a referent; it is always an ahistory.
The end of this song, as the beat fades out to the images of the occupied cafeteria and Marí dancing in front of the chalkboard, neither affirms nor denies the potentiality of the moment that Marí has activated with this song, whose time would not even begin to come to pass until over half a decade later. But this is precisely the point; that the pop, whether it divides itself into four fourths or signals the beginning reintegration of the apparently disparate system, is without time, and thus, without ancestry.
The "origin" itself could seem to be an antithetical concept, something necessarily obviated by an embrace of this phrase, a (not so) simple extension of the parental role into the immaterial realm. But origins are never quite that. Their place, in language and in the arts, always finds itself occupied by the texts that find themselves woven of the stuff they're claimed to predate, before they could have known that this is what they were. No origin slips through without precedents, and no precedents content themselves as such; and certainly no text will sit silent and let itself be hermeticized. The relationship can never be father-child, between an origin and that which came of its origination; no, the text is always a virus, its woven cloth catching and unraveling, making all of what pretends to be itself into its own.
In 2006 Teairra Marí was posed to be Rihanna. Unfortunately, Rihanna happened. Marí now holds a semi-faceless presence, a precarious position at the bottom of the charts, being neither as marketable as Rihanna nor possessing her own fan-army, like her recent collaborators Gucci Mane & Soulja Boy. But before she was struck down, she struck out, with a single.
No Daddy is neither origin nor predecessor, neither of nor outside, #NoDads. They meet in the breath of a voice, in the slippage of the syntactic clarity. For where No Daddy structures itself as a revolt against a deterministic reading of the absence of the patriarch, #NoDads is an embracing of that absence's ineluctability. But from one, the other, and from the other, one; and so it is that No Daddy, despite striking long before the iron was hot, makes the right notes ring out, and holds them in suspension that we might see our own strikes before they happen.
And so I offer, here, a close reading of No Daddy, both song and video, in the hopes that things might become clearer. #NoDads is nothing, as yet; a simple phrase, one that finds itself displacing parts and occupying them, mutating certain cells within the whole and metastasizing their meaning. There will be no exegesis, not for now at least, not until the words take hold, the meme reproduced unto death; until then, we have only the power of creation, of adding meaning where it did not yet exist. And it is from within this non-origin, this perfect accident of an antecedent, that the words can be sprung to clear the space that is needed.
The video opens cold, with what is revealed to be a (day)dream sequence, of Teairra Marí confronting her mother about her new stepfather. It is, presumably, a recollection that serves as a prelude to the events of the video, but this is not entirely clear; it could, just as feasibly, be pure fantasy. A reading of the events of the video could be twisted one way or another depending on which stance one takes on this question; I will say, for the record, that I lean towards it being used as a recollection, but that either interpretation can lead comfortably to my reading, I think. The significant difference (barring the wildly boring reading in which the whole video itself is just Marí continuing to fantasize) turns on the gap between an actually pre-existing antagonism and a potential antagonism. In the case of the latter, the individualistic/voluntaristic threads would necessarily be pulled through more firmly, which I think is obviated by the moves toward solidarity and autonomy that the rest of the song/video seems to privilege.
If I might be allowed to skip ahead here, in order to further this argument and also note a certain thread that doesn't become clear immediately and, when it does, no longer seems to have any explicit relevance, another reason to disbelieve the supposition that Marí is idly (day)dreaming, or reacting to a potential antagonism, is the way that the narrative structure of the video incorporates the Dad Figures.
There are only, to my count, three Dads in this video; the stepdad in the opening sequence, the teacher that is introduced immediately afterward, and the Principal. By the time the video really kicks into gear, the Dads are (once again) absent, and the authority figures that are being struggled with are primarily female. Further, of these three Dads, none puts up any sort of fight - the stepdad merely parrots the mother and gets punched, the teacher shouts impotently and is pelted by paper, and the principal immediately succumbs to Marí's companion's seduction. If this video - and, I might self-servingly add, #NoDads - was about elevating a potential antagonism and working through it, then it would, presumably, be structured around that antagonism, and resolve with that antagonism. Because it is not the case that No Daddy or #NoDads describes, exclusively, a goal - it is not that an absence of Dad(dy)s is desirable, but that it exists.
The classroom in which she has this dream is in a state of revolt. The teacher gesticulates wildly, screaming at the girls who are throwing wads of paper - or doing their makeup - at him, complaining from his position of authority, stationed in front of a chalkboard covered in rules, that he is being prevented from enacting that authority properly.
The teacher's rant is intercut with shots of Marí dancing in front of another chalkboard, this one covered in lyrics to the song she has not yet begun singing. This seems, fairly obviously, to be a playful inversion of the teacher's authority, in that it places Marí in a similar visual space but with certain key differences; namely, the words on the chalkboard change from rules to exhortations of dispossession & solidarity, and the lack of a podium or classroom remove both the mediation and subject/object relationship out of which authority arises. The juxtaposition of the teacher's wild gesticulations in front of his blackboard against Marí's fairly understated dancing also underline the disjunction of this visual metaphor. On top of this, the different demeanors that Marí effects, sitting in the classroom versus dancing in front of the blackboard, the one exasperated and antagonistic, the other self-possessed to the point of taunting, seem to indicate a working knowledge of the influence of both performance and structural positioning in the role of ongoing antagonisms.
That this consciousness of role-playing occurs during the stage-setting period of the video, between the "history" that the (day)dream represents and the insurrection that the video will shortly detail, along with cuts that make explicit where we are (such as the sign that establishes that we are in the "Wainwright School for Girls”) and who we (as viewers who are intimately tied to Marí's perspective) are opposing, is no accident; it even further embellishes the ways in which the established authorities of the school are merely actors. It is precisely this dialectical engagement with the arbitrary nature of authority that the video, and #NoDads, revolves around.
So when the teacher ends his rant with an upset, "Miss Thomas," (the biographical Mari's surname) "speak!" there is a bitter irony to his legitimation.
This irony is no hipsterization, however. And neither is it the reduction to the Imaginary, or a deference to the Big Other in some reductive psychologizing Lacanian fantasy. For while it is the case that the hyperbolic figure of authority is called upon to legitimate the voice of dissent, it does so precisely against the backdrop of a telegraphed appropriation of said dissenter for whom the privileges of the hipster or the analysand cannot exist. For both of these subjects come into being only in the presence of certain sets of social, economic, and cultural structures, and are defined by certain modes of reaction towards them. In the case of the hipster, this includes a combination of racial and sexual privilege which are valorized under the sign of social capital according to certain rules of rejection/negation; in the case of the analysand, it is the capacity to enter into the quasi-auto/theocratic environment which rejects/defers the messy circuits of exchange in favor of a purified structure of the mind, which it then works through.
Marí - and let's be clear here, we're talking about the fictional construct of Marí that the text of the song/video presents holistically, despite certain feints the text makes towards opening out onto the biographical subject, because no one believes them and no one is meant to, at least insofar as they gesture toward the cynical position that posits the fractured celebrity as a singular whole - does not occupy either of these positions. The autocracy of the classroom is ironized not as a cynical (and, therefore, universalizable) exemption, but according to the conditions of its reproduction. Which is to say, the exhortation, "speak!" tastes bitter because it is a speech act intended as both accession and curse, and yet we know that it is spat at a subject who both has no prior experience in the reproduction of the social structures that she is being cursed into (through the lyrics of the chorus and the (day)dream sequence) and who (therefore) does not even possess the capacity to reproduce that system properly (through the sequence in which she dances in front of the altered chalkboard).
This first chorus also introduces two important visual elements. The first is the replacement of the chalkboard sequence with a different extra-narrative sequence, in which Marí dances in front of yellow lockers in the hallways of the school with four back-up dancers. The second is the revelation that Marí brought some really rather pretty brass knuckles with her to class.
The first verse, also taking place in the classroom that finds itself in a sort of nascent-revolutionary state, is fairly rote, lyrically; it establishes Marí's authenticity, claiming that she has navigated special hardship, that she identifies herself primarily with her stance against authority ("I'm the type who don't give a damn about rules"). Its vague-specificity ("I was forced to survive on the streets / make my own way to eat / gotta do what I gotta do") that serves as a way of opening out doubly, serving either as an invitation for the listener to insert themselves into the the position of the narrator, or for the narrative position to be read biographically, to be followed up on to create the larger mythology of the pop singer. This opening out, however, as I've just stated, operates within the universe of pop music and celebrity. It is not, therefore, a lacuna within the text, but an invitation to overdetermine it however you'd like to. This distinction is crucial because, well, broadly, if you fail to grasp it then you are likely to wind up with an incredibly stupid reading of pop music, but specifically because it operates in the context of this video as a strong argument for avoiding the aforementioned reading in which the whole thing is a "mere" fantasy. Because the specific form this invitation to overdetermination takes is one in which the songs vagueness is asked to be read as being linked to determinate forms of struggle which it itself refuses to provide.
The verse, of course, does more than this, however. Its return to the extra-narrative space of the chalkboard dance sequence, in conjunction with its emphasis (while in the classroom) on foregrounding Marí's brass knuckles signifies that this is the moment in which it sets the terms of antagonism. Marí's singing "Been through so much" and "I'm the type that don't give a damn about rules" in front of the chalkboard might be read as a sort of stump speech, campaign promises from a candidate equipped (as we see within the narrative) for revolutionary violence. But these vagaries are, ultimately, more empty description than empty promise, and it is a strange fact of the video that, within the classroom, Marí is often decentered, with shots focusing on the girl brushing her hair, or the girl preparing another paper missile to pelt the teacher with.
That this subtle visual decentering takes place over ostensibly personal lyrics is negatively mirrored in the following prechorus; the lyrics shift from her individual story to words of solidarity and advice, while the visuals shift, in the first half, purely to the two extra-narrative spaces in which Marí dominates, and in the second half to Marí getting ejected from the classroom.
If these first four sections of the video, from the teacher's rant to the first prechorus, maintain the visual continuity of the classroom, then it could be said that this ends the first movement of the video. Marí's ejection thus completes the stage-setting portion of the video as the lyrics move for the first time from the individual narrative that they have so far made their focus to something less personal. But first, something must be said about that second extra-narrative space.
The sequence in which Marí dances in front of the yellow lockers prefigures scenes which we have not yet seen in this video, assuming we are taking it in in a linear fashion. Because, unlike the sequence in which Marí dances alone in front of the chalkboard, the set used in this dance sequence is recycled for the sequence in which the students at the Wainwright School for Girls take to the streets, so to speak; there are going, shortly, to be lots of semi-anonymous feet sprinting past these lockers, not just Marí and her dancers. But this sequence is still extra-narrative; even after the girls have begun running past these same lockers, this coordinated dance sequence still surfaces. That is, even after this space becomes subsumed within the narrative, given a particular location with respect to one of the three main staging locations (the classroom, the principal's office, and the cafeteria), it continues to operate as a space that exists outside of the narrative structure of the video.
Aside from being a visual trope, anchoring the space of the video firmly within the pop/R&B music tradition which dominated at the time of the videos release, this sequence functions as a sort of pivot point, by way of its shared space, between the spaces and actions of the video, and its mutilated temporality. There is an argument to be made, I think, that this sequence can be read as a sort of vanguard, as those who act before the time is right in order to guarantee the right time arrives, and also that it can be read as a sort of holdover, as those who continue to act even after the failure/success of the revolutionary moment. This is why it must remain outside of the narrative logic of the video, and also why it must be connected to it. As opposed to the chalkboard sequence, which posits a detourned and dethroned authority, the lockers and back up dancers signify a return to pop, and its degraded universal.
As Marí is kicked out of the classroom, there is an echo of the earlier invocation to speak; here again, this impotent authority figure is given some semblance of his power back, if only in order to facilitate that which was already predetermined to happen. For Marí was never not going to start singing, just as she was never not going to escalate this antagonism. But there is still that vestige, that performed deference, that qualifies and constitutes her actions.
With the second chorus, we finally exit the classroom and return only to the chalkboard. The opening shot, of the ejected girls' feet marching through the hallways of the school, seems a bit strange; it recalls 80s films about high school, when the cruel, popular girls enter the scene. The lyrics that overlay this visual, "I ain't had no daddy around when I was growin' up / That's why I'm wild and I don't give a (Huh)," also create a sort of dissonance. They aren't describing what you would expect to be hearing in that sort of filmic moment, but they aren't entirely divorced from it either; the "mean girls" characters are almost invariably the ones that end up (either sympathetically or humiliatingly, depending on whether the film tends more towards sentiment or cynicism) acting the way they act precisely through the revelation of "Daddy Issues."
The utility of this framing is immediately realized, of course, in the narrative, as the two girls who aren't Pop Stars distract the principal by flirting with him in order that Marí herself might sneak into his office. But, to linger for a moment on that shot, because it bubbles up out of the moments that precede it, and is subsumed by those that follow so elegantly, that it becomes something quite strange.
Those shots, of Marí and company walking through the hallway in formation, draw on the extra-narrative locker sequence with the backers; they draw on the (day)dream sequence with Marí's posture that seems so prim as to contain the potentials of an explosive violence; they draw on the performed assumption of power that the chalkboard sequence details. At the same time, they draw on this trope, of the bristling power of potential violence that operates by performing its own restraint that the "popular girls" signify.
This chorus, of course, also shifts the #NoDads content of this video from one in which it is explicitly antagonistic, as in the first chorus, if tacitly legitimated by who it intends to antagonize, to a more autonomous position. That lingering sense that the teacher still maintains some symbolic authority, in that he can act Marí into doing what she will do anyway, and thereby retain at least the position of authority if not uncontestedly enact its powers, is here destroyed. For that symbolic authority to maintain any credibility, in the absence of its ability to assert violence, it must at least be able to negate the possibility of retribution. With Marí's sneaking into the Principal's office at the end of the chorus, however, we see that this is precisely what is no longer going to be the case.
This second verse is, I will say it straight, my favorite part. And so I will lay absolutely bare how I see the sequence that it describes.
What is happening is that Marí, having seized the means of distribution, makes an announcement in solidarity with sex workers. The result of this, as shown in the shots of the girls in the hallways and classrooms eyeing the PA system approvingly, is an insurrection, in the form, at least initially, of a wildcat strike.
Now, couching it in these terms is obviously leaning in a certain interpretive direction, an indication that the interpreters center of mass is, perhaps, a bit closer to the spleen than the appendix, so to speak. But then, it seems incredibly difficult to disagree that this is, quite literally, what we are watching. No matter the language you choose, there is a stoppage, an exeunt, of those caught up in the moment of the dissolution of the status quo.
And it is here that the spaces of antagonism become articulated, that the particular classrooms in which this message strike home become visual, and so, according to the logic of the spectacle - for this is a music video, we must remember, a condensation and production of the spectacle, a product that is not bought or consumed, never itself exempted from the circuits of exchange because it never unfolds outside of exchange - and so become real. The computer lab, the tennis court, the science lab, the track. These are the four sites in which the seed of rebellion that Marí plants takes root.
The computer lab, where knowledge becomes digitized and commodified; where this school of girls can learn to type quickly, efficiently, can reproduce the pool of secretary. The tennis court, where physical fitness can double as the internalization of modes of social reproduction, where the ungainly accident of observable exhortation can be honed to a minimum of a grunt, while still keeping the physique and mannered form in proper 'shape.' The science lab, with its beakers and microscopes and candy-colored chemicals in dishes, that holds up the dual promise of progress (and all the wealth associated therewith) and a vestigial mysticism, that worst kind of academicism, that lets one peer through microscopes at possibilities, apportion them through eye-droppers, but never get close enough to play in; that give these girls the scent of what might better their situation, but never taste it. And the track, with its lone stretching figure seeming especially symbolic, almost transparently so, just taking a break from running in circles to hear what she needs to hear to sprint somewhere else, towards this new community of solidarity taking shape.
With the third chorus, the wildcat strike begins in earnest. The reintroduction of the chalkboard sequence anchors the scenes of the girls abandoning their posts, sprinting through hallways past lockers, some of which look suspiciously similar to those in which the extra-narrative dance sequence took place. When the chorus winds down, and Marí steps out from behind her seized means of distribution, leading the girls past the blue lockers that seem (according to the shot structure) to be leading toward the yellow lockers that were danced in front of - and the fact has been established that the girls are not just refusing their labor, not just sprinting through the halls, they are actively striking, barricading the teachers into classrooms - then, well, then we have come to the point we've been building to so far, with only one revelation still in the wings.
It is, of course, this spatial convergence that the camera is urging us toward that is itself the final revelation. The final space.
If the visuals that accompanied the previous prechorus articulated the spaces of antagonism, then this chorus is the process of collapsing them into each other. As the objects of the antagonism take flight into a communal space, the spatial alienation resolves itself; no longer are these girls atomized, broken into arbitrary groups of commodified instruction (it would be hard to believe that the “Wainwright School For Girls” was anything other than a private school, but even if it wasn't, well, if you don't believe public schools are in the business of commodified-knowledge-production/distribution, then I'm pretty shocked you've ever heard of me and made it this far), but instead are, again, escalating the antagonism, not by addressing them individually, but instead by converging them all, in space.
If you have guessed, by now, that the final revelation, the collapsing antagonisms into a unified space, that occurs at the end of this bridge, either by my own language so far or by watching the video, is an occupation – specifically a closed or locked-down occupation – then we're on the same page. Here it is, in its full glory; a pop song, about the absence of the patriarch, which tracks a path of rebellion through the wildcat strike, inspired by seizing the means of distribution (the PA system) and making an announcement in solidarity with sex workers, to an occupation of the only means of reproduction that the school possesses – the cafeteria.
Schools are themselves the premiere sites of reproductive labor within contemporary capitalism. They are social factories, as the saying goes, whose nominal goal, the egalitarian dissemination of knowledge, is only of course a cover, or at best an ideal, which provides a moral cover for the real work of socialization which goes on there, the reproduction of systems of class power. #NoDads, of course, has this particular function as its central concern, the father having always been the symbol not of the fact of reproduction, but its labor; this labor is itself almost always relegated to the women, being most often thought of as housework and birth, but it has always been the figure of the father who carries out, primarily, what we might call immaterial reproductive labor. The absence of the dad is the absence of the coercive and exploitative relation of the reproduction of the social.
Insurrection must follow these lines of flight. From the classroom, where the father-teacher rages at his unperformable authority, which crisis we must facilitate; to the hallways, where the atomized might meet in the synchronized, (dis)ordered stomping of feet toward a goal that perhaps none quite yet know; to, finally, the cafeteria, where the real production of reproduction, both the simple fact of eating, sustaining the body, and the complex fact of the network, where the biopolitical administration of class difference can be enacted through self-management, and where, having both experienced and enacted #NoDads, a community of bodies can be created.
The single most important visual component of the third and final prechorus is the reintroduction of the second of the extra-narrative sequences, the dance in front of the lockers. This is where, as I said earlier, it becomes incontestable that this sequence is in fact extra-narrative; the girls sprinting in front of these same lockers do not encroach upon the sequence, even though at one point there is a cut directly from the girls running to the dance sequenced. And as I mentioned before, I believe the importance of this sequence is its status as a pivot point.
As the occupation of the cafeteria begins in earnest during this prechorus, the return of this pivot point is crucial. What makes the two extra-narrative sequences extra-, of course, is a sort of atemporality - they both exist outside the time of the narrative. The chalkboard sequence also exists outside of the space of the narrative, however, which places it more as commentary, a sort of eschatological projection, than the other sequence.
That which occupies the same space, but is disjunct from time; in other words, a tradition. As I've said, this sequence is what anchors No Daddy to the tradition of pop/R&B videos of the particular moment in which it was made. And so it is that the simple juxtaposition that the video revolves around becomes fully realized.
It is the relation of pop, with its insistence on the bodily, on the disruption of the disembodying of taste, to the direct action, with its insistence on disruption, on the immediate embodying of politics, that is being juxtaposed. And it is done so under the sign of absence of the figure of immaterial reproductive labor.
This is the universality of pop, that it is timeless and of space, as though it were itself a tradition, as though it were itself a history. Its space, though, is always constructed, is always a set, is the club that never quite has a referent; it is always an ahistory.
The end of this song, as the beat fades out to the images of the occupied cafeteria and Marí dancing in front of the chalkboard, neither affirms nor denies the potentiality of the moment that Marí has activated with this song, whose time would not even begin to come to pass until over half a decade later. But this is precisely the point; that the pop, whether it divides itself into four fourths or signals the beginning reintegration of the apparently disparate system, is without time, and thus, without ancestry.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Unified (Gar)Field Theory
(at garfield.com, starting here, with a hat tip to Grant for sharing it)
The clear implication, at the end of the bizarre arc from October 23rd to the 28th, 1989, is that the entirety of the Garfield comic strip is, in some way, an elaborate hallucination, a paranoid delusion, or an extended meditation on a stage of grief. The comic itself is utterly explicit about this, and, strangely, doesn't even bother to shoot a snide sideways grin; there's no wink at the end, nothing but the tiny "End" insert to indicate that what has happened is at all out of the ordinary in the universe of the strip. And of course that it is there is important. But the final panel itself is strange; it takes the tone of a moral, that part of the fiction which tells you that the fiction is being exceeded, that there is a remainder here that you are supposed to recognize and use. The problem, though, is that what it actually says is totally fucking incoherent as a moral; it's, really, just a description of the preceding comic. Which means, I take it, that the arc itself is the didactic footnote to the fable of the comic.
Which, of course, means that Garfield itself is the story of a cat who does not exist, fantasizing about a life which is not real. And if Garfield is an absence, then he is an absence that dreams in a particular, dilapidated house.
Two days after the end of that arc, came this comic
Which is, of course, exactly your ordinary Garfield comic strip. It happens to be the Halloween edition, so there's a bit of a prepackaged theme to the joke. But, coming as it does just so soon after the arc, and especially the comic from the 27th, where we watch Garfield's delusions dematerialize and see the truth of his surroundings, there's something extra eery about this comic from the 30th of October, 1989. Because Garfield is no longer just a sort of apathetic, sardonic cat - he is in fact the absence of a cat, a nocat, subjected to time. Garfield becomes the structuring principle, the ability to imagine of that which is absent. And the truth of his absence, what makes it comprehensible, is, of course, the dissipation of his dream-world; and what signifies that dissipation is the dilapidated house.
The Garfield Minus Garfield webcomic actually gets Garfield, then, both totally right, and totally wrong. Garfield is, apparently, by its own admission, the comic depiction of loneliness and denial that Garfield Minus Garfield supposedly detourns it into. The way that Garfield Minus Garfield could be said to get Garfield exactly right, though, is that, as that arc showed us, Garfield himself is an absence - "But that means I haven't lived here for years." But it seems to assume that because he is an absence, he is erasable, whereas this seems to be the exact opposite of the truth. Because his absence is a structuring absence, not a simple lack of presence. Jon and Odie are, and perhaps always been, mere projections of this absence, figures formed to fill up space.
Garfield is a ghost. And a real ghost, not some bullshit about a lingering soul trying to finish up his business. Ghosts are space. They are, particularly, a becoming-consciousness of space. Ghosts are not embodied, or if they are, it is a function of narrative and not ghost-ness; ghosts are absences of space, absences within space, that structure the space. And so, apparently, is Garfield.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
David Banner Vs. Lil B: The Collapsing Into Each Other of Swag Rap and Radio Rap
(This post is going to be a bit top-heavy with the embedded youtubes (or, if you prefer, a bit bottom-heavy with text). I thought about distributing them more evenly but fuck it.)
So, for all you out there who don't follow swag rap, here's the deal. David Banner made this song, Swag, dissing the trend, taking aim specifically at Lil B.
You might recognize David Banner as the rapper who did that 2-bit (but still pretty fantastic) Ying Yang Twinz rip off, Play
Taking aim at swag rap does seem to be the new trend among rappers who no one really gives a shit about anymore. You might remember The Game teaming up with Tyler, The Creator (and sampling Lil Wayne, all "featuring Otis Redding," Watch The Throne style) for that really abominable sub-sub-Eminem track, Martians Vs. Goblins
(Lil B's response to which, is, by the way, fantastic:
and then Lil B released his I Forgive You mixtape, which doesn't actually explicitly reference The Game, but hell if that isn't the funniest way to respond to a diss)
But anyway, that's all sort of beside the point. Lil B's response to David Banner, in which he jacks the beat for Swag and turns it into I Own Swag.
Now, I'm going to be entirely honest here: before I started writing this, I was under the impression that I hadn't heard hardly any David Banner songs. But as I'm writing, I'm looking him up on youtube, and realizing something kind of strange; David Banner has, apparently, been behind every song on the radio for the last decade or so that occupies that exact 'radio space' - where you enjoy it when it comes on, and it inspires no interest beyond that. I don't think I'd ever really known that I was listening to a David Banner song before Swag, and yet I keep finding these songs that I know most of the lyrics to on his VEVO channel. Like, honestly, somehow David Banner even managed to make a song featuring Akon, Weezy, and Snoop fall completely under the radar. That's pretty remarkable.
But I'm not here to talk shit about David Banner. Because I actually kind of like the song Swag. I think the criticisms he's leveling at swag rap are fucking laughable, obviously - especially the shit about "They won't spit the truth / These niggas been scared / Call my flow the puddin' / The proofs in there / I say the shit they say I shouldn't / I ain't never cared." David Banner isn't exactly a fucking conscious emcee - which is a good thing, fuck "conscious hip hop" and all that shit - and, as far as I can tell, he's never said a controversial thing in a major song, ever.* And then, even, it seems like he's almost taking subliminal shots at himself when he says shit like, "Is anybody on the next level, with me / I'm hearin' niggas dissin' god, y'all think it's witty / I ain't laughin', we don't play in Mississippi" (emphasis mine).
It does seem a bit weird to identify who in particular he's targeting. Lil B is definitely the main one, and V-Nasty is pretty fucking explicit in the chorus; but then, Banner did a song with A$AP ROCKY recently, he of Purple Swag fame. It leaves me wondering how Banner feels about, say, Danny Brown, or Lex Luger. Or if the first half of the chorus is intended as a diss at Brick Squad.
Swag is produced by Swiff D, whose beats sound to me basically like really conservative attempts at swag rap beats, like if Clams Casino were constantly worried about how A&Rs would react to their beats. Or, to be a bit more dickish, like how you'd imagine the Fruity Loops-wielding producer for a really unremarkable Southern California rap crew would sound.
The thing about all this, though, is that I think both David Banner and Swiff D actually excel way beyond everything else of theirs I've heard on Swag. The song might be intended as a parody, but if you listen to it as a pastiche, it is, or at least I think it is, pretty interesting, and not a bad example of the form.
And I mean, Banner definitely intended it as a parody, but listen to some of his other songs; he's a pastiche artist. He's almost as bad as The Game, in terms of biting the style of whichever other rapper is on a song with him. The reason The Game's diss at Lil B didn't come out interesting is because his pastiche never reached out far enough; he just copied Tyler, the Creator (and not even all of Tyler, just the part of Tyler that is heavily influenced by Eminem).
The difference between parody and pastiche, being, here, to take from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s introduction to The Signifying Monkey, that pastiche is different from parody insofar as pastiche possesses an "absence of the negative critique." (xxvi) That is, pastiche takes previous texts just as parody does, and both rework them, and effect them; but pastiche does so not under the rubric of the critical, or particularly the negative critique, as does parody. Instead of being "about the clearing of a space of narration," pastiche "seems to be intent on underscoring the relation of [the] text ... in a joyous proclamation of antecedent and descendant texts." (xxvii)
Now, if you're following me here, and you've listened to Swag, and paid even the slightest attention, you're probably about ready to tell me to fuck off. The song's about as explicitly a diss song, which might be also called a song of negative critique, if we were kind of poncy, as a song can be, short of Banner including some "Fuck you Lil B" punch-in somewhere.
But then, the way that the song plays out is kind of strange. The way that the diss is constructed is definitely not along the lines of your ordinary rap beef; Banner says very little that is directly insulting, instead jacking Lil B's flow, and his ad libs, and some of his memes, and just incorporating them whole. There are moments, lines about how disappointed in the state of hip hop that he is, that sort of shit. And some weird implication that, like, Lil B is the reason that people didn't care about Oscar Grant's death or something. I'm not really sure.
The point being, though, that as much as David Banner wants to decry this new aesthetic turn in rap, he can't do it in the traditional, parodic way; Banner can't simply come at swag rap the way BDP could come at the Juice Crew, presenting criticisms in order to clear a space for narration. He, instead, has to position himself within the aesthetic, in the hopes that doing so will be understood to be subversive of it. His gambit, though, relies so heavily on the critique remaining implicit, that it's actually not that hard to just willfully ignore it, and listen to the song as though it was a swag rap song by a new convert.
Part of the fun in taking the song this way, for me, is how it reframes Lil B's shot back. Not only because Lil B is actually a lot more explicitly taking shots at David Banner (in that he says his name), but because of how Lil B's response is itself also, then, more pastiche than parody.
Again, even though Lil B's song takes the form of the diss, and seems to mark itself clearly with the intentions of the negative critique, it doesn't really serve the purpose of clearing out a space. The comparison I made earlier, to the Bridge Wars, is an example of diss tracks that do precisely this; these crews attack each other, throwing into question the other's authenticity, claims to veracity, and so on, precisely in order to assert their own narrative into and over the tradition. With Tupac Vs. Notorious B.I.G., the disses were, again, attempts at a geographical dominance over the tradition, only coastal instead of inter-borough. Banner might rep Mississippi, but he's made his share of hyphy-biting tracks; and Lil B might rep the Bay, but he's made no secret of his debt to southern rap like Lil Wayne. The only real sense one could make of Lil B vs David Banner, in geographical terms, is actually meta; Banner being the representative of regional hip hops, Lil B being representative of post-geographical, Internet hip hop. Which might be an interesting lead to follow up on, but I'm not going to do so here.
I Own Swag is not, for the most part, your ordinary Lil B song. Unlike, say, Nas Vs. Jay-Z, where the diss tracks are designed to show off the emcee in his element, his flow perfected, Lil B reaches out for a style that he very rarely employs and is, frankly, not very good at, technically. He sounds more like David Banner than he ever has before, for the most part, except in those moments where he breaks the flow, and reinserts the swag into the song.
When, for instance, Lil B breaks his flow to sing "You know I'm more famous than you," or when he suddenly says, "Obama BasedGod," and seems so pleased with what he's just said that he stops and repeats it. And, to a lesser extent, how the whole second half of the song doesn't have any raps over it at all. It is in those moments that the song steps up out of the parodic mode, I think, and takes the moments that would have been read as parodic before that with it.
What I'm trying to say here, in perhaps a bit too roundabout of a way, is that this beef seems to me to be less battle and more dialogue. A sort of discursive instant within the development of swag rap, the moment this new genres maw opens up to consume and internalize certain thematic and technical content that it has up to this point not had access to.
***********************
I've claimed before that "To be Based is to reach a state at which one's very essence becomes communicable." If Based is still, at this point, and I think it unquestionably is, the most advanced theorization and mystification of swag rap that so far exists, and if my description of Based is accurate, which I have seen nothing to indicate that it isn't, then what is going on in this David Banner Vs. Lil B beef is a further reorganization of rap music along the lines of the Based philosophy/meme.
One of the biggest absences that Swag Rap hasn't really contended with so far, in its ascent from a subgenre to a contender for synonymity with the genre as a whole, is the question of its reterritorializing the mainstream rap tradition. Without anything resembling a program or manifesto, aside from the explicit non-thought of Based, but an open enjoyment of appropriation and certain aesthetic and memetic threads that constitute an ostensive & mutable unity, the (potential) "becoming rap" of Swag Rap means that that which is currently just "rap" will be displaced, and made to reconstitute itself along some other lines.
The point that I made at the beginning, that David Banner is the perfect example of a rapper who occupies the 'radio space,' is precisely what I mean by this. It's not quite "pop rap," not quite "southern rap," not quite anything that we can identify when it is presented to us as it normally is. This isn't to say that Banner's music doesn't come out of these (and other) material traditions, that it doesn't have its own work done to it and that it does, and so on. It is just to say that it is a perfect example of that specific set of hegemonic principles that allow something to be just simply rap, the sort of privileged invisibility of nonspecificity that record label money allows.
If the work of pastiche is the insertion of a text into a tradition, joyously or not, as opposed to the clearing of narrative space to create a tradition (parody), and if David Banner and Lil B's "disses" at each other are really more pastiche than they are parody, then, I'm claiming, what we have here is this exemplar of "rap," in Banner, absorbing and being absorbed by Swag Rap, in the form of its head theorist/mystic, Lil B. And in I Own Swag, I think, we see in embryonic form what could very well be known soon as a simple, unqualified, "rap."
*For real, I mean, this video just came out, but if you can show me one David Banner song that has anything near the political content of Lil B's verse on this I would be very, very fucking surprised:
So, for all you out there who don't follow swag rap, here's the deal. David Banner made this song, Swag, dissing the trend, taking aim specifically at Lil B.
You might recognize David Banner as the rapper who did that 2-bit (but still pretty fantastic) Ying Yang Twinz rip off, Play
Taking aim at swag rap does seem to be the new trend among rappers who no one really gives a shit about anymore. You might remember The Game teaming up with Tyler, The Creator (and sampling Lil Wayne, all "featuring Otis Redding," Watch The Throne style) for that really abominable sub-sub-Eminem track, Martians Vs. Goblins
(Lil B's response to which, is, by the way, fantastic:
and then Lil B released his I Forgive You mixtape, which doesn't actually explicitly reference The Game, but hell if that isn't the funniest way to respond to a diss)
But anyway, that's all sort of beside the point. Lil B's response to David Banner, in which he jacks the beat for Swag and turns it into I Own Swag.
Now, I'm going to be entirely honest here: before I started writing this, I was under the impression that I hadn't heard hardly any David Banner songs. But as I'm writing, I'm looking him up on youtube, and realizing something kind of strange; David Banner has, apparently, been behind every song on the radio for the last decade or so that occupies that exact 'radio space' - where you enjoy it when it comes on, and it inspires no interest beyond that. I don't think I'd ever really known that I was listening to a David Banner song before Swag, and yet I keep finding these songs that I know most of the lyrics to on his VEVO channel. Like, honestly, somehow David Banner even managed to make a song featuring Akon, Weezy, and Snoop fall completely under the radar. That's pretty remarkable.
But I'm not here to talk shit about David Banner. Because I actually kind of like the song Swag. I think the criticisms he's leveling at swag rap are fucking laughable, obviously - especially the shit about "They won't spit the truth / These niggas been scared / Call my flow the puddin' / The proofs in there / I say the shit they say I shouldn't / I ain't never cared." David Banner isn't exactly a fucking conscious emcee - which is a good thing, fuck "conscious hip hop" and all that shit - and, as far as I can tell, he's never said a controversial thing in a major song, ever.* And then, even, it seems like he's almost taking subliminal shots at himself when he says shit like, "Is anybody on the next level, with me / I'm hearin' niggas dissin' god, y'all think it's witty / I ain't laughin', we don't play in Mississippi" (emphasis mine).
It does seem a bit weird to identify who in particular he's targeting. Lil B is definitely the main one, and V-Nasty is pretty fucking explicit in the chorus; but then, Banner did a song with A$AP ROCKY recently, he of Purple Swag fame. It leaves me wondering how Banner feels about, say, Danny Brown, or Lex Luger. Or if the first half of the chorus is intended as a diss at Brick Squad.
Swag is produced by Swiff D, whose beats sound to me basically like really conservative attempts at swag rap beats, like if Clams Casino were constantly worried about how A&Rs would react to their beats. Or, to be a bit more dickish, like how you'd imagine the Fruity Loops-wielding producer for a really unremarkable Southern California rap crew would sound.
The thing about all this, though, is that I think both David Banner and Swiff D actually excel way beyond everything else of theirs I've heard on Swag. The song might be intended as a parody, but if you listen to it as a pastiche, it is, or at least I think it is, pretty interesting, and not a bad example of the form.
And I mean, Banner definitely intended it as a parody, but listen to some of his other songs; he's a pastiche artist. He's almost as bad as The Game, in terms of biting the style of whichever other rapper is on a song with him. The reason The Game's diss at Lil B didn't come out interesting is because his pastiche never reached out far enough; he just copied Tyler, the Creator (and not even all of Tyler, just the part of Tyler that is heavily influenced by Eminem).
The difference between parody and pastiche, being, here, to take from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s introduction to The Signifying Monkey, that pastiche is different from parody insofar as pastiche possesses an "absence of the negative critique." (xxvi) That is, pastiche takes previous texts just as parody does, and both rework them, and effect them; but pastiche does so not under the rubric of the critical, or particularly the negative critique, as does parody. Instead of being "about the clearing of a space of narration," pastiche "seems to be intent on underscoring the relation of [the] text ... in a joyous proclamation of antecedent and descendant texts." (xxvii)
Now, if you're following me here, and you've listened to Swag, and paid even the slightest attention, you're probably about ready to tell me to fuck off. The song's about as explicitly a diss song, which might be also called a song of negative critique, if we were kind of poncy, as a song can be, short of Banner including some "Fuck you Lil B" punch-in somewhere.
But then, the way that the song plays out is kind of strange. The way that the diss is constructed is definitely not along the lines of your ordinary rap beef; Banner says very little that is directly insulting, instead jacking Lil B's flow, and his ad libs, and some of his memes, and just incorporating them whole. There are moments, lines about how disappointed in the state of hip hop that he is, that sort of shit. And some weird implication that, like, Lil B is the reason that people didn't care about Oscar Grant's death or something. I'm not really sure.
The point being, though, that as much as David Banner wants to decry this new aesthetic turn in rap, he can't do it in the traditional, parodic way; Banner can't simply come at swag rap the way BDP could come at the Juice Crew, presenting criticisms in order to clear a space for narration. He, instead, has to position himself within the aesthetic, in the hopes that doing so will be understood to be subversive of it. His gambit, though, relies so heavily on the critique remaining implicit, that it's actually not that hard to just willfully ignore it, and listen to the song as though it was a swag rap song by a new convert.
Part of the fun in taking the song this way, for me, is how it reframes Lil B's shot back. Not only because Lil B is actually a lot more explicitly taking shots at David Banner (in that he says his name), but because of how Lil B's response is itself also, then, more pastiche than parody.
Again, even though Lil B's song takes the form of the diss, and seems to mark itself clearly with the intentions of the negative critique, it doesn't really serve the purpose of clearing out a space. The comparison I made earlier, to the Bridge Wars, is an example of diss tracks that do precisely this; these crews attack each other, throwing into question the other's authenticity, claims to veracity, and so on, precisely in order to assert their own narrative into and over the tradition. With Tupac Vs. Notorious B.I.G., the disses were, again, attempts at a geographical dominance over the tradition, only coastal instead of inter-borough. Banner might rep Mississippi, but he's made his share of hyphy-biting tracks; and Lil B might rep the Bay, but he's made no secret of his debt to southern rap like Lil Wayne. The only real sense one could make of Lil B vs David Banner, in geographical terms, is actually meta; Banner being the representative of regional hip hops, Lil B being representative of post-geographical, Internet hip hop. Which might be an interesting lead to follow up on, but I'm not going to do so here.
I Own Swag is not, for the most part, your ordinary Lil B song. Unlike, say, Nas Vs. Jay-Z, where the diss tracks are designed to show off the emcee in his element, his flow perfected, Lil B reaches out for a style that he very rarely employs and is, frankly, not very good at, technically. He sounds more like David Banner than he ever has before, for the most part, except in those moments where he breaks the flow, and reinserts the swag into the song.
When, for instance, Lil B breaks his flow to sing "You know I'm more famous than you," or when he suddenly says, "Obama BasedGod," and seems so pleased with what he's just said that he stops and repeats it. And, to a lesser extent, how the whole second half of the song doesn't have any raps over it at all. It is in those moments that the song steps up out of the parodic mode, I think, and takes the moments that would have been read as parodic before that with it.
What I'm trying to say here, in perhaps a bit too roundabout of a way, is that this beef seems to me to be less battle and more dialogue. A sort of discursive instant within the development of swag rap, the moment this new genres maw opens up to consume and internalize certain thematic and technical content that it has up to this point not had access to.
***********************
I've claimed before that "To be Based is to reach a state at which one's very essence becomes communicable." If Based is still, at this point, and I think it unquestionably is, the most advanced theorization and mystification of swag rap that so far exists, and if my description of Based is accurate, which I have seen nothing to indicate that it isn't, then what is going on in this David Banner Vs. Lil B beef is a further reorganization of rap music along the lines of the Based philosophy/meme.
One of the biggest absences that Swag Rap hasn't really contended with so far, in its ascent from a subgenre to a contender for synonymity with the genre as a whole, is the question of its reterritorializing the mainstream rap tradition. Without anything resembling a program or manifesto, aside from the explicit non-thought of Based, but an open enjoyment of appropriation and certain aesthetic and memetic threads that constitute an ostensive & mutable unity, the (potential) "becoming rap" of Swag Rap means that that which is currently just "rap" will be displaced, and made to reconstitute itself along some other lines.
The point that I made at the beginning, that David Banner is the perfect example of a rapper who occupies the 'radio space,' is precisely what I mean by this. It's not quite "pop rap," not quite "southern rap," not quite anything that we can identify when it is presented to us as it normally is. This isn't to say that Banner's music doesn't come out of these (and other) material traditions, that it doesn't have its own work done to it and that it does, and so on. It is just to say that it is a perfect example of that specific set of hegemonic principles that allow something to be just simply rap, the sort of privileged invisibility of nonspecificity that record label money allows.
If the work of pastiche is the insertion of a text into a tradition, joyously or not, as opposed to the clearing of narrative space to create a tradition (parody), and if David Banner and Lil B's "disses" at each other are really more pastiche than they are parody, then, I'm claiming, what we have here is this exemplar of "rap," in Banner, absorbing and being absorbed by Swag Rap, in the form of its head theorist/mystic, Lil B. And in I Own Swag, I think, we see in embryonic form what could very well be known soon as a simple, unqualified, "rap."
*For real, I mean, this video just came out, but if you can show me one David Banner song that has anything near the political content of Lil B's verse on this I would be very, very fucking surprised:
Saturday, December 24, 2011
An Open Letter to Mark Yudof
I missed a telephone call two days ago. Which isn't so weird really; I'm not a huge fan of telephones anyway, and have a pretty hard time imagining that anyone could really need to talk to me. Plus, the number was one I didn't already have in my phone, so even if I had seen it at the time, I probably would have decided to let it go through to voicemail, on the assumption that it wasn't likely to be anything of interest to me.
The caller didn't leave a voicemail, but he did try again, this time with my mom's home phone. He got in touch with my mom, and talked to her about me.
I tried to call him back yesterday morning, but no one picked up. I still haven't talked to this caller - I'll leave his name out of this for now, so we can just call him Detective - but my mom told me the night before last what it was that he had to say, and my little brother (who overheard my mom's side of the conversation) corroborated most of it.
The Detective called from the University of California, San Francisco. His call was to inform me, I suppose, that some things I had been saying online recently - referring, I presume, to the hashtag #RIPMarkYudof - was bordering on infringing a (new?) law against cyberbullying. I was also informed that he told my mom that they (the UCPD, I'm presuming) have a file on me "over an inch thick," that isn't even complete yet, dating back a few years.
See, in September of 2009 I started to troll @mark_yudof, making up a story about how we had been college frat drinking buddies. I continued to be mildly dickish towards the account until January of 2010, when I sent a series of (very obviously) fake retweets. Yudof's account successfully had me banned from twitter over those retweets, but only temporarily; I lobbied Twitter support to reinstate my account, and they did, after about two weeks. I posted a transcript of the emails I sent & received from Twitter Support here.
The only communication I got from @mark_yudof before the ban was in the form of a single Direct Message, which I happened to screenshot before the ban took. It was in response to one of the fake retweets I had made; you can see, in the pictures below, the relevant fake retweet (outlined in red) & the Direct Message. Both are lyrics from the Flobots song Handlebars.
A friend elicited an email out of the General Counsel at the time, which is also reproduced below; it contains the gem "Impersonation should not be confused with satire" and confirms that the complaint that was lodged against my account had to do with the falsified retweets.
After I got my account back, the @mark_yudof account fairly quickly blocked my twitter account. I continued to say some rude things, occasionally, but not really all that many, and towards a different end, mostly annoyed responses to things that were tweeted.
On December 15, following two successful (at making into Trending Topics, at least) fake-#RIP hashtags, one for Ron Paul and the other for Scott Baio, I decided to throw Mark Yudof's name into the running and, well, run with it.
Using Yudof's name - as opposed to his twitter handle - was strange to me, as I had tried to make it a point (without ever quite saying it) in the past to focus my energies on the UCOP's unequivocally public organs. What a #RIP hashtag would be doing, however, would be announcing (publicly, of course) the passing of a public individual's private self. Theoretically, at least.
See, the #RIPMarkYudof hashtag was split between wildly fantastical reports of how he passed, and criticisms of his policies. It was also very small, created as it was by me, through a mixture of my own lack of influence on these things, mixed with the already limited appeal of faking the death of a UC administrator who I've already babbled about extensively in the past. Which is to say, that the hashtag sort of skipped the announcing part of that equation. We convinced maybe ten people, if I'm being generous, for an average of maybe thirty seconds per. Even Seth Yudof, Mark's son, and the only person who saw our hashtag that could have been truly concerned about it (to my knowledge), laughed it off immediately. The incestuousness of the hashtag took a particularly neat visual form in the graphic below.
All of which seems, to me, to indicate that the jokes we were making were still firmly aimed at his public self.
I mention this because of how I understand the call between Detective and my mom went. I'm not entirely sure how much of it was her inference, or her worried exaggeration, and I imagine that the words weren't used by the Detective himself, but my mom was very worried that this file that the UCPD has on me was being organized to keep track of death threats, on the possibility that I turned out to be some attempted assassin, or, you know, a fucking terrorist.
The thing was, though, that when my mom was through telling me about the contents of this telephone call, I asked her if the Detective had at any point asked her if I would call him back. She said that he had left a phone number, but it is my impression that he didn't seem to think it particularly pressing that I personally talk to him.
So, on my end, what seems to have happened is this: a UCPD Detective, after expending the absolute minimal energy to contact me, opted to have instead a conversation with my mom where he (willfully or not) lead her to believe that I was being placed on some sort of terrorist watch list over potential death threats I may or may not have made, and that the police department had been collecting documents and were considering pursuing litigation against me.
Now, I'm not very well versed in the legal definition of cyberbullying. I'm not sure which law the Detective was referring to - though, as I imagine he knew it would, the Stop Online Piracy Act immediately springs to mind, though I am not familiar with its contents. What this does feel like, from my perspective, though, is getting bullied.
Which brings me to the letter part of this open letter.
I imagine that you, Yudof, are, at most, only very peripherally aware of all of this stuff. I think it's fairly obvious that you have little, if anything, to do with your twitter account, and are certainly not undergoing any personal stress because some kid who helped fund your construction projects has since said some rude things on the Internet about you. Or, more accurately, about your PR wing. I would be hugely surprised to learn that you, personally, had ever even heard my name.
But, on the off chance that you have, and given that I have the attention of at least someone in your administration, let me try to make one thing clear.
Mr. Yudof, I do not give a fuck about you.
This is the first, and, I presume likely, last time I will address you personally. I feel it is fairly safe to assume that neither of us is particularly interested in a dialogue with the other, or anything beyond that. You've made it abundantly clear that you are utterly indifferent to the concerns of students, except for insofar as they coincide with your efforts to privatize the University that you preside over. And as for me, I'm not at all of the opinion that your person is all that important, in the scheme of things. You are, for my purposes, a convenient metonym, a useful figure to represent the constellation of social forces that I would very much like to see replaced. Who you are as an individual, the things you say, I take only as symptomatic of those social forces.
I hope you understand, then, how utterly fucking baseless the claim, perhaps only inferred by my mom, in the Detective's telephone call, that I could ever have made a threat on your life is. I am not interested in your life, and I am certainly not desirous of your death. I desire only the death of the neoliberalism that your office has facilitated; I am interested only in the life of public education.
That your name may continue to figure as a character in my impotent polemics is pretty likely, of course. But rest assured that I am not talking about you; I am talking about the node that you represent in an institution, and about the pressures that that node exerts on the whole to mobilize it in a certain direction. I am talking about the way in which an individual dissolves their individuality in their work, and the ways that certain institutional roles will utilize that dissolved individuality regardless of how it looked beforehand.
And the fact that you bear an uncanny resemblance to an infant, that is immaterial. Except that it does make the whole endeavor quite a bit more fun.
Love,
Ben
P.S. But hey, you know, if you want to pay some dude almost a hundred grand a year to keep reading my tweets, be my guest. It's almost like I'm one of those fabled job creators!
The caller didn't leave a voicemail, but he did try again, this time with my mom's home phone. He got in touch with my mom, and talked to her about me.
I tried to call him back yesterday morning, but no one picked up. I still haven't talked to this caller - I'll leave his name out of this for now, so we can just call him Detective - but my mom told me the night before last what it was that he had to say, and my little brother (who overheard my mom's side of the conversation) corroborated most of it.
The Detective called from the University of California, San Francisco. His call was to inform me, I suppose, that some things I had been saying online recently - referring, I presume, to the hashtag #RIPMarkYudof - was bordering on infringing a (new?) law against cyberbullying. I was also informed that he told my mom that they (the UCPD, I'm presuming) have a file on me "over an inch thick," that isn't even complete yet, dating back a few years.
See, in September of 2009 I started to troll @mark_yudof, making up a story about how we had been college frat drinking buddies. I continued to be mildly dickish towards the account until January of 2010, when I sent a series of (very obviously) fake retweets. Yudof's account successfully had me banned from twitter over those retweets, but only temporarily; I lobbied Twitter support to reinstate my account, and they did, after about two weeks. I posted a transcript of the emails I sent & received from Twitter Support here.
The only communication I got from @mark_yudof before the ban was in the form of a single Direct Message, which I happened to screenshot before the ban took. It was in response to one of the fake retweets I had made; you can see, in the pictures below, the relevant fake retweet (outlined in red) & the Direct Message. Both are lyrics from the Flobots song Handlebars.
A friend elicited an email out of the General Counsel at the time, which is also reproduced below; it contains the gem "Impersonation should not be confused with satire" and confirms that the complaint that was lodged against my account had to do with the falsified retweets.
After I got my account back, the @mark_yudof account fairly quickly blocked my twitter account. I continued to say some rude things, occasionally, but not really all that many, and towards a different end, mostly annoyed responses to things that were tweeted.
On December 15, following two successful (at making into Trending Topics, at least) fake-#RIP hashtags, one for Ron Paul and the other for Scott Baio, I decided to throw Mark Yudof's name into the running and, well, run with it.
Using Yudof's name - as opposed to his twitter handle - was strange to me, as I had tried to make it a point (without ever quite saying it) in the past to focus my energies on the UCOP's unequivocally public organs. What a #RIP hashtag would be doing, however, would be announcing (publicly, of course) the passing of a public individual's private self. Theoretically, at least.
See, the #RIPMarkYudof hashtag was split between wildly fantastical reports of how he passed, and criticisms of his policies. It was also very small, created as it was by me, through a mixture of my own lack of influence on these things, mixed with the already limited appeal of faking the death of a UC administrator who I've already babbled about extensively in the past. Which is to say, that the hashtag sort of skipped the announcing part of that equation. We convinced maybe ten people, if I'm being generous, for an average of maybe thirty seconds per. Even Seth Yudof, Mark's son, and the only person who saw our hashtag that could have been truly concerned about it (to my knowledge), laughed it off immediately. The incestuousness of the hashtag took a particularly neat visual form in the graphic below.
All of which seems, to me, to indicate that the jokes we were making were still firmly aimed at his public self.
I mention this because of how I understand the call between Detective and my mom went. I'm not entirely sure how much of it was her inference, or her worried exaggeration, and I imagine that the words weren't used by the Detective himself, but my mom was very worried that this file that the UCPD has on me was being organized to keep track of death threats, on the possibility that I turned out to be some attempted assassin, or, you know, a fucking terrorist.
The thing was, though, that when my mom was through telling me about the contents of this telephone call, I asked her if the Detective had at any point asked her if I would call him back. She said that he had left a phone number, but it is my impression that he didn't seem to think it particularly pressing that I personally talk to him.
So, on my end, what seems to have happened is this: a UCPD Detective, after expending the absolute minimal energy to contact me, opted to have instead a conversation with my mom where he (willfully or not) lead her to believe that I was being placed on some sort of terrorist watch list over potential death threats I may or may not have made, and that the police department had been collecting documents and were considering pursuing litigation against me.
Now, I'm not very well versed in the legal definition of cyberbullying. I'm not sure which law the Detective was referring to - though, as I imagine he knew it would, the Stop Online Piracy Act immediately springs to mind, though I am not familiar with its contents. What this does feel like, from my perspective, though, is getting bullied.
Which brings me to the letter part of this open letter.
I imagine that you, Yudof, are, at most, only very peripherally aware of all of this stuff. I think it's fairly obvious that you have little, if anything, to do with your twitter account, and are certainly not undergoing any personal stress because some kid who helped fund your construction projects has since said some rude things on the Internet about you. Or, more accurately, about your PR wing. I would be hugely surprised to learn that you, personally, had ever even heard my name.
But, on the off chance that you have, and given that I have the attention of at least someone in your administration, let me try to make one thing clear.
Mr. Yudof, I do not give a fuck about you.
This is the first, and, I presume likely, last time I will address you personally. I feel it is fairly safe to assume that neither of us is particularly interested in a dialogue with the other, or anything beyond that. You've made it abundantly clear that you are utterly indifferent to the concerns of students, except for insofar as they coincide with your efforts to privatize the University that you preside over. And as for me, I'm not at all of the opinion that your person is all that important, in the scheme of things. You are, for my purposes, a convenient metonym, a useful figure to represent the constellation of social forces that I would very much like to see replaced. Who you are as an individual, the things you say, I take only as symptomatic of those social forces.
I hope you understand, then, how utterly fucking baseless the claim, perhaps only inferred by my mom, in the Detective's telephone call, that I could ever have made a threat on your life is. I am not interested in your life, and I am certainly not desirous of your death. I desire only the death of the neoliberalism that your office has facilitated; I am interested only in the life of public education.
That your name may continue to figure as a character in my impotent polemics is pretty likely, of course. But rest assured that I am not talking about you; I am talking about the node that you represent in an institution, and about the pressures that that node exerts on the whole to mobilize it in a certain direction. I am talking about the way in which an individual dissolves their individuality in their work, and the ways that certain institutional roles will utilize that dissolved individuality regardless of how it looked beforehand.
And the fact that you bear an uncanny resemblance to an infant, that is immaterial. Except that it does make the whole endeavor quite a bit more fun.
Love,
Ben
P.S. But hey, you know, if you want to pay some dude almost a hundred grand a year to keep reading my tweets, be my guest. It's almost like I'm one of those fabled job creators!
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Review: Angela S. Choi's Hello Kitty Must Die
I hate Hello Kitty.
I hate her for not having a mouth or fangs like a proper kitty.
She can’t eat, bite off a nipple or finger, give head, tell anyone to go and fuck his mother or lick herself. She has no eyebrows, so she can’t look angry. She can’t even scratch your eyes out. Just clawless, fangless, voiceless, with that placid, blank expression topped by a pink ribbon.
Poor Hello Kitty. Having to go around itchy, unlicked, unscratched. Tortured by her own filth.
Having finally read Angela S. Choi's Hello Kitty Must Die, I figured it might be a good idea to throw together some thoughts on it here.
I was pretty disappointed when I realized that the blurbs on the book likening it to Chuck Palahniuk weren't at all wrong; most of the reviews I've seen basically say that it's The Joy Luck Club meets American Psycho, and, without having actually read anything by Tan or Ellis, I think that's basically dead on. Take that comparison as you will, I suppose; I for one was not especially enthusiastic about it.
That said, however, I did enjoy the book well enough, and think it had a variety of interesting things going on. I don't have a copy of the book anymore, so I'm not going to be able to do anything like close textual analysis, but I think the book's stronger points are in its playing with generalizations anyway, so I think I'll survive.
The book's protagonist, Fiona Yu, is a 28-year-old, Asian American private sector lawyer. Its narrative revolves around her meeting up with an elementary school friend who convinced her to beat up the school bully with a lunchbox full of rocks, and was himself sent off to a Juvenile Detention Facility for lighting a girl's hair on fire. He is a hymen-reconstruction surgeon in San Francisco, and they begin a sort of asexual love affair as he reveals himself to be a serial killer, and she starts to follow suit, killing off the men her father sets her up on blind dates with and her boss. This is all, as you may imagine, very fucking transgressive.
I mentioned this book, before I read it, in my essay Hello Kitty Everything & Hostile Object Theory, and I think what I said there still basically applies. In a way, actually, it's even more accurate than I anticipated; when Fiona complains about Hello Kitty, it's mostly in asides like the one quoted above, and her anger almost always fixates on Kitty's absent mouth. I still feel like this particular issue is one that can be worth pursuing, in terms of subversion and reinterpretation, but that it stems from a misreading of Kitty's function, positioning her as a representative object when her real power lies elsewhere.* What I didn't expect out of Hello Kitty Must Die, and was pleasantly surprised by, was the way this particular obsession plays out within the narrative.
Although this connection is never drawn explicitly in the text, to my memory (oh, and, uh, spoilers to follow, I suppose, though some probably preceded as well), it just so happens that when Fiona does start murdering people, there is a distinct orality to the way she goes about it. She plans to murder one boy by eating a bunch of Snickers, then kissing him with a mouth full of the peanuts to which he's deathly allergic; she constantly carries around roofies to dispatch unwanted advances; and there's, well, something weird going on with cigarettes.
One of Fiona's first dates is killed by Sean when he steps outside for a cigarette, and it is after that that she begins to uncover his secret, and advance the plot. Sean is also a smoker, and the climactic moment of the novel, when Sean is getting sloppy and is about to be caught, involves Fiona filling Sean's apartment with gas and taking off, allowing the explosion sparked by him lighting a cigarette kill him. And then she smokes one of his cigarettes, staring at his burned building.
It's a pretty hackneyed moment, as most smoking-as-metaphor moments tend to be, and it's described with (if I'm remembering correctly) vaguely annoying descriptions of how she's ingesting his essence, or something, but there's something else there, too. Because that list of things that he hates Hello Kitty for not being able to do, aren't exactly things she does a whole lot of herself. She doesn't fuck, or give head. She certainly thinks of telling people to go fuck their mother often enough, but she doesn't ever say it. She drinks sometimes, and eats, but it's always in the context of a man, and so a murder being plotted. There is even a moment where she recounts an uncle attempting to molest her, which she fended off, not with a bite, but a fork. Even the date she intended to kill with a kiss ends up crushing himself with a barbell, avoiding the need for her mouth at all.
Fiona's moment with the cigarette, for all she tries to make it a symbolic gesture to evoke Sean, is, I think, the only moment in the whole text where it really matters that she has a mouth at all. Through the rest of it, what's important is that other people have mouths; those are how she gets power over them. And the thrust of making the smoke symbolic is precisely that it takes away her own power, opens her to being invaded by Sean. Getting a mouth makes her vulnerable.
Vulnerability is, of course, a major theme throughout the text. Fiona goes to great lengths to explain that just because she's a lawyer doesn't mean that she's in charge; in fact, her job consists mostly, according to her, of bending before the whims of the partner she works for, and she characterizes him as a real asshole. She is constantly being stepped on, whether by an overbearing boss or her parents, and she exorcises it with more exhibitions of vulnerability, as when she explains that she wears 4-inch Jimmy Choo heels everywhere because of the pain they cause her, and likens it to foot binding. It is made very clear that those things which purport to provide autonomy are really just ways of fostering new dependencies.
This is, I think, and to make a sort of crude rhetorical move, the point of the whole sociopathic narrative. Capitalism gives you two options: play the game, or play the fucking game. Fiona's aspirational diatribes against her heritage and fashion porn fetish-lists aren't evidence of a lack of character, they're how she stays alive. Traditions require space to develop; interiority needs time. And those are two things that you can have, sure, in direct proportion to how often you're willing to not eat. And when you finally realize how fucked over you're getting, and decide to protest against it, your protests are just as conditioned by those two options, else you're shit out of luck. You can play the game, like Fiona has been doing, of private pain, in a crypto-foot binding procedure, or you can play the fucking game, like Sean does, learn to act like those who put money over everything, and prey on people who can barely even play the game in the first place. There's no out, no middle ground, because that's where we all already are, passively abetting a system of exploitation. You can infantilize yourself, you can murder quasi-discriminately, or you can pretend neither of those things are happening while you feed them.
I feel like I'm pretty far away, at this point, from anything resembling a "review." I'll try, for the rest of this, to step back a bit and shut the fuck up about things I want to think about, and end with a couple of relatively brief points, that are a bit more review-y.
Most descriptions of the novel, whether positive, negative, or neutral, are fond of throwing around the word satire. The question they all beg, in their own way, is of course, "of what?" And almost uniformly, they seem to say without saying, being Chinese American. But that seems like bullshit to me, and it taints all the reviews with moralism. Now, I came into this book reading it as Asian American Literature, so what I'm about to say may not be all that surprising, but here it is: in my estimation, if this book is a satire of anything, it's of Asian American Literature.
I have no idea how familiar Choi is with the Asian American Literature canon (insofar as that even exists), but for what I want to say it doesn't really matter. I do think that the tradition she's working in is a lot more Chuck Palahniuk than Frank Chin, but the fact that it's so often likened to Amy Tan is more than enough context for me to feel justified in what I'm trying to say.
One thing that's fairly easy to notice about this book - and I mean book, like the physical object, not novel - is how similar the author's bio is to the story we're reading. Choi's a 30 year old Chinese American ex-lawyer with a parakeet; Fiona a 28 year old Chinese American Lawyer with a parakeet. They're both from San Francisco. Choi's official author bio even says that she "refuses to be anyone’s ... hole-in-a-mattress," a phrase that Fiona uses in the novel.
It is a fact about most, or all, marginal literatures, especially those of ethnic minorities, that they get pigeonholed into a sort of native informer role, and that this means they are heavily stilted toward memoir. White people like Amy Tan because they can read her and feel like they understand the Authentic Chinese Experience, without ever having to interact with a Chinese person. Even something as weird as Maxine Hong Kingston's debut novel, Woman Warrior, gets saddled with the subtitle "Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts." Woman Warrior seems to draw on experience, certainly, but it's sure as fuck not a memoir.
So Choi's ability to keep the specter of memoir foregrounded, even though there is nothing in the text of the novel to support it, and all while distancing herself from it, is relatively interesting in this context. But it is also sort of something that's been done to death. Kip Fulbeck's Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography makes a similar move in the title, and is a book I did not have a whole lot of love for; Suki Kim's The Interpreter is another example, and one which I would much more unreservedly recommend, as is Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker or even more borderline stuff like Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel. Memoirs like Jane Jeong Trenka's Language of Blood trouble this equation from the other side, and do so with absolutely breathtaking beauty.
My point, I suppose, more than that Choi's book functions to deconstruct how Asian American Literature is supposed to function, is that you should probably be reading more Asian American Literature, because there's some fucking incredible shit out there.
And I guess the last thing I want to say, to make this seem like a real review, like I'm really a real reviewer, the kind of guy who you should trust to tell you whether or not to spend your hard-earned dollars on a book, I guess as that guy I want to say, yeah I would recommend you read this book, but while you do it, keep the two songs below in mind, and think about it as if it had been written with them in mind, and how fucking cool that would be.
*The point, though, is that she's misread this way daily, and this misreading creates its own power, which gets transformed into ammunition for noxious stereotypes, and there is an effectiveness to fighting that misreading on its own terms.
Friday, September 30, 2011
i dont even fucking know
Two (more or less*) adjacent montages from 2004's I Downloaded A Ghost
The first, the moment of defeat, when all hope is lost; having just got her father fired, and her ghost-friend condemned to limbo, Ellen Page enters the lowest point of the film. The narrative arc has bottomed out, and we can tell because... she's putting on makeup and a dress.
But, then! She and her friend find evidence of where the BURMESE FELINE has been taken, and know just what to do. The boy asks: So, who is going to fix this situation? The new Stella, or the old? And she doesn't skip a beat; "the old." So they don smocks and power tools and build a fucking house.
So, I did what I do
*Okay, fine, they're split up by a scene where Carlos Alazraqui does a fucking stand-up comedy routine in the bus he was killed by, to try to learn how to haunt it. Fine. Fuck.
The first, the moment of defeat, when all hope is lost; having just got her father fired, and her ghost-friend condemned to limbo, Ellen Page enters the lowest point of the film. The narrative arc has bottomed out, and we can tell because... she's putting on makeup and a dress.
But, then! She and her friend find evidence of where the BURMESE FELINE has been taken, and know just what to do. The boy asks: So, who is going to fix this situation? The new Stella, or the old? And she doesn't skip a beat; "the old." So they don smocks and power tools and build a fucking house.
So, I did what I do
*Okay, fine, they're split up by a scene where Carlos Alazraqui does a fucking stand-up comedy routine in the bus he was killed by, to try to learn how to haunt it. Fine. Fuck.
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