A spring wind of marketization

I am currently reading a book called China Pop, which is about Chinese pop culture. It is very good so far, but unfortunately is from 1995, so I'm treating it as a sort of a historical document; if anyone knows of a more recent book covering the subject, please let me know.

In the first chapter, the author talks a lot about how Chinese culture changed in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. She seems to see the modern Chin as springing directly from that event--not just the human rights abuses and political repression aspects but the massive economic growth and urban development too--and has a lot of good anecdotes about elites who felt crushed by it, then joined the business world, and then the pop culture industry. But there are a lot of good broad observations, too, and I was especially struck by this one:

Profound cultural differences aside, though, China's post-Cold War social transition is marked by a singularly important factor that sets it apart from all others: the revolution failed in 1989, and the Communist Party stays on to guide and control the reform process.

This is a crucial fact in efforts to understand the peculiar complexities and ironies of China's current situation. It produces a half-baked, sheepish, defensive, cynical, masked, stealthy, and often comic atmosphere in which China's reform zigzags ahead. Instead of dramatic, exhilarating breakdown of old regimes, as occurred in Eastern Europe and Russia, what we witness in China is a slow, soft, and messy meltdown of the old structure. I would whimsically refer to this as "the Whopper effect": there is an impure, junky, hybrid quality in nearly all spheres of the present Chinese life--culture, politics, attitudes, ideology. This is not romantic, not a picturesque scene for the cameras. It's too blurry, too slippery, often shamelessly vulgar. Who can blame the CBS, ABC, and NBC anchors for not having rushed back since Tiananmen? To some, it might be akin to filmin a merry, grotesque banquet on the ruins of a slaughterhouse.

(She then goes on to quote former activists saying a) the Tiananmen students weren't protesting for democracy, they were protesting against economic hardship and injustice, and b) that the country would be much worse off today if those students had succeeded!)

It's an interesting little passage, because not only does it invoke a lot of the qualities I like to see in pop culture (impure, hybrid, slippery, shameless, vulgar) without actually placing an explicit subjective value on them, but it depicts these qualities as flowing directly from the political system under which the culture is created. We tend to think of political systems as reflecting the culture they come from, but in China we have a pretty clear example of the culture changing in parallel with the political system, although of course in part it's simply adopted aspects of other cultures, primarily Hong Kong but Japan and Korea as well, and amping them up. There are certainly practical reasons for this, but the pratical reasons are mainly negative freedom rather than positive freedom, and when you contrast it with the forced cultural change of Maoism, it's revelatory, I think. The culture is like the politics: new, vital, and vaguely troubling while also endlessly fascinating.

Of course, it also makes me want to map it back onto American pop culture, and wonder if maybe this country's pop culture vitality isn't due to the native qualities it's usually attributed to--individualism, entrepreneurism, ahistoricism--but rather reflects the often-overlooked fact that our political system is a hybrid, too, and indeed, this is a big reason for why it's been so vital. The phrase "Western-style democracy" is often invoked, but it lumps together a lot of different systems. American government was never really democratic, and this was one of its strengths--the republican aspects of American government are as important as the democratic ones, and the lack of republicanism in certain foreign "democracies" has been a reason for their failures.

So I think American pop culture tends to reflect both this hybridization and its privledging of democracy over republicanism with the widespread "guilty pleasures" complex. The rhetoric of American pop is often at odds with its reality, and the error people make is in assuming that this disconnect needs to be resolved by hewing to the rhetoric. But we'd all be a lot better off if we were able to acknowledge and embrace the reality of the duality.

Chinese pop seems to have a whole other set of issues, though. More on this as I go along, I hope.
posted by Mike B. at 3:47 PM 0 comments

Claps of Death Metal

Lord Viscuvious & friends - Claps of Death Metal

As promised, here is the death metal song made according to Strong Bad's rules. Miss Clap sang backup and a lovely Valentine's Day was had by all. If you'd like the lyrics, I can post 'em later.

Warning: there is a dramatic intro.

ADDENDUM: Lyriques--

Deconstruction, Deepak Chopra, detonate!
(chugga chigga wugga)
Delicioso, delicate flower, defrock!
(chugga chigga wugga)
Declaw, de-lovely, decapitate!
(chugga chigga wugga)
Decadent Weimar Republic, decapitate!
(chugga chigga wugga)
Debutante, decompose, defrost, deflation!
Demagogue, den mothers, Deutchmarks!
(chugga chigga wugga)
Demi Moore, Def Jam, Delaware!
(chugga chigga wugga)
Raaaaagh! Raaaaagh! Raaaaagh! Raaaagh!

oops, totally did decapitate twice! Well, it is a great word.

posted by Mike B. at 2:06 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Cyn nicely sums up the mixed feelings I have about The Vagina Monologues:

I'm glad that the Vagina Monologues exist, and it's nice that people organize the productions and the proceeds go to support women's issues and all of that. I guess I'm just sort of bummed that it feels like this is the big feminist event on campus, that a bunch of college girls get to giggle about vaginas and feel virtuous about it, and then we all go back to having no women in science and getting paid sixty cents on the dollar or whatever it is.

(picture via demonbaby, which I have not heard of before but which looks good, i.e. I came across the picture by searching for "vagina talk")

posted by Mike B. at 1:25 PM 0 comments

I come for the wuggas, but stay for the jiggy juggas

On Sunday I woke up with a throat that was fairly well closed. There was no particular reason for this, since I only had two beers the night before, and (as mentioned below), one of them was partially gargled.

But my loss of voice is the blogosphere's gain, because together, we will construct a death metal song according to Strong Bad's rules! You can get the full details here if you haven't seen it already, but in sum: "ugly, Nordic, bowels, d-e words." I will provide the ugly Nordic bowels, but I need you to provide the d-e words. Here is an example:

DEFENSESTRATE!
(jugga jigga wugga)
DECEMBERISTS!
(jugga jigga wugga)
DELOITTE AND TOUCHE!
(jugga jigga wugga)

Give me your d-e words, and I will sing them in my raspy throat-voice over a death metal backing. (Note: it may not actually be to-the-letter death metal, as I don't actually have my guitar at home, but it will be, um, metalish?) I will then post an MP3 tomorrow.

(I sang Miss Clap a Valentine's Day song in this style this morning. I believe the lyrics were: VALENTINE'S! (jugga jigga wugga) VALENTINE'S! (jugga jigga wugga) I LOVE YOU! (jugga jigga wugga) YOU ARE PRETTY! (jugga jigga wugga))

But since I am going to post it tomorrow, that means YOU NEED TO POST YOUR D-E WORDS BY 7 PM EST TODAY. I don't know how long this lovely throat condition is going to last!

So, in sum: d-e words (or phrases), in the comments, by 7. Go!

posted by Mike B. at 11:08 AM 0 comments

A brief addendum to my food post: although I mentioned both bad fondue and my friend Janine, I would just like to clarify that my friend Janine's fondue is not bad. In fact, it is delicious, and I would be very sad if she stopped making it.

posted by Mike B. at 11:04 AM 0 comments

Monday, February 13, 2006

I know this is just the picture that went with the story, but it's pretty much impossible to beat

Please get out of the new one if you can't lend a hand

I haven't exactly had tons of time to click around today, but I didn't notice anybody commenting on the article in the Sunday Times about hip-hop tours:

Today, for the price of $70, the Hush Tours bus whisks visitors to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, making stops at, among other places, the Graffiti Hall of Fame at 106th Street and Park Avenue, a schoolyard featuring enormous murals by some of the city's top graffiti artists, and Bobby's Happy House, a record store owned by Bobby Robinson, the onetime proprietor of Enjoy Records, which released some of the earliest hip-hop singles.

At the Graffiti Hall of Fame, there is a Disneyish touch: Caz distributes Kangol hats and fake gold chains with dangling dollar-sign pendants to the tourists, who cross their arms and strike B-boy stances for snapshots in front of the spray-painted walls. Harlem residents have seen a lot over the years, but a gaggle of white tourists dressed like LL Cool J circa 1985 is something new.

In and of itself, this is fine, and actually kind of cool; as the owner points out, you can get a country music history tour in Nashville (and I know at least one person who had their eyes opened to country through one), so why not let people see the sites of hip-hop's birth? (Although this does make one consider the possibility of the Bronx River housing project being somehow turned into a tourist attraction, which is both unlikely and hilarious. Maybe they'll build a scale replica in Times Square?) It seems both slightly odd and, in retrospect, inevitable.

What's strange is the attitude that gets displayed on the bus. As the article puts it, the tour is "an argument about authenticity," with tour guides, many of whom are figures from the early days of hip-hop, saying things like, "Today you're going to learn what hip-hop is and what it's not. It's not just rap music, and it's definitely not just the 10 records you hear over and over again on the radio." The author does a good job of shooting down this attitude, calling it "nostalgia" and pointing out things like how the gansta rap era is now longer than the so-called "golden era" of hip-hop, asking, "Does anyone really believe that Spoonie Gee and Whodini were better rappers than, say, Snoop Dogg or Ludacris?" (He declines to note, though, the disconnect of talking about authenticity on a tour bus.)

There's one thing, though, that maybe deserves to be explicitly addressed:

"We have a real thing in hip-hop about out with the old, in with the new," Ms. Harris said. "I'm shocked about how little awareness of history there is, especially since so many people are making so much money in the rap industry. There's much more awareness of hip-hop history in other countries."

Artists like Grandmaster Flash tour regularly overseas, where they draw far bigger audiences, and Ms. Harris estimated that 80 percent of Hush Tours' patrons are "international visitors." Sure enough, a recent tour included just four Americans, along with tourists from England, France, Germany, Australia and Kenya. In this respect, old-school rappers and D.J.'s have in recent years become similar to jazz musicians, who have long experienced rapturous receptions in Europe and Japan while struggling at home to find respect and decent-paying gigs.

This hardly seems like a problem. I understand why you'd want to get a piece of that mainstream dollar, but don't try and blame it on a defect with America. The reason old-schoolers can get better gigs in foreign countries is because it's not a live art there. Certainly there are skilled practitioners in those countries (I've heard a surprisingly large amount of good French rap), but hip-hop isn't part of the culture in the way it is in America. Hip-hop dominates here, and it seems really hard to argue that this is a bad thing, that keeping the art so alive and so fresh is really worse than it actually becoming like what jazz is now (and jazz finally becoming an offshoot of classical gas). Hip-hop is just mind-bendingly vital right now, going in twelve directions at once because there are just so many damn people doing it and so many ideas left to explore, even if there are stretches where every album that crosses my desk seems to have hit the "default crunk" button on their produce-o-bot. It's one thing to say that Grandmaster Flash got screwed over by his record company. It's a whole other thing to complain about more people wanting to see Jay-Z than wanting to see him. If anything, we should be worried that old dude Jay's still drawing the crowds he does.

posted by Mike B. at 6:37 PM 0 comments

This, sadly, was not representative of our experience

Some notes on food

Went to a place called The Chocolate Room on 5th Ave in Brooklyn on Friday. Maybe my expectations were too high (when you've just polished off a diner grilled cheese and fries and someone suggests a walk concluding in chocolate fondue for dessert the reaction tends to be something along the lines of FUCK YEAH) but it was pretty meh. The whole setup was very nice and as a place to sit and consume things it was great, assuming you ignore the part where they put 6 of us at a table clearly made for 4. And it certainly could've been worse--I've had chocolate fondue before that was just sickening, over-sweet and dense as fuck. But it still wasn't too impressive. It wasn't too rich but it was heavy, and not really all that flavorful, so it ended up striking me as heavy for the sake of being heavy. It would be a plus that it was neither too sweet nor too bitter if it was much of anything at all. Not bad by any means, but not necessarily worth seeking out. Everything was made by them for them, and one of my companions did have a very good tart (and another had a brownie sundae that looked great), but the homemade chocolates we got to go impressed Miss Clap but again, meh-ified me. (Although I did not taste the caramel-and-sea-salt one, which sounded great.)

Then again, I guess my taste in chocolate runs in the Hostess Cupcake direction, i.e. decidedly downmarket and nothing too high-percentage. I would feel self-conscious about that were it not for dips like this one, who ends up sounding like a french Dr. Nick. I appreciate that she's not making the "milk chocolate=bad" argument, and I of course am with her in the alleviating guilt thing, but when you start arguing that said guilt then actually causes a physical reaction that makes you enjoy the thing less, I start backing away slowly. When I've had good chocolate I think it's been less due to the quality of the chocolate itself and more to the fillings or add-ins, although of course a good base is nice. Still, I've had lots of expensive-ass chocolate that didn't rise to the level of a Crunch bar.

Speaking of candy, I was getting sleepy at the Electric Six show on Saturday, so Janine gave me some caffienated candy. But this was not those mints you may have heard of: they were coffee or hazelnut flavored. Having associated the smell of hazelnut with cloudy Mr. Coffee pots for as long as I can remember, I chose the coffee option. Man, was it bad. I am told it tasted like bad truckstop coffee, which would make sense as she bought it at a truckstop, but having only had a really bad truckstop doughnut, I couldn't say for sure. Still, I ended up gargling with beer to try and chase the taste away. Janine likes 'em though.

posted by Mike B. at 6:07 PM 0 comments