bossa nova class & politics fight!!!
Last week I wrote a bit about the cosmopolitanism of a lot of old Afro-pop — the way some of it came from a modern, urbane, aspirational sensibility as much as anything “traditional.” I also mentioned, in passing, that Brazil had a similar dynamic around the same time, which sent me looking back to Ruy Castro’s detailed and wonderfully opinionated Bossa Nova to check my facts. And since I’ve been writing/talking a lot lately about the politics of music — especially in terms of class and race — I want to share a bunch of terrific quotes from the Great Bossa Nova Class/Populism/Politics Split of the mid-60s, because I can almost promise you’ll find them fascinating. Much of the history and background here is summarized from Castro (who, like I said, certainly has his own opinions here), but you’ll likely find a lot of the issues highly recognizable, even if you just skim the quotes themselves. And forgive me for not having time to reproduce all the right accents and diacritical marks on the names! (It’s Nara Leão.)
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“There has been nothing comparable in world peacetime history,” says the French demographer Jean-Claude Chesnais. After the Berlin Wall came down, millions of East Germans who stayed behind decided against producing another generation. Their fertility more than halved. In 1988, 216,000 babies were born in East Germany; in 1994, just 88,000 were born. The fertility rate worked out at 0.8 children per woman. Since then it has struggled up to around 1.2, but that is still only just over half the rate needed to maintain the population. About a million homes have been abandoned, and the government is demolishing them as fast as it can. Left behind are “perforated cities”, with huge random chunks of wasteland. Europe hasn’t seen cityscapes like this since the bombing of the second world war.
And nowhere has emptied as much as Hoyerswerda. In the 80s, it had a population of 75,000 and the highest birth rate in East Germany. Today, the town’s population has halved. It has gone from being Germany’s fastest-growing town to its fastest-shrinking one. The biggest age groups are in their 60s and 70s, and the town’s former birth clinic is an old people’s home. Its population pyramid is upturned – more like a mushroom cloud.
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Fred Pearce in the Guardian, talking about “population crash” in East Germany. And beyond. Image above taken during the construction of the GDR buildings currently being demolished.
My review of Dizzee Rascal’s show in Melbourne this week.
Nick Hornby on "Kid A"
I was hoping this was online! Nick Hornby’s review of “Kid A” is legendarily terrible and misguided, and even if you don’t like the record - I surely don’t very much - it’s a wipeout. His basic argument is: “experimental records are a con job, and this isn’t even very experimental”. Points for honesty, I guess!
But I’m reblogging this because deep down in it he’s touching on an obvious, important, little-explored idea, which is that how you think about music is very dependent on how much time you have to listen to it. Professional critics have a great deal of time and opportunity to listen to music, and so tend to operate on the unspoken assumption that everyone else does too, and that people who don’t have that opportunity don’t have it because they don’t want it enough.
I have never been very receptive to suggestions that if I gave more time to a particular record I would love it. Partly, I feel I have good instincts - I may not like something first time but I’m good at trusting my irritation or revulsion as well as my pleasure. Given that the time I have to listen to music is finite - and of course it is, and it FEELS more that way all the time - then a second play of a record is ultimately replacing the first play of another. I love my favourite albums enough that I allow them to kill other ones each time I play them.
The Year of Too Much Consensus
Why would anyone expect anything other than consensus, especially as professional critics become more and more digitally connected? In fact, I’d assume the more talk of audience fragmentation, the more consensus we’d get from career critics. If critical fragmentation matched audience fragmentation, wouldn’t that only support the perception that music critics are now obsolete? You need consensus for perceived relevance.
I don’t think anyone would EXPECT a lack of consensus - but “consensus” vs “fragmentation” covers a great big span of activity.
My point is that at the moment we have one very big taste-cluster and it’s centred on the Pitchfork Top 10. This is no fault of Pitchfork’s and indeed the editors and publisher should be very proud and happy about it. But there’s also no reason why competing large taste-clusters shouldn’t exist, large enough that P4K’s Top 10 only crosses over with 30% or 40% of the P&J Top 10.
It’s worth pointing out that this wouldn’t necessarily make the P&J list better or more exciting! In the mid 00s we DID have another large taste-cluster, the boomer-rock one Chuck is saying has evaporated, and it competed with the fork-y favourites and the conversation around the P&J lists was “Oh FFS Dylan at the top again”.
"The sustainable building reassures us about the chaos around it, and helps us to pretend the system is rational. Each eco-car-park or insulated gated community is an exemplar of the refusal to think about totality, infrastructure, or economic rather than aesthetic change. It flatters architects, tells them that they can make a difference, and the architects return the flattery by making their spectacularly destructive clients look like paragons of eco-virtue. This loop of indulgence needs to be broken first if we are to come up with serious ideas for a less depressing future. As Archigram used to like to point out, the solution to the problem may not — in fact, certainly will not — be a building."
”’Sustainability’ is a dangerous mirage” by Owen Hatherley.
I reviewed the new Spoon album, Transference.
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Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it’s the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you’re generally looking into is the self. “Other people”, that mainstay of what Shields calls the “moribund conventional novel”, have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the “lyrical essay”.
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Perfect essays abound in this world – almost every one of Joan Didion’s fits the category. Perfect novels, as we all know, are rarer than Halley’s comet. And so, for a writer, composing an essay instead of a novel is like turning from staring into a filthy, unfathomable puddle to looking through a clear glass windowpane. How perfectly it fits the frame! How little draught passes through!
"Zadie Smith on the essay. (And here is Pankaj Mishra on Zadie Smith’s essays.)
