"If It’s True" has a well-defined intro, but one cribbed straight from a classic Motown 45rpm. "Here To Fall" kicks off with the lingering, echo-drenched notes that stud Steve Miller’s Fly Like an Eagle and other stoner rock classics. But most of the tracks on the album, "And the Glitter Is Gone" included, recall Yo La Tengo songs more than anything else. As the album’s title wryly suggests – none of the tracks are destined to be "popular" in a traditional sense – Popular Songs rejects the notion that progress is measured in novelty.

Because Popular Songs is the work of mature artists – co-founders Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley are nearing fifty – this message might initially seem like the self-serving wisdom of those who celebrate continuity in order to suggest that they are still relevant. But as a listen to the early Yo La Tengo material on Ride the Tiger amply testifies, they were never that interested in starting over.

Like other rock acts that formed in the wake of hardcore’s implosion, including The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Stone Roses, and The Smashing Pumpkins, Yo La Tengo made a point of reconnecting with the towering musical legacy of the 1960s, even as they celebrated the disruptive power of punk. They wanted to have their beauty and ravage it too. In Yo La Tengo’s case, however, the reluctance to choose between hippie and punk, Brill Building and CBGBs, delicacy and brute force was so pronounced that the band struggled to make a distinct impression.

Although Yo La Tengo’s music appealed to concert-goers who saw them opening for bands like Dinosaur Jr. and My Bloody Valentine, they failed to make a major impact during the alternative culture explosion of the early 1990s. It wasn’t until the Nirvana era had faded from view, when sugary pop acts like the Backstreet Boys and not-so-conscious rappers like the Notorious B.I.G. were dominating the charts, that Yo La Tengo’s remarkable musical consistency was truly rewarded.

Their 1997 album I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One didn’t break new ground. But its disarming combination of noisy guitar bursts and diaphanous vocals resonated with music lovers who were still coming to terms with the realization that the alternative rock revolution had been retroactively downgraded into a short-lived disturbance. Yo La Tengo finally found itself on the top of the college radio heap because their sound mirrored those station’s eclectic playlists.

A prime cut of Velvet Underground, a healthy portion of vintage Stax soul, plenty of Television, and a few slices of Fleetwood Mac, seasoned with more recent influences like The Dream Syndicate, REM and The Clean all blended together to give Yo La Tengo the taste of sophisticated comfort food. They paid tribute to their musical forebears, while also distilling the essence of fellow alternative rock bands undone by the drugs and money of the early 1990s. In short, the band was a music critic’s dream. And that made sense, since Ira Kaplan had been a music critic before starting the band.

But it also annoyed people who should have been celebrating Yo La Tengo’s rise from also-ran to leaders of the indie rock pack. As good as Yo La Tengo’s records were, they still sounded like climate-controlled simulations of artists whose maddening inconsistency were a big part of their charm. Even more than Sonic Youth, another alternative rock survivor periodically critiqued for making avant-garde notions too safe, Yo La Tengo suffered the ignominy of having their shit together in a world where mistakes are considered a sign of artistic integrity. Eventually, as Yo La Tengo’s detractors matured and a new generation of artists started paying homage to them, the band slipped on the mantle of respected rock elders. The very people who had once grumbled that Yo La Tengo made wonderful music without much sense of wonder now praised their professionalism and respect for tradition. While the band surely appreciated the irony in this reversal of fortune, it did nothing to change their course. Pressing on with the same sense of purpose 

– Ira Kaplan once described the band to CMJ magazine as "inner-directed"

– that had sustained them during their years of being overshadowed, they kept making music of the same quality as before. The main reason for Yo La Tengo’s remarkable stability is that Kaplan and Hubley have been happily married since 1987. Part of the fascination with rock bands is that most of them function like bad marriages, with a messy break-up always looming on the horizon. Some, like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, keep getting back together again, only to realize that the problems that led to their last divorce haven’t disappeared in the interim. When a band revolves around an actual marriage, though, and one that meets most people’s standard of success, the storm and stress of musical collaboration takes a back seat.

It’s no accident that Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth, whose founding members Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon have also been married for a long time, are the two alternative rock bands that have managed to survive the ups-and-downs of the music industry with the least disruption to their production schedule over the past two decades. And that’s troubling for music lovers invested in the notion that rock music is for the men and women who make like rolling stones. Fidelity to one’s musical ancestors may be regarded as a virtue, but other modes of faithfulness are not.

In Yo La Tengo’s case, however, making a distinction between life and art proves impossible. Interviewed with her sister Emily about what it was like to grow up as the daughters of the award-winning animators John and Faith Hubley, Georgia Hubley suggested that, although she and Ira work very differently than her parents did, in a medium that requires less structure and planning, "the way our life is, is really similar." Their partnership doesn’t survive in spite of their musical career, but because of it. Hubley also notes that her parents taught her to be "independently minded," a statement rendered poignant by the fact that her father was blacklisted in the early 1950s because he wouldn’t name names before HUAC. He was able to reconstruct his career, with Faith at his side, and become an Academy Award-winning filmmaker. But their art emerged from the sort of struggle that artists who came of age after the early1960s rarely had to face.

Perhaps Yo La Tengo, for all of their devotion to the history of rock and roll, are actually a throwback to that postwar era, when fidelity to one’s past wasn’t a sign of conservatism at all, but of a refusal to renounce radical beliefs. Celebrating continuity means something quite different in that context. If Yo La Tengo is imaginatively honoring that legacy, it makes perfect sense that their most famous concerts take place as part of a fundraising drive for hometown record station WFMU in Hoboken. Since 1996, the band has generously volunteered to play, on the air, any cover request that comes in with a sufficient donation attached. From classic rock staples to TV themes, punk fury to easy listening, they have done their best with all manner of tunes, some of which were collected on the Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics compilation.

Yo La Tengo also puts on Hannukah-themed shows at Maxwell‘s in Hoboken each year, a different sort of testament to their conviction that keeping something going can be much more significant than starting from scratch. Popular Songs probably won’t win the bands that many new fans. Their stewardship of the soundtrack to the film Adventureland was more likely to do that. But the album does enough to remind listeners why they should keep coming back for more. The fourth track "Nothing To Hide," a short rave-up shrouded in garage rock fuzz, is probably the least original song on the record. Yet it holds the power to keep fans’ passion burning long after it should have gone out. Sometimes the true miracle is keeping the faith.

The post High Fidelity appeared first on Jewcy.

There are scenes in Quentin Tarentino’s new film Inglourious Basterds sure to make your heart race. The film opens with a tour-de-force of tension, in which SS Colonel Hans Landa, superbly played by Christoph Waltz, interrogates a dairy farmer suspected of harboring a Jewish family. At first we admire the farmer, who shows remarkable calm in dealing with his unwelcome guest. But as Landa slowly tightens the screws, our confidence in the farmer lags. We feel for him, but begin searching for a way out of our initial identification. It is only a matter of time before he sells out the family hiding beneath his floorboards. By the end of the scene we have abandoned the farmer – he no longer matters to us – and transferred our emotional bond to the teenage girl who manages to flee the fate of her family members, stumbling through lush green meadows while Landa watches her with bemusement from a doorway.

Her escape, as well as the fact that Landa seems to have a reason for letting her go, prove significant later in the film. But despite that neatly articulated continuity the opening scene feels self-contained, as do many of the memorable passages in Inglourious Basterds. Because Tarantino’s talents shine brightest in the construction of sequences that could be excerpted on YouTube without losing their power, Inglourious Basterds is a film whose parts are somehow greater than their sum.

But that isn’t necessarily a drawback. Tarantino clearly aspires to produce memorable work. And the memories burned most deeply into our brain are usually the sort, as psychoanalysis teaches, that are too powerful to slot into a clearly defined chronology. They burst through whatever mental dams have been set up to hold them in place, flooding places with which they have no obvious connection. If Inglourious Basterds is a film that you can’t stop thinking about, even if it’s only in bits and pieces, Tarantino has achieved his artistic goals.

Whether those are the right artistic goals is another matter. His two-part opus Kill Bill is more fragmentary than Inglourious Basterds. But because Kill Bill is a tribute to Asian martial arts pictures famous for the skimpiness of their plots, lack of cohesion is excusable. In taking on World War II and, implicitly, the Holocaust, Inglourious Basterds invites a degree of moral scrutiny that Tarantino’s choice of genres previously helped him avoid. The fact that he continues to project the image of an insouciant amateur movie fan rather than a disciplined director, even when handling such historically delicate material, compounds the trouble.

Despite the obvious care with which Inglourious Basterds is put together – the period details in the mise-en-scene are fantastic – it still can feel cartoonish at times. The heightened sense of reality that makes the best scenes so memorable actually undermines the film’s realism as a whole. It’s the psychological equivalent of a 3-D movie, so visceral that it can seem fake. But the distance that our proximity to danger paradoxically affords us actually might be a boon. Leaving aside the question of whether anyone would want to see a Quentin Tarantino picture besotted by its own probity, the film’s volatile subject matter, which comes “pre-heightened” even before any artist seeks to heighten it, actually might be better served by his insistence on putting style before substance.

The Jewish Thing To Do?

Have his critics noticed? Tarantino has received his best reviews since Pulp Fiction, in addition to unexpectedly large box office numbers. His career, recently thought to be in trouble, is back on track. But Inglourious Basterds has still provoked the same misgivings as Tarantino’s previous directorial efforts. Some worry that its depiction of violence is excessive, others that the humor that leavens that violence might deaden viewers’ moral sensitivity. But because this is a story in which Jews take revenge on their oppressors, other concerns have come to the fore. The most heated objections to the film have come from those who worry that it makes viewers identify with characters in troubling ways. Interestingly, this charge has been levied from opposing ideological camps. Whether supporters of Israel or the sort of progressive intellectuals who relentlessly point out its failings, critics have argued that the film makes revenge too sweet.

There is nothing in the narrative to imply that the Germans in the film, most of them high-ranking Nazis, deserve sympathy for their plight. Nevertheless, the unorthodox practices of the primarily American commando unit known as the “Inglourious Basterds” – scalping their kills and carving a swastika on the foreheads of any survivors – have troubled those who believe that the distinction between “us” and “them” must encompass methodology as well as ideology.

In a fine piece for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg expresses admiration for the film and its director, yet seems most insistent on arguing that it could never have been made by a Jew. “Given the chance, of course, I would still shoot Mengele in the face. That would be a moral necessity. But I wouldn’t carve a swastika into his forehead. That just doesn’t sound like the Jewish thing to do.” Goldberg is less bothered by the brutality of Tarantino’s “anti-Nazi excesses” in the abstract than his sense that they run the risk of inspiring sympathy for Germans who don’t deserve it. Presumably, the “Jewish thing to do” would involve preventing audiences from identifying with their persecutors’ suffering.

The Nazi Character

While it may seem silly, not to mention offensive, to complain that the film treats its antagonists too harshly, the charge illuminates a crucial dilemma facing those who depict the Third Reich. Stories in which only the good guys are fleshed out tend to fall flat. But attempts to correct this imbalance run the risk of imbuing perpetrators of the vilest imaginable acts with the very humanity they ruthlessly denied their victims. As Nazis have evolved from the stock villains of B-movies to a wider range of possible characters, understandable anxieties about normalizing German atrocities have surfaced.

To the extent that Nazi characters transcend the standardization of villainy that was once their postwar cinematic lot, in which most wearers of the Hakenkreuz were functionally interchangeable, and become distinct individuals, they elicit more complex forms of identification. Even if a character is identified as a worthy opponent, though one who must be vanquished at all costs, the reflexes of the battleground give way to more nuanced reflections on his personality. Once the goal is to outwit rather than outshoot the enemy, the dehumanization of modern warfare begins to lose its sway.

In theory, this may seem like a salutary goal. But its advocates face a conundrum. Is it better to kill people whose humanity goes unacknowledged or ones who remain in the crosshairs despite being recognized as individuals? Although legal precedent suggests that the former is preferable – soldiers are rarely prosecuted for taking the lives of other soldiers – the ethical folds of the question are not so easy to lay flat. Indeed, the popularity of fictional narratives in which a military opponent passes from anonymity to familiarity betrays deep-seated reservations about masses, even those comprised of one’s mortal enemies. 

If You’ve Seen One Stormtrooper, You’ve Seen Them All

But there are two major problems with perceiving your enemies as individuals. If you persist in trying to destroy them, success can feel too much like murder. There’s a scene in Inglourious Basterds in which a German officer, regular army rather than SS, refuses to tell the commandos, who have just slaughtered his the men under his command, where a sister unit is positioned on the map. In theory, such loyalty and courage are commendable, if misguided. But the Basterds have no interest in the honor of the battlefield. They delight in the officer’s refusal because it means that the “Bear Jew,” a hulking man played by horror film director Eli Roth, can beat him into a pulp with his trusty baseball bat, a grisly spectacle from which the camera does not cut away.

Because we have noted the steely determination in the German officer’s face, a face that literally disappears under the force of Bear Jew’s blows, the impact of the scene is especially brutal. Even if the violence feels satisfying to viewers who identify with the assassin’s vengeful glee, pangs of conscience are hard to suppress. But the Basterds’ mission doesn’t allow for second thoughts. If recognizing opponents’ humanity makes you hesitate, they might well kill you first. For those who lack the resolve of those commandos, however, the best survival mechanism may be to pretend that the faces of the enemy have already disappeared. There is safety in reducing one’s opponents to components of an impersonal mass.

One of the best cinematic examples of this pragmatic approach to war can be found in the Star Wars films, in which the identical white suits of the Imperial stormtroopers – a term George Lucas chose with a keen sense of his tale’s cinematic ancestry – so hard and glossy that they hide all traces of humanity, remain inviolate even when their occupants go down in battle. Since viewers never get to see the fallen warriors inside – or even perceive a change of state through damage to the suits themselves – it is impossible to identify them as individuals and, as a consequence, to identify with them.

Although the first Star Wars film – subsequently reclassified as the fourth episode in a sextet – was released in the 1970s, a decade that saw representations of the Third Reich become less monolithic, it represents a throwback to the clear-cut moral universe of those postwar B-movies in which Germans were barely even characters, automatons who were either to be evaded or destroyed, period. While comforting for children, who prefer their badness without ambiguity, this failure to differentiate among enemies had disturbing implications for those grown-ups who welcomed the opportunity to enjoy war narratives without a guilty conscience. At a time when films like Coming Home, The Deerhunter, and Apocalypse Now were winning acclaim for their depressing depiction of the Viet Nam War’s psychological legacy, Star Wars took viewers back to a simpler time when dispatching enemy soldiers was a cause for celebration rather than a crisis of confidence.

The Reach of Reagan

Regardless of George Lucas’s politics, presumed to be of the wishy-washy liberal sort associated with the San Francisco Bay Area, his franchise laid the cultural groundwork for Ronald Reagan’s cinematically savvy reactionary program. Not only did Reagan reject the legacy of the 1960s at the level of policy, he also rejected the way that crucial decade was being represented in film.

His political genius was most evident in his capacity to recognize that most Americans, even those opposed to his conservative ideology, were starving for villains they could root against with a clear conscience. His declarations about the “Evil Empire” and regular invocation of World War II films went hand in hand, crucial components of a project to replace the disenchanted relativism of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era with the high-contrast moral code found in traditional war movies and Westerns.

Ultimately, though, the end of the Cold War made Reagan’s map of the world obsolete before younger generations had fully absorbed its implications. Ever since, politicians in the West have been struggling, with only limited success, to fit dictators and terrorists from the developing world into SS uniforms. Ordinary citizens of the United States, Britain or Japan may recognize the danger these global outcasts pose to world peace. They may even agree with the notion that these men are the embodiment of evil. But the notion that they are somehow Nazis returned from the dead has not really stuck.

The recent Norwegian zombie film Dead Snow cleverly makes light of this failure by suggesting that even frozen, undead Nazis come much closer to the ideal than current pretenders to the throne of evil. Their flesh may be coming off in chunks. Their plan of attack may be lacking in subtlety. But their uniforms still fit the way the tailor intended. Compared to the military discipline these zombines exhibit, evident in a steadfast refusal to take death lying down, the schemes of impoverished Muslim college students in Oslo, Paris or Amsterdam seem hopelessly inept.

Perhaps it’s not that the term “Nazi” has failed to stick, but rather that it has become temporarily affixed to so many different places that most of its historical significance has evaporated. Once politicians have suggested that turbaned religious zealots, perverted oligarchs and drug-trafficking tribesmen are all current-day “Nazis,” despite the fact they neither look nor act like the stereotype, it doesn’t take much of a push to get ideologues to label anyone they oppose fascists.

The radical Left was fond of doing this during the heyday of the counterculture, one of its most shameful legacies. The difference back then was that World War II was still close enough for such exaggerations to be countered by personal testimony of those who had lived through the Third Reich. These days, when those who were adults during the 1940s are already well into their eighth decade, such witnessing is becoming increasingly rare. Both the war and the Holocaust are passing into a netherland where historical evidence blurs with cinematic reconstruction to such a degree that young people find it difficult to make contact with the reality behind the representations. 

This may be why Tarantino chose to turn his latest genre exercise into a project with much higher stakes.  Or perhaps he’s simply young enough himself to intuitively demonstrate what others struggle to pin down. Either way, Inglourious Basterds is a perfect example of how the injunction to always remember is being transformed by the diminishment of living memory. Hitler remains the archetype of the greatest cinematic villainy, as readily identifiable as Mickey Mouse or Marilyn Monroe. But, like those products of the Hollywood dream factory, he inhabits a realm where the facts of history are a secondary concern.

Birth of a Nation

That Tarantino is a true scholar of cinema should be apparent to anyone who notices the way his films pay homage to their predecessors. Reservoir Dogs references a wide range of heist films. Jackie Brown reprises so many highlights of blaxploitation flicks from the 1970s that you can forget it was made in the 1990s. And Kill Bill at times seems more like a catalogue of cool martial arts films than a coherent narrative. Because Tarantino is so attentive to the nuances of genre, paying as much attention to obscure B-movies as he does to canonical favorites, it’s easy to forget that this narrow-spectrum expertise, the province of fan boys and girls, is complemented by a broad engagement with film as a medium. Just because he worked in a video store doesn’t mean that his knowledge can be reduced to trivia. Like Martin Scorcese, his passion for cinema can seem indiscriminate, quick to find something to love in pictures that aren’t easy to like. But that doesn’t mean that his postmodern aesthetic is shallow.

Inglourious Basterds certainly follows in the footsteps of Tarantino’s previous work in paying loving tribute to classic war films and “Spaghetti” spins on Hollywood formula. But because it’s also the story of how lovers of film – French and German, Jew and Nazi – are brought together before the silver screen, Tarantino invites us to reflect on cinematic history as a whole. In one sense, he has simply made another film about films. Because of the subject matter, however, and the fact that he opts to bring his narrative to a climax inside a movie theater, the self-reflexivity that always lurks just beneath the surface of his work has become both more obvious and more profound.

Tarantino’s script plays so fast and loose with history, imagining an end to the Third Reich more dramatically satisfying than what actually happened, that it begs comparison to another historical film that was praised for its stylistic panache: D.W. Griffith’s 1915 feature Birth of a Nation. Although protested by the NAACP and sympathetic white intellectuals for its egregious bias against African-Americans, the film was a tremendous success. Audiences eager to heal the wounds of the Civil War thrilled at the opportunity to identify with both Union and Confederate protagonists, even if that symbolic reconciliation depended on the intesification of white supremacy. That this reconciliation also required the distortion of historical fact didn’t seem to bother most viewers either.

Because of the shorter average lifespan in the early twentieth century, Birth of a Nation shares with Inglourious Basterds the status of being a film about historical events that are no longer remembered by most of the population. Although President Woodrow Wilson, for whom Birth of a Nation was screened in the White House, probably did not make the famous declaration that it was “history written with lightning”, the statement does a beautiful job of capturing film’s power to promote revisionist history. As Thomas Dixon, the author of the unabashedly racist novel on which Birth of a Nation was based, explained, “I didn’t dare allow the President to know the real big purpose back of my film – which was to revolutionize Northern sentiments by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat! . . . What I told the President was that I would show him the birth of a new art – the launching of the mightiest engine for moulding public opinion in the history of the world.”

To follow through on the analogy, Tarantino wants us to think about how nations are born through narrative, the sort of storytelling that film is peculiarly suited to perform. Repeated references to the film career of Leni Riefenstahl, director of Triumph of the Will and Olympia, reinforce the point that the Third Reich was fashioned, to a surprisingly large extent, from film. But that isn’t the only nation that Inglourious Basterds has in mind. Even though the story ends in 1944, it is abundantly clear, both from the film itself and from Tarantino’s comments about it in the media, that he is interested in telling the story of Israel’s birth or, to be more precise, retelling it.

Perpetual Revenge

That’s what critics who complain that Inglourious Basterds is pro-Israeli are picking up on. Even if they are willing to concede Goldberg’s point that the excessive violence in the film may not be a “Jewish thing to do,” they insist that it’s most definitely a Zionist thing to do. From their perspective, fantasies of revenge have played a crucial role in postwar Jewish politics. The pride taken in the IDF’s battlefield triumphs; the reluctance to make concessions to the Palestinians, despite intense international pressure; the doggedness with which both surviving Nazis and the terrorists responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre were hunted down: all can be regarded as evidence of precisely the we’re-not-going-to-take-it-anymore mindset that defines the renegades who comprise the Inglourious Basterds.

There’s a difference, of course, between revenging yourself directly on an oppressor and the pursuit of compensatory satisfaction in another setting. The latter is rather unseemly, like the actions of a boy who, humiliated by a schoolyard bully, takes his frustrations out on smaller children he can safely dominate. Critics of Israel’s foreign and domestic policy have charged that many of its most impressive military achievements – taking out Iraqi nuclear facilities, destroying Hamas hideouts with precision bombing – are the result of an overwhelming technological and financial superiority that significantly tarnishes their luster.

From this perspective, Inglourious Basterds seems dangerous because it uses a World War II narrative to fortify fantasies with disturbing present-day consequences. Goldberg explains the film’s visceral appeal for Jewish audiences – or at least Jewish male audiences – by emphasizing the transgressive pleasure it elicits. He quotes Eli Roth: “It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling.” Tarantino’s longtime producer Lawrence Bender reinforces this troubling conflation of sex and revenge by recounting a conversation he had with the director. “‘As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.’”

While such dreams may prove harmless enough when confined to the bedroom or shower, there’s always the chance that they will bolster the impetus for taking action in the real world, where true Nazis are in relatively short supply but plenty of convenient surrogates are waiting to take their psychic place. At least that’s the conclusion reached by those who fret that Inglorious Basterds reinforces the ideology of the pre-emptive strike, offense as the only defense worth having. It’s vital, they insist, to distinguish between revenge that looks to the past, seeking redress for an injury, and the sort of pre-meditated violence that looks to the future, securing advance compensation for an injury that has yet to occur. Once people are no longer able to tell the difference, they are at the mercy of demagogues.

Identifying the Bodies

What these opposing concerns about Tarantino’s approach underscore is the extent to which Inglourious Basterds exposes new wrinkles in the problem of identification. A staple of the abstract film theory that swept scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s, this topic has taken a back seat in recent years to work of narrower conceptual scope. Histories are in, while sweeping claims about the ahistorical cinematic apparatus are out. The irony in this development, however, is that it is precisely in self-consciously historical films and, more specifically, those that tackle the subjects of World War II and the Holocaust, that the structural workings of film are easiest to discern.

Playwright Bertolt Brecht’s insight that the dominant experience of drama in the West revolves around identification with characters is never more apparent than when watching a conventional war film, in which viewers are given the tools to discern distinct individuals within the masses of people on screen and then get to follow those individuals through a sequence of events that repeatedly threatens to return them to anonymity. Indeed, it’s no accident that such films often linger on dead bodies waiting to be identified. The inhumanity of modern warfare inheres in its capacity to render not only soldiers, but also civilians functionally equivalent.

But this specter of becoming “mass” men and women, deprived of character, is more insidious than that, for it goes hand in hand with tremendous advances in the capacity to identify people negatively, as members of a category being discriminated against. Again and again World War II films have presented characters living in Occupied Europe or trapped behind enemy lines who desperately hope that their disguise, their forged papers, their accent don’t give them away. Even as their plight reduces them to mere shadows, barely able to sustain their humanity, they live in fear of being singled out. And moviegoers, themselves part of an anonymous mass, identify with that fear. They want to disappear into the crowd, even as they long to shore up their selfhood by bonding with protagonists on the screen.

It’s no accident that the climactic scene of Inglourious Basterds takes place in a cinema where some members of the audience fear being detected as imposters and others luxuriate in the false confidence that fills moviegoers when the lights go down. This is the rare film that manages to be ruthlessly self-reflexive without ever making you feel the presence of the mirror. Even a seasoned cinephile, primed to make careful note of every scene in which characters are making a movie or watching a film, will have a hard time wriggling free of the identification that subordinates mind to body. The film’s key scenes, including the remarkable climax, are simply too thrilling, too viscerally realized to appraise with detachment during a first screening.

The Roller Coaster of History Is a Moebius Strip

That’s part of what makes the film what the hippies liked to call a “head trip.” By the time the viewer reaches the end of that climactic scene, the sense of being strapped into an amusement park thrill ride is so overwhelming that the film’s blatant rewriting of history feels like a higher order of truth. Some commentators on Inglourious Basterds have wryly noted that Americans learn so little history in school that Tarantino’s reckless gambit might go unnoticed. Perhaps that’s the case. But it’s also not hard to understand how moviegoers who know perfectly well how World War II ended might still find themselves transported, if only temporarily, to a twilight zone where Hitler never made it to his bunker. Just as many otherwise progressive Americans in 1915 were temporarily won over by the storytelling brilliance of Birth of a Nation,  contemporary viewers can be persuaded to suspend their disbelief in exchange for narrative bliss.

In writing his screenplay Tarantino surely had the long-delayed Valkyrie  project in mind, which tells the story of a nearly successful attempt to assassinate the Führer in the summer of 1944. The difference is that his “alternate ending” is pure fiction, as deliberately skewed as the Thomas Dixon story told in Birth of a Nation. But whereas Dixon sought to influence public opinion to advance an odious political agenda, Tarantino’s purpose is more complex. As the director has repeatedly noted in interviews, he thought it was high time for Jews to escape the role of victim meted out to them in one Holocaust narrative after another. But it’s doubful that his primary goal was to create a kind of political Viagra to bolster Israeli militarism. More likely, he wanted both to show how Israel became the state that it is today and deftly suggest, by telling a story in which a few stalwart Jews practically get to defeat the Nazis all by themselves, that it’s time for the nation to adopt a new narrative.

Hitler Just Isn’t What He Used To Be

There’s a reason why the scene in which the Bear Jew empties round after round into Hitler’s corpse is so disturbing. Even as viewers share in his rapture, it’s hard not get the sense that this climax – his climax, to build on Eli Roth’s metaphor – is one that can only be repeated with diminishing returns. While the increasing frequency with which terms like “national socialism” and “fascism” have been invoked in recent years indicate that World War II is very much on people’s minds, the sheer variety and frequency of the references attest to a precipitous decline in their historical relevance.

Perhaps the best example of this development, as exhilarating as it is disturbing, is in the curious afterlife of the 2006 German film Downfall about Hitler’s last days in the bunker. The product of painstaking research, full of spot-on period details, the film was both praised and maligned for its attempts to be historically accurate. In particular, many critics criticized the film for making Hitler and his associates too human.

By confining the narrative to the final days of a lost cause, Downfall’s creators constructed the perfect breeding ground for melodrama. Even though Hitler is clearly mad and his associates mostly venal and inept, their dire predicament and the time viewers spend with them in the claustrophobically close quarters of the bunker elicit a kind of structural identification, a sympathy in spite of itself à la the famous “Stockholm Syndrome”, that threatens to conceal the magnitude of their crimes. At least, that’s what Downfall’s critics have charged.

The most interesting thing about the film, though, is that it has given rise to one of the most persistent and inventive memes on the internet. The scene in which Hitler finally realizes that his forces have been utterly defeated, first in a fit of rage and then a mood of bitter resignation, has been posted many times to YouTube with new subtitles added for humorous effect. In these guerrilla clips, the actor Bruno Ganz’s over-the-top performance is appropriated for rants of all stripes, from a Republican’s lament that Sarah Palin is leaving the governorship in Alaska to a tirade about Michael Jackson’s untimely death to froth-mouthed fury about a professional football player’s decision to come out of retirement.

Whether this rebranding of Hitler’s image as the stand-in for any authority figure losing his grip constitutes a new example of the banality of evil or merely a sign that history isn’t what it used to be, we have clearly entered an era in which people surfing the internet can find themselves amusingly diverted by identifying with the figure of the Führer for a few minutes. From that perspective, Inglourious Basterds’ insistence that we remember to keep the Nazis in our sights and take pleasure in their destruction can seem downright moral.

But what makes Tarantino’s film, as its final lines imply, his “masterpiece” is not its morality so much as the way it invites us to think about morality. By making us feel the power of identification that the medium of film makes possible, as well as the consequences to which that spectatorial bondage can lead, Inglourious Basterds demonstrates how cinema makes history. The challenge it sets us is to become producers of that history, like that teenage girl who flees through the meadow at the end of the film’s opening scene, only to become first the owner of a cinema and then the principal agent of the Third Reich’s destruction.

Charlie Bertsch is Zeek‘s Music Editor. Prior to joining Zeek, he held the same position at Tikkun. He was also a longtime contributor to Punk Planet, and was one of the founders of the pioneering  electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. He is working on several book projects, as both a writer and an editor. He welcomes your feedback whether in comments posted here or by e-mail. 

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Projects like Open Strings are difficult to review. I have been listening to this double album, the latest release from Blur and Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn’s Honest Jon’s label, for twelve hours a day since it arrived in the mail last week. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with the remarkable first disc, which presents some of the remarkable music captured for posterity in the years following World War I, when major record labels made a concerted effort to reach markets outside the United States and Europe. And the second disc, which offers new material by contemporary artists inspired by those archival recordings, won my heart just as quickly. Simply put, this is the sort of release that becomes a cornerstone of my music library.

But the speed with which I reached this conclusion gives me pause. As great as my pleasure in listening to Open Strings has been, I can’t shake the nagging suspicion that it was enabled by something less wholesome. When I first slid the discs out of their lovely cardboard sleeves, emblazoned with Katharina Immekus’s clever black-and-white update on the sort of intricate patterns that cover mosques, I felt myself getting turned on by the prospect of entering another world. And that sensation, exciting though it may have been, underscores the challenges that face this kind of endeavor.

As Edward Said convincingly demonstrates in his landmark book Orientalism, the interest of Western intellectuals in places like Egypt, Palestine and Persia almost always involves more self­-interest than they are willing or able to acknowledge. No matter how hard they try to be open-minded, fantasies of the East, the residue of centuries of oversimplification and exaggeration, still color their perception of the region to a significant extent.

It’s as if the Middle East can only be discerned through a translucent screen onto which those fantasies are involuntarily projected. Lovers of the exotic Orient often note the overwhelming richness of their experiences there, the mass of details that can only be absorbed as an impressionistic blur. But what such descriptions usually fail to account for is that this excess of sensory information derives as much from seeing what isn’t there, the deep-rooted stereotypes that Westerners bring to the region, as from seeing what is.

Or hearing it. The tracks on the first disc of Open Strings tend to be spare, often deploying a single instrument like the oud. If anything, they should inspire rigorous concentration rather than the feeling that there is too much content to handle. In the slower passages of Nechat Bey’s work, prominently featured on the album, there are moments when convention, the expectation that one phrase should naturally follow another, nearly loses its hold. Yet this insight only came to me after several listens, so eager was my mind to fill in the rests with my own sense of what must come next. The extra-textual associations bound up with this music are so deeply engrained within occidental culture that I struggled to approach it with a clear head.

While some degree of synaesthesia is inevitable in any cross-cultural situation, it tends to be more pronounced when amplified by a substantial difference in privilege. For much of the modern era, Westerners could afford to confuse their fantasies of the East with the reality those fantasies obscured because negative consequences were minimized by the powers of empire.

The history of East-West relations since the 1960s has, in a sense, been the history of this privilege’s gradual erosion. Rather than being anomalous, the events of September 11th, 2001were a logical outcome of this trend. And the vast outpouring of content about the Middle East and other predominantly Islamic lands in that tragic day’s wake testifies to the realization that responding to the threat of terrorism is not a matter of the West regaining its footing so much as finding a new place to stand. 

While historical analyses have dominated mainstream discussion, there have plenty of cultural attempts to help this cause along. From well-meaning but ultimately shallow gestures like Bruce Springsteen’s decision to include stereotypically Eastern instruments on his post-9/11 album The Rising to more sustained engagement with the region, such as the work of graffiti artist Banksy, the past decade has witnessed a significant rise in attempts to find aesthetic remedies for political problems.

Laudable though such efforts may be, however, their tendentiousness has usually come at the expense of art. Perhaps the most troubling insight gleaned from careful scrutiny of aesthetic Orientalism is that there has never been much correlation between the knowledge that Western creators bring to their engagement with the Middle East and the quality of the work they produce. Indeed, it often seems that ignorance and carelessness have served art better than the cautious, enlightened approach to foreign cultures.

Does making effective use of content from another society demand disregard for the context in which it was originally produced? Perhaps the antiquarian approach and its “politically correct” offspring fail to inspire much successful art because they worry too much about respecting their source materials. To give one obvious example, there must be a reason why the misplayed sitar in many psychedelic rock songs has more power to move the listener than the more reverential treatment that instrument received from Western world music aficionados.

But as much aesthetic sense as this realization makes, its political implications are too disturbing to ignore. The expropriation of cultural resources from a different society may not have the same human impact as the expropriation of its natural resources – the prime motivation for imperialism in the modern era – but it follows the same logic. The person who thinks it justifiable to pick and choose from a distant land’s cultural heritage is a lot more likely to reason that it also makes sense to loot its mineral and agricultural wealth.

This brings us back to the problem of desire, the programming that led me to fall in love with Open Strings before I’d even finished my first date with the album. Long before my mental map of the Middle East achieved passable accuracy, I was drawn ineluctably to the sounds of the stringed instruments popular there and in adjoining parts of the globe. I couldn’t tell you where a particular song was from or what significance, religious or secular, it had in its place of origin. I only knew that the music touched something deep within me.

At the same time, even though I simply liked the way the music sounded, it inevitably conjured visions of the Orient, often wildly inaccurate, that had been instilled in me, against my knowledge and will, since I was a pre-schooler. I might not have been able to point out Baghdad on the globe, but I could tell you all about the palaces, minarets and colorful open-air markets I saw there on my musical peregrinations. By way of comparison, the opening sequence in Disney’s animated film Aladdin was a model of cultural sensitivity.

Even as my understanding of geography deepened, these visions persisted, reinforced as they were by everything from movies to the décor in Middle Eastern restaurants keen on giving American customers what they wanted. Although I learned to immerse myself in music intently enough to limit these reveries, they still worked their magic behind the scenes, fueling my conviction that the sounds I associated with the Orient had special power to transport me from my native boredom to a world of mind-blowing excess.

While Open Strings comes with no mission statement, no explanation of what the compilation is meant to achieve, its two-disc format strongly suggests that the project’s creators had people like me in mind. The first disc, with its sometimes crackly – though admirably spruced up – archival recordings is imbued with the aura of a world that is far away in both time and space, precisely the sort of psychogeography suited to Western fantasies about liberation from the tedium of everyday life in the era of Starbucks and Eat-a-Pita.

Considered in isolation, together with Open Strings’ eye-catching but minimally informative packaging, this disc might seem like an invitation to the sort of insouciant cultural imperialism that my own childhood affection for Middle Eastern sounds betrayed. But because it is paired with that second disc full of contemporary responses to the archival material, the album’s effect is far more complicated.

On the one hand, many of those new tracks play fast and loose with the musical heritage they reference. Paul Metzger’s lengthy “Emel” sounds like the sort of New Age music they used to play at Nature Company stores, only with the RPMs turned up to an anxiety-inducing pace. Michael Blue Smaldone’s “Martissa” slips fluidly from Assyria to Appalachia and back. And Bruce Licher’s menacingly propulsive “Mesopotamia” sounds like a demo from the goth band Sisters of Mercy before the vocals were dropped in.

In fact, none of the tracks on Open String’s second disc come close to reproducing the feel of the recordings from the 1920s that comprise the first one. The term “responses” is apt, since these new compositions answer the call of that classic sound, not with an echo, but with music that pays its respects less slavishly. It’s not hard to hear the old in the new. But because the artists on the second disc avoid mere imitation, the work they produced also helps us hear the new emerging from otherwise hidden folds of the old.

The same might be said for the remarkable collection of field recordings put out by the Sublime Frequencies label, which refuse to distinguish between authentic folk culture and the mish-mash of local and global sounds that floods the airwaves in the developing world. But whereas those compilations go out of their way to avoid any attempt to sort the material they contain, refusing even to provide names, Open Strings is careful to present the exchange between East and West, old and new, as a relationship of musical equals.

While it would be nice if Open Strings came with an explanatory apparatus of the sort found on Honest Jon’s superb Give Me Love complilation, the most important thing is that the album showcase the archival recordings on the first disc as the work of individual artists rather than an anonymous treasure trove of inspirational sounds. The knowledge that Kanoni Artaki’s “Soultanigiah” anticipates the multi-octave runs of the surf guitar style popularized by Lebanese-American Dick Dale or that Sami Chawa’s “Eerabi Fil Sahra” stops in midstream for what sounds like the acoustic equivalent of the flanging effect on The Cure’s song “Primary” encourages listeners to give credit where credit is due.

Rather than persisting in the imperialist presumption that the sounds of the Orient were simply there for the taking, like so many seashells washed up on the shore, Western listeners like myself can learn from Open Strings how to discern within that music the same traces of personal style that have long been ascribed to blues and country musicians of the same era.

That sort of attentive, historically minded listening will not dispel the fantasies that this material conjures. After all, it’s not as if the knowledge that a particular song was recorded by Dock Boggs or Blind Lemon Jefferson stops us from projecting a wealth of associations, some sweet and some unsavory, onto the music. But it sure beats treating the recordings as documentary evidence of a tradition impervious to the stamp of individuality.

Each time I’ve listened to Open Strings in its entirety, I’ve felt the hold of my childhood visions of the Orient diminish. Where once I saw architecture and smelled spices, I now see people working hard to realize their own visions. But my love for the music has also grown in the process. Although I still feel pangs of conscience for the desire the album stirs inside me, I have come to realize that it wasn’t the desire itself that was a problem, so much as the degree to which it was ignorant. There’s a crucial difference between lusting after a person one barely knows and lusting after a partner of many years.

That’s not to say that educated desire is necessarily better. After all, many long-term relationships are abusive. In the end, though, the path to enlightenment must pass through the doorway of knowledge. I’d rather respond consciously to someone I respect than remain in the thrall of reflexes programmed during childhood. This is the lesson I take from one of my favorite tracks on the album, “Surfin’ UAE,”  Rick Tomlinson’s wry take on rock’s debt to the Orient.

Invoking all the clichés of the surf rock subgenre, the song nevertheless manages to break with precedent just enough to keep us thinking through our pleasure, rather than in spite of it. That remarkable achievement is a perfect example of what makes Open Strings such a resounding success.

Charlie Bertsch is Zeek‘s Music Editor. Prior to joining Zeek, he held the same editorial title at Tikkun. Bertsch was also a longtime contributor to the late, great Punk Planet, and was one of the founders of the pioneering  electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. He welcomes your feedback whether in comments posted here or by e-mail.  

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It’s getting harder and harder to discuss any aspect of contemporary culture without explicitly considering its means of distribution. Whether your topic is film, literature or music, the massive changes brought about by over a century’s worth of technological innovations have progressively undermined our sense of the boundary between the being of a work, its existence in space and time, and the work that multiplies that being.

Does a record produced from bits and pieces of many studio sessions and other sound effects, like such groundbreaking albums as The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds or The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper, possess a different reality than one recorded live in one take? Does a news segment that makes use of stock footage always demonstrate a higher order of deceit than one that arranges material shot that very day? Should the day arrive, perhaps even in the next five years, when a deceased film actor like Marilyn Monroe is reanimated with computer technology to star in a brand-new movie, like a more sophisticated version of the process that turned Andy Serkis into Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, could the resulting performance still be classified as hers?

Questions like these, urgent even when they remain hypothetical, shadow our experience of contemporary media to such a degree that debates about the use of intellectual property can never be reduced to a merely legal matter. Even if the person who rips a Blockbuster DVD or downloads the entire oeuvre of Paul Abdul using BitTorrent has pangs of conscience, she or he still recognizes that the easy availability of such cultural content has radically transformed our sense of what constitutes a belonging.

The saying that “possession is nine tenths of the law” may not hold up in a courtroom, but it certainly holds true for how those guilty of so-called piracy feel about the material they have managed to collect without paying for it. Property isn’t what it used to be. And neither is ownership.

That’s the message ably delivered by two recent films that consider the state of contemporary music and, by implication, other forms of cultural expression. Rip It: A Remix Manifesto, directed by Brett Gaylor, and Copyright Criminals: This Is a Sampling Sport, put together by Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod, both use the legal battles over the sampling of pre-existing content as the starting point for insightful examinations of the stakes involved, showing us how to perceive these battles as significant moments in a world war that involves us all whether we like it or not.

As its subtitle suggests, Gaylor’s Rip It is the more polemical of the two films, shamelessly promoting the virtues of what it terms the “CopyLeft” against the corporate interests bent on preserving the financial value of the copyrights they own. Because the film is constructed in the style of a personal essay, with the director confessing that he wants it to validate his favorite muscial act, the brilliant mash-up artist Girl Talk, it wears its tendentiousness lightly, like summerweight linen. Gaylor’s enthusiasm for remix culture is infectious and presented with enough flare to sway viewers who know that matters are not as cut-and-dried as the film implies.

Copyright Criminals takes a more balanced approach. Although the form of the documentary, which repeatedly overlays multiple video and audio clips into rich collages, attest to the filmmakers’ affection for remix culture, Franzen and McLeod go out of their way to show that the defense of copyright is not always as indefensible as Rip It would have us believe. To be sure, corporate interests were behind most of the major legal actions concerning sampling. But that doesn’t mean that the actual artists being sampled should be deprived of compensation for their work.

The most powerful sequences in Copyright Criminals concern the fate of drummer Clyde Stubblefield, who was a crucial component of James Brown’s rhythm section in the late 1960s. As the film demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt, Stubblefield’s beats found their way into an astonishing number of hip-hop classics during the genre’s late 1980s’ heyday, when major artists were not afraid to sample indiscriminately. From Public Enemy to The Beastie Boys, the legacy of his brilliantly tight drumming is clear. But it as also gone uncompensated and, to a large extent, unacknowledged.

Considering how little Stubblefield got paid for his work, both by James Brown and the artists who repurposed him later, he seems like a remarkably amiable fellow, proud of his musical achievements and free of the bitterness that could easily afflict someone in his position. And that makes the case for a defense of his copyright all the more compelling. Freedom to remix, the filmmakers show us, may be aesthetically necessary, but that doesn’t mean that it should come at the expense of other artists.

The contrast with Girl Talk, née biomedical engineer Greg Gillis, is telling. Although Rip It underscores the musical brilliance of his mash-ups, which have the power to move audiences into sweaty euphoria, it also presents us with the picture of an artist who, in contrast to Stubblefield, came to his cultural achievements from a background of relative privilege.

That’s not to criticize Gillis, who serves as a sagely amiable tour guide into the labyrinthine passageways of remix culture.

Nor is it to suggest that he is some scion of the super rich. As the interviews Gaylor conducts with his parents make clear, Girl Talk was the product of a middle-class home, though one with a bit more happiness, perhaps, not to mention Hall and Oates, than is the norm. Still, it would be wise to take the arguments that Rip It makes with a few grains of Clyde Stubblefield’s salty presence.

In the end, Rip It and Copyright Criminals complement each other so well that it’s tempting to advise that the films always be seen in tandem. Despite the struggles they delineate and the often dire consequences that legal action has had on the output of remix artists, both are rather hopeful productions. Reminding us that what we now call “sampling” or “repurposing” was going on long before the notion of copyright was established and that human beings have as much natural inclination to mix as they do to separate, these documentaries make us long for a future in which people would spend more energy trying to spread knowledge – and wealth – than they now waste trying to limit access to them.

The “Remixer’s Manifesto” that Gaylor presents near the beginning of his film efficiently distills the mindset necessary bring about that salutory change:

1. CULTURE ALWAYS BUILDS ON THE PAST
2. THE PAST ALWAYS TRIES TO CONTROL THE FUTURE
3. OUR FUTURE IS BECOMING LESS FREE
4. TO BUILD FREE SOCIETIES YOU MUST LIMIT CONTROL OF THE PAST

Even for someone eager to ensure that her or his work in the past does not become wholly expropriated by others in the present, these are words that can be lived by. The danger with guidelines composed in such abstract and absolute terms, however, is that they seem to call for an existential, all-or-nothing decision along the lines of former President George W. Bush’s notoroious claim that those nations unwilling to endorse American military operations in the Middle East were by definition “against us.”

One way out of this bind might be to supplement Rip It’s manifesto with some counterveiling precepts:

5. THE FUTURE ALWAYS TRIES TO CONTROL THE PAST
6. OUR PAST IS ALSO BECOMING LESS FREE
7. TO BUILD FREE SOCIETIES YOU MUST LIMIT CONTROL OF THE FUTURE, TOO

Walter Benjamin, whose landmark essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”  presciently anticipated many of our current-day debates about the distribution of content, would most certainly approve of this expanded list. In the end,  the best remix aesthetic is one that seeks to redeem the past, in the manner of Copyright Criminals’ treatment of Clyde Stubblefield, even as it refuses to let it become a burden on the future. For redemptive critique of that sort, which discerns the people concealed by abstractions like “the past” and “the future,” provides a powerful corrective to the pursuit of freedom at all costs.

The post Copy Right, Copy Left, Copy Central appeared first on Jewcy.

When word that Brooklyn indie-rock stalwarts Oneida were planning to release a triple album as the second installment in a triptych of LPs, members of their devoted fan base rejoiced. But the announcement also excited interest in circles where the band’s peripatetic songs would otherwise have fallen on deaf ears. The scope of the band’s plan was enough to inspire closer scrutiny.

The sheer quantity of popular music available these days, in forms that break the spell of the traditional commodity, inspires a search for alternative pathways to enchantment. An outwardly simple idea, like Sufjan Stevens’ absurdly ambitious plant to make an album centered on each of the fifty states, or Radiohead’s decision to make its most recent album available for whatever price consumers wished to pay, can do the trick far better than a conventional marketing campaign. To be sure, Oneida’s deviation from standard practice was more modest. But by implicitly invoking an era when sprawling, high-concept projects were the norm – and when the music industry was at a commercial peak – they activated a nostalgia for excess poorly suited for shuffle-mode playlists.

Although I’m old enough to remember the era when 8-track tapes were all the rage, I have been living under the velvet-gloved tyranny of my iPod for years. A record that will compel me to listen to it as a whole, despite my impulse to sample and scroll, is a real treat. In this sense Rated O, which is finally available for purchase, really delivers the goods. It’s the sort of album that rewards those who are willing to listen to it in sequence, not once, but over and over. Indeed, the relationship between its three discs is so interesting to contemplate that I find myself overcome with waves of guilt if I listen to a few tracks in isolation.

What makes Rated O’s cohesiveness all the more impressive is that each of the discs has its own distinctive character. The first, beat-heavy disc, with its nods to reggae and electronica, turns the dance floor into a mental exercise room. The second swaps the intricate compositions for which Oneida is known best for shorter, more immediate bursts of heady passion that rock with a slack-armed discipline. And the spaced-out third disc meanders like a Phish record that has been turned inside out to reveal every loose thread of its stitching.

All three would be worthy offerings in their own right, though gravitating to markedly different pleasure receptors. Taken together, they constitute a powerful commentary on the mental prisons fashioned by the fragmentation of contemporary music. We are so eager to sort our unruly music collections that we have forgotten the appeal of bands that deliberately defy all categorization.  Oneida reminds us that thinking big can still free us from the tyranny of feeling small.

This helps to explain why Rated O keeps reminding me of the progressive rock popular in the early 1970s. The major bands of that movement, such as King Crimson,  Genesis, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and Yes, fell out of favor with most critics when punk came on the scene and have never quite managed, despite their impressive musicianship and symphonic approach to songwriting, to wriggle free of the stigma of preteniousness. In fact, it’s difficult for someone who wants to seem “with-it” to confess affection for their work, even though guilty pleasures like bubblegum pop and hair metal can be embraced without fear of being branded a person of bad taste.

What’s strange about the netherland in which “prog rock” has long been mired, though, is that its most able practitioners forcefully invited listeners to expand their musical horizons. In a sense, those bands are still being punished for wanting rock to make room for the kinds of music, such as folk, jazz and classical, that it had initially been pitted against. While that negative judgment might make sense for devotees of rockabilly or three-chord punk, who are invested in the notion that complexity is the enemy of passion, it is poorly suited to the world of artists like Radiohead and Sufjan Stevens, who are praised for transgressing the same boundaries that bands like Yes were crossing four decades ago.

Last month, one of my Facebook friends posted the news that she would soon be attending a concert featuring Asia and Yes. Because she is a part-time DJ on the local college radio station here in Tucson and noted for her discerning taste in new music, this revelation took me by surprise. Although I was sure the show would be too expensive to attend for purely ironic purposes, I wondered how sincere her appreciation for these bands was. And I also wondered how sincere mine could be.

When I expressed interest in the show, commenting back to her that my first rock concert, back in 1986, had been to see Rush, I got a chance to find out. She and her husband had an extra ticket and graciously invited me to use it.  Still, I wasn’t sure whether I should accept. Leaving aside the fact that the bands were performing in Phoenix, a 100-mile drive from my house, and in the Dodge Theater, purveyor of the corporate rock experience, I worried that seeing them now could do more harm than good.

Back in high school, when I first developed an interest in the history of rock, I frequently lamented the fact that I would never get to see bands like Yes live. By comparison, the synthesizer-drenched sugar highs of the mainstream 80s charts seemed absurdly shallow. I wanted popular music that stood for something more than instant – and therefore illusory – gratification. But then I discovered alternative rock, right as it was about to commence its commercial heyday, and suppressed my dreams of being magically transported back to some rustic greensward, bathed in a sweet haze of smoke.

Over time, I came to feel mildly ashamed of my affection for bands like Rush and Genesis, though I never went so far as to prune them from my collection. Sometimes, when one of the prog rock epics I liked came on the radio, I’d find myself turning up the volume, temporarily able to lose myself in the music as I had in my teens. For the most part, though, hearing those classics made me reflect on the ways in which my taste had changed, as if I were starting at the photo of a high-school sweetheart that now seemed like an obviously poor match for me.

In the past decade, however, as hipster-minded internet sites like Pitchfork have promoted artists who clearly have ambitions to transcend the confines of rock and pop orthodoxy, I have found myself startled to be experiencing the sort of musical pleasure I thought I’d outgrown. Listening to groups such as The Fiery Furnaces, who foreground the height of their concepts even when it means hiding the depths of their passion, I almost get more enjoyment out of their work’s audacity, the rules it insouciantly flouts, as I do from the music itself. The room these artists make for forms of listening inimical to rock convention can leave me with an empty feeling, but one which has the same appeal as a newly remodeled home. In other words, it’s the negative space their records delimit that holds me in thrall.

The idea that popular music doesn’t have to be reduced to a three-chord essence or function as the soundtrack to the booze-soaked pursuit of “satisfaction,” that it can be about something other than the sweaty rocking and rolling that gave the genre its name: this sense of possibilities gave me hope even when my body longed for baser forms of sonic stimulation. But when that idea is fleshed out with less cerebral forms of bliss, as is surely the case with Oneida’s Rated O, its force is powerfully magnified. Realizing that rocking out can free us from the bondage of matter is one thing; realizing that it can rock our minds back into harmony with our bodies is another.

In the end, I decided that I should take the risk of sullying my teenage fantasies and go see Asia and Yes. And I’m glad I did. Despite the Dodge Theater’s complete lack of the ambience I now seek in concert halls, with its video screens, ushers and twelve-dollar beers; despite the fact that my companions and I were surrounded by intoxicated Baby Boomers who were intent on securing the pleasure they sought, even if it came at their fellow concert-goers’ expense; despite the decrepitude of Asia and Yes’s members, who looked like they were giving their all just to stand in one place, I had a great time.

Yes, there were moments when my inner ironist took over. Seeing Asia’s ridiculously overblown videos from the early years of MTV made me laugh to think that anyone ever took them seriously. Even though the replacement for Yes’s co-founder and lead singer Jon Anderson camped his way through the set like the second coming of Liberace, the rest of the band plodded obliviously along, a model of earnestness. And when either band turned to the subject of heterosexual love, the pubescent sentiments of the lyrics clashed blatantly with the music’s sophistication.

But even though part of me struggled to avoid the vortex of unreflective bliss, I still ended up getting sucked in. At one point, I was standing in line at the men’s room, hearing the bleached-out throb of the show through the walls, when I detected the beginning of Yes’s  “Heart of the Sunrise.” Realizing I didn’t want to miss it, I ran out the door, mission not accomplished, and rushed back to stand in front of my seat. If I can forget, for a minute, the ideological function classic rock has been made to perform in our society, a song like that can still pluck strings deep in my soul. By turns propulsive and delicate, brash and shimmering, it provides a stern test for listeners intent on getting the volume just right.

And, when heard with an open mind, it sounds like the musical thrift store in which Oneida rummaged to find the not-so-raw materials for making Rated O. The problem with a song as famous as "Heart of the Sunrise" or with other classic Yes songs like “Roundabout” or “I’ve Seen All Good People,” is that people of my generation have heard them so often that access to their subtleties is closed off. Even if we admit affection for them, we have a hard time noticing anything new.

In the case of prog rock, though, the length of the average composition has helped to limit such excessive familiarity. Aside from Yes’s limited number of AOR hits, most of their songs are obscure enough these days to approach with fresh ears. In order to be fair to the band, I tracked down their 1974 album Relayer shortly after the concert, figuring that I owed them more careful attention. Because that LP originally consisted of only three songs – the CD re-release adds extra tracks – and marked the band’s shift towards a more synthesizer-driven approach to rock, inimical to the band’s more musically conservative aficionados, it is now one of the least familiar releases from the their peak years. But it is also one of their best, refracting everything from Chick Corea to Kraftwerk through their path-breaking musical prism.

The more I listened to Relayer, the more I found myself rethinking the distinction between prog rock and the work of artists like Oneida. There’s no doubt in my mind that if Yes were somehow able to come along today, releasing the same albums it put out in the early 1970s, they would be the darlings of Pitchfork. The stigma still affixed to prog rock does not derive, despite what its perpetuators may think, from any failing in the music itself, but from the fact that it achieved a degree of popularity that seems like sheer fantasy today.

One of the revelations I had seeing Asia and Yes in concert is that their loyal fan base encompasses both bookish white-collar types and a rougher-edged element that would be just as comfortable at a Black Sabbath reunion. For all of the disappointments that the early 1970s brought, they also witnessed a temporary destabilization of the relationship between taste and class. Working-class youth whose parents and grandparents had been given little exposure to high-cultural goods suddenly found themselves being encouraged to expand their horizons. Instead of spurring ressentiment for being a means of sorting the haves from the have-nots, symphonies became a source of inspiration: something anyone, regardless of wealth or training, could not only experience with pleasure but perhaps even produce for the pleasure of others.

While this change was more dramatic in Europe, where class was – and is – more likely to be consciously scrutinized, it affected the entire developed world. In the United States, too, musical forms that would usually have been dismissed as pretentious or elitist were embraced, for a time, as appropriate affair for the common people. That’s why a band like Yes, whose records were ill-suited for an industry in which radio was the primary means of disseminating information, could still develop enough of a following that staging another reunion tour at major venues like the Dodge Theater, over forty years after the band’s founding, made financial sense.

Needless to say, the likelihood of Oneida playing arenas of that size several decades from now is remote. Indeed, the likelihood of any contemporary band achieving that sort of sustained career is not great. Although the reasons for that state of affairs have more to do with advances in the electronic distribution of content than they do with any fundamental shift in musical taste, the end result is still the same: complex rock music of the sort popularized by Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, Rush and other bearers of the “prog rock” standard has ceased to be truly popular, in a quantitative sense, except as a commodity for the nostalgia industry.

This surely isn’t Oneida’s fault. Given the band’s openness to musical exploration, incorporating a vast array of influences, I’m sure they would be delighted to attain even the diminished popularity that Yes enjoys today. But the fact that they cannot help but inhabit a narrow cultural niche, one in which the vast majority of consumers are from privileged backgrounds, is still depressing to contemplate. That’s why, as much fun as I had seeing Asia and Yes perform, my memories of the experience are suffused with melancholy. I kept thinking how great it was to see so many people so excited to relive songs that require long periods of sustained concentration. But I also realized that the sort of in-depth engagement to which the audience’s involvement attested has itself become an endangered species, much less in a context where class divisions temporarily melt away in a heady collective ecstasy.

Rated O is a great record, one that could do wonders for the capacity of music lovers to imagine a future that’s brighter and less boxed-in. Unfortunately, even the interest it has excited as a triple album in a planned triptych will do little to liberate it from the box to which socio-economic factors have consigned it.

The post Prog is Not A Four Letter Word appeared first on Jewcy.

Because Beyond the Pale’s impressive new album Postcards comes with no liner notes, no explanation of where the music comes from, it invites listeners to find out for themselves. But that is not an easy task. Some tracks, like the tracks “Magura” and “Extra Spicy” that bookend the record sound like the sort of lighthearted fare one might have heard at Disney World’s Country Bear Jamboree had it been set in a Galician shtetl rather than a mythical American hinterland.

But others numbers, such as mandolinist Eric Stein’s “Split Decision” and violinist Aleksander Gajic’s “Back to the Beginning,” with their nods to jazz and classical music, undermine the downheymish vibe. And the Yiddish ballad “Doina,” beautifully rendered by Vira Lozinsky, may conjure an Eastern European homeland, but one that sounds far too grown-up in its melancholy to be fare suitable for the whole family.

Because Beyond the Pale is such a tight ensemble – the six members have been playing together for over a decade – Postcards sounds cohesive even at its most peripatetic. This is one case in which being all over the map is clearly not a musical weakness. And yet the difficulty of determining where the music comes from – not to mention when it comes from, which is just as important for work that does such a good job of invoking nostalgia for lost worlds – has the potential to rile listeners who seek a particular kind of fix, rather than a more diffuse cultural experience. Even as the continuity of instrumentation and execution gives the album a smooth, if heterogeneous, surface, the abrupt transition from one style to another stirs misgivings, not so much about Beyond the Pale in particular, as about the broader aesthetic sensibility that celebrates hybridization as an end in itself.

Since the music industry started to collapse, many of the walls that separated different idioms have given way. Frequently, though, those walls turn out to have been already riddled with termites. To be sure, developments like satellite radio and digital downloading let listeners choose the type of music they wish to listen to with much greater speed and precision than was possible when consumers had to rely on the airwaves and brick-and-mortar record stores. But the access to information about diverse forms of music has been steadily increasing for decades.

Between the expansion of public radio, the proliferation of free news weeklies and magazines, and New Wave filmmakers’ willingness to forego traditional dedicated scores for compositions, from classical to rock, that had been created for other purposes, the aftermath of the 1960s saw a rapid rise in the number of music lovers who were more committed to the eclecticism of their taste preferences than they were to any particular artist or genre. If we really want to make sense of what used to be called, with insouciant glee, “postmodernism,” we should pay more attention to this trend than the oversung scandals of the art world. The leading edge is only worthy of serious scrutiny when its followers are tightly ranked behind it. 

What matters most in the cultural arena, at bottom, are the barely conscious decisions that consumers make about what does and doesn’t go together. Andy Warhold’s soup cans matter less as an act of provocation directed at collectors and critics than as the inspiration for Campbell’s later move to promote their own label as a fashion statement to people aware, however dimly, that it was now hip to do so. The mind that can switch back and forth from a classic nineteenth-century opera to a rock opera like Tommy without feeling disoriented is the mind of someone who has stopped sorting cultural artifcacts primarily as a means of keeping them apart. It’s an aesthetic sensibility that searches for correspondences, at whatever level, more eagerly than distinctions.

But as the psychedelic era amply demonstrated, the mental transcendence of  limits, culminating in celebrations of the “oneness of everything,” frequently serves to mask the failure to transcend limits at a material level. An aesthetic sensibility open to improbable juxtapositions of high and low, traditional and modern may lead its proponents to regard the social and economic divisions that still define the global order as problems that can be solved solely by proper thinking. Not to mention that a willingness to mix what was once segregated can blind people to the divisions that make their cultural noblesse oblige meaningful in the first place. Indeed, those divisions are often exaggerated or oversimplified in the telling to burnish the reptuation of the trend-setters who, we are told, were so brave to flout them.

Intolerance of those who have good reasons for seeking to preserve the integrity of a specific cultural tradition is no better than intolerance of those who desire to transcend that kind of specificity. All too often, the people who feel most comfortable mixing are those for whom the risks of doing so have been minimized by social and financial privilege. Not only that, the sort of mixing in which they indulge, like someone poised before a well-stocked buffet table deciding what to try next, is wilfully ignorant of a past in which traversing boundaries was a necessity rather than a virtue. People who are too poor to be picky may cobble together meals from a variety of ethnic backgrounds – tacos, pizza, ramen – but the exaltation of “fusion” cuisine was decidedly the work of the haute bourgeoisie.

Being the open-minded, highly informed students of musical history that they are, the members of Beyond the Pale are surely aware that the traditions they draw upon most heavily in Postcards were themselves the product of intense cultural hybridization. The romance of the shtetl, for example, depends as much on its dangerous interactions with the gentile world as it does on the preservation of a distinct Jewish heritage in the face of intense pressure to assimilate or convert. What gets lost on this album, in spite of what we must presume were the band’s best intentions to the contrary – the absence of an explanatory apparatus looms largest here – is a sense of what this earlier, pre-modern form of mixing cost its practitioners.

Just as the Country Bear Jamboree conceals the mixing of racially coded musical traditions by anthropomorphizing animals that make color seem insignificant, records like Postcards risk masking the violence of the cultural juxtapositions they celebrate by recasting them as the decisions of people who are free to choose which traditions to sample. While the same problem faces those artists, like Calexico, Gogol Bordello, and Devotchka, who approach those traditions from the perspective of rock, the edginess of the latter’s best work makes it easier for listeners to sense the danger bound up in their source material. As laudable as Beyond the Pale’s professionalism is, the ease with which they bring everything together gives their music a deceptively placid sheen.  That’s why the three tracks sung by Lozinsky are the album’s best. She makes us feel the pain, as well as the pleasure, that radiates through the musical heritages Beyond the Pale draws upon. Her voice provides an existential answer to the question “Where does the music come from?”

Charlie Bertsch is Zeek‘s Music Editor. Prior to joining Zeek, he held the same editorial title at Tikkun. Bertsch was also a longtime contributor to the late, great Punk Planet, and was one of the founders of the pioneering  electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. He welcomes your feedback whether in comments posted here or by e-mail. 

The post Tastefully Mixed Down? appeared first on Jewcy.

Publicity cuts both ways. With the help of a smart press pack and a persistent publicist, a musician who defies categorization can inspire the creation of a new category. But success of that sort can be heavy load to bear. Once your media profile is well established, it’s hard to modify. And that problem, faced by anyone who sustains a meaningful career, is greatly magnified when you have helped to construct the box into which critics eagerly put you.

Such is the fate of Matisyahu, born Matthew Miller, whose deft combination of different musical genres has made him one of the world’s most successful Jewish musicians. Although it has been half a decade since he first started to attract the attention of the mainstream press, he continues to be defined by the perception that it is strange for someone to practice his religion on tour.

A recent piece in The Idaho Statesman provides a good example.  After labeling Matisyahu a “devout Jewish rapper,”  the author Jordan Levin goes on to describe him making “the kind of journey he makes all the time between his music and his religion.” It sounds like a major undertaking. But the trip in question, later further embellished into a “dual spiritual and musical odyssey,” only turns out to take Matisyahu across Manhattan, from a voice lesson to the preparations for Shabbat, which the author finds it necessary to identify as “the Jewish holy day of rest.”

It’s a long way from New York City to Boise, a distance that has as much to do with ideology as geography. For all of its diversity, vast stretches of the United States remain strongholds of a white, Christian worldview that struggles to make sense of other cultural heritages even when it is open to doing so. That Matisyahu has achieved sufficient market penetration to merit features in those hinterlands as well as in the major cities and college towns where his name first circulated testifies to his talent and dedication. But the increased exposure has also contributed to an awkward lag in the reception of his work.

Although Matisyahu’s musical and religious interests have expanded since he began his musical career, he continues to be labeled a Hasidic rapper. Whereas early profiles concentrated on the strangeness of that coupling, more recent ones have tended to emphasize that he is no longer a “novelty.” Yet in making that point, they reinforce the impression that his music must be understood as an expression of his cultural identity. Whether he wants to talk about other matters or not, his interviewers relentlessly force him back to the subject of his religious convictions.

And Matisyahu, as someone who cares deeply about his faith, takes the responsibility too seriously to play the rock star who brushes off difficult topics. It’s clearly a good thing that his music is helping to educate previously oblivious Americans about what it means to practice his kind of Judaism. At the same time, though, one gets the nagging sense that he will soon weary of pieces that wrap discussions of his music inside discussions of his religion.

A recent feature in The Aspen Times states that, “Matisyahu’s faith appears to be more fundamental to him than the particular style of music he makes.” Nor does the musician argue with his assessment. How could he? Any true believer is bound to confess that, yes, religion takes precedence over art. But whereas country or soul singers who are practicing Christians are permitted to have that fact tacitly acknowledged, Matisyahu is forced to declare his priorities openly.

Tellingly, although the piece notes that his “high-energy stage presence” is “mostly untouched by his religion” – a significant point, given the fact that his commercial stature rests heavily on his reputation as a great concert performer, as made evident in his 2006 album Live At Stubbs – it still concludes by exoticizing him: “One aspect of his performance, however, has been limited by his religion. Matisyahu, who is married, no longer stage-dives, for fear of being touched by women other than his wife – something forbidden in Orthodox Judaism.”

While such trivia may be old news to those who have followed Matisyahu’s career – he has repeatedly been asked about the challenge of keeping faith on tour – it still carries a hint of sensationalism targeted at those unfamiliar with his work. Just as the few Jewish, Hindu or Muslim students in otherwise homogeneous suburban or rural schools tend to be assigned the awkward task of explaining why they don’t celebrate Christmas or Easter like everybody else, Matisyahu becomes a figure here for a cultural difference that intrigues people to the precise degree that it remains foreign to them.

The irony in all this is that Matisyahu’s music itself represents a fetishization of difference. The affection that Jewish young people have for reggae has often been noted, sometimes wryly. One persistent joke holds that this appeal derives from the frequency with which the name of “Israel” is invoked within the genre. What Matisyahu did, whether consciously or not, was to turn a taste for otherness into a way for others to get a taste of his otherness.

It didn’t hurt, of course, that reggae is inextricably bound up with a religious practice that is simultaneously conservative and countercultural. The faith that the genre’s greatest stars professed has roots in Christianity and African spirituality, yet adds up to something distinctive. From one perspective, it looks a good deal like the Lubavitchers take on Judaism. In Matisyahu’s able hands, the reggae that serves as the foundation for his musical approach provides a means, both of breaking with tradition and asserting the importance of becoming reacquainted with its essence rather than perpetuating the “broken” traditions of the modern world.

The release of Matisyahu’s new album Light, now due in late August, was put off at the behest of his record label. Significantly, it’s a major label, Epic, even though the trend in the music industry has been for many long-established artists to migrate to independent labels. That confirms the commercial potential that his work is deemed to have. But the decision to expand and revise the record’s contents suggests that there may be trouble ahead. Such delays are often a warning sign, suggesting that the artist has failed to produce the sort of music that label representatives expected, that they have deviated from the form that made them a desirable commodity.

So far, Matisyahu hasn’t conveyed any displeasure at the label’s decision. Yet if we read between the lines of the interviews he has been giving on his current concert tour, originally intended to accompany the album’s release, it’s not hard to see that he has been struggling with the burden of expectations. Although he continues to confirm his religious devotion in interviews, he has parted ways with the Lubavitchers in favor of an approach more open to kabbalistic Judaism. And although the album contains plenty of reminders of his music’s reggae roots, it also takes bold steps in the direction of rock and electronica.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that Epic wanted him to work with reggae legends Sly and Robbie, whose contribution will make it more likely that Light reproduces the formula for success – the familiar rhythms of reggae and its offshoots – that made its predecessors unexpected hits. Although the label couldn’t very well ask him to return to the religious beliefs that underpinned that success, one almost gets the sense that insisting he bend his new musical directions back towards their roots was tantamount to the same thing.

Charlie Bertsch is Zeek‘s Music Editor. Prior to joining Zeek, he held the same position at Tikkun. He was also a longtime contributor to Punk Planet, and was one of the founders of the pioneering electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. He is working on several book projects, as both a writer and an editor. He welcomes your feedback whether in comments posted here or by e-mail.

The post The Burden of Light appeared first on Jewcy.

Maybe you’re in a crowded restaurant, deep in conversation, when you gradually start to realize that there’s a song you like penetrating the din. Or you’re browsing at the mall to a piped-in soundtrack that refuses to be consigned to the background. Or you’re sitting at a traffic light on a lovely June night, when the sounds pulsing from a nearby car pique your interest. Whatever the circumstances, the appeal of the music inspires you to search out its source. If it was interesting enough to attract your attention from afar, imagine how good it will sound when you are able to listen to it properly? The urge to bring what was in the background closer is strong.

But the truth of the matter is that it’s getting harder and harder to devote that level of concentration to a record, no matter how compelling. Distraction is the dominant mode of experiencing music these days. Paradoxically, the very technology that allows us to carry our music with us, to keep it close at hand, makes it easier to treat it like muzak. Even if we dream of being exposed to music that we take to heart, the reality is that making that kind of long-term commitment is taking more discipline with each passing year.

That’s one of the reasons why the decline of the compact disc has led, remarkably, to a resurgence of interest in the format it had seemingly rendered obsolete. Listening to vinyl demands a degree of concentration, a ritual devotion, that the digital age has made it more difficult to muster. The injunctions that those of us who grew up with phonographs remember with nostalgia – to keep the surface of records clean, to make sure the turntable is level, to refrain from doing anything that might cause the needle to lose its groove – now serve double duty as a demand to pay attention in an era when it’s easy to consume music without paying anything at all.

Farm, the new album by alternative rock stalwarts Dinosaur Jr., does not explicitly thematize the massive changes in the music industry that have occurred since the band formed in the mid-1980s. But it does a better job than most records of making us ponder the way that our understanding of proximity and distance have been transformed as a result of that transformation. Although the songs on the album, with their tried-and-true format of guitar, bass and drums, are far removed from what usually gets classified as “ambient” music, they play with our expectations of the rock idiom. 

The longest song on Farm, “I Don’t Want To Go There,” is a prime example. Replete with the sort of weighty chords and meandering solos identified with the classic rock of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it nevertheless manages to break with that tradition in subtle but crucial ways. For one thing, rather than building to an emotional peak, the track starts with a sonic density that suggests that we are already in the middle of things. The first words, duplicating the song’s title, further reinforce the sense that we are hearing a response to something that happens off the record. While everything about the song suggests that there is an antecedent to the refusal it delimits, the nature of “there” is never fleshed out.

Charlie Bertsch is Zeek‘s Music Editor. Prior to joining Zeek, he held the same position at Tikkun. He was also a longtime contributor to Punk Planet, and was one of the founders of the pioneering electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. He is working on several book projects, as both a writer and an editor. He welcomes your feedback whether in comments posted here or by e-mail.

The post That Noise in the Background appeared first on Jewcy.

Fifteen years ago, the alternative music press was fixated on the idea of  “post-rock.” Whether that label was applied to artists that featured guitar, bass and drums – like the Chicago band Tortoise, whose excellent new album Beacons of Ancestorship will be released June 23rd – or, more diffusely, to the sort of computer-enabled sounds that inspired the term “electronica,” its popularity indicated that the mainstream music industry was already experiencing a crisis of self-understanding. Labels had enjoyed a lengthy boom in the wake of the massive changes made visible by Billboard’s shift to the SoundScan method of measuring record sales, a development that gave formerly marginalized genres like hip-hop and punk a new legitimacy in the marketplace. While sales were still strong in the mid-1990s, however, the relentless search for new products had severed artists from the scenes that had previously nurtured them, stifling the countercultural energies that had fueled the rise of self-consciously “alternative” music.

In the domain of hip-hop, this added up to a commercially savvy, but culturally suspect depoliticization of the genre, reflected in the ascendancy of Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs as a major player in the industry. As the sort of content he favored became a staple of the sales charts, rock and roll’s popularity in the marketplace began to slip. Although the renaissance heralded by the surprising success of bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day had not ceased entirely, the difficulty major labels were having in finding successors to those bands suggested that their flowering might have been the result of an unexpected autumn heat wave rather than a new spring.

Although none of the artists associated with the idea of post-rock seemed likely to produce platinum records, the attitude they demonstrated towards music seemed to hold more diffuse commercial potential. For one thing, their preference for extended instrumental passages made their music well suited for use in soundtracks and commercials, where vocal-driven rock and roll songs have often proved too distracting. But it was the rejection of rock and roll’s foundational premises that most excited the people promoting a post-rock sensibility. Whereas traditional rock had marginalized other genres of music, artists like Tortoise and Moby seemed intent on dissolving the boundaries that kept those genres apart. The expansion of musical possibilities made possible by this shift was breathtaking.

As an added benefit, post-rock opened up record labels’ extensive back catalogues for a fresh look. Just as hip-hop’s use of sampling had revived interest in funk and soul tracks from the 1960s and 1970s, post-rock’s refusal to reject genres for failing to meet a rock standard encouraged listeners to seek out older material, not in a historicist mode, but as music that was capable, in the right context, of sounding completely contemporary. If the break that Elvis Presley marked in the mid-1950s had made even the popular music of a few years earlier seem irredeemably dated for the younger generation, post-rock seemed poised to usher in an era in which the distinction between pre-rock and rock no longer held much significance.

In the end, though, post-rock did not prove to have the impact that its supporters had hoped. Although it pointed the way towards a new cultural sensibility, its leading lights were too dim to transform the music industry to a meaningful extent. As it turned out, the crisis in self-understanding that post-rock had signalled proved to be a prophecy whose full meaning could not be immediately discerned. In his remarkable 1977 book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, the French thinker Jacques Attali inverts traditional leftist thinking in arguing that changes in music often anticipate changes in the social order rather than merely reflecting them after the fact. While post-rock may not be the sort of music he had in mind, his suggestive comments about the revolutionary potential in free jazz – a major influence on some post-rock luminaries – make it possible, without distorting his ideas egregiously, to claim that the radical structural transformation that we have been witnessing in the music industry was prefigured, both in post-rock’s rejection of traditional notions of genre and in the reluctance to pursue stardom exhibited by most of its practitioners.

That being said, there’s no doubt that the major factor in this structural transformation was the technological progress that made music available on the internet. But it is worth nothing that, long before Napster, MySpace and YouTube came on the scene, astute critics had imagined the future that those services would later make flesh. In his comments on the future of composition, written a number of years before the development of the compact disc became a hot topic, Attali himself proves remarkably prescient. “The consumer, completing the mutation that began with the tape recorder and photography, will thus become a producer and will derive at least as much of his satsisfaction from the manufacturing process itself as from the object he produces.” Interestingly, though Noise is about music, Attali clearly includes the manipulation of images in his conception of composition, a sign that, together with future-oriented media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler, he anticipated a world of what Henry Jenkins calls “media convergence.”

This vision of a world in which consumers want to feel like producers of their own content highlights the most profound change that popular music has undergone since being made available on the internet. More and more, even the most devoted music lovers struggle to identify what they are listenting to and, as a consequence, also frequently struggle to identify with it. Despite the fact that today’s listeners can carry “their” music around on an iPod or access it from internet sites like LastFM or Blip.fm, they regularly forget what they have in their collection. It used to be that, once you put an LP on the turntable, you were pretty sure of what you were going to be hearing, even if it was your first time listenting to the record. Now it’s common to see people pause to look down at their iPod or up at their screen to remind themselves of the name of a band they’ve heard many times before.

Rock and roll has always been perched, like a mountaineer navigating a breathtakingly precarious defile, between the promise of abandon and the realization that selling music demands the preservation of ties that prevent that promise from being kept. We want to lose ourselves in the music but find, over and over, that anonymity poses such a profound threat to the status quo that its pursuit is only sanctioned in contexts in which we are willing to name our desire. The advent of file-sharing threw the music industry into a crisis it may never escape not only because it let people listen for free – after all, radio had been doing the same thing for decades – but because it permitted them to build vast collections that were not organized by the corporate structures that package music for consumers. Anyone who has spent much time engaged in illegal downloading can attest to the number of tracks out there that are either unlabeled or, worse still, mislabeled. Combine the spread of this sort of entropy with the fragmentation of taste publics promoted by the sheer excess of content, much of it self-produced, that is available online and you have the formula for a catastrophic financial collapse.

The panic inspired by this disorder has given us a  corporate counter-reformation in which record labels concentrate on selling people what they already know and, in many cases, already own. Reissue culture, the repackaging of old material with new extras, such as previously unreleased tracks or footage, or in new formats, such as high-grade vinyl, is the most obvious expression of this trend. But it is also reflected in the almost hysterical insistence in the media that consumers pay close attention to the latest product by artists with established careers.

The hype surrounding Bob Dylan’s recent albums, in stark contrast to the indifference and frustration with which much of his work from the 1980s was met in the marketplace, is a prime example of this phenomenon. So are the conservative impulses manifest in contemporary alternative music culture, typified by the fact that the critically lauded 1990s band Pavement has now reissued expanded versions of all but one of its albums, with each one getting reviewed by popular publications like Pitchfork as if it constituted a new release, despite the fact that the band has been defunct for a decade.

While it’s not hard to rationalize such behavior – after all, the artists who receive this treatment have stood the test of time in a way that newer ones have not – it confirms the sense that rock and roll is well on its way to joining jazz as a musical idiom whose liveliness feels like a simulation, like the awkward stumbling of the undead. From another perspective, however this decline could be construed as a positive development, with the potential to destroy once and for all the divide between music that is deemed “contemporary” and that which is identified with the past. In other words, what the idea of post-rock promised fifteen years ago, the current state of the music business has the power to deliver fully. If listening to rock mobilizes the same antiquarian impulses as traditional music from the developing world or, for that matter, the sonatas of Scarlatti, it becomes pointless to restrict the definition of what counts as a living musical language.

Not that people have given up trying, mind you. From the radio stations that still have a traditional rock format to the impulse items on display at your local Starbucks, there are numerous examples of attempts to conserve what was best – in theory, anyway – about the music of the counterculture and its aftershocks. Sometimes the same-old same-old really is the same-old same-old. And sometimes it just sounds like it. But whether the artists are new or old, the way they are marketed reflects nostalgia for a time when rock was what linguists term an “unmarked case,” the default mode for popular music rather than just another narrow channel in the vast river delta of post-internet taste.

As previously noted, this metamorphosis in the music business has had profound consequences for devotees of forms once marginalized for not being commercially viable. Indeed, a major reason why we’ve seen a huge resurgence of interest in traditional ethnic music is that it is now possible for casual listeners to explore the material without feeling like they have entered a nightmarish alternate reality in which they are trapped inside a Renaissance Fair at which everyone but them is wearing historically appropriate costumes. Time is now so out of joint that the only anachronistic attire would be the sort that lacks a touch of anachronism.

The philosophical implications of this situation are wide-ranging and hold particular importance for the study and practice of religion. That’s why the work of prescient twentieth-century thinkers like Walter Benjamin – not to mention Jacques Attali, whose work shows the influence of the former’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” – seems more relevant with each passing year. And it’s also why musing on the health of rock and roll almost inevitably gives way to meditations on the meaning of devotion in an era that deprives us of the secure identities that fidelity seemingly requires. One pledges allegiance to a name, after all, even if it’s in pursuit of a state of being in which freedom is identified with namelessness.

Fear is an inevitable byproduct of uncertain times. Just as the penetration of modern thinking throughout the world has inspired panicked attempts to return to a solid foundation – fundamentalism, in other words – the massive changes that have come to the domain of popular music make many people long for sounds with which they are already familiar. To be sure the consequences of reactionary musical taste are not as significant as those derviving from reactionary political or religious taste. Nevertheless, it is worth taking the time to consider Jacques Attali’s thesis from the other side. If new sounds can presage a new socio-economic order, what might the retreat to old sounds foretell?

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the state of the contemporary music industry – to be more precise, its increasingly rapid shift from assembly-line production to do-it-yourself craft – is that it presents us with a situation in which the turn to traditional forms of musical expression, those of a folk or religious character, may be a more progressive move than the insistence that “rock and roll will never die.” If musical fundamentalism means the desire to listen to the same Billy Joel and AC/DC songs – and on many classic rock stations, the number of songs in regular rotation is astonishingly small – until one is consigned to a nursing home, then the willingness to seek pleasure further afield, in music that makes punk with a klezmer sound or soul with the sampled burbles of a washing machine, seems far more optimistic about our chance of arriving at a tomorrow better than today. From this perspective, the erosion of rock inspires hope of a new solidarity.

Charlie Bertsch is Zeek‘s Music Editor. Prior to joining Zeek, he held the same editorial title at Tikkun. Bertsch was also a longtime contributor to the late, great Punk Planet, and was one of the founders of the pioneering  electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. He welcomes your feedback whether in comments posted here or by e-mail.

The post All That Is Rock Melts Into Hope appeared first on Jewcy.

“The problem,” Fisher declared, is not that Sonic Youth failed to be the sort of “self-destructive fuck-ups” that play a central role in rock history, so much as that “they seem to be so pathologically well-adjusted that the music doesn’t appear to be performing any kind of sublimatory function for them. It isn’t that they ‘don’t mean it’ so much as they only mean it.” In other words, the band’s artistic moves have always been too calculating to seem like the expression of true feeling. “There is no sense, even in the early work as far as this listener is concerned, that the music is drawing on any unconscious material.”

As even staunch defenders of Sonic Youth will attest – and I count myself among the staunchest – there is considerable truth in this critique. In live performance, the band excels at building to forceful crescendos without ever seeming to peak personally. Almost preternaturally relaxed on stage, they manage the musical ebb and flow with the insouciance of technicians who have turned the most challenging work into a routine that doesn’t require them to break a sweat. And their records reflect the same eerie calm, even when turned up to a window-rattling volume.

If anything, The Eternal takes this sense of coolly going through the motions to a new extreme, which explains the mixed reception it has been receiving. Although I settled easily into its familiar patterns on my first listen, I still haven’t shaken the sense that they could have done more. At the same time, though, the music conjures the distressed sheen that the band’s fans love. The songs run together, but that’s nothing new. Indeed, it’s the album’s “nothing new” air that makes it both satisfying and troubling. Sonic Youth is happy to give you what you expect from them, whether you have played every one of their records so many times that they feel like bodily appendages or whether you’re coming to their music for the very first time, because you’ve heard that they are a band you simply have to experience in the course of your aesthetic education.

Although Fisher makes it clear that he doesn’t think highly of the band’s music, he acknowledges the unique place they have occupied in the past twenty-five years of rock history. “It seems to me that Sonic Youth’s very long career has been based almost exclusively on their being ‘people of good taste’ – curators, in other words, who can turn a notionally ignorant audience on to cool stuff.”  While this assessment is intended as a negative judgement of the band’s own music, certainly, it also provides a way of understanding the influence it can have on receptive listeners.

I didn’t hear Sonic Youth until 1988, when I was freshman at UC Berkeley.  I was browsing in Rasputin’s Records on Telegraph Avenue when I noticed that the in-store stereo was playing tones that sounded like nothing I’d heard before. Intrigued, I listened closer. Although I’d spent my teenage years thoroughly caught up in the psychedelic revival underway at the time, playing Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane when my classmates were fixated on Van Halen, I still struggled to find my way through the record’s noisy passages. They made me feel as if I’d lost my balance. But this sense of disorientation was one that I welcomed, because it was set to bass and drums purposeful enough to lead me through the sonic labyrinth. More bluntly, even though the music was radical by my standards, it still rocked in a way that made sense to someone who thought that John Mellencamp’s Scarecrow was a masterpiece.

I was sufficiently impressed by the music coming over the loudspeakers to overcome my fear of appearing out-of-touch and ask the man working the register the name of the record. “Daydream Nation,” he muttered with more than a hint of scorn. “That’s the band name?” I inquired sheepishly. “No, no,” he responded, his eyes starting to roll upward, “The band is Sonic Youth!” As upsetting as this interaction was for me – no one likes to be identified as ignorant – I nevertheless went to find the CD in the racks and then purchased it immediately. I knew that this was one opportunity I couldn’t afford to pass up.

Predictably, when I later told my more cosmopolitan acquaintances of my remarkable discovery, they looked non-plussed. I thought I’d been lucky enough to learn of obscure music with the capacity to change one’s consciousness overnight, like mind-altering drugs without the attendant consequences. But, even if they weren’t familiar with Sonic Youth, they had all heard of them. Once again I had the awkward sensation of having arrived at a party a day late, stupidly holding a six-pack whose superfluousness was made clear by the empties stacked by the door. In this case, though, I didn’t mind. The interactions I had with Daydream Nation –  it really did feel like I’d become acquainted with a new person, incredibly knowledgeable yet willing to teach me without making fun of me – were so rich that I was willing to put up with the shame of growing up far from the centers of cool.

“Malibu Gas Station” is one of the least successful songs on the new album, adhering so closely to formula that listening to it has repeatedly stopped me short, convinced I had somehow entered an artist-specific shuffle mode offering up a number from the band’s back catalogue. Although it will never be a favorite, however, I find it impossible to hear with unpleasure. The memories of what Sonic Youth did for me two decades ago are too strong. Call it reasonable gratitude or excessive fidelity, I know that listening for The Eternal’s flaws instead of its strengths would be to reject myself as much as the band.

I suspect that many of Sonic Youth’s fans feel similarly. The band falls squarely into the category of artists who have the special power to serve as a “first time” for their audience. We tend to be sentimental about those turning points in our lives when our worldview is transformed, even if they constitute a loss of innocence. Developing “good taste” in the musical sense that Fisher means forsaking, to some extent, the capacity to listen without measuring one’s own pleasure against the pleasure of others. But what I learned from Daydream Nation wasn’t just to sort the “good” from the “bad” in a more sophisticated, stylish way. As I listened to the album for weeks on end, I also learned to immerse myself in the experience of music in a manner antithetical to the passing of critical judgment.

The Eternal does not introduce any major innovations in Sonic Youth’s repertoire. The most noteworthy change to my ears is the more sinewy bottom end introduced by new bassist Mark Ibold’s playing, especially on the pleasingly pared down “What We Know.” But it’s not like founding member Kim Gordon was a slouch on bass. The guitar parts somehow sound both grittier and more focused during the verse-chorus-verse portions of songs than has typically been the case on their recent records. And the noisy interludes that interrupt most tracks, those “bridges to nowhere” for which the band is famous, feel uncharacteristically goal-oriented. Despite the fact that this is no ground-breaking album, however, it still manages to do most of the same things that Daydream Nation did. I am fairly certain, that had I been able to hear The Eternal at Rasputin’s, it would have had almost as powerful an effect on me as its much-lauded predecessor.

Maybe the best way to think about this new record, as well as Sonic Youth overall, is to reconceptualize the curatorial dimension of their work that Fisher smartly singles out. Yes, they have done an enormous amount to introduce worthy younger artists to new audiences, including notables such as Dinosaur Jr., Nirvana, Pavement, Bikini Kill that they brought on tour with them. Thurston Moore, in particular, has made a point of seeking out new music and mentioning it in the course of the generous interviews he gives to publications big and small alike. But the band’s support of what Fisher terms “good taste,” isn’t simply a matter of putting their imprimatur on the music of others.

Sonic Youth have made a point of trying to collapse the divide between mass culture and the traditional art world as well, showcasing notable visual artists such as Gerhard Richter, Raymond Pettibon, Mike Kelley and Jeff Wall on album covers. While the gallery-hopping set might regard this as a ham-handed exercise, intended as much to benefit the band – conferring legitimacy to its choice of medium – as to benefit those visual artists, the fact remains that this move actually did introduce many fans to their work and, more importantly, inspired some of them to reflect on the relationship between different means of cultural expression. For better or worse – and I would definitely opt for better – Sonic Youth has played an important role in the reorganization of the arts that has occurred during the postmodern era. The elevation of comic books, genre fiction and, of course, popular music to the status – potentially, anyway – of “serious” art and the concomitant weakening of the distinction between “high” and low” culture that prevailed throughout much of the twentieth century has resulted in a situation where the definition of “curator” itself has undergone a massive overhaul. While museum curators still exist, they have do-it-yourself competition that would once have been unthinkable.

Even if we factor Sonic Youth’s interest in bridging the gap between different media into account, however, we are still thinking of their curatorial work in terms of content. From my perspective, as someone who vividly remembers the impact that listening to their music had on my mind, the most interesting aspect of their body of work is the way it simulates a curatorial function at the level of form. The detachment the band’s members project with regard to their craft, that sense that they are technicians managing a flow, rather than embodying the stereotype of the tortured artist handed down to us from Romanticism, is doubled in the music itself, which invites listeners to imaginatively stroll down its passages at their leisure rather than forcing them to a particular destination.

Sonic Youth has certainly supported artists who used their music to vent their passions, from Kurt Cobain to Johnny Thunders, whose photograph is featured on The Eternal’s sleeve. But their greatest achievement has been to create music that avoids the sort of identification that such individuals elicit without becoming so cerebral that it denies us the pleasures of rocking out. Indeed, we could conceive of Sonic Youth’s whole project as an attempt to demonstrate that true ecstasy comes, not by living our lives through others, but by seeing how we can live differently as ourselves. The Eternal may not be their best album, but still forcefully reminds us of what their music can do for us if we open our minds to its mind-altering power.

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