Began with the intention of writing about The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" as an example of a great song with reprehensible politics. The post duly expanded to cover my re-reading of 2666 and, specifically, the questions it raises about Benno von Archimboldi's politics in "The Part About Archimboldi;"* and there to art and politics and the problems of conservative attempts to separate the two in response to the rise of postmodernism and critical theory. Obviously, this significantly violated my '15 minutes per post' rule, and will go up whenever I am done with it.
Instead, you'll get this, and you'll like it:
...imagine if you can, children, that there was once a time in which hip-hop was not considered a legitimate form, and was considered to be too dependent on electronic instrumentation and samples to even be considered music.** But here's LL Cool J, charismatic and powerful, making you believe, if only for a moment, that the rest of his career isn't populated by half-R&B loverboy concoctions. And this changed peoples' minds about hip-hop. The 90s were weird, kids, the 90s were weird.
*As I noticed this time around, the end notes indicate that the entire novel is supposed to be narrated by Arturo Bolano, one of the characters in The Savage Detectives, which raises the question again and in a more intense way (but which will only make sense if you've read that book).
**No one said this about Kraftwerk, of course, but we'll leave aside the racial politics angle, which is not Kraftwerk's fault in any case.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
No comments:
Post a Comment