"Here another kind of sensuality, another kind of sensitiveness, and another kind of cheerfulness make their appeal. This music is gay, but not in a French or German way. Its gaiety is African..." Nietzsche
Socrates …In the course of my life I have often had intimations in dreams "that I should make music." The same dream came to me sometimes in one form, and sometimes in another, but always saying the same or nearly the same words: Make and cultivate music, said the dream. And hitherto I had imagined that this was only intended to exhort and encourage me in the study of philosophy, which has always been the pursuit of my life, and is the noblest and best of music. The dream was bidding me to do what I was already doing, in the same way that the competitor in a race is bidden by the spectators to run when he is already running. But I was not certain of this, as the dream might have meant music in the popular sense of the word, and being under sentence of death, and the festival giving me a respite, I thought that I should be safer if I satisfied the scruple, and, in obedience to the dream, composed a few verses before I departed.
From a fragment in a slow and long work in progress, In Public:
At around noon, dark clouds gathered in the south, and strong winds rushed through trees, raised dead leaves, and made pedestrians nervous—something could suddenly fall out of nowhere (a telephone pole, a crane, a satellite dish) and crush us out of our only existence. In the sky just above the statue of the 13th century Buddhist monk Shinran Shonin, on 15th and Main, a flock of seagulls seemed to be playing with the force of this wind, which, for reasons that might be geographic or purely meteorological, seemed stronger there than elsewhere. Each seagull would, with all its bird strength, fly into the wind and then, as if switching off its flying power, be blown backward by the wind. The wind not only blew the bird back like a lifeless kite but also, after a moment, sent it tumbling earthward. Just before crashing in the park that was watched by the stone form of Shonin, the seagull would re-ignite its strength and fly up and into the wind again. These birds were enjoying themselves. But even more than that: they were philosophizing. It was Socrates in the "Phaedo" who called philosophy "the practice of death," practicing for the moment the soul is liberated from the body and returns to the forms, the light, to the eternal, the Sukhavati (the Pure Land of Shonin's Buddhism). But this death practicing is not sad business, it is, as the birds make so clear, joyful and fun.
Shadows Last night, my dream happened to be in this movie. Is there a more hip American film than Shadows? Its state (jazz cinema) of hipness is near (or is) perfect.
Ludwig Concerning a conversation with Golob that happened moments before the packed Gong Show began on Saturday night in the Chop Suey:
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
This simple passage from the closing (and best) pages of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus says what I failed to express during our discussion. My goal was to somehow connect this understanding of eternity with the fact of biological replication. Biological replication is an effort to mirror the present, which is timeless and limitless. This idea is also expressed in the heart of The Symposium. This is Diotima's revelation. Why replicate? Because all things aspire to the condition of the now, the present.
The problem I have with my poorly expressed idea (biological processes as a--weak--mirror of the present) is it revives the mystical. To think of the physical as aspiring to the present is to regenerate dead Aristotelian/scholastic concepts of sympathy and affinity. That is one problem. Another is the of end of this aspiring is closely related to the end of Phenomenology of the Spirit--the mystical absolute. How does one remove the "transcendental moonlight" from this idea?
Our purpose on this living planet might very well be the production of pictures like this:
According to the BBC:
The world’s most powerful optical telescope has opened both of its eyes.
Astronomers at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona have released the first images taken using its two giant 8m diameter mirrors.
The detailed pictures show a spiral galaxy located 102 million light-years away from the Milky Way.
What does all of this mean? Not that humans can see the universe and record its happenings, but that the universe itself has the ability to see and think of itself. The universe not only produces stars, it produces thoughts about those stars and other cosmic events. The meaning of human beings is to be the means by which the universe thinks and records itself. We were made for the universe to see the universe.
It’s common to describe the affect that dub has on one’s senses as aquatic. Dub, however, is not watery but atmospheric. Dub is nothing else than what we experience during course of an ordinary day. A day is never clear. A day is an amazing light show. Light is bent and distorted by distance, dust particles, random hexagonal ice crystals, heating gases, and the vibrations of vapors. Sunlight bounces from droplet to droplet. Blue rays concentrate here. Orange rays disperse there. The shadows, sun ripples, sun dogs, fog, smog, solar halos, coronas, mountains of clouds, glories, rainbows, inferior mirages, superior mirages, green flashes--what we daily see in our agitated atmosphere has its match in what hear in the agitated sounds of dub. Was ist dub? Dub is a day.
Let's take a moment to think about Cybotron's "Clear." We know that "Clear" is to hiphop/techno what Blade Runner is to sci-fi cinema and Neuromancer is to cyberpunk. All three appeared between 1981 and 1982. All three were plugged into the emerging global brain. But let's consider "Clear" against another piece of 80s pop, Ziggy Marely's "Tomorrow People."
At the end of "Tomorrow People," Ziggy makes this declaration: "Don't know your past/don't know your future." A corresponding meaning to Ziggy's declaration can be found at the end of the eleventh thesis of Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History: "...[T]o assign to the working class the role of redeemer of future generations [is to cut] the sinews of its greatest strength. This training [makes] the working class forget its hatred and spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren." As the father of Ziggy put it: "Every time I hear the crack of the whip/My blood runs cold..." The point: If you want to know the future, you must remember that whip. A revolution, social transformation, is nourished by the memory of enslavement.
But Cybotron's "Clear" imagines a completely different kind of social revolution. For Juan Atkin's first sonic program/fiction, the past must be deleted and the future must be total. For "Clear," only tomorrow is "a brighter day." The dark past--with its whips, slave ships, economic hardships--is a loss from which nothing can be recovered. To completely welcome tomorrow, your mind will be cleared.
"Clear," and the techno program in general, is more radical in many ways than "Tomorrow People," and the rasta program in general. "I don't want to go to another planet. I want to save this one," says the boy at the beginning of the video for "Tomorrow People." Precisely the opposite for techno heads! In a state of essence, techno has no interest in saving this planet; it wants to go to another world.
A hiphop that aspires for the national stage is a hiphop that must dilute its substance. We can see an example of this in Black Eyed Peas: the substance of their hiphop at the local, LA, level is not the same as their hiphop at a national level. And the group made the transition from one to the other with the understanding that a local form of hiphop can not survive in that state on the national stage. So, a truth: you can have static and innovative hiphop at a local level; you can only have static hiphop on a national level.
Also, the transition from rapper/DJ mode to the rapper/beat market system results from the movement that leaves the local for the national. Hiphop, then, can not in all honesty (or in a state of honesty) be national; its home can only be local. Even a group like Common Market, which focuses on global issues and parallels its political views with those of the global justice movement, is still local because the political views the duo represents dominate the liberal and progressive discourses of its city or region.
Finally, hiphop can not happen in an arena; it is a music for basements and clubs. The national and mega concerts empty the music to such an extent that, as is the case of Kanye Omari West, it is not hiphop anymore.
The principles: keep local and keep the crowds small. Only listen to local hiphop (by local, I mean hiphop that is made with the local in mind), and stay away from mega shows. Think of the local as a storefront church; and the national as a megachurch.
The more you apply these principles, the closer you will be to the truth of hiphop. And hiphop, like all other cultural practices, has its truths.
Lines floating in my head recently: "Why is the bedroom so cold?" (Joy Division) One of the saddest questions in the English language. "Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box. Religion is the smile on a dog." (Edie Brickell) 3000 years of thought and speculation is reduced to the smile on a dog. And dogs don't even smile. Why do people hate philosophy so much? Why do people hate God so much? Another song puts God in the back of a bus. Yet another song puts God in the situation of a man who underperforms ("God, sometimes you just don't come through"). When will pop give Western philosophy and theology the respect it deserves?
"I'd rather have Jesus than silver or gold." (Jim Reeves) The man who sang these words, Reeves, died because he thought he was flying up but was in fact flying down. His small plane was turned upside down by a sudden storm. He saw the world all wrong. Heaven and hell were playing tricks on him. He pulled up and flew into the ground.
"What more can I say?" (Audio Two) The last sentence in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence."
Good news! Greg Tate is coming to EMP's Pop Conference. There is no other reason why I write for a weekly than the work Tate produced for The Village Voice in the 80s and 90s. True, I do not agree with his position on Miles Davis' late work (on that point I side with another hero, Stanley Crouch), but Tate's pieces on hiphop and contemporary black culture in general overflow with brilliant insights and ideas.
Sadly, I will miss Tate's reading because at the moment he is talking about his thing, I will be taking about my thing. And my thing will Linton Kwesi Johnson.
The dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson still gives me the intoxication of the revolutionary mood. Wine and Kwesi always get me drunk.
The stars, the sharp shoes, the MJ hair, the popping, the locking, the computers, the interior of the space ship--"the future, the future, the future is here":
Banished from this 1998 video for NTM's hit "That's My People" are dancing/sexy women. The video has no sex in it. It is not selling sex, or the erotic bubbles of a good time, or the Amazonian pleasures of rump shaking. The video is about the stern (severe, spiritual, refined) realm of the b-boy. A pack of French b-boy's roam the empty spaces of the underground and the night streets of Paris. What is on their mind is not their money; nor is money on their mind. Their mind is on the city (in the way the city is on the mind of a flâneur), their rhymes, their art, their political struggles with the forces of the law and the global market system. The b-boy's mood in its most ideal condition is cold and sexless. The fall of the b-boy begins when LL Cool J declares he needs love.
In the late 80s, a heap of dumb love/sex songs had made him irrelevant and he desperately needed to come back to the core of things, the source, the purpose of hiphop. But the first line of his comeback track, "Mama Said Knock You Out," declares: "Don't call it a comeback!" He tells us not to call it what it is. What he says and what he knows are not united. What we know and what he says are not united. What is unsaid is united: this is a comeback. What is said reveals what it is in reality by stating what it is not. Is this a case of what Run-DMC called: "Bad meaning good/not bad meaning bad"? LL Cool J negates what is true and therefore makes it more true than it actually is? The negation enhances the fact? "Mama Said Knock You Out" has a difficult opening line.
Rome just gave me an idea: The city is a chaos that works. Big cities in the Third World are chaotic, but they don't work. For a city to be outstanding it must be at once chaotic and not fall apart. The water must run, the trash be collected, and the electricity radiate to the tidal tails of the city. But what makes this complex emergence work? The combination of wealth and love. A city must be rich (I'm not against wealth but the capitalist domination of wealth and its generation) and, most importantly, be loved. A city with just wealth is as dead as a city without it. Love is needed for the productive chaos of humanity.
While flying across the Atlantic, I listened to Gangstarr's "In Memory Of." Not far from the close of that melancholy track, Guru, the rapper states: "Without love, we would never exist." We can give this statement more substance by saying: "Without love, a big city would never exist." Because the city is about love, the country (its opposite) must be about hate. There is always something severe and mean in the manner and expressions of those who live in small towns or outside of the city. When you see them praying in a small church, or driving a pickup truck down a desolate road, what you are watching is a profound hate for humanity. There is no real love in country people.
The nature of a galaxy is not be alone in the middle of nowhere. At this moment, Andromeda is fleeing the space of its loneliness and approaching our galaxy. In six billion years, the two will meet and create one massive system of stars. Other galaxies are also coming our way, and in a future at the edge of the imagination, there will emerge a mother of a galaxy. Complexity and propinquity are the cosmic imperative, the galactic truth, the sideral law. The force of this law is love.
Asks NASA: "Do you recognize this intriguing globular cluster of stars?" "It's actually the constellation of city lights surrounding London, England, planet Earth, as recorded with a digital camera from the International Space Station. Taken in February 2003, north is toward the top and slightly left in this nighttime view..."
Now, let's go into the city of London with this remarkable video:
Says the man who shot the video:
A journey through London on the Sunday [December 11, 2005] evening after the massive fire at the Buncefield fuel depot. The skies were heavy with thick black cloud.
Music courtesy of Eurythmics' This City Never Sleeps' from the Sweet Dreams album.
Now, listen to the lyrics of "This City Never Sleeps":
You can hear the sound Of the underground trains You know it feels like distant thunder
You know there's so many people Living in this house And don't even know their names
I guess it's just a feeling - in the city)
Walls so thin I can almost Hear them breathing And if I listen in I feel my own heart beating
(I guess it's just a feeling - in the city)
The song is about hearing the city. The city is heard as the distant thunder of a train, the breathing of others, and beat of one's own heart. We hear the machine of the city, the people of the city, and the self in the city.
...The video for this great afro-rock song by Juluka, "Fever" (1980), was not shot in the city that inspired it, Johannesburg...
Johnny Clegg sings:
The night is a promise/I feel it to the core. Young and hungry on the street/Watching the score... Down past an old cafe/Walking to I don't know where... Watching [the people] struggling to get their share.
Two things. A night in the city is nothing if its air is not vibrated by the beat of some promise--the promise of a new pleasure, a new happening, event, exchange, encounter. If you do not feel this promise "to the core" of your being, then you are not standing in a big enough city.
The other thing: The type of walking Clegg describes in "Fever" is only possible in the biggest cities on earth. Clegg deliberately walks with no sense of direction; he walks with no end in sight; he walks only to get lost. "Walking by an old cafe," he sings. Where is this place? What forces brought him to this unfamiliar neighborhood? What will he encounter in this lost part of the city? And you just don't get lost; you must know how to get lost.
The ability to lose your way correctly was designated by the German critic Walter Benjamin as the defining art of a big city person. "Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance--nothing more." he wrote in his memoir "Berlin Chronicle." "But to lose oneself in a city--as one loses oneself in a forest--that calls for quite a different schooling." Johnny Clegg has had this different type of schooling.
I had just left the end of autumn in London and arrived at the beginning of winter in Stockholm. I was 19-years-old and in the last year of the 20th century, 1988. My Stockholm visit was a graduation present from my parents, and I stayed with a baron who did nothing except bitch about the aggressive way the government had taxed his inheritance. The baron had lots of red wine, a beautiful wife, and a younger brother. The younger brother had the blondest hair, the smallest shoulders, a bedroom at his mother's house, two turntables in that bedroom, and, like me, the ambition to become a hiphop DJ. One evening, while comparing, mixing, and scratching records in his bedroom, the baron's brother introduced me to Sir Mix-A-Lot. On one turntable he spun De La Soul's "Plug Tunin'," on the other, "Posse on Broadway." The dreamy DJ then deftly faded De La into Mix-A-Lot's rising boom. I stood from a comfortable chair beside the bedroom's large window, approached the baron's brother and asked: "Is the rap about Broadway, New York?" He removed the Sony earphones from his blond head and said: "No, man, he is rapping about Broadway, Seattle." I thanked him for clearing the confusion, returned to the chair next to the snow-falling window, and carefully listened to Mix-A-Lot's rap about the nightlife in that distant city.
