Comments on: BBC Killed the Radio Star

By: Thom

Thom — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:01:24 +0000

Certainly that conclusion doesn’t sit very well with me, either.

By: Thom

Thom — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 14:54:50 +0000

I wasn’t necessarily selecting Aphex Twin and The Clash as particularly proletarian artists, rather just picking two bands I like at random and weighing them up against pretty much any classical composer.
I think the gangster rap thing is down to a mixture of racial labelling and commodification. African-American culture had always, until recently, possessed firm anti-capitalist and peaceful themes. Maybe today it’s down to the middle-class white kids buying the records that, through some sort of backwards escapism, African-American culture has been reified into the violent stereotype white society once wanted it to be.

By: MATT

MATT — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 13:20:35 +0000

(the hypocrisy being Strummer sending his kids to private school btw)

By: MATT

MATT — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 13:18:32 +0000

my point was more about hypocrisy (and the rather odd choice of aphex twin and the clash as examples of ‘proletarian music’) than whether inherited wealth precludes a belief in socialism, because it obviously doesnt. Although i would say that it’s very easy for an upper class toff to take a ‘moral’ socialist position that doesnt actually require them to do anything about their own rather lovely status in society.

Also, i find the description of gangster rap as extremely right wing a bit weird – i certainly take your point about misogynism, but didn’t gangster rap’s emergence in the late 80s have a lot to do with the development of a non-apologetic identity and with people in the projects or wherever creating a cultural space that could not be ignored? And wasnt the obsession with money etc a result of being pretty much excluded from dominant industries (in as far as being able to make money from them) and therefore setting up alternate channels, before crossing over (like Jay Z or P Diddy) once having made the money? I suppose in the end that is right wing, but defining it like that sits oddly with me for some reason

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 11:29:10 +0000

I agree with Thom regarding having a go at leftists for coming from a wealthy background, though it’s not necessarily true that a privileged background is the only way to get access to these ideas. For generations now sections of the Labour movement have taught the traditions and ideas of Marxism to one another, and I know countless working class activists who are knowledgable about the ideas of Marx based on a non-formal education. Also, I don’t think this has much to do with materialism (which we shouldn’t dispense with!!!). You don’t have to reduce socialism to a purely moral doctrine just cos some toffs are revolutionaries and some workers are reactionary (Marx does have some stuff to say about this).
On Joe Strummer, perhaps the lyrics of (for example) White Riot, Career Opportunities and White Man in Hammersmith Palais, as well as the role he played in Rock Against Racism, are a bit more useful when judging his credentials than who his dad is.

By: Thom

Thom — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:12:21 +0000

I don’t think it’s fair when people have a go at leftists for coming from wealthy backgrounds or having received private educations, etc, when it’s apparent people won’t generally know about those ideas unless they come from those backgrounds (which Marxists wouldn’t themselves be rubbished for ‘being bourgeois’ in that sense?! Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, a couple of others who came from humble backgrounds, but very few). If Marxists have dispelled with the material dialectic there’s no reason why they shouldn’t openly accept their position is largely moral/utopian rather than scientific… and in that sense an upper class toff may be as true a socialist as anyone – just as any chav may extremely right-wing: gangster rap, perhaps the most pro-capitalist and misogynist genre, coming from the poorest subcultures.
Busted also pretended to be cool, interesting, and talented, btw!!

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:09:50 +0000

As far as I’m aware, Busted never pretended to be anything that they weren’t. Except American. Sonovadiplomat Joe Strummer banging on about white riots and knowing your rights etc then sending his kid to private school – classic bourgeois behaviour, surely?

By: Salman Shaheen

Salman Shaheen — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:53:23 +0000

What about Busted? Conservative voting Surrey rich kids. Come on. You might not think the Clash are working class heroes, but let’s not slip into hyperbole.

By: MATT

MATT — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:19:15 +0000

I can’t think of a more bourgeois band than the Clash, despite their protestations….

By: Jacob

Jacob — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:45:18 +0000

Well Adorno is pretty explicit about the relationship between bourgeois culture and art – that is, that art as we know it is an explicitly bourgeois thing, and ultimately it relies on a bourgeois version of subjectivity. The way Adorno paints it, there is this period in which both the bourgeoisie and their subjectivity persisted (throughout the late 18th and early 19th century.) Despite this art being inescapably bourgeois, Adorno sees some value in it in terms of the expression of history in material terms (he calls this truth content – and it’s pretty close to what Hegel calls objective spirit) and because of this I think we need to read Adorno as a historian as well as a theorist. And yes, there is a rather depressing conclusion that art as we know it is no longer really possible. Adorno doesn’t offer much in the way of possibilities for the future, but one can imagine his influence on the Darmstadt school as being at the very least significant if not utterly futile.

We have a similar cutting critique of Enlightenment in general. The fact that he announces “all enlightenment reverts to myth”, and considers the holocaust to be the endpoint of enlightenment thought, does not straightforwardly mean that for Adorno we should simply reject the enlightenment and all that it stood for, rather we should approach it critically (and dialectically.) The point of dialectical thought in cases such as these is to expose the contradictions inherent in what is presented as a monolith, but most certainly not to simply negate them as monoliths.

I think that you’re probably wrong on “the fact his own preference for classical music clearly precedes his theorising” – there is in fact only a single time in which I consider Adorno to write like this, and that’s the opening chapter of the Wagner book, on the social context of Wagner. At other times Adorno is more committed than pretty much anyone to examining the musical material and its relation to ideology – I am thinking here of the detailed analyses in the Mahler book, the Berg book, maybe less so in Philosophy of Modern Music. But nonetheless the one thing that this sort of musical thinking is not is frivolous or disengaged with the cultural objects.

There is no straightforward answer to these issues of popular music being either music for or music of the proletariat, but I do agree with Adorno that any mimetic content is not only undercut but informed by the form of commodity. So in answer to your question of who is more bourgeois out of Stockhausen and Aphex Twin, or Wagner and The Clash, the answer is of course the former in each case but that does not mean that the latter in any way do a good service to the proletariat, or that the former is useless in terms of informing our knowledge of society, history, or indeed future. If we are truly revolutionary in our thinking we cannot afford to fetishise the culture of the proletariat in their position within capitalist society, rather we must understand it in many cases to signify their bondage.