Nov 202010
 

Nej, tyvärr – Detroit-duon gästar inte den rättvist hyllade tv-serien, och några Director’s Cut-scener där Omar sitter och putsar hagelbrakare till tonerna av Lab Rat XL går inte att hitta.

Vi får nöja oss med en utmärkt brittisk musiktidning om ett konstprojekt – skapat av den halvt briljante, halvt skitnödige Kodwo Eshun plus kollegor – som utgår från den mytvärld som Drexciya så effektfullt har frammanat genom sina låttitlar och sina skivkonvolut.

(det finns redan ett nyare nummer av The Wire ute – det är OK då vi här på mellannätet bryr oss litet om den linjära världens kronlogiska tillfälligheter)

Konstnärerna i Otololiput-kollektivet är märkbart stolta över att ha fört över denna Detroitska krigsmaskin till konstvärlden, men varför? Styrkan i Eshuns More Brilliant Than The Sun var just förlitandet på musiken och dess värld i sig – att man inte behövde akademin för att tänka och berätta kring (eller rättare sagt inne i) techno, rap, funk, jazz – idéerna finns redan där. Att man nu vänder sig till konstvärldens rum och diskurser för att återplantera de Detroitska fröna känns fattigt.

Som tur är består The Wires Drexciya-special även av en genomgång av gruppens snåriga och svårslagna katalog. Och där droppas hetare och betydligt mer upplysande citat som uppmuntrar till ännu en electro-musikalisk djupdykning.

Stinton’s experience of getting into electronic music was typical of many of his Detroit peers at this time, but his dedication to the vision was anything but. ‘I got my first taste of Techno around 1980-81′, he said in an interview with John Osselaer. ‘I was a kid riding my bike with a small radio and ‘Alleys Of Your Mind’ by Juan Atkins came on. I stopped my bike to get a better listen. It was the sweetest sound I had ever heard at that time. I was hooked, and for the next eight years I would be programmed by some of the best electronic music on the planet by [local radio DJ] The Electrifying Mojo. When it was time I started hooking up with friends trying different styles until one night I could not sleep, cold sweat, tossing and turning and around 3 am September 18, 1989 I stood up and said Drexciya . It felt like a tidal wave rushing across my brain. All kinds of ideas were coming out. I could not stop it and I would not stop it. For the next three years we worked hard to perfect Drexciya before we would release it onto the world. Getting into production was not quick. It took a year of experimenting.’

“A desire to have that kind of dancefloor status, to keep that notion of kick drums and 303s and the notion of sequenced funk, at the same time as to create a sense of enigma and mystery… it’s an unprecendented project to maintain a dancefloor presence and to keep a kind of mystique, what McLuhan calls a participation mystique.”

Dec 292009
 

“Science fiction doesn’t predict the future, it determines it, colonizes it, preprograms it in the image of the present.” – William Gibson

“Electric circuitry confers a mythic dimension on our ordinary individual and group actions. Our technology forces us to live mythically.” – Marshall McLuhan

More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction is an interesting, even important book, but Kodwo Eshun either reads too much Deleuze & Guttuari, or smokes too much weed – none of it doing his writing much good. Clay-feet language machinery runs smoothly at times only, doing his nomadic thinking a great disservice. Too many neologisms will fuck up your digestive system.

I applaud Eshun’s attempt to bring new textual styles to the table, but try breaking through to new worlds too quickly, and contact with the Mothership will be lost. Expeditions will get stuck in orbit, in a postmodern loop, isolated from the everyday life of the planet. The text masturbates itself. Author hubris is evident. You need to keep contact with the oceans of ancient times and stay connected to the traditions of the older tribes. At times you get the impression that his cathedrals of poetical fragments, fractals and fractures have been raised only to cover up for lightweight ideas; jewels glimmering falsely, like tinfoil bling much less brilliant than the sun.

Typically, the pieces that works the best are those about music whose thinking and mythological structure is already quite developed: Underground Resistance, Drexciya, Parliament-Funkadelic, Lee Perry. Around them his writing works well, actually.

Music can not avoid telling stories and generating concepts. A seemingly empty genre like minimal techno is about nothingness; about meditation and architecture; like dub it’s about creating space. It is music full of ideas. This is one of the strongest points of Eshun’s book. The thinking is already in the music. It doesn’t need academics. George Clinton invented sampladelia, and he didn’t need Heidegger to do it. When Lee Perry talks about the death of the individual (although in different terms) he didn’t get that concept from reading Foucault. It’s right there in the music.

(p. 106) “The producer is now the modular input, willingly absorbed into McLuhan’s ‘medium which processes its users, who are its content. (…) Cyborging, to borrow the words of Norman Mailer, ‘takes the immediate experiences of any man, magnifyies the dynamic of his movements, not specifically but abstractly so that he is seen as a vector in a network of forces.’”

What is the essence of HipHop? Where did its birth take place? Generally one might say: it’s black music, that refers back to the history and culture of black people. Or perhaps: it’s opressed people’s music everywhere, that refers to their specific history in a similar way. That rings true. But Eshun adds a posthuman perspective that says that the human being isn’t the sole source of creativity. Musical equipment – two turntables, the cheap-ass mixer, the time-bending sampler, the drum machine, Roland Space Echo – also have a parental role in the birth of Hip-Hop. Techno music is, of course, even more radical in this sense (think about electro and the 808 or acid house and the 303). On page 102 Eshun writes:

“HipHop updates blaxplotation’s territories; it represents the street. By opting out of this logic of representation, Techno disappears itself from the street, the ghetto and the hood. Drexciya doesn’t represent Detroit the same way Mobb Deep insist they represent Staten Island (sic!).”

Eshun loses me a bit here. Bedroom producers might have made some innovative works in the world of techno music (Drexciya, AFX, etc.), but they would be nothing without the scene, the electro and acid clubs and parties, that is – the streets. That’s what’s given them energy. The streets are essential: it’s where people meet. And as long as we have community, we will have some sort of representation. We can never leave the streets. But we can leave the industry, the inner-city clubs, the traps of fame and professionalism.

(p. 103) “Cybotron’s Techno City, like all these possibility spaces, is Sonic Fiction: electronic fiction, with frequencies fictionalized, synthesized and organized into escape routes. (…) Which is why you should always laugh in the face of those producers , djs and journalists who sneer at escapism for its unreality, for its fakeness; all those who strain to keep it real. (…) Sonic Fiction strands you in the present with no way of getting back to the 70s. Sonic Fiction is the first stage of a reentry program which grasps this very clearly. Sonic Fictions are part of modern music’s MythSystems. Moving through living space, real-world environments that are already alien. Operating instructions for the escape route from yourself. Overthrow the Internal Empire of your head. Secede from the stupidity of intelligence, the inertia of good taste, the rigor mortis of cool. You’re born into a rigged prison which the jailors term Real Life. Sonic Fiction is the manual for your own offworld break-out, reentry program, for entering Earth’s orbit and touching down on the landing strips of your senses.”

(p. 85) “Electro is an E-Z learn induction into the militarization of pop life, the sensualizing of militarization, the enhanced sensorium of locking into the Futurhythmachine.”

(p. 119) “From arcadegames to the Net to simulation games, civil society is the low end research-and-development unit of the military. Techno has the nomad’s edge over HipHop’s hypervisible trooper forever crucified in the crosshair of the gunsight.”

The urban prairies of a downsized and crime-ridden Detroit gave musical scientists a perfect backdrop for experiments in cold, weightless futurism, in a way similar to how Kraftwerk had laid the foundation for a new consciousness among the generation growing up after the Second World War. A new powerful music was needed to fill the catastrophic vacuum. Detroit answered Kraftwerk’s coldly bitter and beautiful anthem We Are The Robots by saying: “We are the aliens” (work and alienation: two reoccuring themes in electronic music).

The visionary quality of Juan Atkins and UR would not come forth as naturally in New York or Los Angeles. Techno doesn’t abandon the streets, but its mode of representation is different. Instead of fighting over old turfs, techno creates new spaces. While HipHop constantly refers to and rewrites its history, electronic music aims for “an empty future waiting to be populated.”

“UR realised that their was little point in ‘exposing the reality’ of social deprivation and inequality – why bother, when that reality was already depressingly well known? Instead they used fictions to diagram the way in which social reality as it is experienced is a second-order effect of more abstract processes: a war between programmers and fugitives, between overground normality and underground gnosis, between a history given over to atrocity and exploitation and an empty future waiting to be populated.

UR started at the end of the 1980s, at the very moment when the End of History was being proclaimed. They immediately understood that, when the Cold War ended, political struggle would get even colder and cultivated an estranging, alienating distance.”

(from The Wire, number 285, nov, 2007)

HipHop being born in New York surely has something to do with its intense mix of cultures (and especially a Jamaican influence – that is after all where the battles, the DJ:s, the MC:s and the soundsystems were imported from). A comment on BLUNT RAPPS adds another important social aspect to our story of modern music (by way of a book by Tricia Rose):

“kids of that period and location were geared towards a manufacturing based economy, whereas they found themselves in what is called post industrialized society. So you get Herc being trained as an auto mechanic in vocational school messing around with his father’s system, Flash similarly schooled making his own cross fader, stuff like that. It’s easy to see that hands-on interest in fucking around with (often obsolete) technology linking to futurism and space rap and electro, currents which have apparently stayed in the ether ’til today. Also tempting to link it to PE’s soundscapes as a representation of a political landscape, or NWA’s as a geographical/political one, as in the same refusal to be left for dead in the ass-end of the system”.

This social angle is needed to balance Eshun’s powerful hybrid of musical myths and conceptual hubris. It’s up to us to expand upon these perspectives, and especially in praxis.

Nov 242009
 

In the chapter Sampladelia of the Breakbeat from Kodwo Eshun‘s interesting book More Brilliant Than The Sun the author highlights a development from Public Enemy’s militant paranoia to the slowed-down, full-blown street life hallucinations of Cypress Hill’s Illusions and Sunz of Man’s Soldiers Of Darkness. These are the two first stages of paranoia in rap music.

Eshun’s prose is more than ten years old by now. Today a third paradigm is visible; from the political, to the mystical, to another set of politics. The enemies have remained the same – the government, the police, the record industry, traitors. Chuck D, Ice-T and Ice Cube feared for the loss of their freedom, artists in the next decade fought a battle for their soul – the biblical 2pac, Biggies bleak visions of Life After Death, a praying DMX, the existensial angst of Big Pun, the battle-ready mysticism-futurism and sad soulfulness of Wu-Tang, the post-Native Tounges spiritualism of Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Common, Black Thought. Most popular rappers these days seem to be more concerned with their money being taken away from them.

The struggle for economic independence and creative control (Company Flow, The Arsonists, Non Phixion) that closed of the last millenium was quite effectively recoded into a quest for dollars (50 Cent, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne and the underground rappers following them). Both the political and the spiritual-cultural has been pushed to the side. (Of course, we’re not talking definite categories here, but paradigms.)

In the bigger picture we can see that the initial call for social change (MLK, Malcolm X, The Black Panther Party, etc.) was persecuted and beat down and transformed into religious, criminal and antisocial activities. This immense energy invested in bettering ones life and reaching for freedom and independence was rehabilitated into the capitalsit system through self-employment, the hustler gestalt, the propaganda for private profits and a preferance for surface, not substace… swagger, not skills, storytelling, ultramagnetism.

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