The Performativity of Male Heterosexuality: Between Beck and Chuck D

Beck Animadverts

Last Night An Obie Saved Your Life: Rethinking The Critique Of Advertising

"Ooh la la Sasson" - Beck, to 20s-and-under audience, 90s

Beck Hansen is one of the major figures of American popular culture today, and quite possibly the most interesting on a number of levels. Since coming upon the scene with his “novelty song” “Loser”, Beck has recorded in a variety of styles and made near-definitive statements in most of them: if Paul’s Boutique is remembered as a definitive white hip-hop statement, Odelay was, for example. But even Beck’s (frequent) commercial and (occasional) “critical” failures are more interesting than most “underground” acts, and so I would like to draw the reader’s attention to some salient aspects of Beckismo, beginning with his approach to popular culture of the past.

You could say Beck is an eclectic, but what he is not is a collector. This is because the Stoff of Beck songs is the commercial culture of the American 20th century, from the ur-ads of American “roots music” (Seventh Son tells all to Cocaine Lil, gains freedom, loses lover) to the most glossy features of the present. Guess what? Beck likes some of it: he is not conducting an Adbusters critique of commercialized meaning. Guess why? He is not of that class; when he was young, commercialized meanings were what was available and relevant to him. (Grandfather was the Fluxus artist, you see).

Furthermore, Beck’s specific competence as an artist is to draw attention to potential for enjoyment inherent in “uncool” popular culture, from designer jean ads to “Tighten Up” (a lovingly-performed staple of his live shows). The “commercialization of cool” bemoaned by Tom Frank is not objectionable to Beck, because he articulates the frequent experience of having to lean on some quasi-cliche to vogue through a situation: and advertising offers the distinct advantage of having been designed for exactly this purpose by genuinely talented people.

Beck’s Risk Society: “It’s All Part Of The Total Scene”

The one Beck record which was an unqualified failure (critics didn’t like it) was Midnite Vultures, but this seeming Prince ripoff (identified by Beck as a Prince ripoff) is of a piece with this program and deserving of special attention. If one listens closely, Midnite Vultures is not a record about feelings; it’s about situations, and scary ones young people can get themselves in (the totally overt Tropicalia ripoff Mutations being an evocation of sophisticated situations they can’t really get themselves in). What Beck does, rather systematically, is draw out marginal potentials for enjoyment in these situations ranging from gallows humor to over-the-top come-ons. The exemplification of the latter strain, “Debra”, is a song which demands attention: its purpose on the record being to confront white listeners with a (slightly attenuated) version of the “slow jam”, which is a love ballad much longer than three minutes. But “Debra” indicates something of a change in direction for Beck, as the open-textured irony of his earlier work is elided in favor of an inscrutable romantic persona. In an interview published around the time of the release Midnite Vultures, Beck discussed black artists who did similar routines and remarked: “You know, the women totally can’t tell it’s not serious”. 

Is it for real? It could get real, in a good way. But it’s also rather clear that the situation being evoked by the song is none too pleasant in itself and perhaps none too consensual on Beck’s part. And so, facile connections are not misleading for once: Beck really is something like the storyteller for a “risk society”, where choice is constrained by material necessity rather than law and morality: you could die tonight for some very good reason, or step into a Hyundai for an all-expenses-paid trip to Glendale. Is the latter an appealing prospect? Yes: “Debra” is a popular item with the female listeners that make up perhaps the majority of Beck fans, it is a song about taking a tightly constrained situation and limning it for a young woman’s enjoyment. And the question of “limning” as a rhetorical practice brings us to the next stage of Beck’s career, Sea Change.

Sea Change: Beck’s Mainstreamlining and The “Pre-predicative” as Categorial

In a way Beck’s recent Sea Change indicates a sharp break with the rest of his music: whereas Beck explicitly invoked the motif of “scavenging” to explain Mellow Gold, and this “low-rent ecletic” approach can be applied to much of his music, Sea Change’s tackling of the singer-songwriter genre cannot. An easy comparison would be to Caetano Veloso’s recent Prenda Minha, but whereas that record is a hard-bitten statement by a “man of the left” from the title on, Sea Change shows Beck growing into the role of burgher. Is this a revolting development? Hardly: when the “chips are down” — when he is represented as being a full practical agent in the world, Beck is without the easy irony which characterizes most of his music. That material is, in essence, anaesthetic for people who are not fully complicit in the historical show and it is indicative of a mature sensibility that it is absent from this record.

But on the other hand, portions of the original Beck persona remain and it is the critic’s job to find a jointure between the two phases. And I will suggest, again following a facile connection, that Beck’s wordplay is none too crafted, but derives its rather phenomenal effectiveness from exploitation of “categorial” features of language. For the enthusiasts, I mean the features of natural language which parallel those features of mathematics captured by category theory, rather than the “categorial grammar” of Adjukeiwicz and Lambek; and, wouldn’t you know, there is actually an exemplification of “Beck’s Theorem” on Midnite Vultures (where two coequalizing “functors” and a comparison functor are used to pin something down very precisely without saying anything definite). For the rest of us, Beck’s technique involves using language as “pre-predicative” in the sense of the philosopher Edmund Husserl; that is, not having a pre-given meaning but not forbidding “fulfillment of meaning” — it’s not all serious, but it could be important; as Beck is no longer “accessible” as a cultural figure, he works harder to make his music that way.

Chuck D And The Violence Of Silence

The Powers That Are: Public Enemy And The Reality Of Social Struggle

Public Enemy is best-known for their well-nigh-epochal It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, released in 1988; but this was not the first PE release. That was Yo! Bum Rush The Show!, which featured a cover stating “The Government’s Responsible” over and over again; and this is not irony, but a simple statement of some fact. This theme runs throughout Public Enemy’s music, like X also consistently anti-escapist; Public Enemy takes an institution which can be reasonably expected to be covering for misdeeds against the black community and buttonholes them, and why not? Liars, that’s why, but this is not a good reason; and the militant tone of the Public Enemy message can be expected to hit responsible parties.

Is this an overarching theme on the American left? No. It is poorly-remembered that the Weathermen, besides being terrorists, were also accomplished ironists after the television culture of their well-heeled suburban youths; they had songs featuring lyrics like “I’ve just met a man named Kim Il Sung/And suddenly his line seems so correct and fine”. Public Enemy is nothing if not serious, and they are not nothing; their music is not properly intellectual, they are simply trying to “move the crowd” without losing credibility with scoffers. How is this done? Very well: Public Enemy is one of the best-remembered hip-hop groups of the 80s and early 90s. And although their production team (the “Bomb Squad”) deserves a great deal of credit for defining the sound of that time, and their political stance leaves little to the imagination, the craft of Public Enemy gets less attention than you might think.

Rebel Without A Pause: Scripta Continua and the “Rights”

“This style seems wild wait before you treat me like a stepchild/let me tell you why they’ve got me on file”

Chuck D and Flavor Flav are not great rappers in the classic style; and although this may in fact explain part of their crossover success, the point to the density of their narratives is easy to miss. The furore over anti-Semitism notwithstanding, it is decidedly not a style out of the verbal culture of the Nation of Islam; although tropes from the NOI are well-represented in Public Enemy songs, the group has never been a member in good standing of any variety of black religious experience. Instead, as Chuck D has made quite explicit in interviews the primary inspiration for the Public Enemy Weltanschauung is the refracted Pan-Africanism of his Long Island youth; the community Chuck D grew up in was none too swanky, and almost entirely black, but it is quite some distance from the black population centers of the Long Island boroughs and so there is quite a bit of critical distance built into PE’s understanding of the New York black experience. Public Enemy songs do not lean heavily on either ghetto tropes or traditional black American imagery; these are not monkeys which signify, they are men telling you something they think you need to know. And this is a recurring theme from Jamaican Marcus Garvey on: but what may not be patent to even dedicated listeners of Public Enemy is that the resonances are more “pan” than African.

In the 60s and 70s Pan-Africanism was a real movement, and in Africa as well: but except in the criminal case of Patrice Lumumba’s murder by Eisenhower through the CIA the political core of Pan-Africanism tends to be elided. Pan-Africanism was a form of the Communist “Right”, such as is generally despised as “Stalinism” although in its heyday the Right extended beyond the Stalinist ambit to include national liberation movements with wide popular support. For casual listeners, the distinction between the two is this: “Left-wing” communists are concerned with ideologically righting the worker’s movement, whereas “Rights” are concerned with immediate action against enemies of the people. They were not particularly “conservative”, and there is much to be said in their favor; but there is a common thread which runs through the discourse of the Right which deserves further examination. (In my opinion, Chuck D resembles no figure so much as the Italian Communist Tasca with his focus on socialist culture, about which more later).

The paradox of Stalinism is that although Stalin was no friend of free speech, Stalinists were among the most “talkative” of Communists; the extensive, inexpensive, and in many places excellent catalogue of the CPUSA’s New World publishing house attests in part to this, as do the many “classic” cultural artifacts of the left borrowed from “socialist realists” who dropped the first term. The unifying aesthetic characteristic of such work could be called “scripta continua” — a simple demonstration that an organic intellectual of the proletariat is not done yet. Friends of postmodernity may raise the objection that such work rather obviously partakes of the “phallogocentrism” which characterizes the texts of Greek antiquity written in a similar format, without punctuation (which the Greeks did know of): but without reflecting on the cultural context of this, the Greek victory over the Persians. Purely and simply, this is a technique for creating solidarity; anyone who resonates with the work is an intended audience. However, this is perhaps neglected not at your own peril; the motivation behind scripta continua is the conviction that the “silver rib of a foreign word”, the unforced force of linguistic singularity, will not benefit the people you care about quickly enough. It is rather obviously a strategy of “unquiet desperation”; is that a situation you’ve ever been in?

Some Old Fool: Chuck D, Away From The “Vital Center”

The proof of this as an aesthetic strategy is that Public Enemy’s music has not remained in that position, but has come to occupy a position akin to that of “Lefts”: incisive commentary with no immediate practical applications. The secret is that this has always been the case to a certain extent, and that the benighted Flavor Flav has been this figure of critique. Classic Public Enemy was homophobic, by design — the majority of black men simply aren’t going to be comfortable with “gay-vague” cultural norms — but anyone still trotting out anti-Semitism should think a little bit about Flavor Flav’s comment “What do they mean by ’suckas’?” (The other point d’appui is just too goddam obvious, “responsible journalists”.) on It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. And much as Tasca turned in truth to the Left when his power as representative ebbed (his sojourn as schoolteacher in Vichy presenting no great difficulty for the postwar PCI), to a great extent Chuck D has adopted a persona more like Flavor Flav than the energetic black militant of the ’80s. Was that a misogynistic pose? Yes, but they had other things to worry about, and it is at least an open question for me whether they were not worth worrying about (I think I remember Michael Bolton doing a good job on love ballads).

Furthermore, anyone who hires Steven Stills to play on a record is not making an exclusionary black-power statement; and Public Enemy’s experimentation with self-released material indicates a growing unwillingness to cater to the tastes of the black business establishment. Plus, would you believe later Public Enemy is exciting music — so what is to be objected to? The persistence of critique: Public Enemy is still not taking it lying down, is still not an appendage of assimilationist groups in American culture (they still haven’t learned that “What You Need Is Jesus” was really a good thing for you to have been repeatedly told). And the question in my mind is: are seasoned veterans who attempt such things to be passed over in favor of youth-culture ephemera in any walk of life?