I Guess White Boys Feel It More

(x-posted to the lovely PopMatters)

I’ve done a bad bad thing
Cut my brother in half
–Little Dewey Cox in Walk Hard

The new millenium has been kind to biopics of musicians. We have, most of us, seen the blockbusters, including Walk The Line, Ray, and Notorious, and these have been accompanied by more minor films like Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, Cadillac Records, and Jenna Maroney’s unforgettable Sing Them Blues, White Girl: The Jackie Jomp-Jomp Story. Some of the recurrent themes of these films, such as drug abuse, became so predictable that they were easily satirized in Walk Hard.

But in thinking about how these films diverge, after finally reaching the (somewhat confused) end of Notorious, I realized that in both the earlier film 8 Mile, the semi-fictional story of Eminem’s life, and in Walk The Line, the white performer comes to a moment of emotional overload that threatens his very ability to get on stage. In Cash’s case, this is because he is re-living his brother’s death; in Eminem’s case, it is because he has to face a hostile, mostly African-American crowd as a white rapper.

By contrast, in their respective films, neither Ray Charles nor Biggie experience this kind of stage fright. Instead, particularly in Notorious, there is an utterly natural transition from the private work of practicing and writing to the public arena of performance. This is even the case despite Ray’s having undergone, like Cash, the death of a brother while very young.

At the heart of this difference are problems of authenticity. For the white perfomers, the “backstage” moment of emotion re-assures the audience that the art they are making is authentic. Cash feels so darn bad about his brother’s death that it makes perfect sense for him to travel to Folsom Prison, there to perform a song about a man he (didn’t kill) in Reno just to watch him (not) die. Eminem is so tortured and vulnerable without the beat to sustain him that he deserves to do black music so selfishly, and to use it to get himself wealthy.

The point here is not to criticize Cash or Eminem, both of whom have done landmark work. Rather, it is to observe that these strategically placed tantrums obscure the imaginative leap involved in creating universal art. We don’t think Bruce Springsteen actually is Johnny 99, but the character lives and breathes regardless. Eminem is a great artist not because he’s remained the factory worker from Detroit, but because, over the course of several albums, he’s led us through the dizzy territory of being too many people at once, and nobody.

When Biggie steps up to the mic to record “Juicy,” the film presents it as though he is bringing his “street realness” to the silky, Sean Combs approved sample. In fact, if one considers what Biggie’s life was like at the time, most of “Juicy” is an act of pure, indulgent fantasy. He could barely afford to feed his family, which is a long way from sipping champagne when you’re thirsty. Later, when he actually had everything he’d been chasing, the songs were both more ironic (“Mo Money Mo Problems”) and, compared to his blistering first album, a tad anemic.

So, on the one hand, you have white performers who adopt fictions (of being black or of being a murderer) in order to express what would otherwise be an inexpressible storm of “real” emotion, and on the other, you have black performers who simply need an avenue for dishing up their “realness” to the world. But this demand for authenticity is misguided, and so is the reaction against it. TI vs. TIP was a casualty of T.I.’s guilty conscience about not being real, as was The Life of Chris Gaines. Meanwhile, flights of sheer, baroque fantasy like the Decemberists’ recent album The Hazards of Love suffer from an off-putting hermeticism. The characters talk to each other, but not to us, because they don’t reflect, unlike a successful piece of pop song fiction, who the singer wants to be, regardless of who they are. T.I. got back on track with his latest album because he succumbed to a new fantasy: he now wants to be a preacher.

In Walk the Line, Sam Phillips tells Cash, “If you was hit by a truck, and you was lyin’ in that gutter dyin’, and you had time to sing one song, one song that would let God know what you felt about your time here on earth, one song that would sum you up…” It’s a powerful statement, but it might mislead us into thinking about the sum of our experiences, when art calls for the sum of our desires. Tyler Durden has it right when he puts a gun to the head of a convenience store clerk named Raymond.

“The question,” he says, “RAYMOND, is WHAT DID YOU WANT TO BE?”

***

PS. If you have any doubt that Cash wanted to be the killer in “Folsom Prison Blues,” check out your local karaoke night. Somewhere, right now, a guy is singing that song, and when he gets to the part about shooting a man in Reno, the audience will go nuts.

Absolutely Fun And True Fact #9: The University As It Could Be

Dear readers,

I thought I’d give us two glimpses of what higher learning might look like if we followed Mark Taylor’s excellent advice about “ending the university as we know it” in favor of a non-specialized, interdisciplinary series of collaborations. These are based on experiences from the past two days. In the first example, we have a situation that brings together business smarts, game theory, wellness, the study of ancient cultures, and an in-depth knowledge of the Federal bureaucracy. In the second example, we have an interdisciplinary conversation that calls upon history, psychology, “guerrilla marketing,” internet business models, advanced strategy, economic modeling, and metaphysics.

SCENE 1: NEAR A POKER TABLE AT THE BICYCLE CASINO

Floor manager: Now what’s that you’ve got, Adam?
Adam: These are my new pills. Absolutely fantastic.
Floor manager, picking up the white and green bottle: Where are they from?
Adam: From China, near my home country. I have already sold about two million advance orders.
Floor manager: What do they do?
Adam: They do everything, they help you as a man, they burn fat.
Floor manager: How many should you take per day?
Adam: As many as you need for your own personal goals and performance.
Floor manager: Well, you see, I probably should take them, because I’m looking to lose about twenty five pounds. I don’t think I’m a fat man, you see, but I am a little, you know, thick. I’m physically a bit thick, and I should exercise, but I just don’t working these hours.
Adam: You could probably lose forty pounds taking enough of these. I’ll tell you what. You take this bottle right here, and if you like them, then tell your friends. Free of charge.
Floor manager: Well I’ll do that, and I’ll have some customers for you for sure if these things work.
Nearby player: Have they been approved by the FDA?
Adam: Almost! Maybe by June. Right now they are on the FDA list for “special grasses.”

SCENE 2: NEAR A PASTRY TABLE AT A BAGEL PLACE

Guy with a greasy moustache: I mean, I think all of this has to do with strategy. It’s like a game of chess. Do you like chess? I used to play when I was a kid. Actually I won a big chess tournament at the age of twelve.
Guy with a shaved head: Yes, um, I don’t play chess as seriously as that, but I like the idea of the game. Game of kings. So you say that this strategical stuff can also work with marketing?
Greasy moustache: I’m not saying it can work with marketing. I’m saying that it IS marketing. Everything else has been left behind.
Shaved head: Where do I get the rest of these books? And how do I apply them?
Greasy moustache: Well applying them is the hard part. Because you really have to make it a part of your daily life. That’s why hypnosis has been so good for me, because I don’t have the discipline actually. But I must have had the desire bouncing around somewhere in here, because I wanted to see the hypnotherapist so that I could make guerrilla marketing more central to my approach. And boom, that office is just five minutes from where I work.
Shaved head: And now there’s a second book?
Greasy moustache: That’s right. And I tell you what. I want you to get that second book so bad that I am going to give you twenty dollars. Here’s twenty dollars. Go on Amazon and order it, and if it costs more than twenty dollars, you contact me and tell me and I’ll make up the difference.
Shaved head: But you say these aren’t new strategies.
Greasy moustache: Well, to you and me they are new, to the general public it’s like wow, I’ve never thought of that, fantastic. But actually it’s all very old. Alan Greenspan was talking about it five years ago. But the real revelation is that Abraham Lincoln was thinking about these things during the Civil War, and that’s why the South lost.
Shaved head: I heard something like that. I love this because it’s like a springboard to my own thinking, you know, the stuff I’ve been able to pick up.
Greasy moustache: Exactly. Which is why these books are like soil for other books. That’s what I call them. Because they take readers and turn them into authors. And at that moment where you say–
Shaved head: –”I’m an author”–
Greasy moustache: Yes, and you recognize that in yourself, the Author Moment, something metaphysical happens, and that’s synergy. Because, you know, if I thought that there was absolutely no synergy, no authorship, and it was all just sell sell sell, I couldn’t do it. I would lose heart.

The NYTimes Says “End The University As We Know It”

Dear readers: every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in. I don’t know why the New York Times published Mark Taylor’s op-ed on “ending the university.” If they hadn’t done so, I could have kept on with the work of figuring out how to write my dissertation without a teaching position, as UCI will probably not renew its TA contracts for seventh-year graduate students. Alternatively, I could have simply focused on writing about music in my spare time. Y’all should be sure to check the PopMatters “Sound Affects” blog for the upcoming post entitled “Just Say No To Dylan.”

But instead, I have to add to Marc Bousquet’s characteristically wonderful reaction piece my own observations about Taylor’s faddish and wrongheaded plan for academic “reform.” Thankfully, Bousquet has saved me the trouble of responding to Taylor’s calls for the end of tenure, and to his off-the-cuff, factually incorrect statements about the job market and probable compensation for so-called “contingent” faculty (who do not have tenure and are not on a tenure track).

I am throwing in my own two cents because still more of Taylor’s arguments compel a response: first, his proposal for re-inventing the dissertation; second, his ideas for re-designing the disciplines, ideas that are very subtly and very insidiously political.

Taylor believes that graduate students should produce multimedia dissertations, along the lines of undergraduate “final papers,” which have been transformed into all kinds of other rhetorical exercises, including websites, video games, films, and so on.

The overwhelming direction of these new assignments options is towards visual media; there is, increasingly, an assumption that visual media (or mixed media with some text) is preferable to plain text. This is not necessarily the case. It should go without saying that a certain depth of analysis usually requires a predominance of text. Of course it is possible to create a film that conveys as much meaning as a book, but the people who can do this usually end up in film school. The reason that most dissertations end up in a dusty attic, metaphorically speaking, is that they are written for a small audience of specialists rather than for Malcolm Gladwell’s audience. The problem is one of content, not one of form. Graduate students could be encouraged to write for a popular audience, but this would naturally lead to a disconnect between the demands of two very different readerships. Perhaps we have reached a point in the cultural history of the West where specialization no longer holds much value for us, other than in practical fields like medicine. Be that as it may, we have to discuss the matter directly, and not dodge it by telling graduate students to put their ideas about Duns Scotus in the form of a theology video game.

On to the second proposal. Taylor writes that we should

…abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

This goes together with his insistence that academia be regulated and reformed in the same way as “Detroit” and “Wall Street.” To begin with, one can only wish that academia received the same treatment as the villains in the world financial crisis, who were bailed out in handsome fashion because their services were deemed indispensable to the society. Moreover, in looking at Taylor’s proposed new disciplines, we discover a very cynical conglomeration of topics that would feel at home in a newspaper’s Sunday magazine, all of which quietly reinforce the capitalist notion of the empowered, optimized, mechanized individual. In other words, Taylor’s naive belief that Wall Street and Detroit are the thriving beneficiaries of centralized liberal planning — as opposed to irresponsible entities exploiting their stranglehold over taxpayers by dragging everyone down with them — is an alibi for Wall Street that goes hand-in-hand with his desire to re-frame academic labor in terms of politically acquiescent “deliverables.”

Consider how ludicrous it is to discuss “Time” as part of a program with a built-in “sunset date” of seven years, after which point it will be either “abolished, continued or significantly changed.” According to this model, the “Time” program is already defined in advance by a “project completion date.” It is unthinkable that such a nebulous “ad hoc” field would produce any radical new insights; instead, after seven years, the researchers would of course come to the conclusion that there are two types of time: managed occupational time, and leisure time, which we need to feel happy and fulfilled. They would cite old studies by Ford, and new ones conducted by Google at their employee complex, in order to help answer questions about how to make workers more productive; they would cite Proust and Bergson in their discussions of “off-duty” leisure time.

The same goes for the rest of Taylor’s categories. Notice how quickly he re-establishes Cartesian dualisms by splitting “mind” from “body”: the former would reduce down to cognition and strategies for optimizing cognition, and the latter would become a faintly nauseating playground for discussions of health, wellness, and sexuality. He invokes “Money” (“Are You Making The Most Out Of Your Dollar?”) but not “Labor.” He calls us to the study of “Life,” but is silent about death. Finally, he comes around to “Water,” the most incongruous discipline, which was his real darling all along. In giving us a quick glimpse of what the “Water” department would look like, he reveals that it is primarily a public works and urban planning department, concerned with problems of distributing water. As a professor of religion, his role would be to legitimize not merely the secularization of modern life, but the instrumentalization of human beings. Notice that he puts “theology” together with the “professional schools,” and apart from the humanities, who apparently do not have professional practitioners: “A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture.”

It is downright frightening to consider how the “religious turn” in academia has been used to justify what ought to be called the “neo-liberal turn.” What on the surface appears to be an interest in religion is really an interest in containing and controlling everything subjective through the definable practices and ideologies of this or that faith. Religion, like leisure time, comes to stand for certain human needs that those at the top reluctantly recognize as extending beyond food and shelter. As long as those needs can still be anticipated and regulated, they can be tolerated and even encouraged. The search for meaning can be doled out, after consultation with the experts, like so many cups of water, and the university as we know it can be brought to an end.