From: Richard Ridge (richard_ridge@tao-group.com)
Date: Wed Mar 06 2002 - 05:05:00 MST
http://www.reason.com/0203/fe.cf.in.shtml
In Praise of Vulgarity
How commercial culture liberates Islam -- and the West
By Charles Paul Freund
Who will ever forget the strangeness of the first images out of post-Taliban
Afghanistan, when the streets ran with beards? As one city after another was
abandoned by Taliban soldiers, crowds of happy men lined up to get their
first legal shave in years, and barbers enjoyed the busiest days of their
lives.
Only a few months earlier, in January 2001, dozens of barbers in the capital
city of Kabul had been rounded up by the Taliban’s hair-and-beard cops (the
Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice) because they
had been cutting men’s hair in a style known locally as the "Titanic." At
the time, Kabul’s cooler young men wanted that Leonardo DiCaprio look, the
one he sported in the movie. It was an interesting moment in fashion,
because under the Taliban’s moral regime movies were illegal, Leonardo
DiCaprio was illegal, and his hairdo, which allowed strands of hair to fall
forward over the face during prayer, was a ticket to jail. Yet thanks to
enterprising video smugglers who dragged cassettes over mountain trails by
mule, urban Afghans knew perfectly well who DiCaprio was and what he looked
like; not only did men adopt his style, but couples were then celebrating
their weddings with Titanic-shaped cakes.
DiCaprio was out of style, even in Kabul, by the time the Taliban’s rules
were being swept away along with the nation’s beard clippings. Men were now
measuring their freedom by the smoothness of their chins. "I hated this
beard," one happy Afghan told an A.P. reporter. Being shaved was "like being
free."
Although it’s omitted from the monuments and the rhetoric of liberation,
brutal tyrannies have ended on exactly this note before. When Paris was
liberated from the Nazis, for example, one Parisian cadged a Lucky Strike
from an American reporter, the first cigarette he’d had in a long, long
time. As he gratefully exhaled, the Frenchman smiled and told the reporter,
"It’s the taste of freedom."
Afghan women, of course, removed their burqas, if they chose to, and put on
makeup again. But some Afghan women had been breaking the morals laws
throughout the period of Taliban bleakness; according to a memorable CNN
documentary titled Beneath the Veil, they did so at the risk of flogging or
even amputation. Courageous women had not only been educating their
daughters in secret, but had also been visiting illegal underground cosmetic
parlors for the simple pleasure of self-ornamentation and the assertion of
self-fashioned identity that lies behind it. (See "Free Hand," page 82.)
Still other Afghans filled the air with music. The most frequently played
tapes, according to press reports, featured the songs of the late Ahmed
Zaher, a 1970s celebrity in the Western style. The Village Voice has
described Zaher as "Afghanistan’s Crosby, Presley, and Marley rolled into
one," and credited him with introducing original pop compositions into the
nation’s culture (before Zaher, the usual practice had been to record
classical verses set to traditional instrumentation). Enthusiasm for Zaher’s
work -- including his English-language covers of American hits such as "It’s
Now or Never" -- was one of the few things that the country’s many ethnic
groups had in common. The model of celebrity he established was later
imitated by other local singers, including, notably, women.
Afghan shop windows suddenly displayed blow-ups of Indian actresses, who
often pose for cheerful cheesecake pinup shots. India’s films are very
popular in Afghanistan, and Bollywood, as India’s Hindi-language movie
industry is known, lost almost 10 percent of its total market when the
Taliban closed the theaters. When a Kabul theater quickly reopened, mobs of
men assembled to see the only print of a Bollywood extravaganza remaining in
the country. Crowds grew so large that soldiers had to intervene. For those
who couldn’t get a ticket, a video store suddenly opened to offer such fare
as Gladiator, Police Story, and Independence Day.
Other Afghans exhumed the TV sets they had buried in their yards to save
them from the autos-da-fé of electronics the Taliban staged in Kabul’s
soccer stadium. A few Afghans examined the homemade satellite dishes --
hammered out of old paint cans -- that were arrayed in the streets. Those
who didn’t have TVs anymore ran out to see what they could get from sellers
who had put their black market stocks of electronics on open display. The
shoppers were looking for a boom box or for any machine that would help
return pleasure to their lives.
In short, the first breath of cultural freedom that Afghans had enjoyed
since 1995 was suffused with the stuff of commercially generated popular
culture. The people seemed delighted to be able to look like they wanted to,
listen to what they wanted to, watch what they wanted to, and generally
enjoy themselves again. Who could complain about Afghans’ filling their
lives with pleasure after being coerced for years to adhere to a harshly
enforced ascetic code?
The West’s liberal, anti-materialist critics, that’s who.
The High Culture Sputter
"How depressing was it," asked Anna Quindlen in a December Newsweek column,
"to see Afghan citizens celebrating the end of tyranny by buying consumer
electronics?" Apparently, if you’re somebody like Quindlen -- who confessed
in the same column that "I have everything I could want, and then some" --
the spectacle was pretty dispiriting. Liberty itself descends on the land,
and the best thing its people can do is go shopping? It was just too vulgar.
Pulitzer Prize winner Quindlen had given voice to the Cultural Sputter of
the bien-pensant , a well-known reaction afflicting people of taste forced
to live in a world of vulgarities. It’s an act with a very long pedigree.
Eighteenth-century aristocrats by the palaceful were appalled when
professional writers first appeared. Writing in exchange for money, they
thought, would be the ruin of letters. John Ruskin, King of Victorian
Sputterers, couldn’t stand Rembrandt because the Dutch master’s paintings
lacked "dignity": All those paintings of self-satisfied, bulbous-nosed
burghers made Ruskin gag.
The sputter is endlessly adaptable. A notorious space-age version choked
Norman Mailer half to death. He was watching astronaut Alan B. Shepard
walking on the moon in 1971, when Shepard suddenly took out a secretly
stowed golf club and launched a drive at the lunar horizon. Mailer was
spiritually mortified. Humankind should have been humbled, literally on its
knees, as it entered the cathedral of the universe; instead it drove golf
balls through its windows. What’s the matter with people? Give them
infinity, and they make it a fairway. Give them liberty, and they reach for
a Lucky. Or they go shopping.
There are a lot of sputterers like Quindlen, and they too condemn the
substance of Afghanistan’s national liberation celebration. Why? Because
they think that cultural consumerism -- whether nascent as displayed in
Kabul or full-blown as in the hedonist West -- is the serpent in freedom’s
garden. When culture and commerce meet, they believe, both democracy and
prosperity are poisoned. As for true culture, it hasn’t got a chance.
Hence, when Hillary Clinton, then still the first lady, addressed the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a couple of years ago, she argued that
"there is no doubt that we are creating a consumer-driven culture that
promotes values and ethics that undermine both capitalism and democracy." In
fact, she said, "I think you could argue that the kind of work ethic,
postponement of gratification, and other attributes that are historically
associated with capitalism are being undermined by consumer capitalism."
Leave aside the spectacle of making such a speech to some of the world’s
richest and most privileged people gathered in a highly exclusive Alpine
resort. Clinton’s message was actually a restatement of a well-known and
highly regarded thesis. She’d lifted her text straight out of Daniel Bell’s
classic 1974 study The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Capitalism was
built on an ethic of work and duty, Bell argued, but it yields a culture of
self-involved pleasure that undermines the attitude necessary for
disciplined achievement.
The man of the hour at this nexus of culture, democracy, and commerce,
however, is Benjamin R. Barber, a political science professor now at the
University of Maryland. As cultural darkness descended on the Afghans,
Barber published a 400-page sputter called Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism
and Tribalism are Reshaping the World (1996). His argument was that
tradition-bound, often blood-based anti-modernism ("Jihad") is one of two
powerful forces in the world undermining true democracy. The other rogue
force? "Unrestrained capitalism," especially of the sort displayed by
aggressive, resource-depleting, soul-destroying multinational corporations
("McWorld"). Their encounter, he argued, would explode at the expense of the
noble communitarian ideal of civil society. Barber’s tome was illustrated
with a striking image of a woman clad in a black burqa holding a can of
Pepsi, the Western drink of "choice" throughout most of the Arab and Islamic
world.
Barber’s approach to this tangle of issues is in some ways the flip side of
the school that derives from Daniel Bell. While Bell’s group sees capitalism
under threat from its own debased culture, Barber, drawing on the critique
of the old Frankfort School of cultural Marxists, sees not only democracy
but culture itself -- in the grand sense -- under siege by an inevitably
debasing capitalism.
"McWorld," writes Barber, "is a product of popular culture driven by
expansionist commerce. Its template is American, its form style. Its goods
are as much images as materiel, an aesthetic as well as a product line. It
is about culture as commodity, apparel as ideology." It is, in short, about
the imposition of Americanized, commercial meaning on daily life, an act
those Jihadists, who take their meaning from the transcendent, are bound to
resist by any means necessary.
If one takes these complementary critiques as a set, one cannot escape an
overpowering conclusion: The capitalist system is doomed, suicidal. In fact,
it has been destroying itself since its appearance. These critics have
isolated democracy, capitalism, and culture from one another, and have each
of them surrounded by the others. Real democracy can’t survive because it is
choked by a capitalist "culture" driven by money and power; true culture can
’t survive because it is destroyed by capitalism’s manufactured populism;
capitalist prosperity can’t survive because it is undermined by the
anti-democratic forces of self-absorption that it unleashes.
In other words, whichever route one takes in this intellectual landscape, it
descends into the same perdition. As for the Afghans, they’re halfway to
hell despite -- or more precisely, because of -- a national aftershave
shortage.
Taste and Distaste
But wait. Barber has a solution to commercial damnation. Salvation, he has
suggested, lies in good taste. Strangely enough, his good taste.
Jihad vs. McWorld made few ripples when it first appeared, but it found its
readership in the wake of September 11, when it was reprinted in a large new
edition. Despite its "Jihad" paradigm, and despite a cover featuring a
veiled woman, Barber’s book is only incidentally about Islam.
Nevertheless, as the United States began its military assault against the
Taliban regime, Barber was suddenly in great demand, offering audiences and
interviewers a Big Picture analysis of what was going on in the world and
what we should do about it.
One of the things we should do, Barber argued, is to stop defiling the world
with the crass products of our cultural machine. Why should we stop? Because
Barber thinks it’s all "garbage."
"I mean, we don’t even export the best of our own culture," he sputtered to
The Washington Post in November, in the course of an admiring profile. Our
cultural best, thinks Barber, is "defined by serious music, by jazz, by
poetry, by our extraordinary literature, our playwrights -- we export the
worst, the most childish, the most base, the most trivial of our culture.
And we call that American."
Of course, cultural artifacts and styles that are "base" and "trivial,"
according to Barber and others like him, are exactly what many Afghans
longed for while under the Taliban heel and what they turned to the minute
they had the chance. They wanted to adorn themselves according to fleeting
style, to hear pop hits, to watch escapist movies. A lot of the things
Afghans sought were American products, and those that weren’t are
recognizably based on commercial models developed in the United States
(e.g., Bollywood movies). Afghans may have thought their troubles -- at
least those troubles involving small pleasures -- were over. Barber explains
why their troubles were only beginning.
By immersing themselves in such made-for-profit vulgarity, Barber argues,
people -- be they Afghans or any other benighted group -- undermine any hope
they might have of achieving a just, civil society. Instead they enslave
themselves to the West’s cultural marketers (or their Eastern imitators).
Instead of pursuing a democratic civil ideal, people will waste their time
and money on a poisonous bath of selfish consumerism. The Afghans were
buying consumer electronics before the shooting stopped; tomorrow or the
next day, they’ll be manipulated into wearing $200 sneakers. If there’s one
thing that critics of consumerism know, it’s that neither Afghans nor any
other people "need" such things.
The notion that there are consumerist "needs" is a founding capitalist
delusion. As Barber puts it, consumer choice is a "charming fraud."
What, then, is the appropriate cultural path to democracy? Barber told the
Post that if the U.S. must export culture it should at least export its
"best." There’s an obvious problem with the list Barber offers, since many
of his examples of cultural quality -- jazz, novels, Broadway theater --
were themselves assailed as intolerably vulgar by contemporary critics who
were disgusted at their appearance. But Barber surely realizes that, so we
can assume he’s getting at something else. He’s singing in praise of culture
that doesn’t pander, of culture that teaches and leaves us thinking, of
visionary art that lifts us morally and makes us better by challenging us.
In short, he’s a champion of what might be called contemplative art. That is
not an art of commerce; it is an art of patronage, of enlightened taste. If
you can imagine those Afghan video smugglers loading their mules with fewer
copies of Titanic and more dubs of PBS programs, then you can imagine
Western liberal critics being more optimistic about the prospects for
Central Asian democracy.
Is Barber right? He is about one thing: The issue here is taste. But taste
in this case has nothing at all to do with perceived quality. To approach it
that way is to run an endless round of Hell’s nine circles, only to arrive
back at oneself. Thus Barber concludes that what the world should do now is
attend his favorite plays.
What this taste debate is about is meaning, the meaning that style and
artifacts have for those who seek them out and consume them. The reason many
critics see the world devolving into vulgar chaos is that they see a world
filled with artifacts, nearly all of them disposable, that have no meaning
to them. It’s all just "garbage": the "base," the "most trivial," the
"worst." But what if these disposable artifacts actually do have meaning?
Does the devolving world suddenly look any different? Do democracy,
capitalism, and culture still have each other surrounded?
As it happens, the 20th century conducted a series of real-life experiments
on just this subject. At various times and in various places, commerce,
culture, and freedom have been isolated from one another, while taste was
allowed to compete with meaning. For those who lived through some of these
experiments, the experience was one of extended misery. Indeed, for some,
that misery continues. But the lessons are fascinating, and the West has yet
to absorb them.
The Style of Anti-Stalinism
In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was confronted by a wave of Islamism in its
Central Asian Republics; it was exactly the same phenomenon that was to
break the Soviets in Afghanistan. Moscow thought it knew just how to combat
it. It started beaming Western rock music in Islamism’s direction, the idea
being that sensual degeneracy (in Soviet terms) would undermine the appeal
of religious transcendence. This is Benjamin R. Barber’s thesis turned
inside out, but for all that it may be its best example in real life.
"McWorld" was really at war with "Jihad," though the forces of McWorld had
been marshaled by the anti-capitalist Soviets against a Jihad supported
militarily, at least in Afghanistan, by capitalist America. Who says
communism lacked a sense of irony?
The Soviets’ rock gambit didn’t work. Why? Because you can’t export meaning
the way you can export anti-aircraft Stingers. To move culture, you need an
array of tricky requirements, from willing early receivers to adapters who
will transmute it into local terms (like the singer Ahmed Zaher) to
diffusionists who will spread it. But even with all that in place, you’re
still not moving meaning. You can’t export meaning at all.
By the 1980s, the people who should have understood these issues better than
anyone were the Soviets themselves, because they had been on the receiving
end of a cultural transfer that had largely undone them. The Soviets even
should have known how and where meaning can arise in such a process.
In the USSR, it was low, disruptive culture that generated a "consumerist"
demand for the artifacts that embodied its values as well as a popular
demand for the freedom to engage in its activities. Because neither
consumerism nor democratic freedoms existed in the country, shadow versions
of both eventually developed. The entire process, from beginning to end, was
founded on vulgarity. Here’s what happened.
Some extraordinary and totally unexpected figures appeared on the streets of
Moscow in 1949 and in other major cities of the Soviet Bloc soon afterward.
They wore jackets with huge, padded shoulders and pants with narrow legs.
They were clean-shaven, but they let their hair grow long, covered it with
grease, and flipped it up at the back. They sported unusually colorful ties,
which they let hang well below their belts. What their fellow Muscovites
most noticed about them, for some reason, were their shoes, which were
oversized, with thick soles. There were some women in the movement as well,
notable for their short, tight skirts and very heavy lipstick.
Although they were Russians, they called each other by such names as "Bob"
and "Joe." In Moscow, they referred to their hangout, Gorki Prospekt, as
"Broadway." They chewed gum, they affected an odd walk that involved
stretching their necks as they went down the street, and they loved to
listen to American jazz.
These young men were to become known in Russian as stilyagi, a term that is
usually translated as "style hunters"; their story has been told by a number
of authors, including Artemy Troitsky, Timothy W. Ryback, and S. Frederick
Starr. The stilyagi constitute one of the most remarkable movements in the
rich history of oppositional subcultures. What they had turned themselves
into were walking cultural protests against Stalinism in one of its most
paranoid periods. All that Stalin had melted into air, the stilyagi made
flesh.
In the years after World War II, Stalin attempted to extirpate every aspect
of American culture from Soviet life. Jazz, which had been played publicly
in the USSR as recently as the war years, was now officially regarded as
decadent capitalist filth; to even speak of jazz during this period was a
criminal act. The same was true of anything American: It was all capitalist
decadence, and it was all dangerous and usually illegal. In reaction, the
stilyagi did not merely embrace American culture in secret; they actually
appropriated American characters ("Joe," "Bob"), as they understood them,
and took them into public. Indeed, they borrowed American cultural geography
("Broadway") and laid it over Stalin’s.
But what is most striking about the American personae assumed by the
stilyagi was that these alternate personalities were built out of
vulgarisms. Mind you, this was not vulgarity as only the insane Stalinist
cultural apparatus would define it, but a strident, studied vulgarity that
made even Western elites grimace when they saw it in their own streets. The
stilyagi were zoot suiters, loud-tie-wearing, gum-smacking, slang-using,
greasy jazz-heads in need of haircuts. Their protest was not a matter of
distributing banned poetry texts; it was a public act, complete with role
names, costumes, and even a peculiar behavior that was intended to call
attention to itself.
It wasn’t only the authorities with whom the stilyagi had to contend; it was
everyone. Being a stilyaga was truly isolating, and the public reaction was
brutal. Their fellow Muscovites taunted them on the sidewalks and on the
streetcars, loudly criticizing their appearance, hurling insults at them,
sometimes attacking them. Obviously, the Communist press took notice of
them, terming them subversive and linking them to criminal elements.
Inevitably, the police also went after them. When the cops didn’t arrest
them, they gave the stilyagi impromptu street haircuts or, interestingly,
slashed their clothes.
Improvising an Image
Where did the stilyagi get their look and behavior? They assembled their
personae from the bits and pieces of low American culture to which they
briefly had access. The men’s hair, for example, came from Tarzan movies.
Stalin had been quite taken by Tarzan and had previously allowed several
Johnny Weismuller films into the country. Soviet critics, however, had
afterward attacked the character as representing the savagery and base
sexuality of the capitalist West. That was all the stilyagi had to hear. The
gum chewing seems to have been borrowed from James Cagney movies that had
been exhibited; as reputed celebrations of disorder and criminality,
gangsterisms were naturally absorbed into the style. Other details were
borrowed from disparate sources or simply made up.
But the truly impressive achievement of the stilyagi was in creating the
material elements of their protest. Remember, this was the heart of
Stalinist darkness: There were no marketers to exploit the stilyagi, no
merchandising apparatus to lure them into the desire for false consumerist
needs. Instead, the stilyagi had to manufacture almost everything
themselves. Their artifacts were the expression of a pre-existing meaning,
of an opposition to the stifling repression of Stalinism. The stilyagi
created their hair, clothing, and slang styles as a means of achieving the
identities they were struggling to assume.
To do so, they were often brilliantly resourceful. Where did they get their
loud ties, for example? They weren’t going to find what they wanted in the
state-run GUM department store near Red Square; there were no chains of tie
shops. Instead, they took whatever ties they had and literally painted over
them, or they cut ties from whatever appealing swath of fabric they might
locate, whether it was in the black market or hanging over their windows as
a curtain. (Prague’s version of the stilyagi affixed pieces of American
cigarette packaging to their self-made ties.)
Who did their hair? The style wasn’t merely lengthy, recall; it was flipped.
There were no stylists who would sell them a look; they had to do it
themselves. Using heated rods, they styled one another’s hair in their
kitchens; old stilyagi would later remember walking around all the time with
burns on their necks. Some stilyagi obtained the leather for their notorious
shoes from the black market, too. They had to peg their own pants. They
couldn’t even locate genuine chewing gum, so they substituted paraffin wax.
But the crowning achievement lay in their music collections. Jazz survived
in the Soviet Union in some astonishing circumstances. As jazz historian S.
Frederick Starr has recounted, many of the country’s best musicians were
actually in Siberian prison camps, but these camps were in many cases ruled
by commanders who liked jazz and who organized the musicians to play for
their often-lavish parties. Prison camp commanders would even exchange these
jazz groups, allowing them to "tour," as it were, camps where countless
prisoners were being worked, starved, and frozen to death. Other bands were
exiled to remote cities, such as Kazan in the Tartar region, where they were
supposed to undergo "rehabilitation." Instead, these groups, many of which
had learned jazz in pre-Mao Shanghai, took advantage of the local officials’
musical ignorance, and played jazz anyway. In Kazan, the courageous bands
even performed on Tartar State Radio. That’s how the early stilyagi kept up
with the music: by monitoring Tartar broadcasts to hear exiled musicians
outsmarting their cultural keepers.
But the stilyagi managed not only to hear jazz, but to assemble collections
of recordings too. How? They had turntables, but they certainly couldn’t buy
jazz records in record stores (there weren’t any). They couldn’t tape what
they heard on the radio. Even assuming they could get access to a
reel-to-reel recorder, where were they going to get enough blank tape? The
solution was a piece of genius. A jazz-loving medical student realized that
he could inscribe sound grooves on the surface of a medium that was actually
plentiful in the Soviet Union: old X-ray plates. He rigged a contraption
that allowed him to produce "recordings" that, while obviously of low
quality, at least contained the precious music and allowed its admirers to
listen to it at will. He and his imitators were to make a lot of well-earned
money on the black market.
The stilyagi were eventually transformed by a series of changes in their
world. Stalin died in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev inaugurated the so-called
cultural thaw in 1956. In the meantime, the Voice of America began
transmitting jazz to the USSR via shortwave. The surviving
prisoner-musicians of the USSR were still playing big band arrangements;
they -- along with their "audience" -- had been completely isolated from the
international music scene and had no idea what had been happening. Thanks to
VOA jazz DJ Willis Conover, however, the Soviet Bloc started hearing bebop.
Its expressive improvisation electrified the stilyagi and their scene
started going cool.
In 1957 a stilyagi dream came true. Despite Khrushchev’s complaint that jazz
gave him gas, American jazz musicians came to Moscow to play at a festival.
The stilyagi who showed up in their notorious costume finery, however,
sensed the inconsistency between their self-presentation and the cool music
they were embracing. It was a bittersweet moment. They went home, put away
the loud ties, and started giving each other Gerry Mulligan crew cuts.
But the cultural problems for Soviet authorities were just beginning.
Russian athletes had returned from the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne,
Australia, with something new: rock music. Built on the foundation prepared
by the stilyagi, the Soviet Bloc rock subculture (complete with music on
X-ray plates called "rock on ribs") was soon to become far, far bigger than
the stilyagi scene had ever been. It was filled with innovations of its own,
eventually adopting Western clothes, especially jeans. Entrepreneurs leased
pictures of Western acts to fans for limited periods (remember, there were
no publicly available Xerox machines under communism); exploited new
technology, especially the cassette tape; and formed illegal bands that
staged illegal concerts. Eventually, the Soviet Bloc rock scene grew into an
alternate world, complete with a string of safe houses that one could use to
inhabit the counterculture no matter where one went.
Soviet authorities tried everything to combat the rock subculture. They
banned it, belittled it, and co-opted it with state-approved rock bands.
They even instructed the gymnastic bureaucracy to invent "official" rock
dances consistent with socialist values, which they then pushed on Soviet
TV. Obviously, nothing worked, and nothing could have worked.
The point of the various musical countercultures under the Soviets was not
simply to hear music. What the authorities never understood, and what many
cultural critics in the West similarly don’t understand, is that the fans
who inhabit such "vulgar" and disruptive subcultures are not being
exploited. It is the fans who are using both the music scene and the
paraphernalia that surrounds it for their own expressive purposes. If there
is no one to sell them the paraphernalia -- the clothes, the imagery, the
recordings -- then the members of these subcultures will not go without it.
They will create it themselves.
There was simply no way for the Soviet system to come to terms with this and
remain true to its authoritarianism. In the end, it wasn’t the musical
subcultures that were delegitimized but Soviet authority. The inability of
such a system to allow its citizens to construct their own cultural
identities -- that is, to meet their "consumer demands" -- was a major
factor in robbing communism of credibility among its own populations.
Rai Spell
Although the Soviets never understood how to use music to oppose Islamism, a
segment of the Algerian populace did. Indeed, throughout the period that the
USSR was vainly beaming Western pop at Central Asia’s Islamists, Algerians
were using their own music and their own cultural tradition in a struggle
against North Africa’s fundamentalists.
That struggle illustrates how broad-based culture, popular and vulgar, is
far from being a mere distraction or a source of self-absorption. As
Islamists have learned, it can function as a bulwark against coercion. More
than that, it can even be a means of democratic resort. Here’s how it worked
in Algeria.
In 1994 a young man named Cheb Hasni was shot and killed outside the home he
shared with his parents in the Algerian port city of Oran. His crime? He was
a singer of rai songs, an Algerian musical style that was as controversial
as it was popular. Hasni was known as the "Prince of Rai" and had recorded
more than 80 cassettes of the music. His murder is often perceived as the
climax of the so-called war against rai being waged by Algeria’s notoriously
vicious Islamists. The religious zealots see rai music as the apotheosis of
a secular culture they consider lewd and impious. But nobody really knows
who killed Hasni. A conspiracist view of Hasni’s death maintains that he was
actually assassinated by the anti-Islamist military, who then blamed his
death on religious militants so as to inflame further an already seething
rai world.
This much is clear: By the time of Hasni’s death, rai music was a major
front in the confrontation between Algerian Islamism and the secular forces
it sought to overcome. What is rai? The style is at least a century old and
has deep folkloric roots, but it is the late, vulgarized form that is at
issue. Rod Skilbeck, one of many academics who have studied it, asserts that
in its modern form rai has developed into a kind of Algerian blues, "singing
of alienation, poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, and forbidden sexual
desires. Hedonism, existentialism, suffering, and total inaction became
major structural elements." Despite the fact that it often serves as
"background" music, its content has increasingly reflected the worldly,
urban concerns of its listeners.
The "rai war" erupted in earnest in the wake of the 1990 elections, when
Islamists came to power in many cities. Among their first acts was to close
nightclubs, prohibit alcohol, and ban rai. Some Islamists would stone rai
fans when they attempted to stage concerts. In 1991 fundamentalists tried to
burn down a crowded hall during a performance. In 1994 a leading Berber
singer was kidnapped by Islamists; he was reportedly "tried" on religious
grounds and then released. After Hasni’s murder that year, many rai singers
emigrated to France.
For their part, rai singers would mix provocative, supposedly pornographic
lyrics with openly anti-Islamist messages in their music, and some rai fans
were drawn to the scene at least in part because of the secularist meaning
they perceived in it. A famous rai anthem of 1988, "To Flee, But Where?,"
asks: "Where has youth gone?/Where are the brave ones?/The rich gorge
themselves/The poor work themselves to death/The Islamic charlatans show
their true face."
In the course of its confrontation with both governmental authority and the
rising Islamist challenge, the rai world took on the characteristics of an
oppositional subculture, reinforcing certain aspects of its participants’
identities. At least some rai cultural statements were militantly
anti-Islamist. For example, the 1997 film 100 Percent Arabica, made in
France by the Algerian writer and filmmaker Mahmoud Zemmouri, uses such
leading rai stars as Khaled and Cheb Mami to portray the rai world as a
culture of hope beset by mullahs who are revealed as criminal hypocrites.
The Islamist campaign to take over Algeria has not succeeded. The country’s
military eventually took control of the government with the apparent support
of many secularists who feared that the alternative was an Islamic state on
the model of Iran. Islamists have massacred tens of thousands of people in
the ensuing civil war.
But if democratic values are stymied in the political sphere, they remain
alive culturally. Algerian rai is a vulgar form by elite standards, one that
addresses "low" subjects of sexual desire through a "base" model of popular
celebrity. It is diffused by way of cheap and widely available consumer
electronics and is a potential means for the gradual reordering of the
society around the music.
Specifically, it is capable of giving voice to powerless outgroups, and of
helping to redefine the position of women and changing the relationship of
the sexes. Nor would such a gradualist revolution be peculiar to Algeria.
British society began a similar reordering of social roles in the 18th
century using similar means. In that case, the vulgar form at issue was
popular, escapist fiction of the kind that critics feared would fill women’s
heads with all manner of bad desires. The United States experienced a
similar process of change in the 19th century. Indeed, the revolutionary
change in the values of both societies was to pave the way for a series of
historic humanitarian reforms.
In other words, the confluence of markets and culture has repeatedly
advanced democratic values, because it has allowed a series of outgroups --
women, blacks, Jews, gays, etc. -- successfully to address the larger
society about injustice and inequality. Such appeals have been successful
precisely because of their "vulgar" forms. It is because they have involved
such emotionally compelling forms as music and melodrama that they have
induced their audiences to experience a given injustice through the eyes of
those suffering from it. Justice’s medium is empathy, and empathy’s medium
is more often the melodrama than it is the manifesto. In short, it is the
broad-based culture that emerges from markets that frequently serves as a
means of democratic self-correction.
Spice Grrls
Rai music has become a conduit for protest against the external world of
authority and poverty. But it has also opened possibilities for other
protests, including protest against its own world. For example, many rai
songs address fantasies of illicit sex. In the tradition-bound,
male-dominated world of North African societies, the women in such fantasies
would be completely objectified types: women of pleasure whom one might
encounter in a cabaret; women who dance, smoke, and drink alcohol. These are
not prostitutes, but rather women who enjoy pleasure as a value in itself.
The type, writes Danish academic Marc Schade-Poulsen, is known as a maryula.
In the course of rai’s contemporary development, women singers have
intervened in this male fantasy narrative. First, they have emerged as
performers in their own right, building on the success of such Arab women
singers as Asmahan and Umm Kulthum, two major Egyptian stars of earlier
generations. As public celebrities, such singers provide new, assertive role
models for women, in contrast to the low social status of traditional women
performers. Second, they legitimize the content of their music as
appropriate expressions for women.
Women rai singers do not only address love and personal happiness: Some of
them have chosen to embody the personae of the female libertines that appear
in male lyrics. These women perform under such professional names as Chaba
"Zahouania," a word that Schade-Poulsen defines as "having the sense of
being merry, joyous, fond of good living." The implication of this role
playing is that the choice made by the maryula is legitimate: Women have a
right to pleasure. If they have such a right, then the independence to make
such a choice is a requirement. In other words, some women rai performers
have used the very objectification of their role in the music to assert
their right to independence.
This parallels closely what British and American women authors of escapist
literature did with the concept of "virtue" in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The rise of popular fiction featured the emergence of various fantasy
adventures, especially the theme of "virtue in distress," in which a good
and decent woman was threatened by a more powerful male villain. A series of
women authors, notably the gothic specialist Ann Radcliffe, used this notion
of womanly "virtue" to challenge the very idea of manly strength. As the
women’s-studies academic G. J. Barker-Benfield has noted, their argument was
that if men too sought virtue, then they must attune themselves to what they
professed to admire in feminine sensibilities. One of the results of their
efforts was the emergence of the "man of feeling."
These women too were intervening in men’s fantasies, turning the apparent
weakness of their roles into a challenge that helped lead to moral
recognition and, eventually, legal rights. Radcliffe was to intensify her
argument by inventing the mechanics of suspense; she involved her readers
emotionally in the fate of her virtuous characters. Radcliffe and her
cohorts were overlooked in the literary histories; their lachrymose
characters and creaking plots were not judged to have stood the "test of
time." Yet the fact remains that they changed their time far more than did
many of their more celebrated literary contemporaries.
Rai music has hardly resulted in egalitarian North African societies, but it
is precisely this kind of force that will eventually facilitate social
change. The potentially liberating forces that are new, by the way, are
products of the market: diffusion via cheap technology. The dangerous idea
that is being diffused -- libertine eroticism -- is not. It’s been present
in Islamic culture all along and is not a Western import.
In some ways, the rai scene appears to percolate with Westernisms. Ray-Ban
sunglasses and backward-worn baseball caps (imported from Morocco and sold
on the black market) are part of its costume. Although the music’s roots are
entirely Algerian, some of its modern instrumentation is obviously borrowed
from Western influences. Rai owes its status as a pop form to the cassette
tape recorder, and its current youth-oriented celebrity structure appears to
follow a familiar model pioneered in the West.
There is a suggestion among defenders of Islamism and critics of Western
culture that surviving moral traditions are being undercut by commercial
baseness. Both groups are making unhistorical arguments that severely
distort the cultural reality. After all, libertinism has a long tradition in
North Africa.
Rod Skilbeck cites an example of the kind of lyric that angers Islamists:
"Oh my love, to gaze upon you is sin/It’s you who makes me break my
fast.../It’s you who makes me ‘eat’ during Ramadan." The same artist,
Rimitti (a woman more than 70 years old), adds, "People adore God, I adore
beer." Not only are the lyrics impious, they subversively use sacred
references to underscore their sexuality and advance their impiety.
Here’s another text, one that actually addresses Satan, demanding that the
devil restore a missing lover. If he doesn’t, the singer makes the following
threat: "I’ll read the Koran! I’ll start/a Koranic Night School for
Adults!/I’ll make the pilgrimage to Mecca every year/and accumulate so much
virtue that I’ll...I’ll..." At that point, the lover is restored. "It was
twice as good as before!" the singer exclaims, adding, "I’ve been on the
best of terms/with the Father of Lies." The missing lover is identified by
the male poet as "my boy."
The first text is recent; the second one, addressed to Satan and threatening
Koranic virtue, is from the poet Abu Nuwas, who wrote erotic poetry to both
men and women in the eighth century. Arabic poetry is extraordinarily rich,
and one of its most striking strains involves the erotic in a context of
religious skepticism. Even caliphs wrote erotic poetry. Indeed, there is a
centuries-old tradition of Islamic poetry celebrating the pleasures of wine,
sex, singing girls, and beardless young male cupbearers.
While there have certainly been periods of ascendant religious piety, there
is a good case that it is modern, censorious Islamist pietism that is the
newer development in the Muslim world, and that the celebration of "vulgar"
pleasures predates it.
If the Hush Puppies Fit
Speaking of those reversed baseball caps worn by rai’s fans, why did so many
people in the West start wearing them that way in the first place? Was there
an ad campaign of some kind that set the model? Was it part of a vast
corporate strategy to instill a pointless "need" in stupid Western consumers
and subsequently sell a lot of hats? What about those notorious, logo-heavy
athletic shoes? People don’t really "need" those, do they? Where did
"grunge" come from? Did the flannel industry invent it because the
lumberjack market was shrinking along with virgin-growth forests? What about
Goth? Did some mascara factory accidentally make a batch too much and invent
Goth to sell the overstock? How are such phenomena born, anyway?
Capitalism’s critics in the West blame what they call "the culture
industry," which makes itself rich by aggressively manipulating consumerist
idiots. The latter part with their money because they have been persuaded
that some truly useless but expensive object will make them hip, youthful,
or desirable, or raise their status. This manipulative scheme is now a
global enterprise, filling the world with what Benjamin Barber and his ilk
castigate as "junk." Worse, say the Daniel Bells and Hillary Clintons, it’s
a threat to Western prosperity, because it instills self-absorption at the
expense of the work ethic.
This critique completely misses the point of cultural commerce. The citizens
of the post-subsistence world have a historically remarkable luxury: They
can experiment with who they are. They can fashion and refashion their
identities, and through much of their lives that is just what they do. They
can go about this in a lot of ways, but one of the most important methods is
what is known and reviled as "consumerism." They experiment with different
modes of self-presentation, assert or mask aspects of their individuality,
join or leave a series of subcultures, or oppose and adhere to centers of
power. It is from this complex mix that the things of the material world
become the furnishings of both a social and a personal identity. That’s what
meaning is.
Consumerism of this sort has been born and reborn many times. The extended
and apparently open-ended chapter in which the Western world has been
wallowing began in 17th-century Britain, Holland, and other European trade
centers. It is still being reborn all over the world, as people grab the
first opportunity to escape the traditionalist boundaries of selfhood. Yet
this is the very spectacle that depresses the West’s anti-consumerist
critics and makes them sputter.
Far from being a drain on prosperity, the drive to create and recreate
identity has proven irresistible, even in circumstances where no cultural
industry exists. Where such industries do exist, self-fashioning immediately
becomes an engine of the economy. As British scholars John Golby and William
Purdue observed in their 1984 study of the origins of industrialist popular
culture, the key factor in the increasingly positive attitude toward work in
the 18th century was neither religion nor legislation but "the growth of new
patterns of leisure and consumption," primed by wage increases. Generally
speaking, workers didn’t start punching the clock because they were forced
to but because they wanted to. Regular hours -- and regular wages -- gave
them more time and money to buy and enjoy the crass, vulgar, and base
artifacts from which they fashioned their senses of self. In other words,
the evidence from the beginning has been that culture, capitalism, and
democracy actually reinforce one another.
The opportunity to create and revise one’s identity is by its nature an
anti-authoritarian enterprise, and that is nowhere more obviously
demonstrated than in the reviled Western cult of "cool." Successful culture
industries don’t try to manipulate their customers; they long ago learned
that they cannot imbue their products with meaning. Rather, they attempt to
engage in "meaning" intelligence, spending vast amounts to identify rapidly
changing meanings; meanings they know will change yet again the moment that
the same public catches the first whiff of marketing. In other words, the
most successful among the cultural industrialists are not leading their
customers at all; that isn’t possible. The best they can do is try to follow
them.
The best description of this process is a 1997 New Yorker essay by Malcolm
Gladwell called "The Coolhunt." Gladwell describes a telling cultural moment
involving the makers of Hush Puppies shoes. A few years ago, nobody wanted
the suede shoes except a dwindling number of older customers. They’d become
passé. Even the manufacturers wanted to drop the old line of "Dukes" and
"Columbias" and get into so-called "aspirational shoes." The company wanted
to introduce something called the "Mall Walker."
"But then something strange started happening," writes Gladwell. "Two Hush
Puppies executives...were doing a fashion shoot for their Mall Walkers and
ran into a creative consultant from Manhattan named Jeffrey Miller, who
informed them that the Dukes and the Columbias weren’t dead, they were dead
chic." People in Manhattan were scouring thrift stores for them; Hush
Puppies were turning up in hip fashion shoots. Hush Puppies executives were
as mystified as they were pleased. They were the beneficiaries of a process
over which the market has no control: They’d become cool.
The best that the West’s cultural industrialists can hope for, as Gladwell
argues, is a well-timed intervention in cool. They can try to associate a
product with a (temporarily) cool celebrity; they can pay to "place" their
product in a film that they hope will be cool, they can try to subordinate
their product to a currently cool subculture, as Sprite has done with rap
music. Sometimes they succeed, but even when they do, their process begins
again the next day.
More frequently, these efforts do not succeed at all, and for the same
reason that Soviet teenagers rejected "official" socialist dances, and that
Central Asian listeners rejected the Western music beamed at them from
Moscow: Culture is built around meaning, and meaning proceeds from one’s
self.
Cultural Exchange
>From mid-century to communism’s end, the Soviet Bloc and the United States
engaged in an official exchange of contemplative art forms. The U.S.
actually sent its "best" abroad, exactly as Benjamin Barber wishes it would
do today.
The process was largely a charade. Not that the material being exchanged
wasn’t good -- it was often very good -- but it was unrepresentative of what
was going on in either country. Still, the arrangement was a good deal for
the Soviets. They had under their control many extremely talented poets,
filmmakers, dancers, and musicians and -- in contrast to the vulgar,
commercialized West -- they were thus able to position themselves as
enlightened patrons of the fine arts, in the best European aristocratic
tradition.
The U.S., for its part, counted it as a victory when a member of the Bolshoi
would hop an airport turnstile and defect. When some American would actually
beat the Russians in an elitist competition -- concert pianist Van Cliburn,
chess master Bobby Fischer -- Americans would celebrate them as national
heroes. It never occurred to the West that the Soviet system was, in the
meantime, being undone by the likes of Paul Anka (much more popular among
Soviet fans than was Elvis, whom they simply never understood). Anyone who
would have tried to make such a case would have been dismissed as simply not
serious.
The West has never been comfortable with its own cultural vulgarity. Such
anxiety is arguably strongest in the United States, which has long nursed a
cultural inferiority complex vis-à-vis more-established British and European
practitioners of high art. Popular, commercial forms are not thoughtful.
Rather, they are temporary, noisy, intense, ecstatic. They are sensual and
disruptive. Because they are frequently set in motion by powerless and even
despised outgroups, they appear subversive. They not only threaten social
morals, but challenge established power relationships.
The result is that such ecstatic forms are attacked not only by the West’s
left-liberal critics for their commercial origin, but by the West’s
conservatives for their disruptive power. Cultural ecstasy may have billions
of participants, but it hardly has a single friend.
For the last 200 years, vulgar forms and subcultures have often set off a
series of "moral panics" among those who perceive a threat to their own
cultural power and status. The popular novel, when it first appeared, set
one off. So did penny dreadfuls and pulps. So did melodramatic theater. So
did the music hall. So did the tabloid press, and the waltz, and ragtime,
and jazz, and radio, movies, comic books, rock music, television, rap, and
computer games.
All of these -- and more -- led contemporary critics to declare the end of
civility, to worry over some newly identified form of supposed "addiction"
(to novels, to TV, to video games, to pornography, to the Internet, to
Pokémon, etc.), to announce that the coming generation was "desensitized,"
and to rail about childishness and triviality. It’s the cultural sputter
that never ends.
In democratic societies, most such panics simply run their course until the
media tire of them. (Drug prohibition remains a singular exception.) Thus,
the generation that in the 1950s was dismissed as Elvis-loving,
hot-rod-building, gum-chewing, hog-riding, leather-wearing,
juvenile-delinquent barbarians eventually achieved a mature respectability
in which the artifacts of their vulgarity became sought-after nostalgia, and
even a beloved part of the common cultural heritage. In less than two
decades, the menacing hoods of Blackboard Jungle became the lovable leads in
Grease . By then, however, that same generation had become, in its turn,
concerned about the disruptive social effects of rap music and violent
electronic gaming.
In places where the moral order is the legal order, however, ecstatic forms
and assertive ways of being remain matters for the police. In December,
Cambodia’s prime minister ordered tanks to raze the country’s karaoke
parlors. Last fall, Iran announced a new campaign against Western pop music
and other "signs and symbols of depravity." And only last summer, the
Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan -- just a few hundred miles north of
Afghanistan -- began a crackdown on dangerous "bohemian" lifestyles. The
authorities went after a number of familiar outsiders -- gays, religious
dissidents -- but even Westerners were surprised to learn that one targeted
group was "Tolkienists." It turns out that there are Kazakh Hobbit wannabes
who like to dress up in character costume and re-enact scenes from J.R.R.
Tolkien’s novels. For their trouble, they were being subjected to sustained
water torture.
Hobbit re-enactors in Kazakhstan? Where do they get their paraphernalia? Are
there Kazakh Tolkienist fanzines? Have fans started changing Tolkien’s
narratives to suit themselves, the way Western Star Trek subcultures turned
their own obsession into soft-core pornography? Do re-enactors change roles
from time to time, or are any of them trapped inside a Frodo persona? Is
there no end to the identities waiting to be assumed? No end to what
invention makes flesh, before it tosses it aside and starts again?
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