From: Michelle (michelle@barrymenasherealtors.com)
Date: Wed Mar 06 2002 - 14:48:01 MST
OK, Richard
You changed my mind.
(More accurately my point of view)
Thank you for that article! Quite heartening! If nothing else, such a
viewpoint shows me more possibilities in interpretation, and given the
choice, I'd rather be optimistic.
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Ridge <richard_ridge@tao-group.com>
To: virus@lucifer.com <virus@lucifer.com>
Date: Wednesday, March 06, 2002 4:31 AM
Subject: virus: In Praise of Vulgarity
>
>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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