About silos

From Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman:

Because in Hendon there are plenty of people just dying to explain the meaning of life to you. I guess that’s true in New York too, but in New York everyone seems to disagree with everyone else about what the meaning of life is. In Hendon, at least the Hendon I grew up in, everything faced in one direction, there was nowhere to get a grip. You needed that disagreement, we all do, so that we can realize that the world isn’t smooth and even, not everyone agrees with everyone else. You need a window into another world to work out what you thought of your own.

Alderman wrote this in the mid-2000s but it has had special resonance in recent days. For example, in the aftermath of the Kirk shooting it became clear that a great many Americans on the political right were completely unaware of the murders in June of the Minnesota legislator Melissa Dortman and her husband. It wasn’t that they didn’t care, or regarded the Dortmans as being less worthy of sympathy. They simply didn’t know the deaths had happened. They’re all in a big silo, all facing in one direction.

In Alderman’s novel, the protagonist (who was brought up in an Orthdox Jewish community in north London) recalls escaping from her own cultural silo by perusing the magazines in WH Smith:

I didn’t properly understand the differences between them. I couldn’t have told you about their target audiences or demographics. I read Loaded and Vogue, Woman’s Own and the NME, PC World and The Tablet. In my mind they became jumbled, those scraps of other lives. There seemed to be so many different things to know about: music, films, TV, fashion, celebrities and sex.

And if you got your information this way, selecting your favoured text from the vast swathe of titles on the newsagent’s shelves, you inevitably pick up other data, almost by osmosis. Even if your own magazine didn’t cover the Hortman killings, or the new Primal Scream album, or Versace’s autumn/winter collection, or which Hollyoaks startlet is posing in her pants, glimpsing the cover lines of the others gives you a few droplets of fact. You may not have the full story but you know these things exist.

We blame the clunky algorithms of social media for forcing us into these political and cultural silos but maybe that’s looking at the problem in the wrong way. Rather than the presence of social media, it’s more specifically the absence of what it replaced, scanning the headlines as you grabbed a paper from the station kiosk or browsing aimlessly in Smith’s on the way home from school, that ensured we knew at least a bit of stuff from the other side.

(Godwin’s Law alert.) Also nudged into the light by the Kirk thing, with specific reference to the silencing of Jimmy Kimmel et al:

About Peter Kyle

“Too often people go to university to explore research and knowledge.”

—Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Business and Trade

About Nero

Here we are again. The core audience for Mastermind is apparently viewers who know that People Just Do Nothing is a TV comedy show, but not that Nero was a Roman emperor.

About The Wire (not the cop show)

I picked up a copy of The Wire for the first time in several years and, despite it being the 500th edition, it seems somehow diminished, as is often the case on the rare occasions I chance upon a print periodical and yes, I guess I’m part of the problem, aren’t I? An appeal for donations (as distinct from subscriptions) means it feels more like the journal of some Trotskyite splinter group being sold outside Brixton station in 1991 than a magazine covering strange music.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that it’s more overtly political than I remember. An article by Mark Fisher’s biographer, arguing that hauntology was “concerned with the ways in which certain forms of fugitive music continue to resist recuperation by capitalism”; another in which Theodora Laird explains that “the solitude of my practice is a direct reaction to my experiences of racialised othering”. Moreover there appears to be an assumption that relatively new-fangled semantic orthodoxies need no further explanations. Two separate musicians are referred to as “they”, without the clarification that they (by which I mean the two of them, not either one individually using that pronoun and as I’ve said before the problem is not that non-binary people require a pronoun, it’s that they want one that’s already being used for something else) are (I assume) non-binary and this is their preferred pronoun; and a piece on using sign language to interpret music performances mentions “Deaf” (capital D) audiences, implicitly taking the side of those who refuse to acknowledge hearing loss as a disability. (For more on this see Ahmed Khalifa’s interesting post.)

There were some gems amidst the lectures, though. First, a quotation from the former Swedish PM Tage Erlander: “A politician’s job is to build the dancefloor, so that everyone can dance as they please.” Which is nice, even if I haven’t danced since about the same time I was buying Trotskyite journals in Brixton. And an article about the Chicago trio Bitchin Bajas, who are officially my new favourite band, even if I refuse to dance to them.

About war (a post for 9/11)

From Nicholson Baker’s A Box of Matches, regarding Marines’ predilection for short hair: “They want to look like penile tubes of warmongeriness.”

But it’s not just hair, is it? It’s Farage with a machine gun; it’s Milei’s chainsaw; it’s President Bonespurs renaming the Defense Department The Department of War. It’s elderly schoolboys indulging in performative idiocy and it’s at once dangerous and deeply, deeply boring. 

(And yes, the death of Charlie Kirk and all the platitudes and hypocrisies that follow in its wake come from the same place.)

About music criticism

In the New Yorker, interesting thoughts from Kelefa Sanneh about how music criticism got too nice. I find two particular takeaways. One I really should have known already: that in 1970, Robert Christgau classified some of his favourite bands (in his case the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Stooges) as “semipopular music”. I take this to mean acts that are neither (or no longer) in the underground, but nor are they selling out arenas; credible but more or less profitable; perhaps a bit more known about than known. And I wonder who from my own collection might occupy the same space. Perhaps Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai, Stereolab, Magnetic Fields... and then I recall that two of the Magnetic Fields aren’t coming on their next European jaunt because of “work commitments” which suggests they have real, dull jobs and the Mags are perhaps a bit less than “semipopular”. And then in turn I recall that Field Music (nine albums and counting) have to moonlight as a Doors cover act to make ends meet. And I wonder whether the blanding of music criticism really matters, because it looks as if music sure as hell doesn’t.

And then something I wish I hadn’t known: one reason critics are wary of giving a proper early-80s-NME-style kicking to music is for fear of giving offence. Not necessarily to the artists themselves, but to anybody who happens to like those artists. And not just because some of the more devoted fans (Sanneh notes the behaviour of Nicki Minaj’s acolytes among others) might take forceful exception to anyone pointing out flaws in their idols. No, apparently it’s rude simply to dislike something that others might like, and the exhortation to refrain from this has its own emetic label: “don’t yuck my yum”. Which I don’t like, but maybe I’m not allowed to say that.

About Sweden

The Swedes have got themselves into all sorts of bother by attempting to identify their country’s cultural heritage by means of a definitive canon, a list of what matters. The stricture that insists on only material from before 1975 being included allows for the presence of Pippi Longstocking, Ingmar Bergman and IKEA, but means that much of the cultural output prompted by recent migration – not to mention ABBA – has been excluded. Inevitably, there are rumblings that certain right-wing interests will be more than happy with this.

Even without the arbitrary (or not) cut-off date, the whole thing is misconceived. For a start, Swedish culture – any culture – is shaped as much by outside forces as by what is created within its borders and this was the case even before our hyperconnected age. A reasonably well-educated Swede has always known about Plato and Shakespeare, Beethoven and Kurosawa as much as Strindberg or the Nobel Prize.

Ultimately, though, as ED Hirsch’s quixotic efforts have consistently proved, while a cultural canon may well exist, attempting to define it as an objective reality, including X but leaving out Y, is ultimately pointless. Any such document is at best a starting point for a conversation, at worst a crass act of gatekeeping. And any half-decent artist left outside should count that as a badge of honour, pleading the Groucho clause in his or her defence. Hit it, Benny.