Hitler's Record Collection

If you click on this link, you will read a very silly article about the recent coming-to-light of Hitler's record library, saved by Russian officers at the end of World War II. The main contention of the article is this:

The pillaged recordings, taken by a Red Army officer after Berlin fell in May 1945, show that Hitler was a hypocrite as well as a monster.

This rests on the following contradiction:
1) Hitler forbade his followers to listen to anything other than German composers. Even jazz was banned as "negro swamp music" and orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic were forbidden from playing anything other than Teutonic classics. The rest Hitler labelled "sub-human music."
AND
2) But the discovery of the recordings of Russians and Jews show that Hitler did not practice what he preached to his people.

In the most obvious way, Hitler does not need this very mild character assassination. Moreover, I don't even see the apparent contradiction.

1) In Nazi ideology, "Russians and Jews" is hardly an umbrella category as used in this article.
2) Thus, we see Tchaikovsky (Russian) but NOT Mendelssohn or Mahler (Jews).
3) There is no demonstration in the article that Hitler was even being hypocritical (its main claim): he only (informally?) prohibited "his followers" (what category is that??) from listening to Jewish and Russian music. And when? During the non-aggression pact with Russia? The article's main point about Jews is that these records had Jewish soloists playing on them--- ought he to have exhaustively researched this before having his secretary buy his albums? I hardly see how this qualifies as hypocrisy (a charge we hardly need lay at Hitler's door).
4) Hitler's comment on jazz music is a complete non-starter: there is no jazz in his collection. Further, OF COURSE THE BERLIN PHILHARMONIC IS NOT GOING TO PLAY JAZZ MUSIC.

In short, it must have been a slow news day for these items to cause a stir:

• Hitler owned no music by Jewish composers
• Hitler listened to Tchaikovsky

DUH. DUH. DUH.

I include this here because this is a blog about taste, under which "record collections" certainly fall, but clearly I intend something else here as well (as perhaps indicated in the last post, about race and taste). What impulse is behind the charge of "hypocrisy" in this innocuous and obvious event? I offer the following:

• A relentless fascination with the unfathomable "personal life" of Adolf Hitler (in which we would trace his dubious lineage, his pathetic artistic aspirations, his perverted love life, and all other character assassination---again, complete overkill that leads to garbage like Norman Mailer's recent novel): the worst kind of historical investigation.
  
• A strange desire which apparently cannot be helped to retroactively impose multiculturalism on a cultural climate that would not have comprehended it. Should this backwards, militaristic hick from Austria have listened to jazz music? To satisfy whom??? Surely the wry, misleading journalist of 2007 would not have been satisfied.
  
• On the most banal level, a strange project to suggest the irresistible appeal of the censored, the banned, the underground, even when it (Tchaikovsky, banned Jewish composers) is music 90% of Americans would be unable to distinguish from Wagner. That is to say, the most insipid liberal self-congratulation on our openness and belief in the aesthetically subversive.
  
• Finally, the bizarre double project of multiculturalism, which comes out in this article in strange ways: 1) to relativize and "tolerate" the culturally other, and 2) to make them "just like ourselves." AND most strangely, to bring HITLER into this project!!! So that he evidently could not resist the cultural products of the racially-other and against his better judgment indulged in these verboten albums. But doesn't this (perversely) make Hitler "human" and "tolerant"? (if we grant, which I don't, the premise of the article). For, if anything, making Hitler into a hypocrite here also makes him out to be lazily tolerant and lax on his dogma of anti-semitism.

In short, this is not just bad writing, boring, and astonishingly stupid, it is also offensively wrong-headed and finally makes of HITLER someone more or less "tolerant" and covertly multiculturalist!!

Race and Taste

Here are two recent articles/reviews on this topic:
NY Times article on "nerds"
Shit-Fi review of "Vikings Invasion"

The unifying element of these two pieces is the idea that "cool"* can somehow be routed through an exclusively white cultural space--- one not premised on exploitation of black culture. Both punks and nerds are "traitors" to whiteness and the appropriation upon which "white youth cultures are founded" (Times).

The problem, of course, is that hyper-whiteness, or a total avoidance of other cultures, despite its neurotic apologism and OCD-style guilt avoidance, LOOKS a lot like cultural segregation. If punk is "honest" because it doesn't mimic black musicians in the manner of Mick Jagger, it is also disengaged from interaction with black people in America. Because punks tend to be middle-class white males, and black people tend to be neither middle-class white males nor punks, the "honesty" of distancing oneself from the (musical) culture of black America is itself an exercise of privilege that applauds itself while merely retreating into itself, reifying (albeit while ironizing) "whiteness."

[I should add that the Times article is extremely embarrassing, references phenomena that I have a hard time believing ("Saying 'blood' in lieu of 'friend'"), and makes no mention of Jews. Is not the supreme American nerd Woody Allen? Is "Whiteness" a category I am supposed to understand? Certainly the KKK is not "nerdy."]

Stuart Schrader's (who, I should say, is not without his nerdish qualities) review of a bootleg of a Swedish 70s hard-rock band thankfully is more about taste than identity, but also seems unable to overcome this central problem: Neither the appropriation of, nor the avoidance of, black cultural paradigms, is any indication of one's attitudes towards race. Let's pose this in terms of Mick Jagger and Kraftwerk. (We can also tie this to the other article, Jagger being clearly not-a-nerd and Kraftwerk obviously being nerds). Plenty of whack, probably-racist suburban frat boys listen to the Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Red Hot Chili Peppers (white people) AND rap music (mostly black performers). THIS MEANS NOTHING. It has, of course, to be situated in mainstream culture and all its impossible-to-calculate determinations. No one would assert that listening to rap music means anyone has a more sympathetic or accurate idea of Black America. (Enter the phenomenon of the suburban "wigger," about which someone needs to write a book right away! I'm not joking.) The question seems to be, "If backwards, racist frat boys can listen to rap and black music with no shame of appropriation, *is it only this appropriation* that makes me unwilling to also listen to this music?" Mr. Schrader locates a foundational discomfort he feels about the blues. He wants to be "honest" and to be free from appropriating black culture, but sense that there is something else (an "essentializing imagination," I'll call it) that is part of that discomfort. I think there is no need to distinguish, psychically, between the two.

Are the Rolling Stones "based on cultural theft"? If you answer yes, you have to say the same about the entire history of art, a series of unacknowledged influences, appropriations, and even actual theft. To show the stakes of this answer, we then would have to re-assert the tired claim that RAP MUSIC is also "based on theft" (even more literally) because of its use of samples, which has been repudiated repeatedly.

There are experts who may want to chime in, but the very IDEA of artistic theft is a fairly-recent white capitalist notion of ownership that broadly corresponds to the idea of ownership-of-land which was used to "steal" our country from the native population. That is, the idea of ownership and the practice of theft go hand in hand. Thus, perhaps the *most "white" behavior* evidenced by these nerds is their reification of cultural property and intellectual copyright.


* on the idea of "cool," I think even hyper-nerds and the scroungiest punk are operating with an idea of cool, of social approval and distinction within their communities. That "nerd" is the opposite of the cool kid has never been tenable: Buddy Holly, Alan Ginsberg, Elvis Costello being the most obvious rebuttals. The nerd is cool within a certain framework. Thus, I think the article about nerds IS ultimately about a "cool whiteness," despite all of its protests contrariwise.

Ipods and genres, pt. 2

However, it is NOT the case that, given the circumstances under which we listen to music--brief, out of context, digital--that easily-digestible pop music will inevitably triumph, just because it is most convenient. Granted, one can hardly listen to Wagner on the subway, but I propose the following:

Following my argument, there would be two types of music: accessible (we'll say) and inaccessible. Under the former category, all "hits" and forms of pop music. Basically, what one could play in an H&M. And in the latter category, cerebral and difficult music, that requires spending time with, etc.

But here is the important part: once you have assimilated, memorized, accustomed yourself to a piece of difficult music (or a fairly uniform genre), that music BECOMES accessible. The experience of listening to something already "processed" is separated by an abyss from the experience of unfamiliar ears.

Even the most abrasive, complicated, or retarded music, once it is entirely-expected, might as well be pop music.

I can imagine some exceptions to this: a perennially-difficult work or group, unable to be completely assimilated..... as well as a series of assimilations and rediscoveries of a single work in the course of a lifetime of listening, but those are separate topics.

Ipods and genres

A couple of my punk friends recently got ipods, and I delicately was trying to ask them, "Do you really listen to punk on your ipod?" Because I don't.

What does it mean to say you like some art? At any given point in one's biography, one may very well not like an album or movie that later will become a defining favorite. One doesn't want to listen to Marvin Gaye while having sex (that would be monstrously lame in 2007), but maybe that is great cleaning-around-the-house music. Or, let's put it this way: where do you hear music first? and where do you listen to music?

Most people don't buy a great number of records unheard, on a whim, or even on recommendations. The radio, mp3 blogs, podcasts, parties, jukeboxes, Starbucks, DJ nights, live shows, and myspace are where most people hear about (new) music. Not me (I read record reviews for at least an hour a day)--but you can see that these are split between social and asocial types. And I would argue, the situation in which you hear music cannot be overstated. A lot of really "difficult" records rely on privacy and a lot of time--like the Minutemen's Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat; other records just leap out of whatever sound-space they are in and grab you--say, Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder they Come," or Poison Idea's Feel the Darkness.

[You can see why The Velvet Underground remain the smartest band of all time. Their eponymous first album splits between, on one hand, immediate rockers ("There She Goes Again"), sweet melodies ("Sunday Morning," "Femme Fatale"), and Dylan-esque contemporary folk-rock fare ("Waiting for My Man," "Run Run Run"), and on the other hand, difficult brooding set-pieces ("Heroin," "Venus in Furs," and "The Black Angel's Death Song"). This division is completely turned on its head on White Light White Heat, of course; the softer songs are infinitely weirder than the straight-forward but unbearably-loud rockers: nothing is easy to digest. Of course it all still "works" more than any attempted-pop record.]

Point being, listening to punk on an ipod is ineffectual. Hardcore already sounds like the subway and street noise--the vocals are usually mixed low, there are no dynamics, etc. Ipods are fucking MADE for Morrissey, though. (And rap, soul, and any pre-Hendrix rock: any really vocal-heavy music, basically). Not jazz, really. Obviously not metal :(

This seems more pertinent the more I think about it. Because very few people just sit in their rooms alone, undistracted by the internet, and just stare at the wall while listening to an album. As if hardcore, metal, free jazz, Wagner, et al, weren't unlikeable enough, they require such specific settings to absorb.

Not only a specific setting (absolute silence) for being able to hear the music, but also a specific mode of listening (complete attention) to get the music. A hardcore song is so compressed-- over very quickly, unrepetitive, and reliant on the listener to fill in a lot of gaps--that you really have to pay attention or else it becomes one big blur. (On top of already *sounding* the grating whir of a lawnmower).

Basically, music in 2007, when we all have ipods, listen to music on crappy laptop speakers, download and then only listen to 30 seconds of an mp3 before we delete an album, etc, means not only that we listen to music and buy music in different ways, but that whole genres no longer make sense. Music has to be so immediate, repetitive, unquirky, streamlined, etc. in order to grab even die-hard fans (we are the most inundated and over-burdened of all!), while casual fans have everything made so easy for them that they will rarely think, "Oh, listening to all 18 minutes of 'Sister Ray' will make this go by a lot faster!"

Further Adventures in Taste

This blog contends that there is no taste that is "essential" to a person. All tastes are contingent. (See previous posts for some complications of this.)

This is seemingly self-evident from the degree to which people's love of Bukowski, Godard, Kurt Vonnegut, etc. directly correspond to the age of their first encounter. I could never argue that I "would always have loved" this or that, since, had I been of a different age when I first read/saw/heard something, it may have seemed entirely otherwise.

This is why aesthetic "close-mindedness" is so unconvincing. No one is born with their tastes, whether in favorite foods, their "type" of sexual partner, or favorite records: we are subject to so many determinants, familial, social, developmental, accidental, economic, that it is a mixture of wild arrogance and extreme self-effacement to imagine that one's tastes (principles, etc.) are not entirely a construct. A construct not entirely of our making, of course, but even a radical self-remaking cannot escape precisely what it is reacting against (and probably within).

What is frustrating, then, is the almost-unavoidable illusion that one is fundamentally this or that sort of person. In a previous post, I defined the canon as the transcendent version of this illusion: a taste for Shakespeare is still historically/linguistically contingent, and yet it cannot be imagined otherwise in any real time. On the other hand, my 17th century self certainly would have paled at hearing even Buddy Holly. What is real and more or less "one's own" is one's methodology of taste. But I refuse to admit (what culture is constantly demanding--from homophobic genetic pseudopsychology to identity-cultures) that anyone is "the sort of person" for any aesthetic particularity.

For instance, being a fan of punk music, I could easily despise Brian Eno's Ambient records outright on a number of grounds. And, in fact, I don't much care for those records. But if I bought Music For Airports and took it home, listened to it while getting ready for bed, I'm sure it would be fine. And there certainly are things I have come to prefer in music (songs, for one) that these records lack. But I would never say, 1) that I never would like such a thing, even if statistically I probably won't ever get around to it, or 2) that it has anything to do with some ME outside of what I have gone out of my way to be. Tastes are fundamentally "meta"--about themselves.

While some stuff is obvious garbage, this judgment cannot be rooted in a subject as such, but only in a force-field (of tastes, values) that conjures up that subject.

Revisions

Pretty much any aesthetic topic, if you push it in the right direction, "really gets at the heart of what this blog is about," but let me relate an anecdote that really gets at the heart of what this blog is about.

When I was in high school, my friend Jeff and I were getting into punk and hardcore together.

[Brief aside: In a way, here we get to the heart of my whole aesthetic experience. On one hand, few things (Proust comes to mind) will ever be as rewarding as the experience of getting into punk, for me. On the other hand, I have become a complete junkie for "getting into things" in the hope of recapturing those ecstatic months/years. So, the irony is, I love something SO MUCH that I am always trying to find that joy in something else. C'est moi.]

We knew there was this band Napalm Death, who were maybe the fastest, heaviest, craziest band--but we had never heard them. Their name certainly was cool. So, using Jeff's dad's computer, we "downloaded" a clip of a song from a Napalm Death fan website. This was before Napster or anything, but because the average Napalm Death song is like 45 seconds, I think we were able to listen to a sizable part of a few songs.

I didn't really get it. They sounded weird. And probably a year or so went by until I ended up buying their second album. I am now completely familiar with this band's discography, they are one of my favorites, etc. And I can say, without any exaggeration, that my recollection of how they sounded bears no resemblance to any actual Napalm Death song.

We have a word for experiencing something that does not exist: "imagination." I imagined all the music I heard that day. My recollection does not correspond to whatever real songs were played over those speakers, or any music played over any speakers, ever. When I play this band today, I ALWAYS try to hear what it was that I heard the first time, but it simply is not there. The experience was completely imaginative. Or so you would think, except that I would bet $$ that Jeff heard the exact same (unreal) thing. We were listening to the same bands at the time, and were equally unprepared for Napalm Death, and had about the same reaction. We agreed that it was very fast, very heavy, and yet decidedly "off." That is, we were more confused than brutalized.

Stanley Fish writes about "interpretive communities." I would go back even one further, and posit a community of apprehension. This would largely be in the realm of imagination, of filtering new phenomena through tastes we have already developed, and expectations we can rely on.

In short, this "experience" (hallucination) is all I think about. The great irony is, while I didn't like what I "heard" that day, I am confident that if I heard anything *now* that sounded like that (which Napalm Death certainly don't), they would be my favorite band.

The Canon

Here are some upcoming topics:
* Cult films/cult records
* Books/films you "had to see in high school"

Here's something I wrote down on a receipt in the subway the other day (no shit). Additions to the receipt-manuscript are in brackets:

If the materialist subject cannot be said to be adequately represented by the transitory and socially-determined fashions (intellectual, religious, or otherwise) of the day---say, if we were Greeks, we would wear Togas instead of tight jeans [Therefore our fashion cannot be said to say anything about us without relating it to a moment and its cultural field. It seems for a moment that there is nothing to "anchor" us to ourselves as existing in some metaphysical personhood; ie: our feelings of identity would be illusory and merely/entirely historically contingent.

Thus the terror of the elementary school alternative-history version of World War II: "If we had lost to the Nazis, we would all be speaking German right now." But, see, would that really be US? I mean, the same US? So my 8-year-old thinking ran.]

However, THE CANON comes to the rescue, presenting itself as a function of what would be true for this subject at any time, and so regardless of time. Sophocles is always great because of who I essentially am. So, when we say that some [work of] art is timeless, we mean this over and against the concerns of any given (historical) present concerns--ie: the particular determinations of the subject beholden to the ephemera of history.

Thus, the canon (understood in this way) is both oriented towards a set of "pasts" [with their own determinations] and constitutes a kind of permanent avant-garde in advance of its future appropriation. One would always be a Shakespeare fan, even if we dressed in metallic future-suits and ate food in pill-form: [the classic work is "outside of time" not in some mystical/bourgeois way but so that the subject might be as well.]