Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Link to a review by Angelia R. Wilson of the book Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (2015), by Lauren A. Rivera:
“Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, by Lauren A. Rivera”
Bonus links: “Social Class in the 21st Century” and “Class Position and Musical Tastes”
João Gilberto – João Gilberto Polydor 2451 037 (1973)
Gilberto is considered the father of bossa nova. The style evolved out of samba, but with a minimalist aspect that used musical gestures to imply elements beyond the explicit content. There was less emphasis on rhythm and more on harmony and melody, drawing influence from jazz in some respects. His singing is almost a whisper, slightly nasal, and is free of vibrato. Bossa nova emerged in the 1950s (some claim the scene coalesced in the living room of Nara Leão‘s parents’ home). It was music of the bourgeoisie, popular among the college-educated, with an emphasis on introverted, existential and personal obstacles. It became an international craze in the 1960s. Yet by the early 1970s, bossa nova had ceded popularity in Brazil and the rest of the world to other styles. The Brazilian junta was in power, and under President Médici the economically polarizing “Brazilian Miracle” was underway, punctuated by the 1973 oil shock. In the United States, the Powell Memo had recently been published and the neoliberal era was finding its feet. The Gang of Four was still leading China’s Cultural Revolution, but President Richard Nixon had met with Premier Zhou Enlai the year before — Nixon had already a few years earlier met with Elvis and gave him a a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. It was chaos everywhere. The timing was perfect for a resurgent Gilberto.
The album comes across as Gilberto performing solo. Nonetheless, Sonny Carr appears regularly on light and gentle percussion, and Miúcha (Gilberto’s wife or girlfriend at the time) provides vocals on one song. Like many Brazilian musicians, Gilberto had multiple self-titled releases. This one is sometimes dubbed the “white album”. The oft reclusive Gilberto had lived in the United States through much of the 1960s, then moved to Mexico for about two years, and then moved back to the United States where he lived at the time this album was recorded, supposedly in New Jersey; he returned to Brazil in 1980.
In many ways, this is a flawless album, as much as such a thing is possible. Gilberto has a lightness to his voice and guitar playing that speaks to the resilience of inner resolve. The recording fidelity is excellent (Wendy Carlos served as the recording engineer and Rachel Elkind the producer). If the sunny existentialism of bossa nova was always one of its defining and most appealing features, this is an album that confirms relevance beyond its faddish commercial peak.
The opener is Antônio Carlos Jobim‘s “Águas de Março” (“The Waters of March”), one of the most highly acclaimed Brazilian songs of its time, performed with a placid, self-content attitude toward the meaningless cycles of nature and the seasons and fully embracing the arbitrary, stream-of-consciousness wordplay of the lyrics. It is followed by Gilberto’s own “Undiú,” with mostly wordless vocalizations and singing that approaches guttural-sounding throat singing. This leans toward a Zen-like attitude, contemplating the universe and offering statements outside language. “Eu quero um samba” opens side two of the original LP, and has some of the most insistent guitar playing on the whole album, bolstered by Carr’s lightly tapped percussion. Despite the minimalist instrumentation, there is much happening on this album, which is tinged with nostalgia and sentimentality (a song about Gilberto’s young daughter, “Valsa (Como são Lindos os Youguis) (Bebel),” and a version of Gilberto Gil‘s “Eu Vim da Bahia” [“I Came From Bahia”]), yet also dry and aloof as well, with the vibrato-less vocals and a sometimes cloistered attitude.
If one word describes Gilberto’s musical approach, it would perhaps be “nuanced.” This is part and parcel with the leisure class undertones of the entire bossa nova genre. And yet, this music is an ideal expression of a relaxed, peaceful attitude toward a stressful and even harrowing urban bourgeois existence. This is just one of the irreducible knots at the heart of bossa nova. These knots lend the tension that is evident in the rhythmic construction of João Gilberto’s music. As one writer put it, “The voice pulled in one direction, the beat in another. The combination was mesmerizing and highly addictive, refreshing and modern.”
If all of Gilberto’s music lends itself to a kind of cultural nationalism, the artist’s reclusive tendencies and withdrawal from the trappings of celebrity suggest something else altogether. Is it a false sense of purity? No, not at all. In a paradoxical way, Gilberto’s dogged pursuit of his own muse while disengaging from a world taking disastrous turns for the worse is actually about making in a crucial statement in the face of cruelly empty formal options. This position lingers:
“the danger today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active,’ to ‘participate,’ in order to mask the vacuity of what goes on. People intervene all the time. People ‘do something.’ Academics participate in meaningless debates, and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw.” (On Clinton, Trump and the Left’s Dilemma).
Stated in another and more general way, this sort of passivity can really be a form of action:
“the very passive ‘withdrawal’ by means of which [a] thought ‘secedes’, ‘splits off’ from its object, acquires a distance, violently tears itself off ‘the flow of things’, assuming the stance of an ‘external observer’; this non-act is its highest act, the infinite Power which introduces a gap into the self-enclosed Whole of Substance.” (The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology)
If the Brazilian tropicalistas sought a new internationalism in the late 1960s and early 70s, João Gilberto’s music here was substantively taking another tack, and yet making João Gilberto in the United States with electronic music pioneers hardly seems lacking in internationalism… The key to it all is the reaffirmation of everything that Gilberto’s music promised in the late 1950s, that not in spite of but because of everything that happened in the interim, the original vision of bossa nova was a vital and radically new historical event, proven through its repetition and a look back that shows its truly original worldview to have gone beyond its causes and influences, an achievement and social rupture that was somehow also impossible in its time.
João Gilberto is an album that deserves a listen, or many.
Selected links to commentary following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States (updated to include commentary on his inauguration and first few months in office too):
Leonard Cohen – Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979 Columbia CK 66210 (2001)
Leonard Cohen was first a poet then, perhaps, a musician. His monotone voice is something you love or hate. This album features recordings from four dates of a 1979 tour in the U.K. While not exactly a live greatest hits collection, Field Commander Cohen does end with his classics “Bird On the Wire” and “So Long, Marianne.” The recordings are very good, only adding as much music as necessary.
The sheer genius of Cohen’s lyrics dominates everything he has done. His music is best described as an acquired taste. The durable ideas and complex emotions unfold slowly. It takes at least two or three listens to grasp Cohen’s purpose. The liner notes are particularly helpful with full listings of all lyrics, which are sometimes understood easiest when read. Vocals add another layer of meaning to Cohen’s words, which can be confusing to new listeners.
Songs portray likable losers and bare insecurity. The faux doo-wop of “Memories” is a sweet story of longing, complete with innocent rejection. “The Stranger Song” captures the appeal of a singer/songwriter’s isolation, recalling the best of Cohen’s early work. “Lover Lover Lover” pauses for a long instrumental passage, while a duet on “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” highlights the song’s sappy wit. “The Guests” is a twisted vision of desire. These songs are deep and profound. Cohen can take you where few other artists can, and offer a glimpse deep into his personal experience.
The band plays well. Overall the sound is mellow, even bland, but this seems like a calculated plan to showcase the lyrics. At times the spark of live performance breathes new life into the songs. Guest appearances by Raffi Hakopian and John Bilezikjian spice up the arrangements. Jennifer Warnes and Sharon Robinson sing backup, adding refreshing vocal depth. The album ends with arguably the best performances.
Leonard Cohen was about as strange a “rock star” as there ever was. He came to popularity near the end of the big 60s folk movement. His unique blend of poetry and music would never catch on in another era, and is still unbelievable as it actually happened. Leonard Cohen could be a great bluesman (though his voice would defy that genre). Rather than the blues, he fashioned his own blend of comedy and tragedy. This album is a good example those talents.
Field Commander Cohen is a nice album for long-time Cohen fans wanting more live material, and is still a good introduction for new listeners (it strikes a good balance between accessibility and potency), though there are many better live Cohen albums, like Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 and Live in London.
Patty Waters – College Tour ESP-Disk ESP 1055 (1966)
Patty Waters was one of the first truly experimental singers. She introduced abstract, avant garde, wordless singing — based on everything from shrieks, whispers, and hums to grunts and moans — into the fabric of jazz music. But she also integrated more conventional jazz and blues styles. This album was recorded on a tour organized by attorney Bernard Stollman‘s ESP-Disk’ label, with a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, for a group of ESP-Disk’ artists to tour New York colleges with music departments in April of 1966. Others on the tour were The Sun Ra Arkestra, Ran Blake, Burton Greene and Giuseppi Logan (the last three all appear on these recordings). Much like Sun Ra, Waters moves between wildly disparate styles, and her innovations lie as much in a similar refusal to privilege one style over another as in anything she achieved strictly on the more experimental end of the musical spectrum — where she pioneered techniques later adopted or deployed by the likes of Linda Sharrock, Yoko Ono, Jeanne Lee, Diamanda Galás, and reminiscent of the “extended techniques” of Joan La Barbara too. All that is to say that parts of the album (“Wild Is the Wind,” “It Never Entered My Mind”) track a typical jazz singer’s repertoire in the 1960s (compare Nina Simone), while the weirder parts of this music are akin to much else on the ESP-Disk’ label at the time, when the label was an early bastion of “free jazz”. Waters deserves credit for her facility across that entire spectrum. Rather than juxtaposing those elements as incompatible opposites, she deploys them as part of a universal continuum broad enough to contain multitudes of different elements. As one reviewer put it, this is music for those drawn to “dreams that blur the line between pure delight and hellish nightmare.” Extending that insight, perhaps this is music like Andreĭ Platonov‘s writings, which chose to subjectivize worldly experience by building utopia out of what others typically considered a dystopia. That is to say that this sort of outlook embraces parts of the human condition that many marginalize, discredit or criticize. It finds room for feelings of uncertainty, regret, confusion, pain — in an indifferent, meaningless universe, these can be bestowed with as much value as anything else. This fit into the context of the New Left movement of the 1960s, and the yippie/hippie lifestyle. This also seems to anticipate the May 1968 slogan: «Il est interdit d’interdire» (“It is forbidden to forbid”).
Even for those who struggle to enjoy this music or subjectively consider it “good” should at least recognize that it pushed boundaries and took bold steps into new territory.
Merle Haggard & Willie Nelson – Pancho & Lefty Epic FE 37958 (1983)
Here’s an album that occupies a strange place between “urban cowboy” country and easy listening pop. Hag and Willie both sing really nicely, even if most of the material is pretty fluffy. The synthesizer, electric bass, trebly electric guitar and other little orchestrated touches bestow on it a dated, faddish sound that is unmistakably of its era, but, for what it is, it delivers fairly consistently. The slickness isn’t too much of a distraction. There aren’t any obvious stinkers here. As a long as expectations aren’t too high, this is a nice light outing. The best song is probably “Opportunity to Cry,” which has no discernible input from Haggard.
Link to an interview by John Pilger:
“The Secrets of the US Election: Julian Assange Talks to John Pilger”
Link to an article by Jason Tebbe:
“Twenty-First Century Victorians”
Bonus link: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Link to a review by Lee Konstantinou of William Gaddis‘ novel J R (1975):
“Too Big to Succeed: On William Gaddis’s ‘J R’”
Bonus link: “Geoff’s Review of ‘J R'”
Link to an article by Dean Baker:
“Inequality As Policy: Selective Trade Protectionism Favors Higher Earners”
This article is Baker grandstanding as usual, making the same arguments he has made ad nauseam for many years. There are numerous flaws in his arguments, which is extremely unfortunate because he’s trying to make some important points, however crudely, about the promotion of inequality.
The major flaw in his argument about intellectual property (IP) law is that he conflates the specific case with the general case (a type of association fallacy). This is a flawed form of argument that many economists use regularly to deceive readers. Baker concludes that all IP is bad, but his argument relies almost exclusively on examples from copyright and pharma patents. It almost goes without saying that copyright laws are indeed maximalist and skewed toward special interests. His criticisms there are spot on and need no further explanation. His critiques of patents focus on pharmaceuticals. The problem is that pharma is not like other technologies. Pharma is a regulated industry, and companies are able to rent-seek even with unpatented drugs. Recent examples in the headlines include the Martin Shkreli saga and the EpiPen debacle. While excessive patent strength/value may be problematic, it is not the sole cause of rent-seeking problems. And there are so many unique aspects of the pharma industry (right down to doctors’ monopolization of writing prescriptions) that criticisms of pharma patents says almost nothing about patents in other technology areas. Baker writes, “The laws have been changed to extend patents to new areas such as life forms, business methods, and software.” The problem with this statement is that it is completely false. While the U.S. patent laws have indeed been updated with the America Invents Act, and other miscellaneous legislative changes, it is worth noting that these changes to the patent statutes did not alter patent-eligible subject matter (35 U.S.C. 101 – unchanged since 1952). While courts did expand patent subject matter eligibility from the early 1980s through the turn of the millennium, Baker ignores how the major development in patent law in judicial decisions over the last decade has been to curtail patent subject matter eligibility (Bilski v. Kappos, Mayo v. Prometheus Labs., Alice v. CLS Bank, Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, etc.). Baker suggests a trend in a direction directly opposite to the bulk of the recent judicial record. While numerous other countries prohibit patenting of medical diagnosis or treatment inventions, and countries like Germany historically (though no longer) prohibited patenting chemical compositions, there was never such a ban in the United States. Furthermore, what about trademarks or trade secrets? These constitute whole areas of IP law, yet Baker makes no mention of them. This further underscores how Baker has cherry-picked specific cases, divorced from their specific factual contexts, and (misleadingly) presented them as the general case.
The comments to Baker’s article make some useful points. As Vic Volpe notes, software and financial patenting is arguably a bigger problem than pharma patents. (see also, e.g., http://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cybaris/vol5/iss2/1/). Also, BobbyG notes the misleading citation of average physician salaries in the article, which further evidences how Baker’s primary mode of argument is to distort the facts to serve his ideological agenda — in case it is in doubt what that is, Baker supports centrist “New Deal” Keynesian economic policies. So, while it is fine that Baker critiques neoliberal policy in its promotion of “winner take all” inequality, readers can rightfully question how and why he inserts New Deal liberalism in its place. Of course, many other critiques of patents and such are equally ideologically-driven, which is unfortunate because meaningful criticism is needed.
Addendum: Baker has continued to promote the same line in a further interview (no surprise). But what is hilariously ironic is that he makes the following snide comment: “There also is a reluctance to think differently. We often joke that intellectuals have a hard time accepting new ideas. Unfortunately it is close to accurate. Even well-established academics are much more likely to accept an idea from an academic with high standing than a person with less standing, no matter how compelling it might be.” Reading the whole interview makes clear that Baker fails to see how this criticism forcefully applies to him too!