Cultural Cowardice

sadmanbarty said:

disco by rock acts: cultural bravery?

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could spin it either way

yes - embracing something often so antithetical to heteronormative 70s/classic rock dudism
no - following the market $, the queerness is usually totally scrubbed, bailed instantly on disco backlash

test run for punks etc guitar bands to embrace disco (+ funk etc) in post-punk

disco Blondie isn't quite the same as Rolling Stones - not braver but more an organic product of their environment

idk I give Bowie stick sometimes but as usual he was ahead of the curve doing Station to Station in 75

in the same vein you could ask

Madonna - Vogue: cultural cowardice or bravery?

she gets a ton of stick - see DJ Sprinkles etc - for exploiting/vampirizing queer culture to her own gain

something here - privilege/cultural capital and cultural bravery

rock band embracing disco - element of relinquishing masculine privilege - not very much cos it's mostly rocked out, but the impulse is there

post-punks embracing scenes-music from people of color - any multiracial scene

but the line between giving up privilege and exploiting it to one's own gain (appropriation) which is complicated and uncertain

almost all of the cowardice cases here are about white guitar dudes embracing or retreating from non-white/queer/etc musics, one way or another

having the cultural capital to make such decisions in the first place - for the larger culture as well

padraig (u.s.) said:

Madonna - Vogue: cultural cowardice or bravery?

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I'd say more opportunism/neophilia, or as you implied straightforward canny business sense, which is amoral rather than immoral and is sort of orthogonal to the bravery/cowardice axis.

But perhaps leaning towards bravery in that she'd have looked like a fool if it had flopped horribly?

this is a dumb analogy but it was one of the first times I really understood privilege in a cultural production as a young dumb person

the Wire - McNulty and Greggs

McNulty cop show archetype - breaks all the rules for nominally mostly the right reasons
Greggs (queer, black, female) - every bit as good if not better but doesn't have McNulty's white dude cultural capital to break rules and get away with it

cos it seems like cultural cowardice is largely history of (mostly) white people choosing to exercise their cultural capital, or not, and/or consumers deciding to buy the resulting cultural output, or not

the real world being offc more complicated, multidirectional, etc than a simple binary, but fundamentally that process

@Tea - ya I mean I lean heavily toward exploitation-appropriation in that case, but it's a logical follow-up question

sadmanbarty said:

madchester: brazen cultural cowardice?

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bravery if you're talking the Happy Mondays

cowardice if you're talking anything else

the Mondays are in that lineage blissblogger and I think Sloane discussed, post-punks embracing 80s black music, via the Fac/Hacienda scene

New Order, ACR, etc embracing dance music - both on their own and via side projects/productions (New Order->Be Music, ACR-Quando Quango etc)

Mondays v much guitar boys embracing black music, combined with krautrock etc, they were very fwd, Manchester was super fwd up thru acid house

I'm sure I've posted this here before - one of my favorite records of all time, supposedly Shaun Ryder's favorite Factory release, a Be Music/Dojo (of ACR) production

this is the first Mondays release, totally fwd, and weird ("shambolic") - they have that Can knack of sounding only like themselves

and Hallelujah is great, in a lineage with lovely things like these - both projects involving ACR members and other Hacienda types

but ya the rest of Madchester - meaning the guitar bands only and not A Guy Called Gerald etc - is mostly dire, a test run for Brit pop

even the Roses - Fools Gold stands with anything but the rest is basically jangle with a better rhythm section, Ian Brown, and Squire doing his Jimi thing

tbf Squire is an interesting in the guitarist in the way blissblogger described Marr, doing maybe not new but fresh things, or putting them in a fresh context

really 80s Manchester scene is a great example of cultural bravery

the literal bravery to open and run the Hacienda, as well as the entire scene - fwd, multiracial

making Madchester yes brazen cultural cowardice, the retreat from that into white jangly guitar pop (but plus ecstasy)

slots perfectly into cultural cowardice/bravery as largely the decision to spend/not spend cultural capital

padraig (u.s.) said:

cultural cowardice is largely history of (mostly) white people choosing to exercise their cultural capital

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to which, a question

are there examples of cultural bravery/cowardice going in the other direction?

Bad Brains going from jazz-funk to (more or less) inventing hardcore

Vernon Reid going from NY free funk scene to founding Black Rock Coalition, and Living Colour

sure you can say rock n roll was largely a black music to begin with but those are projects largely operating in idioms stripped of the blues part of rock

no one would call it cowardice, I don't think, I certainly wouldn't

is it cowardice/bravery for rappers - rap having long replaced rock as global pop default - to play guitars, "real musician" it up, etc? I would instinctively say no but I'm not really qualified to answer, maybe others have insight (and maybe this is part of what barty was asking about 1990s + 00s rap earlier? idk)

and it definitely has to do with privilege, cultural capital - embracing from a position within cultural norms/power structures vs. carving out a space from without

i.e. people of color, queer people, etc have always de facto made art from outside those structures, they usually haven't had the choice of embrace or no embrace

this is also part of what I was trying to get at with agency

these are admittedly kind of half-formed thoughts but maybe some of yall - esp those with real crit theory background - will come along later and help me sharpen them up

**missed this earlier but relevant here - not the underground necessarily but access to power - the privilege to conceive of outsider as rebel.

luka said:

so much of the underground was rooted in the mythic (but not completely imaginary) conception of the black man as rebel, antipathetic to the mores of capitalism and western hegemony. an outsider by choice as much as by oppression

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there are undoubtedly other counter-examples too but I'm struggling to think of any right now

tho, double reverse bonus - Bad Brains then going from hardcore back to reggae (tho that was a religious thing so probably outside the bravery/cowardice axis)

padraig (u.s.) said:

these things happen once in a while - rather the intermittent healthy fires to clear out the underbrush than the mass conflagration

I think not only it is an equally interesting conversation - how these things happen in the world - cultural production is power, and whether a discussion acknowledges it or not, these cowardices exist in that context of cultural power structures but you can't discuss them separately - the tangible mechanics (materialism) and the collective conscious - or at least you can't arrive anywhere fruitful without discussing the whole. so I brought it up because it seems fundamental to the question you're asking. taking "I already answered" to mean "we're not interested in answering that question here" - OK. it's just a less meaningful conversation without that.

not trying to impede anything - psychedelic everything I'm all for it - just also interested in the material - someone has to write things, make music, manufacture the drugs, sell/consume all these things - how, why

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im trying to work out what you are trying to express. it's very unclear to me.

i want to find the common ground here but i can't find the content of the complaint. i think padraig has gone to bed now or to work or something but can anyone else work out what it is he is saying and maybe reword it so i can get my head around it?

it's probably important if it's getting on my nerves.

also my feeling is we should avoid getting bogged down in schoolground debates over which acts are cowardly and which are heroic as it translates too easily into

"they're cool. i like"

and

"they're uncool. i dont' like"

and more importantly it's interminable.

i don't think of the rock superstar groups embracing funk and disco as an act of bravery or cowardice

it was just them doing what they always did, which is take a passionate interest in black music

Rod Stewart, The Stones, et al, were into the blues and soul and R&B in the Sixties. And - hardly surprising - they remain interested in what black music comes up with in the Seventies - funk, disco, also reggae

So Jeff Beck (in Beck Bogert Appice) covers "Superstitition"

Foghat - who used to be Brit-blues band Savoy Brown i believe - have a really nifty slap-bass bit in "Slow Ride"

Eric Clapton covers "I Shot the Sheriff"

Stones become really enamored of Pete Tosh and put out one of his records on their label.

Led Zep do James Brown-like and reggae-ish things on Houses of the Holy (the admittedly horrid "D'Yer Maker" complete with music-hall joke title)

And all of that is pre-punk and pre-disco proper.

So it's that typical British orientation towards black music

But also they're musicians, they hear something new and cool - Larry Graham's bass style, Chic-y rhythm guitar- and they want to have a go

The other contributory factors would be:

they are leading typical superstar glitzy lives, which would mean actually being in discotheques like Studio 54, hearing this stuff, digging it (helped by the white powder no doubt)

they do like to have hit records, be on the radio, and these sounds are the sounds that are selling. BUt probably it's more about wanting to still be in the current musical conversation and maintaining their profile, than actually mercenary, since they could coin it just doing the same old thing to their massive fanbases.

I suppose you could say it's a little brave in terms of their existing audience - Queen doing an overtly discofunk (and Chic-resembling) tune with 'another one bites the dust', Steve Hillage basically doing funk-prog in the late 70s - but really i would say it's just business as usual: Brits and the love of black music. An organic thing, rather than like with postpunk where it's more gestural, more of a stance, and also being less proficient musicians, the postpunks come up with this mangled quasi-funk sound that is probably more interesting ultimately (as much as i love e.g. "Miss You" or indeed "Another One Bites the dust")

is the argument that art and ideas are made of atoms not out of thought-stuff? something along those lines? and what would be the ramifications of that?

sadmanbarty said:

no future

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that was correct but then you got awful shit like the clash who were a shitty rock band. the true flowering of no future is breaking with the spiritualism of rock n roll.

94 jungle compared to 93 darkside.

cultural cowardice?

thirdform, you understand padraig. can you reword his criticisms into language i can understand for me please?

sadmanbarty said:

yes. there seemed not even to be a cultural appetite to map out frontiers.

compared to the uk over the same period and it's stark. dancehall and, starting around 1998, rnb were also braver.

there was however one single exception to this:

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still not sure whether this is technical grandstanding or a flash forward to the ambient stylings of the 2010s. Love it either way

padraig (u.s.) said:

these things happen once in a while - rather the intermittent healthy fires to clear out the underbrush than the mass conflagration

I think not only it is an equally interesting conversation - how these things happen in the world - cultural production is power, and whether a discussion acknowledges it or not, these cowardices exist in that context of cultural power structures but you can't discuss them separately - the tangible mechanics (materialism) and the collective conscious - or at least you can't arrive anywhere fruitful without discussing the whole. so I brought it up because it seems fundamental to the question you're asking. taking "I already answered" to mean "we're not interested in answering that question here" - OK. it's just a less meaningful conversation without that.

not trying to impede anything - psychedelic everything I'm all for it - just also interested in the material - someone has to write things, make music, manufacture the drugs, sell/consume all these things - how, why

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read foucault lucius power is knowledge.

back of house. what power dynamics create the knowledge of the cultural retreat or progression?

Why are we conditioned to find certain textures more innovative? saying simply drugs are not enough. is the whole idea of innovation a problematic paradigm to begin with? i brought this up earlier. this is why versioning and remixing are very proto-communistic. it might not even be senius, im not sure if 93 darkside was very senius... compared to 92 hc that is...