Hipster Blogging vs Party Politics: Two Tribes?

I've spent the past two weeks campaigning at a smartly-designed home-made campaign chest (literally a chest of drawers! ha ha) adorned with rainbow flags and crooked, home-cut graphics I made myself. We had little rugs. We had a banner with little hearts cut out. So why aren't the hip kids taking my flyers?

The people who pick up party information are, frankly, squares; the people I love in this blog, the radically self-expressing kids and working-class outsiders, couldn't give a toss. Past me walked sneering emos, bored hip-hoppers, disinterested otakus, indie kids, no-one giving a damn about our political message at all. But why not? The suggestion from my party colleagues when I brought up the issue was that these people aren't really radical, only posers - or maybe it's us that are mainstream-establishment and, in reality, politically conservative.

But in actual fact I'm convinced that both (left-wing and feminist) political activists and self-expressive extremes are incredibly radical, politically. So why is it that we can't meet up? Why does it seem that we're doomed to be two separate tribes?

An interesting (though slightly depressing) perspective on this comes from political philosopher Hannah Arendt, whose thought I was recently reintroduced to by pirate thinktanker Rasmus Fleischer (in Swedish). According to her, the two groups are engaged in completely different political projects that are largely incompatible with each other.

The political activists are engaging in poiesis, work, the building of something. Anything they say or do is aimed towards creating something, namely a political movement or a successful party or an ideal society. But in this work, Arendt argues, they lose themselves. The ultimate aim may be political, but the individual expressions are empty and in some sense lies - they're merely means to an end and tell nothing about the person who makes them, more than what they are: feminists, or whatever.

By contrast, the self-expression of the kids is really, inherently, deeply political. It's praxis, action, the expression of the self of a free individual. It reveals who they are to the world, thus in that moment they are free and have agency. As Arendt sees it, if poiesis gets to overtake praxis then totalitarianism looms.

I'm not sure I completely agree with her, but I do see how the two ways of thinking are really hard to combine. I've really been wrestling with the question of whether I should blog about my political activity because that's what engages my mind at the moment, or whether I should avoid it, because it just feels untrue. Both to me and to the blog readers, it feels as if I'm not really being honest and expressing what I really think when I'm trying to convince people to act in a certain way. At best, it's just so completely square.

Like, pretty much, all overtly ideological pop music. I've always disliked progg, backpacker rap and roots reggae, because the music tends to be incredibly banal and boring and the lyrics hackneyed doggerel, and by Arendt's account this would be because they're not really self-expressive at all. Only by revealing the underlying who can you get that complexity and that rush of freedom that god pop music has. Pop music (like my blogging, I guess) has consistently been ruined whenever ideologies have entered the picture, and made pop music subservient.

What I fervently hope, though, is that feminism as a rather exceptional (and experimental, h/t Rasmus) ideology has the potential to turn things on their head and make ideology subservient to pop music, or at least to praxis. If we make self-expression and agency central concerns (as indeed they should be in feminism) then we're half-way towards solving the problem, and if we co-operate with the cool kids on their terms we're much more likely to successfully integrate. Look forward to at least one event this fall where we're trying to bring in some of the best queer clubs in Stockholm...

Another (perhaps contrary) consequence, which might please my regular readership, is that I'm bringing my feminist blogging elsewhere and focusing on the music here. I'm not quite ready to reveal the project yet, but it'll be a group blog in Swedish. More news coming up!

The Greatness of Misrepresentation?

Bloggers have power. Hell, anyone who is read anywhere has power, especially if read by the bourgeois public. It'd be foolish not to consider the ethical implications of this power, and I hope I've done so quite often in this blog. About my own power, and that of other media.

A woman in my ethnology class last week really lashed out at the magazine Gringo. Gringo is run by people from a fairly diverse selection of ethnic groups and can be described as basically an immigrant equivalent of a gay pride magazine, brashly and colourfully presenting "suburban culture" with quite a lot of pow and tongue firmly in cheek. My classmate's objection was that they turned a blind eye to reality in the suburbs, which is often hard and poverty-stricken. A more balanced coverage where both the negative and positive side was represented would have been better, she thought, in order to give a fair picture of how things really were.

But I'm wondering how fair this is. Is it desirable when describing culture to be as accurate as possible, or should we default to just showing off the good sides?


I blog a lot about music. Within any particular genre, I usually go ahead and pick out the music that appeals to me the most, that I deem has a good quality. I probably do this less than most posters, because I end up posting stuff like this and because I have no taste, but nevertheless I strive towards posting music that's enjoyable. Is this wrong?

The answer is probably "partly".

If I was a classical music blogger, the question wouldn't even be raised. No-one would go around demanding I give an "accurate" picture of mediocre composers and amateur ensembles, they'd want me to go for the very best all the time. Actually, this comparison is not strictly accurate because there are some interesting music historians (in the field of "style history") who definitely are more interested in average works than greats, but if I was presenting the material outward, selling it as it were, no-one would expect me to bring up the mediocre or the awful.

However, there are a couple of differences here that are worth considering. To begin with, there's the whole imperialist taste-imposition angle. Taste is determined within the context of its production, the whole idea of "the scene" being one in which a group of people act as mutual referees as to which of their music is good. So who are we outsiders to go around selecting music according to our taste? Bloggers have the power of access to the public, so perhaps we should let our taste take a back seat lest we destroy the creativity of the scenes by asking them to conform to our needs? Perhaps. But I guess even going by someone else's idea of quality we're still basically stuck with a reformation of the same problem.

Secondly, ignoring what you feel is mediocre might in fact be oversimplification and the denial of diversity and interesting complexity. My classmate who talked about Gringo came up with an example of a little girl in one suburb who was an excellent violinist, one of the best at her age in the country, but who the magazine refused to cover. There's a danger that thinking about quality along one axis (a "ghetto culture" one, in Gringo's case) causes a creeping essentialism, where one ethnic group (or a whole social category like immigrants) is always associated with one style of cultural expression.

Still, I can't help thinking that we need both. Both stories about the bad and about the good, both pep-pieces and complete analyses. Or perhaps, rather, all possible angles from a diversity of sources. One blogger or one magazine can't possibly cover every story, so why not let them just focus on one thing as long as there is diversity in coverage overall? The general news media's reporting from the suburbs is relentlessly negativistic and bleak, confirming (as the media is wont to do) a negative stereotype. Gringo was partly founded on the idea of providing a positive counter-picture.

In general, the idea that one newspaper or one blog needs to cover all sides and aspects seems a bit old-fashioned in a world where my blog aggregator has something like 309 feeds, all with their own perspective. It does become more of an issue, though, when everyone or almost everyone veers the same way, creating a general monolithic discourse. Maybe someone needs to start a blog of fair-to-middling album tracks and flop singles they don't really like?

Derrida, Dub and the Retirement of Beauty

I've been catching up on blogs after my break lately and I seem to have caught the end of a debate about beauty in music, which is cool, because I'm trying to structure myself up to write an essay that's on a really closely tangential topic. I thought I'd post an outline of what I'm thinking and let it be my contribution to the beauty debate.

People seem generally opposed to continuing evaluating music based on if it's beautiful or not. That's good. But while it seems we're getting little hints of why beauty needs to be retired as a concept I've yet to see a good how, which is where the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and the musical advances of Jamaican dub come in.


Jacques Derrida is an Algerian-French philosopher most famous for launching the concept of Deconstruction, which has wildly outgrown whatever he originally intended by it. His philosophy is quite interesting and makes loads of startling claims, but I'm picking out one particular aspect that's relevant to 20th century music: his work on dichotomies.

Derrida claims western thought rests on unequal dichotomies where one term dominates hierachically over another, one beautiful, one ugly. In music, this would be something like the sound/silence dichotomy - sound is defined as something positive, beautiful, while silence is considered derivative, almost parasitical, an absence. Other similar dichotomies that tend to crop up in 20th century music (especially experimental music) are pure sound/noise and composition/indeterminacy. I guess tonality/atonality is another one really.

Derrida would claim that these dichotomies are very deeply ingrained in the very basic meaning of words and that merely ignoring them is futile. For instance, there's no point in going down the route of Schönberg or Russolo and try to redefine the ugly (atonality, noise) as beautiful, because that would be mere wordplay. Likewise, the attempts of experimental composers like Cage and Schaeffer to ignore the dichotomies entirely and focus on the opressed aspects are probably futile, becuase in making "noise music" and "indeterminate music" and "silent compositions" they're still acknowledging the existence of the dichotomy, in effect (if not in intent) being wilfully negative.

The solution instead must involve the dissolution of the categories, or as Derrida would say their deconstruction, finding the flaws of the dichotomy, its internal logical problems. In order to deconstruct a dichotomy one needs essentially to move beyond it. (This is both the why and the how of why we need to retire beauty.)

Which is where it links up to dub - I think this might be the key as to why dub is so popular with latter-day experimental musicians, the kind that read The Wire. Dub plays around freely with all the categories, focusing on thier combinatronics and how to use them in interesting ways. Effectively, it's got deconstructive properties, and most of all it provides a new alternative to the traditional categories in where the intellectual effort goes. It's where we can derive a lot of producer-oriented music, where "interesting" and "unusual" and "exciting" has replaced "beautiful".

Paradigm-shift or not? I guess these kinds of valuations probably precede dub in popular music. Plus, obviously "interesting" is itself open to deconstruction (in relation to the parasitic "boring"). But that's pretty much how far I've got - I'd love to have someone pick at holes in the thought if they can.