student uprising - 2015 - In Defiance

In Defiance

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois

BTS

2015

In 2012 a broad coalition of Quebec University and Cegep students went on strike to challenge a tuition hike proposed by the province’s liberal government. The strike grew out of a student’s general assembly vote at Valleyfield Cegep, southwest of Montreal, to include over 150,000 students and protests that involved over 200,000 people. Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois was one of the spokespersons for CLASSE,  Coalition large de l’ASSÉ, an organization formed out of the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, one of the largest student unions, specifically for the purpose of challenging the proposed hike. As a figurehead of a successful social movement he was the target of a ton of criticism issued by the press, professional politicians, and other sources. In Defiance is the English translation of Nadeau-Dubois’ these events as he saw them, and his response to some of the criticism he received during the events of spring/summer 2012.

In In Defiance, Nadeau-Dubois is telling the story of the student strike from his perspective, which was often situated in a meeting room or some other nerve centre of decision or communication, rather than out on the street. His book tells the story of the student strikes but it also subverts the standard modes of representations of the dominant institutions of Quebec society, and it subverts the myth of the younger generations as apolitical. Nadeau-Dubois book, and the events of 2012, reveal his supposedly apolitical generation rather as deeply engaged in politics and social justice, while it was the dominant political establishment that cynically sought to prevent his generation’s participation in politics through undemocratic authoritarian means and dismissively shallow and trite communication practices. Secondly, if one sees the government as protectors of democracy, the media as a source of enlightenment, the courts and police as sources of order and justice, then Nadeau-Dubois reveals all of these institutions to function in opposition to how they represent themselves. The Government is undemocratic, the media is a source of confusion and disinformation, the courts produce injustice and the police create violence and chaos. The overarching message of Nadeau-Dubois book seems to be that while these institutions champion democratic liberties and social progress in practice they seek to constrain society into a shape formed by a very specific neo-liberal worldview, but in spite of that change is possible.

punk - 1994 - Get in the Van: On the Road with Black Flag

Get in the Van: On The Road With Black Flag
Henry Rollins
2.13.61
1994
302 pages


What a great book. I've been reading a lot of punk books lately and so many of them are retelling the story of how The Clash in London, and the Ramones in NYC came to be in the tone of a newspaper concert reviewer working with the punk thesaurus on hand. I never hear the names of bands like New York Dolls or Dead Boys spoken in conversation but they're always in the foreground of punk books. No thanks. Way too many punk books tread the same ground of London and NYC and I'm left thinking about how uninterested I am in most of the music being discussed.

Many of those who were part of that first wave of NYC punk bands ended up with major label deals and I find that reading those histories of early punk gives me the sense that, at the time, punk was just a new trend in rock music, rather than a subversive subculture. Bands like Suicide may have been so transgressive in music and performance that they have nothing to offer a major label, but the rest were on board. The real punk of refusal and DIY sensibilities came after that first wave.

Black Flag, one of the originators of hardcore punk, created some of the most intense music of the late twentieth century. For nine years they played everywhere, every day, with as much soul as any group of musicians in history, and by their frontman Henry Rollins' telling, they did this for audiences that hated them. I had heard of Henry Rollins before I ever really heard Black Flag, first from the Liar video and then when I saw him in the film Johnny Mnemonic. When I first mentioned to older friends that I was listening to the Damaged album they would warn me that Black Flag was better Rollins became their singer and that Henry Rollins just plain sucks. In Rollins' written record of his time in Black Flag, he experienced these sentiments being expressed constantly by his audience who often communicated them with violence.

Get in the Van is Rollins' published journal of the time he was the lead singer of Black Flag, from 1980 until the band broke up in 1986. It's subtitle is 'On the Road with Black Flag' and the stories of criss-crossing the USA on an adventure does evoke Kerouac's novel of joyful discovery, but Rollins' story is dark and mean. Black Flag suffered to carry out their tours, and while they may have had one of the biggest names, nationally and even internationally, in hardcore punk, they often went without eating. One Rollins journal entry will have him laughing at being called a rockstar sellout, the next entry will describe the literally starving band saving the food audience members threw at them. Most of the book is about hardship; coping with cold, hunger, lack of money, and the relentless violence that Rollins experienced at every show. I wonder how many of the people who threw a beer a beer at Rollins or did some other stupid thing while he was on stage read this book out of nostalgia for their punk past and felt a stirring in their hearts when Rollins called them idiots or worse.

A lot of the punk books are written for the reader to submerge themselves in nostalgia or dive into the fantasy of being strung out back at CBGB the first night Television played. Rollins book describes the punk scene, from moment to moment, as encounters with the same dumb cowardice thats present everywhere else in society. No nostalgic idealizing is at play here, Rollins journal captures the brute stupidity of their audiences and the cruel grind of touring non-stop by van. Part of what makes his book so great is not only that its an honest and authentic record of hardcore punk life, but the 2004 second edition includes a lot of photos as well as reproductions of many of the flyers drawn by Raymond Pettibon.

street gangs - 2010 - Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain

Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain: How I went from Gang Member to Multimillionaire Entrepreneur
Ryan Blair
2010
Portfolio
222 pages

Before now, I've never ever even opened the cover of one of the mass-market books by some business guru investment whiz. My economic worldview is anticapitalist and I have pretty much zero interest in entrepreneurship but I also haven't read any of them because they generally look like trash published to exploit the gullibles who live in the fantasy of making millions by following a few trite adages. I highly doubt that any of these investment guru/success advice books are required readings in any MBA programs and I also doubt you can mention you've read these books on your resume. I've always assumed that these books have nothing other than the cliches they're drenched in to offer their readers.

As of today I've read one such business guru book, Nothing To Lose, Everything to Gain by Ryan Blair. God, speaking of cliches... just look at that title. I read this one because Ryan Blair says he was a gang member. I don't really believe that claim but whatever, his gang past is a small part of the book. It's his street gang background he draws upon when he mixes Jay-Z quotes in with the Sun Tzu quotes that I'm sure appear in every other book in the genre. I am convinced that every other book of this kind is exactly like this with some surface details altered and its basic elements rearranged from item to item and books like this have no value other than capitalist mythmaking.

punk - Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years

Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years

Alex Ogg

2014

PM Press

204 pages

With all of the punk literature coming out in recent years and with all of the band histories and bios, there’s been nothing about Dead Kennedys until 2014. Now there are two books about the band’s debut album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables; there's a 2015 book in the 33/3 series and this one that started as liner notes for the album’s 2009 25th anniversary commemorate reissue. I’m happy about this because Dead Kennedys were, and still are, my favorite of the American hardcore punk bands. When I was in my mid to late teens I listened mostly to electronic music when a friend gave me a cassette mix of songs from Dead Kennedy’s Plastic Surgery Disasters and Lard’s Pure Chewing Satisfaction. I didn’t mind Lard, DK singer Jello Biafra’s industrial rock collaboration with Al Jourgensen, but I by far preferred the Dead Kennedys songs. A short time later I purchased Frankenchrist on cassette during the same trip to Spinables (now Vertigo Records, a record store in Ottawa) that I also picked up the Kevin Martin curated compilation Macro Dub Infection II. Not long after that I had most of the DK discography.  Now that I have a particular interest in books about counterculture I find myself reading books about bands and musicians whose work I have no interest in so I find the publication of books about the Dead Kennedys to be a happy occasion.

The book itself has a tight focus on the band’s formation and earliest performances through to the recording and release of their first album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, with a detailed discussion of each individual song. The book’s content is largely derived of interviews conducted with each band member and, as is well known, the majority of the band is in a long war over the band’s legacy with their former lead singer and songwriter, Jello Biafra. They hate each other and the things they disagree over in this book are the things I heard them fighting about when I first heard about their disputes: songwriting credits. Unfortunately these arguments make up a lot of this book’s content. Biafra, of course, has been able to continue his career in music without calling himself the Dead Kennedys, and anything his ex-bandmates say about Biafra’s ability to write a song has to be balanced against that. Like most Punk icons, Biafra’s talent for songwriting has waned over a 30 year period, but some of his collaborations from the early post DK years, the recordings with DOA and NoMeansNo especially, were top-notch. Even though his recent work might not stand with the classics, they can be considered “good”. My point is, the attribution of all those Dead Kennedys songs is contested territory, and this book is a battleground, but at least we can observe Biafra’s career as a songwriter beyond the Dead Kennedys legacy.

There’s more to the book than the arguments between old friends and the history of how they came to be. There’s also a lot of history of the practical business end of investing in, recording, manufacturing, promoting, and distributing the album. Ogg’s book includes some photos of the band that I haven’t seen anywhere else as well as some original artwork by Winston Smith, the great photomontage artist who produced a lot of album artwork for Biafra’s recordings and designed the iconic DK logo. The book ends with a series of statements from rockers and other types about how important Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is to them, confirming the album’s status as a cannonical punk album. The one thing I was looking for but never found was the meaning of the album’s title. Maybe I skimmed over such a discussion but I find that after reading the book I still don’t know what Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables means. Anyways, I hope there are more books about Dead Kennedys are in the works out there. I just found out that DH Peligro, the drummer for the Dead Kennedys for most of their original run, published a book in 2013 so maybe there are more DK related books than I thought.

hip-hop - Chicago Hustle and Flow: Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class

Chicago Hustle and Flow: Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class

Geoff Harkness

University of Minnesota Press

2014

244 pages

Like many other people, I’ve been interested in the Chicago drill scene since rapper Chief Keef deleted his cruel tweets mocking his murdered rival Lil Jojo. Lil Jojo was, like Chief Keef, a rapper from Chicago’s South Side Englewood neighborhood who was antagonizing the ascending scene star and his associates back in the summer of 2012. Jojo had rapped that he’s ‘BDK’ (meaning 'Black Disciple killer' - Black Disciple was the gang Keef claimed affiliation to) over the beat from Keef’s early hit track, Everyday.

Jojo also drove around Keef’s neighborhood shouting insults at Keef and his friend, rapper Lil Reese.

Within 24 hours of the above video appearing online, Jojo had been gunned down in the street. Chief Keef responded at first with mocking twitter messages, only to delete them a short time later, replacing them with claims that his account was hacked and messages of condolences to Jojo’s family. At this time Keef was a rising national hip-hop star and he must have had people working on managing his image to find that perfect balance of hood authenticity and mainstream acceptability that's so important to obtaining the desired mass audience of white suburban teenagers that make mainstream hip-hop commercially viable. What came across in those tweets, before they were deleted, was the essence of the more-death-than-death-metal, intensely anti-social, nihilism of the Chiraq drill music scene.

I was in the library looking for an entirely different book in the stacks when Chicago Hustle and Flow caught my attention. The title’s mention of Chicago and the book’s 2014 publication date gave me the idea that it might be about the drill scene in Chicago. Drill is characterized by its simplistic and repetitive \ lyrics of street violence, drug use, general anti-social attitudes and self-destruction, spat over beats that are closer to house/techno than hip-hop. The drillers are only mentioned in Chicago Hustle and Flow's Introduction and Conclusion (which were almost certainly the last completed sections of the book), the term ‘drill’ doesn’t appear in the text, and its only the Keef/Jojo rivalry that’s discussed in regards to this component of the Chicago scene. Author Harkness loves hiphop and whatnot but he's discussing pre-drill Chicago hip-hop and he therefore had the bad luck of researching a scene too early in time. 

Chicago and the midwest has contributed a lot to music, especially underground music:

Chicago’s given the world house music while techno came from nearby Detroit,

And industrial rock comes from Chicago

elsewhere in the midwest a lot of the earliest and best punk and new wave bands come from that area as well.

More recently DJ Rashad (RIP) and the Teklife crew have been producing skittering footwork tracks out of Chicago.

But for all of the innovation that's come out of Chicago and its surrounding region, Chicago hasn’t really given hiphop any unique movement to speak of. Obviously Kanye West is from Chicago, but he’s an international superstar that’s successfully blended with the NY crowd, and there are some other rappers who come from Chicago but haven’t created any particular Chicago movement. Chicago, as a city, has in recent years given hip-hop something of its own with the repetitive, joyfully violent, explicitly gang-affiliated, drill music scene led by Chief Keef, Lil Durk, and their producer Young Chop.

Instead of discussing drill, Harkness investigates the tensions between street life and music performance/production among some pre-drill Chicago street rappers, noting their working class or lumpen origins, and the correlations between those origins and their street lifestyles and attitudes towards music. While Harkness is always clear that he’s conducting a sociological study of a ‘microscene’ of Chicago gangsta rappers, his conclusions are already known to anyone who's been paying attention to the things rappers have been saying for the past 30 years. You don’t have to be a sociologist to know that, for example, an unstable concept of authenticity is nearly essential to the success of a street rapper. These rapper's fans contest the authenticity of their favorite hood rappers on a daily basis via youtube comments and you can check any of these videos to confirm that statement. Books like this serve the function of making the things non-academic people already know knowable to sociologists. Thanks to Harkness, future scholars of hip-hop have a text to refer to if they need to explain what a mixtape is.