The Sex Revolts
has just come out in French (trans. Samuel Roux) on Éditions La Découverte and was this very week described as "irritating but stimulating" by Le Monde - which I think is a fair description of both the intention and the outcome, actually! (I thought the French subtitle was an error for a moment there - but "gender" in French = "genre". Which is interesting if you think about it, being a genreologist and all.)
A bit more than a year ago the book came out in Germany, also for the first time, on Ventil Verlag. And here is an in-depth interview about the book and its I did with Julian Weber for Taz.
In the introduction to your 2020 edition, you tell us the
first motivation, to write a book about genderroles, rebellion and rock music,
and a sort of prevailing misogynistic attitude towards women not only in the
rock biz in general but also in the lyrics of songs. There’s an anecdote from a
dinner with somebody from the noise rock scene who cracked a sick joke about
child molesting. That sounds very 1990s. There was a general attitude of shock
tactics, citing true crime as an influence, acting dumb onstage, being mean.
You could hear it in the music of bands like Killdozer, or the Cows, in
fanzines like „Your Flesh“ . Also on Record covers from labels
like Amphetamine Reptile, there were displays of abject art, stills from horror
movies and porn. Bands like Drunks with Guns posing with snuff movie images and
weapons. But also stuff like Survival Research Laboratories from San Francisco,
staging a sort of apocalyptic last day on earth show with debris and industrial
trash. Reenacting war. Some of it I experienced as an ironic take on life at
the end of the 20th century. What was the dark side of it, the gendertrouble,
can you elaborate?
It came from different sources and with different
inflections. But there was a general interest in the shocking, the abject, the
dark side of human psychology. Some of it came out of industrial culture, the
evolution from Throbbing Gristle to power electronics outfits like Whitehouse,
Ramleh, and Sutcliffe Jugend. In the latter case, it’s a band name inspired by
the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer. At the same time, as a development out
of hardcore punk and noise rock in America, you had groups like Killdozer or
Butthole Surfers who had songs about grotesque or upsetting things. Live there
might be video projections of horrible accidents or surgery. Big Black were
major figures on this scene and when they broke up Steve Albini formed a group
called Rapeman – a name that got a lot of negative responses, in the U.K.
certainly. Songs about the killing of
women were almost a stock theme for a certain kind of alternative rock band. On the fringe of the alternative music culture,
selling in the same kind of fanzine shops or records shops, there were also
zines dedicated to murder or other forms of extreme human behaviour. ANSWER
ME! was one in the early Nineties – they did issues themed around on
suicide, murder, rape. You had publishers that specialized in this kind of
thing, like Feral House.
Now, the horrible side of life and the bizarre freaky evil
things humans do are fascinating, there’s no denying that. And some of these
groups were really powerful as sonic experiences. And you could argue that this kind of subject
matter is a legitimate subject for artistic exploration, confronting the ‘dark
side of human nature’ or the extremes of desire. You might defend the early
work of Nick Cave in the Birthday Party or with the Bad Seeds on that level and
place it in a tradition of decadent and surrealist writing, Lautreamont, etc.
Nonetheless, there did seem to be something oddly fixated
about the interest in the murder of women. It was noticeable that the
songwriters almost always wrote from the point of view of the man doing the
killing, rather than from the point of view of the victim.
There were a lot of things going on with this culture - a desire to shock, to push further than had
been gone before, a cynical and nihilistic worldview, and a sort of hunger for
stimulation, which leads to developing a tolerance for horrible images, so you
need to keep upping the extremism.
But there was also an impulse to goad bourgeois liberals and
upset sensitive people – rooted in the same
psychology and - in some cases the same politics - as the current alt-right drive to trigger
“snowflakes” and to reject political correctness. So for instance, the guy
behind ANSWER ME! – Jim Goad – went on to write the book The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks,
and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats. Most recently he published a book called The New Church
Ladies: The Extremely Uptight World of "Social Justice." “Church Ladies” is a reference to powerful
older women involved in the social life of churches, organizing events and
fundraisers etc – and by implication it references a entire matriarchal
tradition in America that goes back to the temperance movement – basically the
idea is that these women are priggish do-gooders trying to stop men having fun,
whether it’s drinking alcohol or watching porn or telling offensive jokes. Goad
was been cited as an influence on Gavin McInnes, formerly of Vice and founder
of the Proud Boys movement.
In my memory female bands like Babes in Toyland (who are
mentioned in your book later on), Frightwig, and many more were active in that
very same scene. I didn’t take notice of any hate against them, (but perhaps
from todays perspective, there was).
They were probably
considered cool hard-rocking girls. And some of the groups, like Babes and
early Hole, were exploring similar zones of abjection or body-horror, but from a
different angle. Courtney Love was a big fan of Big Black – and the early Hole
records were very noisy, quite different from the more focused, anthemic sound
of Live Through This. She said something along the lines that Big Black,
underneath all the nastiness of the lyrics, were just sad, sensitive, lonely
boys – she could sense a pathos underneath all the vicious noise that seemed to
want to hurt your ears. And there’s probably something to that. There is a
phase that boys in their early teens go through where they are interested in
all things dark and horrible – it might lead them to read books on serial
murderers, or the concentration camps. Or an interest in horror movies. It’s kind of an attempt to harden the
character armor and be cynical and cold, with a dark view of the world. Alice
Cooper said that his fanbase was 13 to 15 year old boys!
Back when Rock’n’Roll started to become a mass phenomenon
in the 1950s, it was accompanied by a moral panic in the media, from
evangelists and politicians to psychoanalists, who made comments on the new
lifestyle, what they had seen in R&R was the youth on the verge of chaos,
music made by „animals“, a mix of racism and cultural pessimism, a danger for
the kids. So lots of police and medical personal in white being deployed at the
shows. Can you comment on the popular psychoanalytic reading of R&R in the
1950s? There was „gender, rebellion and Rock’nRoll“, but maybe in a different
way, than 15 years onwards?
The “race”-based fears and the fears about an unleashing of
sexuality were linked at this point. You had the fear of these “jungle” rhythms and
the wild dancing they encouraged – a loosening of inhibitions. Instead of the romantic pop and slower dance
modes of the Fifties, this was music that incited young people to move in more
abandoned and overtly sexual ways. The fear was that girls would become
sexually awakened by this intensely rhythmic music that appealed to the body
very directly, and also by these charismatic, disreputable singers – who had
derived their vocal and performance style from black music. There is a Cramps
poster that is based on an early anti-rock’n’roll leaflet: the slogan is
something like “Does Rock and Roll lead to Sin and Disease?” It’s trying to
scare both parents and kids with the idea that this music leads to sex before
marriage, promiscuity, and venereal disease.
It was only a short time after the slaughterhouse of WWII
and the singular mass murder of Holocaust, when young people could invent
themselves in a peaceful way through music. Is there a phase of pop music,
before you set in with your book at the dawn of Hippie culture, where young
people actually could get rid of the shadows of fascism and use R&R as an
opposing force to the square culture of the Cold war years?
Yes, absolutely, our book is not denying the liberating
energies of rock’n’roll or the various youth cultures that sprang out of it, or
the idealism involved in the counter-culture.
The desire to break away from domesticity and the traps of a
conventional bourgeois life is both understandable and gives the music a power
and energy that is compelling to this day. It’s just that it was often
inflected with a misogynist aspect, with women and “the feminine” associated
with everything that is holding the young man back from a life of freedom and
heroic adventure. Of course, domesticity
is just as much, or even more, a trap for young women - indeed at the same time as rock is busting
loose, the anomie and boredom of suburbia inspires to Betty Friedan to write her
1963 book The Feminine Mystique, which kickstarts the second wave of feminism.
Although the counterculture wanted to transform life radically in a lot of
respects, often the attitudes to women and the roles they were assigned were
very traditional. Even the idealized images of women in psychedelia tended to
make them into the ethereal dream-women, seen as healing and caring companions,
rather than active figures embarking on adventures of their own.
You set in with your book in the mid 1960s, when Beatlemania
starts to explode in the US, legions of Garage bands try to mimick the music
and images from „the british invasion“. Can you describe the popular male
gender role from that time? It was the exact moment of the Vietnam war, the
draft, but there were loads of young men with long hair, not looking and acting
like soldiers. At the same time they acted out traditional male roles in their
songs, and hang out in „homosocial“ habitat, excluding women. Can you discuss
this contradiction between fear of the draft and traditional sexual role play?
It's hard to reconstruct how subversive growing your hair
even a little longer than the norm was in those days. In their early days, The Beatles hair barely
reached their collars but it was considered a huge transgression – very daring
and, for their female fans, exciting. To
have your ears covered up by hair, if you were a man was almost an outrage! As
a publicity gimmick to get his career going, David Bowie started a pretend
movement called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men.
He managed to get on BBC television and talked with a straight face about the
kind of insults that young men with long hair like himself used to get. Which
was doubtless true and based on real abuse said to him in the street, even if
the movement he created was a kind of media prank. People were very unsettled
by blurring of gender boundaries. As well as being seen as effeminate, long
hair was considered a mark of bohemia –
having it would disqualify you from any kind of normal job in an office or
public service. You had to be pretty brave and uncompromising to go through
life with long hair – meaning, just down to your shoulders.
Bohemianism, though, was about scruffiness. There was
another kind of long hair that came out of flamboyance and an interest in
style. That kind of long hair for men coded as a kind of dandy-ish vanity and
self-preoccupation that was considered unmanly and decadent. Men weren’t
supposed to pay much attention to their appearance. That was a feminine domain.
And if you did show signs of overt care with your hair or clothing, people
might assume you were gay.
What happened in the Sixties was this approach to
self-adornment or grooming drifted from
the margins into the mainstream. Things that only certain daring people at art
school or in subcultures like mod had done become much more common, such that
by the early Seventies your average clerical office worker has hair down to
their collar and covering their ears, and might wear a pink shirt or a brightly
colored tie.
But men taking an interest in “feminine” things like style
or grooming doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to change their
attitudes about women. You can be a dandy and a misogynist – and also not want
to go fight for your country.
With the hippies in America, the long hair was a form of
soft protest against the draft, you were making yourself look as far from a
soldier with cropped hair as possible. Remember in America, they had the call
up, but the UK didn’t participate in the Vietnam War, and compulsory national
service had ended in 1961 – there was a whole generation of young British men
coming through who didn’t have to toughen up with two years in the Army.
In America, the “I’m not fit to fight” aspect was one of multiple
meanings of long hair – another was kind of “natural”, wilderness look, that
carried over into growing beards and so forth. So in that sense, very different
from the dandy, mod sensibility.
To work out „Rock’s psychosexual underpinnings“ you dig
deep and bring in Klaus Theweleits’s „Male Fantasies“, for example, a classic,
we keep coming back to, because it shows the pychological effects on german
male gender at the end of the Great War which then made way for brutal violence
against the council revolution of 1918/19 and then led directly to teutonic
fascism. The pressure of being masculine: What is similar between the
Freikorps-soldiers and rock icons (like Morrison, Pop and Bowie) on a self-destructive
path, and what is different?
Of those three, Iggy Pop is the one where his libido is
mixed up with militarism. The Stooges’s music feels ballistic, like it’s on the
warpath. On “Search and Destroy”, Iggy’s describing himself in terms of a commando
squad on a mission, or a guided missile. He sings “I’m a street-walking cheetah
with a heart full of napalm”. So he’s a fast-moving killing machine of a feline
predator, and instead of love or even blood, his heart is full of napalm, the
incendiary weapon. This is an image he’s using while the Vietnam War is still
going on, when just about the most shocking image of that era is the girl
running screaming down a road having torn her napalm-soaked clothes off. It’s
the complete opposite of hippiedom, it’s already the beginnings of punk – hate
and war replace love and peace. In songs
like that and “Death Trip” and “Raw Power”, Iggy’s about summoning up within
himself of the will to power, and going into the dark zone where
self-aggrandisement and self-destruction become the same thing. The power of
the music is undeniable, but you have to confront that it is tapping into dark
energies.
Iggy carried on using militaristic imagery – he did the
album Soldier in 1980 (which includes a song titled “I’m a Conservative”) and
in the early Nineties he did a record called American Caesar. The title comes
from a book about General MacArthur, who was a military genius who also
entertained ideas about running for President. “Caesarism” – the exaltation of
military prowess and seeing it as a qualification for political leadership – is
on the edges of fascism. Trump has that bizarre, pathetic obsession with having
generals in his cabinet and wanting to throw huge military parades.
Bowie doesn’t really go in for war imagery much, but he did
of course have his “strong leader” phase, when cocaine and half-understood
Nietzsche and his readings of the occult all combined in his addled head, and
he started going on about how he’d like to rule the world. At that time in the
mid-Seventies, he would talk about how liberalism and permissiveness had gone
too far and that it all needed to be “cleaned up” – which is similar to the
line of talk that Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver was making, also in the
mid-Seventies, when he goes on about a “rain coming to wash all the filth and
scum off the streets” of New York. Bowie was probably inspired by some of the
depravity and decadence that he’d seen – and possibly participated in – while
living in Los Angeles. So this
preoccupation with filth is similar to the Freikorps imagery of swamps and
threatening floods (again, very Trump and resonant with imagery used by a lot
of xenophobic, authoritarian, ‘strongman’ aspiring politicians around the
world).
At different points in the Seventies, Bowie identifies
himself (and Lou Reed, his ally) with decadence, and then later on, he imagines
being the strong leader who’ll end the decadence. He’s also picked up a vibe at
huge arena concerts where it gets to feel like he’s like a messiah or dictator,
and that he could tell the audience to do anything. He’s aware of the
manipulative power of stage gestures, huge volume, and lights.
You also cite Nietzsche’s aphorism: „Under conditions of
peace the warlike man attacks himself“ to describe the self destruction but
also the „soldier like“ orchestration of bands like Radio Birdman and the
Stooges: How much of the Stooges‘ music is playful provocation and how much is
a subconscious rapport about troubles with their soldier fathers? Obviously it
went out of hand, xxx
“Playful” doesn’t seem like what’s going on here – it’s
pretty earnest, pretty serious, pretty heartfelt. There’s a real identification
with the military. And it’s a lot to do with wanting to live a heroic life, a
life of adventure. What are the avenues for that in life? Well, you could join
the army, or you could join a rock’n’roll band. (There are others, obviously).
But the parallel between being in a band and being in a military unit have
struck many performers. Patti Smith went through a phase of wearing aviator’s
goggles and seeing her group as a sort of roaming squadron. In the metal world,
this sort of parallelism between military and music is really common. You come
to town, make a huge noise that sounds like explosions, strike all these heroic
postures, and then like a band of Vikings, you wassail and frolic with the local
women, before moving on to raid another town. A tour is like a tour of duty.
The late 1960s are widely assumed as to being the Golden
Age of Rock. The album format, radio airplay, tv-appearances would help
promoting major rockstars to the mainstream, the velocity of touring would
transport (mostly male) stars like Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix to world wide
fame in just a few years. „Too much too soon“, the excessive lifestyle, the
sex, the drugs: Did the myth-making-machine of Rock actually promote sexual
liberation, drug use and antisocial behavior? And what happened when it
collided with the traditional values and gender roles of the mainstream?
Over the long run, rock music -and then later rave culture –
has normalized and banalised what once used to be bohemian behavior. Ordinary
people get up to incredible debauches in terms of chemical intake in an average
weekend. But it’s probably overstating
it to say that rock is entirely responsible for this. After all, people have
drunk enormous amounts for centuries, when the occasion calls for it. It’s not
like people before rock’n’roll were living pure, restrained lives necessarily.
They were getting absolutely off their heads on Martinis or beer or whatever. I
think rock just helped to add a few more intoxicants to the menu.
It probably contributed to the sexual revolution, but more
significant would be the invention of the pill and the legalization of
abortion. People in the pre-rock’n’roll era wanted to have sex before marriage
just as much, it’s just that they had to be more discreet and they were more
afraid of the consequences.
You also research the orchestration of the male loner in
1980s popstars like Nick Cave and Morrissey, two figures who are still around
today. Many of Nick Cave‘s songs are like a modern version of the 19th century
dark romance, with violent relationships, biblical scenery and imagination from
the world of Americana. What does this eternal past say about the artists‘
present? In what way is Cave’s image close to that of a traditional male
rockstar, and what is different? In the case of Morrissey, his antipathy to
women you have illustrated with many examples, him playing a neurotic dandy. In
the light of Morrisseys recent reincarnation as a right wing (who reminds me on
the character of Oswald Mosley in the BBC tv show „Peaky Blinders“). Can you
trace his recent reactionary atttitude in his artist past? Or, is there any
rational explanation for his move from the twee pop romantic to the culture
pessimist and isolationist of today?
Nick Cave probably sees himself as a writer as much as stage
performer – and he’s addressing the kind of themes and scenarios that inspire
him, extremes of human emotion, desires taken to the limit. And a lot of what
he’s exploring is part of a much longer history – the human condition, the kind
of passions and failings and dark drives that fuel the tragedies or myths or
legends. It’s not that topical or tied to the contemporary scene.
Morrissey was such a provocative and dissident figure in the
Eighties, that his current politics is confusing and upsetting to fans. In the
Eighties, the Smiths seemed like part of the opposition to Thatcherism and the
values of consumerism, materialism, yuppiedom. Morrissey was promoting a
radically fluid idea of sexual desire and sexual identity with his love songs
that had no defined gender object. At the same time there was a delicious camp
and playful vein of homo-eroticism running through many of the songs and the
imagery on the record covers. Although there were nostalgic aspects to the
Smiths and his comments about black music seemed blinkered, overall you felt
like he was a progressive figure – and certainly a great original and a poet.
You tended to give him the benefit of the doubt and think that a song like
“Bengalis in Platforms” was an aberration, a misjudgment. Morrissey seemed to
be the enemy of all kinds of bullying and to be on the side of the excluded,
the persecuted, every minority or outcast group. But it is possible now to see
that the nostalgic fixation on the English past that was always there has led
him down a troubling path. It’s very sad
to see him supporting Brexit and the For Britain party and complaining about
left-wingers.
Your book not only tries to explain male gender in rock
music, but also it has a chapter (Flow motion“) about the „motherly“ oceanic
side of rock music, citing the sound of Can as an archetype, a music in flux,
where the male gender of the musicians is not in the foreground of the band’s
outlook. As you finished „The Sex
Revolts“ in 1995, from a present perspective, are there any similarities in the
electronic dancefloor way to produce with that of the non-macho mode of
production of Can?
There is definitely a relationship between some elements in
the German kosmiche music like Can, or Manuel Gottsching’s late Seventies
records and E2:E4 in particular, with the way that house music and others kind
of electronic dance music works. Structurally, with the circular patterns, the
pulsations and caressing textures, and also in terms of how it affects the
listener: hypnotic trance, a feeling of being wombed or floating in a benign
space like the ocean or the cosmos. There is a line you can trace from psychedelia,
through German kosmiche, to ambient music, to people like the avant-disco
producer Arthur Russell, through to outfits like Basic Channel / Chain
Reaction, or the Gas records, or Seefeel. It’s a radically androgynous music.
You also have a chapter on the then nascent scene of Riot
Grrrls, „there’s a riot goin‘ on“. US-female Punkbands, who started with the
promotion of feminist DiY as a raison d’etre. While some of the protagonists
are still around, fe „Portlandia“ the tv show by Carrie Brownstein, is the movement
of Riot Grrrls more than an early example of intersectional fragmentarisation
of pop culture? From today why do you think it was different from earlier
feminist punk artists like the Slits?
Riot Grrrl was very interesting as a cultural eruption, an
explosion of zines and stances and provocations. As music, probably the more
interesting stuff came later, with groups like Le Tigre and Sleater-Kinney (and
the wonderful Portlandia could be considered an offshoot, in a way). For its
immediate purposes of evangelizing and inciting young women, Riot Grrrl turned
to the basic template of punk rock, for its directness and expressive power in
terms of rage or defiance. Riot Grrrl
tended to subordinate music to message, whereas the postpunk figures like the Slits
and the Raincoats were also trying to experiment with form.
What I like about the introduction of your original
version, you declare, you like the Stooges nevertheless. Meaning you work out
their dark side, their problems, but you still like to get down to „I wanna be
your dog“. In the light of #me too, this attitude has come under attack.
There’s now a shame culture. If we have a review of Iggy’s new album „Free“,
somebody will post a comment about him, having treated women in a bad way. What
do you make out of that development?
A lot of the rockers – however inspiring or thrilling their
music might be – got away with terrible stuff. Acknowledging the bad conduct –
and the questionable or offensive or just out-dated attitudes in the lyrics –
is possibly a way of keeping the other aspects of their music, that dynamic
energy so that you can use it in your life, as a positive impetus. But maybe
that’s too hard to do in many cases. With rock music or popular music
generally, the music makes a direct, visceral appeal for the listener to commit
to it totally; the artist or the song
wants the listener to go along with its energy absolutely. Trying to do that
while also retaining your ambivalence or moral detachment from it - that’s very difficult. It’s easier just to reject the work or the
artist completely. And what do you do
when the music itself is fueled by hostility or hatred?
It’s a tricky one -
there isn’t an easy answer, an easy solution, to this question of what do we do
with great art made by bad people. Or
great art, that has some ugly or disturbing emotions or ideas in it. Each
person has to make their own decision, about what they can make allowances for. It’s perhaps unreasonable to expect artists
to be perfect beings in their private conduct, or have ideas and values that
are in line with what we currently think is valid or righteous. You have to
historicise and contextualize to some degree. But when artists are discovered
to have done genuinely reprehensible things, it’s understandable if someone decides
“I can’t have this in my life”. You can feel that the work is stained
permanently.
In recent years, documentaries, autobiographies by/about
Wayne Kramer and Klaus Dinger, to name just two, were published. And basically,
that can be said about many artists, what came to light were stories of being
victims: In the case of Kramer he was abused by his stepfather, in the case of
Dinger, he suffered a romantic love relationship with a woman from Sweden). It
might be much too essential, too monothematical, to combine a broken family
life, a scattered life story with the artistic outcome, in what way,
psychoanalysises can help to explain those factors?
It can be illuminating, but it’s also reductive – it limits
the meaning of a song or album or an artist for the listener. A classic example
of this is what happened with Joy Division. At the time of the release of “Love
Will Tear Us Apart” and Closer, almost nobody knew why Ian Curtis had killed
himself. Only a few people around Factory Records knew about the marriage break
up, the affair, the epilepsy and the depressive medication he was taking to
deal with – the real-life factors that shaped the mood and the lyrics of those
records and also his decision to end his life.
But since the publication of his widow’s memoir, and the two films 24
Hour Party People and Control, this life-story of Curtis’s struggles has become
the meaning of the songs, fixing them to a biography and a set of problems. It
illuminates the songs to some extent but it also confines them.
There are cases where an artist is very public about this
kind of thing – as with John Lennon on his first solo album, doing songs like
“Mother” and “My Mummy’s Dead” and “Working Class Hero”. But generally it can
only ever be a speculative thing, trying to psychoanalyse an artist by their
songs or even their public statements. And it does run the risk of being
reductive. It’s better to psychoanalyse the song, ask what the song “wants” or
“fears”. That’s often what we’re trying
to do with The Sex Revolts.
Last question: Fascism is in full swing and it
is also apparent in pop culture phenomenons like „Nazi Rap“ and the antisocial
orchestration Angela Nagle writes about in „Kill all Normies“. Maybe fascism
never fully disappeared, but, can you please explain examples of fascism in
todays male gender that can be traced to that misogyne rock attitude from the
1970s?
It’s probably most detectable in the migration of “punk” as
an attitude, from the cultural left to the far right, as traced by Angela Nagle
in her book. And some of the people
already mentioned like Jim Goad (funnily enough “goad” in English mean to “poke”
or “provoke” or “bait”) or Gavin McInnes are examples of how that punk impulse
to trample on liberal pieties and desecrate sacred cows can so easily switch
towards the reactionary.
Some of the figures involved in formulating punk as a
sensibility, like Legs McNeil of Punk magazine, already went in for this
liberal-baiting thing – deliberately using offensive words in order to trigger
the righteous and right-on progressive. You had the side of punk (especially in
the UK) that was earnestly left-wing and idealistic, aligned with things like
Rock Against Racism. But there was another side that was cynical, nihilistic,
anti-sentimental… and it’s easy to see how that sensibility could get captured
by the right. Because it’s all about being callous, hard-hearted, not caring.
Not fascist, but certainly Social Darwinist and ruthlessly hyper-capitalistic,
would be the value set of trap music.
When Cardi B says “I'm a boss /You a
worker, bitch” or Rae Sremmurd, early in their career, do a song like 2015’s
“Up With Trump” (complete with a video in which someone wearing a Donald mask
parties with them), you can see an identification with the ruling class – a
desire to be an overlord, not an underdog; an intention to join the few and
leave behind the many (an inversion of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party slogan ‘for
the many, not the few’, itself derived from the poet Shelley). To be fair to Cardi B, she has campaigned in
various anti-Trump causes. But even after he became President, Rae Sremmurd
still cited Trump as a model because he represents “owning businesses, being
bossed up”.
Yet trap
is irresistible as music, so what do you? It’s the same dilemma as with the
Rolling Stones and The Stooges. It’s also potent African-American expression
with a prominent place in mass culture, so you have to see something valuable
there. Perhaps we can take trap as a diagram of capitalist desire while also
dancing to it.
