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The Macklemore Snub

 

 

Looking at “best song” lists for 2024 in the Google top of the algorithm food chain – Rate Your Music, Billboard, Rolling Stone, Vulture, Esquire, Apple Music, Pitchfork, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, Slant, The Guardian, Stereogum – as well as a few podcast reviewers, I found the following names listed, in no particular order:

Laura Marling, Future Islands, The Chisel, Cindy Lee, Xiu Xiu, Taylor Swift, St. Vincent, Sexxy Red, Joanna Wang, Nourished by Time, DIIV, Mount Eerie, Quaedeca, Magdalena Bay, The Black Keys, Ava Max, Waxahatchee, Adrienne Linker, Beyoncé, Ka, Charlie XCX, Zach Bryan, Doechii, Jamie XX, Kendrick Lamar, horsegiirL, Dog Race, Jason Isbell, Chat Pile, Faye Webster, Sturgill Simpson, Eels, The Coward Brothers, S. Grant Parker, Mk.gee, Illuminati Hotties, Friko, MJ Lenderman, Tyla, Ziggy Ramo, The Smile, Cheekface, Caroline Polacheck, Burial, HiTech, Fontaines D.C., Robyn Hitchcock, Brittany Howard, Blood Incantation, King Hannah, Soccer Mommy, Denzel Curry, Floating Points, Igloohost, Jack White, Joey Valence and Brae, Hermanos Gutierrez, Julia Holter, The National, Krallice, Logic, Megan the Stallion, Teddy Swims, JADE, Tommy Richman, Linkin Park, Post Malone, FKA Twigs, Lemon Twigs, Lupe Fiasco, Cash Cobain, Lust$ickPuppy, Agriculture, Hooray for the Riff Raff, MGMT, Moor Mother, NxWorries, Porter Robinson, John Moreland, Yaeji, Quaedeca, Tyler the Creator, Yeat, Kasey (wake ’n bake) Musgraves, Wussy, Jon Anderson, Rosalie Cunningham, Sprints, Richard Thompson, Sierra Ferrell, The Black Crowes, Crowded House, Chapelle Roan, The The, This Is Lorelei, The Hanseroth Twins, Sabrina Carpenter, Kim Deal, Bananarun, Arooj Aftab, Lizzy McAlpine, Camille Cabello, Kim Gordon, Maruja, Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish, King Gizzard etc, Godspeed etc, Father John Misty, Vampire Weekend, Squid, Armand Hammer, Future, Ariana Grande, Halsen, Olivia Rodrigo, Addison Rae, Shaboozey, Tinashe, GloRilla, New Jeans, Dasha, Jessica Pratt and Ayra Starr.  

My best music of the year includes Geordie Greep, Shellac, Chelsea Wolfe, Beth Gibbons, Mabe Fratti, The Cure, and sometimes included in this year’s list, The Last Dinner Party. Bikini Body’s Weird Party was the best EP IMO. Nick Cave, Memorials and Julian Cope are also of interest. Many of the listed albums are certainly worth a listen. Overall, however, these corporate music lists are disheartening. Much of what is on offer is not simply alienated spastic bugging out, but is seriously despairing, nihilistic, narcissistic, indulgent, vapid, ugly, glib, clueless, ridiculous, infantile, irrelevant, and more along these lines. The videos don’t add much either. There was no ‘How Soon Is Now’ this year, for example, or ‘Once In a Lifetime.’

When looking back at 2024, there is no doubt that one of the most important songs was Macklemore’s ‘Hind’s Hall,’ released in May to show support for the Palestinians in Gaza, who are being slaughtered in what the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice have determined is a genocide being carried out by war criminals. And of course, these criminals could not carry out mass murder without the support of the United States and its vassals in the European Union, the G7 and NATO. In his song and interviews, Macklemore does not hesitate to criticize U.S. funding of the genocide. He addresses all of the important facts: the occupation of Palestine is illegal and the Palestinians have the right, if not the moral obligation, to bring an end to it, as best they can; Israeli lobbyists buy American politicians; AIPAC and other groups have spearheaded campaigns against “anti-semitism” as a pretext to cancel even the most modest criticism; the IDF considers all Palestinians to be militant fighters, which they may very well be and have the duty to be. In addition, Macklemore condemns the music industry’s silence on the conflict. As a case in point, music critic Anthony Fantano considers Kendrick Lamar’s ‘meet the grahams’ to be the best song of 2024.1 For his part, Macklemore considers the conflict between Drake and Lamar to be an unimportant sideshow when compared to the Israeli-Gaza conflict, which has drawn Yemen, Lebanon and Iran into the conflict and has led to the neocolonial partition of Syria.

Although ‘Hind’s Hall’ has been compared by Time magazine to Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ and Crosby, Still, Nash & Young’s ‘Ohio,’ in terms of important protest songs, the mass consciousness industry has unmistakenly snubbed it. The intention goes deeper. The corporate-run music industry wants to bury this song and erase it from memory. In September, Macklemore released a sequel titled ‘Hind’s Hall 2,’ which features many Palestinian and Palestinian American artists. The song correctly takes Kamala Harris to task for her stance on the issue, and one cannot but blame the Democratic Party for the fact that Donald Trump has been re-elected, alongside the unelected Elon Musk, who seems to have been hired by Trump to do part of his job for him. It would be reductive to make a homology, or reductive correlation, between the above list of artists and the kinds of politicians who are running what little there is of Western democracy into the ground. One can expect that Trump will attempt to privatize the U.S. Postal Service, among other cuts to the public sector, including federal policy for health care, and this at time when the bird flu has been allowed to spread to livestock. The preliminary report of the House Select Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic already indicates that the American state will revive the discredited lab leak hypothesis to further demonize China as the U.S. attempts to re-dollarize the global economy. Although more than a million Ukrainians have died in the proxy war, NATO powers are full speed ahead with plans to carve up Russia.

In Marxist analysis, culture is considered part of the ideological superstructure of a society. It is similar to other superstructures like politics, law and religion. When things are going fascist in the world of law, one is not altogether surprised if things are going fascist in the realm of politics. This is why revolutionary periods are often accompanied by radical experimentation in the arts. There is no mechanistic one-to-one relation between the different aspects of a socio-historical structure, which develop at different rates, but there is some harmony and some rhyming. Part of what makes some music great cannot be explained by reference to music alone, but involves considerations of the social context, which can include many things, from the biography and intentions of the artist to the political situation, geographical location, and so on. Some people go too far in trying to explain away music and music appreciation by reference to social and sociological questions. Others do too little of this and ignore questions of ethics, meaning, lyrics, band politics, the political views of the artist, the social conjuncture, the workings of capitalism and the culture industry.

Let’s take two recent cases in point. When discussing Chapelle Roan and Sabrina Carpenter as the kinds of artists who are setting trends, The Cure’s Robert Smith hesitates to say anything critical. He admires anyone who manages to “do something,” he says, and rejects the role of music critics in that regard.2 Critics, one is led to think, have no role to play and should not interfere with the business of getting music ‘out there’ or with the pleasure that audiences take in deciding for themselves what they like. Since Smith endeavoured to make Cure concerts available at a lower cost than usual, we are led to think that this demonstrates how a legacy artist like himself – who has a net worth of $25 million – is not just in it for the money. However, just as greed has nothing to do capitalism, the love of art and audiences has little to do with the workings of the music industry – and this is true even for artists like Macklemore. The charismatic definition of art is without doubt an aspect of the nineteenth-century Romantic ideology that people like Smith uphold, yet for good or bad he lives with the rest of us in this era. The past can be used to cast a critical eye on the present, but it cannot replace it. The level of discussion he engaged in for his recent BBC interview is simply sophomoric banter and mostly unworthy of serious consideration, except as a statement issued by the famous musician. As cultural criticism it is simply basic, which is not to say that the industry does not run on basic.

Another recent statement issued for the unwashed was made by Rick Beato on his YouTube channel.3 Beato wonders why music genres are becoming unimportant. He finds that there were important genres in music until around 2010. This of course is undigested postmodern theory, and everyone with an arts B.A. knows that the decline of the historical sense of linear development is supposed to have set in during the 1980s, possibly earlier. In Beato’s explanation, it is online forms of self-directed consumption that accounts for the final disappearance of a mass audience phenomenon. It was powerful industry labels and radio hosts that previously set the standard for the rest of society. What disappears from his discussion of “the end of dominant narratives” is the attendant notion of “the end of history,” which, according to Francis Fukuyama, implied the ideological success of global capitalism. Fukuyama is not the only person who since c.2000 has been heralding the return of history and the class struggle. How is it that the far right understands this better than the mainstream? Max Horkheimer famously said that whoever does not criticize capitalism has nothing to say about fascism. That explains why Macklemore was not mentioned in the top songs of the year, and, by the same token, why the standards of criticism are nothing to get excited about.

Why does the discussion of Spotify rubbish not entail any mention of political economy and any serious criticism of the culture industry? The answer is that people in the music industry accept the rules of capitalist cultural production. Like Margaret Thatcher, they don’t see an alternative. They may regret the effects of capitalism, but they don’t think that they’re responsible for any of it. They are only responsible for putting out music and criticism that satisfies their personal criteria. Protest songs by people like Macklemore, or albums by musicians like Godspeed, can have political value while at the same time having very little music value. With some artists, anti-aesthetics is a matter of design. Politics cannot save bad art, which is a problem known as tendenzkunst, or tendentiousness. On the other hand, art by itself cannot save society from decline. The fact that the music industry has snubbed ‘Hind’s Hall’ 1 and 2 tells you a lot of what you need to know about serving a capitalist system that had led universities, media organizations and government bureaucracies to cancel people and even charge them with terrorism for doing as little as denouncing genocide.4 To quote John Lydon, before he became a MAGA stooge: “If that’s what it’s come to, then what’s the point?”

 

 

Notes

1. theneedledrop, “Top 50 Songs of 2024,” YouTube (December 20, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8x_AISM1t0.

2. BBC Sounds, “2024 in music with The Cure’s Robert Smith | Sidetracked,” YouTube (December 20, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh4jlXJklkk.

3. Rick Beato, “The Death of Music Genres,” YouTube (December 18, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-h_OHhtvPU.

4. For a brief introduction to the Israel-Palestine conflict, see David North, The Logic of Zionism: From Nationalist Myth to the Gaza Genocide, 2nd edition (Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2024) and Marco La Grotta, ed. The Fight to Free Palestine: Palestinian History from a Marxist Perspective (Toronto: Camilo Cahis Marxist Publishing House, 2024).

 

Pseudo-Events for Pseudo-Left Pseudo-Intellectuals

 

 

According to commentators on the left, Luigi Mangione, the rich kid who set out to make an ignominious name for himself by assassinating the CEO of United Healthcare (he has not as of this date been convicted of the crime) is some sort of folk hero – a latter-day Jack Sheppard, the Georgian thief whose hanging was attended by 200,000 supporters. The economist Richard Wolff referred to him as Robin Hood.1 In a related manner, the journalist Sabby Sabs suggests that lack of health care is not a left versus right issue, but a top versus bottom issue.2 This populist angle is exploited by Jacobin’s smug commentator Liza Featherstone, who revels in the objectification of a man who is not as attractive as she pretends but whose chest has been pornscaped enough to rival Greta Gerwig’s Ken.3 Women across the Internet, she tells us, are declaring their lust for him, almost as if Featherstone is inciting copycat “resistance,” or is it weightlifting? What either one has to do with feminism is not the point, nor has it anything to do with socialism. Another DSA leftist, Catherine Liu, was recently chastising the left for being satisfied with unpopularity.4 This tells you much of what you need to know about DSA left-liberals: the way for the left to be more effective is to be more popular.4 A recent Jacobin reprint of a text by Russell Jacoby made a similar point, based on the views of C. Wright Mills in the 1960s, that American Marxism, or the New Left, needed to be less sophisticated and more middling.5

What social democrats leave out of their desire for popularity is the extent to which, as Jacoby concludes, American Marxists have lost the plot. This is apparent in Featherstone’s piece, which argues that Mangione has “tapped” into something. As it happens, Americans who are bankrupt, uninsured and underinsured know perfectly well what this something is that academic elites are telling them Mangione understood better than them. Why do such leftists not mention the obvious fact that Mangione exploited a bad situation for his own personal, narcissistic glory? Do we really need Joker types who indulge the nihilist cynicism and despair that has been exploited by the MAGA Republicans, not to mention the routine occurrence of mass shootings?

Obviously, Featherstone says more responsibly, the attention given to the murder is symptomatic of the failings of American national politics. She adds, however, and correctly, that this reality is not all there is to it. If we do not want to see more violence, she argues, as though this was a matter of simple calculation, the left must seize this “cultural moment, relish its clarity and focus, and push the political system in an entirely new direction.” The “libidinal dimension” of this “cultural event,” she suggests, is an attractive criminal, or attractive criminality, that could “satisfy people’s deepest drives” and that mirrors the political right’s hatred of liberals. Since when is Eros the same thing as Thanatos? Or is this politics beyond the pleasure principle? Slavoj Žižek of course has a political theory of drive, but his is not based on resentment, hatred or attention seeking. Like Alain Badiou’s theory of the event, it is not based in the situation. And what Mangione has done is exploit the conditions of spectacle. Americans “hate this system,” Featherstone argues, and so the left should “pay close attention to the atavistic desires driving many to cheer him on.” It really does not matter how many people cheer for Mangione if they are wrong. Since Trumpism is likewise a phenomenon of passion, the left she thinks can lead the way out of fascism by doing the same, fighting fire with fire, as it were, and to put things in the words of a dumb book written by the now conservative Naomi Wolf for people who consider themselves feminist.

In response to this rubbish, one needs to ask: Why does the left fear being left out of this supposedly wonderful moment of carnivalesque overturning? Although human passions, subjectivism and idealism have never been ignored by the left, socialism has developed through strategic rejection of bohemian and petty-bourgeois Narodnik populism, which makes use of outdated notions of anarchist “propaganda of the deed,” such as assassinations, bombings, torture and terrorism, which have a good deal in common with rightist indulgence in irrationality and ultra-left adventurism, voluntarism and anti-intellectual vitalism. To know the history of the left, and its distinction from the right, is to know this implicitly. That left liberals like Featherstone and that people with confused notions of psychoanalysis like Wolff should indulge this moment as an “event” make the obvious mistake that this is a pseudo-event precisely due to its populist aspect of pitting people from below against elites.

Marxist socialism is not based on populist criticism of moral failings like greed. Populism in fact confuses the masses to identify with demagogues. It leads them to make unholy red-brown alliances, and it reiterates the worst aspects of identity politics by indulging in the illusory concreteness of things like murder. The Watts riots and the May 68 protests did very little to change the system, a fact that belies the mantra that violence is the final option after everything else has been attempted. This illusory escape into the “realism” of matter and bitterness, not unlike the sentimental notion that all humans bleed, etc, is a failure of praxis and not its high point. Socialist dialectics works to mediate the “lower” and “higher” aspects of social interaction, seeking to overcome class society and the division of labour. Old Testament revenge is a form of religiosity whose inoperativity should be obvious to anyone observing what is happening in Syria. One thinks of how Zionists have exploited the Holocaust. Marxism explains that capitalism is not a moral problem of greed. This is not to say that greed is not implicated in CEO wealth, but simply that the moralism of violence is a mistaken identification of the problem and how to correct it. The breakdown of Libya after “we came, we saw, he died” is about as sobering as Featherstone’s semi-fascist text. I would not be surprised if she was a fan of Valerie Solanas.

Marxism is scientific, which means philosophical, historical, economic and cultural. It is not based on moralism. Peasant revolts from below have nothing to do with socialism and are rather desperate pleas to those in power to be more paternalistic in their command of the political economy – much like the DSA hangers on of the bourgeois Democratic Party. If Jacobin can publish a text by Jacoby’s on its website, one might recommend to Featherstone such books by Jacoby as The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (1987) and Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present (2011). However, articles like hers are not meant to impart wisdom but to sew political disorientation on the left in favour of a middle-class liberalism that has no good reason to exist. It is made to bring readers to the website and advertise the DSA agenda to young people. It is a fact that Americans have historically fought against themselves rather than fight against the ruling class. Even if he planned everything in advance, Mangione does not have a clear idea of what he did. He is reportedly a fan of Joe Rogan, RFK Jr and libertarian tech post-rationalists. His culture is similar to the doggerel that is served up in Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft. His action does not heighten class consciousness, it drags it lower than it already is, focusing attention on relations of power rather than relations of production, on personalist nihilistic violence rather than collective socialist revolution. As for the public reaction, it is as Jodi Dean says about crowds: without political organization and expression the discharge of the crowd is no more political than an anthill. Even if Mangione’s act was to cause a serious upheaval, like the suicide of Tarek El-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, it would still be a desperate, regrettable act that is not to be emulated or justified. Shame on those who capitalize on rightist demagoguery.

 

Notes

1. Dialogue Works, “Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson: The Desperation of America's Empire at Its Peak!” YouTube (December 12, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke9UvCezqIo.

2. Sabby Sabs, “The View DROPS THE BALL On CEO Shooter Suspect,” YouTube (December 13, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFLoiiaGCbk.

3. Liza Featherstone, “America Will Be Obsessed With Luigi Mangione for a Long Time,” Jacobin (December 12, 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/12/luigi-mangione-health-insurance-democrats.

4. Joshua Citarella, “Catherine Liu: Trauma, Virtue and Liberal Elites,” YouTube (September 11, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia6m3pIIS2k.

5. Russell Jacoby, “American Marxism Got Lost on Campus,” Jacobin (December 8, 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/12/american-marxism-academia-critical-theory.