Darlin’, we’re Lieven

Reading about the latest Kanye West video, I thought I should go and watch it for myself before passing comment.  As I did, I couldn’t help thinking: how did black American culture go from Leadbelly, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone to 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg and this?

As ever, our old pal Orwell is something of a guide.  In ‘Benefit of Clergy‘, he discussed why the European elite of the 1920s lapped up Dali’s ‘diseased and disgusting’ work, and why ‘if you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back’.  Lamenting the lack of a middle ground between conservatives unable to see any aesthetic merit in morally bad art, and liberals unable to see any moral harm in aesthetically good art, he wrote:

The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘Art’, and everything is O.K.: kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or is O.K. It is also O.K. that Dali should batten on France for years and then scuttle off like rat as soon as France is in danger. So long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.

Another Telegraph writer falls perfectly into Orwell’s trap without even getting beyond the headline — which reminds me of this brilliant bit of satire.

What’s happened since Orwell’s day is, despite his best efforts, the triumph of self-centred Bloomsbury values and their filtration through to every level of western society.  Combined with the awful inheritance that has come down to America’s black population (including, with a third of black men spending time in prison, the normalisation of crime), plus the absolute triumph of consumer capitalism over any opposing values (also inadvertently thanks to the Bloomsbury set, as the selfishness of the ’80s would have been impossible without its forerunner in the ’60s), hip-hop is the depressing result.  The stagnation of living standards has turned the American dream into a warped fantasy.

Music is quite a good proxy for the state of popular culture.  The blues and jazz artists of the first half of the 20th century sang of hardship but also of hope (mixed, in Leadbelly’s case, with great gallows humour).  This was the essence of gospel, and it was still discernible up to the Motown era.  By the 1980s, though, as the promise of the civil rights era waned, hope turned to anger in black music, and from the justified anger of early rap to the pointless, despairing, hedonistic anger of hip-hop — a sort of tribal return to a pre-slavery, pre-Christian culture of polygamous strongmen.  (By the way, I predict that in the coming decades the right to be married to more than one person at once will be enshrined in western legal systems.)

Animism and voodoo are more in evidence than gospel in postmodern black culture: no doubt this makes for more amusing entertainment for its white, middle-class consumers, but one would have to be pretty dogmatically anti-Christian to see this as an improvement for black Americans themselves.  No doubt Christianity became less appealing for them the more it was hijacked by rightwing white politicians.  As in Europe, the backlash is now coming from Islam, which — having not abandoned moral struggle for Christianity’s complicated, self-defeating liberal omphaloskepsis — is really in quite a strong position.  It’s already formed a powerful movement among disenchanted and downtrodden black men in America and Britain: when this reaches the white underclass, perhaps the rest of us will start to take belated note.

I mused on all of this as I reread Anatol Lieven’s ripsnorting bit of apocalypse porn from 2001 in Prospect magazine (nicely bookended by a link with a picture of cheeseburgers and the caption ‘all you can eat in Glasgow — up to 70% cheaper here’).  In it, he more or less predicts the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina and the credit crunch.  With the exception of the latter, which he dates to 2007, these events happened a lot sooner than he expected.  One line in the piece seems apt to this discussion:

This was only the last stage in a long process of the moral degeneration of popular culture, beginning with the spread of television in the 1950s. Erotica, pornography and, at the extremes, sadistic violence, had already made big advances through the popularity of film and video in the 20th century.

Perhaps; I doubt there’s anything new under the sun, but the process that began with TV and continues with YouTube has certainly exposed a lot of sadistic violence that was previously hidden, and has no doubt turned many impressionable people in the wrong direction.  When the harm that passes for public entertainment becomes real rather than simulated, I suppose we will have crossed the line.  Note, though, that as the commodification of life-affirming sex in pop music can go no further without becoming indistinguishable from pornography, so death-affirming sex is commodified instead (compare, say, Madonna’s Justify My Love video, forged in rebellion against repressive sexual morality, with any video by her very boring successor Lady Gaga, forged in rebellion against absolutely nothing, and you’ll see what I mean).

Anyway, the commercialisation of hip-hop is merely the latest and most watered-down incarnation of the cruelty inflicted by white elites on the black underclass, from slavery and imperialism via lynching and segregation.  King Leopold would have loved it; his successors are no doubt perfectly chuffed with the triumph of the completely apolitical gangsta rappers.  I’m almost tempted to tip my hat to the racist Kanye for taking the genre out of its comfort zone of black-on-black violence.  I have to ask, though: if 50 years ago black America had had role models like him, would the civil rights movement actually have happened?

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