Against Radiohead, or, Contrary To Popular Belief Music Existed Before 1990

I have made no secret of the hatred I reserve for the writing of James Poulos (a.k.a Postmodern Conservative, a.k.a. "annoying guy from American Scene"). His work is pompous, overwrought, rancid with unnecessary polysyllabic voodoo, and tries desperately to sound intellectual; he's like a smart Paul J. Cella, or a 21st-century Chris Lacaria. Reading his work is like beating yourself in the face with a thesaurus. (Probably Poulos angers me so much because I'm projecting my own fear of academicism and my cripplingly low self-esteem onto him -- but that's not important right now.)

Less often do I take issue with Poulos' actual arguments. Usually they're so far out in conservative neverland that I can see his preconceptions coming and take his (generally sound) logic for what it is. But this week, he's produced a great big article about a subject very close to my heart -- the generational politics of rock music -- that is so completely misinformed and profoundly wrong that's it's driven me to new levels of wild, head-through-monitor frustration. Here's a sample:

For the generations that came of age as Radiohead got huge, patterns of life seem to have emerged that mutually reinforce and confirm a downward revision of expectations. The band’s catalog tracks the increasing acceptance of a newly fundamental degree of contingency, incompleteness, and transience. It extends across careers and love lives, shaping attitudes reaching from domestic politics to cosmic fate. Many now seem happy just to find or help create the passages of experience that permit momentary and communal escapes. Immanent and transcendent, such fugitive moments of therapeutic authenticity ameliorate the painful costs of being comprehensively compromised.

OMFG SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS. Even if you shear away the clearly compensatory Hegelian verbosity, this is nothing more than self-important superfan wanking mixed with pop-sociology bullshit and -- typically of the "classical liberal" set -- a complete and voluntary divorce from historical context. It's just crying out for a response.

So I'll provide some of my trademark fair-minded rebuttals, some music criticism, and an explanation of why Radiohead actually sucks, after the jump.

Read more »

Hillary Clinton, Outsider?

AT THE RISK of inflaming the very same argument that I tried to kill in yesterday's thread (using the best weapon I know how -- children's television), I have to point out that Hillary Clinton has shown a new and surprising strength in online fundraising, if not to the extent that Obama has. Matt Stoller gives an intriguing take on why (emphasis mine):

What happened now, though, is that the Clinton campaign just tapped out of its McAuliffe big dollar donors, and Clinton was forced to rely on her real base - the women who love her. (I question the "women" bit, but it's not key to the argument --Markus) And unwittingly, with her showing in the Super Tuesday states and her $5 million donation to her own campaign, she asked them for support in a way she never had. And they responded.

It's remarkable, because it is converting voters and supporters into activists and donors, only it's probably not the creative class anymore. Clinton, like Dean, became an underdog, a real underdog, with more public support than Village support, and her public directly responded over the internet to close this gap.

In other words, the Obama campaign has had a strategy of cultivating online donors and activists, they know how to do it, and they are very good at it. The Clinton campaign has not done any of this particularly well because it hasn't been their strategy. And somehow, they are at rough parity over the last 48 hours.

Well, shit. This race has just completely scrambled the insider-outsider dynamic, hasn't it? We all thought that Hillary Clinton was the consummate moneyed insider, and Barack Obama the upstart people-powered outsider. Whether this was ever true is arguable -- but it's certainly not anymore.

Obama's establishment support at this point is on par with Hillary's; all kinds of party apparatchiks have lined up behind him, bringing donors along for the ride. You cannot credibly call him an outsider anymore, just like you cannot credibly call him the underdog. Meanwhile Hillary -- whose campaign tried very hard, stupidly, to paint her as the inevitable Übercandidate -- is now forced by pure financial necessity into more of an outsider role.

It's not an unnatural fit for her, believe it or not; the Clintons' arrival in Washington predates memory for most of us, but the fact is they were (and are) viewed with a definite elitist skepticism by many of the Village doyennes. They and their people were seen as a bunch of Arkansas good ol' boys, hicks who talked funny and hung out in some very unfashionable parts of Washington; it was an affront to many of the older D.C. socialites (Democratic and Republican). Consequently the Clinton administration had a lot of trouble gaining traction (both in the media and legislatively). Think of the way David Broder, king of Old Washington, famously said it in 1998:

"He came in here and he trashed the place," says Washington Post columnist David Broder, "and it's not his place."

Bill and Hillary Clinton were always awkward heads of the establishment, and I think they'd both be much more comfortable running from outside it -- much like, we are beginning to see, their supporters. The question ss whether her campaign is capable, institutionally, of making such a switch. (Certainly Mark Penn is not the man to do it, that worthless union-busting choadbag -- if this once-inevitable candidate actually winds up losing, it will be almost completely his fault -- but other folks in the Clinton organization show more promise.) It's quite possible that they're not, or that the circumstances will dictate a different course, or that the idea will just be too utterly ridiculous to stick.

But if Hillary really can recast herself as the outsider candidate, expect to see a subsequent popular (and populist) Clinton surge -- one that will give both the old-line media who've hated her from the beginning, AND the elite bloggers who are convinced of her pervasive establishmentarianism, a new and altogether confusing kind of heartburn...

Not Gingrich. Oh please, not Gingrich.

Via the American Scene we read that:

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is examining whether or not to enter a "testing the waters" campaign phase beginning the first week of October. According to Gingrich associates, he is mulling an announcement tour that would include appearances on one major Sunday morning show next weekend, along with several Fox News shows on Monday, as well as an appearance on Dr. James Dobson's radio show...

Fuck. Just when I was starting to enjoy writing about this campaign.

Newt Gingrich is the most annoying little pseudointellectual troll in our public discourse today; he has said nothing of value in his entire career and is of no actual consequence to anything, yet Republicans hold him up like some brilliant futurist guru whose insights will transform conservative thought. (One assumes this is because no-one else in that camp is even trying anymore, and ideological beggars can't be choosers.) They have this fetishistic attachment to Gingrich that, natch, spills over into the media -- so if he does run prepare yourselves for a mess of magazine cover stories about "The Thinking Man's Conservative" and such garbage...

...and my God, think of Harvard. This place would cream itself over someone like Gingrich running for president. He's got just that combination of big words and small ideas that suits the Ivy League mentality so well; after all, being a Gingrich supporter gives you intellectual-maverick cred and distances you from the unwashed Midwestern rabble (which of course is required at these Elite Institutions), without having to bother with all those awkward liberal tropes like "caring about other people". It's the new libertarianism!

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not worried about Gingrich winning anything. Dude has the charisma of a lawn chair. (And as we all know, the appeal of a political candidate here at Harvard is exactly inverse to their appeal in the real world.) I'm just angry that, in the event he does run (or even if he just publicly dithers about it for a while, Bloomberg-style), we'll be obligated to listen to him and then write about the crap he says. Gems of wisdom like this, which he has employed multiple times:

He still describes himself as a radical and said this should be his slogan: “Real change requires real change.”

Very radical, that. I can see the protest now. "What do we want?" "TAUTOLOGIES!" "When do we want them?" "AS SOON AS WE WANT THEM!"

This is fluff. Gingrich offers nothing more than platitudes and the occasional insanely stupid policy idea; but his personality and cult-following threatens to eat the entire campaign for, I'd say, up to a month, to the obvious detriment of the real issues at play. Besides, it's just sad; between Newt Gingrich, Hillary Clinton, and Al frickin' Gore, I feel like we're having some horrible flashback to 1997 -- a year I had really hoped we were done with. Next thing you know there'll be another Spice Girls movie. (Item: Did you hear the Spice Girls are reuniting and going on tour? I am not fucking kidding.)

All I'm saying is, if Gingrich does run, prepare yourselves for some truly stupid and infuriating discussions on- and off-campus. This campaign might not be as much fun as I'd thought...