Like Austin
Cooper, I was 9 years old when I first heard Public Enemy. I too was a bit of a hip-hop novice at the
time. The first “rap” (as we used to
call it back in the day) song that mattered to me had come out two years
previous, Run DMC’s cover of the “Ghostbusters” theme, but I largely ignored
the genre after its gangsta phase became polarizing to my white suburban
reflexes.
Still, during this timeframe, I was able to conceive of an
era three years before I was born. It
did seem distant, but the music of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, and
later oddball eggheads like PIL, Throbbing Gristle, Brian Eno, and Joy Division
often spoke to me in a language that seemed more palpably vibrant and
understanding of the complexity of teenage disconnection than the angsty grunge
and virulently macho gangsta of the time.
Though it was the merger of metal (which I loved) and
hip-hop (with which I was only familiar) that brought me to that same
collaboration track that Austin Cooper used as curated background noise for his
Tony Hawke sessions (see above), it was the wailing atonal sirens of “Lost at
Birth”, the righteous indignation and dread-filled creeping stagger of “By the Time I Get to Arizona”, and the both poetic and psychedelic mixture
of news clips, chaotic dialogue, and black music history sound samples that made Apocalypse
91 a game-changing event for me. It
was an album that sounded like a Riot Goin’ On, like the walls caving in. It wasn’t music that clicked, but music that
sounded like something was wrong, like the comfortable suburban world I had
been raised in wasn’t the only one out there.
When NPR threw Cooper out in front of the bus to publish a “them
kids” review of Public Enemy and Cooper came back with a middling “not feeling
it” determination, the internet predictably responded with disgust and
vitriol. I’m not here to join the
stampede against poor Cooper, who is obviously in way over his head. He’s obviously a victim of NPR’s pursuit to
drive high traffic towards low-level content.
I do think however that it is important to respond to this
retort in The Guardian by Alex Macpherson.
Macpherson’s argument is that Cooper is defying the
albatross of the “canon” by his gleeful ignorance of it and we should all
applaud anyone who has the ability to navigate the wild turf of the internether
without the imparted judgment of received wisdom. If this was the whole story, I’d certainly be
on board. No canon should be writ in
stone and it’s important to issue punctual swipes at illegitimate authority
when it rears its head from a high above altar.
The problem is that Cooper’s article doesn’t follow this
model at all. Chuck D’s cited denunciation
of the canon (“Elvis was a hero to most/ But he never meant shit to me”) carried
with it the context of the history that followed, which allowed Elvis to
prosper and the black artists he coopted to flounder or die penniless (“Straight
up racist that sucka was”). These same
grounds for critique are open to Public Enemy as well, be it in their condoning
of Terminator X’s anti-semitism, their homophobic branding of their militant
noise in contrast to hip-house, or their fumbling perspective on the place of
women in “the movement”. Macpherson makes reference to this, but fails
to see how simply sharing the viewpoint of someone who doesn’t like the same
band isn’t the same thing as challenging popular perceptions.
“Public Enemy
themselves – angry, political, serious, masculine – have, as one of the token
few hip-hop acts permitted within the rock canon, been used as a stick with
which to beat the rest of the genre: the lyrics are too ignorant, the beats are
too danceable, the hooks are too catchy and so on”, Macpherson says, which is a
fine point, but Cooper adopts none of these vantages. Instead,
he reveals his own prejudices repeatedly, summed up aptly in the line “It's
rough, rugged, built like a tank — and I'm coming at it expecting a Bentley.”
Cooper’s criticisms of the album- harsh, non-melodic, drill
sergantish- are exactly what many found enthralling about the album when it
emerged, but there’s no curiosity as to why these could be positive
attributes. Instead, they’re seen more
as buzzkills, polar contrasts to the silky smooth “Bentley” hip-hop he has
found in Drake, Hudson Mohawke, 808s-era Kanye, and Clams Casino. His admission that the music goes against the
grain of his listening habits is proof that this is not just about
recontextualizing once challenging music whose edge has worn. Macpherson hints at the crux of the problem
though, perhaps unknowingly, in his own article:
“Underlying the
primacy of the canon is perhaps the most damaging, insidious assumption of all:
the belief that an objective response to art is possible in the first place.
It's a belief that stifles honesty: witness the widespread dismissal of Cooper
as a troll rather than engaging with his piece as a reflection of how he
actually responded to Public Enemy. And witness how many of the more
paternalistic responses, such as Questlove's, emphasised the necessity of
gaining "objective" knowledge about the context of the album – as
though this has anything to do with the kind of music one is naturally drawn
to” (emphasis mine).
Leaving aside the assumption that anyone defending any
single aspect of the canon is, by proxy or synecdoche, a loyalist for the
entire old guard, Macpherson undermines his entire argument with the last
sentence’s hypocritical essentialism.
It’s exactly this that was at the center of the response to the previous
NPR intern controversy and which echoes in Cooper’s article; the notion
that the self, as a superior model of rationale and logic, is the ultimate
yardstick of a music’s value and/or worth.
Yes, surrendering completely from subjectivity is impossible, but to
assume that one’s tastes alone, informed as they are the prevailing surround
sound of circumscribing hegemony, is the only rubric needed to properly examine
cultural artifacts is to surrender to those very forces of control that induce
and perpetuate canons. What makes
criticism itself so valuable is that it forces examiners to look beyond the
self, to engage with new or unknown energies to see if they can enhance,
compliment, redirect, or overturn established and stagnant paths. Cooper’s ultimate takeaway is “gee, music
sure has changed”, which you don’t need an essay or an intern to figure out. More interesting would have been an article
on how and why music got better.
The NPR article is not proof that today’s kids are rejecting
their parents’ music. It’s evidence that
they’re rejecting everything that’s outside of their iPod. If it’s not on my timeline (3 years before I
was even born!), it’s irrelevant to me. Perceptions
need not shifted routinely for the hell of it.
While relativism can raise interesting challenges to illegitimate
authority, it can also kowtow to the fickle whims of marketization. Furthermore, sometimes it’s imperative to
have unique cultural signifiers (yes, commodity fetishes) that we can all understand
or unite behind, particularly ones that give pause to our current station or
which enlighten our understanding of bygone past. Criticism- valid criticism/useful criticism-
is not a soliloquy. It’s a
dialogue. And ignoring the conversation
altogether to focus on your personal feelings, particularly with the vast archive
or music history and theory ever at your fingertips, is not criticism and it’s
not challenging anything.
