The Marx of the Beast

Until yesterday I had been under the possibly naïve impression that music journalism was happily free from the ethnocentric identity politics embodied by certain strains of Marxist and postcolonialist cultural studies. That was when I came by a record review in Dusted Magazine in which these hermeneutical tools are used to test Animal Collective’s seemingly innocuous Water Curses for traces of racism. I’ll spoil the ending for you: We find out that it’s positively seething with the stuff. Yes, the band are thoroughly racist, classist and colonialist all right, and capitalist hegemony might be preventing them from realising it.

It should be noted, however, that the aforementioned hermeneutical tools are analogous to a Geiger Counter with a lump of enriched uranium jammed in its spout. They’re faulty, in short, prone to false positives. So this particular off-the-scale reading scarcely comes as a great surprise. We’d likely have seen the same results had the subject been a patch of bracken or a thunder cloud.

In any event, music is only ostensibly the subject at issue. In reality the writer seems to have had two key ulterior aims: Firstly to pass an only tenuously related third-party article through the filter of his own Marxist class-struggle politics, and secondly to somehow crowbar the whole bloody abortion into a record review.

The third-party article in question – linked in the review – is the quasi-postcolonialist “Race, Rock and the New Weird America” by Kandia Crazy Horse. It attacks as racist the New Weird America movement as a whole and Devandra Banhart specifically; Animal Collective are scarcely mentioned. Further, if her piece is anything to go by, then this Ms. Horse is not only demented but also a race crank. The reviewer describes her language as “a bit purple”. But as far as I could tell, her spectrum is limited to only two colours. By all means read it, if you’re unemployed.

In actuality, the reviewer could have seized upon practically any faintly sentimental “white” folk record, and by any band. Poor old Animal Collective were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ended up serving as the unfortunate catalysts for his accusatory theorising. It’s all rather unpleasant actually.

There is a tendency in a number of these musicians, Animal Collective being at the forefront, to fetishize nature in the way that, say, Devandra Banhart fetishizes Karen Dalton, saying of her, as Crazy Horse quotes, “…she’s got the most far-out, fucked up, amazing soul. She’s the most soulful singer in the universe.” In other words, her music and the way she sings cannot just be a natural function of her life or her cultural or historic context, but somehow surpasses that, takes on a mystical quality, becomes unnatural and in doing so, transgresses the boundaries, becomes something strange or alien, wholly Other. In doing this, Dalton is fetishized for who she is, and the agency for creating her art is taken away from her, replaced instead with this “far-out, fucked up” quality.

So, Animal Collective fetishise nature; and Devandra Banhart, someone with no direct connection to Animal Collective, fetishises Karen Dalton. How do we know? Well, he described her music as “far-out” and “fucked-up”. The possibility that he could have been either indulging in hyperbole or using the terms in a prosaic sense – simply to mean “extraordinary”, “eccentric”, “disturbed”, etc. – seems to have either been arbitrarily dismissed or simply never realised. No, Banhart must have had a nefarious motive. He must have meant that she “transgresses the boundaries” and so cannot be the creative force behind her own work.

It bears highlighting that Karen Dalton was half white. So presumably her “white half” must also have been the victim of this same injustice. But that might not be the way it works. I can’t tell for sure. Identity politics can quickly get confusing – confusing and fucking daft.

Further, it’s worth taking a look at the original interview for additional context: “She is one of the most amazing musicians in the universe. Forget about the amount of soul she’s got — she’s got the most far-out, fucked up, amazing soul. She’s the most soulful singer in the universe. But the technicalities, her timing and her phrasing is perfect. It’s beyond perfect. You can’t even try to imitate it because it’s like beyond, it’s brilliant. She’s also an incredible song interpreter… She makes every one of the songs that she covers her songs.” Marginally numinous though the terminology might be, it’s fairly clear that simple praise of style and technical ability is at its core.

In any event, Animal Collective supposedly fetishise nature – a concept – in the same way that someone else entirely, Banhart, supposedly fetishises Dalton – a person. Thus, Animal Collective are tacit racists. This, incidentally, was supposed to have been the “deeper” of two criticisms.

More generally, the reviewer liberally attempts to intellectually intimidate the reader into submission instead of persuading them with a compelling argument – a tactic seemingly common amongst elements of the theory set.

One particularly objectionable example, which serves as one of the review’s underlying premises, is the assumption that the band are either much too ignorant to realise their own racism or are merely insufficiently courageous to do anything about it; as a corollary, so are we, if we can’t spot it either. (In a dazzling a non sequitur, Noam Chomsky is quoted to bolster this claim.) The reviewer, of course, has precisely the erudition and “moral heroism” needed to speak out.

If that’s the most egregious example, then the most laughable comes near the end where we learn that part of Animal Collective’s “problem” stems from the fact that they live in an area designed by Frederick Law Olmsted – a man who also built parks (building parks is depraved, apparently). The reviewer’s implied mastery of Hegel is then presented as a forged intellectual passport under which he tries to smuggle this gibberish past the reader.

In summary, the review constitutes an ugly and unwarranted smear, and so the magazine should really issue an apology. It might well be that there’s nothing in the writer’s academic environment to alert him to the inappropriateness of his accusations. But as both Noam Chomsky and Panda Bear say, coolness is having courage, courage to do what’s right.