The Mac Weekly

Issue date: 9/28/07 Section: The Arts

Media Credit: www.conspiracyrecords.com

America is a happy place.

At the very least, it's a place where you're supposed to be happy. The universal injunction to smile comes with America's winner-takes-all consensus mainstream culture.

America is a place for fun. People with disagreements are quickly shot down, otherized, and psychologized ("What's her problem?). Bringing up politics is so passé. The placid surface of white privilege and capitalist accumulation is not to be disturbed.

Avant-garde hip-hop duo Dälek make unhappy albums. Their music and lyrics are frustrated, angry and political (Whatever that means. See, aren't eyes rolling already at the dreaded "P" word?).

Indie rock criticism has made self-seriousness and "trying too hard" the cardinal sins of personality and cultural production. This dominant attitude stems from the realization that all those high school years spent moping to NiN could've been spent much better.

This self-recognition is responsible for the above near-unanimous critical consensus. "Just have fun!" is the (now not so) new exhortation, and has been partly responsible for everything from the dance-rock explosion to the prominence of music criticism competing for finding the most banal pop song to analyze.

There's nothing inherently wrong with any of these phenomena. I loved DFA 1979, and cokemachineglow.com's "This is Why I'm Hot" review is one of the best pieces of writing I've read all year. But these preoccupations betray the white bourgeois (mostly male) faces behind all those Pitchfork bylines and hipinion avatars, and the above ideological and life imperatives spill over dangerously. "Have fun!" indie crit overlaps with America's antipolitical happiness fetish, just as the related epistemology/movement of postmodern has fostered a careless malaise that can become capitalism's best friend.

Dälek may have spent their youth listening to adolescent self-pity records like NiN (I doubt it), but they certainly had more to worry about than corralling the gumption to ask the redhead in Kiwanis club to prom.
The injunction to smile rings hollow for MC Dälek, a "bastard child of Reaganomics." There's a fine line between being a happy negro and being-well, listen to Dälek: "I know my n*****s gotta eat / But do we gotta play Sambo?"

This sounds at first like a typical underground rap refrain. There's a lot wrong with indie rap: indie rap is still mostly about rap, which is what makes a lot of aggrieved underground rappers sound like the stag guy at prom. Dälek doesn't drink the Kool Aid: he rejects the very centrality of hip-hop (especially the rap that has been so infiltrated by the black community's greatest enemies) to black culture, a centrality that has undermined the community's ability to organize itself when penetrated on this commodified axis.

Continued...

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