Month: December 2011

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Return to Cinder: Supergods and the Apocalypse

Grant Morrison describes his growing up through comics books as a Manichean affair: “It was an all-or-nothing choice between the A-Bomb and the Spaceship. I had already picked sides, but the Cold War tension between Apocalypse and Utopia was becoming almost unbearable” (p. xiv). Morrison’s first non-comic book, Supergods (Spiegel & Grau, 2011), is one-half personal statement, one-half art history. It’s an autobiography told through comic books and a history of superheroes disguised as a memoir. His early history of superhero comics is quite good, but it gets really, really good when Morrison enters the story full-bore — first as a struggling but successful freelancer and later as a chaos magician of the highest order, conjuring coincidence with superhero sigils.

As if to follow Kenneth Burke’s dictum that literature represents “equipment for living,” Morrison puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of the supergods. “We live in the stories we tell,” he writes, and he’s not just saying that. Morrison wrote himself into his hypersigil comic The Invisibles and watched as the story came to life and nearly killed him.

In Supergods Morrison tells the story in high relief and stresses the transubstantiation between words and images on a page and thoughts and actions in the real world. His works are largely made up of “reality-bending metafictional freakouts dressed up in action-adventure drag,” as Douglas Wolk (2007) describes them, “metaphors that make visible the process by which language creates an image that in turn becomes narrative” (p. 258). If you’re not one for the magical bent, think of it as a strong interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with a Rortian addendum: If we assume that language creates reality, then we should use language to create the reality we want to live in. Morrison writes, “Superhero comics may yet find a purpose all along as the social realist fiction of tomorrow” (p. 116). He insists that whether we realize it or not, we are the superheroes of this world.

The mini-apocalypse of September 11th, 2001 presented an odd dilemma not only for us, but also for our masked and caped heroes and our relationships to them. On one side, the event questions the effectiveness of our superheroes if something like that can happen without their intervention. Our faith in them crumbled like so much steel and concrete. On the other, after witnessing that day, we were more ready to escape into their fantasy world than ever. The years after that event exemplified what Steve Aylett described as a time “when people would do almost anything to avoid thinking clearly about what is actually going on.”

9/11 is conspicuously missing from Peter Y. Paik’s From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), as is Morrison, but blurbed by our friends Steven Shaviro and Bruce Sterling, the book provides another look at the link between the printed page and the world stage. As a contemporary companion to Barry Brummett’s Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric, which came out in 1991, Paik’s book provides another peek at the larger picture beyond the page that Morrison alludes to. I do find it odd that there’s no discussion of 9/11, a date that also roughly marks an epochal shift between things that were once considered nerdy and now are not. Morrison rails against the word “geek” as applied to comic book fans saying, “They’re no different from most people who consume things and put them in the corner or put them in a drawer… Anyone who’s into anything could be called a geek, but they don’t call them a geek.”

As much of a nerd as I’ll admit I am, I’ve never really been much for comic books. With that said, I found Supergods enthralling, much in the same way I found the screen stories of Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives. Intergalactic narrative notwithstanding, Morrison’s prose seems both carefully constructed and completely natural. As my colleague Katie Arens would say, he writes to be read. My lack of comic-book knowledge sometimes made following the historical cycles of superheroes difficult, but Morrison’s presence in these pages and personal touch kept me reading hyper-attentively. Here’s hoping he writes at least half of the other books hinted at herein.

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My own introduction to Grant Morrison came via Disinformation‘s DisinfoCon in 2000 where he explains the basics of chaos magic in an excitedly drunken Scottish accent [runtime: 45:28]:

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References:

Brummett, Barry. (1991). Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Burke, Kenneth. (1974). The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Hiatt, Brian. (2011, August 22). Grant Morrison on the Death of Comics. Rolling Stone.

Morrison, Grant. (2011). Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

Wolk, Douglas. (2007). Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo.

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Maps for a Few Territories: Guides to Gibson

Any web wanderer worth her bookmarks knows that William Gibson coined the term for the spaces and places that we all explore online. So strong was the word that one large software company attempted to trademark it for their own purposes (Woolley, 1992). So many such ideas have been co-opted by others that Gibson has jokingly referred to himself as “the unpaid Bill” (Henthorne, p. 39). We have recently been called “people of the screen” by some other big-name dude, but this idea was evident in Gibson’s early work some thirty years ago. He saw an early ad for Apple Computers, and the idea hit him: “Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe” (quoted in Jones, 2011).

“I needed to replace the ‘rocketship’ and the ‘holodeck’ with something else that would be a signifier of technological change,” he tells Mark Neale in No Maps for These Territories, “and that would provide me with a narrative engine, and a territory in which the narrative could take place… All I really knew about the word ‘cyberspace’ when I coined it was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It was evocative and essentially meaningless. It was very suggestive of… it was suggestive of something, but it had… no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.”

FADE UP MUSIC. Slowly, images start to bleed through. Red swirls, white, black dots… As more and more of the image bleeds through the titles we begin to make out what we’re watching…
— Opening lines, William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic screenplay

In the preface to Burning Chrome (Ace, 1987), Bruce Sterling wrote that Gibson’s early stories had made apparent ”the hidden bulk of an iceberg of social change,” an iceberg that the web’s social warming has melted over the years since. In his later work, Gibson writes in a world informed by his previous prophecies. It is as if the present caught up with his projected future: “I suppose I’ve always wanted to have a hedge against the literal assumption that these stories are fictions about ‘the future’ rather than attempts to explore an increasingly science fictional present. I think we tend to live as though the world was the way it was a decade ago, and when we connect with the genuinely contemporary we experience a species of vertigo” (quoted in Eshun, 1996). His latest trilogy is intentionally set in that science fictional present. Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010) read like Gibson’s earlier science fiction, yet the weird gadgets and odd characters they’re riddled with are all readily available outside the book’s pages. He’s not making any of those things up. Anymore. In spite of its uneven distribution, the future is already here. The merging of cyberspace and the everyday as well as the techno-paranoia he projected in his early work is pervasive post-9/11.

As a guide to his many fictions cum realities, Tom Henthorne’s William Gibson: A Literary Companion (McFarland & Co., 2011) goes a long way to mapping his fiction to our reality. Arranged encyclopedia-style and covering the breadth of Gibson’s novels, the book provides handy crib notes to the concepts and connections of his work. It also includes a chronology of Gibson’s life and work, a glossary, a technological timeline, writing and research topics, a bibliography, and a full index, all of which make it an easy entry point into Gibson’s world of work.

I have often thought he’d get more credit for his ideas if the times he’s talked about them were in print somewhere (e.g., the many ideas he discusses in Mark Neale’s 2000 documentary, William Gibson: No Maps for These Territories). Enter Distrust The Particular Flavor (Putnam Adult, 2012): thirty years of Gibson’s collected nonfiction. Essays, talks, observations, articles, and other ephemera are all collected in one place for the first time, some in print for the first time ever — from WIRED, Rolling Stone, and New York Times Magazine to smaller publications no longer in production.

William Gibson is one of our brightest minds and these two books not only provide a solid introduction into his fiction and ideas but are also valuable texts on their own. Whether you’re fumbling through his fiction, wishing his tweets were longer, or just curious, I recommend checking them out.

References:

Eshun, Kodwo. (1996, November). William Gibson in Dialogue with Kodwo Eshun: The Co-evolution of Humans and Machines. Unpublished outtake from Paul D. Miller (ed.), Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Arts and Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Gibson, William. (1995). Johnny Mnemonic [screenplay]. New York: Ace Books.

Gibson, William. (2012). Distrust That Particular Flavor. New York: Putnam Adult.

Henthorne, Tom (2011). William Gibson: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.

Jones, Thomas. (2011, September 22). William Gibson: Beyond Cyberspace. The Guardian.

Sterling, Bruce. (1987). Preface. In William Gibson, Burning Chrome. New York: Ace Books, pp. ix-xii.

Woolley, Benjamin. (1992). Virtual Worlds. New York: Penguin.

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Cyberpunk’s Not Dead: Rucker’s Nested Scrolls

Like birthdays, the end of the year always brings about a recounting of the previous twelve months. We reassess our existence every year, every ten years, every one hundred… Human and technological movements are cyclical. Heraclitus once posited that generational cycles turn over every thirty years. By that metric, the personal computer revolution has run its course, and with it, the cyberpunk genre. Running its course doesn’t mean it’s over. It means it has been assimilated into the larger culture. What was once weird and wild is now a normal part of the world in which we live.

In his autobiography, Nested Scrolls (Tor, 2011), Rudy Rucker tells the story of catching the cyberpunk wave just as it was swelling toward the shore. Rucker already had two science fiction novels out, a third in the pipe, and was out to change the genre with a vengeance. He’d won the first Philip K. Dick Award in 1982 just after Dick died, and met up with the reigning crop of the new movement. “I started hearing about a new writer called William Gibson,” he writes. “I saw a copy of Omni with his story, ‘Johnny Mnemonic’. I was awed by the writing. Gibson, too, was out to change SF. And we weren’t the only ones.” Around the same time, Bruce Sterling was publishing an SF zine called “Cheap Truth.” Rucker continues, “Reading Bruce’s sporadic mailings of ‘Cheap Truth’, I learned there were a number of other disgruntled and radicalized new SF writers like me. At first Bruce Sterling’s zine didn’t have any particular name for the emerging new SF movement — it wouldn’t be until 1983 that the cyberpunk label would take hold.” It was in that year that Bruce Bethke inadvertently named the movement with the title of his short story “Cyberpunk.” In this revolution, the names Rucker, Gibson, and Sterling were loosely joined by John Shirley, Greg Bear, Pat Cadigan, and Lew Shiner.

Rudy Rucker: Nested Scrolls

While cyberpunk sometimes seems a definitively 1980s affair, it was often ardently so at the time. It was post-punk and pre-web, yet wildly informed by the onset of the personal computer and the promise of the internet, which marks the genre in sharp contrast to its galaxy-hopping, alien-invaded forebears. Rudy Rucker is the bridge from Dick-era, drug-induced paranoia to Gibson-era, network-minded paraspace. He was around early enough to be a Dick fan before Dick died, but noticeably older than the rest of the cyberpunk crew. Nested Scrolls secures his place joining the generations of the genre.

It’s not all computer-generated virtual worlds though, Rucker has had a storied career as both an author of science fiction and nonfiction, as a college professor, and as a software developer, all of which inform each other to varying degrees, and all of which inform Nested Scrolls, making it an engaging narrative of high-science, high-tech, and high times. Cyberpunk’s not dead, it’s just normal now.

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Illustrating the initial disjointedness of the genre, here’s the 1990 Cyberpunk documentary, directed by Marianne Trench:

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References:

Georgoulias, Tom. (2007). Rudy Rucker: Keeping it Transreal. In Roy Christopher (Ed.), Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes. Seattle, WA: Well-Red Bear.

Heraclitus. (2001). Fragments. New York: Penguin Classics.

Rucker, Rudy. (2011). Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolph von Bitter Rucker. New York: Tor.

Rucker, Rudy. (2011, December 6). The Death of Philip K. Dick and the Birth of Cyberpunk [Book excerpt]. io9.com.

Trench, Marianne (Director) & von Brandenburg, Peter (Producer). (1990). Cyberpunk. Mystic Fire Video.

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2011: Are You Going to Eat That?

It’s December and time to reassess the year, and 2011 is a joy to revisit. It was easily my best year ever personally. I signed a book deal, spoke at several conferences with some of my best friends, got engaged to a wonderful woman, built some new bikes, redesigned my website (finally), and finished coursework and comprehensive exams on my way to a Ph.D., among other things.

This year was crazy, from the death of Steve Jobs and Occupy Wall Street to the ramping up of some sort of political happening. I also saw, listened to, and read a lot of good stuff. Here is the best of the media I consumed this year:

Album of the Year: Hail Mary Mallon Are You Going to Eat That? (Rhymesayers):  Hail Mary Mallon is the melding of word-murdering minds Aesop Rock and Rob Sonic and the laser-precise cuts of DJ Big Wiz, all three Def Jux alumni and no strangers to the raps and beats in their own rights. In the interest of full disclosure, these dudes are my friends. To be perfectly honest, if they were wack they wouldn’t be.

These three have been touring and clowning together for years in different guises, and it’s obvious when you hear how well they play together. Are you Going to Eat That? is the dopest record out this year.

Production-wise, “Mailbox Baseball” sounds like an Iron Galaxy outtake, while “Grubstake” evokes the stripped down reduction—all 808s and sparse scratches—of a salad-day-era Rick Rubin. Aes and Rob pass the mic like the Treacherous Three. “Table Talk” is a 21st-century “High-Plains Drifter.” But don’t get any of this twisted: this is not a throwback, it’s a leap forward.

It’s all good (“Breakdance Beach” is dope, though it does get grating upon repeated listens), and the skills are barn-razing and bar-raising. Whether it’s Hannibal Lector or Cannibal Ox, Hail Mary Mallon prove that rap will eat itself.

Here’s their video for “Meter Feeder” [runtime: 3:47] directed by Alexander Tarrant and Justin Metros:

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Close Second: Radiohead The King of Limbs (Waste): “I’m such a tease and you’re such a flirt…” The most important band in the world has returned with another cure for the malaise of the age. Pick one: They’ve saved rock and roll, killed rock and roll, and still emerged from the muck of the music industry well ahead of the curve. Everyone in media keeps them under the microscope to see how they will win. Again. Lean in, here’s the secret:

Radiohead makes great records.

And they do it consistently. They’re also quite adept at parsing the patterns on the horizon of the mediascape, but that wouldn’t matter if their records weren’t good. Damn good.

The King of Limbs is no exception. It’s more mellow than the sparsest parts of Amnesiac, but not nearly as insular. It might be their most even record. Thom Yorke’s voice, which I have to admit used to grate on me as often as it moved me, has gotten mature enough to carry the toughest of tunes. He is the voice of Radiohead, literally and figuratively (no small task either way), and he handles it with confidence and control.

Radiohead was never as joyfully abrasive as Sonic Youth or The Flaming Lips, but The King of Limbs reminds me of the releases of the former’s A Thousand Leaves and the latter’s The Soft Bulletin. All three records are still weird in their ways, but they’re also far more subtle than the previous work of their creators. Radiohead have always been masters of subtlety, and with The King of Limbs, they’ve earned their Ph.D. It’s such a tease and such a flirt.

Even Closer Third: Ume Phantoms (Modern Outsider): If ever a band were poised for the next level, Ume has been teetering there headlong for the better part of the past few years. Phantoms is the kind of record that neuters naysayers and emboldens enthusiasts. Lauren, Eric, and Rachel are some of the friendliest folks you’re likely to meet, but on stage they are ferocious. While Eric (bass) and Rachel (drums) are the stable and able drivetrain, Lauren (guitar and vocals) is the high-octane, internal combustion engine, careening ahead on the edge of control. Theirs is pop music in the sense that it’s explosive. Their live shows are where the real, volatile magic happens, but Phantoms captures their energy serviceably. For further evidence, here’s the video for “Captive” from Phantoms directed by Matt Bizer [runtime: 4:01], the most shared video on MTV.com:

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Runners Up: Wolves in the Throne Room Celestial Lineage (Southern Lord), Seidr For Winter Fire (Flenser), Cloaks Versions Grain (3by3), Jesu Ascension (Caldo Verde), Big Sean Finally Famous (GOOD Music), Knives From Heaven s/t (Thirsty 3ar), Pusha T Fear of God/Fear of God II: Let Us Pray (GOOD/Decon/Re-Up), Random Axe s/t (Duck Down), IconAclass For the Ones (deadverse), Crack Epidemic American Splendor (self-released), Deafheaven Roads to Judah (Deathwish), Panopticon Social Disservices (Flenser), Graveyard Hisingen Blues (Nuclear Blast).
Most Overrated: Opeth Heritage (Roadrunner), Kanye West & Jay-Z Watch the Throne.

Live Show of the Year: Deftones, June 4, 2011, Austin Music Hall, Austin, TX: Say what you will, but it’s absolutely unfair to lump Deftones in with bands they have next-to-nothing to do with (e.g., Limp Bizkit, Korn, Tool, et al). Deftones are as sophisticated as they are heavy and as beautiful as they are aggressive, as much like the Cure as they are Clutch. Their live show confirms all of this and more.
Runners Up: Mogwai, May 16, Stubbs, Austin, TX; Wolves in the Throne Room, September 27, Red 7, Austin, TX.

Comedian of the Year: Louis CK: No one else comes close.

Event of the Year: South by Southwest: SXSW is always a blurry blast, but this year was especially good. I got the opportunity to speak at Interactive and run around with friends seeing great music the rest of the time. You know who you are. Here’s to next year.
Runners Up: SF MusicTech Summit, Geekend Roadshow Boston.
Most Overrated: TEDxAustin.

Book of the Year: James Gleick The Information (Pantheon Books): James Gleick always brings the goods, and The Information is no exception. This is a definitive history of the info-saturated now. From Babbage, Shannon, and Turing to Gödel, Dawkins, and Hofstadter, Gleick traces the evolution of information theory from the antediluvian alphabet and the incalculable incomplete to the memes and machines of the post-flood. I’m admittedly biased (Gleick’s Chaos quite literally changed my life’s path), but this is Pulitzer-level research and writing. The Information is easily the best book of the year.
Runners Up: Insect Media by Jussi Parikka (University of Minnesota Press), The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading by Peter Lunenfeld (The MIT Press), The Beach Beneath the Street by McKenzie Wark (Verso), remixthebook by Mark Amerika (University of Minnesota Press), Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland (Atlas & Co.).
Most Overrated: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Crown).

Educator of the Year: Howard Rheingold: Howard’s homegrown Rheingold University started this year and quickly established an impressive online curriculum. I took the first class and joined the very active alumni in continuing our co-learning with Howard’s help. It was through this group that I got the opportunity to speak to David Preston’s Literature and Composition class — one of the best experiences I’ve had in education.

Site of the Year: Shut Your Fucking Face and Listen: My man Tim Baker and his band of ne’er do wells have put together a site that’s as hysterical as it is historical. Mostly focused on music, they veer off on pop culture tangents and mad rants that are always more entertaining than their subject matter. Get up on that.

TV Show of the Year: Breaking Bad (AMC): I have Tim Baker from SYFFAL to thank for this one. This show doesn’t just rearrange the furniture in the standard TV drama’s livingroom, it tosses it on the lawn and sets it on fire. I’ve only made it through the first three seasons, but my guess is that by the end of the recently inked fifth and final, this will be hailed as one of the greatest shows ever to creatively corrupt the television medium.
Runners Up: Party Down (Starz); Lie to Me (Fox).

Movie of the Year: The Muppets (Disney): I haven’t laughed so consistently through a movie since maybe first seeing Doug Liman’s Go in the theater. It’s not flawless (maybe one too many metacomments and one too many eighties references), but it is downright entertaining from titles to credits. So good to see a chunk of your chlidhood revived so well.
Runner Up: Tree of Life (Plan B).

Video of the Year: “Yonkers” by Tyler, The Creator: Written, directed, produced, rapped, and eaten by Tyler himself. I’ve already spouted my feelings about OFWGKTA elsewhere.
Runners up: Pusha-T featuring Tyler, The Creator “Trouble on My Mind,” Big Sean featuring Chiddy Bang “Too Fake,” Hail Mary Mallon “Meter Feeder” (embedded above).

So those are a few of the things that caught and held my attention this year. What were yours?

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Sharing Music: Kick Out the Spam…

I spent my undergraduate years working at record stores. Not surprisingly, the lulls behind the counter were largely spent talking about and sharing music. We’d all bring in our small CD cases, each stocked with a dozen or so discs for the shift. There was a lot of judging and clowning, but even more sharing and putting each other on to new sounds.

When I first got an iPod in 2003, I thought the practice would continue. Around the time that I procured my refurbished player, my friend Chang came out to San Diego on tour with dälek. Before a show one day, he was hanging out with some of his old college friends, one of whom had a new boyfriend. Chang snagged the dude’s iPod from her, and was judging her new beau on the merits of his mp3s. Maybe this happens more often than I’m aware, but this case is the rarity in my experience. Ironically, our listening experiences tend to be as insular as the devices that facilitate them.

When the Walkman first came out, it was intended for sharing. The first models released had two headphone jacks. I distinctly remember the first one I listened to having dual jacks. When the initial numbers came back, and they found that no one was sharing the devices, Sony retooled their tack. In the ads, Weheliye (2005) writes that “couples riding tandem bicycles and sharing one Walkman were replaced by images of isolated figures ensnared in their private world of sound” (p. 135). And so it has gone, each of us to his or her own.

There is research on the matter though. Termed “playlistism,” the studies aim to highlight the links between music and identity using the practice of sharing playlists. Assuming that we compile playlists to represent our identities, the sharing of them should show how we present ourselves through music. Citing Brown, Sellen, & Geelhoed (2001), Valcheva (2009) found that sharing via peer-to-peer networks “confounded the traditional way of possessing and sharing music, and thus instigating a shift, on one hand, towards a citizen/leech styled community where music sharing interaction tends to be anonymized.” We don’t use P2P spaces to share in a traditional sense. In contrast, “[P]laylistism is underpinned by the practice of capturing and contributing one’s ‘music personality’ in the form of playlists that are either published online or shared through portable devices.” As one article put it, “We are what we like.”

Now that we listen more from the cloud and less as a crowd, the streaming services have adopted a stance of “social integration.” Similar to what Four Square does with your location when you check in to a place (automatically sending it to your social networks), Spotify does with the song you’re listening to. While Spotify doesn’t require that you share your listening, it does require you to have a Facebook account. Some online publications have adopted the practice as well, letting all of your friends know what you’ve been reading online. The trend is troubling. Social integration is the opposite of sharing. Sharing implies intention, and if your playlists are being broadcast without your curation, well, then they’re just spam in the streams of those who follow or friend you. It’s analogous to signing your friends up to newsletters they might not want or adding their numbers to telemarketers call-lists. There is nothing social about it.

I believe sharing music is a powerful practice. I wouldn’t know about most of the bands I listen to or have ever listened to if it weren’t for the friends who shared them with me. Sharing via automation does not make things social. Real sharing requires attention and intention. No algorithm can replicate that.

References:

Brown, B., Sellen, A. & Geelhoed, E. (2001). Music sharing as a computer supported collaborative application. Proceedings of ECSCW 2001, Bonn, Germany: Kluwer academics publisher.

Gelitz, Christiane (2011, March/April) You Are What You Like. Scientific American Mind.

Valcheva, Mariya (2009). Playlistism: a means of identity expression and self‐representation. A report on a conducted scientific research within “The Mediatized Stories” project at the University of Oslo.

Weheliye, Alexander G. (2005). Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Headroom for Headlines: News in the Now

It might be un-American to admit it, but I think the funniest thing about The Onion is the headlines. No offense to the rest of that great publication, but I rarely read past the blurb at the top. I’m not alone in this practice. When it comes to an information diet, our news is largely a headline-driven enterprise.

In 2006 Jakob Neilson found that browsers of online content read pages in an F-shape, conceding that they don’t read your website at all. They scan it. That means that most people who even visited this page have already stopped reading.

Images from Jakob Nielson’s eye tracking study.

The irony of using The Onion as an example is that an onion, when used as a metaphor, is a thing of many layers. It is only by peeling away those layers that one arrives at the elusive something obscured by them. I realize that many won’t consider The Onion a viable news source, but as an example, it works in the same way that The Daily Show does. Viewers of that show tend to be among the most-informed of publics, but it’s not because of the show. It’s analogous to the child growing up in a house full of books. A child who grows up with books in the house tends to be smarter, but it’s not because of the books. The books–and by analogy the show–are the third factor in the correlation. Parents who have books in their house tend to be smarter, and smarter parents have smarter children. Daily Show viewers tend to already be more informed before watching his show. I submit that the same can be said of readers of The Onion.

Back to the onion as metaphor: If we only observe the onion’s peel, we miss out on the something inside. So, if we’re only reading headlines, how informed are we? Status updates, Twitter streams, and Google search results only add to the pithy reportage we consume. Part of the problem is economic. Breaking headlines are much cheaper and easier to produce than in-depth follow-up stories (see Burns & Saunders, 2009), but part of it is us: We’ve chosen this form of media.

I’m admittedly not much of a news hound. In spite of my love of magazines, if you’ve read–or scanned–any of this website, you know I tend to read more books than anything else. I’m also not lamenting any sort of “death of print” sentiment or trying to rehash the arguments of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. I once called Twitter “all comments, no story,” and I’m just frustrated at finding out about things but never finding out more about them. If  “the internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history,” as Clay Shirky once said, then what is it that we are reading?

The Onion and The Daily Show make preaching to the choir an understatement, but if The Long Tail taught us anything, wasn’t that it? Find your audience and serve them (Thank you for reading this far).

References:

Anderson, Chris. (2006). The Long Tail: Why the future of Business is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion.

Burns, Alex & Saunders, Barry. (2009). Journalists As Investigators and ‘Quality Media’ Reputation. Record of the Communications Policy & Research Forum 2009, 281-297.

Carr, Nicholas. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Nielson, Jakob. (2006, April 17). F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content. Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability.

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Sam Seidel: You Must Learn

Sam Seidel is a progressive pedagogue. He chronicles his forays into education reform on The Husslington Post. In his new book, Hip-Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), he drops science on the High School of Recording Arts, where he’s implemented many aspects of the four elements in the classroom. In what follows, we discuss the book, the classroom, and how Hip-hop can help education come correct in the twenty first.

Roy Christopher: Most would agree that modern education needs an upgrade. How can Hip-hop help in this endeavor?

Sam Seidel: Hip-hop innovators have always found value in things that mainstream society has deemed valueless–whether it’s old records, the sides of train cars, or the lives of poor young people. Educators can learn from this by recognizing brilliance and beauty where it is often ignored. Much of the schooling that happens in this country fails to respect or build upon the intelligence and cultural competencies of students. Instead schools–encouraged by standardized accountability measures from the federal and state governments–try to force all students to be homogenous generalists.

RC: It’s more than just rapping lessons and turntables in the classroom, right? What’s at the core of this idea?

SS: The core of the idea is respecting young peoples’ brilliance and culture. Bringing turntables and rap songs into a classroom and acting like an expert on hip-hop culture doesn’t necessarily make you a hip-hop educator. You might be an English teacher who is teaching rap songs as texts. I’m not trying to position myself as the arbiter of who is or isn’t a hip-hop educator, but what I’m excited about is exploring new ways of teaching–and beyond that, new kinds of learning environments and leadership models.

RC: Is the success of the HSRA reliably repeatable?

SS: Just like a rapper using a punchline that has already been used in another rhyme is wack, educators shouldn’t just copy someone else’s work, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t study others’ styles closely. More educators could definitely see results like those at the High School for Recording Arts and there are many aspects of HSRA’s program that they could potentially borrow and build upon, but they shouldn’t necessarily try to replicate everything from the school. People can definitely look to HSRA for inspiration, examples, and even direct consultancy, but there is only one David T. C. Ellis, there is only one Twin Cities (well, I guess there are two of those!), and it would be unrealistic to think that you could recreate what he and his team have done there.

RC: Every time I try to spread the word about the power of thinking through Hip-hop, I invariably meet resistance. Do you find yourself defending your love of Hip-hop?


SS: Not so much. I don’t find those conversations very rewarding and I seem not to attract them. Sometimes people want to point out some of the negative elements of Hip-hop… Okay. I’ve never argued that hip-hop is all positive all the time. It is an immense culture. But, in this day and age, who can really front on the power of Hip-hop? The culture has transcended almost every boundary imaginable. My man, Stephen Buddha Leafloor does life-changing hip-hop workshops with Inuit and first nation young people in remote Arctic communities that can only be reached by plane. Hip-hop artists who started as rappers have clothing lines, footwear, and fragrances sold in department stores across the world. The President of the United States has rap songs on his iPod and uses Hip-hop slang. I recorded a song with an emcee from Mozambique, who rhymed in four languages in one verse. I mean people can say they don’t personally like the music or they think graffiti is vandalism that should be stopped, but they can’t front on Hip-hop’s relevance and power–so my point is, if we know it’s relevant and powerful, then what effect it has is all about how it is engaged.

RC: Why do you think people resist this culture so strongly?

SS: They’re haters. It scares them. I don’t know. Yesterday I was walking across a street in New York City and i heard a rap song rattling out of a dude’s car. The lyrics were, literally, “bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, fuck ’em all.” People hear something like that and form a lot of judgements–as if that song must represent the entirety of a multi-dimensional global culture. Don’t underestimate racism. Or classism. We’re talking about a cultural form that emerged from the hood. There’s a lot of people out there who will hate for that reason alone.

RC: So, it’s much more than just a generational difference?

SS: There can be a generational thing. As George Clinton points out in the Foreword to Hip-Hop Genius, the music of a generation often sounds like noise to the generation before. At the same time, it was my pops who brought home rap records when I was five years old. George Clinton is in his 70s and he loves the culture, so… It’s not just generational.

RC: What can we do to get past the stigma?

SS: We need to stop engaging it so much. People write whole books trying to validate uttering the words “hip-hop” and “education” in the same sentence. There’s a place for those arguments, but I think we need to just focus our energy on building beautiful things and proving that what we know works works. Jay-Z didn’t spend years arguing with music execs who weren’t feeling what he was doing, he went and did it himself and then they started paying attention. This has happened over and over again in the rap game. No Limit and Cash Money had to build their own empires before labels recognized that the south had a rap market. Success has a funny way
of smothering stigma.

RC: Whenever one tries to institutionalize an organic movement as such, there’s always a risk of making it lame and losing the students’ interest. How do we use Hip-hop in the classroom and keep it engaging?

SS: By letting the students run it. If they are creating art that reflects their interests and aesthetics, it will never get stale.

RC: What’s next for you and Hip-hop education?

SS: Now that Hip-Hop Genius has dropped I’ve been getting some great invitations to talk about it. The video we made about Hip-Hop Genius has also gotten a lot of buzz online which has led to other opportunities. I just started a book tour where I go to cities, visit as many cool organizations and schools as I can–specifically those related to Hip-hop arts and empowering young people–and then put on an event that features their work, the work of the High School for Recording Arts, and Hip-Hop Genius. The first few events have been dope! We’d love to bring it to more cities, so holler if you have ideas about locations we should add.

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Here’s the book trailer for Hip-hop Genius [runtime: 4:23]:

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