POWERS OF PERCEPTION

In a July 3 article on NPR’s website, Ann Powers draws attention to recent discussions about Miley Cyrus’s new(ish) video, “We Can’t Stop” (that's it above). She takes an adversarial, even scolding stance; the title of the piece is "When Pop Stars Flirt With Bad Taste," and Powers calls Cyrus out for “racial appropriations”—namely, twerking, which, for those who don't know, is the latest of the ass-shaking dances that have been part of hip-hop (and Latin music—do a YouTube search for "perreo" sometime) for decades.

Says Powers, “Many critiques of Cyrus rightly [emphasis mine] question why this privileged young woman has chosen to adopt an ‘urban' style grounded in the most abject aspects of African-American culture, as it's been filtered through a ‘hipster-racist’ subculture that reduces black masculinity to thug primitivism and femininity to door-knocker earrings and big, juicy butts.”

One of the critiques Powers links, and by extension co-signs, comes from Sesali Bowen; it was originally published on the blog Feministing, and reappeared on the blog Racialicious. In the piece, which seems intent on making some larger point (it fails), Bowen implicates Cyrus in “a larger system of cultural appropriation, commodification, and sometimes exploitation,” reproducing a photo of the singer with her hands on her knees and her ass sticking out, glancing over her shoulder Betty Boop-style at the camera, and sneering, “Her skin and class privilege overfloweth in this poorly executed commodification of ‘ratchet culture.’”

Another critique comes from the self-described feminist blog Jezebel; this piece is called "On Miley Cyrus, Ratchet Culture And Accessorizing With Black People." Here's a sample quote:

"In the video, Miley is seen with her 'friends': Mostly skinny white boys and girls who appear to be models. But in a few scenes, she's seen twerking with three black women. Are they also her friends? Or is she just hoping for street cred? Note that she is wearing white, in the spotlight, the star of the video — and they are treated as props, a background for her to shine in front of. We've tackled the use of people of color in the background before; it's a theme that persists, but remains wrong. In a white-centric world, putting white women quite literally in the center of the frame while women of color are off to the side is a powerful, disrespectful visual message, and it really must be said: Human beings are not accessories. These women might be her friends, but the general dynamic created is that she is in charge and they are in service to her."

Or they might be, you know, backup dancers in a music video.

I have questions.

1) When did Miley Cyrus become a ‘hipster’? She’s from Nashville, the daughter of a country singer, and a former Disney child star. She’s about as unhip as it’s possible to be. Indeed, for years now it’s been perfectly acceptable for online commenters and even some bloggers to call her a hillbilly or white trash, without repercussion.

2) In what way is Miley Cyrus “appropriating” anything? Look, I’ve argued many times against the existence of a monoculture in America, but if there is one, it’s hip-hop. Miley Cyrus is 20 years old. Hip-hop is at least 35, maybe 40 if you’re stretching it a little, and at the time of her birth in 1992, it was in a golden age, and beginning an era of commercial and cultural dominance that shows no signs of fading. She, like millions of other children, has grown up in a world where hip-hop is the lingua franca of pop culture.

To say, as Powers does, “For Cyrus, hip-hop is a corporate legacy, not a lived one; like virtually every privileged kid her age, it was sold to her like sneakers and soda,” is absurd. There is basically no way for anyone under 30 to avoid “living” hip-hop; it’s everywhere, at all times. There is underground hip-hop, but hip-hop is not underground, and it hasn’t been for at least 25 years. Are underprivileged kids presented with hip-hop in some pure, non-corporate way? As far as I know, black kids watch the same YouTube videos as white kids. But maybe they just osmose this stuff. You know, like “natural rhythm.” 

For Powers, Jezebel's Dodai Stewart and other critics, the problem with Miley Cyrus is simple, even if it must go unsaid within the polite confines of NPR: She’s white, and rich, which given the state of contemporary pop-culture/Internet-social-justice discourse means that her pleasures, her tastes, are always suspect. To any critic with correctly aligned racial and class tunings, she can never be anything but an exploiter. Powers asks whether “Cyrus genuinely like[s] and participate[s] in the cultural expressions she's now taken on,” but for her, the answer seems clear: it’s “just another case of artistic theft.” 

Based on what evidence? This argument (and calling it that is being generous) is two-pronged: On the one hand, we are asked to believe that white participation in hip-hop is still, nearly 30 years after the Beastie Boys, somehow suspect, and on the other, we are asked to infer that Miley Cyrus is the puppet of outside songwriters and producers (it’s apparently very important that “We Can’t Stop” was submitted to Rihanna, who rejected it, before Cyrus bought it), without individual will or an aesthetic perspective.

But the facts just don’t support that interpretation. Miley Cyrus hasn’t just posted Instagram photos and YouTube clips of herself twerking, and incorporated the dance into the “We Can’t Stop” video; she’s also shown up at a concert by rapper Juicy J (of the Oscar-winning Three 6 Mafia—how underground!) to dance onstage. But somehow she’s forever an interloper, an exploiter, never a true fan.

Meanwhile, in 2007, when the rap group Shop Boyz had a massive hit single with “Party Like a Rockstar,” the chorus of which featured slang that was 20 years out of date (it ran “Party like a rockstar/Totally, dude”), no one went after them for (totally) misunderstanding rock culture. Similarly, the pre-teen, all-black metal band Unlocking The Truth, whose live videos are a YouTube sensation, aren’t being questioned about what "culture" they might be “appropriating." When they talk in interviews about not liking hip-hop, nobody asks if they “genuinely like and participate in the cultural expressions [they’ve] now taken on.”

There’s a strong vein of racial essentialism running through this discussion. In some way that’s never clearly explained, black people’s experience of pop culture is apparently radically different from white people’s experience of that exact same pop culture, even though they’re both getting it from the same websites, radio stations, and cable channels. Even though no hip-hop album can go platinum without attracting a significant number of white buyers, critics like Powers (and others) continue to insist that white listeners are still somehow outsiders to this culture they’ve been subsidizing for three decades. They're also desperate to elevate street culture, as when Powers makes sure to point out that twerking "has roots in African dance," as if Africans invented ass-shaking and African-Americans are taking folkloric study to the club. Why must hip-hop be homework?

And another thing: Was it really hipsters who “reduce[d] black masculinity to thug primitivism and femininity to door-knocker earrings and big, juicy butts”? That seems like a convenient way to exonerate hip-hop for its own messaging—apparently, hip-hop is like Communism; it cannot fail, it can only be failed. (Mostly by white people.)

(Note: Lizzy Acker also has an excellent rebuttal to the Jezebel piece.)

INTERVIEW: OMAR RODRIGUEZ-LOPEZ

[Recently, Alternative Press did a feature called "Class of 2000," wherein they looked back at several important/influential albums that are now 10 years old. One of them was At the Drive-In's Relationship of Command. So I interviewed guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez for the third time, to get his thoughts on that record and the disintegration of ATDI soon after its release. Some of the Q&A didn't make it into the magazine, for space reasons, so here's the full transcript.]

What was your relationship with producer Ross Robinson like?
On that record, Ross basically ran the show. I was very eager to be learning at that time. I always say I’m still in training. I’m still learning, but the root of my training was from [producer] Alex Newport, who came before Ross. Then Ross and then Mario [Caldato Jr.], because De Facto—the other band Cedric [Bixler-Zavala] and I had—recorded with Mario C right around the same time. Then of course, there was Rick Rubin. My schooling was watching those guys and seeing what pieces of gear they had and asking questions about why they’d choose to use that particular gear. Ross, at that time, had the reputation for being the wild guy who would throw things or drive you around, doing things like method acting, but for whatever reason, he didn’t really do that with me. I know he threw a trash can a couple of times, and he took Paul [Hinojos, bass] and drove him in an SUV really fast through the hills in Malibu, where there was no barrier, to get his adrenaline going and recorded him that way. But with me it was a very different type of relationship.

How did Iggy Pop wind up on the record?
That was by way of Ross Robinson. He had been talking to Iggy because they were gonna work together. I don’t know if they ever did, but they’d sort of been chatting, so Ross had passed him our previous records and he liked them. So, of course I brought up the idea, “Why not [have Iggy] come and do something on the album?” Ross mentioned it to Iggy, and he was completely open to it. He came down to the studio for a whole day in which he sang [on “Rolodex Propaganda”] and did the ransom note on [“Enfilade”].

When you were making Relationship of Command, was the band already divided into you and Cedric versus the other three?
It was always like that. You see, that’s a thing people don’t understand because we never really talked about our internal affairs. There wasn’t the “reality show” approach to bands like there is now. It was like that from the beginning. It was always me and Cedric. We were in tons of bands before At The Drive-In and we continue to be in bands after At The Drive-In. It was always sort of us against particularly Jim [Ward, guitar] and his candy-coated way of doing things. For example, people always say we broke up out of nowhere and we imploded because of the popularity, and that’s something that always makes us laugh. We’re all good friends now. We all talk now. I invited Tony Hajjar [drums] and Jim and Paul [Hinojos, bass] down to my house in Mexico and had them over. I flew them down here. We’re all good friends, and we still laugh about that [rumor] because [the break up] had nothing to do with that. It was just that I felt it was our time. I felt that the lifespan of the band was over and I broke the band up. It was all personal affairs. It was very much a life thing, it had nothing to do with external pressure and all those theories. Going back to this point again about the way people say that we imploded out of nowhere, they don’t understand the context that we broke up at least three or four other times before we finally broke up. There were three or four times where I or Cedric or Cedric and I both talked about leaving the group because our desires were so different [from the rest of the band]. Looking back on it, it’s part of the beauty of that band and what made it work. It wasn’t what we wanted versus what they wanted. It was a really special dynamic, even though it was volatile in that way. It was what made the band what it was. I don’t regret it at all.

If the band hadn’t broken up, what do you think the album after Relationship Of Command would have sounded like?
It would have been a heartless piece of garbage. I mean, I can only assume that because I wouldn’t have been doing it for the right reasons, and I don’t think that expression or art should come second to anything else. I think the only reason to [play music] is expression—getting out the thing you have inside that can’t be conveyed through any language, whether it be English, Spanish, Japanese or German. So I think when something isn’t real, people will perceive it. Even if they don’t, I just think we would have imploded. I would have been very unhappy; Cedric would have been very unhappy doing it just to do it; and then a true resentment and a true hatred for each other would’ve grown. That’s what happens in a normal human psychology—you start blaming each other. Even though I would have only blamed myself for not leaving, that would be the true blame. It would’ve been easy for me to blame someone else and be like, “Oh, they’re the reason this record sucks.” When in actuality, I would have been the reason—for not being honest. You know, it’s like I always say when people ask me about the breakup: It’s like staying in a relationship with a woman you’re not in love with. It doesn’t work for anybody. You’re lying to yourself, you’re hurting yourself and in the process you’re hurting the other person. You know the way life is. Life is not gonna make it easy for you when you’re living a lie.

What’s your least favorite thing about the album?
In a heartbeat I could tell you, one of my only regrets out of anything I’ve ever done is the way that record was mixed. That record was ruined by the mix. Up until I moved to Europe in 2005, I had the rough mixes that we made on the console [for reference]. Those CDs that I kept were so much more potent and raw. People think that was a raw and energetic record, but what they’re hearing is nothing compared to what it truly was before it was glossed over and sent through the mixing mill that was Andy Wallace—who is a wonderful person and a very talented mixing engineer and has done great albums—I’m not trying to offend him… And I understand he had the pressure of the label and all the people who had dreams of it being this grandiose thing, and being played on the radio, which it was, [but] that record was ruined by the mix. I just find it the most passive, plastic… It’s the one record [I played on that] I still to this day cannot listen to. The mix ruined it for me.

The cover art has a lot of Trojan horse imagery—was that related to the lyrical content, or was it that you guys felt the band were sneaking into the mainstream or something?
It was a running concept that Cedric had going through his lyrics that we all noticed. It wasn’t even a conscious thing for Cedric, but it was more looking at the overall thing that we had created and seeing the lyrics and the music and the themes we talked about at the time. We realized that, first of all, it’s a nice story. It can also be seen politically. I think we always thought of it conceptually more as ideas or a passion. You’re surrounded by something that’s passionless and you bring a heart inside. I don’t think it was ever as grandiose as us sneaking into the mainstream world. We had no idea what that record would end up doing. We were just happy to be making our album. I think it ended up taking on that context for people, but at the time, being in the middle of it and making the record, it was way more of a personal thing. In all of our music, whether it’s evident or not, our politics are in that music. At the time, we toured a lot with other bands and were exposed to a lot of people. For me in particular, I just became completely disillusioned and saw what bullshit the music scene was. It’s why to this day, I don’t have opening acts. It’s like the term “Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.” Rock ’n’ roll, which is supposed to be the musical aspect of it, comes last—sex and drugs are first. It was the sort of thing where you run into other bands and they talked about anything else but the things that were actually important. So it just seemed like a lot of the illusion of what art was and why you do music were shattered when you met all these bands who were really just interested in partying and girls. They put very little time or effort into their craft. So what that means to me is that it’s something without soul and something without heart, and that’s what I relate about coming in with heart and being surrounded by a sea of things that don’t have anything truly to do with the path of healing.

How did the album come to be released by Grand Royal?
That was our dream come true. We used to put out our records ourselves, and then we did them on Fearless and Flipside. When the idea first came that labels were asking about us, we had the conversation with our manager about what would be the ultimate label for us. This was years and years before [Relationship of Command], but we said Grand Royal. It just seemed like the perfect thing. They had the right attitude and seemed to be doing it for the right reasons, yet they were sort of considered a major. They had some push behind them, tour support, all that kind of stuff. So if we could dream, it would be Grand Royal. Then years later, when we got signed after Fearless, we signed actually to a company called Den, and they were really ahead of their time, actually. It was sort of like this internet label. In fact, that was kind of the weight that crushed them. They were making TV shows that were gonna be strictly on the internet. They gave us a digital camera when we first signed with them that was nicer than our own. We kept filming everything and cut them up and with that we made these little programs. But at the time, most people’s internet connections weren’t fast enough, so it didn’t work. You’d sit there to watch the TV show and you’d give up. Then Den crumbled under some sort of scandal, I don’t know what it was. I wouldn’t wanna start a rumor, but one day the owners told us, “Den is closed. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that you’re gonna be on Grand Royal.” It literally happened from one moment to another. We couldn’t believe our ears. So the same core of people we were working with remained the same, just all of a sudden now we were talking to [Grand Royal owner and Beastie Boy] Mike D. Mike went on to put out a De Facto record, and we never asked him to. We never pushed it on him and said, “Oh, by the way, we have this [album from our other band].” He sort of just heard about it and put it out. Once I broke up [ATDI], I drove straight to L.A. and he was the first person I told. He was kind enough. I expected him to be mad at me and never want to talk to me again because they had gotten distribution with Virgin based purely off At The Drive-In. But instead of being mad at me, he said, “Well, whatever you do next, I definitely want to put it out.” So he was gonna put out the first Mars Volta record, and then Virgin pulled out completely and he decided to close Grand Royal.

Any more solo albums coming this year?
There’s four that have already come out and there’s six more coming this year. Then I’ll be releasing another film that hopefully will be in the winter festivals and then one that I’m making now that’ll hopefully be in the spring festivals. And touring in between all that, of course.