Non-Constructive Myths: Lou Reed And DJ Shadow

Non-Constructive Myths: Lou Reed And DJ Shadow

Can a myth, however, be non-constructive?  How could an instrument
conceivably be effective if, as in Sorel's vision of things, it leaves
the collective will in the primitive and elementary phase of its mere
formation, by differentiation ("cleavage") -- even when this
differentiation is violent, that is to say, destroys existing moral
and juridicial relations?

Gramsci

Lou Reed: The Mystery Man, Or, Were You Confused?

In the history of postwar American popular music, there is no more
enigmatic figure than Lou Reed: to the point that consideration of the
Velvet Underground has been hampered by the perception that they were
a band rather than a group.  And they are much so-considered, even
thirty-six years after their first record and thirty-three years after
their last one; but perhaps this is, in some fairly definite sense, a
bad thing.  Do people like the Velvet Underground?  People will never
like the Velvet Underground, but their rising popularity with
individuals during the 90s said something about that era.  Not about
the Velvet Underground, whose music was "obsolete" when it was
recorded, but about the coming of a "long present" in youth culture –
where references to long-ago acts could be much more with-it than
contempo confabs.  Was this a bad thing?  I don't think so, although I
am very much of that era.  Did Lou Reed think this was a bad thing? 
Who the hell knows, and that's the subject of this section.

Normally, this would be the point in the essay where I would give a
run-down of Reed's maturation and formative influences: but no such
thing is really possible, since Reed really got "younger than that" as
time went on.  He went to Syracuse and studied under Delmore Schwartz,
*went* to the city and wrote a couple minor hits for the
then-dwindling Brill-Building system, formed a band with a Welsh
Fluxus reject and "made an honest proposition of it" by confounding
record company hopes for the longest recorded stretch ever; first by
being the most-talked-about, least-purchased act of all time and then
being the most-purchased solo artist you wouldn't want to take home to
mother.  Who is this Welsh Fluxus reject?  Everybody knows, and Lou
Reed's interviews for many years have consisted largely of asking
exactly why it is him, and not the chain-smoking radical historian or
Southern Wal-Mart checker, who was the figure of Zen out of the bunch.
 Yeah, the German chick was great.  No, not like that.

Reed himself is not a Zen figure, and really doesn't have to be: after
a couple years, more than a couple thousand people started buying
Velvet Underground records and stopped forming bands (in a trick of
genealogical sleight-of-hand, it seems rather obvious that was the
purpose of the Pixies, which were engineered to be).  Lou Reed is mad;
and he has some reason, because people buy the wrong records.  Yes,
that's right, some VU records are better than others; and Doug Yule
didn't actually make the group worse, 'cause those are the better
records. Is it unfair that the Velvet Underground was Lou Reed's
group? It's unfair that they are remembered as Warhol's
flash-in-the-pan freak-out kit, and not the band which later exerted a
powerful tellurian influence on proto-punks.  The powerhouse live band
which toured with later-released material is the one persons of the
era remember, and fondly: the opposite of Michael Jackson was Lou
Reed, you couldn't get molested by Lou Reed if you wanted to.

Why is this?  As reported in Lester Bangs' fan's notes, Lou Reed
doesn't tip much; but he always pays, and not just up-front.  It seems
clear that a lot of Reed's career moves were intended for other
people's careers, and at a distance of several years; he is nothing if
not unselfish. Perhaps this is because there is no natural appeal to
Lou Reed: he is also the opposite of Al Green, there is absolutely no
reason for Lou Reed to act as he does.  Laurie Anderson tolerates Lou
Reed, does your woman tolerate you?  Probably not, so why fuck up a
good thing?  And so the question is, why do so many people try to act
like Lou Reed?  And the answer is, you can't do it wrong because you
can't do it right: Lou Reed doesn't take sides, and you are.

DJ Shadow: Waxidermy At UC-Davis

Who is the preeminent man of contemporary popular music, the "man by
virtue of which other men are men"?  The answer I can think of is Josh
Davis, AKA DJ Shadow; and that's because I can't think of anyone else
and I have a few ideas why.  Davis is known as a purveyor of
"trip-hop", but this is something of a sop to James Lavelle and
company; "trip-hop" is either DJ Shadow only or something else, and
not quite because he is sui generis.  DJ Shadow is not generous at
all, because he is not "talking with his hands" to other people, or
even to himself; his records are about as close to visual art as
contemporary culture gets, but what are you gonna do?  Nothing due to
his influence. Shadow walks a different sort of "razor's edge" than
Lou Reed, one first articulated by Bowie (James, that is): that some
layabout be most intellectual at their most earthy.  Does DJ Shadow
accomplish this by fusing his art completely with black culture?  It
would never in a million years occur to you that DJ Shadow was black,
but it doesn't occur to me too often that he should be; he is the
complete master of his instrumentation.

Should he be?  Maybe it should occur to me, and this is the underside
of Shadow's focus on the "spiritual"; his (rather massive) cultural
influence is not worked by speaking to you with his soul's tongue, and
in fact may primarily derive from a record predating his rather
massive popularity: "In/Flux", available on the (popular enough)
Preemptive Strike, which collects material released before
Endtroducing.  The 12-minute "In/Flux" is typically referenced as the
founding document of trip-hop, and it is not completely of a piece
with the rest of the DJ Shadow records: it's a lot funkier.  Or so it
seems, but in my opinion what "In/Flux" really accomplished was ending
the Sixties, and not the Sixties of Davis' parents.  The
subject-matter of the song (quite definitely established through
heterogeneous materials, which is a testament to the character of this
piece as "masterwork") is the media reception of the 1967-68 riots (a
time period later revisited with "Six Day War").  DJ Shadow is from
Davis, California; and there weren't any riots anywhere near Davis;
Oakland, which has never burned for much of anything, did not turn
over a new leaf at the Black Panthers' behest.

But you don't know what I mean by that, and not necessarily because
you don't know the Panthers were against riots; consideration of those
events is consigned to the study of history, and not least because of
this record: Shadow crystallizes the structure of the media response,
such that it cannot be utilized as a tool for getting at
"on-the-ground" realities of the riots: Andrei Codrescu once said he
had a great time during the early part of the Detroit riots.  But
Andrei Codrescu is a) from Romania and b) prone to saying a lot of
stuff; and really, who's to say, including someone face-to-face with
Andrei Codrescu?  Nobody, and this is DJ Shadow's function: to
"reveal" that portion of American cultural history which is "dead"
(has only visible means of support).  Does he accomplish it well?

I couldn't imagine anyone doing it better, and so he reminds me of
nobody so much as the person contracted to preserve the utilitarian
moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham for display in King's College London
(that city also being one of his haunts); to resolve sound-impressions
which moved the masses into absurd remainders.  By contrast, Prince
Paul's most recent record (which has Paul engaging in the contemporary
form of the early-modern business of "colportage" on the cover)
features Paul asking for money, or love, or neither, and young fools
from Paul's neighborhood stepping up to the mike.  That's not the
right kind of kind of control for DJ Shadow's project; Paul does too
much with too little.  Does Shadow appear on his records?  Nobody
appears on Shadow's records.  Does Shadow do anything more than what
we've talked about?  In my opinion, no: The Private Press, one of the
most intellectual music projects of recent years, is fundamentally of
a piece with the aforementioned antiquarian tendencies.

This record (although I can't imagine Shadow ever listening to wax and
not using the CD, that's what it is) deals not with the present nor
the inflammatory past, but features snippets of sound from
"private-press records", novelty vinyl records cut at cottage-industry
"studios" such as the one Elvis recorded for his mother.  Is it a
fascinating project? Oh yes, and if it is a choice between Davis and
Stephin Merritt as curator of our musical heritage I'll say something
I'll regret.  Is it living culture?  No.  And perhaps this says
something about more than Josh Davis' life-world, but perhaps it's not
what you'd hope for.