Warning: Semiotic Swamp
The signpost up ahead.
In the late 80s, when I was still youthfully gung-ho about my shared mission to Free Bartleby, I was, like many thousands of computer geek compatriots eager to computerize everything that could be computerized. Then I came across a cat named Marshall Blonsky. I’ve mentioned his name several times before around here, most recently in this context:
My quantum of diversity, depending upon whom you ask, has something to do with my having been a notable ‘black Republican’ back when candidate Obama was the hottest [black crossover] dish since Bobby Short. Remember ‘post-racial America’? Only people with no real grip on the reality of black America could suggest such a thing seriously. You know, the postmodern Progressives, who know what’s good for all of us and will just magic up a knowledge economy to grease the skids to the glorious moral future. Be that as it may, I would prefer you consider me something of a throwback. My actual quantum of diversity is that I prefer accessing arcane streams of knowledge that isolate my emotions and inner peace from the tectonics of the interwebz. I learned about semiotics in the 1990s thanks to a cat named Marshall Blonsky and I was fascinated to learn that a great number of smart people in the Humanities were pulling our collective legs. That Ralph Lauren polo shirt literally had everything to do with my imagination about British class and civilization, not the actual thing. My excuse was that I studied Computer Science and accepted that I would always be a nerd. I desperately wanted to understand the Arts & Letters, in order to be as philosophically complete as possible, but I’d always be an outsider. I didn’t realize how outside I was. I leaned into that anyway, finally when I broke with that category of intelligence I called Domestic Affairs.
So I watched the Super Bowl and was not impressed by the game, the halftime show, the opening ceremony and most of the commercials. Worse still our nachos at home were burnt. Thank god for Modelo and sudoku. In my dotage, that’s what I’ll be doing, except with bourbon.
But the chatting class will chat. And we have now gone to asking the significance of Kendrick Lamar (aka K.dot) and his performance with its implications for the USA.
The post-game interview with the winning QB, Jalen Hurts was unpredictably pathetic. He didn’t have a prepared statement, he wasn’t overcome with emotion, he didn’t ad-lib well. Maybe he was just exhausted from playing the biggest game in his life? Doesn’t matter what that black American quarterback says about America, but how exactly to suss out the hidden meanings of Compton’s most notorious rap idol, that’s the ticket. Well, that’s the price of the ticket. Welcome to the semiotic swamp.
$$Hiphop Now$$
It doesn’t take a genius, it merely takes a Hollywood survivor to play mind games on youth yearning for rebellion. Every hair band, every punk band, every front girl in leather and lace, every black hatted cowboy ever has figured out the formula. Rappers have been doing it for 40 years. But like Ozzy Osborne rappers have managed to be on fire in one segment of fandom and unknown to all the rest, until one day they get a Grammy. Full disclosure, my old company EBB Text & Graphics used to have the contract for printing the ballots for the first Soul Train Awards. There’s plenty of recognition in every respective fandom, but getting to be America’s public enemy of Pop, now that’s saying something. This is why Kanye is selling swastika shirts. Feeling a bit left out, even though he sold his house in Malibu just in the nick of time.
So I used to be into hiphop hermeneutics and even wrote raps in 1991. Hmm, now there’s a potential treat for paid subscribers. I fell out of love when my toddlers learned to toddle, but hiphop of the great sort was on its deathbed years before that, pour a bottle for MC Lyte and Monie Love. I would have to say that aside from De La, the last passably great hiphop album was Chant Down Babylon, but mostly because they were covers of Bob Marley. But I digress. I exited the fandom because it is essentially juvenile.
When I say 'hip-hop is dead', basically America is dead. There is no political voice. Music is dead ... Our way of thinking is dead, our commerce is dead. Everything in this society has been done. It's like a slingshot, where you throw the muthafucka back and it starts losing speed and is about to fall down. That's where we are as a country ... what I mean by 'hip-hop is dead' is we're at a vulnerable state. If we don't change, we gonna disappear like Rome. I think hip-hop could help rebuild America, once hip-hoppers own hip-hop ... We are our own politicians, our own government, we have something to say.[7]
— Nas 2006
That almost makes sense, but would make perfect sense if the state of hiphop were the boundaries for the state of music and the arts in toto. Nevertheless, that’s where a sizable fragment of American youth live. Certainly the Left bloc of them have been dreaming that their vision of America could run shit. They have had some non-trivial alliances since George Floyd. Funny they didn’t drag Chuck D visibly into that new woke limelight. I suspect that Chuck has always been overtly suspicious of white liberals allied with black liberals, like a proper radical black nationalist should. Yet again I digress.
The Symbolic Palace
I will be writing about the Black Left here and elsewhere cross-posted because I expect that my readers can and will disambiguate race from culture from fashion. The mashup promulgated by postmodernists and poststructuralists push us closer to a swamp of signs that can be interpreted - that such ideologues wish to be interpreted - through the lens of ‘lived experience’ which is aimed at elevating such first-person testimony towards the heights of authority. I don’t believe that the whole of the Black Left is part of a postmodern agenda, quite the opposite in fact. They simply believe that their ghetto experience is more universal than it actually is. They therefore mistake their exposure with empowerment.
That ‘empowerment’ is subverted by actual work. As I’ve said before, you cannot sing your way to liberation. Whoever occupies the hiphop throne lives in that symbolic palace and hiphop fandom is a good sized market. It makes millionaires predictably. So predictably that Hollywood banks on it. Thus the symbols live large in the popular imagination. Whatever the rules were barked by Sam Jackson’s Uncle Sam during halftime are certainly the gist of the formula. The American youth in my living room giggled furtively through the whole thing Sunday, but the energy was provided by an actual betting market. If you didn’t know, you could have bet last year on the number of times Taylor Swift appeared on camera during the broadcast. This year a lot of money was won by the presence of Sam Jackson, how long the show actually went, whether or not ‘Not Like Us’ would be performed, bleeped or delivered in all its explicit glory.
That’s the game within the game.
The inner game has nothing to do with football. It had nothing to do with what the Philadelphia head coach said about teamwork. BTW ‘My Prerogative’ was hiphop in 1988. That’s the theme for the ground game.
I think I’ve worn out my welcome quoting Musa al-Gharbi on his categorization of the symbolic capitalists. Those are the architects of the inner game; their goal is mindshare. They want the ARR of your subscription. They don’t care about the content or what games their content rides the back of, so long as it is sticky in the moment. Two weeks of attention is all they need to monetize the superdistribution. Famousity ratchets. You cannot get unfamous without some actual censorship and disinformation. Speaking of which, let me illustrate.
The Economy of Illusion
All of the balls in the above picture are the same color. The entirety of the trick of this optical illusion is to color the stripes covering the balls. It’s not about the ball, it’s about the coverage. This is the power of the symbolic capitalists and their spin. You just need to stoically understand that you cannot control what is presented to you or the context through which you receive your information. Without analysis about what you are actually hearing or seeing, you may be subject to hallucination. Blue dress or gold?
While I’m beating up on the credulity of young Americans and our collective susceptibility to hallucination, let me remind you of my moment of departure. That would be somewhere around the second season of JJ Abrams’ TV show Lost. I was prepared for it to be sci-fi, but then the plots went sideways and left tangents hanging, and then the tangents became the plot and then entirely new subplots became the plot. I have since imagined it to be a test of the audience’s capacity to pay attention over time to something that is essentially and purposefully incoherent.
In a nation of a few hundred million, there’s profitability lurking. The problem of course is as it has always been, monopoly power. The monopoly of orthodoxy is a very dangerous thing, inherently. Such monopolies are best confined to the offices of a small town mayor and distributed through network protocols from there. Decentralize until it breaks. Only centralize until it works. Massive concentrations of power spread hysteria when they become overburdened, especially when they violate Gall’s Law.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
In the semiotic swamp, you don’t even know where one system ends and another begins. Beware of the charlatan who sells you the entire conspiracy theory. They’re probably selling you colored balls.