"Bring the Noise"

By: Bernard Chazelle

Public Enemy's political voice may have obscured the enduring brilliance of their work. It's been 21 years since the release of "It Takes a Nation" and it's hard to believe how fresh, innovative, and emotionally powerful that album still sounds. The raw energy of Chuck D's booming voice, trading rhymes with Flavor Flav, is channeled through a layered mix of swirling scratches, quick beats, and funky James-Brown samplings. It's only when you listen to the old masters like PE and Run-DMC that you realize how much the current generation (Kanye and the rest) are in their debt. And, who knows, perhaps gangsta rap will even prove to be a short-lived commercial aberration.

You may know Chuck D from his Air America radio show and perhaps less from his status as one of rap's great MCs, along with 2Pac, Nas, Jay-Z, etc. The "noise" in the title is what the pop world thought of hip-hop in the early days. Chuck D welcomes the slur. Yes it is "noise," he is rapping, our kind of noise, and if you don't like it, tough. As in much of black music, of course, there is an underground "elitism" there meant to shoo away the white establishment. The "noise" played the same gatekeeping function as the jarring harmonies, forbidding virtuosity, and asymmetric rhythm of bebop did 40 years earlier. It didn't help matters that Seamus Heaney (a poet I admire enormously) praised the poetic power of hip-hop. Heaney was right, of course, but to declare hip-hop safe for the establishment was the last thing hip-hop needed. (Everyone was probably too busy listening to Britney to hear Heaney.)

Some quick historical perspective. In my view, one pop figure dominates, nah, towers over everyone else. Nothing the Brits did comes anywhere close. Same with Elvis. No one can claim his musical breadth, creativity, and influence. That person, of course, is James Brown. And yet there was always something missing. Brown was always so far ahead of everyone else he ended up talking to himself. And you can't formalize a new language when you only talk to yourself. Hip-hop is Brown's legacy as an autonomous musical genre, its culmination if you will. It's a genre that never ceases to amaze me. It's not musical in the traditional sense of the word. But there's an emotional intensity to it, a rhythmic richness, and a verbal brilliance that have no equivalent in pop music. I love it.

— Bernard Chazelle

White Skin Privilege is Sweet! SWEET!

There are many great things about being part of the white majority, but one of my favorites is that I don't have to release a statement condemning it every time some white guy somewhere shoots people.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Violent Lunatics the Same All Around the World

I read this back in July when the Saddam transcripts were first released, and assumed it would be picked up and mentioned in news stories around the world. Nope.

Anyway, it's pretty funny, at least as much events that involve the deaths of millions can be funny.

FBI Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, March 3, 2004:

The invasion of Kuwait was accomplished within two and a half hours, equivalent to that previously estimated. Hussein stated it should have taken no more than one hour. He believes it should have occurred more quickly than originally estimated due to support from the Kuwaiti people. Hussein reiterated a previous statement to the interviewers that Iraq was asked by the Kuwaiti people to invade their country in order to remove the Kuwaiti leadership. When asked to clarify how the Kuwaiti citizens communicated their desires to the Iraqi government prior to the invasion, Hussein stated some, not all, Kuwaitis felt this way. He added, "We felt they were asking."

Dead Certain by Robert Draper:

"What reaction do you expect from the Iraqis to the entry of U.S. force in their cities?" Bush wanted to know.

"The Iraqi will welcome the U.S. forces with flowers and sweets when they come in," volunteered Makiya ... The other two [Iraqis] agreed that American troops would face immediate jubilation.

Bush was ready to believe this.

Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm, p. 250:

We may not have a perfect understanding of how Saddam Hussein thinks, but one thing we know for certain is that he does not think like an American president... Assuming that Saddam Hussein will think and act like a Westerner -- indeed, like anyone but himself -- can only lead to disaster.

—Jonathan Schwarz

In the World's Richest Country

By: Bernard Chazelle

Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood.

"The current recession is likely to generate for children in the United States the greatest level of material deprivation that we will see in our professional lifetimes," Stanford pediatrician Dr. Paul Wise wrote.

The analysis is in line with other recent research suggesting that more than 40 percent of U.S. children will live in poverty or near-poverty by age 17.

It's not all bleak. Thanks to Bush and Obama, the children of Wall Street bankers can still afford their private Polo lessons.

— Bernard Chazelle

Beliefs, What Beliefs?

By: Bernard Chazelle

David Corn on NY23:

An ideological civil war probably won't be good for business for the GOP—though these conservatives clearly believe that right-wing purity is the best path for a Republican return to power.

Markos's take on it:

These conservative activists are approaching things differently -- they'd rather lose general election races than make gains in Congress with (in their eyes) less-than-perfect Republicans. That's a weird way to build a majority.

Both embed NY23 within a narrative of power and strategy. As good liberal pundits, they only see a story of suicidal conservatives displaying Palinesque levels of stupidity. They'd rather lose a seat than compromise their principles. Hahaha! Now how dumb is that? Surely no liberals would commit such a sin. They'll go with Blue Dogs and Green Hyenas if that's the road to power. The word "principle" is too well-pedigreed so the preferred putdown in the liberal commentariat is the derisive "purity."

My point is not to argue that conservatives have principles (many do, but that's not my point). I only wish to bring up the fact that liberal pundits lack the genetic makeup, or the intellectual category if you will, to bring up the issue of principles, even if only to dismiss it with a giant laugh.

When, in fact, NY 23 taps into a deep, widespread anger at the establishment (in that case the GOP). Beck and Palin are such inviting targets it's irresistible for liberals to dismiss the whole thing as "the Freak Show of the Retards." But it's missing two important facts: the first is that the anger is legitimate. The Bush-Obama plan to rescue the criminals on Wall Street on the back of ordinary Americans will not be soon forgotten. The visceral opposition to HCR among many can be traced to it. The second fact is the appalling condescension of these liberal elites toward conservatives who have principles they care deeply about. I happen to detest virtually every single one of these principles. And, yes, Beck is a dangerous demagogue. But there's still something to be said about a political movement that would rather lose an election than its principles: a concept completely alien to the liberal establishment.

— Bernard Chazelle

New Tomdispatch

#1

Obama's Choice
Failed War President or the Prince of Peace?
By Nick Turse

When the Nobel Committee awarded its annual peace prize to President Barack Obama, it afforded him a golden opportunity seldom offered to American war presidents: the possibility of success. Should he decide to go the peace-maker route, Obama stands a chance of really accomplishing something significant. On the other hand, history suggests that the path of war is a surefire loser. As president after president has discovered, especially since World War II, the U.S. military simply can't seal the deal on winning a war.

While the armed forces can do many things, the one thing that has generally escaped them is that ultimate endpoint: lasting victory.

#2:

Welcome to 2025
American Preeminence Is Disappearing Fifteen Years Early
By Michael T. Klare

Memo to the CIA: You may not be prepared for time-travel, but welcome to 2025 anyway! Your rooms may be a little small, your ability to demand better accommodations may have gone out the window, and the amenities may not be to your taste, but get used to it. It's going to be your reality from now on.

Okay, now for the serious version of the above: In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency, issued the latest in a series of futuristic publications intended to guide the incoming Obama administration. Peering into its analytic crystal ball in a report entitled Global Trends 2025, it predicted that America's global preeminence would gradually disappear over the next 15 years -- in conjunction with the rise of new global powerhouses, especially China and India. The report examined many facets of the future strategic environment, but its most startling, and news-making, finding concerned the projected long-term erosion of American dominance and the emergence of new global competitors. "Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025]," it stated definitively, the country's "relative strength -- even in the military realm -- will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained."

—Jonathan Schwarz

Alan Grayson $$$

Alan Grayson is an oasis in the vast desert that is the Democratic party. But like every oasis, he needs money. I just contributed to his moneybomb today, and I urge you to do so as well.

If he can't raise money online and loses next year, it will have a genuine chilling effect on a party whose temperature is already near absolute zero. But if other members see that someone like Grayson can raise lots of money, survive and thrive, it will have the opposite effect. Please give early and often.

I also appreciate that, unlike every other member of Congress, Grayson doesn't dress like a Wells Fargo Assistant Vice President.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Between You and Me, We're Committing Securities Fraud

The big McClatchy story today about Goldman Sachs is great:

"The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion," said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who's proposed a massive overhaul of the nation's banks. "This is fraud and should be prosecuted."

But for straightforward admissions of guilt, the recent long Vanity Fair article by Michael Lewis about AIG is even better:

Cassano agreed to meet with all the big Wall Street firms and discuss the logic of their deals—to investigate how a bunch of shaky loans could be transformed into AAA-rated bonds. Together with Park and a few others, Cassano set out on a series of meetings with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and the rest—all of whom argued how unlikely it was for housing prices to fall all at once. “They all said the same thing,” says one of the traders present. “They’d go back to historical real-estate prices over 60 years and say they had never fallen all at once.” (The lone exception, he said, was Goldman Sachs. Two months after their meeting with the investment bank, one of the A.I.G. F.P. traders bumped into the Goldman guy who had defended the bonds, who said, Between you and me, you’re right. These things are going to blow up.)

The amazing thing about human beings is that, even when they're organizing death squads or creating multi-billion dollar swindles, they can't stop talking about it.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Steven Levitt, Easy Grader

This is from a long, detailed review in the Boston Globe of Superfreakonomics:

A similar problem arises in another instance when the authors call carbon dioxide’s role into question. At one point Dubner and Levitt write, “Nor does atmospheric carbon dioxide necessarily warm the earth: ice-cap evidence shows that over the past several hundred thousand years, carbon dioxide levels have risen after a rise in temperature, not the other way around.”

In the endnote for this passage, the authors cite a 2004 blog post written by Jeffrey Severinghaus, a professor of geosciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, summarizing ice core research he did on the beginning and end of ice ages. The fourth sentence of that blog entry reads, “Does this prove that CO2 doesn’t cause global warming? The answer is no.” Severinghaus has not read “SuperFreakonomics,” but when the passage was read to him over the phone, he called it “flat-out misrepresentation.”...

Asked over e-mail about the use of Severinghaus’s research, Levitt responded, “The sentence may be poorly written, but I do not think it is factually inaccurate.” He also defended the citation on the grounds that, while Severinghaus may not think his finding supports their point, it does not clearly disprove it, either. “Severinghaus says that this is not definitive evidence against CO2 warming the earth; he certainly can’t argue that this is definitive evidence that CO2 does warm the earth,” Levitt wrote.

Hopefully all professors at the University of Chicago are like Stephen Levitt.

PROFESSOR LEVITT: None of the citations in your paper actually support the points you're making.

STUDENT: Maybe so...but my supporting citations don't definitively prove that I'm wrong.

PROFESSOR LEVITT: A+!!!!!

—Jonathan Schwarz

The War on Drugs Dealt by People America Isn't Friends With

Deal opium and don't do what the U.S. government tells you to do? Instantaneous death from above!

The Obama Administration has also widened the scope of authorized drone attacks in Afghanistan. An August report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee disclosed that the Joint Integrated Prioritized Target List—the Pentagon’s roster of approved terrorist targets, containing three hundred and sixty-seven names—was recently expanded to include some fifty Afghan drug lords who are suspected of giving money to help finance the Taliban. These new targets are a step removed from Al Qaeda. According to the Senate report, “There is no evidence that any significant amount of the drug proceeds goes to Al Qaeda.”

Deal opium and follow orders to our satisfaction? Knock yourself out!

The inclusion of Afghan narcotics traffickers on the U.S. target list could prove awkward, some observers say, given that President Hamid Karzai’s running mate, Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim, and the President’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, are strongly suspected of involvement in narcotics. Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, who has written extensively on military matters, said, “Are they going to target Karzai’s brother?”

Will this massive hypocrisy and brutality generate more than a question or two on the Sunday D.C. talk shows (if that)? Nope.

If the U.S. political class will swallow this, is there anything they won't eat? Would they make trouble if the federal government set up concentration camps on the National Mall? I'm guessing no.

AND: From George Tenet's book At the Center of the Storm:

The Agency had...been rocked by false allegations in 1996 that some of its members had been complicit in selling crack cocaine to children in California. The allegations were ludicrous, but even attempting to refute them gave legs to a lurid tale.

I like to believe he dictated that while signing off on the next delivery of cash to Ahmed Wali Karzai.

—Jonathan Schwarz

"Layla"

By: Bernard Chazelle

"Layla" features rock's most famous guitar riff (missing here) as well as its greatest modulation.

Enough has been written about this song, always polling as one of rock's top anthems, I'll deal only with the technical part, which is itself somewhat interesting.

The intro and chorus follow the progression of "All Along the Watchtower" (i-VII-VI-VII-i, ie here, Dm-C-Bb-C-Dm): one of the most common chord sequences in rock (0:27-1:10). The song is in Dm, but the verse begins on a C#m (1:10) ie, its antipode on the cycle of fifths. By rock standards that's as wild as it gets. In country music, you'll often hear a singer move up or down by a half-step for no particular reason, as though a boring tune becomes interesting just by virtue of raising its key. But Clapton knows what he's doing. When he leaves the comfort of Dm for C#m he actually modulates to its relative major E. Just wait: you'll see there's method to the madness. Now when he hits the root E (1:17), you should soon be hearing a nice interrogative D (the Mixolydian quest for a change): you need it as a leading tone for the coming F#m (1:18). But Knopfler seems asleep and drops the ball, so the transition is not as compelling as it should be.

The idea then is to go through a perfect cadence twice (ii-V-I-IV, ie, F#m-B-E-A) -- the kind of downwind sailing I was talking about earlier. The final A is then used as the dominant of the original key of Dm. It's all tonally "correct." If you've ever heard of the harmonic minor scale but always wondered what it was about: this is your perfect illustration. In theory, from A the reentry should be to D major, not minor. Of course, home is Dm so Clapton has no choice. The problem is that A has a C#, which is not in the scale of F (the notes of the keys of Dm are given by the scale of F), so hundreds of years ago people invented a new scale called Harmonic (common in Middle-Eastern music), which gives us a leading tone to the tonic, ie, C# -> D. Voila!

Mark Knopfler's solo is tasteful. You can say it's just noodling over the Dm pentatonic with passing notes from the Aeolian mode, but there's a melodic quality to it that a quintessential bluesman like Clapton does not like to bring to his playing. The tone he gets with his fingerpicking is gorgeous. Some of his swelling bends have a wind instrument quality.

There are tons of cool Knopflerisms in the obbligatos: I love the G#-A-G#-F#-Eb-E-C# lick over the G#7 at (1:12-1:14). It's very quick so you have to pay close attention. I forget which one but this is straight from one of Beethoven's piano sonatas.

PS: Why I care about such analyses: because it's a myth to think those guys woke up one day, grabbed a guitar, and composed these tunes. They have in them, as we all do, hundreds of years of cumulative musical sensitivity that was "invented" (not discovered) by people who worked out the theory. That's what makes western music different from all others. Since the 9th century, it's been built as a written theoretical construction. The interplay between theory and practice is tighter than in any other art form. So to think of theory as what scholars did after the fact to understand music is naive. In the West, the theory always came first. Don't forget that.

— Bernard Chazelle

George H.W. Bush: GOP Base Are Morons

This is a funny section from a new interview with Mikhail Gorbachev:

...in 1987, after my first visit to the United States, Vice President Bush accompanied me to the airport, and told me: "Reagan is a conservative. An extreme conservative. All the blockheads and dummies are for him, and when he says that something is necessary, they trust him. But if some Democrat had proposed what Reagan did, with you, they might not have trusted him."

Pretty much what you'd expect from the Wall Street wing of the Republicans. I'm sure they've said many worse things we don't know about—especially now as their power wanes and the blockheads and dummies get closer and closer to control.

PREVIOUSLY: Welcome to the Terrordome:

The ascendancy of Reagan, who was just slightly less insane than Goldwater, indicated the system was under stress. Still, he was surrounded by people like George H.W. Bush and James Baker, who kept him from going off the deep end.

But that was then.

—Jonathan Schwarz