The Portuguese translation of Shake the City has been available in Brazil for about six months and appears to be selling well. There is also possibly some news in the post regarding the original English version, though it may be a bit until we can be public about it.
This is an interview I did with Arthur Dantas for Jacobina (the Brazilian version of Jacobin) and was published on November 22. Naturally we covered a lot of ground having to do with the book. He also, unexpectedly, asked well more about my own background and how the intersection between music, space, and politics came to be such a fascination. The English version is below.
You certainly share a point of view very similar to Mark Fisher's. And the first decades of the millennium produced a lot of critical cultural theory. I would like you to tell us a little about your political and intellectual career, what was the intellectual landscape that shaped you, etc.
I suppose my preoccupations with art and radical politics simply comes down to a matter of timing. I grew up in the 1990s. The Cold War was over, capitalism was triumphant, the American empire was more or less entirely unopposed. The idea that you could experience anything outside of the market was dying out entirely. So it was a profoundly alienating and confusing time to grow up, but if you tried to understand this alienation the explanation you would get was that you were irrational and crazy. This was years before we had any terms like capitalist realism on offer to help explain what was going on.
Nonetheless, there were ruptures, signs that something was starting to shift politically and culturally. I was just lucky enough to discover my obsessions with music and the performing arts right around the time of a renewed wave of activism against the World Bank, the WTO, and corporate globalization. The links and interactions between art and radical politics started to fascinate me. It would take me several years to finally make my way to the theories that would illuminate these connections. Walter Benjamin, John Berger, much of the Frankfurt School, the Situationist movement. I didn't have anyone walking through these thinkers with me, so much of my intellectual training (if we can call it that) was done by trial and error, searching and seeing what works for me.
Naturally, a lot of my thinking has changed over time. When I think back to what I wrote or thought twenty years ago, I shake my head. What has kept me fascinated, why I keep investigating these connections, is the fact that we keep making art. We live in end times. The planet's climate is retching us up and society is behaving accordingly. But we keep making art. We keep painting and performing and creating music, regardless of whether these works and gestures are viewed by massive audiences. There is something about our existence that necessitates it. It isn't fanciful to believe, as I do, that there is something deeply anthropological but also unavoidably utopian about this impulse.
As a cultural researcher and writer, I like to think of books that, by affinity, influence or even dialectical opposition, form a gang. What works would form a good gang with Shake the City?
There is, of course, most of Mark Fisher's work, and I would in particular name Ghosts of My Life as a major influence on the content of this book. I've also been deeply influenced by Simon Reynolds, especially his book Rip It Up and Start Again. Some of my affinity for their work simply comes down to shared taste. Like them, I am enamored with the constellation of bands and artists that wind up lumped into that vague category of "post-punk," which was a descriptor Reynolds and Fisher both argued could be applied broadly, encompassing everyone from Gang of Four and Siouxsie and the Banshees to the ambient work of Brian Eno. Reynolds' work on electronic dance music and the rave scene, in books like Energy Flash, were also a big influence on me.
There were and are plenty of philosophical and aesthetic characteristics that draw these artists together, but what interests me most is the belief that music can play an active role in reimagining the physical shapes and contours of the world around us. Understanding how hauntology works as a framework for understanding music, how lost futures are brought to bear on different modes of sound and space. That is a central part of Shake the City.
I would also like to think of Shake the City as being in dialogue with most of the writings that are its influence. Benjamin's "On the Philosophy of History," Henri Lefebvre's work on the production of space and his concept of rhythmanalysis. I do think there is a lot of more recent work that is attempting to push the left toward a deeper understanding of arts and culture, including music. I've just finished Toby Manning's book Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music, which was recently published by Repeater Books. It is an ambitious book, and very impressive. Manning has set out for himself to essentially lay out a Marxist understanding of how all popular music in the US and UK evolved, from the end of the Second World War through to today. He's very flexible and thorough with the thinkers he cites, most of them of course Marxist. How do you use Gramsci to understand Fifty Cent? Or Herbert Marcuse to understand the music of Kate Bush? It's rather stunning in its scope, and I would hope that Shake the City shares a continuum with it.
You say you grew up in the 1990s in the United States. The end of that decade saw a lot of protest music in the English-speaking world and beyond (I think of names like Rage Against The Machine, The Coup, Asian Dub Foundation, Chumbawamba, Levellers, Chris Liberator, Atari Teenage Riot, among others). What was the music from that period that captured your imagination?
Many of those acts you just mentioned were influential for me. At the time they were at their most popular, Rage Against the Machine were sonically and politically mind-blowing. The blending of rap and metal and funk, Tom Morello's guitar work, Zach de la Rocha's lyrics, they all combined to sound like the insurrectionary worldview and ideas they were putting out there. That was significant because, as I said, in the 1990s, it became very difficult to conceive of what revolution would look like, sound like, feel like. RATM answered that, at least in the sound department.
Today, however, their music doesn't have that same resonance. Maybe it's because the act is regarded as part of "nu metal" and all the embarrassment that comes with that label. Maybe it's because I'm old now. But I'm sometimes taken aback by the gap between how RATM could be experienced then and how they sound now.
Chumbawamba I actually think are a band who, musically and politically, managed to capture my attention for far longer, and not just because they continued making new music well beyond the 90s. This often puzzles my British friends; I've learned that much of the UK left, for whatever reason, find Chumbawamba incredibly annoying. But they were always willing to experiment and further explore the intersection between their beliefs and their art, reaching backwards and forwards, pulling from all manner of influences, positing new fusions of riot and dance, even as they struggled with fame for those years immediately after Tubthumping. I'd like to think history will ultimately look at them in a far more favorable way.
When I first started to identify as a socialist, I was primarily into punk and post-punk. Ironically, most of these groups that shaped my politics had either broken up or peaked several years before I started listening to them. It didn't take me long to get into hip-hop, though: Jurassic 5, Black Star, Digable Planets, a lot of the rap that was starting to come out of the UK. Then from there it was anything with a beat that either put itself in opposition or explored alternative ways of thinking and being. When I discovered Tricky, Massive Attack, and trip-hop, that was another revelation for me, another step in understanding how sound and content could merge into something that told a story different from the one we're taught to take for granted. And I'll always wish I had been around for the height of the rave scene.
At one point in Shake the City, you say that the relationship between space and time, between being and becoming, is also the main locus between music and protest, and you specifically use the Black Lives Matter movement as an example of this. From the 1990s onwards, what other moments in the English-speaking world were fertile ground for this relationship?
I think we are only just starting to understand just how radically neoliberalism changed our relationship to time and space. There have been those studying it for a long time of course — David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, in which he dissects the way finance capital has revamped public space, came out in 1989 for example. But we may only fully grasp the scope of this in hindsight.
That said, it's not particularly surprising that struggles over public space and the right to exist in that space generally have been a major feature over the past twenty or so years. Big, central workplaces, which would in the past provide a locus of struggle for working people — factories, steel mills, auto plants and the like — are simply less prevalent than they once were. Which is concomitant with the shuttering of these workplaces, the casualization of labor, and its diffusion through our spaces and our lives through the "gig economy" and platform capitalism. Meanwhile, the steady privatization of services, increasing surveillance and policing of public space; these have translated into an urban commons that isn't really a commons. It's space we are nominally allowed to exist in, but only on the terms of capital.
In the book, I look to Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis to illustrate this, because most of the time, as we exist in this space, it's in the form of being ushered through it — on the way to work, returning home from work, or going to spend money and consume. All require us moving through space rather than stopping and really occupying it on our terms, individually or collectively, and normally there are specific times during the day or night that we are to do this. If you look at the Occupy movement in the early 2010's, which was the first big explosion of protest in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, this was a movement that pointedly refused to be in urban spaces on the terms of capital. To occupy Zuccotti Park in New York City, right there in the financial district; this exposes how we take for granted the current configurations of public space. It invites us to ask why there aren't other uses for it, and in whose interest it is that we don't avail ourselves of these alternatives. And of course, when the police show up to force protesters out, it further forces these questions.
I would posit that this relationship between space and capital and protest can be seen going back ten years before too. The biggest protest of the global justice movement in the late 90s was the Battle in Seattle, where the World Trade Organization met in 1999 and was met with about 25,000 activists and trade unionists. Seattle as a city was notably more liminal before the 90s. This isn't to romanticize it, but there were far more spaces you could exist and interact in if you were broke or on the edges of society. Cheap bars and music venues, parks that the cops wouldn't go to. It was exactly the kind of city that could give rise to these weird indie bands that we now lump into the grunge movement: sludgy, aggressive, crude but musically experimental and angry as hell. Then by the end of the 90s, Seattle is the playground of Microsoft and Starbucks. So there's ultimately a connection between the global financial institutions that the global justice movement is protesting and the progressive homogenization of the city they're meeting in. It's no wonder Starbucks windows were getting smashed up.
How harmful is the platformization of music by streaming apps and how does this current dynamic, where playlists made according to algorithmic measures, undermine the relationship between music and rebellion?
I think we need to be careful with this, as it's easy to fall into a technophobic stance. It's not so much streaming itself that is the problem, but the way that capital has shaped our experience of streaming. This becomes a tricky distinction to make, because capitalism has been the driving force behind most changes in the way we relate to culture for at least the past century. Headphones, which essentially start us on this track toward mitigating music as a social experience, became commercially available in the wake of World War II, transitioning war production of what was at the time a military technology into consumer production. Most innovations in how we interact with music come bearing the mark of the society that produced them.
That is certainly true with streaming. We've all learned recently how toxic the algorithm is on social media, that it's designed to drive traffic based on outrage, acrimony, controversy, and, most importantly, the oversimplification and flattening of content. You could argue that the algorithm is merely following the logic of what a certain style or genre or theme sounds like when it is compiling these playlists, but who determines the standard of what a style or genre "should" sound like? But because most streaming services pay artists next to nothing, getting onto a playlist can potentially make a real difference. So we have artists' own styles and songs being shaped by the same logic of marketability that have always driven the music industry, only now on a much more granular level, and even enforced on artists who may exist well beyond the reach of any of the major record labels.
What this does to an artist's output is almost a cliche by now. The room for experimentation and difference and variance is narrowed over time. That has happened most notably on Spotify, and that influence has spread to other streamers. It is an accelerated version of what Theodor Adorno described as the standardization of music in his famous essay "On Popular Music." While I don't think Adorno gets everything right in this essay — for example, I strongly disagree with the assertion that all possibility for sonic dissent is eliminated in popular music -- I think he got this aspect more correct than even he could have known at the time.
What does this mean for how we relate to the world? The interaction of a song's rhythm with the rhythm of public space — as systematized by Lefebvre — is a preoccupation of mine. When music is performed or amplified in any space, it has a tendency to transform the way we experience it. Music has the potential to expand our imaginations as they pertain to the environment in which it is experienced. But capital has shaped our generalized experience of music in two ways that mitigate this imaginative participation. First, it has made it possible to listen to music without the participation of anyone around us, specifically through the ubiquity of headphones. Second, this standardization of music output itself means the pallet of our imagination is impoverished. The irony then is that while it is now feasible to travel through shared and/or public space — town squares, train or bus stations, streets, parks, playgrounds, offices, workplaces — with the entire history of recorded sound at our fingertips, the way we interact with this expansive catalog actually aids our atomization within that space, cutting away at our impulse to change it.
I certainly don't think that all streaming has to be this way, and there are attempts on the part of some artists to invent alternative models, but if we want to transform music streaming entirely, then it means also the transformation of music and the way we interact with it. This itself requires a transformation of our relationship to our built environments, and, I would argue, time itself.
Finally, it is hard not to ask: Brazil being the first country to translate your book must have been quite a surprise, right? Who is your book aimed at and more: what do you expect from the Brazilian public in order to engage in an active dialogue with the work?
It certainly was a surprise when sobinfluencia reached out to me. I'm honored and thrilled to have my work in front of eyes that wouldn't necessarily have seen it otherwise, and I'm very grateful to the sobi crew for the passion and intelligence and sensitivity they brought to the translation. This is a tricky question for me to answer though, and it's one I've been turning over in my head for some time now, simply because I am not intensely familiar with the lay of the land in Brazil. I know the general thrust of things, and know which side I am on. I know you have just come out of years facing down that far-right thug Bolsonaro, and that the threat of fascism is far from pacified. I heard when Marielle Franco was murdered six years ago and it sent chills up my spine. I have been lucky enough during my time on the Left to speak with a handful of Brazilian trade unionists and socialists, brief as those conversations were. But in terms of knowing exactly who needs to hear this book's arguments, I can't say specifically. This is a case in which I am very much trusting and following the lead of my publishers, who undoubtedly have a stronger grasp on where the left-wing Brazilian audience is.
At the same time, I suppose I do know who I want to read Shake the City, because I believe that, in some sense, this audience exists everywhere. Every city has a contingent of the disaffected and struggling, young people working jobs that feed their bodies just enough and feed their minds very little. These are the people who should be making a city vibrant and interesting, and will if they have the space and resources to create, to make their ideas real. The current organization of the city — from the privatization of space to how expensive everything is, particularly rent — makes that more difficult than ever and downright impossible for so many. It's not just that our lives are more boring and alienated than they have ever been, but there is a direct corollary between this and the level of exploitation we're expected to endure.Â
As always, these are the people with the most potential to change this dismal set of circumstances. In Shake the City, I talk about the mass protests in the UK back in 2010 and 2011 against education reform. Given that these reforms made higher education unreachable for a large portion of the poor and working class, it makes sense that kids from the housing estates, mostly youth of color, played a key and often leading role in these protests. These were also the people who, at the height of those protests, turned Parliament Square into something of a rave. They blasted dubstep over the speakers, and transformed one of the most heavily orchestrated public spaces in London into a site of mass catharsis, even with cops circling around them. It was temporary, but powerful.Â
What do we learn from this? Most of all, that the rhythms of mass produced music and the neoliberal city isn't just about domination and the repression of creativity. They aren't merely a confirmation of what Adorno wrote about popular music helping extend exploitation into leisure time. It seems that way on the surface, and the longer capitalism is dominant, the harder we have to search for it, but every manifestation of exploitation also contains the potentials for liberation so long as they are seized on by the masses of people directly exploited by them. It's as true for gig economy workers as it is for those in heavy industry, and for culture industry workers as it is people overburdened by rent. These moments give us a chance to glimpse a fundamentally different arrangement of our constructed spaces, our cities, and our lives.Â
Header image is from Pixabay.