Mighty Whitey

A bunch of years ago, Terry Zwigoff made a film about obsessive record collectors called Ghost World. It was based on Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel and it stars a very young Scarlett Johansson and Thora Birch as two teenage girls who trail around after some loser old man blues-fan vinyl junkie (Steve Buscemi) because they are enamored of the past, which they think is more real than the horrid, plastic, present. Enid and Rebecca hate everyone and everything, and Enid, for one, can only find solace in the sound of the blues.

I thought of that scene when I first read Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and I thought of it again this week as I finished Hari Kudzru’s new book “White Tears.” Ghost World is a beautiful and tragic chronicle of the alienation and ennui imposed on suburban kids by the soul grinding samey-ness of, well, the age of mechanical reproduction. “White Tears” jacks that aspect of record collecting up about a thousand percent and then multiplies it by its natural, yet oft hidden, corollary, race-driven exploitation. In short, the book is about a whole bunch of things that have been on my mind lately. 

First and foremost, it is about hipsters and their appropriation of black music and the scarily obsessive and secretly hurtful nature of what is-or-is-not cool. Its protagonists and anti-heroes, Seth and Carter, are not so much record collectors as sound vultures, jonesing on the sonic patina of other eras, and doing it through actual things: not only records, but special headphones, special sound monitors, hardy old equipment…stuff. They fetishize the past. They live in Brooklyn, and Carter, Seth says, “begins to dress like the year was 1849 and he was heading west to pan for gold.” They bill themselves as audio craftsmen, “artisans of analog. We would even offer to record to quarter-inch tape, if that’s what the client wanted.” Because they are record producers and djays, they pursue particularly rare records to cannibalize for other people’s recordings, post-modernly. “The present is dry, but add reverb and you can hear time reverse its flow, slipping on into the past, into echo and disaster … distance can create longing. It can open up the gap into which all must fall,” Seth tells us. 

Marx has a word for this process, and the word is reification. To thingify. Seth and Carter thingify sounds. That the things themselves rise up against them in revenge is just one of the ways this book spins the concept of mass consumerism, so that here, ‘hurtful’ ends up meaning to be literally hurt, to be beaten, smashed, and otherwise tortured on the rack of (imagined) social justice. It also may have something to do with history. Because, as Seth concludes, “On your record deck you played the sound of the middle passage, the blackest sound. You wanted the suffering you didn’t have, the authority you thought it would bring. It scared you, but you thought of the swagger it would put in your walk, the admiring glances of your friends. Then came the terror when real darkness first seeped through the walls of your bedroom, the walls designed to keep you safe and dreaming. And finally your rising sense of shame when you admitted to yourself that you were relieved the walls were there.” 

“White Tears” has much in common with the film “Get Out,” including an ending that is pretty much a revenge fantasy and is, fair warning, really violent. Beyond that, though, it is also a book about rich people: rich people, and rich people’s kids, and the people around rich people and their kids, and how unculpable – that is, lacking in a sense of culpability -- they feel and act about the things their money has wrought or is wringing on everyone else. Does this sound familiar? It should, because at this moment in history, I feel like we are all in the process of becoming unwitting human teabags being repeatedly dipped in a stenchy brew of greed, extortion and vice to have our humanity leached out of us.The question really is, where does our culpability begin and end? This is an era of chickens and roosts, and addressing that thorny question in fiction feels very, very timely.

I found that part of the book pretty satisfying – more satisfying then the Robert Johnson-Mississippi Crossroads-Deal With The Devil part, although granted, this book takes that narrative back to its logical roots. Hence – spoiler alert! -- at its heart, “White Tears” is actually a book about convict leasing, mass incarceration and private prisons, or in other words, exactly what I’ve been teaching in my class for the last two quarters, American Crime and Punishment. 

I wish I could have assigned it last quarter, not only because it contextualizes readings I did assign, like “Autobiography of an Imprisoned Peon” (1904), but because I desperately need people to unpack this with (as we say in academia). Since I can’t, I am writing about it here in the hopes I can unpack it with you. Because, as good as I think this book is, and much as I recommend it, I also kind of think it does a disservice to music, to collecting, to sound, to culture, to fandom, and the actual redemption that those things can offer us. Because it is redemptive to listen to music. It is the one sure way back to paradise, or it is for me, anyway. And paradise is definitely not a place this book has any room for.

In fact, the central conceit of “White Tears” is that sound waves may linger in time, “that they persist fainter and fainter, masked by the day to day noise of the world.” If you could invent a good enough microphone, the narrator suggests, you could hear everything that ever happened, and honestly, I don’t think that’s so farfetched. A few years ago, the filmmaker Sam Green made a short documentary about the (one inch) tape archive of Louis Armstrong. Green doesn’t believe in video-taping his work or circulating it in any way other than live; so as with Robert Frank's Cocksucker Blues (only for different reason), his films can only be seen in his presence.  According to the documentary, Armstrong really liked taping things at his home on a big, state of the art tape player, and the film Green made ends with several minutes of the sound of Armstrong’s breath, after he has fallen asleep in front of the microphone. 

The result is, as Green in his live narration pointed out, that for a few moments, we, the audience, get to breath together, across time, along with Louis Armstrong. Yep. That happened, and it happened to me, thus, in my humble opinion, giving the age of mechanical reproduction kind of a big fat second chance. Distance may create longing, but distance can also be bridged. I like to think that those bridges are what our humanity rests on, and not as "White Tears" sort of suggests, what is taking it away.