Tag: racism

Racism and Plunderphonics

A google search for ‘Plunderphonics racist’ returns no relevant results. So here is a rough draft to address that.

Plunderphonics is a tape cutup movement invented by John Oswald. Of course, doing tape cut up pieces from pop culture ephemera and applying tape music techniques to these sources was already occurring. For example State of the Union Message by Ruth Anderson had come out some time previously. As had Bye Bye Butterfly by Pauline Oliveros, who, like Oswald, drew all her material for that from a single song. I think its fair to say that his name recognition and subsequent musical career owes a lot to having got into the charts.

Oswald’s charting record does contain musical merit. Pretender, based on Dolly Parton’s recording of The Great Pretender pulls out hidden depth and vocal timbres in her voice. The choice of material is especially clever, given the rich timbres of her voice. This richness makes her slowed voice a convincing baritone. The program notes suggest that she is secretly a a drag queen (or trans woman), suggesting her femininity is so over the top, it must be self-consciously performative. Indeed, Ms. Parton does not seem to object to this interpretation of her gender presentation. She once entered a drag contest dressed as herself and has repeatedly identified with gay men, as well as been open about the bodily transformations she has undertaken to present her image.

That piece appeared on an earlier EP as well as the one that charted. The one that charted also featured Dab a remix of Michael Jackson’s Bad. the program notes on the Plunderphonics website note that “This is probably the most complicated piece on the album.” And talk about the structure. Officially, it was the copyright violations inherent in this piece that lead to the record eventually being suppressed. Oswald was sued by Jackson and his record label, who forced him to destroy all copies in circulation, never offer the record for sale and never to distribute it in any of the formats that existed at the time. As this was before the web, he has taken advantage of MP3s not being listed to upload the album and its cover image to his website.

However, it was almost certainly the cover image which lead Jackson to sue. The album cover is a modification of the cover of the Bad album, except the iconic image of Jackson in a leather jacket has been manipulated so it shows the jacket slightly open to reveal the torso of a naked white woman.

This album was never on sale. Instead, he sent it to college radio stations across Canada. These stations were influential. Getting a lot of college radio play could get an artist into the charts, which it did for Oswald. Because college radio stations offer a way to get in to the music industry, they used to receive a very high number of promotional recordings – many more than the staff could hope to play on the air or often even listen to and evaluate. This staff was made up of college students who tended to be mostly white men between the age of 18-22. Oswald’s crass joke about Jackson’s race and gender would have appealed to many of these young men, who then took the time to listen to the record and discover it had musical merit.

Although the image was unsubtly racist, there was no trace of that in the audio. Thus, only the DJs saw the image, not the public who came to like his skilfully produced music. Oswald was therefore able to very cannily employ racism as a path to a successful career.

He has cast himself consistently as the victim of corporate bullying, picked on by a superstar out to bankrupt him. However, despite his losing battle with one record company, he has since been commissioned by record companies to do remixes of work in their back catalogues. The lawsuit has hardly destroyed him, but instead, cast him into a victim role which has thus far seemingly prevented any discussion of his own use of structural power against Jackson. Oswald may have been disadvantaged in terms of industry connections, but, as his record cover reminds us, he is a cis white man and therefore, empowered to police the otherness of black people who do not adequately conform to racial and gender stereotypes.

Oswald is not somebody who happens to have done a racist thing. Oswald is someone who owes his entire career to successfully deploying racism. The Plunderphonics cover is not dog whistle racism – it is clearly, indisputably racist. He has never apologised for this and in interviews has doubled down, going so far as to say that Jackson’s body modifications mean that he should have no right to control his own image. He’s framed this in terms of copyright, but the message is clear enough.

As a music tech teacher, Plunderphonics often appears on course syllabuses. Everywhere I’ve taught, the undergrads have included a significant minority of BME/PoC students. Their presence is much rarer doing postgraduate degrees. The number of black composers doing non-pop electronic music is worryingly low and suggest that there are structural issues dissuading people from carrying on in art music. I don’t think covering Oswald helps with this. I also have objections in silently participating in a system where he continues to benefit from his past deployment of racism and transphobia, especially given the absence of any kind of apology.

The success of Plunderphonics is racist and transphobic. I’m going to cover other remix artists instead.

Authoritarians

If we’re going to talk to racists, it would be helpful to know about more about some of them. I think it’s important to start this post with the assertion that every Anglophone society is structurally racist. We’ve all been indoctrinated with racism from a very young age. There is no way to get through that without absorbing some racist thoughts and ideas. I’m going to say some things that will sound very us vs them, but this is only for convenience sake. The traits I’m going to describe are not binary, but are on a scale. Everyone posses many of these traits in greater or lesser degrees. This is not a look at how good people can reach bad people, but rather how people who are participating in a bad situation can help each other withdraw support from it.

A researcher named Bob Altemeyer has dedicated his career studying how/why people participate in authoritarian systems. He has written a free e-book about this. I re-read it last night to see if it could offer insight into reaching pro-police racists.

Authoritarianism is a set of personality traits that correlates very strongly with racism and being pro-police state. This is also a dangerous type of racist. If they are on juries, etc, they have strong double standards and are more likely to convict people from vulnerable groups and give harsher sentences. They love cops and law and order. And they reliably vote. Furthermore, they have a tendency to bully people different from them, especially if they feel they have the upper hand. They dig victim blaming. This is the kind of person who says that murdered black people shouldn’t have resisted arrest.

Altemeyer confirms things we already knew about these people – namely you can’t argue with them. (p 93) (p 237) Authoritarians are self-righteous, but also full of fear. They have many self-contradictory beliefs, yet feel they have a monopoly on the truth. This is, essentially, an intellectually precarious position and thus I would expect they’d be very prone to white fragility. Also, although they think all kinds of racist things, they’re also aware that overt racism is bad. (p 100) Again, there is no way to win an argument – they come out of defeat feeling more dogmatic and sure of themselves then they did beforehand. (p 93)

However, there is hope. As might be expected of people with no coherent inner life, they are highly dependent on group consensus to shape their views. (p 89) Indeed, they tend to have very little interaction with people who disagree with them, and use this as a way to maintain their beliefs. (p 88) Unfriending them on facebook, therefore, just makes the problem worse. Posting alternative viewpoints at least breaks up the racist consensus in which they’ve surrounded themselves.

Authoritarian followers really want to be normal. They will moderate their bigotry heavily, if it makes them fit in with the norm. (p 35) Therefore, a good way to engage with them is bandwagon technique. If you can pass along polls that show most people thinking the police are overly aggressive or racist, they will moderate their beliefs to conform with the majority. This is how the US went so quickly from gay people being a political wedge issue to gay marriage having majority support. It also really really helps if the authoritarian actually knows someone who is an alien other, but even exposure to any nice people outside of their belief system can help.

Authoritarianism is also really driven by fear. Everyone who is afraid tends to become more authoritarian. This is also what causes people to lash out in general and drives victim blaming. (If victims had it coming, then I’m safe because I’m good.) Reducing fear is a good way to help people chill out and think more rationally. Alas, I don’t have ideas of how to do this, aside from banishing all Fox News from a person’s life, which is easier said than done.

Finally, obviously, authoritarians are not going to come to your White People Getting Over Racism Event, no matter how many cookies are served there. Other connections must be leveraged to make contact. But you’re not just stuck with people who are already frustrating you on social media. Authoritarians are found in large numbers in fundamentalist / evangelical religious groups. If you are also a Christian, you may be able to reach them through pan-Christian initiatives. Again, exposure to people different than themselves helps them become more comfortable with all kinds of others. Also, authoritarians are not necessarily on the wrong side of every issue. Many have concern about the environment – even if there is disagreement on global warming, they are somewhat more likely than most to sign for local community efforts to do things like clean up streams. If you start showing up to help pick up litter, you’re likely to have an opportunity to befriend people with high authoritarian tendencies and expose them to non-authoritarian ideas. Because you will have bonded by working together for a common cause, you’ll be more receptive to each other’s ideas.

In summary, facebook arguments are not going to help with intractable proto-facists, but will just frustrate you and make them feel more sure of themselves. Instead, the way to reach them is by showing their consensus is not universal, exposing them to alternative viewpoints, and working with them on a common cause unrelated to fighting bigotry.

All of this is a lot easier said than done, but at least gives an idea of where to start with some kinds of social contacts.

If you have a racist friend

In 1984, The Special A.K.A. / The Specials sang, ‘If you have a racist friend/ Now is the time, now is the time/ For your friendship to end.’ It’s a catchy song and it takes no prisoners. Racist comments are intolerable, no matter the source ‘Be it your sister /Be it your brother / Be it your cousin or your, uncle or your lover.’ Don’t pretend that racism is socially acceptable. Don’t tolerate it and cut people off if they keep it up, the song directed.

With the invention of social networking, the song suddenly gained new currency. Whereas in the past friends, co-workers and family members engaged in self-censorship around their pinko-liberal connections, Facebook encouraged them to share their inner-most bigotry. And here were The Specials with a proposed solution to how to react to this: unfriend them. Write a note saying why (or don’t) and walk away. Their racism is not socially acceptable and the consequence of sharing it is losing our own wonderful company. It was the moral thing to do! And also very very easy.

But in recent months, the extent of white supremacy in the US has become so glaringly apparent, the easy way out no longer seems good enough. If all left/liberal white people unfriend all of our pro-police contacts on social networking, that does precisely nothing to help anything or anyone but ourselves. If we want to do something about white supremacy, we need to leverage our connections to racist expressions, not sever them.

This will be really hard. I’ve had long, frustrating conversations with religious evangelicals intent on saving me from hell. They barely concealed their intense distaste for deigning to speak to me, pretended their hatred was concern and went through their tiresome, hateful scripts. Somehow, my soul was not saved. I thought maybe we could learn a bit of perspective from each other, but they had no interest in listening to me. They wanted me to accept their truth, surrender my entire identity and conform to their vision of a better world (without me in it). This was not compelling. The person I was speaking to was not my friend. He did not value me as a person. He thought I had nothing interesting or worthwhile about me. I was a soul to save. A target to achieve and then he could move on to the next person to save. We can’t copy this technique and expect it to work.

If we’re going to change the minds of racist friends, we have to actually be friends to them, listen to them, see the good in them, but somehow, through this, never agree to disagree about racism. I don’t know how to do this or how to strike this balance. And, honestly, part of the hard work is that it’s not just reaching one’s friends, but also a commitment to doing a lot of learning and research. What’s more, as white people who benefit from white supremacy, some of it is going to be personally uncomfortable.

And through this all, we still need to de-centre ourselves. The effect on us, as white people, is so far beside the point. Fighting racism is literally a life and death struggle for many Americans.

I lost three days of my life when I tried reasoning with trolls on Twitter, and I got nowhere. I don’t know how to do this right. But I think it needs to be done. Internet searches have not been particularly fruitful on this but here are A few approaches to try and some reasons why these conversations don’t tend to go well.

Have you had success reaching out to a racist friend? How did you do it?