In The New Yorker’s science fiction issue this week is a story by Jennifer Egan – Black Box – a sci-fi thriller featuring a character from her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. In the novel, Lulu is the love-child of a publicist and a movie star named the General, and here we find her not only an adult but a sexy undercover spy musing on the realities of seducing a powerful and ruthless stranger. Written in 140-or-less character bursts, the story will also be systematically tweeted over the next ten days (well, five days now), at a rate of one tweet a minute for sixty minutes a day.

The concept is gimmicky, but only because it’s been framed as this innovative exploration of using twitter as a delivery system. This isn’t going to revitalise serialised fiction, especially not in the way they’re doing it. Why in God’s name would anybody want that pixelated duck-face preening next to each sentence, let alone the constant reminder that you’re reading ‘New Yorker Fiction’? At the very least, create an account for the character – this is one of the strengths of Twitter after all: disseminating bite-sized insights into the banalities of a stranger’s life  – case in point: Coffee Dad’s day-to-day repression.

Thankfully the story can also be read here and so far, it’s a good time — poetic and powerful in ways that surprise, and it’s remarkable how well she builds suspense given the constraints she’s working under. I hugely admire Egan’s experimentation with form – her PowerPoint chapter in A Visit From The Goon Squad was one of the most exciting things I read last year – and it’s nice to see somebody exploring the medium and its potential instead of writing it off as “everything I oppose.”

I spoke in this panel discussion alongside Kiran Dass (Listener, Sunday Star-Times, Landfall) and Duncan Greive (Real Groove, Metro, 1972) last week. The moot was a super-broad and rangy look at NZ Music Month, a NZ Music Commission promotional scheme dating back 12 years that has now developed an almost-institutional feel. This is partly a testament to the effectiveness of the campaign, but also a reflection of the awfully short memories we have of our pop culture landscape and the policies that shape it.

Check it out if you’ve got a free hour approx — just a few supplementary observations:

1. Though the NZ Music Commission has main charge of co-ordinating and promoting NZ Music Month, it’s the product of a lattice of organisations including NZ On Air, RIANZ, APRA, and the Radio Broadcasters Association. Simon Woods of the Commission turned up to hear us out and responded with candour and good humour — he also had to hear a volley of criticisms that are better directed at the main funding body and the industry interest groups it allows input from. Put simply, it isn’t the Music Commission’s sole responsibility to make changes to the public funding, support and promotion of New Zealand artists, and I don’t think it was ever our intention to paint it that way. Although month-long events like this kind of rub our faces in it, the vanilla promise of Jason Kerrison, Jonny Love and Annabel Fay turning NZ Music Month into a ‘Why We Fight’ rallying cry for everyone who still gives a shit.

2. If we talked ourselves into apoplexy in the panel, there was at least one way pointing out. NZ On Air puts around $6 million a year into funding schemes and promotional strategies. A positive new development is the shift away from outrageous lump sums for full albums, and perhaps from an over-reliance on traditional broadcast media. I feel like we all agreed on this going one big, bold step further: take 15–20% of that amount each year and re-allocate it as a free-for-all. Not just for artists and songs, but for tours, small labels, promoters, blogs, all-ages venues, new media initiatives.  As Duncan observes, musicians themselves aren’t always the best judges of how to spend a windfall, and this reflects the integrated nature of the industry, which has shrunk but still has a lot of constituent parts from distribution to performance to shilling.

The Canadian model (at page 14 of this Richard Sutherland and Will Straw study) has gone so far as to set up two different funding bodies so that established and fledgling labels are no longer competing for the same funds. Good idea, but I think confining the 15–20% I suggest above to artists and labels alone is still too restrictive. Anyway, I genuinely believe this could be a worthwhile pilot, acknowledging the funding body’s inevitable risk-aversion while allowing it to tentatively venture into the musical equivalent of funding R & D (something I definitely see a role for the government of a NZ-sized country in doing, as opposed to subsidising existing winners).

3. Apart from a bit of suss alcohol marketing, the Commission has kept a loose rein on what can and can’t be NZ Music Month. Neither Real Groove nor The Corner nor anything in between has ever been cease-and-desisted for Awesome Feeling, which is probably the best “NZ Music Month” initiative ever. And anything else people try and do, be it some Pantera soundalike playing in Henderson on a Thursday night in May or a panel discussion at a venue for sound art, doesn’t face the kibosh either. I see nothing wrong with an open-source form of marketing that can be reappropriated for positive musical ends. Find a way to do it, and try and pick up a few followers on the way. Otherwise the Whiskey wins.

He proclaimed that hip-hop was a ‘great musical stench’. He called it ‘offensive, artless and styleless thuggery’. But that was 1988, and since then a lot has happened that makes Steven Patrick Morrissey, the former frontman of the greatest band of all time, seem an awful lot more like an elder statesman of rap than an elder statesman of rock n’ roll.  Here are five reasons why, all of which that should have ended a lot more tongue-in-cheek than they appear. Bit like him, really. Titles for each section courtesy of someone’s auntie, most egregious passages all mine.

1. Last Time I Checked, A Real Musician Could Play An Instrument

Morrissey seems to get cover billing on the Q/Mojo/Uncut ‘real music’ axis of doom quite a bit (often as the quiffed twenty-something Smiths frontman, but also sometimes as a quaffing middle-aged man). It puts him up there with the likes of Paul Weller and Pete Townshend and whatever the bros from Pink Floyd were called. The difference being that the aforementioned are guitarslinging, songwriting triumphalist artifacts, like eroding lions guarding the entrance to a park that’s been taken over by scary young people, and Morrissey is a cavorting, flamboyant pop star who has probably never picked up a guitar and certainly wouldn’t know what to do with it. Lil Wayne gets a lot of flak for having done so, but at least he tried. In a world of craggy-faced and braying Claptons, Morrissey is the original pretty motherfucker, gorgeous and proudly idle.

While The Smiths were musically a league unto themselves, Morrissey’s solo career is usually just an okay-sounding but low-key accompaniment for the frontman to sound alternately assured, wounded and scathing over. It doesn’t often sample, but for its amiable pastiche of rockabilly, glam and easy-listening riffs, it may as well do. The vocalist is front and centre, and whoever’s making the noises in the background may as well be anonymous to the casual listener. Though no one will ever admit it (least of all the music journo equivalent of Top Gear), an average Morrissey song is closer to an average hip-hop track than an average rock band’s output. Coupla good lines, a nice drumbeat the guy must have gotten off some old sixties tune, over and out without too many guitar excursions. Sort of a big, blank but appropriate-sounding slate for one charismatic guy to do his thing over. That’s what you can say about an awful lot of hip-hop’s deep cuts.

NB: To take this rotten analogy and make it bear fruit you need to ignore Moz’s hilarious and bewildering 1995 misstep Southpaw Grammar, which has a bunch of ten-minute jams with tabla solos. You also need to ignore the cult of the amazing producer – Shadow, the Neptunes, Clams Casino, Dilla – who all, at one time or another, have made music that stands up completely and compellingly as its own right rather than as a backdrop. Unless you’re really into Steve Lillywhite or Jerry Finn and their fresh sounds, you’re probably not hankering for a set of instrumental Morrissey cuts. Still, the ratio of producers you’d never listen to by themselves to those you would is probably 20-to-1.

Also — perplexingly, the cavernous Northern sadness of Morrissey’s voice, which even the most antiseptic and hamfisted treatment won’t mute, actually translates really well into terrible dubstep remix form. Is this why I’m listening to this? Tell me it’s why I’m listening to this.

2. They Certainly All Put Out A Lot Of Rubbish

“I got the most songs in the rap game…and it feels good, it feels good to have the most songs in the rap game. It feels great. Let’s go…” – Soulja Boy, ‘Texas’

“You see, it should’ve been me/It could’ve been me/Everybody knows, Everybody says so/They say, “Ah, you have loads of songs/So many songs, oh, songs and they can stand/Verse, chorus and middle eighth/Break a fade, just listen” – Morrissey, ‘We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful’

The Smiths were first and foremost a singles-oriented pop band, at a time when it was expected that the format supplemented an A-side with one or two additional B-sides. Their extra material remains more or less unparalleled in pop music, not just for its volume but its standard – Hatful of Hollow and Louder Than Bombs are probably back-to-back the band’s greatest works, secured by sequencing savvier than most of their studio albums and free of the alternately lightweight and overwrought afterthoughts that marred the likes of Strangeways, Here We Come and Meat Is Murder. This profligate legacy might be one of their most daunting.

For ex: I spent the entire summer of ‘98/’99 trying to track down inscrutable zero-bitrate RealAudio streams of every Smiths B-side as a 12-year old, using the randomly generated Imagine Radio playlists and skipping through the Placebo and 311 tracks I had also had to select to get to “Stretch Out And Wait”. It feels good to confess this piece of vaguely OCD-behaviour. Fact is, it was all carried out via a fledging medium in a way that will never, ever be replicated and so it’s kinda a historical curio – but it generated both the thrill of the chase and the expectation that this chase was part of following any band that was worth loving. A fan put the work in and duly reaped the rewards.

Three years later, I got really into The Stokes and Interpol (hammering on ECM’s doors for Room On Fire and Antics at the day of release, yo). But even though I loved these bands at the time, there was already a gradual undercurrent of unease. When I tried to dredge LimeWire on dialup for the extra tracks and sessions, there was nothing. It seemed like both bands had struggled for two years just to release ten or so good-not-great songs apiece, hinting at a mixture of creative paucity and laziness that become a hell of a lot clearer later on. The Smiths had set an early bar to me for how a band should operate, and so groups that got by on the bare minimum seemed essentially disappointing.

At any rate, this 90s and 2000s period now feels like a weird, isolated moment. Rock bands drip-fed out music out in a format that reified some 70s concept of the album that had stopped being a thing in the 80s; they worked sluggishly and overcautiously while rappers and producers of all stripes started recognizing the use of the Internet to document their output comprehensively.

Morrissey follows the Smiths’ lead to this day, seemingly generating two to three extra songs for every single he releases – several discs worth of B-sides, C-sides and outtakes, if they’re ever compiled in full. And singles, of course, appear to be a thing he invests a great deal in. His first few years solo were a run of Top 20 hits and cult B-sides next to decidedly wobbly albums; for 2004’s comeback, You Are The Quarry, he cracked the top ten of the UK singles chart with flush CDS’s 4 times over. The difference, of course, being that this extra stuff isn’t really a patch on his original band.

The idea of grudgingly teasing a fanbase with half an hour’s worth of music every few years just isn’t a thing in rap (ignoring a weird outlier artifact like, say, Detox – even then you’d be hard-pressed to say a figure like Dre has been absent from the scene). It smacks of a lack of ideas, a lack of confidence and more damningly, a poor work ethic.

So at one end of things you get someone like Jay-Z who financially speaking never needs to write a bar again, but who promptly reneged on an early retirement to keep generating an output that’s occasionally been exhilarating but has also had its pretty inexplicable and horrible moments. He can’t lay claim to an unimpeachable canon  anymore, but you get the feeling that this isn’t as important as showing the world he still creates, that he still works for this.

At the other end of this, rappers nearly 20 years younger lay every single idea and whim bare on Datpiff, YouTube, Twitter, Myspace – and yeah, if they’re really lucky in 2K12, the occasional major-label album. What actually makes the DeAndre Way quote above interesting isn’t that he’s so ardent about quantity as a marker of quality, but that despite a discography about yay long it’s probably already an empty boast – he’s not out on his own by any means.

For a would-be dilettante, this makes for a treacherous and frustrating sort of entry into someone’s body of work, but it rewards a fan’s dedication and completism endlessly. We’re talking the same sort of people who ten years ago swagged mislabeled MP3’s off Napster, and ten years before that traded tapes. Probably had to stream off RealAudio, even. We’re talking Morrissey fans, really. Is it just a sort of weird pale decorum – their shyness to criminal vulgarity (sorry) – that stops them from posting things like “MORRISSEY JACK THE RIPPER VERY RARE AND POWERFUL” and “MORRISEY NOBODY LOVES US VERY EMOTIONAL LIMITED EDITION” on YouTube? Either way, there’s the same glee of discovery and ownership, right?

3. They Endorse Violent Crime With Their Lyrics

“Dear hero imprisoned/With all the new crimes that you are perfecting/Oh, I can’t help quoting you/Because everything you said rings true/And now in my cell (well, I followed you)/And here’s a list of who I slew”  — Morrissey, ‘Last Of The Famous International Playboys’

“The Godfather saga/hit you dead in the chest with shots of Vodka/Funerals crowded like soccer while I’m watching opera/Last like Sinatra, blast like Binaca/Binoculars is how I’m watchin’ droppin’ from the chopper/Mafia imposter/You’re left for dead with your face inside your plate of pasta”  — Kool G Rap, ‘3 To The Dome’

Morrissey came to prominence as an anti-Thatcher vegetarian who bedecked himself in gladiola, but his love for gangs has run hard and heavy for some time now. This is sometimes a product of good reading (see: the Brighton Rock–reffing ‘Now My Heart Is Full’, which if we keep using Lil B terminology is Morrissey’s ‘I’m Graham Greene’), sometimes a product of inescapable cultural phenomena he grew up alongside (see: ‘Last Of The Famous International Playboys’, based on the East End’s infamous Kray Brothers), and sometimes it’s a delirious sort of working-class revenge fantasy, young and angry men cast out from a society, finding each other, and shocking and terrorizing it with their violence and flouting of basic moral norms (feel free to imply your desired level of homoeroticism into all of this).

That same crime narrative as something literary/cinematic, with an experiential and political element, with that combination of enthrallment and moral unease? That’s there in gangsta rap and its progeny. Trade in Scarface for Greene, but the allusions to film and historical figures tend to play parent-teacher associations and moral crusaders for fools (because when you cite Tony Montana, of course you’re being 100% literal). Both Morrissey and N.W.A courted controversy with fantasies of young men killing police, but for obvious and offensive reasons it was the latter who got national law enforcement attention.

As for Morrissey’s standing to write songs like “The First Of The Gang To Die” as a graying and effete Englishman in the nice part of LA, well…you don’t really care, do you? Ta-Nehisi Coates nailed the vast majority of latter-day gangsta rap as ‘mythology cobbled together from a few shreds of personal experience and a lot of Donald Goines, Biggie Smalls, and GoodFellas’ as far back as 2003, and most of what’s traded in the same matter since is either the chubbening remnants of that sad wave or dudes who babble it as non sequiturs with one big wink to the audience. Long story short, you’d look bloody silly barrelling either Morrissey or Kanye up for lack of street cred.

4. That Album Cover Must Have Taken One Hell Of An Ego

The overwhelming majority of rappers have not been 1930s mob kingpins, dumped bodies off a pier, or turned into gigantic demigods that have annihilated the White House – but hey, if you talk big, you generally need something a little more adrenaline-inducing and high-stakes than leching around in front of a brick wall. Or squatting tentatively in a grey void like a troubled singer-songwriter on Doxepin, which is the sort of thing Morrissey had been reduced to by the late 1990s. Since his 2004 comeback, his album covers have both reflected the glorious solipsism of the lyrics within and made up for their tepid melodies. All three are vainglorious photographic loveletters to the man in the most unlikely of poses: posing with a tommy gun (cf: point 3);

as the commensurate virtuouso on his violin (cf: point 1);

and finally and most absurdly, with child. This is his The Carter III.

5. They’re Troubling Moral Cowards

“This is a historic event spreading an important, anti-racist, message so it must be allowed to go ahead.”
Morrissey, September 2008, on donating 28,000 pounds to the Rock Against Racism Festival

“Did you see the thing on the news about their treatment of animals and animal welfare? Absolutely horrific. You can’t help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies.“
Morrissey, in the Guardian, 2010

“Let me say to the sisters from Spelman we acknowledge there’s a problem and we [the hip-hop community] want the help. When I talk to cats on the street, they don’t want to be in that situation. We don’t want to be in this painful situation. And we are apologizing for the disrespect that does come from the mouths of men to women.“
Common, 2007

“I want a bitch that look good and cook good
Cinderella fancy, but she still look hood
Butt naked in the kitchen flipping pancakes
Plus she tricking for the dough that her man makes”
Common, 2011

In his 80s heyday, Morrissey was the most compellingly unreliable narrator the pop music world had ever seen. Dylan and Bowie were beautiful, inscrutable actors who put on roles and still guarded their emotionally transparent moments behind allegory and fantasy; the Smiths singer offered up a raft of glorious, honest and open contradictions around sexuality, self-image, class, and political identity. This was supplemented by the pugilistic feyness of his appearance, the way a band that declared themselves to be of the here-and-now assembled their artwork from the recent past, and reams of UK press interviews that only served to heighten his enigma. These days I listen to The Smiths as a full musical package (maybe the best one ever), and the peculiar cult of Morrissey leaves me amused yet cold. But to a teenage me, terrified of change but longing for it, this sort of contrarian, eloquent rage felt like something to wear like a badge of honour.

For reasons which the quotes above probably make apparent, I didn’t hold on to the feeling. Today, Morrissey’s inconsistencies are a glib, unpleasant morass. Where he used to toy with conventional sexual expectations, you find yourself thinking it would be braver of him to just come out. He rails against greedy liars after having had to have been pursued through court by two of his former bandmates for recording and performance royalties. He hates the endless repackaging and reissuing exercises of big record companies but appears to have been a particularly fortunate beneficiary of their excesses. His interviews are a disinterested exercise in holding court to obedient and properly-briefed fans.

Most damningly, he’s never really accounted for his comments on race and immigration. He’s talked a lot about how unfairly maligned and poorly treated by journalists he is. This is different from retracting or amending your statements. Even his donation to Rock Against Racism was more strategic than redemptive – he came to the party after his arch-enemies in the NME had withdrawn their support.

In other words, he’s a sliver of self-regard away from claiming he’s a ‘walking fucking paradox’, and I’ve written before about what an endless bummer this is,  how lazy and complacent I find this vis a vis any actual catharsis or complexity in a performer.

Without walking into the hierarchy minefield around racism, xenophobia, sexism and misogyny, I look at that pair of Common quotes and basically get a twinge of the Moz. Is he going on Oprah to make these conciliatory warm fuzzy gestures then painting a picture of his dumb supplicant dream girl because he’s an awfully complex figure who contains multitiudes? Or is it actually just because he’s sunken into a sort of selective self-delusion past his prime? An unreliable narrator’s fascinating blessing becomes his curse – his mysteries his excuses, his revelations his tired habits.

In hip-hop – all outsized braggadocio, rogues’ feats and veiled confessions – the unreliable narrator is king. But the arc when that figure loses his spark and lashes out – from dangerous to tedious, from a thrilling mystery to a forensic disaster scene marked out in tabloid bylines – is painful. This is not to say this is always the way it has to go – I mentioned Jay-Z above, and Adam Yauch’s death brought home the capacity of an artist to grow up in public, to flourish and age in dignity, while someone like Ghostface seems to command this quiet, certain stature even while still being a brutal and uproariously funny storyteller with the odd big stylistic gambit.

Yet for Morrissey and so many rappers – Common, Busta Rhymes, DMX – big personalities, huge passion, a febrile youth and a uncomfortably long tail in the spotlight –there’s that shedding of fascination, that realization that you’ve grown up and they haven’t. Morrissey clung to the untimely grave romance of James Dean, Jobriath and Klaus Nomi – equally, the specters of Biggie and Tupac loom large and long over their one-time peers and their later followers. Realising that you won’t be the one to burn out, that you’re settling in for a protracted fade, can’t be easy. So maybe that’s what reconciles them at the end – not that they command our respect, but that they once did, and it’s enough to at least retain our pity forever. It’s fine when pop music ultimately lets you down, because 99% of the stuff never lifts you up at all.

PJ Harvey: The Words That Maketh Murder

In the sixteenth century or so, music theory first began to get into the concept of meaning or feeling resting in composition, rather than lyrics — ie: the idea that the chords and melodies behind a song meant more than just being a pretty little bed for the hymns and prayers to go on.  20th century/21st century rock critics tended to forget all this and just do their thing, but I feel like the question of taking the two separately gets kinda complicated when you get to listen to popular hard-rock or metal songs depicting the brutality of war (as opposed to the more drippy paeans for peace). The gold standard for this probably remains Metallica’s “One” and the futility and horror of its Dalton Trumbo–inspired protagonist. The lyrics are one thing; the gung-ho triumphalism of machine-gun fire chords and artillery barrage drums are another. It’s got the enthusiastic, stylised macho aggression of NASCAR or  or pro-wrestling. The message is simple: war is hell, but hell is freaking awesome.

Flash forward 20 years and “One” gets blasted out of US Army tanks next to Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” and Disturbed’s “Down With The Sickness”, while James Hetfield, when asked to comment on the use of Metallica’s music as part of Guantanamo Bay’s interrogation techniques, responded that he was “kind of proud…It’s strong; it’s music that’s powerful. It represents something that they don’t like — maybe freedom, aggression… I don’t know… freedom of speech.” Sure, the combination of an anti-war message and exultation in the military-industrial application of noise as torture is a kind of cognitive dissonance — but worse still, for the band it borders on unintentional self-parody, effectively the place where everything from teen-pop to black metal goes to die.

PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake is less clear about what it represents and stands for than Hetfield — its sources, which include T.S Eliot, historical tomes on Gallipoli and the oral testimony of survivors of a couple of 21st-century wars, wouldn’t make this much clearer — but it’s a refreshingly honest piece of work with a fierce intelligence to its music, and “The Words That Maketh Murder” functions well as a miniature of this. Apart from some of the more elegiac aesthetics (the way the waves of guitar strum carry the ghostly trace of delay of a faded photograph, percussion that sounds like its been assembled out of items you’d find in a pub kitchen) I like that it’s old person music. Wait, hear me out.

When I last visited Melbourne, the RSA’s in the more gentrified and hip areas were starting to get frequented by dudes who looked like Nathan Barley rejects. Pink crop tops, filthy dyed mops, tiny denim jorts, tricycles, the whole package. Idiots parading themselves in front of bemused old men and women who were too polite and possibly too stricken to say anything. The same guilty, conservative twinge I get when relish the thought of kerbstomping people like this is (I think) the same frission I get when I hear people making the experiences of war’s aging and ancient survivors into bitchin’ punk-rock or metal songs. Put on something respectable, get out of drop-D, and shut your fucking mouths. Let England Shake doesn’t alienate those it tries to document in the same way, which I actually appreciate a lot — a puff piece though it is, this story from the Herald last year made me smile.

Though L.E.S represents an extension of artistic effort, the conclusion of a process of reinvention that started on the underformed if admirable White Chalk, Harvey’s characteristic bluntness suits her subject matter. Here, “soldiers fall like lumps of meat”, “a corporal’s nerves were shot”, “arms and legs were in the trees”, “flesh quivering in the heat” — etc. The masterstroke on “Words” is a protagonist who intersperses the cascade of horror with a longing to see a woman’s face, and then winds up stumped at the end of it — “This was something else again/I fear it cannot explain”.

The interpolation of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” (“what if I take my problems to the United Nations?”) at the song’s end comes out as pitch-black gallows humour rather than right-on sloganeering — the music that boys young enough to go and die listened to, the organisation that couldn’t have helped them anyway. In terms of contemporary British music, it’s a moment that sits alongside the mutation of “Jailhouse Rock” that opens Scott Walker’s “Jesse”, or the processed nuke klaxon that ties Portishead’s “Threads” into the apocalyptic 1984 TV drama of the same name — cultural references a shade or two smarter than dropping a great big sample in there, and all the more chilling and effective for it.

Anyway, it’s probably the best song cycle about warfare I’ve ever encountered. I’m not going to read that AV Club 2011 roundup again but I think Hyden complained that the songs felt “too much like homework”, which should tell you more about most people who are paid to write about music than you ever wanted to know.

Kurt Vile — Puppet To The Man

November saw a Tweetwar-I-can’t-believe-I-just-wrote-tweetwar-oh-G_d between Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter Kurt Vile and Patrick Stickles of New Jersey prog-punkers Titus Andronicus. Long story short: Vile licensed his his song “Baby’s Arms” to the Bank of America for a TV ad; Stickles went after him for the perceived betrayal (“I thought you were, like, the best dude in music!”); Vile mustered the energy to respond with his second tweet ever “I did it to be like the carpenters.and to buy my daughter high end diapers .… and to pay back my publishing advance. and because I never cared about that sorta thing.” Stickles promptly backed down with what I thought was a pretty decent measure of contrition.

Being a jobbing indie rock musician in 2011 wasn’t so much a false economy as it was a contracted one which the musicians themselves have been avowedly shut out of. Big, medium, and small labels devote their energies to their own survival before that of their signings; the physical releases don’t recoup their advances; the touring overheads are higher, in many places; Pitchfork and the big aggregator music blogs make very, very strong advertising revenue from judicious selection of other people’s creative output and contribute virtually nothing in return apart from the hope of another 8.0+ review in 20 months’ time. This has probably been the case for about five or six years.

In this context, Vile trying to provide for a baby daughter and get a few thousand more ears listening to his music in the process (because the environment to have that happen in virtually any other way is, of course, kaput) is probably not the mighty moral undoing we might have been able to paint it as twenty or thirty years ago. Doing the ad thing used to be a way for a well-to-do artist and very well-to-do label/publisher to scoop more cream off the top with; now you do it to get by for another year or two.

What’s more, Vile has a dry sense of humour about it — “Puppet To The Man” presages the BoA deal but the sound of a dude basically laconically stating “I’m selling out, deal with it” over heartland “authentic” rock is definitely kind of subversive and great. Like Harvey, you really just learn to sit and anticipate those moments when Vile deviates from the mean and mucks with traditional forms a little bit — terse, choppy transfigurations of Dire Straits chords alongside rock ‘n roll non-starters like ‘I’m stuck in a rut so much I don’t want it to end’. The disappointing long-slog backend of Smoke Ring For My Halo puts the fear of God into me that he thinks he should lose some of the cleverness or oddness and ‘just be real’. Really hoping to be proved wrong, and hoping that we get more like this in the future.

ASAP Rocky — Wassup

This was Clams Casino’s year for sure, when Instrumentals became the first set of MC-free productions in a while that didn’t make you feel like the kind of person who actively listens to movie soundtracks (Clams né Mike Volpe, sitting in his mother’s New Jersey and editing bits of Aguirre to match his beats, might still be this dude). But the best evaluation of his impact is trying to imagine hip-hop right now without him — he helmed a third of ASAP Rocky’s mixtape, his post-Enya cascades make Lil B seem truly based in a way that the Berkeley rappers straighter work can’t, and his partnerships with the likes of Main Attraktionz have left a permanent mark on their work — it’s hard to imagine this (excellent) Squadda B track for 2011’s Shady Bambino Project existing in his absence. Guy is blazing some serious trails.

Eighteen months ago, the first and best answer to the cheap and rough sound of mixtapes still seemed to be maximalism — throw everything you’ve got at it to make it sound huge. Cue lots of 96kbps sub-Lil Wayne bells and Vocoder and portentous synth-string shit in my ears. I sort of never want to hear anything like this again. Anyway, it feels as if Clams has found the way out by obfuscation. His best productions are muffled, hazy, dreamlike and perhaps not all that far away from the hypnagogic pop states posited by The Wire a few years ago, when they sought out a common reference point for the likes of Mark McGuire and Ariel Pink.

Anyway, “Wassup” is the best of a very good bunch. ASAP himself is a rare find, the sort of rapper you get who is nimble without sounding like he’s trying, finds room between lines for the tics and weird digressions that make up charisma — a pretty motherfucker with hidden depths, basically. He also defers to the space and serenity of Volpe’s atmospherics really well — I love Lil B, but, really, compare the way he scrawls all over “I’m God” to this. It’s smooth. I’m genuinely fascinated as to what happens next — by all rights, Clams should be in hot demand, but it’s hard to see how a million-dollar major-label sheen would improve his sound  (there’s a case to be made that it would actively detract from it — think a nth-grade version of “Stan” with a lot more Dido on it, shudder a bit, move on). The alternative — that the big players and elder statesmen in rap instead opt to cloak themselves in spooky deliquescence — would probably be incredible.

SBTRKT — Go Bang

I can’t get into James Blake. There, I said it. I was on board in 2010 with the reverent plunderphonic overtones of stuff like “CMYK” — though after a couple of years of Girl Talk worship, anything that didn’t sound like a retarded adult crossfading two genres into each other could be considered a qualified success in recontextualisation. I have no good or coherent reason for my apathy towards his 2011 full-length, but I guess it has a certain austere greyness to it that seems more exhausting to me than bracing, a self-conscious highmindedness to its soul manoeuvrings that just makes me want to go back and listen to Jamie Liddell’s work five years earlier. Blake is a million times better than, say, Skrillex or Nero, but I worry when I see him go on the record attacking the “frat-boy scene” in the paper, just because it’s never a good idea to take a big dump where you eat. Bros aren’t averse to something presented as big, challenging, or out-there; they listened to Radiohead, they listened to Arcade Fire. They are listening to a crossover artist like James Blake.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying how much more I enjoy SBTRKT (Aaron Jerome’s) work this year. Like Darkstar’s North in 2010, SBTRKT’s best work treats dubstep as a nominal starting point, a sort of pervading low-end wub for very good midbrow electronic pop music. The former drew on the likes of OMD and early Human League; Jerome’s moveable feast feels like it’s taking in the more playful Chicago house auteurs like Larry Heard alongside a nostalgia for percolating 2000s 2-step (yes I’m thinking of “Fill Me In” yes it is a tune).

In other words, it draws from a musical world outside of its time and scene rather than opting to seal itself in, so yes, I like that there’s nary a sample to be found, I like that his in-house MC is aching and plaintive in-my-ear rather than being reduced to juddering shards and whispers, I like that Jerome gave up the spooky-mask anonymity bag and turned it into a gimmicky, bemused shrug, and I like that they have a good live show. Most of all, I like “Go Bang”, his one instrumental workout that stands above as a sort of stately Eno/Aphex artifact. There’s a lot of post-dubstep R’n B guys out there at the moment. I don’t think many start up their computer and make something with the out-there pageantry at 0:58 of this number.

Diana Rozz — Walk On By

Just to end our wrapup with some yuks — the New York Times ended its musical year in review with a piece by Jon Caramanica entitled “The Year Rock Spun Its Wheels”. The thesis of the essay is that 2011 was a time where commercial rock failed to really take creative leaps or risks. In other words, it’s a thesis statement that can roughly be valued somewhere between “Endangered Beauty: How Do We Save The Compact Disc?” and “Bald Lazarus: Why Billy Corgan is Back and Better Than Ever”.

I’m still not sure what’s behind Caramanica’s piece (current theory: he’s an advanced algorithm designed by the NYT to ingest certain parameters on bands and labels and then rigidly follow them with written output) but it’s endlessly rewarding to delve into for nuggets of idiot-savant insanity. “The Gaslight Anthem are a great rock band, but they are indie, so they do not count.” “Large record companies are choosing to fund and foster acts which will give them the largest financial return.” “Bands who have existed for approximately 87 years like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and R.E.M failed to reach their previous heights”. Rock, he declares, is zombified — moving, occupying space, powerful from afar — yet stagnant and rotting.

That bit isn’t such a bad piece of visual imagery, apart from the fact it misjudges the scope entirely. The zombification isn’t just about the music — it extends to thinkpieces like Caramanica’s, prodding at the cadaver. I think what gives me the most comfort is the sheer anachronistic fascination of an article like this. Its reasons for existing don’t extend beyond the fact that rock music is possibly still popular somewhere and the New York Times is a large newspaper. It contains no capacity to engage, because this isn’t how people encounter and process genres anymore; no capacity to offend, because it debates an issue that was being described on exactly the same terms in 1999; no capacity to harm, because no one will ever read a musical account of a year like this and believe that that’s all there is ever again. Once it would have been a run-of-the-mill and vaguely authoritative piece of commentary. Realising how much things have changed around a fixed point like this is scary, but mainly exciting.

My favourite rock song this year came from an all-female band in Wellington, New Zealand. Their EP came in a desultory plastic sleeve, or on Bandcamp. The music sounds as if it’s being played down a wind tunnel at first, although it’s beautiful. It promises to fall apart, then doesn’t. It mocks itself with its own coda and reminds us this isn’t all so serious. Everything would have been a count against it in the model world Caramanica creates. But that world doesn’t stand for shit now. All told, I think we’re in an okay place, and we have Diana Rozz along for the ride.

Happy new 2012, and thanks for sticking with us this year.

You know the drill — I drummed up one of these last year. Just like back then, it still seems more worthwhile then posting a top ten albums list, especially given that what we tend to mean by a top ten critics’ list album now is one which gives us four songs for a playlist, as opposed to one and two. Waiting until after the Xmas holidays to do this also gave me a chance to see what a couple of the big-players had to say about the year (New York Times, The AV Club) and savagely disagree with them. Still, I’m grateful for a jumping-off point.

Real Estate — Easy

Writing for the AV Club, Steven Hyden pontificated on 2011 as the year of no Important Albums (but many Good Records). The caps are His and Not Fucking Mine. The litany of lamentation gets a bit confusing when you read him. He laments the lack of albums with the heft and ambition of Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion; he puzzles over the fact that there wasn’t quite the typical hegemony in website, magazine and newspaper year-end lists. Also, at some point Adele’s 21 is hailed as at once 2011’s “most transcendent release” and also the antithesis of an Important Album.

For all that, he gets round to citing Real Estate’s Days as his number one album of the year, albeit damning it with faint praise. “Not terribly consequential in the cultural world…I don’t think it will change the course of music or anything…it will probably get pulled off the shelf every couple of months or so.” I’d hate to see what the dude thought of the stuff he didn’t like.

Fact is, I could pick any number of songs to rep hard off of Days. A bit like that Phoenix album a couple of years ago, it’s one of those records you end up playlisting two-thirds of. The New Jersey band’s matriculation on album number two isn’t marked by any colossal sea-change or world music elements or anything — the quiet amendments and developments, like the Strokesy bass that gives “It’s Real” its propulsion, or the way you can picture “Out Of Tune” coming out had they recorded it three years ago — a haphazard drift, rather than  the hard-fought exercise in concealed discipline we get here.

“Easy” wins out by managing to achieve Days’ lyrical and musical preoccupations in microcosm — and considering the album’s autumnal sense of wistful resignation, functioning as an upbeat opener is definitely a balancing act. The sense of gratification I got hearing it for the first time swept aside the “spot-the-influence” game, or questions of Importance, or whatever. It conjures up a lot for me, emotionally speaking (ie: I’m trying to find a taciturn out rather than saying something as trite as “it makes me happy and sad!”). I can’t stand the notion that critics have to be guarded about this, that a conversation about “Easy” or any of the other songs on here needs to be prefaced with “I liked it a lot, but…” It’s a halcyon teenhood in four minutes, and its lack of flash and quiet cultivation of a sound shows up so many of the artists pitching for critical-darling status as so self-important, so vulgar. I didn’t have a hope in hell of not loving this.

Radiohead — Codex

What would happen if Radiohead put out an album and nobody cared? It felt like we got as close to that as we’ve ever got this year, with the group occupying what I think has become a very odd, anachronistic place in the lives of most twentysomethings.

Part of this was the realization that the band is now on album number eight and has now existed for approx 20 years. They are, indisputably, in the realm of old person music that I don’t give two shits about and will never listen to. Stuff like Pink Floyd, Genesis and The Who, that whole “fat libertarian politics blogger” subgenre of 70s classic rock. Bands that continued to exist in some languishing form five, ten, or fifteen years after their expiry date. They’re of that same vintage — and though they don’t seem as embarrassing as any of the above, I can’t help but wonder — is this the sort of entrenched, received wisdom “real music” that all the kids coming up the ranks are going to fight?

I mean, I grew up embedded. OK Computer on CD as my twelfth birthday present, huge and infinitely sad. The Bends and Pablo Honey paid for in gold coin Xmas money, realising that Pablo Honey was, actually, just a little bit shit and feeling the first incipient pang of a critical faculty. Kid A/Amnesiac listening parties. Not “getting” either and wanting to get them badly, something I know I will never have the time or patience for again. Hail To The Thief’s hysterical melodrama as a hysterical and melodramatic 17-year virgin who hated George Bush. In Rainbows presaging an imminent quarter-life crisis and feeling like a sort of emotional salve. We’re still here, and we still push the same buttons. It’s not an original story, and I know that while I’ll never cop to calling them my favourite band and I don’t even talk about them in gushing tones, I look sideways at friends who claim to hate them, or more bafflingly, say they never got into them. How did you get here from there?

But here we are. In Rainbows landed out of nowhere with a kinghit online release strategy and some pretty good tunes. Kingy Limbsy comes out accompanied by a ream of Stanley Donwood fanwank overkill (yo, I peeped the secret booklet in the back of the Kid A jewel-case guys. This is some weak shit in comparison) and a set of songs that just feel desultory, workmanlike. I’m used to liking an album from some bloggy Pitchfork act and then being let down by a follow-up, but this is the slow-decay twilight of something bigger in a way that I haven’t experienced in my lifetime before. They are the last of the bands of this size and this reach, and they caught us square-on and held us captivated for over ten years.

“Codex” is still very good and best in show here, although given that Thom Yorke wrote “The Tourist”, “Pyramid Song” and “Sail To The Moon” I sort of feel like he just can generate songs like this in the bat of a lazy eye. Then I just think, is this how (terrible) people defend their favourite songs on late-period Yes albums (“reminds you that this is the same band that made “Heart Of The Sunrise”…this is great!!”).  Fucc you Thom I hate classic rock I only listen to mixtapes and Coco Solid.

Parallel Dance Ensemble — Shopping Cart

Looking out from the survivor’s side of 2011, Possessions And Obsessions is the best full-length release by a NZ artist this year by so far it’s not actually even funny. It’s a collaboration between Dane Robin Hannibal and Coco Solid (nee Jessica Hansell) that seems demographically unlikely at first — how’s decadent, dilettantish Europop going to go down with a mouthy and unmistakeably Kiwi girl, and how’s Coco going to sound outside of the scrappy, kitchen-sink backing of Casio fuzz and guitar scree that marked albums like The Radical Bad Attack?

As it turns out, they both bring their A-game. Hannibal’s project with Philip Owuzu could suffer from that post-Dilla malaise: dudes paralysed by their own immaculate record collections and making beautiful wallpaper. Coco Solid forces him to put together songs rather than tracks; likewise, partnering with an established producer, she didn’t let anything throwaway sneak through on here.

“Shopping Cart” is case in point — dig how it moves through from the spacious, polyrhythmic glide at the start (could be a long lost Tom Tom Club) to slinky, melancholy R’n B. Sounds fantastic, and it’s got the substance to match. “Shopping Cart” takes a trope of classic caveman pop, country and hard rock — the wild,wandering woman who’ll take your cash and gifts and fail to prostrate herself in return — and completely flies with it. Hansell gives us an ice-cool lyric that makes us feel hostile toward (“she’ll never stop-stop/’til she gets all your money”), cheered by (“sometimes a girl has to be smart”), and sorry for (He ain’t her prince, but then who is?”) the protagonist in as many seconds.

I compared Possessions And Obsessions to Pulp’s Different Class earlier this year — as a peer, not a echo — and I stand by that. Fundamentally there’s not any jet-setting glamour to the song, or anything else on the record — the titular shopping cart image, the toastin’ with friends on the deck — it could be Outrageous Fortune. So it’s a triumph of social observation in pop (see also: Hansell’s cutting anti-materialism in “Possessions”, the on-the-money TVNZ-style news commentary she reels off between verses in “Wildchild”), and also feels like music that couldn’t have been generated anywhere else, despite the trans-continental connections. I’d hate to think that that’s limited or hampered its success in any way.

Kimbra — Cameo Lover

While Hansell waits for national accolades and plaudits, 21-year old Kimbra Johnson has ended up a sort of Russell Crowe pavlova creation. We want her just as badly as the Australians who gave her her boost, but probably didn’t have the domestic apparatus to push an debut album with the art-rock pretentions of Vows (safer to go with your Brooke Frasers or your Gin Wigmores on our end, neither of which are likely to try and make their quasi–Bjork track anytime soon. Lovely though Gin is.)

Let’s not gloss over it — Vows is mostly horseshit, but it’s admirably ambitious horseshit. I can’t stand the awkward blend of indie-twee and burning-dollhouse symbolism 101 in her “Settle Down” video, but the song is good (in fact, my friend Hannah suggests it’s her lyrical peak, a sort of freak-out anthem for twentysomething girls expected to reconcile myriad social expectations as expected lover, wife, mother, and worker — ie: the imperative of the title is meant to be ironic)  and “Cameo Lover” is one step better, an endless crescendo of girl-group tropes that has the good sense to propel itself forward with an 808 beat rather than get mired in quirk. The backlash has been interesting: the thread that The Corner spawned when their critics’ panel covered her for Great Sounds Great is seriously worth reading. Lot of haters pointing to the obvious chinks in her armour — middle-class, Christian, in-your-face kooky chic — oh yeah, and it turns out speaking to the Sunday Star-Times in October 2010 she inferred that she considered pre-marital sex, abortion and homosexuality a “grey area” that she was still trying to work out.

Responding on The Corner’s discussion, Auckland promoter and musician Matthew Crawley had this one down straight: though it’s easy to get the blinders when you’re out on the town in these parts, we don’t all get to be born to liberal-arts Grey Lynn parents who were into Flying Nun and equal rights. Some of us end up in Hamilton instead and grow up going to those vile mega-churches with surfer-bro pastors and promise rings. Johnson has to work through issues which I wouldn’t even blink at. I don’t envy her, or the surprisingly large number of remarkable NZ artists and musicians who have to reconcile a religious-conservative upbringing with creating work in the diverse, challenging secular world. Frankly, I think it’s a more subtle and interesting backstory for an emerging pop star than most, and the value of her future work will probably depend on how much of it she’s willing to thrash out with us as her audience.

On the other hand: the idea that homosexuality is even a ‘grey area’ is pretty abhorrent to me, and there’s almost something way more insidious about imagining 12-year-old girls who love Kimbra reading a even-sounding, ‘moderate’ statement like that that than there is about a group of young black men throwing the word “faggot” into a hip-hop track. You know what happens now.

5. Tyler The Creator — Yonkers

Faced with the thorny question of Odd Future’s hissing-rape gag schtick, music critics got one lucky, lazy out when Tyler The Creator released Goblin — “it doesn’t matter ‘cos the album sucks anyway”. It’s as if we were in high school again and all about to be asked a question in fifth-period Stats that we hadn’t revised to only to be saved by the 3.10 bell. Nice save everyone.

“Yonkers” is really good though, with a great, unhinged delivery (love the edge to his voice on “for a fucking shrink/sheesh I already got mine and he’s not fucking working/I think I’m wasting my damn time”) and a sound like knife of bone which feels as close as we’ll get to a 36 Chambers/6Feet Deep 21st-century redux. Then he went and made “Bitch Suck Dick” a single.

A few pretty useless and stray thoughts: I’ve no idea how everyone in the media reacted as if OFWGKTA and Tyler became the first hip-hop artists in history to use homophobic slurs in their lyrics when the kerfuffle began that got them shit-canned from the Big Day Out. It sort of felt neither better or worse than when thousands of other rappers use the word — a thoughtless, non-malign throwaway on their part, hugely hurtful if you get tagged with it everyday because you’re actually gay. No amount of equivocating can really get past the fact that “faggot” still gets used with specific derogatory intent towards gay people on a constant basis, pretty much everywhere. It hasn’t been “reclaimed’ under a countercultural movement (cf: queercore, NWA). A shift in who uses language, and how it gets used, is inevitable and organic, but that doesn’t really help the plight of the individual stuck on the receiving end in the interim. But Tyler and Odd Future aren’t out on their own for doing it.

I definitely don’t think it’s on the same level as Beenie Man, banned from the BDO in 2010 for calling for gays to be executed in a new Jamaica in his songs — advocating genocide out of some batshit mixture of genuine belief, transformative nationalism, and twisted-in-translation Christianity seems to be on the next level. Long story short, I don’t know why it was specific allegations of homophobia around Tyler/OFWGKTA that caused a stir when it’s the shit they say about women that makes me genuinely blanche.

I won’t repeat the most trenchant criticisms of Tyler’s lyrics, though I’m onside with them, but I’ll suggest that the creative paucity of most of Goblin didn’t help his cause. The overture for 2010’s Bastard — all abandonment, debasement and caustic self-hatred — created the context of a damaged, sick persona for the rest of his boasts, threats and sneers to sit within. An album that traces the arc of the abused as abuser, however objectionable his statements or behaviour, has got to have more merit then the “walking paradox” cop-out he makes his M.O on Goblin — a sort of ex post facto justification for him to flip back and forth out of rape-rap as he sees fit, but without any sense of catharsis or self-reflection.

It’s like a billion other bloated CD-era 75 minute rap albums where the dude talked about dealing drugs, murdering people, bunch of other despicable shit and then did a quick (and by quick, I of course mean five-to-ten minute) shout-out to Mum, brothers and sisters and God at the end. The whole idea of “rapper as paradox” is just a tiresome, expository version of that. If all Tyler has to offer beyond that is some sort of endgame ante-upping in the depictions of raping and killing women, this is going to fall off pretty fast.

In saying this, I think it’s the individual’s decision to make on how to approach (or not approach) this act. I disagree with censoring OFWGKTA from the Big Day Out (which, of course, gets them all sorts of ‘taboo’ hype) and I really can’t stand when that Tegan & Sara duo, fundamentally a product (albeit for a different demographic) in every sense that OFWGKTA are, take to the Internet to rail against Tyler and company. It’s just shoring up their own brand identity with some cheap moral outrage. Young people don’t need musical icon figures that think rape jokes rule; they also don’t need musical icon figures that will act as the Twee Association for the Protection of Community Standards.

One final thought, going back to that idea of insidiousness (ie: my belief that it’s worse for a peaches-and-cream middle-class white indie starlet to go on the record and say that homosexuality is a ‘grey area’ than it is for a 2K11 rapper to say ‘faggot’). Goblin is like a grand guignol of misogyny, but the whole world of male-dominated popular music is streaked with a soft, subtle touch of it. Sexism is nimbler than racism or homophobia, and so we get a straight line of music from 1966’s “Under My Thumb”, where Mick Jagger exults in his final, exacting leverage in a sexual power struggle through to 2008’s “Skinny Love”, in which Justin Vernon doesn’t win the battle but wins the war by recording I Fucked Off To A Cabin Because I Instructed My Girl To Be Patient, Balanced And Kind And She Left Me: The Album. Is a world where we shut down Tyler completely but ejaculate joyously all over Bon Iver’s tales of woe, his mythos of the struggling/noble male artist torn in two by these little wandering women, necessarily a more progressive one? Or are we just feigning disgust at things we’ll never do, while continuing to sit in cosy thrall to a Paleolithic view of men and women’s lives together?

Tune in next week for the “thrilling” conclusion — five more songs, five more rambles.

Okay — this month we railed against some of the ignorance, laziness and arrogance that frames how we enter election cycles here in NZ, but our complaints are minor compared to enduring the shitshow that is the Republican Primary race over in the US. The campaign, running hot, fast, and viscous/vicious as we speak, determines who has the best credentials to go up against Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election. In populist GOP terms this has led to the race to the bottom of the barrel in terms of social and economic policy.

Naturally, these personalities and policies need good, slick American-style TV (in 2011, read “youtube”) ads to go alongside them. Here are ten of the best. For fairness’s sake, we have left out this Herman Cain ad — partly because it’s more of a showcase for his demented X-Files Smoking Man campaign manager, partly because it would dominate the pack unfairly. Similarly, video ads only — although everyone has to see this comic book Michele Bachmann put out.

Get through all these babies, then try and have a happy 2012. Love, the Panty Punch.

10. “Vindicating Herman Cain”

“It’s time for the truth…the media won’t tell you what one of the foremost lie detector experts in American said about Herman Cain…” Cue media soundbite of “T.J  Ward” of “Investigative Consultants Int’l” indicating Cain’s truthfulness and innocence (not so his female accuser). Although it’s pretty funny that scientific studies have demonstrated that Ward’s software, which looks a bit like Audacity on a nice computer, is no more reliable than flipping a coin, I like the bleak, tawdry aspect of this most of all. Cain on the downswing.

9. “I’m Michele Bachmann And I’m Running For President”

Insane Minnesotan Michele Bachmann’s campaign has ground to a standstill in between her assertions that vaccines cause “mental retardation”, and alleging that a fatal hurricane was God’s warning to Washington. I was disappointed by how low-key her kickoff ad was at first, but ultimately its devastating crap cheapness — its creapness? — gets to me, in conjunction with the mania of her stare.

8. Rick Perry: “Faith”

“I’m not ashamed to say I’m a Christian. But you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can openly serve in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in schools.”

Haha, “gays”. Fuck you Rick Perry, you’ll appear in this list again.

7. Sarah Palin’s “Iowa Passion”

She still counts, cos she was making overtures like this before pulling out of the race. Two excruciating minutes of Sarah Palin speaking in heartland Iowa, during which she orders deep-fried butter from a stall to a soundtrack of Christian rock. Watch all the way to the end for inexplicable surprise bear.

6. Mitt Romney’s “Not A Bump In The Road”

This is amazing for many reasons, not least of which the fact that the healthy plurality of Romney-bros (fat relatable bro, veteran bro, pregnant Latina bro) holding up signs with their sob stories directly anticipates the “I am the 99%” pitch used by the OWS movement. Did they even see this? Hippies. Anyway it’s quite a well-made ad although I don’t know why Drew Carey appears at 1:05 and I’m not sure if all of them fucking off and leaving their Mitt Romney placards on the ground strikes the triumphant or redemptive note the makers may have been aiming for.

5. Rick Perry’s “Proven Leadership”

A huge, ridiculous, movie-trailer style video in which Perry appears to correctly identify the cause of American’s woes. Namely, it is a deserted post-apocalyptic society.

4. Jon Huntsman’s cute daughters

Jon Huntsman is probably the least evil figure in the GOP race. He’s a socially liberal entrepreneur who tweets about Captain Beefheart and terrifies fundo Christians by dressing like this. In other words he is the most Important hipster politician since Epsom’s Paul Goldsmith and will never ever be president in a million years. His alt daughters made this inscrutable viral ad for him that is actually pretty amazing, and again, indicates that he will never ever be president in a million years.

3. Perry’s mea culpa

In early November, Perry cancelled out the early promise of his post-apocalyptic gay bashing by having a brain explosion and forgetting on live TV which three State Departments he would disestablish. His campaign thought it would be a good idea to play it to us all over again while promising that if he becomes President Americans can expect more of the same. Watch to the end for a great little chuckle! Fuck you, Rick Perry.

2. Ron Paul’s banned “Beijing: 2030″ ad

Another glossy and expensive clusterfuck that, unlike Perry, intentionally sets up a dystopic future-world and runs with it. The main thing that makes the year 2030 dystopic, in this case, is Chinese people. Even those who are repulsed by the combination of self-regard and racism should enjoy the way this ad holds its breath for so long to try and make a room of young Asian people look normal and benign before you have their lecturer turn to face us, the viewers, and laugh evilly. Like a great big satisfying exhale of dick.This would be number one were it not for:

1. Ron Paul’s “Big Dog” ad

The sine qua non of loud and stupid political advertising. This is literally Idiocracy on anabolics. Must be seen to be believed. Ron Paul is history’s greatest monster, and I’m not at all sure that I mean “greatest” in a pejorative sense. Wake me when the Act Party’s ads are this good, then promptly euthanise me.

His 2003–2007 project “Alter Ego” was inspired by a photo shoot with a corporate CEO who revealed that he used Everquest to meet his children every evening without attracting the ire of his estranged wife. He spent the next three years travelling the world, and photographing avid male and female users of online simulations and role-playing games alongside their polygon-and-pixel gamer identities.

The blurbs that accompany them are well worth reading. Very funny, but also culturally revealing.

Name: Andreas Fischer
Born: 1980
Occupation: Designer
Location: Vienna, Austria
Game played: City Of Heroes

“I am married to a beautiful girl and the father of two sons. Family is very important in my life, and my wife and I play City Of Heroes together. We have a lot of fun…

My character, Zero Cold, was the leader of a group called Justice Corp, or JC, proudly fighting for justice in the world. Zero Cold was their mentor, their friend, and their father-figure. But that was a long time ago. Now, a year and a half later, Zero Cold has left JC and is in a new group, Team Xtreme. The team is a provocative supergroup — with a few comedians. We’re here to have fun rather than fight for justice in that American style. Team Xtreme. Fell the Xtreme!”

Name: Young Ki-Jang
Born: 1982
Occupation: Student
Location: Seoul, South Korea
Game played: Lineage II

“In the real world, you have to conform to the expectations of your parents, teachers, and peers. What matters the most is how much money you have, which schools you went to, and who your parents are. Where you start determines where you end up. In Lineage it’s different. You create your own avatar — it’s not already chosen for you. The path forward is up to you. Play well, and you will get ahead. It’s not like the real world, where things are set for you.”

Name: Jason Rowe
Born: 1975
Occupation: None
Location: Crosby, Texas
Game played: Star Wars Galaxies

“In the real world, people can be uncomfortable around me before they get to know me and realise that, apart from my outer appearance, I’m just like them. Online you get to know the person behind the keyboard before you know the physical person. The Internet eliminates how you look in real life, so you get to know a person by their mind and personality. In 2002 at the UO Fan Faire in Austin, I noticed that people were intrigued by me, but they acted just like I was one of them. They treated as an equal, like I wasn’t even the way that I am — not disabled, not in a wheelchair, you know. We were all just gamers.”

See more of Alter Ego and Robbie Cooper’s other work here. The Alter Ego work has also been complied in a book.

Since then I’ve given birth to a collection of short stories, which has mostly served to confirm my suspicion that I’ll be a terrible mother one day (I never want to see it again, feel only disappointment when I spot it under my bed, and instead of picking it up and brushing the dust off its jacket, I nudge it further beyond view and pretend it never happened). On the upside, I hope to be a happy MA MA soon (dad joke. I hate myself).

Laboured metaphors aside, it’s been a formative year and I spent a lot of it reading short stories. It’s a rewarding form, and one that’s surprisingly difficult to work with. You think it’ll be easy, but no. First you trip over the ‘short’ part, and by the time you reach the ‘story’, everyone in class is asking with carefully concealed frustration, “What were you trying to achieve here?”

Alice Munro describes the short story as seeing the world in a ‘quick glancing light’, though it takes talent to shine it in the right place. When it does happen, its incredible. It can be as transportative and transformative as any novel, an uppercut to the jaw dealt in a few thousand words. I’ve come to admire the form intensely, and so, in no particular order, here are ten short stories I enjoyed this year:

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby — Donald Barthelme (1973)

Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he’d think about it but it would take him awhile to decide. I pointed out that we’d have to know soon, because Howard, who is a conductor, would have to hire and rehearse the musicians and he couldn’t begin until he knew what the music was going to be. Colby said he’d always been fond of Ives’s Fourth Symphony. Howard said that this was a “delaying tactic” and that everybody knew that the Ives was almost impossible to perform and would involve weeks of rehearsal, and that the size of the orchestra and chorus would put us way over the music budget. “Be reasonable”, he said to Colby. Colby said he’d try to think of something a little less exacting.

Finding Barthelme was a revelation. Like a more energetic and outrageous Kafka, he deals with the bleakness of the human condition in ways that are absurd and delightful in equal measure. Be warned: he’s one of those writers you have to be cautious of loving, because there’s a seeming effortlessness to his style that makes you want to emulate him in bad and embarrassing ways (see also: Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver).

Paper Losses — Lorrie Moore (2006) (or listen to her read it here)

It had been a year since Rafe kissed her. She sort of cared and sort of didn’t. A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: choosing the best unhappiness. An unwise move and, good God, you could squander everything.

The summons took her by surprise. It came in the mail, addressed to her, and there it was, stapled to divorce papers. She’d been properly served. The bitch had been papered. Like a person, a marriage was unrecognizable in death, even when buried in its favorite suit.

Earlier in the year I had a heated debate over the merits of Miranda July, who I stubbornly defended against claims of being worthless and twee. I like her. I like her socially inept cast of characters and the big and unorthodox steps they take to make meaningful connections with others. I like the decisions they make, the way they surprise you in a way that feels real. But then I found Lorrie Moore.

I often describe Moore as a more intelligent and sharp-witted Miranda July, which does her a disservice, but the similarities are there: The overarching sense of aimlessness. The weird yet likeable characters. But Moore goes beyond. Her characters have psychological depth and her prose is so rich it feels decadent. And by god she’s funny. That’s what strikes you the most about her stories: the sharpness of her insight,  the one-liners that make you pause in admiration.

Also highly recommended: Birds of America (the collection), You’re Ugly, Too (from Like Life) and How to Become a Writer (from her first collection, Self Help)

The Artificial Nigger — Flannery O’Connor (1955)

Mr. Head had once had a wife and daughter and when the wife died, the daughter ran away and returned after an interval with Nelson. Then one morning, without getting out of bed, she died and left Mr. Head with sole care of the year-old child. He had made the mistake of telling Nelson that he had been born in Atlanta. If he hadn’t told him that, Nelson couldn’t have insisted that this was going to be his second trip.

“You may not like it a bit,” Mr. Head continued. “It’ll be full of niggers.”

The boy made a face as if he could handle a nigger.

“All right,” Mr. Head said. “You ain’t ever seen a nigger.”

“You wasn’t up very early,” Nelson said.

“You ain’t ever seen a nigger,” Mr. Head repeated. “There hasn’t been a nigger in this county since we run that one out twelve years ago and that was before you were born.” He looked at the boy as if he were daring him to say he had ever seen a Negro.

“How you know I never saw a nigger when I lived there before?” Nelson asked. “I probably saw a lot of niggers.”

“If you seen one you didn’t know what he was,” Mr. Head said, completely exasperated. “A six-month-old child don’t know a nigger from anybody else.”

“I reckon I’ll know a nigger if I see one,” the boy said and got up and straightened his slick sharply creased gray hat and went outside to the privy.

I don’t find O’Connor’s stories all that satisfying, but I do think she’s important considering when and where she was writing. The Artificial Nigger is a great example of her work: A damning commentary on the racism of her time, it’s an unflinching portrayal of human stupidity and cruelty that leaves you crestfallen due to its sense of historical reality.

Also recommended: Everything That Rises Must Converge (though it suffers from the lightning bolt ending she’s so prone to employing).

Finances — Lydia Davis (2002)

If they try to add and subtract to see whether the relationship is equal, it won’t work. On his side, he is giving $50,000, she says. No, $70,000, he says. It doesn’t matter, she says. It matters to me, he says. What she is giving is a half-grown child. Is that an asset or a liability? Now, is she supposed to feel grateful to him? She can feel grateful, but not indebted, not that she owes him something. There has to be a sense of equality. I just love to be with you, she says, and you love to be with me. I’m grateful to you for providing us, and I know my child is sometimes a trouble to you, though you say he is a good child. But I don’t know how to figure it. If I give all I have and you give all you have, isn’t that a kind of equality? No, he says.

When I first started reading Lydia Davis I felt both surprise (“This is a story?”) and excitement (“This is a story!”) which was mostly because of the genre she was writing in. That is to say, it’s near impossible to classify, unless you define it vaguely as postmodern. Each story is a little joke, an essay, a scrap from a notebook. They’re tight and they’re fun. I’ve cited Finances mostly because it’s the only full-text story I have handy, but it gives you an idea of her style. If you’re going to read her I’d recommend starting with the collection it’s from, Samuel Johnson is Indignant. It showcases the psychological acuity of her humour and the experimentalism of her writing in a way that’s still easily accessible.

Also recommended: Story from Break it Down (1986), an intoxicating account of romantic obsession and sexual envy.

Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Allison Blake — Jennifer Egan (2010)

Is this cheating? Probably. But while we’re talking about exciting uses of form, this chapter from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, was incredible. Through the medium of powerpoint she achieves an unexpected emotional and narrative depth, packing a punch in a short series of slides.

Also recommended: the rest of the book

Why Don’t You Dance — Raymond Carver (1981)

The man came down the sidewalk with a sack from the market. He had sandwiches, beer, whiskey. He saw the car in the driveway and the girl on the bed. He saw the television set going and the boy on the porch.

“Hello,” the man said to the girl. “You found the bed. That’s good.”

“Hello,” the girl said, and got up. “I was just trying it out.” She patted the bed. “It’s a pretty good bed.”

“It’s a good bed,” the man said, and put down the sack and took out the beer and the whiskey.

“We thought nobody was here,” the boy said. “We’re interested in the bed and maybe in the TV. Also maybe the desk. How much do you want for the bed?”

“I was thinking fifty dollars for the bed,” the man said.

“Would you take forty?” the girl asked.

“I’ll take forty,” the man said.

He took a glass out of the carton. He took the newspaper off the glass. He broke the seal on the whiskey.

“How about the TV?” the boy said.

“Twenty-five.”

“Would you take fifteen?” the girl said.

“Fifteen’s okay. I could take fifteen,” the man said.

The girl looked at the boy.

“You kids, you’ll want a drink,” the man said. “Glasses in that box. I’m going to sit down. I’m going to sit down on the sofa.”

The man sat on the sofa, leaned back, and stared at the boy and the girl.

I always worry about including Raymond Carver in any top ten list because in my mind he’s in every top ten list ever, so long as the list-maker has taste.  I re-read most of his stories this year, and the two that stayed with me this time were Why Don’t You Dance and The Compartment. Why Don’t You Dance is quintessential Carver. Minimalist and haunting, it’s precisely what you want when you turn to him. The Compartment, on the other hand, was a surprise. Nestled a third of the way in his collection Cathedral, it was startling because it was so raw in its emotion. Usually in his stories, everything simmers below the surface. You intuit them, but the narrator won’t take you there. This story — wow —  was overwhelming by comparison. It follows a man on his way to meet his son, who he’s been estranged from for eight years. As they’re approaching Strasbourg — the place he’s arranged to meet him — he gets up to splash water on his face, and when he returns he finds that the expensive wristwatch he bought his son has disappeared from the pocket of his coat. The irrational transference of rage that ensues makes for a great story, but more than anything, it jolted me out of the suppression of emotion that you’re so used to with Carver. It reminded me a lot of Kafka’s The Judgement, actually.

See also: Hills Like White Elephants and Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway and A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J.D. Salinger for other wonderful but predictable top tens.

Moral Something — Etgar Keret (2008)

(I can’t find the original version online, but here’s a previous incarnation at The Paris Review)

They said on TV that the military court handed down a death sentence to the Arab who’d killed the girl soldier, and they had all kinds of people come into the studio to talk about it, and because of that the evening news went on till ten-thirty and they didn’t show Moonlighting. Dad got so pissed off about it that he lit his smelly pipe in the house, even though he’s not supposed to because it stunts my growth. He shouted at Mom that because of her and lunatics like her who voted right wing the country is just like Iran, which is where all the Persians came from. Dad said it was going to cost us, and that besides what it’s done to our moral fortitude—which is a word I’m not sure I understand—the Americans weren’t going to take it lying down either.

The next day, they talked to us about it at school, and Tsion Shemesh said that if you hang a guy his dick gets hard like in the porn movies, so Tsilla, our homeroom teacher, kicked him out, and then she told us that when it comes to the death sentence opinions were polarized, and no matter how good the arguments were, for or against, it is really all in the heart. And Tsachi the moron, who’d been left back twice, laughed and said it was really all in the heart of the Arabs but their heart would stop beating anyway when they hang by the neck, so Tsilla kicked him out, too. Then she said she wouldn’t listen to any more inane reactions and she was just going to teach us our regular subjects—and she got back at us, with a ton of homework, too.

After school, the older kids had an argument about if when you hang somebody and he dies, it’s because he chokes to death or because his neck gets broken. Then they took bets on cartons of chocolate milk and caught a cat and hanged it from the basketball hoop, and the cat screamed a lot, and in the end its neck really did break. But Mickie wouldn’t pay for the chocolate milk, and he said it was because Gabi had pulled hard on the cat on purpose and that he wanted to see it again with a new cat that nobody touched. But everyone knew it was because he was a cheap-ass, and they forced him to hand over the money. Then Nissim and Ziv wanted to clob-ber Tsion Shemesh because he was a liar and the cat’s dick didn’t get hard at all. And Michal, who’s probably the prettiest girl in the school, happened to pass by and said we were all disgusting and like animals, and I went and threw up on the side, but not on account of her.

My supervisor recommended Keret and it took me six months to track him down. Boy, did I regret not doing it sooner, and for not realising he was the same guy Joe had recommended months before. Verdict: He’s great. Surrealist writers often trade in psychological truths, but what Keret has up his sleeve are a series of truths about the world today, a lot of them relating to the political climate in Israel. The playfulness of each story becomes underscored by this darker reality, imbuing the act of both writing and reading with a genuine need for escapism.

The Kiss — Pip Adam (2008)

Lennon was the last to come through the double doors, his mother was there. His girlfriend ran to him, grabbed his face in both hands and kissed him on the  mouth. She looked odd. He’d forgotten about her. He’d seen her name on the letters she sent, called her a couple of times. He’d mentioned her name and had her name mentioned to him in strip bars and mess tents but he’d forgotten about her — the her that stood in front of him now, smiling broadly and wiping tears away like something he was sure she’d seen on television. She was something waiting for him — what could be done with her now? He kept his distance. Lennon wasn’t frightened of anything but he kept his distance, unsure of what she could tell or smell or sense. He smiled at her carefully from beside his mother. Wyatt and Knight came over, said something about a party in the afternoon. Wyatt was going to have breakfast with his family and Knight said he was going to have sex with one, or more, of the women. They left.

I read this in Sport 36 and didn’t think much of it, but when I was still thinking about it a week later I realised I was only kidding myself. A good ending, as Chekhov once said, will shift the centre of gravity to provoke maximum thought. The ending in The Kiss does exactly this, in a way that seems benign but then continues to tug at you long after you’ve read it.

Retreat — Wells Tower (2009)

Stephen spent his inheritance on music school, where he studied composition. What I heard of his music was gloomy, the sound track you might crave in an idling car with a hose running from the tailpipe, but nothing you could hum. When no orchestras called him with commissions, he had an artistic crackup, exiled himself to Eugene, Oregon, to buff his oeuvre and eke out a living teaching the mentally substandard to achieve sanity by blowing on harmonicas. When I drove down to see him two years ago after a conference in Seattle, I found him living above a candle store in a dingy apartment that he shared with a dying collie. The animal had lost the ability to urinate, so Stephen was always having to lug her downstairs to the grassy verge beside the sidewalk. There, he’d stand astride the poor animal and manually void its bladder via a Heimlich technique horrible to witness. You hated to see your last blood relation engaged in something like that.

I’ve cited Retreat not because it’s my favourite story but because of this idea of revision. Tower actually published an earlier and drastically different version of this story in McSweeney’s 23. The story centres around the relationship between two brothers, and how that dynamic plays out when the younger brother visits. In the McSweeney’s version, it’s told from the point of view of the younger brother, but in the collection, we see the events from the older brother’s perspective. It’s a completely different story, and the fact that he embarked on this process post-publication fascinates me. It served him well. The new version reads a lot better, and seeing it from the jerky older brother’s point of view lends the story an added pathos, but you know what? It was good to begin with. It says a lot about the importance of revision, though mostly it makes me wonder if anyone is ever happy with anything they write.

Argentina — Breton Dukes (2011)

They went out of the camping ground, across the railway lines and into the town. There wasn’t much to see. Outside the church a tall man was using a lawn mower.

“Is that him?” said Todd.

“Who?” said Rainey.

Todd had never been in love before, but Rainey had. In her last year of high school she’d been in love with a basketball player. Todd swaggered in a circle around her, dribbled, then aimed a shot at a street sign. Rainey watched but didn’t say anything. He faked to one side and then went past her. “Slam dunk for the big man,” he announced.

But she wasn’t watching anymore; she was looking up and down the road. The day before, the sky had been high and blue. It had looked like it was stretched so tight that a sharp point would cause it to burst, exposing all the stars and the moons and the endless galaxies. When Todd said that to her she’d laughed and said, “That’s clever. I love the way you look at things.” Then she’d moved close to him and put her hand under his t-shirt.

As they walked back from the church the sky was grey and low and though he thought hard, Todd couldn’t think of an interesting way to describe it.

I initially bought Bird North to send up to a friend in Auckland, but while waiting at the bus stop I made the inevitable mistake of flicking through it. It’s a great collection, and Argentina was one of the stories that stayed with me. There’s a sense of quietness in this one, a tension that builds and dissipates in tiny unrelenting waves, threatening to spill onto the page.

Going For a Beer — Robert Coover (2011)

He finds himself sitting in the neighborhood bar drinking a beer at about the same time that he began to think about going there for one. In fact, he has finished it. Perhaps he’ll have a second one, he thinks, as he downs it and asks for a third. There is a young woman sitting not far from him who is not exactly good-looking but good-looking enough, and probably good in bed, as indeed she is. Did he finish his beer? Can’t remember. What really matters is: Did he enjoy his orgasm? Or even have one? This he is wondering on his way home through the foggy night streets from the young woman’s apartment. Which was full of Kewpie dolls, the sort won at carnivals, and they made a date, as he recalls, to go to one. Where she wins another—she has a knack for it. Whereupon they’re in her apartment again, taking their clothes off, she excitedly cuddling her new doll in a bed heaped with them. He can’t remember when he last slept, and he’s no longer sure, as he staggers through the night streets, still foggy, where his own apartment is, his orgasm, if he had one, already fading from memory.

I read only two of Coover’s stories this year, Going For a Beer and Matinee, both published in The New Yorker, both fun, experimental pieces. In Going for a Beer, Coover condenses time in such a way that it exists not sequentially but at once, capturing an entire life in a one-page story. It’s absurd in the Sisyphean sense, a life of ever-repeating patterns, cycles of behaviour, the same lines spoken again and again. The other story, Matinee, begins with a woman going into a movie theatre that’s playing her favourite film, but when the projector breaks down half-way through, the woman stands up to leave. As she does she notices a man a few rows down, and she knows in that instant that they’ll bump into each other in the aisle. The story then cross-fades to another man watching the same film. Cross-fade. I know it’s a filmic term, but it describes precisely what Coover achieves in this story. It’s so seamless you almost don’t notice it at first. Even better, things start getting meta. This beginning scene is later described as a film someone has watched, but the character thinking of this film is herself a character from a film that somebody in a previous scene has described, and so forth, and so forth. Scenes repeat. Characters repeat, and it’s so effortlessly weaved that it never feels too clever.

It was really nice coming across Coover this year: He was a reminder of what you can do with the short story form. It was reinvigorating reading him — he was to structure what Gertrude Stein was to language. I mean that in the good way.

-

Notables:

His Father’s Shoes — William Brandt

Town of Cats — Haruki Murakami

Discontinuous Lives — Barbara Anderson

You Are Now Entering the Human Heart — Janet Frame

The Things They Carried — Tim O’Brien

New Zealand’s intellectuals have preferred not to contribute to the debate that is going on about New Zealand’s future course of development. This means, specifically, that much of the argument is based on ignorance of how this society functions – simply because no one has bothered to provide the necessary information.

—Bruce Jesson

I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

Hey! Teacher! Leave Those Kids Alone

(so as to avoid presumptions of political bias)

We should have civics in our schools. In saying that, I’m not thinking about some sort of “patriotism class” where kids are expected to pledge bemused allegiance to a flag, or where they’re taught the sort of nationalist exceptionalism they offer in some US schools. Instead, you’d be thinking more of what the University of Washington’s James A. Banks articulates, a place where:

students (can be) taught about and have opportunities to acquire…democratic values while at the same time learning about…realities that challenge those ideals, such as discrimination based on race, gender, and social class.

I was taught some civics – in odd ways. Ahead of the 1993 election and referendum, Ms. Gilmore bravely tried to instruct me and the other seven-year olds in Room 14 about political parties (it didn’t go too far beyond – Who is your MP? How old do you have to be to vote? What is the Prime Minister’s name? Which party is the government at the moment?) and the nuances between voting First Past The Post and Mixed Member Proportional. I remember I preferred FPTP because it was easier to explain and also I was playing with Cubex when Ms. Gilmore tried to go through MMP for a desperate fourth and final time. It was really noble (actually, it piqued my interest for a lifetime, but I think I was a bit of an outlier in that respect). But in the grand scheme of social studies – from primary, to intermediate, to high school – what do kids actually get? They could come out at the other end at the end of Year 13 and vote in a general election. Did anything at school help them make an informed choice?

The instruction could extend beyond Social Studies to History and Geography, and Economics and, especially, English. Even the socially worthy material we read or viewed came from overseas. It was remote and decontexualised. Cry, The Beloved Country. The Power Of One…Bend It Like Beckham. Even The Crucible was bungled – there’s lots of perspective on what it meant to 1950s McCarthyite America, but not a lot about why Miller’s play matters now. I quoted Kurt Vonnegut before, and hopefully it’s not too much of a gloss to say that he was an ardent champion of civic responsibility and informed participation who ended up in the fitting position of his literary work framing a lot of the ethical and moral discussions had in American high schools (when they weren’t busy banning him). Why don’t we do the same thing with our authors and playwrights? Use them, not ban them.

I threw the word ‘discussion’ in there, pointedly. Because discussing ideas (and I don’t mean that gasping, impromptu “argue about anything on the spot!” shit that kids do for prefect brownie-points after school in Debating Club) isn’t something we get wired to do at school. There’s plenty of it in tutorials once you get to university, but anyone who’s ever taught or tutored a Stage One paper will tell you exactly how forthcoming and prepared their new arrivals are for the frank exchange of ideas and interpretations (ie: there’s not a heap happening beforehand to get most of them ready for it).

The idea that creating this sort of environment of mutual dialogue in learning is good enough for university undergraduates and not good enough for all high school students (some of whom will go on to more vocational study, some none at all) is snobbery at best. When you factor in the democratic rights each of those students have and the importance that they be able to exercise them in an informed way, it’s positively obscene.

I’ll admit that the distinct lack of civic instruction and discussion in my schooldays suggests  it was something teachers weren’t really sure how to factor in, or speak to. It’s possible that it was even a bit of a taboo, like talking about whose dad earned the most. Implementation of a curriculum that taught civics and taught young people to discuss and challenge the presumptions that informed that civics would obviously be a huge and complex undertaking. This is not the same as saying that an undertaking is impossible.

(As an aside, as I write this, Kerre Woodham concluded her Sunday Herald column by advising that we teach “political studies” in our schools to create better educated voters. Apart from the fact that she appeared to draw this conclusion from a wholly unrepresentative sample (her own elderly talkback audience), the fact that she saw the economic costs and benefits of asset sales being simply ghettoized into some umbrella subject called “political studies”, and the fact that she’s Kerre Woodham, this idea is pretty sound.)

The Phantom Menace

Media coverage of political issue be busted, and it’s in everyone’s – including the media – to fix it.

You know what was a blackly funny bit in the election campaign process? When the media turned feral on John Key after getting copies of his café conversation with John Banks – making him “storm out” of press conferences, tracing the steps of each successive faux-pas with glee, leading on their websites and the 6pm broadcasts with the shiftiest and sweatiest images of him they could find – and then the public response was resoundingly in support of Key against them?

It’s basic narrative stuff. For three years-plus, John Key has been presented in the media as a charismatic, likeable leader with streaks of pragmatism that always trump ideology. He talks like one of us, he treats abstract disasters with a blasé optimism, he treats concrete disasters with a vaguely manly heaviness and gravity. Occasional gaffes and incompetence from his Cabinet and Caucus are treated as vaguely episodic problems which Our Hero must resolve – and does, with no repercussions ever shown.

No way are you going to change your mind and decide that dude’s a dick all of a sudden just because the Herald and TV3 suddenly start putting the heat under him for a few days. If anything, their attacks are malign and vindictive. They’re the bad guys. Thus it was that what in any other developed democracy would have been the repellent spectre of a leader authorizing police raids on the free press immediately before the election became a likeable but frazzled guy finally dealing to some slimeballs who had it coming.

You don’t have to like it personally, but you can see why ordinary people weren’t too outraged. You could say that if those ordinary people had a stronger sense of the importance of a free press and what police seizing material gathered by the free press potentially symbolizes, maybe it would be different. You could also say that if myriad NZ media outlets failed to generate any sense of the importance of the free press through their own output in recent years, then that’s tough shit for them.

The Teagate thing is a symptom rather than a cause, the result of what happens when reporting disassociates personalities, strategy and polls from society itself and fails to provide the public with a clear picture of what all these actors are deciding, and what their decisions mean.

Or to put it another way, here is how a regular member of the public would describe Star Wars:

There’s this bad empire led by this guy in a black suit called Darth Vader, right? They want to oppress and hurt people, and crush the prosperity and freedoms of lots of communities on lots of planets. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo lead a rebellion of people who believe that the empire is corrupt and does lots of cruel and tyrannical things. Eventually after a long struggle they defeat the empire and everyone is free.

Here is how a political pundit would describe Star Wars:

The Grand Moff Tarkin is looking like he will be facing dissent in his Cabinet and demotion after handling a scandal facing his coalition partner Boba Fett badly. Boba Fett got a DIC fifteen years ago and now serious questions are being raised on the Grand Moff’s ability to manage his coalition partners, one of whom has been polling under the 5% threshold since a long time ago far far away last April. In the beltway the word is that Darth Vader’s steady hand on the campaign has been invaluable in showing the galaxy that the Grand Moff has the interests of ordinary galactic citizens at heart. And a recent poll that shows that the Emperor Palpatine is still most preferred Emperor on 59%, with Jabba The Hutt a distant second on 13%, will suggest that that strategy is paying off. The question will be whether Stormtrooper #546 will be at number 13 or number 15 on the Empire’s party list come next year. Some tout him as a future leader, but Massey University’s lecturer in political marketing Clare Robinson said it best when she said that he sweats too much and looks uncomfortable on live television. Also a bunch of planets got blown up wiping out millions of people.

Thrilling stuff, huh? I don’t want to labour the point too much, but it’s not an understatement to say that NZ political journalism has become obsessed with minutiae and trivia while world-shaping and important things are (always, at some level) happening. If you’re not up with the play on said minutiae and trivia (ie: if the second passage didn’t make sense, or if you hated the new Star Wars films too), you’re likely to stop holding any emotional, social or psychological stake in the whole thing. Starting with the people who are paid to write about this sort of thing (because you can’t stop big fat nerds from continuing to blog about asinine things if they’re already doing it for free) this has to change.

(I have no idea if an actual political journalist will ever read this, but if somehow they do, and they wind up thinking something like – “oh, that’s all the other journalists. I’m great!” – no. 95% chance it’s you unless you’re Gordon Campbell or Colin James. Change your game up.)

Positive participation is a lot less lame than it sounds

This follows on a little from the media issue above. In his 2007 book Republic.com, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein posited:

I urge that in a heterogeneous society, such a system requires something other than free, or publicly unrestricted, individual choices. On the contrary, it imposes two distinctive requirements. First, people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. Unanticipated encounters, involving topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quire irritating, are central to democracy and even to freedom itself. Second, many or most citizens should have a range of common experiences. Without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult time addressing social problems; people may even find it hard to understand one another.

The fascinating but very long excerpt is well worth-reading, if you have the time. It’s located squarely within the context of the American system, and what it means to guarantee free speech under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, but there’s a lot to be taken from it to consider in other 21^st–century democracies.

Sunstein’s argument is that once upon a time, in smaller communities pre-mass communication, these common experiences were something we all encountered, and part of these were unanticipated encounters we didn’t expect in advance. A preacher in a park square, a demonstration for workers’ unity handing out leaflets at the rotunda. Rowdy town meetings, even. As society expanded and interconnected, we started needing general interest intermediaries. For most of the 20^th century, this was newspapers, magazines, radio and television broadcasts. We still experienced common, world-shaping events through these, and we would find ourselves reading, listening to or watching alternative viewpoints we wouldn’t have gone out of our way to take heed of, evaluate, or expose ourselves to (unanticipated encounters through media, basically).

The Internet is a very different place, and more and more we’re hurtling toward a sort of utopian ideal of total consumer sovereignty, or “the Daily Me” – a complete personalization of one’s communications network where he or she can determine with growing accuracy what she will and will not encounter. As the filters themselves have become more refined, we’re even further towards this idea than when Sunstein wrote about it four years ago (Google Reader delivers you what you already know you want on a feed, the all-customisable Facebook lets you not hear from the friends you might happen to disagree with from time to time, unless you seek them out yourself by clicking on their profile.)

Sunstein seems to say that this is bad, because being able to avoid exposure to thoughts, ideas, views and experiences we might once have serendipitously encountered atomises a society and frays  the ties that bind it together. The results: extremism, or partisanship, are unhealthy for democracy.

I’d throw a couple of considerably less scholarly cents in the ring and suggest that “the Daily Me” doesn’t simply confine people somewhere to the left and the right on a political spectrum but actually allows a lot of people to opt out altogether. If you feel total apathy towards all manner of current affairs, we are reaching a stage where you don’t have to accidentally come across it ever again. The only other thing I’d mention is that the fracturing of civic virtue actually happens under the watch of a number of large multinational media and technology companies, with significant commercial interests of their own. Without being alarmist (seriously – I hate conspiracy bros, and I don’t want to come across as one) it would not necessarily be in those companies’ interests to encourage active, cohesive political debate and movement at a grassroots level, either within or across states. Whatever.

Sunstein says you can’t force individuals in a free society to consume a certain cultural product (you must read this paper, you must attend this talk, etc). I’m inclined to agree – just because for some crazy reason an ordinary New Zealand citizen is not inclined to understand or follow the incisive satirical wit of Jim Hopkins, doesn’t mean we should force them at gunpoint.

However, the idea that a plurality of free speech should be ensured, where necessary, by positive action on the part of the state, is a sound one. It distinguishes between consumer sovereignty and political sovereignty in a scenario where the former stands to undermine the latter’s ambitions of self-government and freedom. Sunstein’s examples of where the state might do this are things like some form of comprehensive voluntary self-regulation by the communications sector, or disclosure of commercial and public interest activities by outlets and broadcasters, or ‘must carry’ rules on popular or heavily partisan websites – or subsidized free speech through public broadcasting or in the online sphere.

The last of these speaks strongest to me, especially given the wind-down of TVNZ 6 and 7 and their effective, populist, and pluralistic programmes while an overwhelming commercial imperative (the most at the loudest for the cheapest) that drives local content on the other channels, including those that ostensibly still serve as state broadcasters (one Outrageous Fortune for every hundred Julie Christie–vaginal-spawn-reality-show-hybrids). At a time when technological changes and the stats of participation show a dwindling of civic engagement (and thus, free speech), the government is downsizing its contribution to a democratic cornerstone rather than maintaining it. Unlike Sunstein, critics here in NZ have no black-letter constitutional argument to resort to. Instead, again, we just have to expect democratically-elected leaders to enable the fundamental tenets of the system that let them get there.

(These little parenthesesed italic bits weren’t meant to be an ongoing thing, but Sunstein also seems to give the academic wunderkind equivalent of your blokey uncle looking up from his Double Brown and giving a faint nod of approval to the idea of ‘direct digital democracy’ in here – that is, people setting out to use the new technology to enhance free speech and discussion (though of course he cannot condone the constitutional ramifications). It’s an idea, but I’m not sure that if you just implemented it formally in NZ tomorrow it would achieve that much that was genuinely representative and effective. It’s a neat idea – it’s just not the one silver bullet, though it could alongside a raft of other changes.)

So, no one solution. Obviously. Sorry. But I think these would be a set of things that worked well in tandem, toward the goal of a more engaged and participatory NZ populace. I basically ran through them in a rough order of feasibility, but I believe any of them could assist in arresting the decline.

And any idea that, properly studied, indicated a chance to enhance voter turnout in our elections (not guaranteeing mine would) should be one that democratically-elected politicians of any kind should support. Should they not, they are, in all seriousness, ‘the enemy’ – and those who happened to support them while also claiming to support a healthy democracy would need to reconsider where they stood.

Plenty of reasons to be either alternately ecstatic or bummed from a superficial, by-the-numbers look at the New Zealand general election results (depending on whether you hang right or left), but the total voter turnout of 73.8%, the lowest in 124 years, should give us all cause for thought and concern. In 7th form, I sat the Scholarship-level English exam and got told I’d come fifth in the country. My jubilation was tempered by that hollow, gnawing feeling in the back of my mind, the inevitable and unspoken knowledge that there were probably about 12 people in the country who had bothered to sit it. There’s probably a bit of that amid the celebration going on – doing really well isn’t quite so awesome when realise you’ve succeeded in an unusually small pool.

But let’s go back – 1887. Turnout: 67.1%. This was before women gained the right to vote (an oddly-worded Herald article had some thinking that figures were artificially low before that – turnout has always been based on total eligible registered electors, and prior to 1893 a woman in New Zealand couldn’t be one). It was also before the birth of the political party system as we know it, before Labour, National, Reform, or the Liberal Party. And yet there’s some eerie similarities when you peep the Encyclopedia of New Zealand for a snapshot of New Zealand in the 1880s, when:

 “…a group of politicians who could best be designated “prudent” endeavoured to grapple with what had become the problems of acute depression. For from 1879 on, without any intermissions till 1895, the country knew hard times: declining prices for its exports of wool, a diminishing output of gold, a high level of indebtedness, both private and public, low and falling wages, unemployment, and destitution in the towns. No resolute answer was given; ministers hesitated between retrenchment and taxation on the one hand, and renewed if reduced borrowing upon the other. For once borrowing had become established, it was hard to control; half-completed works prevented an absolute cut, and borrowing could still appeal as a miraculous panacea. So much was this so that the old magician, Vogel, could return to power in 1884, in alliance with Stout as premier, upon a promise to borrow and spend on the grand scale once again. Within three years it became clear that the magic had faded; 1887 brought Atkinson and “caution” back, and saw an end to overseas borrowing for the best part of a decade. An era in New Zealand life was over…By the end of the 1880s, hard times seemed to have come to stay: in 1887–90 more people left the country than arrived…

 …(The 1887–1890 government) attempted, rather half-heartedly, to bolster up local industry by tariffs, while small-scale land settlement continued. At the same time stringent governmental economy was applied. In brief, Atkinson was attempting to keep a depressed New Zealand going by using what she had – her land and her small factories – and not by relying upon what she might borrow.”

I’m not going to bullshit here and claim to be au fait with 1880s NZ economic history anymore than anybody who reads this – but we can see some of the past echoes, can’t we? Prudent politicians with a pessimistic and limited vision; low wages and high private debt; a glum see-saw between borrowing, and taxation, and retrenchment; a draining exodus of the skilled and intelligent (no points for guessing where). Significant new ideas were ventured (land tax reform, industrial relations legislation, constitutional reform) but were tarred as too radical and damaging by those who opposed them. A term or so deep into this morass, how motivated would you be to get out there and vote? Hi 2011.

Obviously plenty of the structures and institutions are different, but some of these situations feel equally intractable. If you’re thinking of going to Queensland and getting a mining job in the next 12 months or so because work here is miserly and sparse, why hold a stake in our democratic outcome for the next three years? If you’re worried about paying more taxes, but you’re worried about high unemployment, and a useless public service, and asset sales (which figure into that terminal retrenchment-tax-borrowing shuffle nicely), and too much debt, maybe you just feel paralysed. Maybe you don’t even know anything about any of these, and electoral politics is a little like a Dungeons & Dragons board game that you didn’t really want to follow at the start and couldn’t possibly begin to follow now (in which case, thank you for getting this far. I promise I won’t start talking about coalition partner strategies and party lists and any of that pundit geekscum shit). Also now we basically have no gold. Sweet.

 On the Other Hand

Voter turnout has been decreasing in most established democracies over the past 30 years or so. Which is not to absolve New Zealand’s responsibility for sorting its shit out, but to get people who are soulsearching on this to cast their net a little wider than blaming, say, Phil Goff. Or MMP. Or The Feelers. Or offering up a comparison of the 1887 general election. I don’t know.

Here’s a pretty good table of what I’m talking about (perhaps take it with a pinch of salt, because it says the NZ 2005 turnout was 61.6%) What’s happening in NZ could be seen as broadly similar to what’s happening in a country like Ireland (72.9% in 1982, 62.6% in 2002) or Finland (75.7% in 1983, 66.7% in 2003) or France (78.5% in 1986, 60.3% in 2002). We were beating these countries at getting out to vote then, and we’re still beating them now. But the downward trend is there. The unspoken fear, of course is that you end up like the States, which has sort of functioned as the running conversation piece for moderately apathetic people to make small-talk about very apathetic people for years. I don’t think we’re quite going this way, but we might well have under an ongoing two-party, First-Past-The-Post style system. So there’s that.

Probably where a Rage Against The Machine lyric would go, if we were the worst  people ever

The other big worldwide trend – bigger than the 1880s, maybe even bigger than the 1930s given time, is the international economic crisis that began in 2008 and never really went away. Currently, this crisis has devolved into a endless series of national or regional crises that begin to feel a little bit like losing someone to a series of strokes. The killer blow never quite comes, but each time there’s a little less left. If that’s a cruel idea in the abstract, it’s crueller in its specific impacts – the jobless, the homeless, the hungry. And those same people look at their governments and see promises that amount to resuscitation, not rejuvenation.

Up until a few years ago, one strain of thought was that decreasing turnouts in Western democracies was related to contentment – if you’ve got your needs and some of your wants covered, what more would voting get you? The trend could continue from here, but with none of the wants and fewer and fewer of the bare needs. If changing the government by way of an election won’t help, why bother? In other words, it’s a decline that subs out contentment for despair and then heads on its merry course.

In the United States (or the United Kingdom), there’s no way for ideas beyond that mere resuscitation to enter the mainstream party political discourse. I wonder if that’s a key to the persistence of the Occupy movement in both those countries – ideas that don’t have any way in to the halls of influence have to hammer angrily (but peacefully) on the doors. Alternative ideas, and the people who might have the capacity to carry them out, are in our Parliament, albeit not in the positions of most influence yet. It’s 1887, it’s 1931, it’s 2011. Can ‘no future’ become ‘no, future!’? Can people give a shit?

I feel like there are some ways to do this. In part two, I’m going to try and outline them. Good news: it’s concise. Bad news: it involves a Star Wars analogy.