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Against Everything: Essays - Hardcover

Greif, Mark

 
9781101871157: Against Everything: Essays
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1101871156 ISBN 13: 9781101871157
Verlag: Pantheon, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

A brilliant collection of essays by a young writer who is already a star in the intellectual firmament. As William Deresiewicz has written in Harper’s Magazine, “[Mark Greif ] is an intellectual, full stop . . . There is much of [Lionel] Trilling in Greif . . . Much also of Susan Sontag . . . What he shares with both, and with the line they represent, is precisely a sense of intellect—of thought, of mind—as a conscious actor in the world.”

Over the past eleven years, Greif has been publishing superb, and in some cases already famous, essays in n+1, the high-profile little magazine that he co-founded. These essays address such key topics in the cultural, political, and intellectual life of our time as the tyranny of exercise, the tyranny of nutrition and food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of Radiohead, the rise and fall of the hipster, the impact of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the crisis of policing. Four of the selections address, directly and unironically, the meaning of life—what might be the right philosophical stance to adopt toward one’s self and the world.

Each essay in Against Everything is learned, original, highly entertaining, and, from start to finish, dead serious. They are the work of a young intellectual who, with his peers, is reinventing and reinvigorating what intellectuals can be and say and do. Mark Greif manages to reincarnate and revivify the thought and spirit of the greatest of American dissenters, Henry David Thoreau, for our time and historical situation.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MARK GREIF received a BA summa cum laude from Harvard in history and literature and an MPhil from Oxford in English as a British Marshall Scholar. In 2004, he co-founded the literary and intellectual journal n+1 in New York and has been a principal at the maga­zine since then. He earned a PhD in American studies from Yale in 2007. Since 2008, he has been on the faculty of the New School in New York, where he is currently an associate professor. His previous book, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973, was published in 2015. Greif has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and, for 2016–17, is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

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9781101871157|excerpt

Greif / AGAINST EVERYTHING

LEARNING TO RAP

It’s a fortunate fate to have your lifetime be contemporary with the creation of a major art form. Embarrassing, then, not to have understood it, or appreciated it, or become an enthusiast, even a fanatic, from the first. Especially shameful when it could have carried you, if only in imagination, across a racial barrier in America—at least as far as you can go without kidding yourself, when you’re white, and therefore approaching from the wrong side. I came of age at the same time as hip-hop. But like some other ostensibly politically minded middle-class white Americans of my generation, I made a historical mistake: I chose to believe in punk rock exclusively. This meant pledging allegiance to a minor tributary (post-punk) of a minor genre (punk), to squeeze the rind of a major genre, rock, that had been basically exhausted by 1972, instead of committing to a new world-historical form.

My mistake also meant in practical terms that I didn’t learn to rap properly when my mind was supple, at an age when language is effortlessly absorbed. Not that I am completely incapable or innocent of rapping. But I had never applied myself.

I tried to make up for the deficiency, finally, last year. I vowed that I would not rap in front of anyone else, ever, and that I would not try to write my own raps. I just had the idea that I could fix myself, privately. The immediate irritant was that I can hum rock, and of course I can sing along. I know a good part of the lyrics to all kinds of old songs: “Sunshine of Your Love,” “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” But I couldn’t rap along beyond a few simple refrains, not even to hip-hop songs I thought I knew well, which seemed to be increasingly occupying my head in the first year of Obama’s presidency. This disability began to seem sinister, not to say racist.

I really didn’t know how hard it would be to rap along until I tried. I had projected a straightforward plan of study. I would begin with the classics. I didn’t want to go around on training wheels—I’d start immediately with the best. I wanted my repertoire to include songs I could live with forever. So I started with the first track from the first Nas album, “N.Y. State of Mind,” which had lived in the back of my mind as a blur for a long time. “

I think of crime when I’m in a New York state of mind”—that and other easy lines, I already possessed in memory. And the famous aphorism “I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death,” which gets quoted often enough. Plus boasts like “It’s only right that I was born to use mics,” which gave the title to a Michael Eric Dyson book. But I suffered the illusion that a chorus or a standout aphorism was comparable to a verse. I thought I would just start at the beginning and roll through, rewinding the song and memorizing, as if it were a classic rock song or a folk ballad. I went for a walk outside on a hazy day in July, with my headphones, and pressed play:

Rappers, I monkey flip ’em with the funky rhythm I be
kickin’—
“Rappers I . . .” what?
Rappers, I monkey flip ’em with the funky rhythm I be kickin’—
“Rappers I—mubbliggithm . . .”
“Rappers I go up in ’em . . .”
“Rappers I grow up with ’em . . .”

I think what Nas is saying is that his rhythmic flow has such force that it sweeps his rivals’ legs out from under them. He whirls them over and lands them on their backs, as Bruce Lee knew to judo dumb opponents. That Nas can do this just with his musical skills, he confirms in line two:

Musician, inflictin’ composition

But I couldn’t get past the impossibility of line one. The first line is seventeen syllables in just over two bars, across eight beats in a quick 4/4 tempo—at eighty-four beats per minute. The delivery is shifted slightly, as I hear it, so that it starts with a quarter-rest and crosses into the next two bars on the last syllable. Rather than marching in the iambs of most English versification, the meter sounds subtly trochaic, suggestive of falling rhythm. And seventeen syllables! By contrast, think of the first line, over a comparable two bars, of Elvis’s “That’s All Right,” a kind of entry into the story of rock:

Well, that’s all right, Mama

Six syllables, slowed by a caesura, delivered in the same length of time as Nas’s seventeen. If that seems an unfair comparison—Elvis is just getting warmed up!—there’s also “All Shook Up”:

A-well-a, bless-ah my soul-a, what’s wrong with me?

Twelve syllables in two bars.

Obviously it’s not the number of syllables that should impress anyone about a lyric. That would be like judging opera by the number of people onstage. It’s the implication of the words and, for the pleasure of the ear, the way they’re laid across the rhythm and the breath. One thing that registered immediately about hip-hop, at a minimum, once I tried to accompany it, is that it’s a more difficult and complex lyrical art in performance than just about anything that has ever been known to rock, and it has been so for about twenty years. I guess all hip-hop listeners already know this, and I fear they will be narrowing their eyes now with distrust. But I notice that some white people my age, but especially those a decade or two older, when they try to rap, fall into end-stopped, nursery-rhyme couplets, when such rhythms haven’t been common in MCing for more than two decades. It’s like thinking of rock ’n’ roll exclusively as the era before solid-body electric guitars predominated— say, 1963 and earlier.

It took a week of repetition for me to get the Nas song right. I still can’t point the accents correctly when I do it at full voice. My delivery is made worse by the fact that my rap voice is very much a white person’s voice, therefore unappealing to me, as I suspect it would be to anyone else. Rapping involved muscular tasks my mouth was not yet practiced enough to do, plus a mental focus and precision that’s hard to sustain, and simply isn’t called for with rock lyrics, not even, like Bob Dylan’s, the most verbose.

I should add that I had to look to the Internet to find the most plausible construction of Nas’s first line. There are now countless hiphop-lyric exegetical sites that try to resolve what is being said. Even so, interpretive disagreements persist.
 
 
I grew up Jewish in the Boston suburbs. New York was the home of my father’s side of the family. If my grandmother didn’t take the Amtrak from New York on the weekend to visit us, we drove to the apartment, in the co-ops for workers in the garment trades, on the Lower East Side.

The New York City Housing Authority had erected the Samuel Gompers housing projects just across Delancey Street, twenty years before. They razed half of the neighborhood to do so, including the tenement in which my grandfather had been born. This was slum clearance. It created tensions, between the low-income Orthodox Jews in workers’ housing, erected by the unions, on our side of the street, and the low-income black and Puerto Rican residents of the public housing erected by the city on the other. My grandfather had managed to keep the family on the street on which he’d been born, but now looked back on it from the reverse direction, toward the new buildings that sat on top of his remembered home.

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Verlag
Pantheon
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101871156
ISBN 13 
9781101871157
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
PANTHEON
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/

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