Wednesday Open Thread: The High Spark Of Low Culture Boys, Complexity As The Only Virtue, Part One

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“lifting weights will make you bigger / but lift me…”

Call this the Lightning Round of ACF: I have exactly 41 minutes to write today’s piece before getting on a plane. Critics and “haters”, today is your chance to catch me in any number of errors, from trivial to libelous.

Like much of America, I get almost all of my ideas from social media nowadays, much of it via advertisements that seem to be targeted with T-1000 accuracy. (Japanese metric sockets! Machined titanium pens! Clothing with pictures of cats on them!) This morning the algorithm thought I should be made aware of the above book.

Why Bushwick Bill Matters, like the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, has two important advantages over its immediate literary competition. In this case, the advantages are:

0. Unlike almost every nonfiction book published in the past decade, it doesn’t have TWO titles. In the hands of a less competent editor, this could easily have been Why Bushwick Bill Matters: The Critical Race To Save A Dwarf’s Life And Release The First Rap About The Horror Movie “Child’s Play”.

1. It’s about Bushwick Bill.

A brief personal anecdote: Thirty-four years ago, I was engaged in all-out war against the Miami University Office Of Residence Life, and in particular its three manifestations at my dorm. The “head res” was an utter moron named Jo Throckmorton, a man with the soul of an East German ration-card checker and the countenance of a recently sodomized iguana. I despised “Joey Cockthrobber” for reasons that escape me now but probably had something to do with my many pranks and misadventures in the dorm.

Throckmorton had managed to get me placed on University Conduct Probation for a prank in which I stole a fellow resident’s mattress and/or an incident in which I bullied another resident into tears over the fact that he liked his girlfriend to feed him his seminal emissions after manually releasing it. (The girlfriend is now a senior United States Attorney, and the only reason I’m not giving her name is because I have a much worse story about her that I want to tell in the future.) The next thing I did would get me kicked out of school. He thought he had the upper hand, but I had Bushwick Bill…

…whose album Grip It! On That Other Level was required listening in the dorms. I wanted to grind Jo Throttlejock into submission and I knew just the way to do it: via Diversity. The first step was to get myself elected the Diversity Counselor for Dodds Hall, which was easily done. The next step was to create the Bushwick Bill Fan Club. There was just one requirement for membership: that you allow me to print out some Bushwick Bill lyrics for your dorm room door.

Ten days later, the dorm was plastered with the most offensive and repugnant sentiments possible — but nothing could be done, because to take action would have been RACIST. The next step was to use my Gibson Skylark amp and a microphone to perform a “reading” of these lyrics at top volume. Which caused half of the dorm to complain to Throatjobber, but there was nothing he could do. Except complain to the Dean of Students. Who insisted on interviewing me. And basically gave me carte blanche to do anything besides set the place on fire. It would take the university a full three additional years to expel me after that, an attempt that failed because the then-head of Residence Life met my father during the disciplinary meeting, promptly fell in love with him over the course of five minutes, gave him all her contact information, and withdrew her statement. As far as I know, Dad threw her business card into the ashtray of his deep-blue Lexus ES250 and never thought of her again.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Bushwick Bill. He was a brilliant, self-aware artist whose transitions from breakdancer to wannabe dwarf thug to victim of failed suicide attempt to Christian witness seemed both effortless and infinitely deft. There was an artistic tradition in rap at that time of “comedic sidekicks”; think Flavor Flav. Bushwick was part of that. As a dwarf, he was aware of his risible qualities. But he was also hard. As a lyricist and as a human being. Not a joke. You could laugh at “Side Ain’t Shit” but you also had to respect it.

Therefore, I’m not entirely surprised that Charles L. Hughes, a dwarf (do we say suffers from dwarfism now? I don’t have time to check) who has written extensively about black culture and music in the south, should choose Bushwick Bill as the subject of a scholarly treatise.

Put aside for a moment that this is written in the sort of garbage-language doublespeak that clogs modern academia the way someone once deliberately clogged every toilet on the female floor of Dodds Hall, and recognize some of the truths behind it. Bill was a dwarf in a genre that valued masculine power and strength above all else. He tried to kill himself, failed, then used it as the subject of his work. He never shied from a confrontation, either with his rapping adversaries or with himself.

In other words, he was Alexander Pope.

Pope, whom I studied with attention in school when I wasn’t busy playing “Gimme Three Steps” at top volume through my Gibson Skylark at midnight, was a dwarf in an 18th Century genre — public discourse — that also valued machismo. He would challenge, insult, and humiliate his opponents via the Dunciad and the Letter to Arbuthnot. He called people out for being weak, cowardly, faithless, gay, trans (I kid you not), and many other things. His most vocal opponent, the sexually fluid and loathsome Lord Hervey, publicly opined that he would have Pope slain out of hand by his servants, except it was a greater punishment to let him live.

When a road was bulldozed through his modest property, Pope dug a tunnel beneath it and entertained guests in his “grotto”; Samuel Johnson wrote that he “had made an ornament of an inconvenience.” Although he primarily survives to normies in a misunderstanding of his famous “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” Pope was a giant among poets, philosophers, and men of his time. He has been the subject of a thousand scholarly books and many more dissertations.

So. Why is Pope the combative dwarf worthy of all this work, both him and said work taken seriously from Oxford, England to Oxford, Ohio, while Bushwick Bill gets one volume that probably elicits either chuckles or outright contempt from most serious men? Good question.

Once upon a time, we had “high culture” and “low culture”. High culture was the province of the noble, the clerics, the people who mattered. Low culture was everyone else. Most of what we know about the past, particularly everything more than two hundred years old, comes from high culture. It was all that got written down, because writing was a difficult and expensive proposition. Surely there were a million songs and stories and plays of which we know nothing because they were popular among the proles and the illiterate.

Once everybody learned how to read, and especially once they had the ability to record their own media, low culture acquired some permanence. Five hundred years from now, you’ll be able to find Bushwick Bill’s work as easily as that of Rachmaninoff or Philip Glass. Just like this blog will be about as archived, or non-archived, as the work of distinguished public intellectuals and the “Hoodville” Instagram account.

This newly-acquired equality of distribution has led a lot of academics to turn away from their normal discussion of Pope or Mozart or Monet in favor of a focus on Toni Morrison or Little Richard or that one idiot who does the giant balloon dogs, can’t remember his name. There are solid reasons for this, at least on the surface.

To begin with: as my old faculty mentor and disciplinary-committee secret weapon Edward Tomarken used to tell me, criticism competes with the text, it doesn’t merely comment on it. When you read noted moron Greil Marcus’s meandering fecal drippings regarding Van Morrison or Bob Dylan, you’re giving him some of the headspace that you would normally reserve for the musicians. He is feeding off that. It elevates him. As a musician, Lester Bangs wasn’t. As a kingmaker of rock, he made it into movies. You get the idea.

It’s uncharitable, but undoubtedly correct, that competing with the work of less-intelligent, or less-educated, or less-acculturated people is simply easier. It is easier to come up with memorable critical insights into Bushwick Bill than it would be to do so for Prokofiev. And you have less competition among the academics, as well. It’s virgin territory.

But there is also the raw fact that academic work about prole shit is often more valuable to posterity than further rumination on the top-shelf stuff. You can make the argument that our culture needs some thoughtful discussion about the media and art that 95% of the people are consuming. That to do so otherwise consigns them to a little death (not “the little death”, that something else) where they and their cherished media simply cease to exist after a nasty, brutish, and short interval.

Which should lead me to Shakespeare, the value of balancing high with low, and the idea that complexity is the only moral-neutral virtue that matters. But that will have to wait, because as the low-culturists of REO Speedwagon once said, it’s time for me to fly.

Since this is an open thread day, feel free to discuss something besides the above. Enjoy the typos; like Johnson with his famous essay on procrastination, written as the messenger waited, I shall not read it twice.