koganbot | (Reply)

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Yeah, Nitsuh can be very frustrating. He'll take a genuinely worthy stance and then stop dead. I remember reacting to a post of his on Kreayshawn in the same way you reacted to his Vampire Weekend post.

But I'll note first that it wasn't Nitsuh who asked a question explicitly, it was you, on this thread, a few days ago: "Why [does] this game get played?" And second, it's the sort of question I've been asking and answering for 45 years, scores of times, maybe hundreds. And I'll bet that right now you yourself could map out an answer to the question in about 200 words. I don't think the thread we're on right now should become a vehicle for me to rewrite "Death Rock 2000" and "The Death Of The Cool" etc. etc. etc. But, for instance, see my response to John Wójtowicz back in WMS #4, which I reprinted in Real Punks (chapter 17), where I quote LeRoi Jones* actually using the word "one-upmanship":

Heroin is the most popular addictive drug used by Negroes because, it seems to me, the drug itself transforms the Negro's normal separation from the mainstream of society into an advantage (which, I have been saying, I think it is anyway). It is one-upmanship of the highest order... The terms of value change radically, and no one can tell the "nodding junkie" that employment or success are of any value at all.

(Obv. "my" answers draw on other people's, e.g., Jones', Lester Bangs', Lou Reed's. And my "answers" won't speak for every aspect of everyone's participation in those games Nitsuh decries, but they do at least draw a picture of the psychosocial background within which the supposed one-upmanship makes sense.)

So I simply don't buy your contention that rockwrite asks explicit questions that it never answers. A lot of people botch the questions, but the ones who ask 'em right also give pretty good answers. There aren't enough of us, and most social analysis within rockwrite doesn't get much beyond posturing. But not all social analysis, all the time. (And I've not been keeping up with Nitsuh, but who's to say he hasn't returned more deeply to the subject he fumbled on his Tumblr?)

*Don't know whether he prefers having his old work cited as by LeRoi Jones or Amiri Baraka; one of my editors suggested that it was the former, so that's what I went with.