Love and Anger in the Commonwealth

Thanks to Topspun’s post about Paolo Virno and other recent books of theory at his Seven Red blog, I just started reading Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s new book, Commonwealth. In this book, they explore what a viable ethics might look like in an era of postmodern globalization – an era they called Empire with a capital “E” in their earlier book Empire, which was an international bestseller nine years ago. I haven’t got very far into the new book yet, because I just bought it yesterday on the way home from work, and because I should be grading a ton of papers right now, not reading stuff for fun… and then also, because something they wrote got me to looking up stuff on the internet instead of reading further. Yes, yes, that’s right, I was procrastinating, but anyway, what they wrote is that the two central concepts of the book are “poverty” and “love,” and of course they define love not in terms of the bourgeois romantic love between two people that leads to marital bliss and the white picket fence in a capitalist economy, but in terms of the production of commonalities and social life that leads to a radical interrogation of — and resistance to — the privations of capitalism… and that leads to a breaking down of the white picket fence and to a sharing of the common wealth.

In some ways, I like this starting point, but I couldn’t help but wonder about love as a central concept for a revolutionary political project. What about its opposite, anger and hate? So, just for fun, I did three searches on Amazon.com, first “love” and then “anger” and “hate.” Not surprisingly, most of the titles that came up for all three words were “self-help” books, which I’ve heard is one of the most profitable genres in bookstores these days. Also not surprisingly, the books that came up for love were all about expressing love, finding the right love, and even love’s utility (or use value, which I throught was a bit odd), etc. In contrast, the books that came up for anger were all about controlling, repressing, overcoming, and transcending anger. And this is not surprising since for Christians, love is good, while both anger and hate are bad. To put it another way, we are supposed to transcend anger and hate, but we are not supposed to transcend love. Love is the path to transcendence, enlightenment, civility, social life, and so on.

But what if we flip this? Isn’t it possible that sometimes love can be bad, and sometimes anger and hate can be good? Consider that love can sometimes lead one into self-destructive attachments and mistaken identifications. Consider too that there are lot of injustices in the world that one ought to be angry about and hate. In fact, not being angry about injustice is (one might say) a sign that you are ethically dead. And one can imagine two people coming together in love after first discovering a shared hatred of social injustice. So, I’m curious what a book whose starting point is anger and hate might look like. Are anger and hate ever ethical?… What about rage? What would a book by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt that began with “rage and wealth” as its central concepts instead of “poverty and love” look like?

Perhaps it’s better that their starting points are love and poverty, but it’s hard for me not to consider anger when I start thinking about all the injustices of global capitalism (e.g., sweatshops, slavery, sexual abuse, destruction of the environment, war, etc.) I got to thinking about starting points a few days ago after watching the movie Examined Life, which just came out on DVD. This movie interviews a number of very different philosophers and theorists: Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, and Sunaura Taylor…  and also Michael Hardt. The director of the film presents each of them with two prompts. The first is a statement by Socrates that “the unexamined life isn’t worth living,” and the second is the notion of taking philosophy out of the university and putting it in the streets. (This is inspired, I suppose, by the Greek notion of philosophy as a paripatetic endeavor — i.e., philosophy while walking, philosophy as movement — and so all of the philosophers in the movie are walking around somewhere as they talk.) What’s nice about this film is that it offers undergraduates an image of some of today’s biggest names in philosophy talking about stuff they see as they walk around like ordinary people in the world. What is disappointing about the film is that none of them are making philosophical arguments with any depth or rigor. And none of them explain how their approach might differ from another philosopher’s approach, so the stakes of their points of view are never clear. Also, most of them rarely engage with their environment in any significant way, so ultimately what we-the-audience are left with is something that’s not really philosophy and not really in the streets.

However, what I find most useful about this film is not what they are saying but their starting points and where each philosopher chose to situate himself or herself. If I were to teach this in  a classroom, that’s what I would ask all my students to pay attention to and compare/contrast. A public park? an airport terminal? shops on the street? I think the choices of location by the analytic philosophsers (Nussbaum, Appiah, and Singer respectively) reveal how unimaginative, boring, and (at the end of the day) less useful their senses of ethics are. In contrast, Hardt’s choice is beautifully ironic, since he is rowing a boat around a pond in New York’s central park while talking about his experience meeting communists in El Salvador who understood revolution in terms of guns and struggle against oppression. His choice illuminates what’s hard about thinking about a revolution that would connect both locations, and I thought this choice was more honest and less trite than if he had walked around an impoverished neighborhood and expressed love for random homeless people (as the concepts “love” and “poverty” in his book Commonwealth might suggest he would do.) Even better than Hardt is Zizek, who begins by walking around piles of trash in a dump — in other words, if we really want to examine ourselves as Socrates says we should, we need to start with our shit. And perhaps even better than Zizek is Butler, who begins by taking a walk and talking with someone with a severe disability. In other words, in contrast to all of the other philosophers in the movie, Butler starts with dialogue rather than with monologue. And she also starts with doing something that is so easy for most of us that we might take it for granted, but so difficult for the one she is talking to.

So… starting points… love and anger…. That is the question.

the loco local glocal

Recently, I was teaching a little introduction to the concept of globalization in my first-year-writing seminar, and one of the students said he was still a bit fuzzy on the concept of “glocal.” To explain this word, I started telling them about an essay I had just read by a student in one of my other classes about a small village in Africa whose economy is based on tourists who want to learn about a traditional African culture. In other words, the economy of this small village far away from any major city is intensely global, but the cultural tradition it supports is intensely local. Similarly, I could have my students read one of my previous blog posts here about the Masai market I visited in Kenya. This dynamic dialectic between local culture and global economy is what I wanted my students to pay attention to, because mainstream journalism usually represents culture inaccurately in static, essentialist terms.

What I realized when I left the classroom is that I had located the “glocal” in the third world. This was, perhaps, a mistake of mine, since my students may leave the classroom thinking that glocality is something that happens elsewhere. But we can also see the glocal down the road in any American town. If you walk into your average Wal-Mart, you will see men and women buying up clothing, guns, and other commodities that are all part of an intensely felt local American identity. The most extreme examples, I suppose, are cowboy boots, country music, hunting equipment (often worn indoors when they aren’t even hunting), and Harley-Davidson motorcycle stuff (not the actual motorcycles, but T-shirts, vests, and badges with Harley logos that all present the feeling of “American.”) Ironically, everything sold in Wal-Mart is made in China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, El Salvador, and other countries, not in the U.S.A. Wal-Mart is one of the largest and most ruthless multinational corporations in the world, but it is precisely the low prices it offers that enable people to buy so many expressions of “local” country culture.

The thing to notice here is this. The more that the Wal-Mart economy globalizes and moves factories and capital all around the world, the more working-class Americans react to the uncertainties of global economics by grasping onto what they feel is a distinctly “American” culture. I mean, seriously, who needs cowboy boots? This American culture and the commodification of American patriotism is illusory, of course, and is often made-up. There’s nothing especially traditional about the kind of country music that gets played on the radio in the mid-West, because it sounds more like 80s pop and 60s rock than authentic 40s country, but I often hear Minnesotans blasting pop music about the hills of Arkansas. Ironically, Wal-Mart’s headquarters is in Arkansas, so maybe that’s oddly appropriate, though I doubt most of the people sporting conferate flags and blasting “country” pop in their pickup trucks in central Minnesota are aware of that. What they are doing is affirming a somewhat racist attachment to their “roots,” even though they are (paradoxically) expressing their roots through a globally produced commodity culture. In a sense, their self-expression is an unconscious attempt to resist the negative effects of global capitalism (job losses, low wages, etc.), but is clearly an attempt that will fail to achieve much of anything except a vacuous pride and an insidious racism. So, in conclusion, the glocal is local – it’s right here, all the time — and it is sometimes a bit crazy (or loco, as the many Mexican-Americans who live and work down the street from the Wal-Mart in my town might say in Spanish.)

On the flip side, we can raise a reverse critique of the fake cosmopolitanism of the liberal elite, who love their Japanese sushi, their Indian yoga, their Australian wines, and their boutique coffees from Ethiopia, Brazil, and Sumatra (pretending they can taste the difference between the various coffee beans even though the roasting process affects the flavor more than its location.) This too is a cultural expression, an effort to fabricate an identity out of the many globally produced commodities. In contrast to the invention of an intensely local “country” identity, this is the invention of an intensely global “cosmopolitan” identity. The university tends to endorse this cosmpolitan identity because it believes students will be better prepared to succeed in a dynamic, global economy. However, this identity is just as fabricated (almost pre-fabricated) as the “county” one.

In my view, the real question is how to truly confront the global economy, resist its evils, build on its goods, and work towards a more just and equitable society. It seems to me that the glocal nature of postmodern cultural identities is often more a symptom of our capitalist economy’s paradoxes (like a runny nose is a symptom of the common cold virus) than it is a viable culture that might enable people to ethically engage with the world in which they live.

Interracial Marriage, Chasing the Empty Balloon

I’m guessing that everyone who reads this blog is aware of two news stories from yesterday: the one that dominated the television networks for hours and hours about the boy who turned out not to be in the balloon floating 7000 above the earth, and the other that dominated the alternative internet sites about the judge in Louisiana whose policy it is to deny interracial couples a marriage license. My guess is that most would see these two stories as opposites — one the kind of hyped bizarre-ness common on Fox News, the other the serious, social issue addressed by the progressive Hungtington Post. But are they really so different? 

This morning, NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! show’s criticism of the balloon-boy episode was predictable — the oft-repeated criticism that networks devote hours and hours of air time and labor to this absurd story and ignore all the important news such as in-depth analysis of the American economy or the on-going crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I’ve written about this standard lament about journalism before [here]. Of course, nobody would be saying this if it turned out that the boy actually were in the balloon and died. It’s only the emptiness of the balloon that symbolizes the emptiness (and “hot air”) of the stories that the media tends to chase and the consuming public tends to eagerly follow. And who can blame the networks since their ratings went up as all of America together chased this empty balloon? Hipper-than-thou indie-rockers everywhere must be penning lyrics about it as I write this.

In contrast, the websites about the racist judge all express almost unanimous outrage that something like this could still be happening in 21st century America. One can imagine someone saying that this is the kind of important news that the TV networks should be covering instead of the balloon boy. And one can also imagine Northerners muttering under their breath the standard stereotypes about the racist South – a stereotype that my fellow blogger Dr. J has worked hard [here] to complicate and dispell. After all, in support of Dr. J, it’s clear from the Associated Press report that Louisianans themselves are just as outraged at this judge as other people in the country. And where was the national outrage when swastikas appeared in the dormitories of St. Cloud State U. in Minnesota or the lives of black student leaders were verbally threatened at Penn State?

The issue of race and racism in American continues to be important, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. Being in an interracial relationship myself, this is something I care about. But the media does not really cover race – even when it pretends to cover it. Instead, it chases empty balloons, easy appeals to the mass public by presenting the judge whose extreme racism we can all define ourselves against. What I want to point out here is that the Associated Press never mentions what legal precedent the judge might be applying to this case. In the judge’s own mind, his policy is not only reasonable but also supported by the local black community. And we probably ought to assume that the judge — being a judge – had some legal principle in mind. Based on the judge’s answers to the journalist’s inquiry, my guess is that he is applying the “best interest of the child” rule that guides all no-fault divorce cases, and I will speak more about that in a moment.

In my opinion, the journalist should have mentioned what legal standard was being applied here, but doing so would have forced us to think about the legal system at large rather than just the racism of the individual judge. It always surprises me when journalists fail to do their homework, though I suppose it shouldn’t. I remember being interviewed once, and I discovered that the journalist only wanted a one-sentence statement of how I felt about the issue. I told the journalist that if he just looked at this publicly available website he could find all the documents and evidence he needed to expose the truth about the situation he was covering. He said he wasn’t interested in that, just in my feeling. He was obviously a young journalist, just a year out of college, so I pressed him why, and he said that’s what he learned in journalism school — to find the human angle…. the empty balloon.

Back to the “best interest of the child” rule. Although the judge is clearly applying that rule innappropriately, it is a rule that (when appropriately applied) might seem perfectly reasonable to everyone. In the case of divorce, the judge has to decide which parent the child should be with, and so the judge generally decides what’s in the best interest of the child. Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? But, as Jane Juffer discusses in great detail in chapter five of her book Single Mother: The Emergence of a Domestic Intellectual (2006), feminist lawyers have for years challenged the rationality of this rule by demonstrating how “best-interest” is a culturally constructed notion that tends to be merged with notions of what’s normal. In other words, judges everywhere have tended to use this rule to discriminate against ambitious women, women in interracial relationships, homosexuals, and even women who choose to live in cooperative arrangements rather than in the “normal” nuclear arrangement with the white picket fence and dog in the back yard. The belief that guides this rule is that “normal” is better for the child, and lawyers can easily find simplistic sociological and psychological studies to back them up. In such studies, other sociologists and legal scholars have discerned an inherent bias — that the very standard of “normalcy” is the stumbling block for parents and couples, not anything unnatural about their alternative choices. More methodologically rigorous sociological and psychological studies present a more complex picture and suggest alternatives to a narrowly defined normalcy. We should be thinking critically about how to change our society and live better lives, not just thinking pragmatically about how to follow the given cultural codes, which remain racist as well as nuclear and individualistic. And while the judge appeals to his “black friends” who he claims agree with his policy, we should have the courage to (1) challenge his black friends for buying into a racist culture and (2) recognize the diversity of voices and successful lifestyles within any local community. Such standards of normalcy usually reign (hegemonically) wherever we are, especially within the liberal, academic community that imagines itself to be more open but in reality is not.

My point here is that the story about the racist judge and the balloon boy are both empty balloons that trigger emotions and may even address an important issue but ultimately allow us to avoid dealing honestly with our own anxieties and with the systemic injustices within our society.

Ethiopia and Historiography

Just this weekend, I finished reading a couple of books about Ethiopia by two of the most respected historians of that region who seem to me to approach the study of Ethiopian history in two different ways. One is Donald N. Levine’s Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society, first published in 1974 by The University of Chicago Press at the same time as Ethiopia’s first revolutionary war. A second edition with a new preface was published in 2000. The other book is Mohammed Hassen’s The Oromo of Ethiopia, 1570 – 1860, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1990 at the same time as Ethiopia’s second revolutionary war, and republished by Red Sea Press in 1994. Notably, Levine’s addendum to his bibliography in his second edition mentions Hassen’s book as one of the top five important books published on Ethiopia since his first edition.

In my view, Hassen’s book does a better job answering two of the questions that Levine raises: (1) what constitutes “greater” Ethiopian culture and society, and (2) why were “the Oromo able to defeat the Amhara so regularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Both books are rigorous and brilliant, and both are controversial in how they challenged the scholarly community of Ethiopianists to revise their understanding of Ethiopian history and society, and in some ways, Levine’s book broke a path for Hassen’s.  Obviously, in some ways they are similar, in some ways very different. I would characterize Levine’s book as an idealist historiography whose understanding is simultaneously holistic and wholistic in a way that fails to fully account for the contradiction between a wholistic and a holistic understanding of culture. In contrast, I would characterize Hassen’s book as rigorously materialist in its approach, and I argue that this approach gives us a sturdier understanding of the social forces at work.

What do I mean by holistic and wholistic? To be fair to Levine, his project was arguably more difficult – theorizing and describing the whole of Ethiopian history – while Hassen focuses solely on how the Oromo emerged as a powerful political and commercial entity by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Levine describes his approach as holistic, meaning that he emphasizes the interplay of a multitude of social forces and protean, hybrid cultural identities in contrast to a single master narrative of history that would single out one social structure and/or cultural identity as representative of the totality of social, political, and economic relations. In particular, he attends to the interplay of several “cultural codes” and “social institutions” that contribute to a social system that is “greater” (as in his title “greater Ethiopia”) than the sum of its parts. So far, so good; I appreciate what he was up to theoretically,  despite a lot of the problematic details of his narrative.  Ultimately, he was attempting to recognize all of the cultural contributions to the Ethiopian state in a way we might today call “multicultural” “pluralistic” and “liberal,” and he did so at precisely the moment (1974) when the possibility of a truly multiethnic state seemed within reach. But herein lies the real problem, and perhaps what I have to say about the problem with Levine’s argument may also suggest why his image of a multiethnic state did not emerge after the 1974 revolution, and instead the ruthless and bloody totalitarian Derg regime did. It seems to me that Levine’s holistic approach depends upon a wholistic approach. What I mean by wholistic here, since Levine himself never uses the term, and since I’m kind of making it up, is an assumption about a national wholeness. In other words, the purpose of Levine’s book is to prove how multiethnic social forces led to Ethiopia’s integrity as a nation, but his argument tautologically assumes Ethiopia’s essential wholeness beforehand (that is to say, a priori).

There is a lot to Levine’s book, and I don’t have time or space to discuss it all here, but his argument is essentially that the interaction between the Amhara-Tigrean culture and the Oromo culture is what produced and developed the modern Ethiopian nation state. Levine formulates this as the “Amhara thesis” and the “Oromo antithesis,” out of which an “Ethiopian synthesis” emerges. The Amhara-Tigrean political structure along with its providentialist Christian ideology contributed a durable imperial political system. In other words, their translation of the Hebrew Bible into a national Ethiopian script (the famous Kibre Negest) that claimed a divine genealogy and the right to conquer others along with their hierarchical political structure and individualistic social habits enabled a strong political system. But they could not have accomplished an Ethiopian state on their own. The Oromo’s egalitarian political structure and collective social habits not only enabled them to often defeat the technologically more advanced and politically more centralized Amhara, but also contributed to the absorption of the smaller ethnic groups and the integration of the expanding trade networks. The Oromo political structures and cultural practices were adaptive and integrative in ways that the Amhara were not.

Why I call Levine’s book idealist is that it characterizes two cultures as two conflicting ideals whose resolution resulted in yet another ideal, the nation state. Though he calls it holistic because it recognizes the many political, social, and cultural factors that had a role to play in the constitution of a “greater Ethiopia,” it is also clearly dialectical in the Hegelian style — thesis, antithesis, and synthesis – and it is idealistic in how it subsumes all of those political, social, and cultural factors to the ideal of a nation state. This is an ideal that Levine assumes rather than proves. What is problematic is that much of the Oromo society he describes currently lives in Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya – outside the borders of the modern Ethiopian state, borders that were somewhat arbitrary and are still contested. Notably, Levine includes Eritrea within “greater Ethiopia,” which was certainly the case when Levine published his book in 1974 but was only the case for a fairly short period of time, from 1950 to 1991. Many of the Oromo and other ethnic groups such as the Somali do not want to be a part of greater Ethiopia or feel exploited and oppressed by the Amhara-Tigrean system, and believe they would run their state differently. It is a bit troubling that the very factors that make the Oromo an “antithesis” in Levine’s formulation also make them a non-state (page 135) and “unsuited for political dominion” (page 155). Notionally, for Levine, they are the antithesis to statehood, which in my view is a problematic way to characterize the culture of any people, especially a people who have been politically oppressed for a long time and who have been struggling for their rights and for independent statehood. (For all of my blog posts about the Oromo, see here.)

In addition, and more importantly, I say that Levine’s book is idealist and wholistic because it leaves out a key event. The Amhara were able to dominate the region largely due to their strategic alliance with the European empires who supplied them with weapons in exchange for access to trade routes. It should be obvious to Levine why the Amhara “resurgence” happened in the 1870s and not at another time. Their so-called resurgence was in large part because of the French and British involvement, but in all his analysis of the many factors that led to the formation of Ethiopia at the end of the nineteenth century, Levine never once mentions Europe or the transformative effects of the Suez Canal that opened in 1869 immediately before the so-called resurgence occurred. Instead he writes: “Where the Oromo culture was fragile, Amhara culture was durable. Where the Oromo were inclined to associate with one another as equals, the Amhara were disposed to rule. The variables which led the Galla [the pejorative name for Oromo] to cooperation, acculturation, and interethnic affiliation led the Amhara to a resurgence of traditional political and religious culture and the establishment of a hierarchical order throughout Greater Ethiopia” (page 164). Levine admits that the Amhara also controlled the gun trade in an offhand remark in the last paragraph of his book (page 185), but he doesn’t acknowledge why they did. Levine’s blindness to outside forces is as much a methodological, historiographic blindness as it is an ideological one. If Levine had admitted contributing factors from outside of Ethiopia, his idealistic formulation of the nation would have fallen apart. In other words, his holistic interpretation of history depends on a wholistic notion of “greater Ethiopia.” As a result, he reads history backwards, assuming that the present conditions of the Amhara and Oromo in 1974 should be the organizing principle for their whole past.

Though Mohammed Hassen’s book, published sixteen years later, never discusses Levine’s book except for a citation or two in the endnotes, some points of his argument agree with Levine’s. For example, Oromo culture was more open to interethnic affiliation and integration. Hassen elaborates this in greater detail and hence provides a richer and better explanation of the Oromo success than Levine. Levine’s characterization emphasizes the Oromo character and what this meant militarily. In contrast, Hassen emphasizes the economy and the long, slow process of acculturation. The Oromo tended to adopt the people they conquered rather than merely exploit them (pages 47 and 58). Their system placed less emphasis on a Biblically inspired, racial genealogy, so the other tribes and ethnic groups could feel a part of the Oromo’s more open political system. Though neither Levine nor Hassen come out and say it, I believe this aspect of Oromo political culture helps explain why the Oromo became and still remain the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia (somewhere between 35 and 50% of the population depending on how the statistics are calculated) despite the efforts of the Amhara government under Emperor Haile Selassie to suppress and erase Oromo language and culture. Hassen’s methodological approach is also similar to Levine’s holistic approach that emphasizes the intermixing of cultures, economies, and political structures, and like Levine he also asserts that the Oromo system contributed to the integration of the economy when he points out that the Oromo language became the language of trade for some areas in the eighteenth century (page 161). It is these commonalities between Levine and Hassen that lead me to believe that Levine’s book paved the way for Hassen’s.

But Hassen’s differs in several important respects. First, Hassen never characterizes Amhara and Oromo culture in the idealist and culturally essentialist way that Levine does. Instead, he points out that political, cultural, and economic practices of all of the ethnic groups were usually contingent on a range of other factors and quickly transformed to adapt to changing circumstances. For instance, the Oromo were pastoralists when they were forced to migrate, but became agrarian when they settled, and commercial when they began to interact with the Arab trade networks. Their political institutions, cultural practices, and religious affiliations changed alongside these economic and political circumstances (pages 86-87). For instance, when the Oromo eventually took over the prosperous and powerful Ennarya kingdom in the seventeenth century – the Ennarya being an ethnic group that no longer exists because of the this takeover – they absorbed a lot of Ennarya’s economy in ways that were transformative for the whole region (for the Oromo, Ennarya, Amhara, and others.) To put it another way, Hassen’s argument does to Levine exactly what Karl Marx did to Hegel; he turns the dialectic off its idealist head and puts it firmly back on its materialist feet.

Second, he also shows (again dialectically) how a weakness can be a strength. Whereas Levine suggests that the Amhara system is more durable because of its will to domination, Hassen shows how the adaptive cultural practices of the Oromo and their adoptive political system (what Levine perceives as their weakness) ultimately makes them more “durable.”

Third, Hassen is always quick to point to external factors. For instance, one particular war between the Amhara Christians and the Muslims of Harar so weakened both sides that the Oromo were able to move in. Hassen’s historical narrative stops in 1860 at the point of the Amhara resurgence, but he indicates that the Amhara control of the gun trade and its strategic relationship with European empires facilitated the end of the Oromo domination of the Gibe region of Ethiopia, one of the richest and most fertile regions of the whole Horn of Africa. Other books continue the story of Ethiopia after 1860, namely Sisai Ibssa and Bonnie Holcolmb’s The Invention of Ethiopia, Asafa Jalata’s Oromia and Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict 1868 – 2004, and Harold Marcus’s two books, The Life and Times of Menelik II and Haile Selassie I: the Formative Years.

Fourth, and most importantly, Hassen doesn’t formulate the Oromo in problematically essentialist terms as the antithesis to nation building as Levine does but instead explains how the political systems and culture of all the ethnic groups in the region adapted to a changing economy. Hassen’s historical method is, in my view, ultimately more satisfying and convincing than Levine’s.

Most Important Albums of the 1990s

Yesterday, out of curiosity, I asked my students what they thought the most important albums of the 1990s were. And I guess I asked for two reasons. First, because I went to college between 1990 and 1994, so I’m curious what their generation thinks of my generation. Second, because my own appreciation of 1990s music has actually changed as I’ve grown. For instance, now I might include The Writing’s On the Wall (1999) by Destiny’s Child, not only because its hit single ”Say My Name” (below) is totally brilliant, but also because the album was important for the fusion of hip hop and R&B. But back when the album actually came out, I was less open-minded and would have been scornful of such mainstream pop.

The question, of course, as I’ve discussed before [here], is what criteria we use for defining “most important.” Is it some ineffable aesthetic quality? Its originality, innovation, or guts? Its influence on the music industry or the broader culture? Its enduring popularity? For instance, as I mentioned in my blog before, Madonna’s hit “Like a Virgin” had a huge effect in 1984, but I rarely hear it on the radio anymore compared to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” which came out the same year and which is still very popular (and which I totally love, though I wouldn’t have admitted to liking it so much back when it came out.)

In my view, Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind would be the number one most important album of the 1990s, because it single-handedly ended the reign of hair-metal and brought indie-rock into the mainstream. Also, every song on the album, not just the two hit singles, rocks, and it remains popular with younger generations today. But at the time, I was much more into another album that came out the same year, Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, which I would argue should be included. And other members of my generation might fondly remember R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People (1992) and Beck’s Odelay (1996). I would also argue that Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders (1993) should be at the top of the list for its brilliant poetics, jazz riffs, and serious themes. Perhaps because of those qualities, I think it did more to bring hip hop to a white, college-educated music consumer than any other hip hop album (kind of like what Bob Marley did for reggae.)

One of my students suggested Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill (1995), and though I never would have thought of that, I have to agree. I had just started a teaching position at a summer program for Japanese and Korean exchange students, and they all loved it. And globally, Ace of Bass’s Happy Nation (1993) was huge, as was the Spice Girls’s Spice (1996). There are some other groups such as Radiohead, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wu Tang Clan, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dog whose albums (one might argue) should be added, but I have to confess that I never personally got into their stuff. (I was more into the obscure indie-pop of Beat Happening and Sebadoh when I was in college, and am now more into the ethically and intellectually astute hip hop of Mos Def.)

Interestingly, the album that I listen to the most right now is The Score by the Fugees (1996), but I only started listening to it a couple years ago. “Ready or Not” (below) is one of the best songs ever, and quite a few women have told me how meaningful Lauryn Hill’s brilliant presence on – and departure from – that album was for them.

Someone asked me about the next decade, 2000 — 2010. I have in the past asked students about what they consider is their generation’s contribution to the development of popular culture. I know what my generation is — indie and hip hop. (See Jeff Chang’s excellent book on the hip hop generation. I don’t know if there’s a similarly excellent book on the indie scene. If someone knows, please tell me!!!) My students have speculated about the effect of the internet, iPods, and the FCC’s deregulation of radio in 1996 on the production and consumption of music. For sure, the telecommunications act of 1996 assassinated radio, and perhaps that is why few of my students feel they can strongly claim a distinct musical contribution, but indie rock was mostly distributed by an underground hand-to-hand passing around of bootleg cassette tapes, not the radio. And I have to wonder why it’s even possible that some of my students would claim The Beatles as their favorite band. I don’t mean to argue that the Beatles weren’t great, because I find that argument silly and pretentious, but come on!!! How could your favorite band be the same age as your grandparents? Move on!!!