Cash Still Rules: Wu-Tang Clan

[Doug Millison]

Rare moments when popular musicians, firmly entrenched in the star 
system or aspiring to be, have consciously used their power for 
subversion in any meaningful way.  Rap musicians whose songs fuel the 
sorts of concrete actions that Thomas E mentioned earlier and which 
jody mentioned, too, by lifting them up enshrined in productions of 
rococo proportions, would seem to be quite literally undercutting the 
foundations of their economic well-being, by attacking the very 
fabric of society; a few performers have credibly sustained such a 
stance, at all moments in the development of popular music over the 
past few hundred years. The truly dangerous players usually get 
knocked off early. By far the largest proportion of pop music in any 
genre is commercial pap played by poseurs, produced and distributed 
by cynics; the lowest common denominator is well named; but music is 
never totally tamed even in the most repressive regimes -- I think of 
the prole woman hanging out the laundry and singing the pop hit of 
the day in _1984_, "It was only an 'opeless fancy, It passed like an 
Ipril dye...." Pynchon is particularly strong in his depictions of 
the uses to which culture puts pop music, which are varied; clearly, 
he gets it on the liberating aspects of musical performance, at the 
personal and group levels, too.  I especially like his mature views 
on rock and roll and how it served the Reagan revolution, in 
Vineland, where the arc of Mucho's career speaks volumes.
-- 

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