By JASMINE MAHMOUD
Published online: November 19, 2009

Issue 2 Sneak Peak. Despite our best efforts, The Arts Politic Issue 2: Bias is not yet published. It *soon* will be. (*A few weeks, fingers crossed). In this interim, we intend to sustain arts political dialogue with sneak peaks of content from the upcoming issue. Thank you for your engagement, and please let us know your thoughts.

I just got schooled in Miley. For the upcoming print edition of The Arts Politic (we promise, it’s coming!), I interviewed Mr. Pop Culture,  Joshua Clover. Clover is a UC Davis professor, poet, cultural critic, contributor the Village Voice, former senior writer for Spin and author. Clover’s new book 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About, presents a lyrical history and analysis of pop music during “the end of history” era. Here is the publisher’s description:

In a tour de force of lyrical theory, Joshua Clover boldly reimagines how we understand both pop music and its social context in a vibrant exploration of a year famously described as “the end of history.” Amid the historic overturnings of 1989, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, pop music also experienced striking changes

I wanted TAP to feature 1989 for a bunch of reasons: for its arts/major political moment context, to better understand how pop music/culture is historically recorded and to elucidate a positioning of commerical/pop music within arts.  I also wanted to use 1989 and the year 1989 as to glean Clover’s thoughts on pop culture today, twenty years later, when current chart toppers like Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Jonas Brothers seem so removed from political currents.  But Joshua disagrees with my take on Miley and others. Here’s the sneak peak.

JASMINE: Of the rave scene, you write “But apolitics is a politics — a fact that is always with us.”  This statement seems very true today when current chart toppers like Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus produce content devoid of political consciousness, and further when there seems to be a huge split between apolitical pop music, and political music that brews beneath the surface. Do you agree? How does 1989 help us understand the current placement of the (a)political pop musician, and the often political “underground” musician?

JOSHUA CLOVER: Here we may have a real disagreement. I will start by saying that I am a big fan of Miley Cyrus’s current single, and of Taylor Swift in general; I actually wrote about her on my blog three years ago, and it was obvious to me then she would be a huge star. I must say I am largely indifferent to the question of “political consciousness”; for my own thinking, I am interested in the ways that politics inheres to pop exactly in ways other than evident consciousness: the sounds, the way it circulates thorugh social space, the uses that people make of it. One would say that Roxette’s “Listen To Your Heart” is devoid of political consciousness, and the author would probably say so too. But it was still Vaclav Havel’s campaign song, and it was still the #1 song in the west on the day the Wall fell, meaning it was a choice people wanted to make in that situation.

When I say “apolitics” is a politics, I am not at all chiding pop. I mean that when Jesus Jones says, basically, I am not going to hold forth on the political significance of this moment, in fact I am going to refuse to do so, I am just going to sit here and experience the intensity of the instant — well, that’s a political decision.

I would add, as a last caveat, that Miley’s current single (“Party in the USA”) seems eminently political, exactly in its attunement to markets. It’s a country-based track that announces that her favorite song is by Jay-Z, and moreover that takes its basic architecture from the rapper Nelly’s “Ride wit’ Me.” It may be that the only point is to expand her demographic. It may be that you take compositional ideas where you find them. But there’s no way it’s not political.