Nonfiction
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Unfortunately, such an intense time in U.S. history has been rendered dull by the author. His strenuous effort at encyclopedic objectivity is commendable but a little more three-dimensionality would have helped bring this exciting and often gut-wrenching age to life. The populace remains at best a faceless blob reduced to mere statistics. Even the strongest personalities, like the outspoken Douglass, the fiery Democrat orator William Jennings Bryan, Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt, are described only in terms of their stances on legislation. Notorious binge drinker and alleged anti-Semite Grant, one of our most colorful presidents, once got a speeding ticket for riding his horse and buggy too fast through D.C. Sadly none of that, whether fact or legend, is mentioned in this book. Instead, we get a whitewashed Grant—a sober, taciturn administrator who is either loathed or loved by those in his immediate circle strictly for his positions on matters like currency reform. What did the black community really think of the Gilded Age presidents? How were they perceived by religious factions in the North and South? What did the populace think of them, and not just through poll numbers but events and anecdotes? Surely something as sexy-sounding as the Whiskey Ring, a Republican scandal, caused a stir in the citizenry outside the nation’s financial districts and nominating convention war rooms. The women in the presidents’ lives, even when they’re exerting direct influence, are most often nameless “wives” given little more than a polite tip of the hat from the author as he passes them by. For the record, Grant’s wife was named Julia Boggs Dent and she was the daughter of a slave owner. Before the Civil War, Grant happily made use of his father-in-law’s slaves and even bought one of them. The Grants were scheduled to attend Ford’s Theatre with the Lincolns on the night of President Lincoln’s assassination but canceled because Julia had gotten into a tiff with Lincoln’s wife, Mary Ann Todd. None of this is mentioned in the book. President Rutherford B. Hayes’s wife, Lucy Webb, the first First Lady with a college degree, was an ardent abolitionist who convinced her pro-slavery husband to accept her views and change his political position. None of this is mentioned in the book. Overall, the work is a near miss. The central lesson seems to be simply that there’s nothing new in American politics. If its purpose is to document presidential decision-making in the late 19th century, it’s a handy reference. If its intent is to bring the oft-forgotten Gilded Age to life for the average reader, it’s best left on the shelf. ©2010 by The Brooklyn Rail. All rights
reserved.
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Nonfiction
The Sheikh’s Batmobile takes a step in the right direction, focusing on how U.S. pop culture, especially punk, heavy metal, and hip-hop, impacts upon and co-mingles with the cultures of the Middle East. The author is a Canada-based, white, South African journalist and director of music videos and commercials; he has a particularly keen eye and ear for the U.S.’s cultural influences, having been raised on a full diet of it himself. During his two years of travels, Poplak dines with the Muslim world’s top TV moguls and their surgically-perfect wives one week, and slums it with Palestinian rappers in bombed-out apartment buildings the next. From the titular sheikh—who will spare no expense to three custom-built Batmobiles from the eras of Adam West, Michael Keaton, and Christian Bale—to self-mutilating, Indonesian punk rockers slam dancing in their Doc Martens, to screaming metaliens at an Egyptian death metal music festival, Poplak takes readers on a frenzied, colorful journey. He finds pretty much what he expected: that they love us, they really love us. Still, his anecdotes are alternately amusing and tragic. Despite the ever-present danger of embracing all things American, Dewa frontman Ahmad Dhani, “Indonesia’s Bono,” is such a devout worshipper of U.S. culture that he waxes downright eschatological: “[W]hat you call pop culture, this will save us. It’s very easy to make this place more Western. We need more good Hollywood movies. Otherwise we are finished. We are lucky here. We have malls, movies, music. It is a start. It will be hard to topple that. I often thank God for these things.” To his great credit, Poplak does his damnedest not to seem condescending, or to paint his host countries as quaint or backward. In Indonesia, where the punk scene is apparently the number-one youth subculture, “Western pop has...been ransacked for what worked... It’s tempting to call the Indonesian way imitative but that wouldn’t be quite right, because it’s absorbative—Indonesian punk is punk...as Indonesian an art form as it is an American or British one.” The reader can also take comfort in feeling that
the writer knows his stuff, and didn’t stop his prep
work at back issues of Rolling Stone or the
often incomplete allmusic.com. “[My] iPod was no
stranger to rap made by Muslim artists. The subgenre
took shape in France’s riot-ridden banlieues where
young immigrants found corollaries between their
situation and that of blacks in urban |
North America. From there it spread to Lebanon...Hip-hop had also made it to North Africa where Moroccan rappers like Salah Edin (who raps furiously in the Moroccan dialect of Darija) built a hardcore local fan base.” In another instance, Poplak doesn’t just tell you that Tupac is popular in Palestine; he looks under the hood to tell you what makes the engine purr. “Tupac’s legend runs deep: his mother was one of twenty-one Black Panthers arrested in 1969 under suspicion of planning terrorist activities. She had links to the Nation of Islam, her adopted last name is a derivative of the Arabic shukran meaning ‘thank you,’ or in this case, ‘thanks to God.’ In prison, she wrote a rather uncompromising epistle to her captors promising ‘a war—a true revolutionary war—a bloody war. And we will win.’” However, the author’s historical leaps to depict a world in which everyone can trace their musical roots to Islam would make Evel Knievel envious. “Hip-hop traces back definitively to the rhythm of Qur’an recitation,” he tells us without a blink. “Its poetic cadences, when properly rendered, are both sharp-edged and liquid...It flows...The Qur’an means, literally, ‘recitation’: it is meant to be performed, called from the ramparts.” That means it can be claimed as hip-hop’s grandma? The much older poetry of the Vedas and Upanishads was also meant to be spoken and sung. Does this mean one can claim that punk rock traces back definitively to Hinduism? Unlikely. It is also disappointing that music other than punk, heavy metal, and hip-hop is ignored. Poplak’s smugness in differentiating these musical subcultures from what he apparently considers inconsequential is embarrassing at times. Visiting the Crusader castle Krak des Chevaliers in Syria, he tells us with an eye roll that “a stage had been set up for a French/Syrian jazz concert promoting ‘dialogue’—a quaint, officially sanctioned piece of cultural back and forth far removed from the trenches.” Jazz music isn’t pop culture, despite its roots in the African-American experience, alongside hip-hop? Aside from a mocking examination of superstar Lionel Richie’s popularity in Libya and a fleeting allusion to the legendary Johnny Cash, the international popularity of mainstream American pop music feels oddly cast aside. Poplak eventually leaves music behind and introduces the reader to controversial and wildly-popular talk show host Zaven Kouyoumdjian, Lebanon’s father of reality TV who once had a deaf guest host speak in sign language with deaf guests before an all-deaf studio audience, a huge hit with viewers. Explains Zaven, “So once a year you don’t understand the TV. Big deal.” But, the author infers that “[i]n deliberately staging a show that is incomprehensible to most of his audience, Zaven was posing a punk-like query: we are talking, but are we saying anything that counts?” Here Poplak makes the same mistake as Greil Marcus, seeing only a world in which all roads lead to and from punk. Has he never heard of Theatre of the Absurd? A glaring omission throughout the book is the influence of the East on North America’s own pop culture, which is then fed back to them, and back again to us. The book feels stuck in a monologue rather than a dialogue. We may not have our antidote to all the biased books on U.S. pop culture until an Eastern-born Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, or Hindu writes a book in Arabic, Hindi, or Farsi about how fascinating and quaint and “absorbative” we North Americans are in our appropriation of Eastern mores. ©2010 by The Brooklyn Rail. All rights reserved. |