Monthly Archives: September 2022

Chinas leaders have staked the countrys future on innovation. In its latest blueprint for national economic development, China has pledged to end its reliance on imported technology and to focus on domestic consumption as the primary driver of growth. At a conference in May for engineers and scientists, Chinese leader Xi Jinping urged greater self-reliance in science and technology, which would serve, he said, as the strategic support for national development.

Chinas drive toward technological independence has raised alarm bells in the West, where a resurgent China powered by a leading technology industry is widely considered the key strategic challenge of the 21st century. But these fears all too often fail to consider the internal obstacles facing Beijings push toward tech supremacy. Among them is one very low-tech problem: a prevailing sense of social and professional stagnation.

The drive toward self-reliance has encountered an unlikely form of resistance in a generation of young Chinese who balk at the Partys high-minded calls for continued struggle alongside an deeply engrained culture of overwork without the promise of real advancement. They opt instead for lying flat, or tangping (). The lying flat movement calls on young workers and professionals, including the middle-class Chinese who are to be the engine of Xi Jinpings domestic boom, to opt out of the struggle for workplace success, and to reject the promise of consumer fulfilment. For some, lying flat promises release from the crush of life and work in a fast-paced society and technology sector where competition is unrelenting. For Chinas leadership, however, this movement of passive resistance to the national drive for development is a worrying trenda threat to ambition at a time when Xi Jinping has made grand ambition the zeitgeist of his so-called New Era.

Lying flat is justice

The lying flat movement was jumpstarted in April when a post on Baidu titled Lying Flat Is Justice went viral on the platform. A manifesto of renunciation, the post shared the authors lessons from two years of joblessness. The extraordinary stresses of contemporary life, the author concluded, were unnecessary, the product of the old-fashioned mindset of the previous generation. It was possible, even desirable, he argued, to find independence in resignation: I can be like Diogenes, who sleeps in his own barrel taking in the sun. Discussions about lying flat picked up pace in May, as young Chinese, over-worked and over-stressed, weighed the merits of relinquishing ambition, spurning effort, and refusing to bear hardship.

On May 20, the Party-state media issued a series of simultaneous rebuttals. The creative contribution of our youth is indispensable to achieving the goal of high-quality development, Wang Xingyu, an official at the China University of Labor Relations wrote in the Guangming Daily. Attending to those lying flat, and giving them the will to struggle, is a prime necessity for our country as it faces the task of transitioning development. Nanfang Daily, the mouthpiece of Guangdongs CCP leadership, ran a page-four commentary expressing disgust over the notion of lying flat, concerned that talk of resignation might become a self-fulfilled prophecy. At any time, no matter what stage of development, struggle is always the brightest base color of youth, it said. In the face of pressure, choosing to lie flat is not only unjust, but shameful. There is no value whatsoever in this poisonous chicken soup. In a video that made the rounds online the same day, a commentator at the official Hubei Economic Television said in an admonishing tone: To accept misfortune is fine, but lying flat is not. This condescension was widely ridiculed across Chinese social media.

As state media made their position clear, the original April post on lying flat suddenly disappeared. The search function for lying flat on WeChat, where the word had still been trending, was disabled. On the Douban social networking service, a lying flat discussion group was also shut down. And on Taobao, the popular online shopping platform run by tech giant Alibaba, t-shirts related to lying down were pulled from online stores.

The social cost of innovation

Over the past decade, Chinas leadership has identified innovation as the way forward for economic and social development. The promise of innovation has been epitomized by Chinas tech entrepreneurs, including billionaire founders like Alibabas Jack Ma and Tencents Pony Ma. But the dream of innovation has collided with the harsh reality of overwork in a technology sector that seems sapped of opportunities for breakthrough. Jack Ma and others have advocated a severe culture of overtime work that has become known as 996working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. At the technology giant Huawei, this extreme work environment has been dubbed wolf culture, a climate of fierce internal workplace competition in which workers must either kill or be killed. Observers have drawn a straight line from 996 culture to the lying flat movement. Lying flat was spawned under the persecution of the 996 overtime culture, one writer argued on the Zhihu platform. We employees are too tired. We have to lie down and rest.

The lying flat movement isnt the first time Chinas tech workers have rebelled. In 2019, thousands of tech workers, including programmers and beta testers for major technology firms, responded to Chinas extreme working conditions by launching an online campaign called 996.ICUa mashup of 996 culture and intensive care unit referencing instances of programmers seeking emergency medical treatment for work-related health crises. 996.ICU began compiling a list of Chinese companies with extreme work cultures and advocated an industry consensus on reasonable hours.

While the campaign managed to focus some attention on the issue of extreme overwork, it could not shake the predominant culture in Chinas tech industry. Company bosses merely shrugged it off. Confronted with questions about 996 at a meeting that year, Jack Ma said, In this world, all of us want to be successful, all of us want a good life, and all of us want to be respected. I ask you, How can you achieve the success you want if you dont put in more effort and time than others? In a post to Alibabas WeChat account, Ma called the companys work culture a huge blessing.

Chinese tech executives embrace of extreme work culture find justification in the official Party narrative of tireless struggle in the service of Chinas global rise. But try as it might to drown out the growing despair among millennials and Generation Z, Chinas government will have to grapple with the social costs of breakneck competition in an environment of dwindling returns. And it will have to do more than repeat slogans of struggle and self-sacrifice to inspire the next generation of workers and innovators.

For Chinas young workers, the pressure to forge ahead and innovate is compounded by the pressure to consume. Before the new millennium, Chinese were culturally savers, and consuming on credit was exceptionally rare. It was generally supposed that conspicuous consumption was something unsuited to Chinas national conditions. Over the past decade, however, these assumptions have been turned upside-down. Chinese can now be counted among the worlds most conspicuous consumers.

The consumer boom has been fueled by government policies to encourage domestic consumption. Just eight years ago, in 2013, the government introduced consumer finance pilot programs that encouraged easy credit. These programs came alongside a tech-driven revolution in consumer payment, including the launch in 2013 of WeChat Pay, a digital wallet service connected to the all-purpose social media super-app that enabled users not just to make mobile payments but to transfer money to their contacts. By 2016 in China, barcode payment had been completely normalized, transforming mobile phones into virtual wallets. By 2019, the new trend was to link payment with facial recognition technology.

Fueled by technology and cheap credit, online shopping has exploded in China in recent years. During last years Singles Day shopping event, e-commerce giants including Alibaba and JD.com made $115 billion in sales. Alibabas sales alone doubled over the previous year. During the recent 618 online shopping event, total sales turnover on major Chinese e-commerce platforms reached nearly $90 billion, up more than 26% over 2020. (By comparison, independent sellers on Amazon took in $4.8 billion between Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year.)

Along with innovation, consumption is the second leg on which Chinas economic future is to stand. It was a telling fact last year when Chinas Premier, Li Keqiang, refrained from talking about GDP in his annual government work report, focusing instead on consumption. In a press conference after the release of the report, Li said that consumption is now the primary engine driving growth and indicated that the bulk of government stimulus funds would be applied to support the increase in peoples income through direct or relatively direct means in order to spur consumption and energize the market.

But as consumption has become a perceived necessity, a form of psychological reprieve from the pressures of work, and even a patriotic duty, some young Chinese have buckled under the immense pressure to keep up. Consumer debt has grown dramatically in China during Xi Jinpings New Era, in what one business analyst has called an unfolding debt crisis. The problems facing young borrowers, who have increasingly turned to online consumer finance providers, prompted Chinese regulators to issue a ban in March on new consumer loans to college students, who have frequently been targeted by providers with loans at interest rates sometimes nearly double the 24% allowed by regulations. Skyrocketing living costs in Chinas cities have also meant that many young Chinese, even with elite college degrees, find it difficult to cover the basics, much less afford a life of conspicuous consumption.

For young people struggling under the weight of both extreme competition and its would-be reward, the empty promise of consumerism, it can seem that there is no escape from exploitation. And in a society where more open forms of protest, such as labor activism, are quickly suppressed, they have found release, if not relief, in online expression. The lying flat movement, whose forums have drawn upwards of 200,000 members, is one example of this, and a slew of popular online terms have emerged to describe the sense of hopelessness. These include leek people and harvesting leeks, phrases that liken those caught in the struggle of work and consumption to leeks that are constantly harvested under the blade. Lying flat-ism, one Chinese journalist wrote on the Weibo platform, is a non-violent movement of non-cooperation by the leek people, and the most silent and helpless of actions. When one opts out of the cycle, or so the reasoning goes, it is no longer possible to be cut down, as the illustration below, appearing on Chinese social media in May, expresses. A harvest knife slashes vainly in the air as the plants below fold themselves down toward the earth. Leeks that lie down cannot be harvested so easily, the caption reads.

Lying flat-ism is seen by some as the only possible form of resistance to this cycle of exploitation. One of the dominant slogans of the lying flat movement has been, Dont buy property; dont buy a car; dont get married; dont have children; and dont consume. For this reason, calls to lie flat have doubly concerned Chinas leadership, as they threaten both to sap the country of the ambition to innovate and to knock down the second leg of the countrys long-term development strategythe drive to consume.

Rejuvenation, great and small

One lesson to emerge from the recent wave of attention to lying flat is that there are societal limits to the power of the Party-state to generate economic vibrancy and technological innovation through campaign-style approaches. These limitations can be overlooked or underestimated by the policy community in the West, as the dominance of the Party and the weakness of civil society encourages the perception of a monolithic command state capable of fulfilling its own policy wishes.

But even if they cannot be expressed openly as constraints on policy, the wishes of the Chinese people remain an important factorand the lying flat movement makes this clear. More Chinese hunger for basic dignity. In Chinas current political climate, however, dignity is something abstract, imagined only for the Chinese nation as it rises above the indignities of the 19th and 20th centuries to regain its rightful place in the 21st. In an April speech delivered shortly before the Lying Flat Is Justice post went viral, Xi Jinping encouraged the youth of China to constantly strive for the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

For many of Chinas young workers, struggling through a twelve-hour workday and bracing for the next loan payment, such sloganeering about rejuvenation may sound detached from the personal hope for renewalfor better pay, better working conditions and protections, and for more security. With or without anti-slogans like lying flat, the attitudes of Chinas white-collar workers seem to be changing. A recent survey by Zhao pin, a leading career platform in China, found that more than 80% of white-collar respondents cited fair treatment and respect by companies as the most important factor in company cultures. Workers generally rejected 996 and wolf culture, hoping instead for more balance and humanity.

In Xis China, however, where the Party and the state reign supreme, it has become virtually impossible to stand up for ones own rights and intereststo assert ones personal needs and desires over the grandiose ambitions of the national self. Lying flat is an answer, passive and desperate, to the dehumanizing nature of the struggle, both national and personal. Why should one stand for self-reliance, only to be cut down and harvested?

DavidBandurskiis the co-director of the China Media Project, a research program in partnership with the Journalism & Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong.

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The lying flat movement standing in the way of China ... - Brookings

When loss and grief mark you at a young age, how does it shape every aspect of your life, from your family to your understanding of truth and memory? These questions are central to Cassandra, the main character in Namwali Serpells sophomore novel, The Furrows.

When Cassandra is 12, her younger brother, 7-year-old Wayne, dies while in her care, taken by the sea with no body recovered. The death ruins Cassandras parents marriage. Her father finds a sense of solace in his new family, while her mother becomes obsessed with finding her missing child, even starting an organization dedicated to the cause. This disorienting and fracturing trauma causes Cassandra to become unmoored, which only intensifies into adulthood when she meets Wayne, who she believes could be her long-lost brother.

The talented author, whos also a Harvard English professor, made waves with her previous novel, The Old Drift, which won a slew of awards and landed on many best-of lists. By contrast, The Furrows is less sprawling and more intimate, examining grief and death while playing with time, dreams, parallel realities, and notions of the truth. Serpell also touches on race in America, incarceration, conflicting ideas of love, and the doppelganger effect.

Shondaland spoke with Serpell about the disorientation of grief; truth and lies; sexuality and desire; and the nature of storytelling and loss.

SARAH NEILSON: How did this story come into being? Was there a seed that led to this novel and these characters?

NAMWALI SERPELL: Yes, more clearly than for other novels that Ive written. I had a dream in 2008 or so, and in the dream I was out in the water swimming, and I was with a young boy. Probably my imagination was picturing my nephew Chedza, who was about 5 in 2008, and a storm picked up, and he was struggling out there in the water, and I was trying to swim him to shore. I woke up with a real sense of panic but also with an uncanny feeling that reminded me of dreams that Id had about my late sister, who died in 1999, and about whom I had a recurrent set of dreams in which she would try to convince me that she hadnt in fact died, but as the post-epigraph to my novel details, she would try to convince me that in fact she had just gone away on a long trip.

Proust presents this as a natural tendency of humans we dont really believe that someone has died; its very hard for us to fathom what death actually means. And that feeling of panic and love, but also this deep sense of grief and of loss that I would feel whenever I woke up from a dream like that and remembered that my sister was in fact gone and she hadnt just taken a trip somewhere there was something about the way I felt when I woke up from the dream about my nephew that reminded me of that. Trying to coordinate these two feelings of familial love and desire to protect with the minds flailing and grappling with the question of loss was really the emotional seed out of which The Furrows grew.

The Furrows

The Furrows

SN: Death is portrayed in the book as a dynamic and ongoing experience, especially for the people who are left behind. But Wayne has his own life in the book in unexpected ways. How did you approach rendering Waynes death and life, and the ghosts who live in the bodies of the people you might not even expect?

NS: The second half of the novel really starts to play with this notion of haunting and doubling and doppelgangers in a more explicitly genre sense, and there I was really riffing on Edgar Allan Poes story William Wilson. The family in the doppelganger story of Jordan Peeles Us is also named the Wilsons, so hes obviously thinking about this as well, the way that theres some kind of uncanny relationship between the notion of the double or the doppelganger, the notion of haunting, or being haunted by a version of yourself, that seems particular to Black experience. And one of the ways that I think about this is that the double consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois speaks about manifests as a doppelganger in my novel as well. I was interested in how these two men in the second half of the novel, Wayne and the man who calls himself Will, whos talking to us from prison, are engaging in this question of haunting as it pertains to Black experience. In Cassandras perspective, theres a way in which her baby brother Wayne keeps appearing to her in different figures, whether its a sandy boy that sometimes appears in the shadows to her, or whether its in her memories and dreams of her little brother, and then perhaps more unsettlingly, the way that he seems to appear in this man who approaches her when shes an adult, and the staging of a scene of recognition that has to do with feeling that theres some familiar spirit in this man who happens to have her brothers name becomes a knotty moral and emotional question for her as the novel proceeds.

SN: Staying on the relationship between the adult Wayne and Cassandra (who are not related), one of the things I liked a lot about the book is that Wayne is always saving Cassandra, or at least trying to, during all these disasters. It felt to me like he was saving her at the end of the world, and that really paralleled her trying to save her brother at the end of the world as they knew it. Can you talk about that part of the story and how you came up with that thread?

NS: I dont know if it was intended on my part, that reversal that you just described, but Ill take it its beautiful, and it makes a lot of sense insofar as the adult Wayne presents to Cassandra a kind of solution to a problem that she has not really properly worked out for herself. He seems to save her from the condition that shes in, which is shes trapped in a cycle of bad mourning, in the psychoanalytic sense a compulsive melancholy where she keeps repeating and reiterating this loss for herself, but she cant seem to actually heal from it or feel any closure about it, and he seems like the missing piece to that. So, it makes a lot of sense that she, having lost Wayne and having not been able to save him, that the older man would then save her from that condition.

We discover relatively quickly into the plot that this man is not in fact her long-lost brother, but one of the things that I wanted to capture about these reunion scenes, these false reunions, is the way that it would feel like a climax of life, a drawing together of all youve been longing for coming to you in this moment. But the moment that she recognizes him, or so she feels, the world erupts around them. Part of what I was trying to get at there its something that [Toni] Morrison talks about in her description of what shes trying to do in Tar Baby, which is to register in the external world the intense tragedy and violence thats happening in the world of the characters on the island. So, theres all this internal family violence happening in that novel, but she has these images of the trees screaming and the birds registering this disaster. Its like when we see the prophetic omens before a plague strikes in biblical type of stories. So, it was a way for me to register in the body of the world that Im depicting what I think is a fundamental wrongness about Cassandras desire to replace her brother with this man, to fill the hole inside her heart with romantic love for this person, whos basically a perfect stranger to her, and whom she really doesnt try to know in his full self. The reader gets to know him, but Cassandra really doesnt, and I wanted to speak to the futility of that. Our desire to get out of grief can sometimes overwhelm us to the point where we no longer think of other people as people but rather as solutions to our own emotional problems. So, the catastrophes, in some ways, are ways to register the wrongness of that in Cassandra.

The author photographed in her home in 2019.

SN: Can you dig a little bit more into the role of sex and desire in the book and how it intersects with grief and trauma?

NS: I had an interview with a wonderful Australian writer recently, and she said, As I was reading, I was like, oh, no, Namwali; dont go there. Oh, shes going there. To stage a sexual encounter immediately following what seems to be a characters recognition of someone as her brother is obviously quite perverse and dark in a way of thinking about sexuality. And I think theres several different angles from which one can understand this. Theres a long literary tradition of thinking about these kinds of transgressive sexual relationships, and youll find it in The Bluest Eye and Lolita, The Sound and the Fury these intimations of incest hover over texts, I think, as ways of thinking about how Eros [a Greek word from which erotism is derived] can really derange our moral and our emotional lives. At the same time, I think this goes back even further to much, much older literature. What interests me is the way that family love and romantic love present to us two conflicting versions of love. In the case of Cassandra, she has an irresolvable dilemma for herself. If she accepts that this man is her brother, then she cannot have him as her lover. But if she accepts him as her lover, then she loses her brother altogether; she loses all hope of ever reuniting with her brother. Of course, this whole time shes been maintaining that her brother is dead, but what the recognition reveals to us, and also I think to her, is how much she actually hopes that in fact he did not die.

So, theres this way in which drawing together these two kinds of love presented an impasse for Cassandra that I thought would be really interesting to work through. Whats interesting to me is that its not really a factor for the adult Wayne at all because he knows that its not his sister, and hes quite disgusted when it even comes up later in the novel, that this would even be a shadow that would be cast over their relationship in any kind of way. And so, it becomes entirely internal to Cassandras own tortured relationship to family love and to her deep loneliness.

SN: Theres a repeating line in the book that reads, I dont want to tell you what happened; I want to tell you how it felt. Throughout the book, time is written about as an ocean, a storm, a carousel, a rope its furrowed and nonlinear, and there are parallel existences happening. Can you talk about that intersection of nonlinear time, memory, and feeling?

NS: If you search the word plot on Wikipedia or Google, youll find all this advice for writers about conflict and resolution, about climax and denouement. It gives us an illusion that we tell stories from beginning to end. But almost always, even if events happen from beginning to end, the order of telling is not the same as the order of happening, and theres a really good question as to why that is. Very few stories start from the beginning and move toward the end, and so thats a wonderful tool for writers because it means that we can manipulate time. We are time travelers just by virtue of how we write. One of the exceptional things that I think modernism, as a movement in the early 20th century, brought to us is just how much variety you can have when it comes to our playing with time, and in this novel, I felt very interested in experimenting with the order of telling in order to capture what Cassandra characterizes as wanting to tell you how it felt rather than exactly what happened.

I think one of the reasons we play with time in the stories we tell, and one of the reasons audiences like that, is because it allows for suspense; it allows for information to be revealed to us late. We can start in the middle of things, right when things are getting exciting, and then flash back to how we got here in the first place, and theres this dynamism to that way of telling. For me, it seemed like this is a really amazing opportunity to try to enact through the readers experience what grief feels like, and one of the things that I think grief intensifies is the way that time feels. We always say that time flies, or it creeps, or it stretches, or an hour can feel like three hours; a day can feel like it goes by in a minute. The way we experience time has very little relation to its orderly movement through seconds and minutes and hours. So, being able to play with temporality in that way was really helpful to try to embody, or have the reader feel in their body, the way that time might move when youre mourning, but also the way that time moves differently when youre dreaming and when youre remembering. As the novel progresses, I tried to give a sense of how time feels now in the contemporary moment because this is a novel thats very much about how time feels in the United States in the twenty-teens, and the ways in which our relationship to feelings, our relationships to other people, is really filtered through a larger zeitgeist, as we like to say, of how the world is doing time.

SN: I wonder if we can extend that a little bit into ideas of truth, because I found it really interesting that in Cassandras family, the word lie was really taboo. Why did it feel important for you to make that part of the story, and can you elaborate a little bit about notions of truth and lies that you were thinking about when you were writing?

NS: Something I think about the modern era, especially this particular time, from the 2000s to the twenty-teens, is the extent to which we have a context collapse, information collapse. The great digital shift in how we consume media has made our grasp on what is true and what is not true quite tenuous. Of course, the novel takes place before Trumps election, when a lot of these questions and issues came to the fore. But I think we often perceive that as a kind of existential crisis in how we can know whether or not something is true. I actually think one of the greater losses is that the instability of what is true and what is not true has led us to this always happens when theres a panic, when theres a crisis is that we tend to fix those categories much more strongly. Truth and lie become much more fixed. When actually what we know, and what literature knows, and what art of all kinds knows is that within the category of truth, theres a whole spectrum of what we understand truth to be. Theres empirical fact, theres emotional truth, theres phenomenological truth, which is how you experience something, even if it doesnt actually correspond to what happened, and theres also truth that changes our understanding of the world changes, but the world also changes. And then within lies, theres a huge spectrum theres white lies, manipulative lies; theres lying to yourself, self-deception. We lose a lot of complexity when we fix these notions of truth and lie, and my novel is really working at the edges of what we can know to be true. Theres very little in the novel that we can know to be true except that this boy is gone. Thats all we know, and everything else comes down to how we handle that, how we respond to that, whether we believe one thing or another about that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Neilson is a freelance writer. They can be found on Twitter @sarahmariewrote.

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Namwali Serpell Distills the Disorienting Experience of Grief in 'The Furrows' - Shondaland.com

Summer is officially over, and as the days get longer, its only natural that we take stock of the seasons biggest moments in music.

There are a lot of themes and events that nabbed summers attentionfrom major box office releases to a string of live festivals and fashion shows. But in music, nothing has dominated conversation as much as house and dance musics triumphant rise to mainstream popularity.

In June, Drake entered the world of dance with his seventh studio album, Honestly, Nevermind. The project, which borrowed sounds from Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago house music, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. A few weeks later, Beyonc entered the conversation with her highly-anticipated album, Renaissance. The album served as a sort of history lesson in dance and house culture, utilizing classic samples like Robin S.s Show Me Love and Donna Summers I Feel Love. Beyoncs record also debuted atop the Billboard 200. Beyonc and Drake are not the only contemporary artists to dip their toes in the genre. Kanye West, Azealia Banks, Teyana Taylor, and a handful of others have also contributed tunes to the space in the last decade. But the success of Beyonc and Drakes respective records makes a case for why dance is the official MVP of summer 2022.

Before delving into dance musics current success, its worth noting that its a far from new endeavor. Dance music has been around for over five decades, first gaining traction in the 1970s and early 80s in Chicagos underground club scene with artists like Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy. One of the main influences of house music was disco, but DJs began adding their own spin to the sound by altering the beat to have more electronic and mechanical elements. By the 1980s, DJs began playing a range of house styles at parties, including subgenres such as deep house, acid house, and UK garage.

Hip-hop also started to embrace house music when MCs and beatmakers joined forces to create energized songs with funk samples and gritty vocals in the late 80s. Since then, modern house music has become more regional with subgenres like Jersey club, Baltimore club, and Philly club music taking center stage.

House music, though it never completely fell off, lost much of its popularity after its peak in the 1990s, as the industry moved towards other genres and sounds. Pop and rock music creeped into dominance during the Y2K era and remained for many years, until 2017, when hip-hop and R&B surpassed rock as the most dominant genre in music and has occupied the space for the last four years. Hip-hop, of course, isnt going anywhere, but there has been a shift in some consumers musical interests.

A need for vibrant and uptempo music comes in large part as a result of a global pandemic that kept most of us indoors for months at a time. Venus X, DJ and host of GHE20GOTH1K (pronounced ghetto gothic)an underground party held in New Yorks club scenetells Complex that she saw a thirst for more upbeat and vibrant records in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We came to a head collectively as a culture, whether people want to accept it or not, she says. A lot of people died, and a lot of people got sick, and a lot of people lost jobs, and lost money and were in a recession. All recessions historically create the demand for more dance music. So, if anybody thinks that that dark shit is going to continue to work right now, its just not.

Its always interesting to me when people try to call things a revival.

In conversation with Harpers Bazaar, Beyonc also noted that her album came together as a result of the pandemic. With all the isolation and injustice over the past year, I think we are all ready to escape, travel, love, and laugh again, Beyonc said in August 2021. I feel a renaissance emerging, and I want to be part of nurturing that escape in any way possible.

The resurgence of house music in popular culture can also be attributed to musicians and music listeners changing interests. Venus X says that artists are moving away from certain themes and sounds that might have been popular five years ago. We are shifting from a dark, secretive culture into a transparent, Me Too oriented, and very self-help and wellness oriented culture, she continues. We dont have the same type of songs we had seven years ago from Future where hes promoting Percocets and lean. Its changing because people are dying and also because you cannot survive a pandemic and go back to the same lifestyle you had before. And, according to the charts, that tracks. The shift was documented on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Songs like Burna Boys Last Last and Beyoncs Break My Soul have been popular summer anthems and held spots on the Hot 100 for several weeks.

Although new cultural events are pushing the reemergence of house music right now, creators and experts within the space wouldnt call this a comeback or even a revival. Its always interesting to me when people try to call things a revival because to me, I think a revival implies some sort of community-oriented cultural focus where the quote-unquote revival is the result of intentional action, house and garage producer DJ Dirty Bird tells Complex. Instead, its become more marketable and people are paying more attention to it because certain high profile figures are interested in it.

You cannot survive a pandemic and go back to the same lifestyle you had before.

DJ Dirty Bird attributes dance musics latest marketability to a number of things; the first being the Black communitys interest in reclaiming genres that have suffered from whitewashing, he explains. People are interested in house music because of [its] history but also the later whitewashing of it, Dirty Bird adds. The story of it is more accessible and is being covered in more high profiles and articles now, so its reentered the zeitgeist again.

Internet culture has also contributed to the genres marketability, says DJ Dirty Bird. TikTok has been a huge source for rediscovering and promoting other genres of music. Thousands of videos are uploaded every day using clips of dance songs that arent necessarily getting a lot of spins on the radio. With all these emerging underground music scenes break core, hyper-pop, and general electronic musicyoung people [on the internet] have been discovering this music for the first time and started to produce it, he adds. Then theyre seeing that these big artists delve into the genre a little bit, so its become a little bit more interesting. And with the general cultural interest being reignited in it, all the big million dollar music labels are dumping money into it and are making money off of it.

Creators on the ground who have been putting in the work for years now might not call it a comeback, because as far as they are concerned, theyve never stopped playing house records in spaces. But Daze, a Black electronic producer from Brooklyn, New York, says he has noticed a surge in house music requests in social functions since the end of the pandemic. I am usually asked to play house [music] now, Daze shares. Of course, Ill get some pop [requests] as well, but I usually run it up more and everybody enjoys it.

These genres and these styles of music have been kept alive and were pioneered by queer and trans and alternative people.

While Daze has always specialized in dance and electronic music, hes aware of the appeal of all DJs playing the genre, saying, House and dance music is much easier for DJs to loop as well. Its much smoother to transition two 4x4 dance tracks by big artists that everybody recognizes, rather than a very abstract electronic song, or a very off-the-grid rap song.

Whenever mainstream artists hop on a trend, there is always some backlash, and understandably so. Creators who pioneered the space are often dismissed and denied credit, and the scene tends to lose the underground feel that appealed to its core audience. This wave of popularity for house and dance music is no different. Venus X says that people can look at it as a loss of authorship and a loss of representation, which it can absolutely be that, considering both Beyonc and Drake, though they may be Black, are straight, cis-hetero people. These genres and these styles of music have been kept alive and were pioneered by queer and trans and alternative people, which I would say very clearly they are not.

There is also a lack of knowledge that comes with underground music moving into the mainstream. DJ Dirty Bird says a lot of requests hes received in parties are from a short list of contemporary artists because people dont have knowledge of artists outside of their immediate network. Theyll be, Oh, I like house music. I love Kaytranada, he recalls of fans music requests. I hate to name-drop him because its not his fault that people are drawn to his music and base their experience of house around him. But its interesting to me that people only seem able to explore the genre around this singular launching point.

DJ Dirty Bird continues: I think now that the genre is more popular, people are trying to use what they know as a springboard to learn more about it. But in that process, they dont really have the critical tools to engage with the music thoroughly. This is where it becomes the DJs responsibility. It takes a little bit of cultural facilitation to get people from their starting point to true appreciation of the genre as a whole.

Despite the inevitable hesitation, everyone who spoke to Complex recognizes the benefits of having two of the worlds biggest artists jump onto the movement, recognizing it as a big commercial push for a genre that hasnt seen this much attention in several decades.

Plus, any time a major recording artist hops on a trend, there is a new possibility for growth and education. People dont speak the language of house or queer culture yet, but they will be able to understand more words as a result of these artists using these similar practices and drum patterns, Venus X explains. And it is a great opportunity for people who have been trying to push it forward and do the work.

The music industry is fickle, and every trend leaves almost as fast as it is introduced. So, although dance music was more popular than ever this summer, DJ Dirty Bird asserts that drill and contemporary are still mainstays in the music scene right now, too.

House music caused a lot of ripples, but when I think of whats the most popular music right now, its still rap. Lets not get it twisted, he says. Its still Atlanta rap music All that is way more popular than house music will probably ever be in the states, at least for next five or 10 years. But I think house music had an interesting peak in its popularity this year. Still, he says its going to take a little bit more from the house scene to really say that we had a smash hit summer type of thing.

Its only as profitable as long as its marketable, and its only marketable if the community is supporting it.

Nevertheless, with Beyonc, Drake, and possibly other big names joining houses resurgence, DJ Dirty is hopeful that the trend will continue long past the summer. Im just thinking about all the other dance music artists who I know and have been friends over the past two years. I think it would be cool to have a cultural moment that persists, that can support these artists in the same way that weve done for Atlanta rap, and Detroit rap, and whatnot, and UK drill, he adds. I dont think people realize that their level of interest and support directly affects the livelihood of underground artists. So, its reliant on both the support of the general public and the music industry. Its only as profitable as long as its marketable, and its only marketable if the community is supporting it.

Dance music might have ruled summer 2022 and entered the conversation for a new generation once more, but Venus X, DJ Dirty Bird, and Daze all agree it will never die. Why? Well, because people need stuff to dance to, Daze insists. In fact, its likely that the need to move our bodies will facilitate dance musics continued success in the mainstream landscape for years to come. Daze predicts that when a lot of the public gets into dancing to house music, its going to become much more intertwined with pop music, and many more rap artists will start experimenting with it.

See the original post here:

Dance & House Music Ruled the Summer. What Now? - Complex

NOT since the foundation of the Labour Party in 1900 has the need for an alternative political vehicle in Britain been more urgently required.

The defeat of the Jeremy Corbyn project left millions of people bereft.

So much hope and expectation was invested in the Labour Party under Corbyns leadership.

But the direction in which Sir Keir Starmer has steered Labour for the last two-and-a-half years has created a political vacuum on the left.

Millions of people in Britain no longer have an electoral home. All the political parties currently sitting in the Commons favour retaining the economic and foreign policy status quo.

This makes a mockery of our democracy. Politics should be about giving people choices but in Britain there is no real choice.

It doesnt matter whether Labour or the Conservatives win most seats at a general election.

They are both committed to retaining the neoliberal and imperialist status quo, as are the SNP and Lib Dems.

Of course, there would be some tinkering at the edges, but nothing would fundamentally change whether a majority Tory or Labour government was elected or whether a coalition was formed with the Liberal Democrats or SNP.

All these parties would preside over rising poverty, worsening inequality and increased authoritarianism that would undermine our fundamental rights and Britains involvement in overseas wars would continue apace.

It is 110 years since Vladimir Lenin published his seminal pamphlet about the situation in tsarist Russia, What Is to Be Done.

We need to ask ourselves the same fundamental question what is to be done in 21st-century Britain?

It is an entirely futile exercise to waste time and effort trying to make the Labour Party a force for socialism and anti-imperialism.

We had our chance and we blew it. New grassroots organisations have sprung up like Enough is Enough, and I helped to found the Resist Movement a few months after the 2019 general election.

Trade union militancy is also on the rise as a reaction to the cost-of-living catastrophe that has been facilitated by Natos proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

But although these initiatives are inspiring, it still leaves the question about what is to be done at the next general election.

Are trade unions and the Enough is Enough movement going to urge people to vote Labour even though a Labour government would retain the system that has created the explosion in poverty, insecurity and inequality?

Britains democracy is a sham, but I believe the political vacuum could be filled by a rejuvenated Socialist Labour Party (SLP), the alternative party founded by Arthur Scargill in 1996.

I have lost count of the number of people who have said to me that what we need is a socialist Labour Party.

That is why Resists steering committee unanimously recommended to our members that we should join the SLP, and in a poll of Resists membership last month, 89 per cent voted in favour of the move.

Lenin recognised the need for a vanguard political party and I believe the SLP could fulfil that role.

Corbyn showed that there is an appetite for a socialist alternative and I think the SLP has the potential to mount a serious challenge to the political duopoly.

It wont be easy of course. The first-past-the-post system favours the mainstream parties, but the political duopoly has been broken before and it can be broken again.

More recent attempts by parties like Respect, Tusc, and the SLP for that matter, floundered because the timing wasnt right.

There was still a hope, when those parties first emerged, that the Labour Party was salvageable but the evidence from the Corbyn experience proves beyond any shadow of doubt that it isnt.

I firmly believe that the zeitgeist has shifted in favour of an alternative socialist party. One of the key benefits of the SLP, apart from its unambiguous commitment to socialism, is its name recognition.

Even though there is huge dissatisfaction among the electorate with the Labour Party, it is still ahead of the Tories in opinion polls because many people still see Labour as the natural alternative to the Tories.

Consequently, having the name Labour in the SLPs title is hugely beneficial, and a socialist Labour Party is precisely what many people have been clamouring for.

I want to see a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families in this country.

That was a pledge given by the Labour Party in its 1974 manifesto before it was abandoned after Denis Healey went to the IMF on a false premise.

Tinkering with the system will not do. It is system change that is required now.

There is currently no political outlet in Westminsters corridors of power for the anger that is being expressed through street protests and industrial action.

So, my plea to all Morning Star readers is to join us in this endeavour to build the Socialist Labour Party into a serious electoral force.

You can join us in Liverpool this Sunday at the Liner Hotel, which is a minutes walk from Lime Street Station, when we will be formally announcing our intention to join the SLP.

Chris Williamson was MP for Derby North from 2010-15 and 2017-19.

Continued here:

It is time to back a new party in the elections - Morning Star Online