NFL Week 5: Let's Get Caught Up

The National Football League season is already in its fifth week. The season, entering its second quarter, has been a strange one, particularly if you are Seahawks fan. At this point last year, the hard times were ahead for Seattle; now, Seahawks fans have essentially dodged a season-ending bullet with Kam Chancellor's ball punch of a paydirt-bound Megatron on Monday night.

At 2-2, things could be worse, though it is a long shot to think that the situation will improve going into Cincinnati this Sunday. Marshawn Lynch is out again with a strained hamstring. Seattle is going to have to find a way to run the ball; otherwise, Russell Wilson will be eaten alive by the Bengals front seven. It will be a good test of the Seahawks defense. I can't think of a more complete offense right now than Andy Dalton's. A.J. Green is awesome, and the Cinci running-back combo of Jeremy Hill and Giovani Bernard is potent.

Let's get caught up on the season so far. First, two general comments. A guy, a labor politico of sorts, who survives by peddling seminars to unions, came into the office recently. He sat in the little reception area in front of my work station and waited for the head of the labor council to get off the phone and come out of her office and greet him. While he was waiting I took the opportunity to ask him, "Are you a Seahawks fan?"

This is my litmus test, a type of loyalty oath. Most people, believe it or not, say yes and then proceed to break down with acuity recent action. There are a few who beg off and say, "Well, yeah, but I don't really watch the games." This labor politico, which was surprising to me, admitted up front that he didn't follow the Seahawks, quite a liability for someone whose business is telling labor leaders how to connect with their membership.

I said to the guy, "Imagine if there was just one-quarter the interest in our political process as there was in the National Football League."

He stared back at me in a perturbed, confused manner. He didn't get it. The fact is that right now the athletes of the National Football League -- Kam Chancellor, Russell Wilson, Aaron Rodgers, A.J. Green, et al. -- are in the cultural vanguard. When I wore my Beast Mode hoodie on Friday, young people turned their heads as I passed by.

The music industry has been debased along with film. Neither can lead the masses as they used to. It is a dystopian world in which we live. But the gridiron is an idealized space where the heroes are untarnished (except for the New England Patriots). I can't remember a time -- and I've been following the NFL since 1975, when I was in sixth grade -- when the cultural cache of professional football athletes was this full.

Prior to last Monday night's Detroit-vs.-Seattle match-up I was in the grocery store. I live close to downtown in what many would describe as a hipster neighborhood. Never before have I seen so many young hipsters decked out in NFL jerseys. In the past, allegiance to the NFL home team was the provenance of the white, suburban working class. No longer. After Seattle's overtime Week 1 loss to St. Louis I went out for a run and was surprised to see the number of young people in Seahawks regalia glumly streaming out of house parties. Something different is happening here.

That's the first point. The National Football League is of enormous cultural importance now in the United States. I take it as proof that our political system is almost entirely bankrupt; the rapturous allegiance to the NFL is the observe of this bankruptcy, a hunger to believe in something that is authentic. And what is more real than a physical contest? Until our political system becomes more democratic and begins to address the many concerns of working people, I'm sure the NFL will continue its meteoric rise.

If the first point is that the NFL represents the cutting edge culturally in this country, then the second point is that it is simultaneously able to tap into an amazingly nourishing pool of nostalgia for a time when things were stable and prosperous, when every man was safely ensconced in his castle (and securely positioned in front of his television, usually in the fortress of the suburbs). I speak here of Thursday Night Football, at least the first nine weeks that are televised on CBS before retreating behind the paywall of NFL Network.

There is something about being a bachelor alone in his apartment at the end of the work week watching a primetime professional football game as the sun goes down and the room goes dark, particularly when the contests are close, as they have been the last two Thursdays -- Ravens vs. Steelers; Colts vs. Texans; it is a feeling of contentment, order, and tranquility, a lifeline back to previous generations of bachelors alone in t-shirts bathed in the phosphorescent glow from the TV screen, like a fictional Paul Drake watching a nighttime telecast of Norm Van Brocklin's Los Angeles Rams. One sleeps well after a night like that.

But this Sunday the story is about the unbeaten teams that remain. Let's hope the Seahawks knock off the Bengals; the loathsome Cowboys wallop the villainous Patriots; the Falcons keep rolling; the Raiders whip the Broncos; and the Packers best the Rams. This would leave three teams undefeated: Green Bay, Atlanta and Carolina (because of a bye).

Oh, and I wouldn't mind seeing the Lions give the Cardinals another loss.

Hippies vs. Punks: Future's DS2

The fact is that Hippies and Punks have long been absent from the cultural vanguard. Hippies represented the last hurrah of post-WWII prosperity and social democracy. Their contributions to the avant-garde ended in the early 1970s, even prior to the time that the Punks arrived on the scene. When the Punks showed up in a big way in 1976 it was to herald the arrival of the "No Future" paradigm of neoliberalism.

Punk quickly went Post- and splintered; it happened at a time when Hip Hop first appeared. So Hip Hop can make a claim as well to be present at the creation of our current neoliberal paradigm. As the decades have looped by Hip Hop has only grown in stature and relevance, while Punk and Hippie music are merely marginal curiosities.

Future's third studio album, DS2 (Dirty Sprite 2) debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 charts this summer. If there is a pop cultural avant-garde in the United States now I have absolutely no doubt that its manifesto is Future's DS2.

I have been immersed it all week. All I can say is that it says it all about late-stage neoliberalism: a vacant, joyless celebration of money, drugs, pussy and violence. It's End Times. No doubt about it. Fucking 'em two at a time, dodging bullets, pissing codeine and gobbling Percocet -- "They got blood on their money, and I still count it." Boy, does it sound good. It's Nietzsche after rejecting Schopenhauer's pessimism but somehow fast-forwarded to the doped-up care of his sister Frau Förster.

I was aware of Future at first because living in Seahawks country the news of the off-season was Russell Wilson hooking up with Future's ex-fiance Ciara (and mother of one of his children). There was some social-media kerfuffle when a picture of Seattle's QB pushing Future's son in a perambulator with Ciara at his side went viral. Then I read an excellent piece by Jon Caramanica, "In Atlanta’s Ever-Shifting Hip-Hop Scene, Future and Migos Keep Innovating," and I was intrigued. It seemed to me that what we were dealing with here is a moment when the Owl of Minerva takes flight not at dusk but midday. The Zeitgeist is being revealed in real time. According to Caramanica:

Future is digging into his weird. “DS2” (A1/Freebandz/Epic), his third major-label album, is full of psychedelic angst, girded by Future’s uncanny gift for melody. He’s as singular as ever here, and also more accessible; “DS2” topped the Billboard album chart last week.

Future has already made his concessionary album — “Honest,” released last year, which was widely maligned but wrongly so. Few rappers are as well suited for pop’s melodic tenderness as he is — the album showcased that gift.

That was one version of Future retreating into his feelings. But since then, and especially after his split from the R&B singer Ciara, with whom he has a son, he’s tried another way. Now when he turns inward, his lyrics emerge as a catalog of savage boasts and self-destruction, his sadness made manifest in the severe desiccation in his voice and the digital fog that obscures it. This approach has made for some of the most bracing music of his career, as heard on the three largely outstanding mixtapes he has released in the past nine months: “Monster,” “Beast Mode” and “56 Nights.” (Future has released as many impressive full-length projects as any artist in the 2010s.)

“DS2” isn’t quite as consistent, but it’s exceptional at its peaks. The album’s cold tone is established early, on “Thought It Was a Drought.” “Bitch, I’ma choose the dirty over you/ You know I ain’t scared to lose you,” he raps, later sinking deeper into narcotic haze: “Have these meds on me, I’ma do ’em/ I take these pills and I’m having a thrill.” Much of the album is produced by Metro Boomin, who knows how to make low rumbles feel epic, like on “I Serve the Base,” with its terrifying scrape; the surprisingly warm computer melodies of “Blow a Bag”; the milky “Rotation,” which showcases Future’s phenomenal mumble.

Future’s vocal approach is impressionistic, which means that when it’s ineffective it can feel faint. But it’s also absorptive and affectingly tragic. So much of this album is devoted to drug consumption — “Take me a Xan and I levitate,” “Ain’t no fabrication, I’m on medication/ Cough syrup, I’m infatuated” — that it begins to take on an air of trauma. Even though the album closes with the mayhem-inducing song whose abbreviated title is “Commas,” Future mostly sounds as if he’s gasping for air, and that dangerous place is where his creativity thrives.

My best friend of the last several years has been a young woman, a coworker. She is a black woman, part Latina, part African-American, who has two boys, one in middle school and the other in elementary. She went through a divorce while we worked together. And even though she had a lot of the other women in the office gunning for her because she is attractive and was being rapidly promoted following a change in leadership at the local, she kept it together, showed up to the job everyday and consistently worked hard.

We share a history of being raised in the debris of broken families; that, and we are both fervent Levellers. We did Occupy Seattle stuff together, PAC for our union local, Labor Neighbor, etc. It is rare to meet a person who doesn't harbor tacit attachment to notions of a divine chain of being, who believes that privilege --all types: skin, money, cronyism -- needs to be scrapped. She has the spark.

When I left the local where we worked together to take my present job, she was very generous. As a thank you for her generosity, I bought her a copy of Future's DS2. Before giving it to her yesterday, I had peeled off the cellophane, opened the CD jewel case and loaded it into my iTunes. That's what I have been listening to all week.

When I saw her yesterday, she said that she had been on the road for three-weeks straight and was burnt out; she hadn't seen her sons in almost a month.

My relationship with this young woman -- never sexualized, always supportive and real, never phony -- is one of the only things that I can point to in my recent life and say that it is an unqualified success.

Future's DS2 capture of the Zeitgeist is proof to me that we're coming to an end here.

Hippies vs. Punks: A Digression on the Avant-Garde

Every Friday evening we've been exploring that short period of time in the 1970's -- 1975 to 1979 -- when the Hippies were wiped out as the avant-garde in the West by the Punks. The hope is that by understanding why it happened -- and happened so quickly -- we might gain insight into how it is that the larger paradigm, what we have named neoliberalism, has us in a chokehold today. What's the connection you ask? Because neoliberalism was launched at the same time that the Hippies were wiped out by the Punks.

Tonight a digression; we're going to jump a decade forward to the late 1980's, the last hurrah of the Punks. I say Punk but what I'm really talking about here is underground rock'n'roll, and in particular hardcore as practiced by those bands featured on SST Records. If ever I considered myself belonging to an avant-garde it was when I was a young man in the late 1980's listening to hardcore.

I forgot how passionately I felt about guys like Mike Watt and George Hurley until I posted a letter that described seeing them play at Columbia in the spring of 1990. D. Boon had died at the end of 1985, but Watt and Hurley carried on as fIREHOSE with ed fROMOHIO handling the lead guitar and most of the singing. I considered them true artists, pure and above reproach. They were blazing the trail, and I was dutifully trying to follow along.

When I had a record player I owned a copy of If'n. It came out while I still lived in Berkeley, but I didn't get into it until I moved to New York City in 1988. The album cover represents everything about that time for me. I look at the album cover and I remember what it feels like to be of the avant-garde.

The kachina dolls, the flannel shirts, the pictorial homage to Hüsker -- add Surfer Rosa, drunken devotion to Neil Young's Ditch Trilogy and Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation and you get an idea of where I and a lot of other people were at; the same place that provided the last rock'n'roll "Great Barbeque" for the corporate Leviathan; the place that created Grunge.

It's painful to contemplate.

But before Grunge, and its corporate excess and crass commercialism, there was a hardcore vanguard in this country. Yes, it was predominantly white. Yes, it was urban and university-oriented. But it was a vanguard nonetheless. To hear what it sounded like listen to the last track off If'n, "Thunder Child," sung by Watt: