A response to Mark Lilla [see previous] at the literary magazine, Hamas. I won't continue on Robin, or start in on Peter Frase. All you have to know is here.  There's a nice moment in the video [The comments have been removed but the video is still available here] when Doug Henwood drops a couple of bills into a can that's being passed around before handing it to Seth Ackerman who looks confused, asks what it is, and hands it on to someone else.
Interestingly or not Jacobin has an affiliated site that publishes art criticism. [not affiliated, just on good terms]


One of the pieces featured on the sidebar link is titled Sealing Off the Wonder of the Sublime, a review of a show at the James Cohan Gallery.

I've known Cohan for 26 years. I worked with him at another gallery. I've known his director for just as long. I know five of his artists. It's a small world, the world of artisans, boutiques, and clients for (at a minimum) $100,000 objets d'art.

Another piece, a music review.
undun: The Roots reclaim hip-hop for the corner

This nigga raps with a razor, keep it under my tongue
The school drop-out, never liked the shit from day one
Cause life ain’t shit but stress, fake niggas and crab stunts
So I guzzle my Hennessy while pulling on mad blunts.

That’s Nas on 1994’s “Represent”. Here’s the Notorious B.I.G. on “Things Done Changed”, also from 1994

Talk slick, you get your neck slit quick
Cause real street niggas ain’t having that shit
Toting Tecs for rep, smoking blunts in the project hallways
Shooting dice all day.

And from that same year, 2Pac on “Cradle to the Grave”

See, the doctor tried to smack me, but I smacked him back
My first words was ‘Thug for life’ and ‘Papa, pass the mac’
I’m busting on these motherfuckers baling
Listen, you can hear my mini fourteen calling.

I was a child when I first heard these lyrics, and the onset of a quenchless thirst for more was immediate, but met with impediment. I remember well the constant denigration that hip-hop was violent, nihilistic, ugly, bad.

How many times has that paragraph been written in the past 150 years?

The author:


The piece gets better and perhaps the photo was unnecessary. I could be accused of mocking bourgeois political commitment but I'm not; I'm mocking naive and openly hypocritical bourgeois commitment. Jadaliyya is absolutely bourgeois. The question is why it's so much better than Jacobin.