Paul Rekret’s Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2024)
There is a long history of music expressing resistance. It includes enslaved people in the South singing of freedom to come, and Rage Against the Machine songs blaring at campus rallies. At various points during the past century, music has been at the avant-garde of challenges to dominant norms under capitalism. Early rock ‘n roll’s celebration of around-the-clock excess challenging the time-demands and mores required by wage-labour. Anti-war folk songs of the 1960s and 1970s. The anti-cop spirit of so much hip hop. The Ledbelly song “Take This Hammer,” after which Paul Rekret names his book analyzing the relationship between music and resistance today, is about resistance not just to white supremacy, but to work itself under conditions of exploitation. It is about the downing of tools, the refusal to work.
Music’s anti-capitalist essence
Of course, music is also big business. Under capitalism, music is, like all goods and services, for the most part, commodified – bought and sold on the market, whether in the form of a vinyl record, through a streaming service, or at a concert hall. Considering that today, when the mainstream world of producing, circulating, and consuming music is organized by private corporations whose viability depends on generating profits, it’s reasonable to ask whether music’s capacity as a tool of resistance still exists under contemporary capitalism. Rekret’s book is an extended answer to this question, focusing specifically on instances of music’s anti-capitalist character in the period of social destabilization opened up by the 2008-9 economic crisis.
This is by no means a simple story. The opening chapters establish what music is, in terms of being an expression both of political economy, and a method of human communication. Key to later arguments in the book, Rekret establishes early on that there is an inherently anti-capitalist (and pre-capitalist) spirit to music – notwithstanding its subsumption within capitalism that shapes our experiences of music today. This spirit isn’t ultimately about radical lyrics of songs or specific cases of revolutionary art, but about the way the rhythms of musical time emerged out of and still hint at the reality of non-capitalist experiences of time; that is, time organized around play or free labour, not the clock-time required by bosses or judges or test-taking.
The book touches on music-making across centuries and continents. This isn’t to say that the book is only for expert musicologists or philosophers of culture, but if you’re allergic to theory, best keep your distance. The virtue of Rekret’s rigorous application of Marxist theories of culture, work, and resistance, is that he manages to keep sight of the dual character of music-as-exchange-value and music-as-use-value. This is a very important critical response to prevailing understandings of music among left thinkers. Some, like Robin James, suggest that the quest to be original, authentic (or, at least, commitment to the performance of originality and authenticity) has become so central to the music industry under late capitalism, that the only way to avoid completely reproducing capitalist logic is to surrender the impulse for artistic innovation and produce the most mainstream, bland, innocuous songs possible. The late Marxist Mark Fisher argued that today’s capitalist landscape has been so thoroughly overwhelmed by capitalist demands and sensibilities that we are incapable of imagining future utopias, meaning music is incapable of advancing, and the songs of today merely echo utopian visions of the past (retro rock, retro hip hop), visions themselves that have been vanquished by history. Against the surrender of Robin James and the tragic lament of Mark Fisher, where does Rekret find evidence for music’s ongoing capacity for resistance, and why does it matter?
The expressive power of song
The Black Radical Tradition of thought and action guides Rekret’s analysis throughout. In particular, he draws on the writing of WEB Du Bois and Amira Baraka to “locate the expressive power of the song, in part, by way of its subject’s exclusion from easy access to employment and the benefits of capitalism, more broadly.” According to Baraka, for example, who sees “struggle at the level of musical form itself,” the refusal to separate art from life (or play from work, or song from labour), which originates in African cultures, that refusal inheres in music still, and so haunts capital’s dreams of a working-class fully subservient to the time-discipline required by wage-labour.
Chapter 2 examines the contemporary popularity of ambient music and “chill” aesthetic, not so much as a genre, but, increasingly as “the experience of music itself.” Rekret suggests that the Spotify playlist has become Muzak for the post-2008 precarious labourer. Streaming platforms enable you to listen to your tailored blend of songs in the morning shower, on the bus, at (waged or unwaged work), and while making dinner and winding down through the evening. “The ubiquity of music at issue here gestures towards the blurring of labour and leisure itself taken as characteristic of a post-Fordist epoch.” And yet, when music accompanies our every moment, we get an experience (however impoverished by capitalism) of the expressivity of everyday activity as it might’ve been experienced in precapitalist societies, where music potentially accompanied any activity.
Chapter 3 invites readers to think about the world of work reflected by trap, the Atlanta-rooted post-rap music that’s become synonymous with hip-hop over the past decade. Unlike a previous generation of New York and LA-based rap, in which the pleasure of the party never stopped (in lyrics and on music videos), trap is about work, specifically, the “insistent dread of [the] dangerous, dull, and interminable work” of cocaine production and circulation, and so “amounts to the Monday morning to what had become hip-hop’s fantasy of the never-ending holiday.” Rather than glorifying the hustle, though, trap tells of dreading it, surviving it, rejecting it (?). Rekret’s queer reading of trap’s relationship to work and resistance (to “the domestic and domesticating logics of sexuality”) in Atlanta’s strip clubs exemplifies the book’s richness of thought.
Chapter 4 focuses on the racial extractivism of one subculture of the so-called “new world music.” Here we see Western collectors and music labels pursuing “DIY aesthetics of underground music” in Saharan Africa and other parts of the Global South, explicitly in the search for gritty, raw, locally-rooted, non-commercialized sounds. Ingenuity, flexibility, and artisanal work is routinely fetishized by creative labourers in conditions of generalized insecurity, and there is often a vision of non-capitalist trade in the life-hack, the DIY project, the farmer’s market. Of course, in the new-world-music-tourist’s selling and circulation of “exotic” sounds on Western music markets, the collector destroys the very beyond-capital thing they desire while bolstering a cultural imperialism for times of global crisis.
Chapter 5 traces the surge in “field recordings” in response to the rapidly worsening ecological crisis. The deeper the crisis, it would appear, the greater the impulse to faithfully represent nature in all its fragility – the sounds of icebergs cracking, “the snaps of vultures feeding on a zebra carcass,” and a thousand tiny ant feet marching. But with microphones able to record sounds unhearable by the human ear, with recording equipment developed for military purposes, if the point is to turn the fragile ecoscape into a composer, what does it mean when “mediation becomes the agent of composition”? Still, the impulse to defend the sovereignty of nature against the violent aggression of capitalism persists.
Music feeds revolutionary politics
Overall, Rekret guides readers through a rigorous argument about various ways in which music still feeds revolutionary politics, notwithstanding the pervasiveness of capitalist logic throughout the arts. The instances of resistance he explores in this book are rarely obvious and always shot through with contradictions. There’s no starry-eyed celebration here of songs played at rallies, or artists who support socialist movements. Rekret is listening for impulses that refuse capitalism, desires that can’t be met without going beyond capitalism, and strategies for surviving capitalism in our current period of rolling crises.
Author
Did you like this article? Help us produce more like it by donating $1, $2, or $5. Donate