The New Now

By BB Hawes

Jason Krakow—music critic, Brooklynite, aging hipster—is losing his touch. And he might be losing his mind.
The lapses of consciousness! The memory loss! The eerie insights and coincidences! The implosion of his relationships! This mysterious new woman! The disappearance of his roommate! And possibly an international plot! The universe seems to be falling apart... and it might take Jason with it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BB Hawes
• Release date: Oct 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370753116

BB Hawes

B.B. Hawes was the winner of the Wilkinson Library (Telluride, CO) Short Story Prize in 2007. He lives in Colorado and sometimes produces songs on his computer under the name JungJungle.

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The New Now

by B.B. Hawes

Smashwords Edition

© 2016 B.B. Hawes

Cover Illustration: B.B. Hawes and Patrick Felsenthal

Preface

I began work on this book in 2005 and finished it in 2011. Intended as near-future satire, I extrapolated from the present day; eleven years later, however, the period of this novel’s inception is now dusty and faintly-remembered history.

Predictions are always presents remixed by our preoccupations. This book is no exception. Some of the changes in culture I forecast over the six-year process of creating this work have since come to pass in near-approximation, while others were less astutely imagined. Some of the most embarrassing or distracting of the latter were edited out prior to publishing. Some omissions, most technological and some political, were slapped on in post.

Nevertheless: musical genres, certain political themes, and the comportment of the American urban dweller remain as they were originally imagined back in thick of the Bush II years through the tumult of the Great Recession that followed——the Aughts, now a historical era. In this sense, the book you hold in your hand is a snapshot of retro-futurism, an artifact of prognostication. With this in mind, I bid you enjoy the particular flavors of its failure and occasional, unlikely, triumphs.

Which is all you can ask of art, or life.

—B.B. Hawes

for Amelia and Henry.

Chapter One

My reflection haunts the embers of a Friday afternoon, a setting blaze on rooftop tanks and roofs of cars in the borough. It is late October; in a few weeks, on an early Sunday morning, this lingering vestige of summer will be reeled back in, folded up and put away, leaving darkness after five o’clock. The thought of this makes me sad. I am alone in the apartment, and now this solitude seems borderless, infinite, as if the universe itself has emptied out. I tent my hands to see better. My nose is cold against the pane. Down below in the yellowing dim, the street seems arranged to scale, movements through the maquette smooth on hidden rails: vehicles like puzzle-tiles sliding into spots; humanoid figures stalled phoneward then released; gesturing pairs slow-roaming in the gloaming. Brooklyn hasn’t disappeared.

Still: the feeling that the planet has been purged of the living and that I am entirely alone stays with me. The sensation is similar in tone to times I’ve taken long, late naps before going out; I would awake from my disco nap with the impression that I had gone ominously out of sync with the rest of the world, somehow lost behind time. But perhaps time is not ahead of me in this case, waiting for me to catch up. Perhaps time, like a great moon-tide, has gone out somehow, receded completely, leaving me and all of us stragglers out there stranded in the shallows. We’ve all been abandoned by history. There is no progress, no journey still to make; all that is left is to scour the drying sand of culture for cast-off fragments, minor treasure left behind.

Or whatever.

Tappity-tap.

I am sitting at my desk, snugged up in a dead space at the end of my hallway in Greenpoint. A small chipped thrift-store plate, gold-speckled cream with burgundy line abstractions——an object once stylish, then ugly, then kitschy, then curious, and now stylish again——displays at my right elbow the memory of a black currant scone in crumbs and soft butter smears. Next to it, a coffee mug with a faded Boy Scouts fleur-de-lis offers up its coffee entrails for my inspection, perilously close to the edge. There is something talismanic about the scene, the arrangement of detritus forming some power-shape whose disturbance could doom my future in the petty way that gods are petty, issuing obsessive rules to guard the arbitrary.

I am finishing this review. I am trying to finish this review. I have finished this review. One of the three.

I save a backup on a flash drive and then stare at my handiwork. I tap my fingers on the sides of the laptop, tap-tap-tap, some odd-metered rhythm of equivocation, as if to dislodge the flaws. It could need a little nudging here and there, perhaps. And the length is a problem, even for the lead review. But I think I’ve gotten the tone about right. Critical, but slightly awe-struck; add three stars and the label ought to be satisfied. No one is going to bitch at my editor, no one is going to question my fitness as a pop/rock reviewer. I will still have a job. I will still get paid.

Tap, tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tappity-tap, tap-tappity-tap.

I know, because I have been here before, that the wise move, or at least the easiest move, would be to send it off to the magazine at this point and let the copy editors find the errors. I should let them fiddle with the punctuation, standardize the style, process the material to uniform consistency. That’s what they exist for. Becky’s racket. If she were here, I’d let her have a go at it first, if only to make me feel the utmost confidence, a confidence that should be automatic by now and was before but somehow isn’t any longer.

The piece is there. It is ready. Any further massaging of the prose might only roughen it up, possibly even dismember it.

But just to be sure, I reread it again.

And then I reposition a prepositional phrase from the middle to the end of a sentence.

And then move it back.

Tap-tap.

It still feels…off. The hesitation: maybe it isn’t the writing. The gum in the works, the minor rub——very minor to be sure, tangential to my purpose, to do the doing of the job, to the getting paid——maybe it’s that, personally, I hate the album. It’s tawdry crap, a veneer of novelty cloaking a necrotic concept. The style is still basically hip-hop, and nothing has happened there in years. Every last drop of life had been wrung out of the genre a decade ago, but here is yet another record, touted as the New Shit, an obnoxious pile.

Every major-label album I hear these days is like this; popular music has become an expensively promoted poverty of imagination. New ideas have been banned from Billboard’s charts, everything a mere resequencing of what we’ve all heard before, a post-apocalyptic landscape of musical junk-buggies. Smooth jazz and hip-hop gave birth in a back alley to smooth rap. Smooth rap went out to the club with K-pop and trap and came back with K-rap. Death metal devoured part of country and shat out hard country. Country fled to the hills, did a little Irish jig, and came back with classic country. Irony gave way to new sincerity, which then gave way to desperate commercialism and corporate sponsorship of lyrics. Meanwhile indie-rock, long mired in self-conscious genre-trolling, amuses itself on the college charts with Prince-tinged, keyboard-driven, hair metal slumming, though already there are signs of a Rudolph Valentino-inspired crooner revival, lightly dusted with Weimar-era gay cabaret, and the hot new indie R&B artists still sound like Hall & Oates or Lionel Richie fronting C&C Music Factory. Everything, all the styles in popular music, are played out.

Who is buying this stuff? Teenagers? Pre-teens? Tweens? Their parents? Their grand-parents? I don’t know anyone who pays for music, or at least admits to it, especially major-label fare. Of course, the new media tariffs on broadband are once again filling the conglomerates’ coffers, so in reality, everyone is buying it. But what’s the target demographic? It certainly isn’t me. I have to assume the people who listen to commercial music are all dull, trend-driven, adipose-addled morons who can’t throw two sentences together without an emoticon. Which is why they need me, and people like me, to make the case that what they listen to isn’t the worthless, grotesquely base schlock which of course it is and patently so. I’m a corporate wing-man, the sympathetic shill, a roofie in my pocket for my patron’s next victim, all the while telling myself it is deep irony, my job, my ornamental enabling of this unseemly affair. But it is a job.

The alternative, my straw-man, is to cast my lot with the would-be indie-scene ramen-eaters, blogging in obscurity about the bands I so quaintly love on piece-work wages. And there are already a million guys younger than me in that game, tirelessly attending shows, collecting the vinyl, combing the Interwebs for new sounds on the cusp of fruition and posting their finds and linked streams from the crippling refuges of their parents’ basements. They wax and wane in a dilapidated insignificance like fruit flies in the summer heat. Me, though, Jason Krakow: I can see my name on the glossy, albeit shrunken, pages of a national mag at an airport newsstand or the hair salon and know that, despite all the haters, myself included, at least I have a name. That is a solid achievement. It is real. It establishes integrity, albeit of a certain kind, when understood a certain way.

And yet the page just pushes me away.

It seems like there are times when my disconnection from the material——and the suppression of my own aesthetic——is so complete as to cripple my abilities to self-edit. These spells have been happening with greater frequency. Drumming the desk veneer, tapping the carapace of the laptop, my mind jammed in its temporizing mode: it certainly seems like one of those times. And of course, the way these things go, once it seems that way, the seeming makes it so. No amount of auto-suggestion, no cognitive behavioral trick can penetrate the autonomic loop I get into, my leaden writing hand welded to an arm welded to a brainstem bent on sabotage.

I know I have to stop. I know I have a deadline. The ticking away of the weekend hours relates the story of my procrastinations. It’s a dull story, a cereal-box procedural, the same list describing the same product that is always new and improved. This is the same thing I do every week, on time, without fail. It’s my virtue. But at the moment I can’t help myself. I can only observe myself observing the work, fiddling with it, fecklessly chiseling its impenetrable surface. And the work looks worse and worse. Like some demonstration of quantum laws, the solidity of the prose begins to separate before my eyes. Look at it. Just look at it: sentences piled up helter-skelter, meaningless strings of ascii backlit through the cracks. The letters aren’t even forming words anymore. They have begun to disassociate from their bonds, separating into loose-knit affinities, page after page of individual squiggles huddled together and shuddering in negative space like cattle in the yards. The harder I attack the issue——the more I reread, the more commas I add, the more adjectives I exchange or leave out, pulling out the thesaurus, rearranging this and that, scrolling up and down to compare the various bits——the farther away I find myself from the whole process, trapped in some Jedi mind-cave with my worst self, unable to remember what is good anymore. This fancy computer, this silver sliver of sorcery that has bequeathed and forbade, gives no quarter. It’s all trash. Everything is total trash. I am stuck.

I’ve got at least two other reviews to go, but I can’t continue. My stomach is sinking, my shoulders sag, my neck a coil of rusted cable. Revulsion: I feel it toward this album, toward the writing, toward the entire Critical-Musical Industrial Complex within which I’ve inscribed myself. It wells up within me like soggy worms on sidewalks, the overflowing issue of some storm bank of dread. Usually I can just soldier through——bullshit, name drop, throw in some semiotic boilerplate or pop history, whatever’s required——but not tonight. I need to take a break.

I stand up and stretch. An elevator of blood descends, and my world acquires a hypotensive palette of tingling purple and its complement; I quickly grab the desk. My hands shake, slightly. I watch them vibrate and wonder at the frequency. What sound would they make? These hands that look like mine but are not somehow, latex-rubber novelty things, maladroit and inert before the cursed page: I imagine them oscillating a tinnitic hum, a hollow sound.

My phone rings, startling me: Alex.

—Drink?

—Yeah. I need one. Where. Styro Bar?

—Duh.

—K. Be there in an hour.

—Damn straight.

The breath of dead air. I continue to hold the phone to my right ear as silence pours out. My eyes are drawn to the left hand resting on the desk, the hand left there, a sick, spiny arachnid that lives at the end of my arm. I listen to it tremble. I can almost hear it now: a ringing quiet that grows louder, closer as I stare.

Chapter Two

TIGHTY WHITEY

MCYT: Blacce

Once upon a time, there was a CU-Boulder sociology student named Cody Wagner who discovered he could rap. Mr. Wagner honed his skills on the indie-rap circuit, winning freestyle competitions and earning YouTube fame. Typically, he rapped about small things; in one popular clip, Formula 409, he spent three minutes freestyling entirely about cleaning his apartment, a Ulysses-like celebration of the mundane. And he made it thrilling, constructing Chinese box-like verses filled with fractal haikus of broken half-rhymes and hanging metaphors that recursively revised, sabotaged, and reconstructed all meaning on the verge of emergence:

I take time rippin pages / outta rages / fear wages / paid in kind / paid in stages / earned the right / exit right / behind a sign / I’m fine / back to mine / it’s cleaning time / no formula / 409 / 408 I’d tried / left me blind / and dumb / a mime / in boxes / made of mind / no mind / don’t mind / me, myself & I / gettin by

He didn’t do Battle Rap; he refused to do The Dozens, he refused to tout himself and his talent——dude didn’t even have a stage name!——and he never employed the standard riffs and spacers of freestyling: no yo-ing, no that’s right-ing, just an unending production of unexpected rhymes weaving a tapestry out of time that was both evocative and internally consistent, a unified block of improvisation, interpenetrating mundane and profound. He was hailed as the next titan of hip-hop. And then he disappeared. Nothing much was heard from him until two months ago when, in his stead and looking very much like the young Mr. Wagner, a man calling himself MCYT appeared, still rapping, but with a profoundly changed style.

Like the bastard child of David Duke and Dr. Dre, MCYT apes gangsta rap’s solipsistic sociopathy to push a wingnut Redneck Rights agenda. His debut, Blackface, finds him cruising in a King Cab, tossing verbal beer cans out the window at the heads of black and brown kids. In I’m Black and I’m Proud, YT throws down the white appropriation gauntlet:

You think you so hard / You just a blowhard / My flow is sponsored / Like dudes at NASCAR. / I’m huge as Earnhardt / Junior / You a dwarf star / Where you get your rhymes son? / The SuperWalmart? / You’re shit’s been marked down / I’m the cheeky upstart / I’m tight and white, kid / You just a wet fart / I’m a style genius, boy / You just a retard / You my human sacrifice / I’m a eat your beatin’ heart! / Usin’ you, like a tissue / Confusin you, like a black Jew / Forever, like a tattoo / A redneck who can rap too!

It’s typical battle-rap up to this point, and then the chorus arrives and YT shows us his hand: "The Bigga Nigga / Cuz I’m the Bigga Nigga / The Bigga Nigga / Bigga Nigga than you!" It’s difficult to quantify the shocking, exploitative power of the refrain the first time you hear it; it’s like being at a bachelor party and someone orders up a prostitute. There’s a species of swaggering, corruptive liberation at the heart of the song, an impetuous renunciation of White guilt that veers perilously close to, and maybe crosses into, flat-out White racism. (The effect of all this——the ominous, morally ambiguous power of the song——is best appreciated when witnessing a chorus sing-along by a group of drunk, white college students, as I have. Bleached of irony, the song becomes a bullying war cry of the entitled.) The almost deferential race-consciousness of early white rappers like the Beasties and Eminem is long forgotten, as is the relaxed post-racial feel of Indie Rap. Instead, despite the facade of knowing irony he seems to project, MCYT should really be considered the first crossover star of Race Rap.

The Race Rap genre has weakly coalesced over the past few years out of a smattering of novelty raps by rednecks and skinheads, the former embracing the parochial bellicosity of Country anthems, the latter the xenophobic economic populism of Deathcore. A number of these nasty little independent releases have garnered notoriety and fans on the Web and at shows on college campuses and anti-immigrant rallies, primarily in the South and Midwest, but their popularity has so far been circumscribed by their regional flavors and, most importantly, the lack of genuine rhyme skills among any of the artists. And though it’s obviously a loose and ill-fitting label, covering a broadly heterogeneous scattering of styles, what these artists seem to share is a sneering rejection of the notions of White Guilt and racial harmony and an embrace of race consciousness and White Pride. That these artists have chosen Rap as their means of expression is key; the appropriation of a Black genre to disseminate attacks on people of color is unadorned minstrelry, a form of cultural rape.

So, when MCYT calls his album Blackface, he is telling us he understands exactly what he is doing, he knows precisely the perilous territory he has ventured into. He wants us to call it irony. But something wrong lurks at the heart of his ostensible irony, something inexcusably mean and atavistic. YT is fully aware of his privilege and is swinging it around in our face like a freak dick. He invites us (us meaning white-ass crackers, alt-right meatheads, 4chan sociopaths, and vape-guzzling douchebros of all stripes, obvi: colored need not apply) to share in the freedom of the drunken pillage, the heedless appetite of the conqueror unleashed and validated. Then he stands back and dares us to call him racist.

Judging by the seemingly calculated scandals cum publicity stunts that his press interviews inevitably devolve into, I think nothing would please him more. This is post-Ali G hip-hop, a Moebius-strip of irony, confusing, sickening, and yet—let’s not fool ourselves——guiltily pleasurable and hypnotic. Juxtaposed with the Neptunes-meets-Nashville Hick-Hop that DJ/producer Darth Brooks provides us to bob our heads along with his flow, you don’t know whether to grin or puke.

Or have we all been had? Some have theorized that this is all nothing more than Mr. Wagner’s Ph.D. thesis. Perhaps he has trapped us all under glass in his microscope, our reactions fodder for the insatiable intellectual enterprise of his mind. It’s possible, sure; and maybe in a few years, some all-encompassing, all-revealing text will vindicate him and clear his name. Maybe. But by then it may be too late to contain the mess. The ironist’s creation, having escaped its air quotes for good and gone feral, might live out the remainder of its notoriety as something far more durable.

And banal.

The Polish Men’s Club is packed. Alex Oliphant is standing by the window, sandwiched in next to the end of the bar. He isn’t hard to spot: a tall and bear-like white male with a giant bearded head, he looks self-consciously anti-stylish in a tweed jacket, green sweatshirt and chinos, his hair in a vague, puffy side-part brushed back over his forehead: short hair grown out without a plan. Alex looks like a Prep school English teacher, gearing up for another autumnal reflection on Shakespeare and A Separate Peace. He has a large Styrofoam cup in each hand. He hands one to me.

—Drink and be merry.

—Full speed ahead.

The stale-water metallic foam hits the spot. Cheap American beer in even cheaper Styrofoam cups: pure utilitarian immigrant genius. The Poles, my people, know how to keep the machinery of drunkenness churning smoothly along. I think I am starting to feel a little better about things.

—So, Mr. Krakow. You hear anything good lately?

—Yeah, if by good you mean… really bad.

—And I do.

—The worst.

—Worster than last week?

—Not worst-worst. Run-of-the-mill worst.

—Smooth-rap jazz-metal?

—Racist country-rap.

—They still make rap-rap anymore?

—Naw. That shit’s long gone.

—Don’t make ’em like they used to, then.

—Here-here.

We toast. A rubbery friction of Styro-cups.

—So, Alex.

—Yes, Jason.

—Allow me to posit a question: do you think it’s possible to do anything original at this point? I mean, now even pastiche has become a classic form. And irony is so totally moot.

—Dude.

—… [sip]

Def Leppard is playing on the jukebox, some of the early stuff, from when the drummer had two arms. I look around. Next to me, a crew of red-eyed, dusty construction workers take up most of the bar’s length, staring at a ballgame broadcast over multiple TVs leaning down from the corners, sipping their own light beers in even lighter cups. But beyond the barstools, out on the floor and in the booths, I figure at least a majority of the males here at the majority-male Kielbasa Klub are stoop-shouldered, resentfully fashionable, oversized-plastic-glasses-wearing post-grads and aging hipsters like myself. Seeking authenticity, we have displaced it.

—I mean, look around. The hipsters make fun of the lumpen masses for living in the past, hanging on to dead forms. But they’re even worse. Me included. We all mine the past for the obscure moments in pop history that no one else wants so we can claim exclusivity. And then maybe combine it with something else and call it new. It’s so disingenuous. If you’re going to rape the past, why not just preserve it whole, or try to perfect it. Be a classicist [sip]. But then, of course, you admit that your taste is not exclusive or unique, y’know…niche-tailored. You admit you got no game better than your peers, or your parents, or your ancestors. The march of progress comes to a grinding halt. Western civilization dies and fossilizes. We all become ancestor worshippers, forever looking over our shoulders at the golden age and ruing our unfortunate births.

—…[shrug]

—Why does it seem like it’s all stopped? And why now? [sip]

—I don’t know about that. You think it stopped recently? I think the last really new thing was, like, thirty or forty years ago.

—The early eighties. That seems about right.

—Maybe even the late seventies. [sip]

—Of course. Yeah, you’re right. Even new wave was just a combination of punk, ska and Hi-NRG disco. There was already rock, punk, disco, even hip-hop, all before nineteen eighty. And country, R&B. All the same shit we still have now.

— Been there, done that.

—Hey.

—Sorry. It was so tempting.

—Yet it hurts us all.

We sip our booze-broth, the cups floating in our hands like party balloons.

—It’s not just music, either. Or even art. Politics, religion, wars—they’re all versions, repopularizations, expansions of what we’ve seen before. There are no new radical ideas.

—Ok, maybe. But then there’s the internet. Virtual communities, etc. That’s new.

—Again, not original. The technology has been around since the seventies. Arpanet. Scientists and geeks were discussing Trek conventions by email way back in seventy-six. I mean, remember WarGames? Matthew Broderick had a modem!

—So the whole progress thing has run its course, you’re saying.

—But what’s stopped it now, here, in our lifetimes? That’s what I can’t figure out. I mean, what makes the intellectual, artistic, popular and spiritual trends that we have now the final forms, or at least the last forms?

—Well…I guess if it has to end, it has to end somewhere, you know. Even if it’s with Disco.

—Punk, too. But don’t dis Disco, my friend. It has given us electronic dance music and boogie of all stripes.

—I believe Kraftwerk got there first, Mr. Music Critic. Kraftwerk weren’t Disco.

—Says you.

—You want a punch in the face?

—Sometimes.

—We’ll make a date.

And now our cups are empty. Alex leans over the bar and tries to get the hard-case, mustachioed bartender’s attention.

—Hey, Lech!

—Alex, shut the fuck up. You’ll get the shit beat out of us.

—No one can hear me, anyway. But doesn’t he look like Lech Walesa? I mean, the guy’s gotta do something in retirement. Man of the people, serving beer.

The crotch of my Swedish jeans is vibrating. Becky.

—Hello! Hey, Becky…I’m at Styro-Bar. I can’t hear you at all.

I think she’s at home, getting ready to come out. Alex grabs the phone.

—Just fucking come! Fucking come and get fucking drunk!

He hands the phone back to me with a smirk and a slightly malevolent gleam. Girlfriends have always occupied an odd position between us. We’ve known each other since high school, and in the years since we’ve bunked together in various squats, squinting through the beer-sticky anarchy of summers bussing tables in resort towns, argued and suffered through the hovels of our first years trying to make it here, getting to know the accessible faces of each other’s beings like we didn’t even know ourselves. And our deep familiarity with each other has tended to transfer onto each new partner, inevitably introduced, in person or over the phone, in some grand, usually drunken gesture of invited affection. Alex broke up with his last girl months ago, however. A few drunken encounters since, but they haven’t been elaborated upon. Lately I have sensed Alex taking some vicarious enjoyment of my closeness to Becky, perhaps mixed with something else, something less well articulated.

—So when are you getting fucking married?

—Man, I can’t think about that. The whole process is so tacky.

Becky and I have been engaged for, I think, eight months now, and I’ve been dragging my heels a bit on the wedding date. My cover story is we need to decide the apartment situation first. And I’ve been hoping to defer the apartment decision for as long as possible. It is a chronic discussion. She still lives in her L-shaped cubby in Brooklyn Heights, which is technically big enough for two people, albeit in diminished style. The crux of her argument