Joshua Clover

This was a required textbook for a course, otherwise I can’t imagine myself paying for an analytical look at The Matrix.

The first third of Clover’s book is pretty good as he reviews a short history of turn-of-the-millennium media recognizing the transition from looking “into” a world to looking “around” a world. It’s A Wonderful Life give us a look at any small town in America in 1948, but The Godfather just three decades later is a specific world unknown to it’s viewers. How much more The Matrix when the characters literally inhabit a constructed world that disassembles throughout the series?

The second third of the book gets bogged down in an attempt to review the solipsistic references of the film, which culminates in the final third entirely embracing the idea that the movie is Marxist in worldview. (MATRIX = MARX IT, as Clover argues as a high school paper might) A single paragraph dismisses the Christian references (Neo is “my savior, man”, dead and resurrected, the foretold hero) as a “misfortune”—seemingly as much for the fact that it’s difficult to reconcile a single hero to Marxist ideology as for the whiteness of the main cast member. (Keanu is born in Lebanon to a English mother and Chinese-Hawaiian-Portuguese father. Reducing him to skin tone seems to miss the point of his casting.)

The Matrix is infamous for the Wachowskis slipping in as many references to modern philosophy as possible. To focus on one as the answer is to play directly to their desire. The philosophy smorgasbord is the message. It’s McLuhan all the way down.… (more)

Cultural critic, poet, and professor Joshua Clover examines the pivotal year of 1989 as it manifested itself in popular music. He has three main focal points. First, the transition of rap music from Black Nationalism to gangsta, from East Coast to West Coast, through Public Enemy and NWA (with a short dalliance into the third way of De La Soul's da inner sound, y'all). Next, he goes to England for the rave scenes of "The Second Summer of Love" which is both a term I've never heard before and a culture I knew little about. Back in the US, Clover heads to the Pacific Northwest for the emergence of the inwardly-focused punk/metal blend of grunge. Later chapters also explore what was on the Billboard charts in 1989 and explicates the vapidity of the Jesus Jones' song that provides the subtitle of the book. The ultimate conclusion is that popular culture embraced the image-event of the fall of the Berlin Wall but missed that actual revolutions of that year. Overall, this was an entertaining trip down memory lane (not to mention filling in the gaps of the things I missed the first time around) but found the author's use of an overly-scholarly tone off-putting. If you're interested in music criticism and the history of the late 80s/early 90s, pick up this book as it won't take long to read, but otherwise I wouldn't recommend it.… (more)