Culture Jamming: Bringing Artists, Activists and Scholars Together in the Struggle for Radical Change
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“I will never forget the first time I read the words “culture jamming,” in a galley for Naomi Klein’s seminal 1999 manifesto, No Logo: “Culture jamming baldly rejects the idea that marketing... must be passively accepted as a one-way information flow,” she wrote (p. 281). I thought: Brilliant! No doubt, corporations want communication to be one-way unless they can control or at least direct the consumer’s response toward purchasing and consuming their product. In response, Klein continued: “The most sophisticated culture jams are... interceptions – counter-messages that hack into the corporation’s own method of communication to send a message starkly at odds with the one that was intended.”
I’d been a professional musician for a dozen years when I read those words, and my experience told me that whatever jam this was, it most likely didn't sound very good. You’re not supposed to intercept someone’s message in a jam; you’re supposed play in synchrony with it, harmonize with it, help expand it, even amplify it – exactly the opposite of the definition Klein had offered. But then I understood that for Klein culture jamming didn’t mean bringing cultures together to jam, something I’d been trying to do most of my musical life. For the anti-corporate globalization activists, she represented the message was much more literal: the jamming of messages into and against corporate advertising in order to subvert its intended meaning. The Marlboro Man’s face painted over by skull and crossbones; “Philosophy Barbie;” Hitler instead of Einstein in a jam of the famous Apple advert with the words “Think different.”
In its original incarnation (as exemplified by the magazine Adbusters) the goal of culture jamming was to “change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.” But jamming another message into a network will never work against a transmitter as powerful as the corporate world; sooner or later your attempts will be overwhelmed or become just one more overtone that produces the complicated harmony of capitalist hegemony. At best what will remain would be an echo of critique, soon itself to be mimicked in a future advertisement in the kind of nod towards ironic self-awareness that is a common advertising strategy. On the other hand, as we see today with the rise of the cult of Donald Trump, QAnon and the Alt Right, the most far-fetched and demonstrably false stories can spread like wildfire and generate widespread belief and action not merely by “jamming” mainstream political and media messages, but by wrapping them around a narrative that gives people, who may be lost in a world without hope, a sense of meaning and purpose. The “music” might be lousy, but the story definitely has got a groove.
The reality is that however creative and original, over the last twenty years the kind of culture jamming imagined and developed by anti-corporate globalization “jammers” has utterly failed to achieve much interference of neoliberal capitalism. As Theodor Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues predicted, the “aura of style” overwhelmed most criticism without too much trouble. What has always struck me as interesting has been that the culture jamming movement never considered the other, musical meaning of the word jamming, as an alternative to a strategy that never had much of a chance to succeed. Indeed, given that the term was coined by a band (Negativland), it seemed that musical jamming should be embedded into the core meaning of the concept.
Not merely for aesthetic reasons but also for political ones, I knew from years of traveling around the Middle East and Africa, jamming with musicians, and working with activists and scholars from other cultures that actual culture jamming would be crucial to the creation of what Manuel Castells (1996) has termed “project identities”—open, pluralistic, tolerant, and future-oriented identities, rather than the kinds of “resistance” identities that were the best possible outcome of the negative practice represented by the culture jamming Klein was encouraging.
OG Culture Jam - Ozomatli saxophonist Ulises Bella, KRS-One, Vernon Reid, Davey D and Mark LeVine, Shadow Conventions, Los Angeles, August 2000
Photograph courtesy of the author
As someone who has spent his professional life as a scholar, activist, and artist, I thought it natural to try to create a kind of “culture jamming” in which artists, activists, and scholars could come together in discussion and performance – where ideas and critique could be shared and developed as part of the process of creating new, critically engaged art. From the perspective of the worlds of art, academia (and to a similar extent, journalism), and activism – all of which must operate in some sort of harmony in order to achieve common ends – culture jamming is the best, and perhaps only, way to grasp and work through the unprecedented complexity of globalization and the problems it has generated. That is, we must approach those with whom we are working, dialoguing, or struggling in the same way that a great musician would approach sharing the stage with an equally accomplished peer.
Such jams require several elements to succeed: a high level of skill and innovation combined with sensitivity and selflessness, ability to listen and attenuate the music based on the smallest, sometimes subliminal cues from other musicians and, most importantly, a righteous intolerance of the existing system and willingness to push themselves as far as necessary to find the cultural language and grooves to disarticulate it.
But culture jamming was never just about musicians. It seemed clear that the only way to challenge, or better yet transcend the increasingly powerful neoliberal ideology that had become so hegemonic globally as well as in the United States during the 1990s would be to combine the research and insights of critical scholars, the best practices and strategies of activist communities, and the most creative and original politically engaged art, music and literature. Only such a holistic approach could create the complex synergy – not necessarily harmony, but definitely grooving and with a singular melody – that would amplify the messages of the movement, reach a critical mass of people, and get them moving onto the streets where the real fight for racial, social, economic and environmental justice would have to take place.
There were hints of the potential efficacy of culture jamming thus practiced in the period between the eruption of the Seattle anti-corporate globalization protests in late 1999 and the 9/11 attacks. After a decade of post-Cold War triumphalism by the fin de millennium, critical scholars had come up with the first trenchant critiques of neoliberal globalization, which coalesced and helped shape large-scale activist efforts and mass protests, wherein politically engaged art played an important role. In July and August of 2000, I organized the first official “culture jams” bringing together leading scholars and activists with artists like Chuck D, KRS-One, John Densmore, Vernon Reid and others, at the Shadow Conventions that took place alongside the Democratic and Republican conventions. It was here were the proof of concept began to emerge for the power of “culture jamming”. A follow-up held in Prague for the anti-IMF protests in September 2000 showed how strong the synergy was between these three crucial components of the movement: media-savvy activists, critical scholars and artists.
OG Culture Jam - KRS-One and Vernon Reid
Photograph courtesy of the author
What ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman has described as art's “aesthetic embeddedness” within larger social, political, and economic dynamics of a society – that is, reflecting and amplifying – is central to the ability of culture jamming to create new political as well as cultural opportunities. At certain moments the synergy of artistic creativity, activist energy and political discourse created what I and my colleague Bryan Reynolds have termed emurgent (emerging and urgent) cultural production that is new, innovative and powerful enough to transform what begin as subcultures into countercultures and ultimately revolutionary cultures capable of affecting wide transformations in their societies. One can think of Nina Simone's “Mississippi Goddam,” Picasso's “Guernica,” Pete Seeger's “If I Had a Hammer,” James Baldwin's entire oeuvre, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, Public Enemy's “Fight the Power” or Rage Against the Machine's “Killing in the Name” – these works of art and more are not merely powerful in their own right or politically charged, they bear a certain political knowledge that transcends their aesthetic qualities and power; their experience, at least for a time after their creation, “expressed the antinomies” of the hegemonic ideologies against which they were created (as Adorno described music in one of his later essays), offering at least the possibility of action which, if not fully revolutionary, than far more anti-systemic than most other art surrounding them.
For many if not most of these works of art, their creators embodied the principles of culture jamming in their knowledge both conditions and the mechanisms of struggle as well as the most powerful, jarring and new ways to represent it aesthetically. Such singular artists are far from the norm, most of the time deeply embedded knowledge of conditions and methods of struggle and powerfully original artistic conceptions come together through the interaction, or jamming, of many people. But such jams are hard to organize, never mind sustain, especially when (as has happened with the anti-neoliberal protests of the turn-of-the-century) governments ramp-up violence and repression. For instance, by the July 2001 anti-G8 Genova protests in Genoa Italy, the violence became severe enough that one protester was killed by Italian police. Two months later, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the ramped-up War on/of Terror overwhelmed the emerging global peace and justice movement, its vocabulary of spectacular violence all but silencing art or activism for years to come.
Even the global Occupy Wall Street movement inspired by the eruption of the Arab Spring uprisings beginning in late 2010 couldn't pierce through the discursive, legal and when necessary physical violence of the American State. It was only with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, fueled by one of the two most elemental forms of American violence – racist anti-Black state violence (the other and related form being genocidal anti-Indigenous violence) – that a new nexus of deeply embodied historical, political and activist knowledge and aesthetically innovative and even explosive art, could meet together again. What Walter Benjamin as well as Adorno termed the “aura” of art had returned with a renewed “guerrilla semiotics” (in the words of Umberto Eco) that has slowly begun to shake the core political epistemology of white capitalist rule in the United States.
The psychopathological politics of Trump and the fanatical and false-religiously grounded white nationalist Right, call for the peaceful but potentially effective guerrilla tactics of culture jamming. Whether deployed in the arenas of art and politics, or on the streets, simple resistance is insufficient to prevail in the existential struggle now facing the United States. Like all great jams, more than ever, today’s culture jamming must encourage and sustain an unprecedented level of empathy for ourselves and especially for those who would suffer were the American republic (re)turned to a white nationalist staging point for an Apocalyptic End Time war. Besides jams that I've organized I've seen hints of the perfect brew in magical locations on most every continent – at the Chicoco radio, music and film studios of the Community Media and Advocacy Platform in the waterfront slums of Nigeria's oil capital of Port Harcourt, in the T2F community space in Karachi, at an military checkpoint in the Occupied Territories with the Jenin Freedom Theater and at an art festival next to a cornfield in a Zapatista-controlled “autonomous municipality” in Chiapas, Mexico. None of these locations and moments were haphazard or spontaneous, even if the art being produced was often improvised. They were rather the product of intense study, planning, collaboration, courage and determination by multiple actors – artists, activists, academics young and old, sharing skills, experiences, stories and sometimes blood to create an aesthetic and political fulcrum or singularity intense enough permanently to transform everyone who passed through it. It's not just about producing an amazing song, video, painting, novel or play. It's about producing a whole aesthetic ecosystem that is so lush and robust that, in the words of Toni Cade Bambara, it “makes revolution irresistible.”
In short, lives of freedom demand that we create music and art that better responds to and resonates with the present struggle to be counted. As the work of scholars and practitioners of art in conflict zones across Africa such as Cherié Rivers Ndaliko has clearly demonstrated, for art to realize its power to shift perceptions and motivate people towards holistic healing, it has to be profoundly grounded in local knowledges, experiences, and aesthetics and not shaped, motivated or directed from the outside. Culture jamming represents one path towards achieving the goals of better representation and inclusion for the multitude of rich and diverse perspectives in America and beyond.
In the face of a truly psychopathic politics epitomized by Trump and the fanatical and religiously grounded white nationalist Right, guerrilla tactics – whether deployed in the artistic or political or on the streets, is not likely to prevail in the existential struggle now facing the United States. Like all great jams, more than ever culture jamming today needs to encourage and sustain an unprecedented level of empathy, not just for ourselves but for those who would see the American republic (re)turned into a white nationalist staging point for an Apocalyptic End Time war, and do so at the same time we remain engaged in a long term struggle that, especially if Trump secures a second term, will likely cost more than a few their freedom and even lives. In short, we need to create a music, and art more broadly, equal to the scope and stakes of that struggle.
Dr. Mark Levine teaches African and Middle Eastern histories at University of California-Irvine, where he is a 2020-21 Guggenheim Fellow. Having traveled to Palestine, Nigeria, Kenya and Chiapas, his focus is on conflict zones and the role of culture (especially music) in communal healing of trauma in war/conflict. He is a Grammy winning musician who also works in theater.
(c) 2020 Mark Levine