Addendum, Slam

On the "death" of Slam, Jasmine said it on the phone last night, "Marketing, it just eats everything now." She's right. Marketing, once one part of the State's apparatus, or the Ideological State Apparatus (as defined by Althusser), has now (now being practically from the moment he wrote the essay) replaced most of the other apparati. Marketing, with its endless need to feed off the creativity of fringe cultural actors, marketing in collusion with a consumer society, taming and bringing under the auspices of overdetermination all the impulses and rebellions that might do us some real good. Cheezy example: There's a new Wendy's (?) commercial to which the soundtrack is a Violent Femmes tune. And all the people in the commercial are a bit young to "remember" the Femmes tune. Not that the Femmes are radical and adventurous new music, not these days. But, they never did go mainstream, and where these brightly polished youngins in the ad would have heard the song is mostly their Gen X parents' music collection. And, now, we have been graced with a Tourist's Guide to Slam. (Fair play: the book can serve other purposes, but it is also, very much, a tourists guide to an underground scene.) The ISA is doing the incorporating and transcending when that's what we should be doing.