Tariffs Redux

Weirdly, Not Uncertain

Hi Everyone!

When we dropped our episode about tariffs and their potential impact on the American culture industries, we didn’t expect them to last forever. But we also didn’t expect them to be dropped so quickly, as the Trump administration notched a remarkable policy victory over the leaders of economically fragile China…JK JK JK—Navarro & Co. appear to have totally caved, reversing themselves down to a (still inexplicable) 30% tariff on most goods, and crowing to the skies about positive steps while achieving precisely nothing in actual commitments (at least publicly).

This abrupt back-and-forth raises a number of vital questions: Does Wall Street REALLY buy that everything’s okay? How intense will the disruption of Americans’ access to Chinese goods be like? Can you just turn the Trans-Pacific faucet back on this way? How much political anger will removal of the de minimis loophole cause?¹

While all of these deserve a deep dive in their own right, none of them really fit our primary focus, namely—what is all of this going to do to music? And to a surprising degree, that thru-line actually enables an analysis that can maybe separate the political-economic shifts these tariffs still represent from all of the smoke + glitter that the unfolding news cycle has cast over the landscape. To put it another way—despite what would seem like a massive change in the trade landscape since we talked through the potential implications of Trump’s policies…basically nothing has changed. And just maybe, that’s actually the most important thing.

So—despite the tumult, most of what we talked through on the podcast is still all too current, with perhaps the sole exception being the current (and, we’d bet temporary) recovery of AI-addicted tech firms. So: The potential impact of a recession (or even just slowed growth) given the fact that streaming’s never-ending rise seems like it’s hitting maximum saturation? Still tough for a music industry that seems like it’s trying to pivot to commodified fandom as the next big thing. The increased costs of touring + the increased difficulty of border crossing? Still really bad for an indy sector that is, in so many ways, just hanging on. A final test of whether financialized music really is a counter-cyclical investment? A fascinating test of whether good ol Merck Mercuriadis might have been on to…at least half of something.

Want more details? Listen to the episode.

What might be worth expanding on in this newsletter, however, are the ideological stakes of the tariffs for the American cultural economy. Here, it’s necessary to go big picture for a minute, and connect the expansion of the U.S. culture industries to the broader emergence of managerially-organized consumer capitalism at the turn of the 20th century. Viewed from this perspective, the underlying political economy of American music is part of a broader turn towards domestic consumption (rather than raw capacity building) as a means to stabilize the crises of accumulation that plagued the late 19th century. This early deal, which was to be expanded and re-entrenched as part of the new deal / social democratic states of the 1940s, sought to head off the potential disruptions of outright class conflict by creating economies that, while definitely not “working for everyone,” provided the industrialized core of the world’s western empires with enough goods (both cultural and material) to create some sort of hegemonic buy-in from the newly media-tized masses.

Not just ancillary, cultural goods were key to this whole thing working—negotiations through, with, and around them are what created the newly expansive, newly flexible societies of the 20th century—while also producing everything from Jazz and Rock’n’Roll to Rap and Techno. This account, it’s important to note, is by no means intended to be a valorization. Anyone who knows the history of American music (or who, you know, listens to this show) is well aware of the extraordinary systems of exploitation and expropriation integral to the functioning of the modern culture industries. Still, compared to a lot of what had come before, all of this could look suspiciously like progress.

And that same set of dynamics, both embedded in the products that carried commodified entertainment and the industries that sold them, were one of the key factors that allowed, I think, American entertainment to achieve its remarkable degree of global success over the last 100 years. The construction of a cross-class, cross-ethnicity consumer base that emerged as a way to address the tensions within the U.S. political economy, and the potential drive towards connection and individual freedom that art produced within this system could carry, proved, well, extremely popular. But, and this is the crucial point, those cultural goods were always integral parts of a larger industrial complex that sought, more or less, to make the entire globe a consumer market for American companies. I’d like to buy the world a Coke, or sell it a Ford, or a pack of Marlboros, or…you get the idea.

This is where we can get back to the question of tariffs and the political economy of culture. That entire system was predicated, I think you can argue, on a willful refusal to acknowledge a key contradiction at its core—namely, the blithe assertion of near perfect unity between American interests and global interests. It was a linkage that lasted an extremely long time, from the late 19th emergence phase, when the U.S. could claim it just wanted IN on a system dominated by Britain, to the post WWII everyone-else-has-destroyed-their-factories phase, when the U.S. claimed its role as the leading power of Western capitalism. It was challenged, arguably, by the Nixon shock and the various financial crises of the ‘70s, but was reconstituted by a Neoliberal order that maintained its global vision while radically changing which consumers really counted.

With Trump—and heck, even with Bernie—it does feel like we’ve come to the end of this particular road. The last 40 years have been great for the I-95 corridor, clearly, but the economic costs are no longer politically sustainable. And with a return to industrial policy under Biden, and what could charitably be termed Neo-Mercantilism under the current administration, we’ve entered into a fundamentally different…well…vibe. Interests now need to be balanced. Winners and losers determined by explicit politics, rather than the invisible hand of the market.

And if we accept the premise that commodified art and the industries that produce it are integrally linked to the overall structures of production and capital accumulation/distribution within a society, this leads to some important questions. U.S. culture has been shaped, I’ve argued here, by a boundary-crossing drive simultaneously spiritual and financial. How would an economy built around “protecting our own” at a cost to the world—a stance, I’d argue, that is increasingly prevalent on both left and right—what kind of music would that economy produce? How would this (potentially) tectonic ideological shift radiate through American culture? Or…in a turn towards mass cult, exclusive experience, and regional scenes, and a general shift away from shared pop experience…have we already started to hear the change?

Department of Actual Music:

Saxon: Stand out track from the latest LP of this sleazy, London-based, acid-y house outfit featuring Fat White Family frontman Lias Saoudi. Also, fun lyrics! (“momma wish she never had me because her clothes don’t fit her body like mine”). Favorite forget the hellscape we live in and just dance record of the year (so far).

(Sam’s note—Saxon told me, and I quote, “If you don’t like this, we’re getting a divorce.” Safe to say, the podcast continues.)

Sam: On a real “back on my bullshit” Canterbury scene kick lately. Caravan AND Camel, you know? Of all the groups, I really do think that the short-lived Matching Mole is probably the most underrated—weird, catchy(?), and definitive proof that while Robert Wyatt had an astonishing career despite his accident, he really was a fabulous drummer.

LUV,

Saxon & Sam

1. Our gut: Yes, surprisingly intense, who knows!, a surprising amount.