Gang of One

Every novel is a license to obsess. To fixate on a subject—chess, comic books, Yiddish, the Khazars. To go overboard; to pluck the beeswax stoppers from the ears, cut the restraints, and freestyle madly toward the siren subject that is calling from the shore.

Vinyl records, for example. Early on, I decided to make a used-records store on Telegraph Avenue one of the key settings of my novel in progress. Okay, maybe “early on” is an under-exaggeration. Maybe it would be more accurate to say “the entire novel is just a pretext for spending as much time and money as I possibly can in used record stores.” (A similar rationale doubtless underlies my projected next novel, the epic Tacos Al Pastor.)

At some point in the course of my thrilling, exhaustive and necessarily prolonged research among the crates and cratediggers, I encountered Wax Poetics, the greatest magazine in Known Space (sorry, Atlantic). Beautiful, well-written, intensely curated, WP articulates a hip-hop based theory of the history of black music on vinyl, 1950-1980. Borges argued that every writer creates his or her own precursors, that a great writer like Kafka retrospectively alters the way we read his predecessors. This is the line taken by Wax Poetics toward postwar black popular music; as if hip-hop were the root, and soul the flower; hip-hop the constellating line that draws an animal in a scatter of stars.