Nik Cohn - Triksta

 My brother bought this for me in a charity shop because he knows I love Southern American rap. It’s an unusual story, readable for its sheer implausibility.

Cohn is a self-proclaimed Jewish outsider growing up in the sectarian obsessed Ulster of the 1960s.  The son of an historian father and a writer mother, he moved to England and made a name for himself writing about rock and roll in the 60s and 70s.  He writes articles, books, novels and seems to have played an active part in that ‘scene’.  Among other claims to fame he offered some advice to ‘The Who’, panned ‘The Beatles’ in reviews, wrote a novel that inspired a David Bowie album and made up an article on which the movie ‘Saturday Night Fever’ was based.  Perhaps more intriguingly he was also indicted on drug trafficking charges for importing $4m of Indian heroin but refused to give testimony and the charges were subsequently dropped.  I got a lot of this information from Wikipedia because the author’s own revelations in the book are patchy.  He shares some highly personal information, like the fact he has contracted hepatitis C and that he is an addict, but also omits a lot and certainly doesn’t provide anything like a chronological overview.  What the reader does learn about the author comes in incomplete, unexplained snatches.  For such a personal book, I thought this was unusual and a bit frustrating.

Like many books by journos that I’ve read, it feels like a series of articles stitched together and lacks cohesion.  There’s the story of his time taking notes for a retired champion boxer’s biography, which has nothing to do with New Orleans rap except that the boxer is from New Orleans.  Next, a story about using his record label connections to shop for a deal for an artist called ‘Choppa’, which ends abruptly when his friend at the label who’s financing the deal gets fired.  Finally, two tales of abortive attempts to launch the careers of a couple of artists using his own cash to back them. He’s good at sketching a scene or a character but overall the book lacked structure.  The writing is proficient and readable, as you would expect, but sometimes misses the mark a bit.  An MC re-recording lines from a verse does so, “as neatly as if she were swatting flies”, which isn’t a quintessentially “neat” activity.  Alternatively, there are some phrases that really hit the spot like, “an entertainment lawyer with the splendidly serpentine name of Micheline Levine”! 

It would probably be quite easy to criticise the author for being ‘a carpetbagger’ or ‘a white saviour’, as he is essentially attempting to insert himself into a culture he has no connection with.  I’m not sure the book has aged that well since its publication in 2005 in this regard.  He makes an absurd attempt to differentiate his own interest in black culture as a ‘tribute’ but when other people do it he seems to think it’s ‘crass’ and ‘barefaced theft’ (p98).  He also occasionally speaks patronisingly about the rappers he works with, saying of one, “Will handled everything I threw at him, however polysyllabic, and even seemed to relish the change of pace” (p118).  This seemed a bit rich to me given he’s the one who’s gone to New Orleans to try and involve himself in the rapper’s native culture!  Towards the end of this weird mish-mash of stories, confessions and encounters of a ‘grandad gone wild’, I began to wonder what the ultimate motivation behind such madness was.  Prima facie, the author says he is obsessed with N.O. and has always loved bounce music so wants to do something related to these passions after being diagnosed with hepatitis C.  However, he never moves to the city permanently and maintains his main place of residence as N.Y.  There may be good reasons for this but he doesn't mention them in the book.  It seemed like he was using N.O. as a highly unconventional location for a holiday house, dabbling in bounce culture voyeuristically and not fully immersing himself in it.  Equally, when he’s buying studio time and equipment for his budding artists, he sometimes says things are ‘out of his budget’.  For a man with a successful career, a P.A. and a home in N.Y., I struggled to take this in the literal sense of having no more money.  Instead, it seemed to mean something more like ‘that was more than I was prepared to invest’.  This gave me the impression that he was getting into bounce as a kind of diversionary game or hobby and not wholeheartedly as you might expect from his professions of love.  At other times, his budget seems far more lavish like when he flies down to N.O. to chaperone a young, female artist to Paris (p146)!  He explicitly denies he had any sexual interest in her but it struck me as a strange thing to do ‘on a budget’!  

On the other hand, if he really did what he writes about he should be praised for his audacity and originality.  I  also enjoyed some aspects of the book a lot.  It’s a first hand account of what the rap game looks like at a minor label level and gives many interesting insights into the recording and production process.  Cohn is also eloquent about the conflicts rich, white, liberal, European listeners feel about enjoying black, American rap music, especially it’s more violent or derogatory variants.  Are we rubbernecking the extreme deprivation that leads to neighbourhoods dominated by crime and drugs?  Is listening to that kind of music perpetuating the prison industrial complex?  Cohn doesn’t offer any easy answers but he’s right to point out that violent, cruel and misogynistic lyrics can create visceral, euphonic tracks and capture certain feelings in ways more ‘conscious’ rappers sometimes struggle to.

The best part of the book is the detailed explanations of how artists are exploited by major New Orleans rap labels.  This means Master P’s No Limit and Baby and Slim William’s Cash Money imprints but Cohn, perhaps wisely, doesn’t name names!  Written a full decade before Lil Wayne sued his adoptive father and record label boss Birdman aka Baby for $50m, the strategy is concisely summarised:

“They’d taken him off the streets, maybe out of jail, and turned his whole life around.  They were family, they told him,  The family card, that was the key.  They made the talent feel guilty, an ingrate.  To show they cared, they gave him a new car or jewelry as a token of goodwill, and sent him back to work.  A couple more years went by and everything ran smoothly, till finally the talent got wise and hired a lawyer, who found they owed, say, $10m.  So they offered $1m, take it or leave it.  The talent was broke; all he had was some medallions and a car he’d probably smashed up by now.  What’s he going to do?  He takes the million.  That leaves the label with nine.” (p76-77)

Something that confused me was the name Choppa gives to Cohn, Nik Da Trik, which he repurposes as the book’s title.  I’ve only come across ‘trick’ as a derogatory term used by prostitutes as a synonym for ‘mark’ or ‘john’.  I thought it might have different meanings in N.O.  However, I then remembered the 1991 bounce anthem ‘Bounce’ by DJ Jimi and a young Juvenile featuring numerous uses of the name ‘trick’ as a synonym for ‘ho’!  It’s impossible for someone who loves N.O. bounce music to be unaware of this song but Cohn only offers this explanation for his name:

“There was a rich irony here.  In African folklore, the trickster is a central figure, Esu-Elegbara; in voodoo, his name is Papa Legba.  And, in black America, he remains the great signifier: the joker, the storyteller, the liar.  The one who wears a mask.” (p129)

This seems like an extremely positive gloss to put on the nickname!  I’m also not sure that  Choppa, as represented in the book, would’ve necessarily been more aware of African folklore than he would’ve been about a word used in common parlance in N.O.  One that had featured in one of bounce culture's biggest hits, which he must have heard countless times growing up.  African folklore is not the first allusion that springs to mind when I hear the name ‘Nick Da Trik’.  I wondered if Choppa wasn’t actually mocking Cohn by calling him a trick?  Or making some allusion to prostitution?  Was Cohn a ‘trick’ in the sense that he was hiring a lot of hookers?  Or is Choppa calling him a ho for being so desperate to ride his coattails?  Or is Cohn a mark to Choppa, someone who will pay for him to rap?  Whatever the explanation, it struck me that the name might well have been meant as an insult.  Cohn would certainly have known the words negative connotations so I wondered why he doesn’t mention them.  

Ultimately, it’s hard to work out exactly what’s going on because of the lack of personal background Cohn provides.  This was a major flaw as it is fundamentally a highly personal book.  He should have written more about the history of bounce and less about himself or told us more about his life; it ends up being neither one nor the other.  I love the fact that he did something crazy like trying to get into the N.O. bounce scene in his mid 50s even if the true motivations for doing so are murky.  The fact it’s such an unusual book, and that it’s about a subject I love, meant there was plenty to enjoy.  On the other hand, it has little or no structure and is frustratingly vague about the author’s wider life even though he’s the protagonist.  I’m interested to read some of his other work but wouldn’t recommend this book unless you have a particular interest in bounce or N.O. rap.

Carlos Castaneda - The Teaching Of Don Juan

 The book is separated into three parts.  First, an account of the author’s experience as an apprentice to Yaqui ‘brujo’ (sorcerer) or ‘man of knowledge’ Don Juan.  With him, the author is introduced to chewing peyote, ‘smoking’ magic mushrooms and using Jimson’s weed in a ritual context.  Much of the text is explanations of arcane preparations of these substances and the rituals that go alongside them.  As these drugs are mainly used recreationally in Western culture, but are often linked to more ‘spiritual’ experiences, this was the most interesting and best part of the book.  The substances are anthropomorphised, to a greater or lesser extent, and characterised as ‘allies’, ‘protectors’ or ‘guides’.  The author describes experiences like meeting the embodied form of peyote (‘Mescalito’), flying through the sky and other ‘non-ordinary’ realities during his apprenticeship.  I often feel like huge amounts of indigenous knowledge must have been lost during colonial occupations and the relentless drive towards consumerism and Westernisation.

While the first part of the book was of some interest, I started to get annoyed by how the author always has ‘special’ experiences that impress his teacher.  Don Juan is reported as saying that each of the substances can either ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ a person, which will eventually lead to them either ‘taking’ a person as an ally / disciple and allowing them to use their power, or ‘leaving’ them.  The author is more or less always ‘liked’ and writes about how his experiences are special and mark him out as extraordinary according to Don Juan.  A bit like religions or other cults, I sometimes think the primary motivation for adherents is to feel like they’re better than other people and I find this offensive.  After a couple of hundred pages of instructions for obscure rituals and relentless self-congratulation on how well he is doing in his apprenticeship; I felt like Castenega was primarily an egotist and a bullshitter.  

The second part of the book reads how I imagine an anthropology dissertation might be. This is unsurprising as Casteneda was an anthropology student at UCLA while writing these books. The author tries to categorise and systematise the substances he has taken, the rituals he has performed and how these have interacted to form a body of knowledge or course of study he has undertaken with Don Juan.  This second section was more or less academic gobbledygook to me.  It was annoying to read, deeply unclear and pissed me off so much I abandoned the third section of the book (an appendix), which is something I hardly ever do.  I was extremely surprised to learn that the book had formed the basis for a PhD he received from UCLA.  It crossed my mind that he made the book up, perhaps to get his PhD, perhaps to mock academic anthropology, but I don’t know if that fundamentally changes its quality as a text.

I wasn’t really sure what to make of this book.  Read as a guide for someone who wants to perform these rituals it could be a valuable set of instructions as the descriptions are detailed.  Although it also seems to indicate that any apprentice needs a teacher like Don Juan so I may be mistaken here.  As a pure work of literature, I found it boring and couldn’t really get much out of it.  The experiences the author has sound extraordinary.  However, as anyone who has had to listen to stories of acid trips or other drug sagas will know, they’re rarely as engaging to the listener as they were to the experiencer.  This left me a bit lost as to what the point of the book was.  At this stage of my life, I’m probably not going to go to Mexico, sew up lizard eyes and mouths and smear my genitals with arcane preparations in the company of mysterious holy men.  As I mentioned before, it does give a different perspective on the substances it describes from the one typically encountered in Western culture.  The first section allows the reader to partially enter into the experiences of the author but it certainly isn’t a classic by my estimation.  But beyond that, I found the book didn’t really speak to me and I got almost nothing out of it.  Especially the godforsaken second section, which, like much academic writing I have read, is more or less meaningless to the layperson.

I didn’t enjoy this book and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone as all I really learned was that Castaneda thinks he is a very special person but isn’t a very special writer!

Rogan Taylor and Klara Jamrich - Puskas on Puskas

This book is based on a series of interviews with Puskas and other key figures from his life.  It feels like a documentary film in book form. The author collates snippets from various interviews and other sources.  The interviews may have originally been conducted for a film documentary but it was enjoyable and readable as text.  It’s in roughly chronological order, giving a great overview of an extraordinary player and a fascinating career.

From romantic beginnings playing football in the streets of Budapest with a ball made of bundled up tights, Ferenc ‘Ocsi’ Puskas and his best friend Jozsef ‘Cucu’ Boszik rose to unimaginable heights both domestically and internationally.  Representing teams that transformed the way football was played.  

Puskas’ career began in earnest after the end of WW2.  After the defeat of the Nazis, Hungary was a Soviet satellite state.  In order to improve the quality of the national team, the best players were concentrated in two clubs:  Honved - the army team, and MTK - the secret police team.  Under the guidance of coach Guzstav Sebes, the national team would experiment with new tactical formations in behind closed doors games within Hungary when the players weren’t representing their clubs.  From this, they developed a highly flexible 2-3-3-2 formation, with a deep lying number 9 and wingers that could drop into midfield, that is seen as a forerunner of total football where the majority of players join in both attack and defence.  The team was known as ‘The Golden Team’ or ‘The Mighty Magyars’ and between 1950-56 they were undefeated except for losing the 1954 World Cup final to West Germany, despite beating them in the competition’s group stages.  

Owing to Communism, very few Hungarians could travel outside of the country and none of the players could be paid according to their true worth on the open market.  However, because they were so successful and this reflected so well on the country and, in turn, its Communist form of government; the players existed in a rarefied atmosphere unlike most of their compatriots.  They were granted plum Army positions and salaries (Puskas was a Major), with no requirement to do any work or live in barracks and a blind eye was turned to the large-scale smuggling the squad undertook when returning from trips abroad.  The book contains lots of great stories about these exploits and it serves as a good example of the absurdities that arose from Communism.

Although the team played in many famous matches, two stood out to me alongside the 1954 World Cup campaign, which would require an essay all of its own!  First, Hungary defeated England 6-3 at Wembley, where England had never been beaten by a team from outside the British Isles, in what has been called ‘The Match of Century’ and, second, a 4-2 victory over Scotland at Hampden in 1955.  

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 saw the breakup of the national team with many players moving to Europe to play for lucrative salaries.  Incidentally, the under-21 team was also on tour when the revolution started meaning Hungary effectively lost 2 generations of incredible footballers.  Puskas was banned by the Hungarian FA, and subsequently FIFA, for 18 months for refusing to return home. Many predicted that this signalled the end of his career at the age of around 30.  As prolific an eater as he was a goalscorer, Puskas’ weight ballooned while he couldn’t play.  Nonetheless, he secured a huge contract with Real Madrid, lost all the weight and went on to win 5 La Liga titles, 3 European Cups and play 4 times for the Spanish national team.  After his playing career, Puskas moved into an itinerant coaching career.  The highlight of which was a spell at Greek club Panathinaikos (1970-4) where he took an average side to the brink of the 70-71 European Cup.

A larger than life character both figuratively and, at certain times, physically Puskas seems a true rascal and loveable rogue.  His passion and appetite for football seem matched only by that for good, spicy Hungarian sausage.  The most precursory of searches brings reams of adoring quotations from the who’s who of the footballing pantheon.  Everyone seems to have been mesmerised by his talent and captivated by his personality.  For Puskas himself, he seemed to be as obsessed with being loved as he was with football and was wildly successful in both.  His confidence seems to have galvanised all those he came into contact with.  

In spite of playing for two of football’s most extraordinarily successful teams for 23 years and coaching for nearly 30 years, he never seemed to lose an ounce of his enthusiasm for the game.  Famously keen for game even when he was very overweight and could barely squeeze a jersey over his belly; he said during an interview while coaching in Australia, aged about 60:

“I play any invitation, any friendly game, I hope I can play 10 years more.  The reason I want to play 10 more years?  So I can live 10 more years!”

A true great of the game and singular personality, he seems to have loved football from the earliest days of his life until the last and it is certain that it loved him back!

“From the moment as a little kid I heard the roar of the crowd from Kipset Stadium I suppose I was spoken for.  In the end, God willing, I will be just an old man who loves football.”

I found this a highly enjoyable read and would certainly recommend this book.

 

Phil Knight - Shoe Dog

Nike is an iconic brand that was ubiquitous in my childhood sporting dreams.  The champion athletes it sponsored and the coveted equipment they wore dominated my imagination.  Nike’s growth coincided with a number of interlinked, supportive trends.  First, the increasing popularity of sports with second, the increasing commerciality of sports, much of which was made possible by a third factor - improvements in communications allowing star teams and athletes to reach a global audience, which brought more and more sponsorship money into sport.  A fourth factor, the huge increase in sportswear worn casually for non-sporting activities, arose simultaneously and is perhaps best exemplified by the ubiquity of Nike trainers!  It’s probable that Phil Knight was, to a greater or lesser extent, betting on these trends when he founded Nike.  However, I found Knight’s key insight was the transcendent power of sport for an ever expanding crowd of spectators.  Writing about Steve Prefontaine, a superstar distance runner and early Nike sponsored athlete, he observes:

‘I’d never witnessed anything quite like that race. And yet I didn’t just witness it.  I took part in it.  Days later I felt sore in my hams and quads.  This, I decided, this is what sports are, what they can do.  Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, taking part in other people’s victories.  And defeats.  When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.’ (p212)

I was often struck by the difference between perception and reality in the book.  As a child of the 80s and 90s, I think I was aware Nike was an American brand but thought of it more as a global marker of sporting excellence and cool equipment.  Reading about Knight’s early life in Oregon eating pot roasts and drinking milk round the family dinner table revealed a far more All American background than I had ever envisioned.  In one sense, this is the genius of Nike - let the universal qualities of sporting excellence and superstar athletes do the talking.  In another, perhaps it’s simply the timing of when I became aware of the brand.  I missed its early adverts of Oregon treescapes and became conscious of it when the US and its sporting culture was much more revered in the UK than it is today.  Nonetheless, I think few people would’ve envisaged Nike’s early management as so pale, male and alcoholic based on the image it projects today!

This dissonance can also be found in Knight’s writing about himself.  In spite of his ferocious competitiveness in every aspect of his life, he makes repeated attempts to style himself as a dreamer, a rebel or even a bohemian.  He declares he is only ‘maybe’ interested in money as a young man but doing an MBA and an accountancy qualification are things only people who are very focussed on money do, in my experience.  In his defence, it could be argued that he could have easily had a career as an investment banker with far less risk than starting his own company.  However, for me, he is driven by competition and victory, not dreams and ideals, as he sometimes tries to make out.  Alternatively, his drive to succeed could be interpreted as a son’s diligent respect for his father’s conformist ideals of respectability.  Knight seems to have been very close with his father and would display a natural disposition towards pleasing him as a young man.  Against this, it seems his father wasn’t wild about the idea of him starting Nike.  In the end, I have to concede that Knight is a bit of a rebel because he did something crazy like start a running shoe brand when the market was so nascent it scarcely existed.  

Another example of saying one thing and then providing examples of almost exactly the opposite is how he simultaneously trumpets how honest Nike is as a company while describing how he violated the terms of his contract with his supplier!  Albeit there were mitigating circumstances, but like the MBA holding accountant who starts his own businesses in his spare time but is only ‘maybe’ interested in money - something doesn’t sit right.  My interpretation is that Knight is at bottom a competitor and not one overly concerned with sportsmanship.  

He also repeatedly asserts that he did very little as CEO and gave his employees freedom to do what they wanted and this is what resulted in such stratospheric success.  However, he then goes on to list how much everybody on the management made out of the IPO, which is also a strange thing to do for someone who doesn’t care about money!  He makes $178m and everyone else $5-10m, which shows he kept very tight control (p354).  Regardless of how much he praises his employees and says it was all because of them, he doesn’t recognise them with much equity in the company.  I think his stake around the IPO was close to 50%.  He even tries to justify this as his employees' idea, which is fairly absurd when contrasted with his claim that his employees did everything.  I’ve never met someone in corporate management who wanted to do more work and make less money!  Even if his employees did want a strong leader, this could have been structured in a way that gave Knight more voting rights rather than so much more equity than everyone else.  For me, he thinks of money as the metric used to determine success in the race / war of life.  He finishes the book by mentioning how he is worth $10bn and is mates with Gates and Buffet, which is a bit nauseating and clearly demonstrates his penchant for status and wealth.

So what was it that made Knight tick?  For me, Knight is a bloody-minded and combatant competitor, not at all a bohemian or a dreamer unless you count dreaming about trouncing your enemies!  As a college track runner, where the absolute classification handed down by the clock is as brutal as in any sport, he flourished, producing a 4.13 minute mile.  He once played badminton against a friend 116 times in order to beat him once.  The way he idolises military generals from WW2 also makes a lot more sense in the context of a person obsessed with victory rather than a dreamer or a rebel.  Making money is a competition of sorts and was a very vibrant and visible one in 1950s America.  Knight saw making money like a sport or, better yet, a war like his heroes the generals fought.  But in this war dollars are the determinant of victory, like the clock in athletics, rather than body counts, which seem to shock Knight as much as the average person.  In this sense, he is obviously admiring an admirer of the generals personal qualities and their place in history rather than being bloodthirsty.  But both the track and the marketplace were perfect competitive environments for Knight and he flourished in both.  Comparing himself to Prefontaine he writes, 

‘I’m all out, all the time, he said.  In their relationship I saw a mirror of my relationship with banks.  Pre didn’t see the sense in going slow - ever.  Go fast or die.  I couldn’t fault him.  I was on his side.  Even against our coach’ (p220).  

Knight’s extraordinary focus on business victory at all costs seems to have taken its toll on his personal relationships.  His wife is one of his former accountancy students who he then employs and then later dates and marries, which said a lot to me about the breadth of Knight’s interests and social circle!   Rather tragically, he seems to have very little connection to anyone - friends, family or employees - and seems ‘closest’, if that is even the right word, with the athletes who he sponsored.  He recounts how they all loved him too, which may well be true. He was writing them huge cheques, for one.  But for any sporty child from the last two or three decades it is probable that Nike played a huge role in their aspirations and that a sponsorship from Nike was, in some ways, the ultimate proof of their success.  In this sense, Knight has built something extraordinary in Nike, but I still think it is silly to pretend that money wasn’t a motivation.  It seems Nike the company and its business were his entire life.  Everyone who goes against him or leaves Nike is described as a traitor in the same way soldiers might talk about deserters.

The way Knight and Bowerman interact through their career is the best and most interesting bit of the book.  Like his father, Bowerman is gruff and grudging in the praise he gives to an extreme degree.  But the combination of Bowerman’s obsession with the gains athletes could make from equipment, especially footwear, and Knight’s obsession with growth at all costs is ultimately what seems to have driven the early successes of the company.  Knight’s own management style seems to have drawn from both his father-son relationship and his coach-athlete one.  He portrays himself as a stand-offish and distant boss but he has the guts to admit this and see the good and the bad in it rather than trying to make himself out as some kind of management guru, like so many billionaires seem to in their often self-aggrandising memoirs.

The book was easy to read and was reasonably well written perhaps because of Knight’s journalism degree or perhaps because he had a lot of money to hire a good ghost writer!  At bottom, it’s a good story and, in spite of my reservations about Knight’s true motivations, it doesn’t shy away from including some material that doesn’t show Knight in the best light.  In a personal sense, Knight is remarkably self-critical for such a successful person.  However, sometimes the book does seem to gloss over uncomfortable subjects.  For example, it gives a couple of paragraphs to things like labour issues and wage levels in the emerging economies where his products are manufactured, which seems a bit token.  He ultimately concludes that the kind of free market capitalism that has worked so well for Nike is the only way to bring prosperity to the emerging countries, which could be true but definitely deserves more critical examination than he gives it.  There is a slightly annoying tendency for Knight to include references to Greek mythology, Buddhist philosophy or whatever else he thinks might make him seem more cultured but overall it wasn’t fatal.

This book was a decent read and an interesting story.  Knight has a very high opinion of his work at Nike, which is understandable given its success and influence as a brand, but he is probably a bit unrealistic about his own motivations.  He also doesn’t seem capable of engaging with any criticism of it in a meaningful way although this seems less true in his personal life, where he openly admits his faults.  I wondered if he might have somehow derived this from the WW2 generals he idolises, who might admit personal failures but would never openly criticise the institution of the military!?