029: Q&A Interview With 1Dime
029: Q&A Interview With 1Dime
Hope you've got a notepad on standby...
Friends,
Around a year or so ago, I stumbled across one of the very best pieces of video content of any style or format I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing. The depth of analysis, critical thinking and logical reasoning blew me away, and I can only hope that this incredibly high standard of integrity and dedication becomes the norm amongst creators globally (wishful thinking, I know).
The gentleman at heart of this work of art goes by the name 1Dime. 1Dime is a video creator, podcaster and recently published author who is passionate about the societies we live in, delving into topics ranging from politics, economics, philosophy, history and many more. He also happens to be a huge Hip-hop fan. So after going through his incredible work, I simply had to track him down and get some of his thoughts on the Bars Of Wisdom newsletter.
I certainly had a blast talking to him, so buckle up and enjoy this exchange where we literally chop it up about anything and everything you could imagine. Its a good one!
But anyway, let’s get back to business…
Q: Firstly, tell us who you are, what you do and what keeps you busy.
1D: My name is Tony Chamas, AKA 1Dime. I run the YouTube channel called "1Dime" and the podcast “1Dime Radio,” which focuses on various socio-cultural topics and draws from the fields of philosophy, critical theory, history, politics, economics, and sociology. On the main 1Dime channel, I mainly do video essays, mini-documentaries, and some YouTube shorts and on the 1Dime Radio podcast, I talk about similar topics in greater depth with guests and also talk about some more niche subjects. My content generally could be classified as experimental “edutainment.” Each video serves as both an educational analysis of a different topic and a novel artistic experiment at the same time. Aside from making videos, I am about to finish grad school and am an aspiring political theorist. Aside from that, I work, socialize, eat, sleep, and try to enjoy the small pleasures of life worth cherishing.
Q: I was introduced to your work by coming across “The Culture Industry: How Capitalism Ruins Hip Hop”. It’s a fantastic watch and extremely well put together. I think you did a great job from a conceptual standpoint and made every minute of this video captivating. Can you talk us through what inspired you to make it and how you feel about the information you’ve conveyed? Was there something specific that resulted in you wanting to get this message specifically around Hip-hop out to viewers and beyond?
1D: I have always been a Hip-hop head, and am deeply immersed in the world of theory and philosophy. Rarely do I see people who are simultaneously interested in both things, even though many leftists listen to Hip-hop, and historically Hip-hop has been one of the more politically rebellious genres. I made my video on the Culture Industry with a certain audience and message in mind. Many Hip-hop heads and music critics/reviewers have complained that “real Hip-hop is dead” and that it has been overtaken by mind-numbing “mumble rap.” Although I do not actually believe “Hip-hop is dead”, as there are plenty of great Hip-hop acts still making music, especially in the underground, I understand their sentiment when it comes to the commercialisation of Hip-hop and the decline of lyrical and instrumental dynamism as the genre has become more part of mainstream pop culture. In my video, I wanted to show how this trend is reflective of a broader tendency that takes place in popular music and popular entertainment in general in capitalist society.
Q: Describe your journey and relationship with Hip-hop, both as a musical genre and a culture. What kind of impact does it have on areas of your life, and does it influence your content (beyond the “Culture Industry…”) at all as well?
1D: I have been a fan of Hip-hop since I was a kid in the early 2000s. Probably the first Hip-hop song I heard was Eminem’s “My Name is,” and since then I was hooked. However, I became a lot more knowledgeable about underground Hip-hop and explored the classics of 90s Hip-hop when I was in high school and throughout university. Hip-hop helped me get through life. I made my days working office jobs a little less boring by making a conscious effort to listen to a brand-new record each week. I would listen through the entire discographies of respected rappers from the 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, and underground acts from the current generation. I would find a rapper or group and listen to their entire body of work, or their most critically acclaimed albums at the very least. I am naturally a very curious person. I get an excess of joy from discovering new things. The way I accumulated my knowledge about Hip-hop is similar to how I learned theory and philosophy. I would look at those who were veterans when it came to understanding the field and checked out the things they recommended.
Like many people who watch YouTube, the first music reviewer I stumbled upon was Anthony Fantano (TheNeedleDrop) which is where I first got introduced to a lot of more contemporary underground acts such as Danny Brown. But I was mostly into a YouTube channel called “Dead End Hip-Hop” (DEHH) comprised of 4 dudes who were quite knowledgeable about Hip-hop and talked about albums in a funny but insightful way. I especially like Myke C Town and Ken from DEHH. I discovered some of my favourite Hip-hop acts from them, such as Atmosphere, Common, Lupe Fiasco (who I had heard of but not explored in depth), Ka, Billy Woods, Roc Marciano, El-P and Killer Mike, and Kool Keith. Although music enjoyment is subjective, I never quite bought the view that music tastes are all relative. Some people have a more defined taste than others and have far more references to compare with. If someone has listened to 1000 Hip-hop albums from different eras versus someone who listened to just 20 albums (or if any albums at all) from what is popular right now, the person with more reference points will have a greater breadth of knowledge and probably a stronger taste. How do you differentiate what music is high quality and unique versus what is low effort and standardised if one does not listen to a wide variety of albums? So even though everyone is entitled to their opinion, I will always take the opinion of someone who is more well-versed in the genre more seriously, even though I don’t have to agree with it. So that’s how I discovered a lot of Hip-hop acts and explored its history.
As for how Hip-hop has influenced my life and content, I find that it has impacted me personally in three ways. First, I have always been a verbal person (which is not surprising given that I basically talk and write for a living), and Hip-hop, at its best, is among the most sophisticated genres when it comes to lyricism and storytelling. Sometimes listening to great lyricists like Andre 3000, MF Doom, and Lupe Fiasco inspires me to write.
Second, Hip-hop has always been a very abrasive genre that least succumbs to political incorrectness. Sometimes that is to its detriment. We all know the problems of misogyny and homophobia in Hip-hop. But one has to respect that compared to genres, rappers tend to be the most honest about the most primal egoic desires, many of which we are socialised into having but don’t admit to others. Desires as wanting to have sex with the most attractive people, money, fame, and the power to actualise one’s will. These are all very shallow desires, but in capitalist society, we are programmed to desire many of these things and there is a difference between people who truly realise that such things won’t ever satisfy you, and those who secretly do desire these things but repress their desires and pretend to be morally righteous.
In a certain sense, Hip-hop has a very Nietzschean spirit to it. Rappers are most transparent when it comes to revealing their “Will To Power” so to speak, and are not stopped by society’s moral norms and mannerisms that encourage people to pretend to be “civil” on the surface. However, there are different ways in which rappers express their will to actualise their egoic desires. Some rappers are clever and creative in doing so, and some are more vulgar and tasteless. Jay-Z for instance, I think is probably the best braggadocious rapper of all time. He never had a deep political message or much emotional vulnerability compared to someone like 2Pac, but he still has an outstanding catalogue and is a GOAT contender. Way before he wifed up Beyonce and became a billionaire, Jay-Z since his first albums, found clever ways to brag about finessing his way up the system’s social hierarchy, using double entendres, similes and creative metaphors in his raps. His bourgeois antics aside, those who are fans of Jay-Z’s work know that Hov is an immaculate lyricist who consistently puts out great albums. The Michael Jordan of Hip-hop.
Third and lastly, Hip-hop tends to have the most revolutionary spirit compared to many genres, or at least it used to. While no art form is inherently “revolutionary” politically speaking, acts like KRS One, Public Enemy, Immortal Technique, and 2Pac have songs that contain politically rebellious messages that you would rarely see in other musical genres. I don’t think Hip-hop has to be politically “woke” for it to be good. In fact, there is plenty of corny pseudo-political rap out there. However, the political character of many Hip-hop acts are even more radical when you think about the time in which “conscious” Hip-hop was at its best: the 1990s. The 1990s was the “end of history” decade in which Soviet communism was officially defeated, and liberal capitalism was considered to be the best possible system humanity could achieve, a belief that started to become challenged again after the 2008 economic crash. While upper-class white people were celebrating the “end of history” in the 90s, Hip-hop expressed the bleak reality of working-class black Americans who faced poverty, gentrification, and police brutality. So yeah, Hip-hop has a transgressive aspect to it and many lyrically talented rappers were able to reflect realities not captured by the spectacle of mainstream television in America. Hip-hop, I believe, is also a fundamentally working-class genre, or at least it used it be. Hip-hop began with not the most expensive production, a low barrier for entry, and producers relied on the creative use of sampling to make new unique instrumentals out of the old. Of course, this became harder as record labels cracked down on sampling through copyright laws, but when you think about it, what makes Hip-hop unique as a genre is that it is a rebellious expression of the unheard.
Q: I’m curious to know which one of your passions came first, and whether these interests in politics, economics, or history lead to you being a fan of Hip-hop, or vice versa? Furthermore, did one of these domains shape or influence your internal rationale in one another? What do you think is the glue that holds them all together?
1D: I definitely got into Hip-hop first. As I mentioned, I was into it since I was a kid probably since I was about 2 years old. No joke. Though I didn’t become a “Hip-hop head” properly speaking until I was in high school at around 15-16 and became a more mature connoisseur after I explored the history of Hip-hop (the 90s and 80s acts) more thoroughly when I was between 18- 22. I was into philosophy since I was in high school, roughly 17. I truly became “politicised” when I was around 17-18 as I would argue for policies like Universal Basic Services, healthcare, education, affordable housing, the right to a job… etc. You know, what should be common sense shit. That stuff ain’t necessarily “socialist,” but I had a high school teacher at the time who would jokingly always call me “the socialist’ because I advocated such ideas. So I was like “ok well, if this stuff is socialist, then I guess I am a socialist.” Before that, I was just vaguely on what was considered the “left” in the mainstream political scene. My family was always vaguely “liberal” and anti-imperialist as half of my family is Lebanese. Shoutout to the Palestinians fighting for their freedom against the apartheid settler colonialism perpetuated by the far-right Israeli state. Palestinians need their Hip-hop. It was not until the insurgency of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic nomination that I started to discover what is called “radical theory” (Marx, Marxists, critical theorists… etc.). As we know, Bernie Sanders was narrowly defeated by Hillary Clinton in what appeared at the time to be a heavily manipulated electoral process marked by voter restrictions, immense corporate funding for Hillary Clinton, and a massive propaganda campaign ushered in by the mainstream corporate media against Bernie Sanders. Facing this reality, I became disillusioned with the myth of US “democracy,” and after learning the history of how many countries in Europe got their social programs (which was by having a strong labour movement and communist/socialist movements that scared the state into compromising with the people), I became more open minded to forms of socialist/communist politics. Obviously, the past existing forms of socialism were not ideal and were products of very harsh economic conditions that had to defend against the vicious imperialist forces trying to destabilise them. But at the very least, I figured that if we had radical communist movements in North America, it would make something like social democracy appear less radical in comparison, as it has existed in many European countries and is more or less the form of politics embodied by Bernie Sanders, who laughably gets depicted as a “communist” by the corporate media. There has historically been plenty of people in the arts who have espoused socialist/communist sympathies, and in fact many of them were purged for that during McCarthyism/ the Second Red Scare. Yet by the the 80s and 90s, communism as a force was basically dead and artists who openly expressed any anti-capitalist sympathies were few and far between. Hip-hop was one of the few exceptions when it came to anti-establishment sentiments at the time. Not only did you have the acts like 2Pac that I mentioned earlier, but you had Nas openly praising Fidel Castro on his track “Ghetto Prisoners”, though as we know, and as I have shown in detail in my Culture Industry video, Hip-hop was soon absorbed into the capitalist system and most of the remaining artists with quasi “radical” politics were confined to the underground.
Q: One of the reasons I’ve found you so informative and great to learn from is due to your analysis being so thorough. When you lay out details and intricacies of the subjects you explore, it becomes easy to follow and feel your patterns of thought. So, with that said, how would you describe your work’s mission, especially as you cover a wide range of topics?
1D: My work’s mission is threefold. On the one hand, I am constantly reading and trying to understand the realities of the world as accurately as I can. Through my videos, I like to communicate the key lessons and important bits of information that I have extracted which I believe can help people understand a certain issue or provide nuance surrounding a particular debate. On the other hand, by illuminating crucial realities that are repressed or obfuscated by the prevailing ideology and established common sense, I seek to encourage people to think about moving towards a better society than what exists. This might sound vague and like Sway in the Morning; I don’t have the answers, but as Marx notoriously said: “The philosophers have mainly interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.” I don’t have the answers, but I have a few ideas on what needs to change and how.
There are many people far more knowledgeable than me who have studied such questions, and the best I can do is look at their work and try to convey the important bits to a general audience. Ideology and different political “camps” are inevitable when it comes to politics, but I tend to avoid committing myself to a single political label/ideology for now. 1 - because “left” has only recently started to be reborn in the US and Canada (where I live) and 2 - there is no single organized socialist force that has enough momentum yet to constitute a serious political opposition, so limiting oneself to political sects right now is mostly pointless. Adopting an overly specific ideological label, especially as an academic or YouTuber, can significantly limit one’s intellectual creativity and open-mindedness because one feels they have to live up to a certain “brand” they have adopted and they have to avoid “going against the line” of their fellow partisans.
To reiterate, for now, the purposes of my channel are to examine certain phenomena/issues ( understand reality as such) to the best of my ability and to then convey what I believe is most important to a wider audience. Of course, my work will contain my biases and some prescriptions of what I think is a general way forward (or which paths are incorrect), but generally I hope to get my viewers to think for themselves, and use it to think about how to combat the established system, why they are combating it, and how they want to change it. But to do so, one first has to try to understand what they are trying to combat. In order to do so, history and philosophy are the most powerful tools. History contains the knowledge and events that contextualise how things have occurred the way they have. Context is everything and knowledge of the past can radically change the way you view many issues and assumptions we take for granted. But philosophy adds another dimension to this. To use Plato’s metaphor of the allegory of the cave, studying history is like exploring what lies outside of the cave and how it got there while philosophy is like the glasses you put on that can help you see what you are exploring. Philosophies and theories are the lenses that can broaden or narrow out what you see. The more lenses you have to explore the world with, the more you can truly understand and deconstruct what you are seeing. Philosophy can give us the tools that can teach us how to think and the vocabulary to make sense of the information/phenomena we have internalised. But without studying history, one won’t have much information to actually think about using their philosophical lenses. It goes both ways. If one is a history encyclopedia but does not have many philosophical lenses, one may know what events lead to a phenomenon and how they take place, but not why they take place and how we might interpret them.
Q: Per your channel and profile descriptions, you aim to counter one-dimensional thought. Talk us through how you define this - the process and challenges that come with it - especially online, where we are oversaturated and overwhelmed with opinions, facts, misinformation, and many other hurdles. Do you see certain sections of society, or subject matters suffering more so than others?
1D: Well there is a general way that I like to describe “one dimensional thought” and then there is the way the philosopher Herbert Marcuse defines the term in his book “One Dimensional Man” which has heavily influenced my thinking. I think of it in a similar way. “One Dimensional Thought” can be described as the opposite of “dialectical” thinking. Dialectical thinking refers to thinking through the contradictions of reality. Reality as such is complex and filled with contradictions, and ideology serves to hide such contradictions by giving people a closed system of thinking that narrows what we can see and gives us pre-established answers to the phenomena of the world. For instance, one dimensional thought reduces what should be contestable ideas and terms into one dimensional buzzwords synonymous with the corresponding set of operations it serves in the existing system. For example, “democracy” is taken to just mean voting in elections for one shades of elites for another. “Freedom” is taken to just mean freedom to consume and to say things. You would be surprised how so many teachers and even academics conduct studies and write books using such terms without even questioning their established meanings. The inability to think beyond the dominant systems of thinking provided to us by given society characterises one dimensional thinking. Often people who think they are “free thinkers” against the “establishment” do so using the ideological goggles they inherited form the system’s closed marketplace of ideologies. Take Kanye West for example. Artistic genius, but a total idiot politically. He boasts about being a “free thinker” breaking free from the “democratic plantation” yet what does he choose instead? The republican plantation is lead by one of the establishment’s wealthiest beneficiaries: Donald Trump. This tendency is common with many people who enter politics without any lenses. They get swept up into the spectacle of liberal-conservative politics, which represents the two main heads of the capitalist system. One Dimensional thinking makes people take the most basic things for granted and stick to a mode of thinking that robotically programs them to reproduce their roles and functions for the dominant socio-economic mode of production: capitalism. Where they are either an owner of capital or a wage slave. And the people up on the hierarchy are just as programmed as the people at the bottom. People lately have been both worried and excited about the trend of AI and machine learning replacing various forms of human labour. But what I think this trend really says more about us humans than the robots. If robots are capable of replacing humans in areas that are considered “intellectual labour” - journalism and writing for instance - then what does that say about how the evolution of humans? Is it really so so much that robots are are becoming as intelligent as humans or are humans becoming as one-dimensional as robots? The singularity to fear, I think, is the robotisation of humanity. We already live in a planet of the robots.
Q: I’d be interested to know who your favourite notable figures are, given the areas of interest you have and in relation to the work you create off the back of it. Who do you deem to be significantly important people in these domains, regardless of your own personal sentiments towards them?
1D: Well there is a lot. I am influenced by a wide array of thinkers, so I will mention the most important ones. Probably the most important is Karl Marx, as he was the first to pioneer a rigorous study of capitalism and lay the seeds to a vision as to how to change it. I am far from an orthodox Marxist, but in terms of the way I view the world, I could be characterized as a heterodox Marxist. Marxism, which includes not only Marx and Engels but the many key theorists who have developed the Marxist tradition such as Antonio Gramsci and Lenin. Aside from the political Marxist cannon, I am heavily influenced by thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Slavoj Zizek, Jean Baudrillard and an American thinker named Sheldon Wolin, who has one of the best books on the American political matrix (Titled Democracy INC: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism). When it comes to the music industry, there is obviously Theodor Adorno whose writings on the “culture industry” and popular music I discussed in my video on Hip-hop. I tend to be drawn most to interdisciplinary thinkers who incorporate a mix of philosophy, psychoanalysis and sociology into their works. In terms of pure philosophy, I have been quite influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophy for a long time, even though his politics are somewhat at odds with mine. If you want some recommendations of publicly left intellectuals who are more accessible and have a lot of great interviews on YouTube, I suggest checking out Michael Parenti, Yanis Varoufakis, Richard Wolff, and Cornel West of course. Everybody already knows Noam Chomsky, who is still an OG despite my many disagreements with him, so I figured I would mention the others.
Q: Overall, are you optimistic and more positive with the future of Hip-hop, politics and other facets of the world which you keep a close eye on?
1D: To be honest, based on the way things are going now, not really. But you never know. As I mentioned in my video on Hip-hop, there was a resurgence of creative Hip-hop into the mainstream between 2011-2015 (what I call the third golden generation of Hip-hop) when TDE (Kendrick, Ab Soul etc), Odd Future (Tyler The Creator Earl Sweatshirt, Vince Staples), Pro Era (Joey Badass’s crew), A$AP Rocky, Mac Miller, Danny Brown, J Cole, and a bunch of others got quite big off the internet. Many of those dudes, with the exception of J Cole and Kendrick, mainly got big through the internet. So that could happen again, but I think streaming really destroyed the incentives for Hip-hop and not only has the bar for lyricism in rap been quite low recently, but production has also become super standardized and boring in my opinion. Producers are less creative and rely more on the same loud 808s instead of creative sampling. That said, there is still plenty of gems to be found in the underground scene of Hip-hop. The internet is saturated with millions of people trying to be rappers, but beneath the sewage there are some hidden treasures. There are still many great acts making music today such as Run The Jewels, Danny Brown, Mick Jenkins, Quelle Chris, Jean Grae, Rapsody, Billy Woods, Earl Sweatshirt, JPEG Mafia, Ka, Freddie Gibbs, Roc Marciano, and Griselda (Benny the Butcher, Conway, Westside Gun). There are probably more I am forgetting. Of course Kendrick Lamar is still going strong in the mainstream and is easily the GOAT of this generation.
Q: As this is a Hip-hop newsletter, we must ask the customary question around who you have on rotation and featuring regularly whenever you plug in to some music. Anybody who has caught your eye recently? Somebody who you frequently listen to, past or present? What can we expect when 1Dime gets the aux?
1D: Oh Man. Ok well the rappers I have on repeat the most are probably Common, Lupe Fiasco, Atmosphere, Pusha T/The Clipse, Jay-Z, The Game, Nas, Pac, Big, Outkast, Danny Brown, Kid Cudi, Ye’s first 6 albums, MF Doom, Kool Keith, Immortal Technique, Little Brother, Blu, Dead Prez, Royce da 5'9, Talib Kweli, Mos Def and The Roots. If you forced me to pick my top 3 favourite it would probably be Common, Jay-Z, and Lupe. As for who caught my eye recently, not much to be honest. I think Griselda are among the best up and coming rappers, but I can’t say its recent as I was an early fan of their music before Eminem and Jay-Z tried to sign them. Denzel Curry is another rapper rapper who is relatively “new” who I think is quite good. There are also a bunch of “bump in the whip” rappers who I don’t consider that good but I really enjoy their music such as 21 Savage, Future and Drake. Drizzy is basically a pop star more than a rapper in my opinion, but as far as mainstream standardised music goes, he has got some dope bangers. I think he went really downhill after his 5th album, but his stuff can be enjoyable. I don’t hate all standardised music, and I still enjoy some fast food music in the sense that one might enjoy McDonalds from time to time. As long as that is not all you are consuming and know there is better stuff out there.
Q: Finally, would you like to sign off with any parting words?
1D: Yeah sure. I reckon Hip-hop heads would find my Culture Industry video very interesting, even if they may or may not agree with all of it. To those who are also curious to explore how further into how our political and economic matrix works, I recommend checking out my other videos. You can find my links here:
My YouTube Channel (1Dime): www.youtube.com/@1Dimee
My Podcast 1Dime Radio (on all podcast Platforms): www.youtube.com/@1DimeRadio
My Twitter: twitter.com/1DimeOfficial - @1DimeOfficial
Patreon: www.patreon.com/OneDime/posts