When it comes to connecting the personal with the national, nobody beats Joan Didion. From her 1979 collection, The White Album:

I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principal, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor. Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment’s high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple’s ranch, the freeway sniper who feels ‘real bad’ about picking off the family of five, the hustlers, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night. Acquaintances read The New York Times, and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows.

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Imax – Soft White
from Untitled. Deepchord, 2000
Elegant reverberations from Rod Modell.

Ambivalent – White Tea Disciple
from Roomies. Clink, 2006 
Nothing rattles your ribcage better than a Clink record.  

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Continuing with the white theme, Hua Hsu ponders the end of white America in the Atlantic Monthly: “What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?” Hsu puts a surprising amount of stock in the impact of hip-hop:

Eminem notwithstanding, hip-hop never suffered through anything like an Elvis Presley moment, in which a white artist made a musical form safe for white America. This is no dig at Elvis—the constrictive racial logic of the 1950s demanded the erasure of rock and roll’s black roots, and if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else. But hip-hop—the sound of the post- civil-rights, post-soul generation—found a global audience on its own terms.

And techno? With the exception of artists such as Drexciya and Moodymann, techno’s black roots  are largely overlooked. Perhaps this is the unavoidable side effect of a genre that favors the machine over the man and the anonymous graphic over the expressive photograph. Would it be fair to call techno a musical form that transcends culture or nations? If so, is this a good thing?