Been a Long Time

I've got a lot of reading to catch up on. Just as a long-simmering threat exploded into the most imporant geopolitical moment of the past five years, a deadline of which I was previously not told was unceremoniously shat upon me. Consequently, I spent the past week hiding in my headphones, wrestling with amp-emulator plug-ins (spiking 110Hz and 2.7kHz does not a Marshall stack make!) and trying to turn what was a snare drum from a timbale back into a snare drum.

Mercifully, my ears were well-tuned to my clients' particular idiom: I've recently been digging deep into the annals of sweaty, hirsute rawk. Once the whole Adbusters hipster debacle had saturated the blogosphere, I desperately needed to hear some music whose sincerity ripped straight past try-hard into the epically ersatz - and what music better exemplifies balls-out self-belief than vintage heavy metal?

Prog rock. The only thing that trumps a Rayon-locked dude with a Les Paul is a Rayon-locked dude with a Les Paul singing about extraterrestrial dragons.

What's long fascinated me most about pre-thrash heavy metal is its utterly junior-high male mindset. Here's the lay of the land: smoking pot, super heroes, and a cryptomystical obsession with death and Satan. These may seem like quaint and hokey enthusiasms in the era of phonecams and the Nintendo Wii, but throw out every gadget with a microprocessor and see what else there is to do when posessed of that restive adolescent essence. If humour rears its head (and it rarely does), it's typically sophomoric. If a girl enters the picture, it's framed in the same manner that a hormonally hysterical boy would gaze cautiously at the creatures on the other side of the cafeteria: there walks some unfathomable succubus or unattainable Venus! Which is actually the best argument against anointing Led Zeppelin the original heavy metal band: they may have sung songs about Vikings and Tolkien characters, but they also dared vocalise something approximating adult sexuality as opposed to, well, this.

In the introduction to Rat Salad, Paul Wilkinson parallels the history of rock with an average human lifespan: from its goofy insouscience in the '50s, across its mercurial adolescence in the '60s, through the barn-burning death of innocence manifested as the late-'70s punk shitfit, and finally slouching into the slick, careerist adulthood of the '80s. Based on such a timeline, the blossoming of prog rock as a technical & thematic maturation of early metal would correspond to the naive hubris of a first-year philosophy major who's just read Beyond Good and Evil, Siddartha, and/or The Simulacra for the first time. The clumsy gumbo of half-baked New Ageism, cherry-picked Oriental religion, and modernist philosophy; the use of fantastic narrative to make some profound (if foggy) point; the unflinching self-seriousness with which the discourse it carried out - why, it's as though those insufferable freshmen Know-It-Alls you sat behind in the lecture hall started a band!

The student analogy also underscores the class difference between much early metal and first-wave prog: while Black Sabbath were a blue-collar bunch from dingy Birmingham, Genesis were posh Charterhouse schoolboys. Though technical prowess is a prime directive in both genres, it's born of very different social instincts: in metal, of the working-class pride of a well-honed skill; in prog, of an indulgent, academic studiousness. The socioeconomic gap can also account for the lyrical thematic differences between metal (pulpy fantasy and B-movie theology) and prog (packed full of highbrow allusions to psychoanalysis, cultural theory, and philosophy).

Of course, with a little persistence and practice, some of these arrogant geeks actually progress (what is the parent word of "Prog" anyway?) into more difficult, exploratory realms. Their employ of philosophical themes graduates from toe-dipping to something more thorough; their inquisitive disposition often makes them early-adopters of new technology; the best even succeed in breaking new ground.

This creative questing is, of course, not without its pitfalls. Curiosity can still kill the cat, and what we need isn't always more technology. But better to look foolish and take risks than rest on someone else's laurels and give up even trying.

Anyway, click on the mix title to download. If we use Wilkinson's rock lifeline, this mix (at one song per year) would trace some young fellow's development from age 13 through 23. Or something like that.

Hard, Heavy, Heady

1. Fuzzy Duck - "A Word Form Big D" (00:00)
2. May Blitz - "Snakes and Ladders" (01:32)
3. Black Sabbath - "The Wizard" (05:58)
4. Sir Lord Baltimore - "Hell Hound" (10:16)
5. Warhorse - "Vulture Blood" (13:32)
6. Colosseum - "The Machine Demands a Sacrifice" (18:35)
7. Heldon - "Standby" (21:50)
8. Tool - "The Grudge" (35:52)
9. Magma - "Mekanik Zain" (Live; 44:15)
10. King Crimson - "Indiscipline" (01:00:18)

End On End

That I'm posting this four days post-facto only extends my reputation as a master of delayed reaction (my excuse comes later), but as soon as I thought the discussion had ground to a halt, K-Punk enters the fray to heap disdain upon disdain upon disdain upon the Adbusters anti-hipster "Jeremiad." More specifically, Mark slaps around Momus' defense of the amoebic subculture, taking particular note (as I did) of Momus' seconding ex-Vice-roi Gavin McInnes' schoolyard dismissal of hipsters' critics ("chubby bloggers who... are just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable"). However, Mark rather oddly misreads this remark, proclaiming

I would say the opposite: the problem with "hipsters" is precisely that they are pathologically well-adjusted, untroubled by sexual anxieties or financial worries.

Uh... well, yes, that is precisely the problem with hipsters, no argument there, but this in fact is in firm agreement with McInnes' assessment of anti-hipster sentiment. Minus the "chubby blogger" snipe, of course.

But this puzzling misstep aside, Mark gets it absolutely right and cuts to the chase far quicker than I did: that such blasé hedonism & luxuriant narcissism can't possibly produce any worthwhile art. "The very seamlessness," Mark writes, "of these unalienated, guilt-free lives leaves no material for sublimation." Which, again, would put us in agreement with McInnes: yes, we are angry with these kids for getting wasted, having fun, and being fashionable because their vapid bacchanalia will give birth to sweet fuck all.

The Gavin McInnes' quote presupposes that resentment against the Last Boys and Girls is somehow illegitimate. But it strikes me as a classic case of good resentment - precisely the kind of resentment that, unlike the hipster's studied weltschmerz, could motivate the production of interesting art and culture.

That is the 24-karat nugget of Mark's piece: "When youth culture was interesting it was because of alienation, not pleasure-seeking." Lack, want, frustration, anger, resentment - these are the tools of anyone seriously intent on ripping open a seam and seeing what spills out.

Douglas Haddow's article was hardly a groundbreaking bit of sociocultural journalism. It was badly written, researched worse, and (by the twist-ending switch from third- to first-person) percolating with histrionic self-loathing. But the sensational headline - "The Dead End of Western Civilization" - is a succinctly perfect damning of hipsterism's artistic sterility. So, being fairly confident that we can write off hipsterism as a source of sublimation, where do we turn? Mark suggests that "Metal, Goth and even, God help us, Emo, are still animated and enervated by that sense of abandonment and maladjustment." I'd add Punk to that list, though I'd consider this list a registry of foregone opportunities. Any revolutionary potential these subcultures once possessed has long since ossified into stylistic orthodoxies as uninnovative as hipsterism's gluttonous nihilism. Even Emo, by a decade the baby of the subcultures, has become so conservatively defined that it can be legally targeted with laser-accuracy by culture-warriors in the Duma. Absent the presence of some supermassive oppositional Other, what is rebelled against becomes smaller and more localised, eventually winnowing subcultures into sectarian bickering ("Death to false metal," East Coast/West Coast, etc.). The revolutionary impetus is replaced by codifying an aesthetic.

A friend who's been following the above furor agreed that the debate too often turned towards specific signifiers, accessories, fashions - a tunnel-vision that not only misses the bigger point, but gets really dull very quickly. In declarative all-caps, my friend wrote to me, "ANY FUTURE CONVERSATION MUST BE ABOUT THE THINGS WHICH ARE AT STAKE." This is the best tactic, as it keeps to focus above petty symbols and stylistic bias. No taxonomic nitpicking, no trend-oriented trainspotting. The revolution will not be symbolised.

"If you're out there, and you're beautiful, maybe you're cute... there's more of us ugly motherfuckers than you."
~Frank Zappa

Non-sequitorial Postscript: David Berman of the Silver Jews perfects the art of talking too much about your own art and makes the curious claim that he titled his new album What Is Not But Could Be If because "the language that looks really plain on the album is actually completely Google-pure." You sure about that, Dave?

Hip Is Not a Four-Letter Word (But Boho Is)

Well, about ten days have passed since the initial publication of the infamous Adbusters article; this lapse, translated from real-time, equals about 2.3 years of online-time. (Not insignificantly, this is the same ratio of Earth-time to Uranus-time.) Netizens ripped through the article like Norman Bates in a Bed, Bath, & Beyond, and I myself bore witness to about a half-dozen discussions in various bars. By now, the thematic terrain has been torn up and left as barren as the Somme - but that ain't gonna stop me from having one last waltz through the minefield.

Within a certain online cul-de-sac, the Adbusters article couldn't come at a better time, following a sudden flush of posts about how at-least-middle-class "creatives" have franchised a butterknife-dull brand of bohemianism. Both Simon Reynolds and Phillip Sherburne connected the dots between this nuevo-cosmo sprawl and the HUAC-like hysteria over hipsterism by way of one Mr. Nick Currie.

Momus... with his nomadic lifestyle and restlessly mobile aesthetic, his Japanophilia and his privileging of the faux/unrooted/"superflat", was very much a pioneer, an early settler on this post-geographical "terrain".

His CV bullet-pointed with such po-mo touchstones as Shibuya-kei, Wired.com, and Vice Magazine, few are better qualified than Momus to comment on all things au current. Indeed, his response did not disappoint, lambasting the article's theatrical tone ("Haddow comes over all purple, all 6th form apocalyptic") and its ankle-deep cultural analysis ("Haddow fails to get down to the serious business of art criticsm"). But the most fascinating moment of Momus' rebuttal is when he agrees

with my former boss at Vice, Gavin McInnes, when he says that disdain of hip subculture tends to come from "chubby bloggers who aren't getting laid", people who are "just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable".

This accord, between the dialectical and juvenile fronts against anti-hipsterism, is key in understanding anti-anti-hipsterism. (If there's such thing as pro-hipsterism, it's a better-kept secret than Merchandise 7X.) Momus has made a career of being the token outsider, an arch-Orientalist in a mobile bubble; meanwhile, McInnes (an anti-immigration activist with a history of racist outbursts) did more to define the parameters of irony in indie culture than anyone since Stephen Malkmus. In short, they are both Other-ers of the first order.

In spite of the avant-garde associations with the word, Hip rarely debuts any new ideas these days. (We'll come back to the this.) Instead, it traffics almost exclusively in irony, manifested typically as either hostile mockery, or deconstructive play-acting. Either way, the relationships created are oppositional, across lines of generation, gender, class, and race. But there's nothing ideological about these oppositional positions. Take everyone's favourite polyglot performer, Mathangi "M.I.A." Arulpragasam, for example. She named her debut after her Tamil Tiger father's nom-de-guerre, and her current single's chorus is a bald endorsement of armed robbery. She's posed herself as the voice of the developing world's vengeful animus - at least to the extent that everyone else agreed upon her role as such. Yet this former St. Martin's College film student panders to Western pop-cultural hegemony by relying heavily indie-orthodox samples (the Clash, the Pixies, etc.); she likewise denies supporting violence under any circumstance. Indeed, this is already several years after Robert Christgau succinctly argued against expecting a coherent political agenda, much less a revolutionary one, from a pop star - and yet his reasoning demands that the audience be possessed of a normative psychopathy:

The decoratively arrayed, pastel-washed tigers, soldiers, guns, armored vehicles, and fleeing civilians that bedeck her album are images, not propaganda...

Just images. See? Nothing to get frazzled over. Naturally, that a signifier is hollow to some doesn't mean that it's universally null & void. Momus himself made this point in his riposte to Adbusters:

I'm sure that somewhere, as we speak, a Shining Path Maoist is being sold a Shining Path Maoist t-shirt via AdSense, thanks to a link between Shining Path Maoist keywords and Shining Path Maoist products being marketed in his area. This does not, however, invalidate the politics or philosophy of Shining Path Maoism. It just gives him the chance to proclaim what he believes in via a t-shirt, should he so desire.

By extension, anyone might buy a copy of Kala not because it's got a good beat, but because they want to express their hatred of Sinhalese Buddhists over the stereo at a house party. Call it Che Shirt Syndrome: as commodified and mediated by capital, all symbols are sold to one of two customers - either the True Believer, or the cultural scavenger who can afford such whimsically purposeless purchases.

That is, to either the ideologue, or the bourgeois hipster.

A twentysomething in a Che shirt may qualify themselves as a revolutionary Marxist, but until they grab an AK, storm the streets of São Paulo, and fight to nationalise Brazil's $517 billion industrial sector, then the symbol remains unfulfilled, necessarily empty. The now-intrinsic vacuity of bohemianism is a consequence of it being reduced to a spin-cycle of pop symbolic flotsam with a shrinking circumference. (The current sample-rate of the nostalgia feedback loop is down to a mere five years.) Very telling is that many discussions, both online and off, of the Adbusters article were petty turf wars over specific objects like the fixed-gear bike. I've no doubt that the fixed-gear bike is of great importance to anarchosyndicalist eco-activists, but if their only place in the conversation is as a rhetorical prop and not a participant, of what use is the bike beyond a stylish accessory? If artifice is its own reward, then there's no argument to be had. But the pretense that there's a bigger point has little to recommend it.

This debate is by no means new, and hipsters have been subject to ridicule by their own for decades. One Brooklyn Vegan commenter cited Marcel Duchamp's 1913 Armory Show as an early example of such infighting (though it was Wallace Stevens, not William Carlos Willams, who played Duchamp's nemesis). There's also been an implacable parade of slumming rich kids, from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker up through Lou Reed to Lee Ranaldo and Gerard Cosloy. However, a crucial (if arguable) distinction between the hipoisie of generations past and now is that, before, some genuine sacrifice of comfort & entitlement was required to live down on the street - which isn't to deny that it's always been true that, "if you called your dad, he could stop it all." But there now exists an infrastructure, social and physical, to comfortably accomodate any & all who can afford to exile themselves from the straight world. And it's that word - comfort - which presents the biggest problem: its presence is anathema to art. As Leslie Feist recently put it:

Comfort is comfortable - there is no need to circumnavigate. Once you stretch your mind out to get around something, as it pulls apart, you see stuff in the cracks - things you wouldn't glimpse otherwise.

Contemporary boho inharmony has apparent little to do with dialectical self-critique. Rather, it's the sound of a corrosive boredom, of deracinated dilettantes whose ennui has metastasised into cannibalism. Make no mistake, their complaints emanate from the elevated strata of society. Whenever Pitchfork is derided as a Cliff Notes of Cool for dumb kids in Des Moines, or when Momus describes "the general population, which schlepps about in jeans and listens to shapeless, floppy music and sleepwalks through shapeless, floppy jobs" - there is no disguising the sneering, priggish contempt for the lower & working classes. I'd almost admire the gall with which Momus lets the cat out of the bag, comparing hipsters to "chivalric aristocrats," were he not so astonishingly smug and condescending.

Which brings us full-circle to the debate about minimal techno. What struck me as the key phrase at the time was this observation by Owen Hatherly:

One often got the sense... that whatever was happening, it didn't really matter, nothing was at stake.

In light of conversations since, this would be the keystone of anti-hipster sentiment: above and beyond all else, hipsters are inconsequential and ineffectual. Momus (again) has a point in remarking that "maybe this 'smashing' [of conventions] has always been mostly gestural," but wouldn't it be better if a gesture were revolutionary as opposed to self-consciously empty? Shouldn't there be a more noble goal than staying one step ahead of the advertising agencies by ceaselessly subdividing into smaller & smaller subcultural cliques? Or does "what's at stake" have be of greater urgency than something gestural? Does the cold hand of actual catastrophe have to slap us across the face before we become bold? Because, right now, there's a whole lotta standing around and talking shit behind each other's backs - which is hardly the recipe for refinement, let alone revolution. "When," Christopher Hitchens once wrote, "a precious and irreplaceable word like 'irony' has become a lazy synonym for 'anomie,' there is scant room for originality."

Fasci(oni)sta

A couple of days ago, the popular expat-in-the-Orient blog 不良外人 (a.k.a. Furyogaijin, a.k.a. Fucked Foreigner) excavated a talkshow excerpt of military history enthusiasts dressed in Nazi regalia. As the doe-eyed, helium-voiced hobbyist insists his fetish is pure fashion, a panel of international Japanese residents rips into him for being so blind to the substance behind the symbols. The end of the clip is particularly surreal: one of the exiting hobbyists taunts the audience by snapping off a quick sieg-heil salute (disproving his claimed ignorance), prompting an enraged Frenchman to spring from his seat with intent of something stronger than a verbal reprimand. After he's physically dragged back to his chair, a German (!) panelist admonishes the Frenchman for overreacting, saying, "It's just a symbol, it's okay!"

Now, following their defeat, both Germany and Japan were culturally reindoctrinated and forced into schizoaffective reconstruction by a foreign occupier. The significant difference is that, in Germany, the reindoctrination became the keystone of domestic policy; Japan, on the other hand, has remained at best unrepentant, at worst revisionist with regard to its crimes during WWII. Yet, in spite of these opposite approaches to ingesting (or not) history, hard-right & fascist movements persist in both nations in apparently equal measure. It's harder to track the prevalence of hardcore nationalist & xenophobic group in Japan, if only because there are no "hate crimes" from which to derive statistics. But Japanese fascists (uyoku dantai) are boisterous and blustering enough that they'd needn't turn to violence to influence the nation's internal dialogue. Meanwhile, their German counterparts appear to have been gaining ground with each year since reunification: not only are racists attacks reaching record numbers (to the point of becoming a permenant fixture of quotidian life in some parts of Germany), but neo-Nazis are a growing presence in legitimately-elected governing bodies.

A climate of general intercultural ignorance in both countries works very much in favour of these fascists - but, of course, intercultural ignorance is the stock-in-trade of xenophobes worldwide. But if forced to pick between Germany and Japan the country with the greater potential for a racially harmonious future, I'd say: Japan. This is not to excuse the obvious extant problems (not the least of which are the racist cops), especially in light of Japan's minuscule foreign population (approx. 1.6%) and its extensive history of deliberate isolationism. But Japanese nationalists aren't even the looniest goons in the neighbourhood. The irony is that Japan's lack of contrition for its wartime acts has produced a particularly spineless, neutered stripe of nationalism. Not facing the active popular & institutional opposition that, say, the NPD does means that the uyoku dantai are never forced to exercise any real conviction in the face of adversity. It's the same brand of laziness afforded to Manchester United or NY Yankees fans: when there's no serious opposition, nothing need be sacrificed to the cause. On the other hand, German fascists, racists, and nationalists are as opposed a constituency as it's possible to be (without resorting to crimes against humanity, that is) - and still they persist with psychotically deep-seated defiance and dangerous dedication.

(Also, Japanese fascists are pussies. Seriously. I've had my picture taken striking goofy poses next to them, which earned me a bunch of red-faced rhetoric over the lance-voix but nothing more. It was also two years in Japan before I'd met a foreigner who'd been physically attacked simply because they were foreign - as opposed to five days in Germany. But would I pull the same goading pranksterism on Deutsche skinheads? Hell no.)

There's a grim punchline to all this. Japan is likely the only country where someone strutting around dressed as an SS officer could (maybe) convincingly argue that they're doing so apolitically - not that I'd excuse it. As po-mo manifest, Japan specializes in deconstructing, (mis)appropriating, and refracting symbols. (This is doubtless one reason for the anemic nature of its "hardcore" nationalism: the icons & figureheads of imperial Japan have seen their substance either rotted or gutted.) While European cultures similarly disbelieve in a symbol carrying any innate power, there's a reinvestment in reappropriated symbols here that gives them (often terrible) new life and new meaning. Thus, witness the German neo-Nazi incorporation of the Japanese imperial flag into its design arsenal (skip to the 3:48 mark for a full view). Of course, this is hardly a huge twist, though even if it were strange, strange bedfellows are scarcely so strange under closer scrutiny. I wonder what Momus would make of this...

Speaking of whom, I realize that a full week has already passed since the Adbusters bourgeois-boho flamewar came and went like a five-alarm fire in a toilet-paper factory, but I've been slowly tacking away at some kind of a thoughtful response. Extend your attention spans, and your patience will be rewarded, my friends.

* * *

Elsewhere online, Alan "I Started A Joke" McGee waited out the initial wave MBV-mania before reiterating his too-cool-for-shoegaze contempt for Kevin Shields & Co. In a MySpace bulletin, McGee wrote:

THE NEW MOGWAI ALBUM THE HAWK IS HOWLING VERSUS THE ''NOSTALGIC CABARET'' OF MBV LIVE IN 2008

Finally got time to listen to it and it's even better than the last two Mogwai albums which to me have both been wonderful... Their [sic] is a beautiful irony that the ''nostalgic cabaret'' that is my bloody valentine are throwing at people in 2008 gets critical acclaim in the easily pleased UK press with MBV still playing the exact same set they did 20 years ago and the only trick Kevin Shields has anymore in 2008 is actual volume and double extra pa to numb you and zero new songs.

Hear the new Mogwai record it's beautiful.Mogwai are 2008 My bloody valentine were a joke signing in 1991 maybe they got better..

Maybe as a token of gratitude, Mogwai can hire McGee a proofreader. Nevermind that to hail the genius of Mogwai in 2008 is as bold & iconoclastic as to do the same for, say, Echo & the Bunnymen in 1988. This flailing contrarianism is to be expected of an aging, conservative rockist. Given that, in signing Oasis, McGee may have single-handedly launched the reactionary atavism of Britpop; in that regard, it makes sense that he'd hate something as blurrily sublime and genre-obscuring as Loveless (to say nothing of the macho posturing that he sank a quarter-million quid into a "joke"). I'd even be willing to take him at his word, had he not allowed himself the pusillanimous emergency exit, "Maybe they got better..."

* * *

So it's 88 Boadrum day. I don't actually care, and not for the knee-jerk anti-appropriative reason. Honestly, the Boredoms fuckin' bore me these days - which sounds silly, since they've been doing the same orthodox drum-circle schtick for the better part of a decade now. But please, examine Exhibit A, followed by Exhibit B and tell me that Seiichi Yamamoto's meteoric guitar doesn't make all the difference.

Out of the Mouths of Boors

A great debt is owed to perennial shot-caller J-Hop for helping disseminate this bit of brilliant digital detritus:



Like his brother-in-knuckle-scraping-arms Liam Gallagher, Diamond Dave operates as a William of Ocham for the jet(trash)-set: he's a perpetual-motion machine of flapping gums so incapable of complex thought that he's able only to express the elemental truth; everything else, being more complicated, could only cause him confusion. (Perhaps that's why DLR's hair looks so fried: he blew a synapse discussing mechanical royalties with Mo Ostin?)

No, I'm not taking the piss. I defy you to find a single false statement issued from his shit-eating grin. Let's pick it apart, shall we?

Van Halen music, heavy metal music, any kind of rock music, is what I like to call "high-velocity folk music."

Consider (as we've done before) that, essentially, folk music is anecdotal narrative or reductive personal expression wrapped around simple, uncluttered chord structures that resonates upon some universal truth. Well, isn't that precisely what Van Halen in their prime produced? Who hasn't jumped, run with the devil, been hot for teacher, or, uh, fallen under the control of Manuel Noriega?

Taken as a general statement, it's true that heavy metal fulfilled the same role that campfire acoustic singalongs did a hundred years prior. Certainly, upon closer examination of niche subgenres, not many people would say the songs of Cannibal Corpse, Gorgoroth, or Dragonforce speak directly to/of them. But across the broader sweep of metal - from "Paranoid" to "Aces of Spades", from "Welcome To the Jungle" to "Midlife Crisis" - it's easy enough to find some empathetic resonance therein.

I look at heavy metal music - Van Halen's brand, rather, of heavy metal music - as a combination of religion and hockey.

Again, dead on. Consider the intricate weave of metaphysical devotion and gaudy materialist ceremony, the relation to a higher spirit through annointed spokesmen (yes, spokesmen), the large celebratory gatherings of the faithful to behave in manners unbecoming of their quotidian reality - and then consider the presence of large, sweaty, swearing men with an emphasis on indelicate, antagonistic contact. Ian Svenonius has written far more exhaustively on the parallels between rock and religion, but it bears remembering that sports occupy the same place in a great many people's lives.

We had to get into a band because we are this way... I have successfully turned "monkey hour" into a career.

A band as a synergistic culmination of personalities; to play music as a means of personal psychic reconstitution; making art as an end unto itself as opposed to a single facet of some larger marketing campaign for one's career as a public persona... how bloody tragic is it that these now seem like quaint idealisms, delusional romantic fantasies? That it should be expressed so succinctly by David Lee Roth of all people is, as they say, a head-fuck.

Meanwhile, his "monkey hour" anecdote is a perfect example of precisely why I regard the psychiatric industry as fascistic and dehumanising.

Style is not to be confused with Class. A Mercedes Benz is Class, because it represents money. However, chili dogs have absolutely no Class, but a great deal of Style. Punk rock, new wave, whatever you have, reggae, rastafari haircuts, what-have-you, are all different kinds of Styles. None of them, however, have any Class - I got class.

Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Roth's 15-second summation of the ontology of capital! Assuming it's true that chili dogs got mad style, Style would be the more desirable of the two characteristics: Style implies a kind of substantive polysensual engagement, an experience that diversifies (or even gives body to) reality's symbolic framework. Class, on the other hand, is symbolic of a single substantive quality: economic power. For those who would question Roth's claim to Class in view of his squalid apartment, recall his analogy between music religion; consider the decidedly unglamorous daily lifestyle of the average priest, contrasted with the elaborate pomp & circumstance of his rituals before his flock. There exists the same degree of difference between Roth's life on and off the road.

There's no question, DLR does have Class, in spite of the frat-house squalor of his apartment: he was (and is again) the face & voice of a band that has sold over 80 million albums to date - a distinction shared by only about a hundred other musical artists in history. Among the many bands that can't match Van Halen's account balance is, ironically, the act that best signifies the detached superficiality and bland "good taste" of Class in the 1980s: Roxy Music. Consider that, as Roth was giving this interview, Roxy Music were recording Avalon, the summa of vapid yuppie sumptuousness. I wonder if it frustrated Bryan Ferry that, after his studious & painstaking adoption of all the hollow affectations of wealth & privilege, that he was lumped into the same club as this dandelion-haired yahoo. Ferry may have sported all the appropriate symbols, but Roth had the substance.

Mixed Media

So: which is it, lads? Is it "false to frame the biofuel debate as a choice between people or SUVs," or is it literally a choice between "a Prius hybrid on a trip from San Francisco to San Diego and back... [or] feed[ing] a person for a year"? Having enjoyed not one, but two burgers of locally-raised red meat last night, is my moral credit as bad as someone who commutes downtown from Bergedorf in a Beemer, or, alternatively, who sups on tofu flown in from Japan and Pink Lady apples? Are we trapped between complicity in the deaths of either up to 150,000 Iraqis or at least 130,000 Burmese?

Please note, naturally, that all four articles linked above were published via the same website. It's very hard to move forward when you're not sure which direction to face.

Bourgeois Art Threat

The great confluence of posts about creativity, class, and the "creative class" continues, though so far circumstance has conspired to keep me too busy to compose a proper reply. In the interim, here's a mix of music about class tension, the offspring of the obscene embrace between art & commerce. Not insignificantly, a number of the songs most declaratively aligned with the Working Man are by people who've assuredly never felt the sting of sweat in their eyes if not under stage-lights. A few of the acts - the JSBX, the Dandies, and of course the Shat - damn near disappear up their own asses in acts of self-satirisation. Meanwhile, for all their Fela-esque anti-capital populism, The 3rd Generation Band were actually the official Ghanaian state police band - but of course, capital adopting anti-establishment postures is as old as the rebel yell itself.

Also occupying my headspace: a couple of recent posts over at I Cite mentioned the difficulty of creating consensus, a difficulty aptly demonstrated by others who smugly self-paralyse with ping-pong rhetoric and infinite regresses. Discussions of the Symbolic with neither the Imaginary nor the Real and a theory of "progressive" tourism aside... One of the problems facing post-modern politics is that there isn't an ideology, that is neither essentially nihilist nor religious, which accepts that people just don't get along - that in all likelihood, we hate each other. In spite of this being a fundamental consideration of Enlightenment philosophy, there seems to be not the barest bones of any progressive agenda that incorporates a status quo of everyone hating each other's guts. This is not a new problem, as I certainly wouldn't be the lone member of a previously-proposed People Who Hate People Party...

Middle Class Revolt
(click on the title to download)

1. Tricky - "Money Greedy" (00:00)
2. The Fall - "Prole Art Threat" (05:24)
3. The 3rd Generation Band - "Because of Money" (07:18)
4. Pete Wiggins - "I Don't Work For a Living" (13:07)
5. The Wu-Tang Clan - "C.R.E.A.M." (16:08)
6. The Constantines - "Working Full-Time" (19:57)
7. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - "Sweat" (23:51)
8. Talking Heads - "Found a Job" (26:51)
9. The Beastie Boys - "Mark On the Bus" (31:42)
10. XTC - "Day In Day Out" (32:36)
11. Public Image Ltd. - "Careering" (35:41)
12. Fugazi - "Five Corporations" (40:09)
13. Buck 65 - "In Every Dream Home There Is a Heartache" (Roxy Music cover; 42:25)
14. Wiliam Shatner feat. Joe Jackson - "Common People" (Pulp cover; 46:55)
15. The Dandy Warhols - "Bohemian Like You" (51:25)
16. Tom Waits - "Heigh Ho" (54:54)

Everybody Else Is Doing It So I Won't

I'm all for a little bloody-minded contrarianism now and then, even if it involves backlash against the new Batman movie, but if it can't be done with the minor courtesy of spoiler warnings, the kid gloves are off. David Cox' humourless dismissal of The Dark Knight has so ruined my morning that I was halfway to titling this post "David Cox is a twat" just to cool my blood.

Like every salaried hack, Cox doesn't even treat his readers to moderately imaginative writing. This aloof exercise in simplistic indignation stumbles right out of the gate, under a title unduly pleased with itself as a bad pun built on cheap consonance and sort-of synonyms. This is followed by a pre-critiqued laundry list of the objects he'll be examining, a cheat-sheet so we can keep up with him - a device as tired and condescending as beginning a trailer with, "In a world..."

The central conceit of Cox' article (that the film wrongly denies any moral authority in the War On Terror) is awkwardly incorrect. He's right in his analysis ("the distinction between good and evil has evaporated") but wrong in his condemnation thereof, not the least because Cox seems to have missed the past seven years. He posits the Joker as Osama bin Laden's onscreen incarnation, and makes 9/11 - but no subsequent events - the moral climate in which all decisions are made. If these cinematic metaphors don't bear up under scrutiny, it's because they're the wrong metaphors to be inferred. When Cox scolds the film's apparent moral ambiguity towards such things as mutually-assured destruction, extraordinary rendition, and total surveillance, he does so with a hubris that ignores that our own governments are engaged in exactly those things. The film is explicitly post-9/11 in its ideology, necessarily acknowledging our betrayal of our principles in their own name. We "have become a monster out [our] very excessive attachment with seeing Evil everywhere and fighting it." If the Joker is an imperfect stand-in for the "boringly purposeful" bin Laden of September 11, 2001, then the Joker is a perfect stand-in for bin Laden as he currently exists in our imaginations: an indefatiguable trickster, a walking embodiment of an anarchistic sadomasochism, an "evil-doer."

For a man who makes his living in the media, Cox is surprisingly unsophisticated in his interpretation of the film: that by presenting the collapse of moral authority, the film endorses it. Yes, let's take everything at face-value, shall we? (This could explain why Cox apparently thinks we occidentals are still possessed of some unimpeachable sense of right-and-wrong: because, after all, we say so!) Of course, if the anomic aside of "Cool, man!" is Cox' idea of piquant "irony," then he's measurably forty-some years behind the curve on symbollic literacy. Sure enough, solemnly intoning that "without morality, there can be no saviours," Cox makes clear his preference for the ol' "Boy Scouts in blue," two-dimensional propaganda for a grey-less worldview. This is the same brand of escapism that led Depression-era audiences to sympathise with unrepentantly spoiled debutantes and dandies: when reality gets ugly, flee into an anaesthetising fantasy anthithetical to real life. But should he find his own enjoyment interrupted, Cox ought to be angry at our governing bodies, not grease-painted fictional action figures, for casting "a smokescreen behind which... some kind of coherent whole can be persistently ducked."

Of course, I might be demanding too much of Cox. We're dealing with a man who fell head over heels for a Francophone exercise in Ed Burns-esque provincial romanticism. Perhaps Cox is just grumpy while he waits for Flash Of Genius, that heart-rending David-&-Goliath allegory balanced upon legal appeals over the patent for friggin' windshield wipers.

Most disturbing in all this, though, is the peak in his libindal scrapbook Cox offers us when expressing shock & disappointment at seeing "Maggie Gyllenhaal drained, astonishingly, of sex-appeal." Great, thanks for that, Davey-boy, now we can all imagine your unsypathetic mastiff/headmaster pout drooling salaciously as Maggie crawls around in a pantsuit-and-leather-leash combo. Nevermind that most of my friends and I always saw Gyllenhaal as a pleasantly unglamourous indie everygirl instead of some ur-sexual goddess. Perhaps Cox is a textbook pervert who willingly accepts any actor, in a role signified as "sexy"/sexual, as innately "sexy"/sexual.

Can we please hand Anna Pickard all the Guardian's AV coverage already?

Green Light/Red Light

There's only so far I can wander into the debate about minimal techno's lack of a certain sumbitch, because I'm in no way qualified: I don't dance, I hate clubs, and the last self-advertisedly "electronic" album I bought* was Amon Tobin's Supermodified. (My one snidely brief salvo: why listen to something labeled "minimal" then complain about its flatness?) But in his reading of minimal techno as a symptom of Berlin's - and perhaps Germany's - cultural listlessness, Mark K-Punk nailed it:

Berlin has in many ways become a capital of deterritorialized culture, a base for DJs and curators whose jetsetting lifestyle is indeed a "bizarre phenomenon". If hauntology depends upon the way that very specific places – Burial's South London Boroughs, for instance – are stained with particular times, then the affect that underlies minimal might be characterised as nomadalgia: a lack of sense of place, a drift through club or salon spaces that, like franchise coffee bars, could be anywhere.

Quite possibly as he was writing this, a British friend and I were busy slagging off Germany for not incubating any place-specific cultural idiosyncracies; there is nothing being created here that is innately of here, that couldn't be found in any number of other cities. I've met my fair share of creative types around both Berlin and Hamburg, but they're all either transients or have their ambitions and attentions focused elsewhere. Berlin in particular functions less as an artistic cauldron than a boho crossroads, a city-sized airport lounge where people encounter each other, debate ideas, exchange contacts, and then hustle off to where ever the real action is.

The Berlin mythology that seduces so many (Bowie & Pop, the Birthday Party, Blixa Bargeld, and Bruno Ganz with wings) was founded on an antagonism that no longer exists. Following the collapse of communism, it seems Germany swapped its aphasia for amnesia, forgetting how to speak as Germans, opting instead to speak as Europeans. Combine this erosion of self with the gentrification forced by an influx of "international 'creatives'," attracted to Berlin's cheap rents and scuzzy cachet (now minus any genuine danger) - that makes for one anonymously monochromatic playground. If this could be anywhere, then why be here?

* * *

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, an unexpectedly melodramatic exchange over at The End Times has Dan apparently "consider[ing] packing it all in." I'll assume the best: that this is a sarcastic jab at the defensive hysteria into which the conversation descended. As self-aware and ludicrously well-read as he is, surely Dan's not going to close up shop because of one dilettante with all the good grace, objective reason, and eloquence of a teenager who discovered Sylvia Plath and Garden State at the same time.

Nor should my second comment be misread as some P.C. plea for civility & offensensitivity. Wasting as much time I do online, I see way too many comment threads descend into coke-head-aggressive lobotomite name-calling of the "Fuck you!"/"No, fuck you!" variety. Reading Dan's deletion of the controversial link and denial of an ad hominem attack, it was refreshing to see someone who'll cool the rhetoric and commit to common courtesy to keep the conversation going while leaving identity out of it, in hopes that it doesn't come to shrill Stuart Smalley-esque self-affirmation and oblivious hypocrisy (e.g. "I'm hurt!"/"I'm strong!" and "I'm classless!"/"So what if I'm bourgeois?").

Didn't work that time, though, did it? Better luck tomorrow, Dan.

(*) Despite being a laptop musician, Tim Hecker's music is sufficiently vague, degraded, hauntological that I'd shelve him between Philip Jeck and My Bloody Valentine, not alongside Hawtin or RIchard D. James.

Weltanschauungkrieg

What does it mean for Tricky to say, "Remember, boy, you're a superstar," in the age of Guitar Hero?

The other day, I was knee-deep in another diatribe about the dire state of music, how progress has been replaced with pastiche and rehash, and I demanded some manner of explanation from my friend. He pointed to the decline of the recording industry - which isn't to say he's pining for the days of mafioso maneuvering and the artist-as-indentured-servant. The Big Four's throne is eroding not because people can get music for free, but because people don't really need music any more.

As a collectively-accessible storehouse/exhalation of lust, fear, anger, joy, desire, excess, lack, whatever: pop isn't insufficient, it simply isn't needed. The quest for communion over shared aesthetic tastes, the osmosis of the zietgeist over the airwaves, and (most importantly) the unrequited idolatry of pervert rock stars... This is all archaic in the age of MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Guitar Hero. As encouraged and enacted by the parade of role-playing mediocrity on American Idol and its bottom-feeding spawn, the brave new wired world is less an information superhighway than a panoptical full-length mirror. Everyone can be the star of their own ipsocentric universe, smiling for the cameraphone, applauding their vlogged views as both pundit and audience, investing pale karaoke pageantry with the same vigor once reserved for the original object or event.

Perhaps contemporary pop's greatest mistake is its relentless effort both to mystify and demystify. Some artists, like Daft Punk or Animal Collective, concertedly create a folklore out of cosmic debris; others, like Kanye West or Bradford Cox, "just wanna be real as much as possible" and are exhaustively confessional, barely stopping short of blogging their bowel-movements. Yet there's an undeniable sense in Animal Collective and Cox being good friends: "Keeping It Real"-style demystification is simply "brutilitarian" antiglam, which itself is a form of mystification. Whatever the method's style, the end result is that the persona surpasses the music as the artist's essential product. Every action or utterance by an artist is an expression of a marketing campaign for themselves, not their art.

The more specifically tailored and ornately detailed an artist's identity becomes, the less empty space there is in which the audience can resonate with the artist. The most enduring & indelible legends of pop are such because of their ambiguity. How deep were Led Zeppelin's dalliances with black magic and mudsharks? What was Kevin Shields thinking during the three years it took to make Loveless? Who knows? Which is exactly the point: in those blank margins, the listener can articulate their relationship to the artist. These days, every artist write-up is so heavily footnoted (often so referential because they have nothing new to say) that the page is already full, no room to respond or reflect.

Writing nine years ago, Zizek already identified cyperspace's founding myth - the promise of a Global Village - as just that: a myth.

...What effectively happens is that we are bombarded with the multitude of messages belonging to inconsistent and incompatible universes — instead of the Global Village, the big Other, we get the multitude of "small others," of tribal particular identifications at our choice.

Individuals create ever-more elaborate online shrines to themselves, while filtering content to whatever crumbs do not clash with their constructions. These "small others" simultaneously proliferate and shrink in their specific scope, chipping away any intuitive sense of community until understanding is so rare that it appears more conspiracy than compassion. More and more of the rest of the world necessarily appears psychotic to any one person.

This is not a new point: Mark K-Punk has written probingly about modern youth's possession by depressive-compulsive hedonism, a desperate pleasure-hunt to fill their unnameable emptiness that leads to the hollow make-believe of MyFace, Rock Band 2, and the like. (Mark has dubbed these electronic IVs of fantasy "The OediPod," one of the better buzzwords I've heard since "-izzle" became a suffix.) There is also something larger at work. Rather than a simple swap of EMI for iTunes or Sony/BMG for Google, the sacrifice of the music industry to the ascendence of Web 2.0 marks a behemoth victory for capital. As the internet can amplify negligible differences into flamewar-worthy impasses, the Global Village has managed to divide and conquer itself, placing greater emphasis on bitchy bulletin-board retorts than building a progressive consensus. Capital is being fed by our infighting. What remains to be seen is if the Captains of Industry will score the truly horrifying hat-trick of resurrecting the old media industry while tightening its chokehold on the new one.

So how does Mr. Adrian Thaws figure into all this? I recall an interview on Canada's MuchMusic around the time of Angels With Dirty Faces (named after the classic Cagney mobster movie), wherein Tricky was queried about "urban" music's fascination with the antisocial & criminal element. I'm paraphrasing through the cobwebs of a decade-old memory, but he said (more or less):

Growing up in the ghetto, the only people who got out of the ghetto were gangsters and drug dealers. So those were my heroes growing up.

Aside from explaining the now for-granted characteristics of "ghetto" culture (paranoia from being constantly surveiled by police, the romanticising of strongmen, etc.), this speaks volumes about the types who would succeed according to the rules of capital. Also, amid the ruckus over Knowle West Boy, The End Times reminded himself (and us) of Tricky's role as class antagonist during a lengthy rumination on the socioeconomic tension he (Dan) endures as a bookstore wage-slave. Evidently, a hefty psychic tax has been exacted upon him by

the middle-class-and-over customers... [who] never once tak[e] pity on a face prematurely aged by harassment, as all working-class faces seem to be, but feel that they have to treat you like a piece of shit, and that you should be thankful for the privilege of even speaking to them.

I sympathise. My wife spent quite some time in the same gig, and my incumbency as a record store clerk forms the bulk of my CV. (My professional history gets no more glamourous either, with one fleeting exception from which I was ultimately sacked.) But before I raise my fist in solidarity with service industry drones everywhere, let's be clear about one thing: working in a bookstore is considerably different than working in a Chinese coal mine, Alberta oil rig, north Atlantic fishing trawler, Vietnamese sweatshop, or African diamond mine. Across the spectrum of employment, working retail ranks as pretty damned easy, comfortable, and safe - sufficiently so that I hesitate to designate it blue-collar.

Nonetheless, anyone who's ever worked in the service industry would affirm the presence of a seemingly inherent antagonism between the customers and the staff. The political persuasion of the antognism, however, is elusive. Retail work seems to be a Rorschach test for this fundamental antagonism's ideological framework: it can be racial, a Nietzschean upstairs/downstairs dynamic, the classic religious condescension which endorses the wealth of faith alone, or (in Dan's Case) black-and-white Marxian class struggle. Though the antagonism's nature is not given, its presence is - in every exchange, eye-roll, request, sneer, smile, and sale.

Since the predominant context of human interaction is within the work environment, the political vagueness of the interaction allows any ideology to be adopted as a basically-true filter through which to view all interaction. Of course, to adopt an ideology immediately disavows its exceptions, only hardening our opposition from the Other while doing the individual no justice. As Carl Jung put it more concisely than I can, "While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way." More useful references for the antagonistic dynamic might be the Stanford prison experiment or the Milgram experiment, in terms of the persecutive nature of demands by authority. Again, this is not to dramatise the service industry as the frontlines of an epic battle for humanity's soul. But to frame the antagonism psychologically makes it a human problem, as opposed to a product of the necessarily dehumanising will to power of capital.

Does this complicate the issue? Almost certainly - but then, when has getting along with people ever been easy?

On another front of the class war: Ladies and gentlemen and fair folk in between... In a discovery that will be rivalled only by the eventual detection of the Higgs Boson, I have stumbled upon the single most pretentious and precious band name ever: To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie. No, I'm not fucking around. They are beyond parody, people. A coed duo dressed all Derelicte, doing a digi-glitchy update on 4AD's glacial, gothy art-rock with the (somewhat tone-deaf) lady cooing into cavernous reverb, complete with a David Lynchian video whose self-important vapidity means it blows its load only a third of the way through the interminable seven-goddamn-minute runtime. The music crosses from tastefully minimalist to totally blank, from emotional coldness to zombiefied void - probably to avoid the embarrassment risked in articulating a position.

I mean, look at 'em - is that 100% class warrior or what? The only thing saving this band from being a pitch(fork)-perfect Brooklyn Vegan Spinal Tap is that they live in Minneapolis instead of Bed-Stuy.