I remember once commenting to a friend that for all punk's supposed "transformative" and "revolutionary" properties I was hard pressed to find how the years since 1977 could've gone better for the power we were supposedly fighting against.
It's interesting—I've seen two definitions of "punk" bandied around in responses to this thing. One is what I'M talking about when I talk about punk: a particular sartorial, musical, and visual aesthetic that originated in the late 1970s, was popularized during the 1980s, and survived at least through the early 2000s. The other definition of punk is more abstract, and is sort of like what Thompson gets at when he says that the original beats shrank into the background and returned as hippies ten years later. the Spirit of Punk has nothing to do with power chords and mohawks and safety pins, but with the DIY ethos, cheeky irreverence, distrust of the mainstream, elective IRL community, etc. etc.
If we're going by the second definition, then there are places where Punk is indeed alive and well—it's just localized and invisible to outsiders. Maybe it doesn't have revolutionary potential—and publicity can only harm it in this regard, unless the stars are very particularly aligned— but at this late hour I can't but be glad that it's just out there.
It was an interesting and enjoyable read! But with all these cultural analysis pieces I feel that it falls into the old alt culture trap of "There must be something to resist". Young arabs in totalitarian countries toppling autocrats to replace them with populist Islamist are rebelling. Suburban kids listening to weird music have had nothing real to rebel against for generations.
Is the world perfect? of course not. Is western middle class life so incredibly comfortable and alluring that people will almost universally prefer it to any reasonable alternative given enough time (and age)? evidently.
The "Man" is a centralized authority more fitting in a soviet era society when things are centrally planed. In the modern liberal capitalist world you are fighting cultural streams. There is no one building to burn to change the world, you would literally need to convince billions with your idea and by definition to become mainstream.
In my small sample size of my life most "alternative" people do not reject the mainstream initially. At young age for one reason or another they are rejected or are a misfit in the mainstream and looking for acceptance and comradery they find another group. Later they build their personality around the alternative music, financial system, family structure, etc that is defining that group. They just want somewhere to belong. And as they age and become more "mainstream" themselves they realize that they do not hate general society as much as they thought. and some people are just contrarians by nature, that also happens :)
This does not detract from the fact that there are powerful people trying to benefit from cultural movements, but they are as influenced by the movements as they are influencing them. Trump was created by the culture shock of Obama. Is he manipulating people? sure. is he also molded and guided by the zeitgeist? arguably more so.
Traditional "resistance" comes more easily in a society organized as a unitary pyramid that controls people by way of punishment and negative reinforcement. In one like ours, where there's no dictator or icon of Big Brother to rail against, and which exerts control through positive reinforcement, it's considerably more difficult to locate targets to which pressure may be efficaciously applied. That's why the [so-called] left and the right in the United States are each primarily going after cultural targets lately. There are visible and personified effigies to punch out at in these case; the blue hairs, the guys in MAGA hats, antifa, Evangelicals. But when the defining problems of our age (climate change, runaway economic inequality, even racism) are the result of how society is organized, what can most people rally against but abstractions and specious avatars?
True True. This is where the Academia/Philosophers/Intellectuals what ever you call it failed us. What we need now are constructive ideas on how to go forward and less ways to breakdown the social order. But they too got swept by laziness and easy targets.
You have a lot of social energy, but its un-directed so it collapses on itself. I don't know if its something truly "Good" but initiatives like the new Austin university seems like constructive ideas on how to improve the world.
Unlike the nihilistic helplessness of the maximalist ideologues in the left and right, its actually constructive and not "Give me everything I want, 100%, or this world is just bad and there is no reason to do anything"
"Young arabs in totalitarian countries toppling autocrats to replace them with populist Islamist are rebelling. Suburban kids listening to weird music have had nothing real to rebel against for generations."
Just my five cents - I lived in eastern Europe country (part of USSR kind of) when I was a teen - Ther were always movements fighting the Big Brother and our crumbling goverment. And those bands and arts were true, but still in my mind, kind of facade to show off and differentiate from the mainstream. The access to good music was limited, but I was able to discover amazing bands. Local subculture music had already copied different styles from the west and it was easy to take a mickey out of stupid rules and propaganda. But when the Berlin Wall fell and the capitalism creeped in, suddenly our subcultural identity slowly disolved into oblivion. Not to say it was weak or something - I just wanna say we often just didn't give a shit and there was suddenly nothing to fight against. I was involved with punk/metal scene btw.
Not really in art, but in the last year or so we started to see the system trying to do the same thing to the degrowth subculture (?) (of which eXtinction Rebellion might or might not be a visible offshoot ?).
That one might be hard to absorb... maybe that's why there recently has been a clash between it and the """blue hairs""" (over issues of artificial reproduction and medically-assisted transsexualilty ; anything cyber- is anathema to degrowthers) ?
The figure of the burned out 30-something engineer (couple) that has decided to retire to the country (after accumulating enough money in their old job) and live frugally seems becoming a cliché by now... at least they are well aware that this comes with hardship (one of Degrowth's recent editorials is titled "You can't survive on a garden" (alone)).
Anecdotally, it's really telling how many of my friends wistfully imagine buying a plot of land in the middle of nowhere and living the simple lives of homesteaders. They sure as shit weren't talking about it twenty years ago.
I know we usually ignore recommendations from strangers online but I'm pretty fucking sure you would love to watch the barely one-hour documentary called "The Merchants of Cool". Maybe you've seen it before but if you haven't, it's a must watch. You can easily find it with a Google search.
For decades I've been mulling over corporate co-optation of subversiveness, the relationship between authenticity and expressions of rebellion in art and popular culture and I came to the conclusion that it's all fake. All of it. We've been duped. It's all an act. It's all performative. Always was.
Not just the music but all forms of art. If you sell a cultural or artistic product, you're a product yourself. A brand. I don't care how edgy or contrarian or outside the norm you purport to be. The thing is: artists know it's all an act, the majority of fans know it's all an act and no one really cares. Only the suckers like me care. And, apparently, you too.
I came to the conclusion that all the "too cool for school" bands and artists who riffed on the mainstream did so not because they were against the mainstream per se but precisely because they weren't part of the mainstream. They weren't motivated by anti-conformity or an unwavering sense of authenticity... but by resentment and envy.
It's easy to have morals when you have no money and no fame. In my country we have a saying: money doesn't corrupt people, money reveals people.
The trajectory of the industrial act SPK is interesting. Their early stuff was really abrasive, dissonant, provocative, experimental. A few years later, they were doing artsy eighties pop. Then its last remaining founding member went off to do film soundtracks, if I recall. It's easy to be avant garde when you're young, but not so much after a few years have gone by and you (1) don't want to stop making music and get a job in sales or accounting or whatever (2) don't want to live like a terminal adolescent, either.
In a lot of cases I think ripping on the mainstream IS genuine. Like, I could see why Bill Hicks bashed "dick joke" comedians. One doesn't like to see mediocrity prevailing in one's field. But given the industrial production of culture, whatever flavor prevails will invariably be mediocre. The iconoclastic energy of Nirvana upended the world of popular music—and made Matchbox 20 and Creed possible.
Cool. For as long as this has been a problem, there has been an antidote: No Pity For The Majority (Wax Trax)
Seriously though, the antidote has always been a very local one: to drop out of *culture* while opposing the system, instead of the other way around, and to make your own culture as much as possible. Write, rather than read, play an instrument, rather than listen to one, paint, rather than look at images. It doesn't solve the unsolvable problem of there being a mass culture, or of capitalism being almost everything, but it does solve the problem for oneself in particular.
I think it is very hard for counter culture in general to accept that it is a half measure. The full measure is revolution. We're echoing the deeds and ways of much older movements, like the English Dissenters, American revolutionaries, Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, early scientists, early Christians, even the proper soviet communists. But all of these things, for all their flaws, got their shit together, got up early in the morning, had boring meetings, made concrete plans, and *completely replaced earlier systems*. They were all counter culture, but also *so much more*, and so much more lasting.
For as long as I can remember, the "resistance" has been allergic to organization, hierarchy, and planning, and altogether without discipline. It disintegrates like an unstable isotope under the glare of publicity.
All wild talk and fancy ideas, very little follow through. The Tom Sawyer of resistances.
I think this comes of having a long series of political movements, with no social desperation. All the coffee shop rebel talk, none of the starving parent urgency. Things will have to get bad before that energy is available.
Personally, that thought has kept me out of political resistance for 20 years. I want to see a sea change, I just don't want to directly contribute to terrible hunger or civil war.
I remember once commenting to a friend that for all punk's supposed "transformative" and "revolutionary" properties I was hard pressed to find how the years since 1977 could've gone better for the power we were supposedly fighting against.
Fantastic as usual.
It's interesting—I've seen two definitions of "punk" bandied around in responses to this thing. One is what I'M talking about when I talk about punk: a particular sartorial, musical, and visual aesthetic that originated in the late 1970s, was popularized during the 1980s, and survived at least through the early 2000s. The other definition of punk is more abstract, and is sort of like what Thompson gets at when he says that the original beats shrank into the background and returned as hippies ten years later. the Spirit of Punk has nothing to do with power chords and mohawks and safety pins, but with the DIY ethos, cheeky irreverence, distrust of the mainstream, elective IRL community, etc. etc.
If we're going by the second definition, then there are places where Punk is indeed alive and well—it's just localized and invisible to outsiders. Maybe it doesn't have revolutionary potential—and publicity can only harm it in this regard, unless the stars are very particularly aligned— but at this late hour I can't but be glad that it's just out there.
It was an interesting and enjoyable read! But with all these cultural analysis pieces I feel that it falls into the old alt culture trap of "There must be something to resist". Young arabs in totalitarian countries toppling autocrats to replace them with populist Islamist are rebelling. Suburban kids listening to weird music have had nothing real to rebel against for generations.
Is the world perfect? of course not. Is western middle class life so incredibly comfortable and alluring that people will almost universally prefer it to any reasonable alternative given enough time (and age)? evidently.
The "Man" is a centralized authority more fitting in a soviet era society when things are centrally planed. In the modern liberal capitalist world you are fighting cultural streams. There is no one building to burn to change the world, you would literally need to convince billions with your idea and by definition to become mainstream.
In my small sample size of my life most "alternative" people do not reject the mainstream initially. At young age for one reason or another they are rejected or are a misfit in the mainstream and looking for acceptance and comradery they find another group. Later they build their personality around the alternative music, financial system, family structure, etc that is defining that group. They just want somewhere to belong. And as they age and become more "mainstream" themselves they realize that they do not hate general society as much as they thought. and some people are just contrarians by nature, that also happens :)
This does not detract from the fact that there are powerful people trying to benefit from cultural movements, but they are as influenced by the movements as they are influencing them. Trump was created by the culture shock of Obama. Is he manipulating people? sure. is he also molded and guided by the zeitgeist? arguably more so.
Traditional "resistance" comes more easily in a society organized as a unitary pyramid that controls people by way of punishment and negative reinforcement. In one like ours, where there's no dictator or icon of Big Brother to rail against, and which exerts control through positive reinforcement, it's considerably more difficult to locate targets to which pressure may be efficaciously applied. That's why the [so-called] left and the right in the United States are each primarily going after cultural targets lately. There are visible and personified effigies to punch out at in these case; the blue hairs, the guys in MAGA hats, antifa, Evangelicals. But when the defining problems of our age (climate change, runaway economic inequality, even racism) are the result of how society is organized, what can most people rally against but abstractions and specious avatars?
True True. This is where the Academia/Philosophers/Intellectuals what ever you call it failed us. What we need now are constructive ideas on how to go forward and less ways to breakdown the social order. But they too got swept by laziness and easy targets.
You have a lot of social energy, but its un-directed so it collapses on itself. I don't know if its something truly "Good" but initiatives like the new Austin university seems like constructive ideas on how to improve the world.
Unlike the nihilistic helplessness of the maximalist ideologues in the left and right, its actually constructive and not "Give me everything I want, 100%, or this world is just bad and there is no reason to do anything"
"Young arabs in totalitarian countries toppling autocrats to replace them with populist Islamist are rebelling. Suburban kids listening to weird music have had nothing real to rebel against for generations."
Just my five cents - I lived in eastern Europe country (part of USSR kind of) when I was a teen - Ther were always movements fighting the Big Brother and our crumbling goverment. And those bands and arts were true, but still in my mind, kind of facade to show off and differentiate from the mainstream. The access to good music was limited, but I was able to discover amazing bands. Local subculture music had already copied different styles from the west and it was easy to take a mickey out of stupid rules and propaganda. But when the Berlin Wall fell and the capitalism creeped in, suddenly our subcultural identity slowly disolved into oblivion. Not to say it was weak or something - I just wanna say we often just didn't give a shit and there was suddenly nothing to fight against. I was involved with punk/metal scene btw.
Don't have much else to say, but your five cents are appreciated. Where are you from, by the way?
My own addition to the incoming tl;dr gags:
tl;dr
SLC Punk
Being a radical is expensive and often ineffectual.
Not really in art, but in the last year or so we started to see the system trying to do the same thing to the degrowth subculture (?) (of which eXtinction Rebellion might or might not be a visible offshoot ?).
That one might be hard to absorb... maybe that's why there recently has been a clash between it and the """blue hairs""" (over issues of artificial reproduction and medically-assisted transsexualilty ; anything cyber- is anathema to degrowthers) ?
The figure of the burned out 30-something engineer (couple) that has decided to retire to the country (after accumulating enough money in their old job) and live frugally seems becoming a cliché by now... at least they are well aware that this comes with hardship (one of Degrowth's recent editorials is titled "You can't survive on a garden" (alone)).
Anecdotally, it's really telling how many of my friends wistfully imagine buying a plot of land in the middle of nowhere and living the simple lives of homesteaders. They sure as shit weren't talking about it twenty years ago.
I know we usually ignore recommendations from strangers online but I'm pretty fucking sure you would love to watch the barely one-hour documentary called "The Merchants of Cool". Maybe you've seen it before but if you haven't, it's a must watch. You can easily find it with a Google search.
For decades I've been mulling over corporate co-optation of subversiveness, the relationship between authenticity and expressions of rebellion in art and popular culture and I came to the conclusion that it's all fake. All of it. We've been duped. It's all an act. It's all performative. Always was.
Not just the music but all forms of art. If you sell a cultural or artistic product, you're a product yourself. A brand. I don't care how edgy or contrarian or outside the norm you purport to be. The thing is: artists know it's all an act, the majority of fans know it's all an act and no one really cares. Only the suckers like me care. And, apparently, you too.
I came to the conclusion that all the "too cool for school" bands and artists who riffed on the mainstream did so not because they were against the mainstream per se but precisely because they weren't part of the mainstream. They weren't motivated by anti-conformity or an unwavering sense of authenticity... but by resentment and envy.
It's easy to have morals when you have no money and no fame. In my country we have a saying: money doesn't corrupt people, money reveals people.
The trajectory of the industrial act SPK is interesting. Their early stuff was really abrasive, dissonant, provocative, experimental. A few years later, they were doing artsy eighties pop. Then its last remaining founding member went off to do film soundtracks, if I recall. It's easy to be avant garde when you're young, but not so much after a few years have gone by and you (1) don't want to stop making music and get a job in sales or accounting or whatever (2) don't want to live like a terminal adolescent, either.
In a lot of cases I think ripping on the mainstream IS genuine. Like, I could see why Bill Hicks bashed "dick joke" comedians. One doesn't like to see mediocrity prevailing in one's field. But given the industrial production of culture, whatever flavor prevails will invariably be mediocre. The iconoclastic energy of Nirvana upended the world of popular music—and made Matchbox 20 and Creed possible.
tldr; Pop Will Eat Itself (RCA).
Cool. For as long as this has been a problem, there has been an antidote: No Pity For The Majority (Wax Trax)
Seriously though, the antidote has always been a very local one: to drop out of *culture* while opposing the system, instead of the other way around, and to make your own culture as much as possible. Write, rather than read, play an instrument, rather than listen to one, paint, rather than look at images. It doesn't solve the unsolvable problem of there being a mass culture, or of capitalism being almost everything, but it does solve the problem for oneself in particular.
I think it is very hard for counter culture in general to accept that it is a half measure. The full measure is revolution. We're echoing the deeds and ways of much older movements, like the English Dissenters, American revolutionaries, Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, early scientists, early Christians, even the proper soviet communists. But all of these things, for all their flaws, got their shit together, got up early in the morning, had boring meetings, made concrete plans, and *completely replaced earlier systems*. They were all counter culture, but also *so much more*, and so much more lasting.
For as long as I can remember, the "resistance" has been allergic to organization, hierarchy, and planning, and altogether without discipline. It disintegrates like an unstable isotope under the glare of publicity.
All wild talk and fancy ideas, very little follow through. The Tom Sawyer of resistances.
I think this comes of having a long series of political movements, with no social desperation. All the coffee shop rebel talk, none of the starving parent urgency. Things will have to get bad before that energy is available.
Personally, that thought has kept me out of political resistance for 20 years. I want to see a sea change, I just don't want to directly contribute to terrible hunger or civil war.
I know at least two people who will instantly read the 1200-pager! After all, how will you top the dragon?
good god, I have no idea.