Revolution Music and Over-the-counterculture

Further to that last post, I feel like the transformative impact of music (and art) is seriously overstated. The 'establishment' isn't living in fear of rock, it's busy studying its success at business school.

Beware of people praising to the skies a particular thing, when they they just so happen to make their living creating that thing. That goes for musicians and artists (and the academics) just as well as it does for vacuum-cleaner salesmen. Music (or art) is wonderful -- my life basically revolves around it. But it isn't the end-all and be-all of life -- just one of many worthwhile interesting aspects of life, no better than any other.

That said, these two things are awesome. They've gone a long way to dissolving my cynicism about art these past few months. It really is possible to make art that challenges 'the powers that be' in electrifying ways...



This is CocoRosie's subversive cover of Akon's misygonistic tune, where they give a voice to the pole dancer he's busy objectifying in the original. (If you're as cut off from mainstream culture as I am -- an edited version of this songs was a #1 hit but I didn't come across it until CocoRosie -- you can watch the original here. You'll get the idea after the first minute or so -- I know I haven't managed to sit through the whole thing, so don't feel obliged to).



CocoRosie - lyrics to You Wanna Fuck Me



Now this is Sinead O'Connor a week after she tore up a photo of the pope on live national tv, as a way of protesting then fresh revelations about sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, and the way the hierarchy systematically protected offenders. (She was abused as a child herself).




Is anybody else amazed at the irony of trying to boo a performer off the stage at a tribute to Bob Dylan? (And what she did was quite a bit more gutsy than just plugging in an electric guitar...)

Ursula LeGuin's translation of Book 1, chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching

The Use Of Not

Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn't
is where it's useful.

Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot's not
is where it's useful.

Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn't,
there's room for you.

So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn't.

Art's Overrated (Dismantling the Cult of the Artist)

That's right. I think our idea of 'art' is very artifical, finding its basis in more general principles of specialization that have a really corrosive effect on our lives. Think of a carpenter and a composer (or painter) living in the Baroque or medieval period, for example. There actually wasn't a whole lot of difference between what these two craftsmen (craftspeople) did. In their work, they exercised creativity, autonomy, self-expression and skill. They planned the work out from beginning to end, performed just about all of it themselves, and did their best to make sure it was the highest quality they could produce, learning and gaining skill with everything they made -- all in all, they investing a little bit of themselves in everything they produced. But at some point art separated completely from craft, ordinary work, and ordinary life, and we evacuated all of the creativity and spirit out of the ordinary things we do, leaving art as some sort of sacred, magical thing that only 5% of the population ('artists') get to do, or that the rest of us get to do it with 5% of our time (a 'hobby')... the rest of the time our work and what we do leaves us no space for creativity, autonomy, self-expression, etc. Lame.

What I'm trying to say is that the way you made music and made a chair was basically the same before the Industrial Revolution (which relied on an extreme division of labour) ... the maker would get to exercise quite a bit of bit of creativity, autonomy, and skill. Today, most chairs are made by factory workers who are left bereft of such things. Their work is repetitive, boring, uncreative, fragmentary (a worker contributes only one tiny action to the creation of a chair), and entirely determined by others above them. The ideal worker is a pre-programmed drone.

In a lot of ways, the modern divinization of art is an attempt to retreat and escape from the effects of industrialism, but paradoxically, all it does is support the dehumanization of work by saying that creativity, independence, and self-expression is reserved for 'artistic' activities. The pursuit of 'pure art,' 'art for art's sake,' often involving an indifference bordering on antagonism to any potential audience ('I don't write/paint/create for people, it's just for me, and the more people I offend the better' -- the cult of the maverick, revolutionary artist) seeks to remove these values even farther -- as far as possible -- from ordinary life.

(And for the record, there is no such thing as 'pure' art. All art is functional. Even the most abstract art of art serves the function of reinforcing certain values, and delineating social groupings -- at the very least, between those who 'get it' and those who don't. 'Coincidentally' those who 'get it' tend to be the economically priveledged and well-educated).

Why Punk and Drunk Just Don't Go Together

Went to a punk show last night. Cool to see a Canadian hardcore legend (that'd be DOA), almost as old as the Sex Pistols, contemporaries with Black Flag and Bad Brains, and still going strong. Johnny Shithead (the only remaining original member) managed to be really fun (mock guitar-hero pyrotechnics) and really serious (political) at the same time. Hmmm. Somehow, too much modern punk seems to have lost that wonderful combination.

Probably would have enjoyed it more if me and my friend weren't both a little sick. It also would've helped if there wouldn't have been beer spilled all over the moshpit area.

(God, I'm getting too old).

Hello, kids, please listen to Grandpa Tim's advice here: if you want to mosh, don't bring your beer bottle in with you. I know you like pretending to be all rebellious and stuff, but you're crossing the line from rebellious to just plain stupid here. It will spill, and besides the dangerous hazard this will create for everyone else, you'll be out some beer. (And that's the best case scenario -- you could lose the entire beer, and the floor could just end up littered with glass -- never fun to land on). Believe it or not, punk is also supposed to be about taking care of each other (that'd be why we instantly pick each other up when we fall).

One more reason all punk shows should just be all-age shows.

In Honour of DIS

Three kids are playing on the playground, and one turns to the others and says "Are they making us go to school or are we learning for the sake of beauty?"
-Jack White

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."
-Neils Bohr

"Public education: The bureaucratic process of replacing an empty mind with a closed one."
-Brooke McEldowney

"It's only work if somebody makes you do it."
-Calvin (from Calivin and Hobbes, as written by Bill Watterson)

Christian death metal (and other oxymorons)

So this year I'm going to be trying to write an honours essay (like a thesis, but for undergrads) on Christian Death Metal. And yes, such a thing really does exist, and some such bands that play it are even quite good and fairly popular in the world of metal. Zao and As I Lay Dying, for instance. Stop rolling your eyes!

Anyways, the main theoretical issue I think I'm going to be grappling with is whether there's something inherent in the music that lends itself to a certain feel/message, or whether the relation between the music and the message is arbitray, so you can just just graft any discourse onto it willy-nilly.

If you're strange like me, and something in the above paragraphs pique your interest, you may want to look at what I have so far, (god knows I'll take all the feedback and help I can get!):
Rough Outline
[A far from static plan, with links to sectional drafts, thoughts, and annotated bibliographies].

As I go, I'm planning to post as much of my writing as I have, probably linked into the Rough Outline, though I may also add fresh links direct into this post. And of course, the nice thing about google documents is they automatically update, so if you're really crazy you can follow my thought and writing process all the way through to what will hopefully be the final product. Or just jump in at some random point and never look back!

If you want to witness the glory that is Christian death metal, you could do worse than to try:
Mortification - Scrolls of the Megilloth video and lyrics
Zao - Savannah live video, and lyrics


Incidentally, John Coltrane is awesome my friends, and on Blue Train he has a seriously wonderful trombonist (among others) playing alongside him. (Listening to it right now). Definitely worth checking out.

300

"In which a small band of racially-pure Europeans save democracy and freedom from the mixed Asian hordes of an androgynous despot. They are betrayed by a cripple who should have been killed for his deformity, and who was seduced by the sexual lasciousviousness said despot was able to offer. Fortunately, good still triumphs over evil."

[For anyone who doesn't know, the movie is a shot-for-shot remake of Frank Miller's graphic novel].


Frank Miller used to be one my of my favourite comic book authors. As far as I'm concerned The Dark Knight Returns is just about the best superhero comic ever written, and though it took a while to grow on me, the long-awaited sequel The Dark Knight Strikes Again is at least as brilliant. But it's hard to have much respect for him these days. 300 is a good story, and I enjoyed it as such when I finally watched the movie version this summer with a friend. But as soon the movie was over, and we started talking about what the movie seemed to saying... things start getting a little creepy. Then I read Edward Said's Orientalism for a class this fall, and had to do a presentation on it, which really opened my eyes to all that's wrong with this movie.

Those behind the movie/book will (and do) say "relax, it's just a story" and "it has no meaning in (or relation to) the real world." But as Said argues, we in the West have a long history (going back at least as far as Homer's Illiad, and Herodotus' Histories) of portraying 'the East' as both dangerous and decadent. Not only have such attitudes and discourses -- often unconscious -- justified imperialism, they sure become convenient when marshalling support for the latest military adventure out in the Eastern world. Thumbs down, Frank Miller.