When I started this column in June, I introduced myself as an unregenerate ’60s kid, but defined the ’60s as “an ongoing conversation, brawl, argument, exploration, catastrophe; many voices engaging, disengaging, pulling themselves this way and that.” And I added: “A motive for this column is that too much of rock music and rock criticism, too many of what I think of as ‘my people’—the intellectualized quasi-bohemia that arose out of the beats and ‘folk’ music and jazz and rock and then punk—have chosen to dance only with themselves while refusing the broader dance, the larger conversation.” So I’m implying that “my people” aren’t being true to our cantankerous past. And back when I’d originally proposed the column to my editor, I’d included “the sort of people who are likely to read an alternative paper’s music section” in my definition of this quasi-bohemia, of “my people.”
But I wonder how true all this is. Do you, whoever you are, identify in some way with music that, like rock or punk—or like jazz or techno or rave—is associated with bohemia and the cutting edge, at least in its ideals? (The Las Vegas Weekly website informs potential advertisers that its readers “find hip culture and edgy journalism almost as important as buying houses, cars, and home furnishings, which they do more than the average Las Vegan.” Apparently you also make about four times as much money as I do.) And is it true that as a group, overall, we’ve been refusing the broader conversation?
But I’ll set those questions aside for the time being to ask another one: Let’s say it’s pretty much true that we’re now dancing only with ourselves, turning our backs on other dances and the larger conversation. What’s wrong with that? The ’60s were a special time, after all, full of tumult, when new values and new dances had to be invented. I don’t recall having any choice about whether to try new things as they were foisted on me. But what’s wrong with subsequent stability? Why shouldn’t we dance the dances we like, with the people we get along with? Why should we be under obligation to other dances and to distant dancers, especially given that our dances cover a range from ballroom to salsa to world beat?
“Dance” is my metaphor for a general engagement with the world. Last week I noted—as an example of the limits of my own curiosity—that I’d never in my life read a mystery novel that featured a cat, and that I likely never would. This isn’t because I know in advance that such novels have little to offer (I’m sure they’d give me some information about popular tastes, or popular cats), but is just an educated guess that I’d rather be spending my time on other things.
A quick answer to my question would be that curiosity and adventure are our ideals, damn it. Our self-image as quasi-bohemian-alternative whatever-we-ares is that we step outside common understandings, tread into new realms. But that’s just me stamping my foot and repeating myself, and anyway, my self-expansion and spirit of adventure apparently stop at the threshold of cat mysteries. (It’s women who read these things, right? And maybe occasionally a guy who owns a cat, but he’s still more likely to favor more hard-boiled stuff with psychopaths in place of cats, isn’t he?) If someone I know and like makes the case for cat mysteries, maybe then I’d read one. But notice the proviso: “someone I know and like.” Actually, if someone I neither know nor like makes a good case, that might also persuade me to try one, except I’m not likely to come across this person’s argument, as I don’t spend my time trawling the net for people’s opinions of cat mysteries.
My point here is that it’s quite normal for us to cluster on the basis of interests and affinities, and that even when our ideals include contrariness and self-expansion, we generally step into the unknown accompanied by someone who resembles us (I’d really hate to have a traveling companion who didn’t get my jokes), using a map created by someone who seems to share our mind-set.
You can call this conformity, but I think it’s just a natural way of dealing with a world that throws too much information and too many possibilities at us. As I said last week, we simply can’t explore everywhere and test every idea. To a large extent we have to believe what we’re told and trust people who seem trustworthy, this trustworthiness often due to their seeming to hold the same ideas that we hold. We hold those ideas because we think they’re good, after all. So it makes sense that we hang around people who tend to dance our dance, and venture out in their company.
Interestingly enough, we live in a society that makes something of an ethic of nonconformity. (See Rules of the Game No. 7: Hero story.) My spur-of-the-moment explanation for this ethic—an ethic that seems to run in the face of how we actually live—is that, not as individuals, but as members of social groups, we benefit from a push toward instability and adventure. There are enough good, sane, practical reasons to narrow ourselves, to make our lives manageable, but if we narrow ourselves as individuals then our social groups become narrow and lose their flexibility, their group brain, as it were. So the ethic acts as a counterbalance.
That’s all very abstract, of course. Now here’s closer to my own gut-level reasons for why I can’t stand the narrowness of “alternative” discourse.
Twenty-one years ago I attempted to write a book about punk rock. I made it through five chapters before abandoning the thing, deciding that I was irreparably resentful toward both the reader (as I imagined him or her) and what punk rock itself had become, which was almost the opposite of the punk I’d identified with and loved. My basic thesis, for what it’s worth, was that terror and social division were a normal part of modern middle-class life—not extreme terror, just normal terror (except that for some people it is extreme, depending on circumstances and temperament). But this terror and this division weren’t recognized as being validly terrifying or divisive—you know, in comparison to real terror and conflict—so in effect they were driven underground or considered inexplicable and childish when they appeared. Driven underground, they were an aesthetic gold mine for kids wanting to wave their inexplicable self-destruction and anger in people’s faces. Self-destruction and anger felt deep, because they were buried deep.
I still like the thesis, simplistic though it is, but for my purposes today the crucial word is “normal,” not “terror.” Terror was normal and the punk impulse was normal, but punks were willing to buy into the lie that they weren’t normal, and this helped everything to go stupid. In my introduction I wrote (being rather preachy in tone), “I want my readers to understand their interconnectedness. If you are outside the music, reading this book perhaps out of curiosity, nonetheless you are in the music.
You are part of its context. You might wish to—or I might wish you to—stop being passive or naively malignant members of this context.” (In regard to what’s on my mind today, I need to recognize my complicity in the social contexts that produce mystery stories that feature cats. I might wish to stop being a passive or naively malignant member of such contexts.)
I said that while one could make half-true generalizations about where in society a punk was likely to come from (e.g., more likely to have parents who were middle-class professionals, less likely to be black or Hispanic), the social pattern that interested me was not one of people coming from certain social groups but rather of society breaking into groups, punk being one of such groups. So people choose to separate into subcultures, choose not to understand one another, choose to be confused and alienated in each other’s presence. “It is a social achievement that parents can’t understand their kids’ slang or that one child will become a punk and another a Mormon and a third will go into interior design (and discos and cocaine) and none will have much to say to the others. Each incomprehensibility is a kind of vengeance.”
Later on: “Someone could make himself incomprehensible in an attempt to be understood. Like he’s saying, ‘Look, I’m different from what you thought. You thought you knew me, but you did not. You must look again.’ But this does not guarantee that the other person will really look or that the first person will really want to be seen. (It does not guarantee that he will ever really want to be seen as anything but different and incomprehensible.)”
The insight I was feeling my way toward was that punk and any kind of “hip and edgy” subculture feeds off of the culture at large. Bohemia’s claim to hipness is that it has stepped beyond the common knowledge and is willing to experiment with the new and the different, and also that it’s got a critical perspective on the broader culture. But the more it becomes a subculture itself, it loses its gut feeling for what it’s like not to be part of that subculture. What claims to be critical insight becomes habit, and then ignorance, “our” way of viewing the world. So other people’s dances, so to speak, aren’t just interesting for their curiosity value, but are smarter than ours, some of them, or at least aren’t dumb in the same way, aren’t telling the same lies, are better dances.
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