About 21 years ago I put out a fanzine with the happy title Why Music Sucks in which I proclaimed “WE are doing something to kill music.” By “kill” I meant “make more feckless and tepid,” by “music” I didn’t mean “all music everywhere forever and ever” but rather “current American and English rock especially the postpunk variety but also to a lesser extent dance and funk,” and by “we” I really really really did mean people like me—people who constituted a marginal musical intelligentsia that not so marginally had created hard rock and folk rock and progressive rock in the ’60s and glitter and punk in the ’70s and now were putting together a loose network of fanzines and indie distributors to promote not just indie and alternative rock but all sorts of esoteric and little known music and writing and art, including music and writing and art of the past that was no longer popular or had been overlooked in the first place.
Beyond that I didn’t know what I meant, and was trying to figure it out. I soon decided that late ’80s music was better than I’d thought, that it was producing tremendous dance-club music that I hadn’t noticed up ’til then (freestyle, for instance), that hair metal wasn’t all that bad, that I’d missed the boat on synth pop (I’d called it “a new wave pseudointellectual contamination of disco,” which was true, but fortunately the disco pop overwhelmed the pseudoness), and so on. But I also decided that my negative analysis was spot-on in regard to the social environs of indie-alternative, which after all was the music I played and which seemed to be falling dead from my fingers.
What made my analysis interesting was that I thought our good impulses as well as our bad were bringing us down, that what was going wrong was a natural outgrowth of great progenitors like the Stones and the Stooges and the Sex Pistols, and that despite our marginality and our precarious finances we nonetheless had enough cultural clout to pull people into our orbit. The way I put it was, “We can’t get everybody to listen to our music—but we can become arbiters of taste.” So status moved in our direction.
But beyond this I was noticing a more general process: Our impulses were shared by much of the broader culture—which had given birth to us, after all—and so, whether they were influenced by us or not, lots of other musicians and artists were likely to follow a dire trajectory like ours. (So if you’re someone who loves indie-alternative more than anything, you can take heart from my analysis.)
These ideas of mine were strong, but they were very incomplete, and still are. They propelled me into rock criticism where I got at least some attention, but rock critics simply don’t know how to sustain an intellectual conversation, so only a few of them were addressing what I was actually saying. In effect, my ideas were being praised without being noticed. So what you’re going to get from me for a while in Rules Of The Game, on and off, is an argument with myself, my trying to work out how viable the ideas actually are and if there’s a way to make them better. And of course I’m going to try to cajole you guys into the argument.
I’d come up with a metaphor: “Our way of making music and our way of relating to it as an audience destroys music. Music for the Independent-Minded seems more and more like PBS for the Youth.” (At age 33, when I wrote these words, I still identified with “youth,” I guess.) I took for granted, without thinking about it, that my readers would understand “PBS” to be derogatory; also, that they’d know what it was. Since some of the online readers of Rules Of The Game are British or Australian, I’ll explain that PBS is short for Public Broadcasting Service, which describes itself this way: “A trusted community resource, PBS uses the power of noncommercial television, the Internet, and other media to enrich the lives of all Americans through quality programs and education services that inform, inspire, and delight … It features television’s best children’s, cultural, educational, history, nature, news, public affairs, science, and skills programming.” In other words, it’s Good For You.
I only mean “Good For You” half sarcastically, in that PBS takes as its mandate to broaden awareness, which is pretty much what I’m trying to do with this column. But recall back in Rules Of The Game No. 7 I quoted the critic who praised a couple of what he called “white trash” bands as “a throwback to the days when rock-n-roll was actually bad for you, back when it actually had an ‘I’ll kick your ass’ attitude.” Rock ’n’ roll thinks it’s bad in a good way, better and broader than pale middle-class culture, so by calling indie and alternative rock and its whole milieu “PBS” I was saying that rock had narrowed itself down to an acceptable cultural niche, much like PBS. And I was implying that this put rock under the aegis of the Protestant Ethic. But narrowness aside, what’s wrong with that? And was rock ’n’ roll itself so nonnarrow in the first place?
Actually, without realizing it, I was using my PBS metaphor in two somewhat different ways:
(1) A straight-up metaphor: The indie-alternative-fanzine network was playing a role in popular music and youth culture similar to the one that PBS played in the larger culture. Here I didn’t mean just the alternative bands that the real PBS would find acceptable such as Talking Heads or R.E.M.; I meant the whole kit and caboodle, including hardcore punks and skinheads and moshpits and bands like the Mentors who advocated “peaceful rape” (like when the girl is passed out on drugs or alcohol) and Psycodrama, who would bait their audience with anti-Semitic and racist insults (while playing a kind of funk) and had a member, Fifi Poop Butt, who’d sometimes load up with an enema right before a show and let loose onstage, heaving shit at the audience. (My girlfriend Leslie had been a member of Psycodrama, though she’d quit the band well before the racism or anti-Semitism or shit-throwing had become part of the act.) The music-youth “PBS” wasn’t so much a set of bands or particular sounds; any music could be approached and extolled in our “PBS” way, whether it was old rockabilly or free jazz or hair metal.
I wrote: “I mean a certain PBS head (attitude), which can include a cult taste for shitty horror movies, pro wrestling, African pop, comic books, Hasil Adkins. All this pseudofun is a covering for a mindset that’s ruled by PBS. We’re making horror movies safe for PBS. We have met PBS, and it is us. I mean an imaginary PBS of the future, with pro wrestling, splatter films, and leftist analyses of the Capitalist Entertainment Industry (scored by a reformed Gang of Four). All rendered lame in the context of our appreciation.”
(2) A culture-wide process I called “PBSification”: Something vital discovers a sense of its own significance, thereby losing certain psychological protections that had allowed it to fool around and maybe not grasp its own potent nature. I was thinking of ’50s rock ’n’ roll as being pre-PBS and then the British-invasion groups such as the Rolling Stones—my favorite band ever—setting rock on a PBS path; but this can apply to any cultural form, not just rock music. Once the significance is understood, a reverse process takes over, and the performers imagine capital-S Significance for themselves that they don’t in fact have, and sell this imaginary significance, which the audience buys.
So I was saying that significance becomes a mere signifier. “Certain effects of music are reduced to symbols: E.g., a type of music symbolizes rebellion rather than provoking rebellion, symbolizes outrageousness rather than being an outrage, symbolizes fun, symbolizes intelligence, symbolizes protest.” And so the symbol stands in for the event, which doesn’t actually happen.
But to the extent that this is even true, it raises a whole lot of questions. There’s nothing inherent in understanding one’s significance, or in signifiers and symbols, that causes such a freeze. You can say “I’m brushing my teeth” and actually be brushing your teeth, despite the words “brushing” and “teeth” being signifiers. A couple years earlier I’d written, “Now so many musicians conform to the idea of truth that says that truth is raw, ugly, and primitive that this primitiveness is a cliché, it’s a new brand of deodorant, punk-hardcore deodorant; ultimately, it’s nothing. Punk isn’t punk anymore, it’s a bunch of musical/clothing signs that symbolize punk. It’s closer to literature or advertising than to music.” But a lot of the punk I’d loved in the old days—the Sex Pistols, for instance—also had signified punk, had advertised itself as such, had played the music and worn the clothes. And though hardcore punk wasn’t my kind of punk, that didn’t make it nothing, just something else. Even if I’m lying about brushing my teeth, that doesn’t mean I’m not doing anything.
So if the PBS of my metaphor—indie and alternative and its environs—or the real PBS, for that matter, is a dead hand where the symbol stands in for the event, this needs to be explained. It happens in a particular culture at a particular time. If something vital loses its psychological protections when discovering its own significance, well, why did it need the psychological protection of not knowing its significance? What does it need to be protected from? Is there a grave insecurity that causes us to seek fake significance and flee the real thing?
Keep the conversation going at koganbot(at)gmail.com