Apotheosis Of The Electric Age

Back When We Had an Appetite for Destruction

James Poulos of the Claremont Institute and Editor of the online journal American Mind has pursued the work of Marshall McLuhan regarding the effects of our Electric Age. Our Electric Age is unable to come to grips with the onset of the Digital Age because digital bots don’t follow the “dreams of the imagineer’s imagination,” but instead possess “perfect memory,” something that pushes back against the dreamers and their attempt to direct our collective consciousness.

According to this theory and to Poulos himself, what we see happening in the world around us, the elite attempt to hijack the election, the universal symbolic language of “Build Back Better”, the attempts by the WEF to perform a “great reset” and the woke spiritualism pervading our existing institutions is a byproduct of the digital bots’ existential threat to the dreamers and their ability to dream.

Let’s not forget that the quintessential “dreamer,” former President Barack Obama, creator of the Dreamers and author of Dreams of My Father declared recently in a 60 Minutes interview that, “The Internet poses the single greatest threat to our American Democracy.” This interview auspiciously taking place during a disputed presidential election while promoting his 3rd autobiography, a slender 760 page homage to the world’s dreamiest dreamer and the epitome of a dying age. Here’s the downloadable pdf.

Because while the electric age once contained a dream of Hope and Change based on Imagining a world free of “religion, death, murder, conflict, strife, greed, hunger, heaven, hell” (one wonders if Lennon himself is currently experiencing that condition trapped this side of the river Styx or in Sheol, forever waiting, never fulfilled), the digital age has no room for such frivolity. The digital bots remember everything. Every slight, every hurt, every pain. Every voter discrepancy. Every Tweet. Even the most minute CIA sponsored program is encoded forever.

We are entering the age of endless memory where everything hidden in DMs will be brought to light and all your embarrassing searches are saved in a Google Server somewhere in the depths of Mordo…er Palo Alto.

In that spirit, let’s remember back to a simpler time. When rock stars were rock stars and women showed up willing to do whatever they could to get backstage. Where the future never happened and the past didn’t matter. The pinnacle of the rock and roll ethos expressed by shrugging off conventional norms while simultaneously refusing to comply with sustainable sensibilities. It’s the greatest expression of American “Electric Seduction”. An album produced at the end of the 80’s and a band whose short-lived career burned itself out like a roadside flare. A last gasp before the overwhelming power of the digital encapsulated all things under its terrible, and yet terribly just grip.

Guns and Roses’ “Appetite For Destruction” is the peak of our electric age. The album cover exhibits an almost Puritanical Christian element with the skulls and the cross centering the imagery. Like something out of a Tim Burton movie (the celebrated dreamer of Hollywood), the skulls possess, not the borg-like sameness of the human skeleton, but instead unique characteristics: hair, hats, sunglasses, kerchiefs. One even wears a gold collar. This consumptive declaration of unique personhood echoes the album’s title. What else is an appetite for destruction other than ethos of our era? We feed and feed but are never satisfied. Like some character from a Monty Python sketch — “Just one more mint” — we beg, captive in our own bodies, our own minds, our own homes.

And if you want to see the electric age bots’ consumptive desire on full display, open that album cover and take in the sight.

Could such a thing even be published today in our age of #MeToo feminism? The image of an Electric Age bot finishing his “Weinstein-like” impression of male-female interpersonal relationships is as taboo as it gets in the infancy of our digital age. And this image pales in comparison to Axl Rose’s desired interior art: “In an interview with That Metal Show in 2011, Rose stated his original idea for the cover art was to be the photo of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding, which was on the cover of Time magazine in 1986, but Geffen refused it saying it was ‘in bad taste’.”

Rose, that electric symbol of life lived fully in the moment, wanted to put one of the greatest failures of our electric age on full display. A mass produced image, shown in every American schoolroom ending in disaster, a harbinger of 30 years of despoilment of the American people. Just drive down to Flint, Michigan and see the Challenger tragedy happening slowly, in real time.

All this Electric vitalism on full display and we haven’t even gotten to the music. In this case, it’s “Rocket Queen”, the final song, that most fully exhibits Electric’s volatility and chaotically seductive nature. At issue is the #MeToo cancel culture chorus,

Here I am
And you’re a rocket queen
I might be a little young but honey I ain’t naive
Here I am and you’re a rocket queen, oh yeah
I might be too much
But honey you’re a bit obscene

A younger than legal man propositioning an older woman. He’s ejaculating into the fertile void, as it is. This is not the procreative act, this is the act of the moment. Combined with the vocal distortions, the chopped chords and the pounding beat 1, 2, 1–2–3, the recording contains what’s rumored to be a woman’s la petite mort, supposedly in the throes of ecstasy with Mr. Rose himself. Imagine a band attempting this today. Electric cares nothing about the future. Knows nothing of the past.

Imagine yourself in 1988, a teenager living in the Inland Empire or the San Gabriel Valley and you turn on 100.3 Pirate Radio only to hear what initially sounds like the anthem rock of the hair bands turn into the primeval banshee wail of “Welcome to the Jungle.” It’s a pure cocaine rush of adrenaline, but with the acknowledgement that in all broken systems with no thought for the future, “It gets worse here everyday.” In order to survive, one must “Live like an animal.”

“Mr. Brownstone” and “Nightrain” echo that sentiment exactly with lines like, “At first it was a little but a little wouldn’t do it so the little got more and more!” or “I’m on a Night-Train ready to crash and burn, I never learn.” The destructive (mostly self-destructive) nature of electric seduction with regard only for the moment, but cursed with the knowledge that such a lifestyle cannot end in good.

From “Paradise City” (where the “grass is green and the girls are pretty”) to “Sweet Child O’ Mine” (“Where do we go, where do we go now?”) — as the album moves through these classics, the sense grows, at least now in hindsight, of moving from a paradisal electric age America to embracing the coming digital reality. An era of carefree sex, carefree drug use, of things hidden in the dark, is ending. AIDS, social media, phones that are really movie cameras that you carry with you, pornography and its hi-def stream of all the dark secrets of the bedroom.

Just watch the home video for “It’s So Easy” where the band explains that they are spending $150,000 for a video that “can’t be shown on MTV.” The result is a display of the debauched hedonism that was the 80’s LA rock scene. The decadence fails to impress now. Today, someone with an iPhone would record it on Instagram Live after which it would be shouted down for its misogyny even while it is ignored by the millions of hardcore porn users for whom it is too tame.

Even the punk outlaw theme song “Out ta Get Me,” with it’s chorus and descending guitar riff fails to take account of a reality where all of us are watched, all of us are followed, where all our most private thoughts and searches are known, not only by God, but also by Google and their CIA startup money:

They’re out ta get me
They won’t catch me
I’m fucking innocent
They won’t break me

There is nothing in current popular music that is comparable. The closest thing we have to the “live in the moment” ethos is found in underground music acts like the “$uicide Boy$” and even they have gotten themselves clean.

And while it may be a blessing that digital’s perfect memory forces us to live more cautiously, more thoughtfully, there is a price to be paid. As electric energy dissipates and is replaced by perfect digital memory, the vitalism dies as well. Sedentary, cautious, risk-averse, we see these values steadily increasing and on full display during this pandemic. Mask wearing, stay at-home orders, Zoom school, shutdowns of playgrounds, parks, restaurants — these are hallmarks of digital’s risk averse nature, the opposite of the profligacy electric brought. You can see the same energy in our political conflicts, the risk averse vs. the swaggering crowds. As we stare into the unknown digital future, for who but God himself knows what blessings and horrors the digital age brings, it’s nice to look back and take solace in a group whose meteoric rise resulted in the electric age apotheosis: Appetite For Destruction.