Crisis Music
There is something violently schizophrenic in our culture. It is remarkable that, as entire sections of the globe are torn into vicious anarchy, as Antarctica cracks and melts, and as the most powerful nation in history has become the latest on a long list of countries led by right-wing authoritarians, the notion of “don’t worry, be happy” can still have any purchase.
And yet, here we are. Self-help books urge us to think ourselves happy. Advertisements almost universally promote a comfortable, middle class lifestyle as both the ideal and perfectly attainable to those willing to accept the parameters of consumption. Movies and television shows advance neat story arcs that allow for no dangling ambiguity to keep us awake at night. Human suffering, when acknowledged, is done so in the framework of charity, yet another human problem that can be bought away and metabolized into a shiny happiness.
A few days after hearing Mark Fisher had died (and the day before Trump was inaugurated as president) I re-read an article he wrote in early 2016 on the reissue of the Pop Group’s How Much Longer Will We Tolerate Mass Murder? Fisher’s description of the politics embedded in this magnificent piece of industrial punk-funk is prescient:
While dominant ideology sought to naturalise and neutralise drudgery, atrocities and exploitation, The Pop Group aimed to do the opposite: to bring suffering and systemic violence to the screaming forefront of consciousness. This wasn’t simply a matter of reciting facts, but of emotional engineering, a jolting out of the ideological trance that accepts injustice as inevitable. Mark Stewart’s vocals perform this maladjustment, this refusal to treat the excesses of global capitalism as anything but insane.
All of which is to say that modern music has been in for some hard lessons in recent years, and it may be in for even more still. It must learn how to resist again. And if it isn’t to be sucked into the assembly line of re-Neducation that our culture thrives on, it must learn how to resist as music.
What makes Fisher’s description of How Much Longer… so prescient is its stark comparison with the literal manufacture of ideology. “[T]he album is best seen,” he writes, “as part of a struggle against the new ‘common sense’ that capital was seeking to impose in the early 1980s using techniques of reality- and libidinal-engineering (PR, branding and advertising).”
These techniques weren’t exactly new at the time, but it had only been the economic boom in the wake of World War II that had made them and an attendant consumerism ubiquitous in the “developed world.” By the time that boom ended and the Reagan-Thatcher years had dawned, ideological consent could be produced more easily than ever.
How Much Longer, along with so many other punk, post-punk, reggae and hip-hop albums coming out of the US and the UK at the time, were seen by their makers and their audiences as being in full-spectrum opposition to this kind of sly manipulation. And with the lines between “mainstream” and “underground” culture both more defined and more permeable, it was possible for these sounds to reach a large number of ears without their meaning being diluted.
This was an era in popular music roughly bookended by the arrival of Rock Against Racism on one end and the campaigns against censorship that characterized the late 80’s and early 90’s on the other. Official explanations for the latter often hinged on rhetoric about sexually explicit lyrics or drug use. But the reality ran far deeper. The reality was that entire populations were subject to a malicious neglect, that the world was in a bad state and that governments were keen on its bounce back coming on the backs of the poor, who would then be taught to love it. Some artists weren’t having it, and certain pearl-clutchers felt threatened by that.
A few embodiments of this dynamic in music: Gang of Four’s deconstructions of modernity’s prison. The mania of early Fishbone. Public Enemy’s declarations that Armaggedon had “been in effect.” Afrika Bambaataa and PiL-era John Lydon’s “World Destruction.” The distinctly feminist refusal of the Slits, the Au Pairs and Delta 5 to let anyone interfere in their crisis. Peter Tosh at his most militant. Lee “Scratch” Perry at his most millenarian. The Clash between London Calling and Combat Rock. The situationized rock and roll nihilism of the Manic Street Preachers up through The Holy Bible. Gangster rap’s prediction of the LA riots. The unrelenting wail of Poly Styrene. The concerts of Refuse & Resist! in front of Keith Haring’s iconic artwork. Devo’s skewering of the “post-nuclear” Reaganite lifestyle that were so well acted they put irony to shame. The concrete thump of the Beatnigs, TACK>>HEAD, Meat Beat Manifesto and other industrial hip-hop acts. British ravers taking Thatcher head-on.
These weren’t just bland examples of “artists speaking out.” They were, in essence, exercises in critical dys/utopia. All in one way or another honed in on the neglected corners of existence that the evangelical lights of Reaganism left deliberately unilluminated, using the temporal disjointedness to construct something in which humans’ thoughts were their own again, even if the symbolism of the act was limited.
This is different than what we might blandly refer to as “protest music,” the use of song to decry this or that specific issue. There were plenty of those too, including many from the artists above. But even those who focused on the single issue did so in a way that used it as a kind of synecdoche, one cog of many on a carriage careening off a cliff. In both content and form, these songs sought to expose the deep-seated malfunction at society’s core. They sounded like the madness that was gripping daily life underneath its saccharine shell, centering the decay while defiantly refusing to take the blame for it.
We need this kind of music; music that is ill at home with the sanitized, that refuses to normalize full-spectrum threats. That swallows and regurgitates the rhythm of daily horror without digesting and metabolizing it first. A hopeful shade of this can be found in the artists who publicly declined invites to play at the inauguration of Donald Trump. But with some of his biggest fans on the warpath against what they refer to as “degenerate art,” and when milquetoast liberalism has diverted the meaning of “resistance” into bland recitations of the word “Russia” over and over, it won’t be enough.
What “enough” might look like on a wide scale in our own culture is difficult to tell. The culture industry is apparently more diffuse and unwieldy than ever, wormed even further into the crevices and cracks of our lives through online playlists, tailored advertising, Snapchats and YouTube videos. But this dispersal is merely a cover for an even greater level of consolidation and centralization. What appears at first to be a greater democratization of info is, as others have noted, an increase in cultural coercion.
Naturally, there have been artists in more recent years who have tapped this vein in irreverently savvy ways, undermining the false sense of social control with their music: MIA, clipping., BLXPLTN, Run the Jewels, Moor Mother. The question is how these threads can be stitched together into newly coherent flags of resistance. How the alarm might be sounded the loudest and most dissonant way possible.
