Lies They Tell Our Children by Anti-Flag. A polemic.
Why did the point in punk just disappear?
I didn’t want to write anything about this album at first. Any attention for this album is one attention too many. In the end, however, I let myself be persuaded to do so, because there is a certain thematic proximity to my other reflections. Also, several friends have asked me what I think of this album. I hereby answer that question. Mainly because thematically, I often dealt with neoliberalism and capitalist ideology. But Anti-Flag show on this album once again how much these are buzzwords that can even keep up with the ubiquitous hyper-politics. The following will be a polemic.
Those who have read my previous reviews will now wonder why I don’t like this album, after all it touches on similar topics as e.g., Disarstar — Rolex für Alle, which surprisingly made it into my Top 10 of 2022. But there are so many differences that the comparison already makes me so angry that the keys of my keyboard are threatening to break under my fingers as I write these words. Anti-Flag have managed to take what was supposed to be against the system and adapt it to the system to such an extent that it actually speaks for the system. A cynic might even say it affirms. Adorno would have said that it is already reified as passable from the outset.
Thus, the song MODERN META MEDICINE says: “We want it all and nothing else”. So everyone wants everything, including Anti-Flag. So what happens here is a banal criticism, which itself only comes back to the fact that this album exists at the same time as a product, which is just so marketed and just to satisfy the left-wing market. A bit like sugar-free products for diabetics, there are now also products for pseudo-Marxists, and in this case we are certainly dealing with one of the worst kinds. But the problem doesn’t just remain on the content level, no, as if that weren’t enough, it also has to fail on the form level. But is that really a miracle? Do we really have to ask ourselves why all songs sound like Nickelback songs, only with a seemingly Marxist and critical lyric? Or isn’t that even the most efficient proof of my annoyance?
The same song goes on to say, “Create desires and trade them publicly”. What is this analysis supposed to tell us? I can’t counter it with anything, except that it’s not advertising or the media that builds our desires, but instead, they tell us how we should desire to fulfill our desires (e.g., by consumption). But this difference is essential, because desire itself constitutes our identity in the first place. Isn’t it true that nowadays we are all cynical enough and know about the deception of ideology, and are still willing to swallow this pill? In other words, what Anti-Flag wants to sell here as a subversive act of an artist, is in fact simply a confirmation of our own skepticism, which ultimately takes away our guilty conscience — this is satisfied when we outsource the activist act to the simple hearing of music — and lets us consume in peace. What Anti-Flag criticizes is, in truth, exactly what they themselves help to support.
I’ll tell you who’s your enemy and who to trust
If you don’t like it, I don’t really give a fuck
(IMPERIALISM Lyrics)
It is therefore not surprising that Anti-Flag, in the above quote, follows exactly the same maxim as today’s conspiracy theorists or the very politicians they themselves criticize. They all say they are not the enemy, it’s the others. The “others” are an empty signifier, a void that can be filled with anything except themselves. And this brings us back to Adorno and Horkheimer, who observe something similar in the culture industry. Non-identity with oneself is a sacrifice that seems to be gladly made. Yet a genuine, productive critique of our world would be so important and urgent. But we wait in vain and are instead appeased with punk songs that are so close to radio and the culture industry, that the word punk is almost an insult at this point.
What makes me most angry about this album is not the formal misunderstandings of Marxism. Nor the arrogance with which Anti-Flag is simplifying things, as if they don’t trust us to understand the whole thing, but at the same time they are saying that they have understood it and that they now have sovereignty over who may understand it and who may not. No, it is the terrible banality of the album’s lyrics that makes me so angry. The difference to Disarstar and other left-wing musicians is precisely that they have understood that content always includes its form. It is not enough just to say “the right thing”, it must, in order to be true art, also be worked up artistically. It has to open us the possibility to interpret, but Anti-Flag exactly does not do that. Everything is obvious. Each line of text screams at us, like a military sergeant, about what it is actually trying to tell us. And we stopped hearing a long time ago, and who can blame us?
No one.
“You’re still stalking around so stiffly,
So straight as a die,
As if they had swallowed the stick,
With which you were once beaten.”
(Heinrich Heine, Deutschland ein Wintermärchen (1844), translated by the author)
This is political art. An artistic practice that I fear has forfeited its possibility.
