Greil Marcus Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989) [My notes say:] pp. 64-65—on what elsewhere gets placed under the heading The Democratization of Creativity All of this being as it is vis-a-vis "You don't need nothin'. Just play it", it's worth recalling that the Situationists had quite early in their history realized that "We now know that automatic writing is monotonous." It should not have been difficult to see the analogous aspects of unrefined musical technique, especially not since that was well-known by this time in a couple of contemporaneous musical milieux. With THAT context front and center, the explosion of activity recounted so fondly here is much more lucidly viewed as the negative reflection of these people's prior ignorance rather than any kind of blossoming; and if the activity undoubtedly had value for them as individuals to achieve the feeling, if not the state, of agency/empowerment, one imagines that such individual afterglow was easily and precipitously shattered by the eventual realization that so many other musically unrefined individuals could and did do exactly the same things with their newfound agency. I think it is demonstrable that refinement per se was of less interest to the Situationists than was, say, functionalism (e.g. in architecture), ahistoricism/timelessness, etc. Those issues are not directly addressed by the punk aesthetic, as best I can tell from this account; refinement per se is not necessarily related. [from a post-it, 2017] [Now:] The Goodreads reviews of this book are viscious and seem to hit the mark. And so here I come, giving it attention it probably doesn't deserve. Ignoring it would be more appropriate. But indulge me here as you might indulge any unrefined technician searching for a sound. Rereading these pages now, two stickier webs of intrigue leap off the page. First: "A lot of people...didn't think this was music at all, or even rock 'n' roll; a smaller number of people thought it was the most exciting thing they'd ever heard." (64) Great. Just like literally every other new style of music ever. But sure, let's then quote someone who is (1) part of the "smaller number" rather than the bigger one, and (2) famous; then we'll let them yatter on about how great it all was; finally, the coup de grace, to make the implicit explicit, (3) we posit this famous person to be representative of all the little people you'll never meet and need not give a shit about: "what Westerberg said, so said countless other people." Sure. History is necessarily reductive, space is limited, etc. But only a broad and, ultimately, superfluous thesis has been thus reduced; Westerberg's own words, meanwhile, occupy quite a chunk of the page in full granular detail and thereby betray elements of his perspective which cannot possibly qualify him as speaking for "countless" others. In short, there is a sort of currency trading that art and music critics love to transact, whereby a dollar's worth of fame is thought to buy many shilling's worth of representativeness. I have been collecting examples of this; currently they are not organized or even locatable. This one is not the worst of them, but it does exemplify the maneuver quite transparently. I gotta think it ain't very punk! And, for those who do think that "criticism" per se has any reason at all to still exist and to be taken seriously by anyone for any reason, I double dog dare you to do "criticism" without doing this. Just once. Please. Second, "They made a blind bet that someone might be interested in what they sounded like or what they had to say, that they themselves might be interested." (65) Awesome. Regular readers know that I struggle to find the balance between acknowledging my own privilge and making honest sense of things other people say. This "blind bet" remains a crucial aspect of life. Everyone needs to give it a shot! Meaning, for their own sake. But since this book was published, a lot has changed. When everyone takes their shot, the effect on culture is now somewhat like the effect on the power grid when everyone turns on their air conditioners at the same time. The options at that point are few and they are not good ones: barricade oneself in some form of artificially constructed isolation or small community; or fight for negligibly small, temporary pieces of recognition on the present "mass" level. It's fun to place the bet, but it almost never hits anymore, and when the bet doesn't hit, it can literally kill people from the inside and/or lead them to hysterically kill other people on the outside. Cruelly, in the "long tail" paradigm of cultural consumption, recognition has been capped at an upper limit even for the high rollers, rather than being truly "democratized" or expanded to include everyone whose "blind bets" deserve, cosmically at least, a modest pay out. In hindsight, it was possible to valorize the "blind bet" only because so few people had been making it. The more people who bet, the less valorous it becomes; to the point that nowadays I feel a twinge of guilt even about making a few extra off-the-cuff posts, like this one, which are necessary for me to meet my own needs of self-examination and self-education but which cannot contribute much more than noise to the overall condition of humanity and certainly are quite unlikely (though I'll cop to holding out the same hope as you do!) to pay out much of anything, material or otherwise.
COMMENTS
Ernest Becker The Denial of Death (1973) [4] "When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero,...then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. ... But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. ... We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are. "The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. ... [5] ... What the anthropologists call "cultural relativity" is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. ...each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the "high" heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the "low" heroism of the coal miner,... "It doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. ... The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count." (more)