Censorship Now!! by Ian F. Svenonius

Author:Ian F. Svenonius
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2015-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

9

The Artist, Alienation, and Immortality

I. ALIENATION

THE DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC of the rock ’n’ roll group is not electrification of instruments or the colonization of outsider music. Nor is it a rebel pose, outrageous hairstyle, or daring footwear. The characteristic of the rock ’n’ roll group which sets it apart from other art producers—the reason it is the most modern of all art producers—is that the group’s stature has little relation to what it produces.

The group, after all, is not its records, its songs, or its concerts. The group hovers above what it produces; the group is just the group, and the promise of its particular proposal. People may love a group despite their terrible records, their boring concerts, their lack of charisma, etc. The group likewise treats its records coolly and its concerts as ephemera; none of them really are the group.

The group always maintains that it is better than the things it does, which are the unfortunate products of particular circumstances. These are always either a case of an idiot producer, incompetent sound person, bad crowd, or a momentary lapse; “we were sick” / “I was drunk,” et cetera.

Conversely, other artists’ stature and identity are determined by the work that they produce. Matisse, Jane Austen, Godard, and Beethoven weren’t beloved or renowned because of some ineffable quantity which was bestowed upon them. It was their oeuvre or “body of work” which, at least initially, heralded their notoriety. But the rock ’n’ roll group is different; as opposed to other art makers, what the group “does” is separate from what the group “is.”

This situation is ironic because, at a glance, a group appears to reconcile the alienation at the heart of the modern postindustrial malaise, whereby people are divorced from the fruit of their labor, the source of the things they consume, and their community and political process.

The group, briefly surveyed, seems to represent a successful defiance of such conditions by ensuring the participants a direct role in their destiny and the art which they produce. But a closer look reveals that the group, once named, takes on a life outside of its creations.

Indeed, rock stars from the beginning express ambivalence about the groups they construct, feeling outside of them, bullied by them, sick of them, imprisoned by them. Even when they slay the group-beast with a suicidal “breakup,” it still guides them, haunts them, derides them from the grave, oftentimes gaining otherworldly power and stature in the afterlife.

The songwriter in the group quickly finds that no song or record can serve as a corrective to what the group is in the minds of its onlookers, and that he or she, a participant in the group, may have been a spectator—or the host-body to a parasite—all along.

Groups like Black Flag, the Runaways, the Grateful Dead, the Germs, P.I.L., Crass, the Shaggs, Slayer, Lynyrd Skynrd, Einstürzende Neubauten, Minor Threat, LiLiPUT, Ultramagnetic MCs, Wu-Tang Clan, Pussy Galore, Death in June, and Throbbing Gristle all reveal how groups live outside of their “output”; they

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