The Psychic Soviet by Ian F. Svenonius

Author:Ian F. Svenonius
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2020-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

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10

ROCK 'N' ROLL AS REAL ESTATE

We're a garage band.

the clash

In the early years of the twenty-first century, Alan Greenspan, in his job as steward of the Fed, set radically low interest rates on real estate. This served to fuel manic speculation of housing, and propped up the depressed wartime economy with a building-and-selling boom. The subsequent inflation of property transformed cities across America and displaced millions of poor people.

Greenspan can, therefore, be considered the godfather and midwife to the two paradigmatic indie-music movements of the early twenty-first century: "electro-clash" and its successor, the semiacoustic/psychedelic "folk" revival, both movements based on the new condition—absence of space.

While the two forms are distinct and even aesthetically in opposition to one another, their common aversion to acoustic drums reveals their shared genealogy: they are the fraternal twins of Alan Greenspan.

As popular focus has shifted largely from traditional-style rock "groups" to the new streamlined "folk" or acoustic acts and the one- or two-person computer-programmed "electro" aggregates, we see the old quartet or five-piece splintered, each shard taking a new name in a Balkanized variety of autonomous bodies.

Both the electronic and neo-folk variety are wed not only by a reduction in numbers of the performers (resulting in a larger number of total "groups"), but also principally—and most importantly—by the abandonment of the acoustic drum kit.

Rid of this instrument, with its enormous volume and its attendant need for a PA, guitar amp, and bass amp to match its outsize sound, both formats can be composed, on headphones and at bedside, civilly and in the quietude of high-density living quarters.

This shift has been presented in music journalism as the result of a new awareness of old traditions, but it has really been determined by market forces. The groups now, like the expansive rock groups of the suburban era, are a reaction to, and an expression of, the real estate market and the economy as a whole.

These music trends are a response to a lack of insulated space. Both of these forms advertise the dearth of space, a new kind of living arrangement for most Americans, a poverty which they seek to rehabilitate.

This change was predicated by the abandonment of the suburbs by their traditional bourgeois inhabitants who have now occupied and settled once-abandoned cities. The "folks" and "electros" accommodate the city's new, thoroughly mediocre inhabitants who have their concerns about noise and excitement, having recently transplanted from the controlled environs of the suburbs. The electro-folk acts are typically singular or small, can practice anywhere, and therefore do away with the need for the soundproofed practice space, a hot commodity in any "gentrified" city.

This stylistic transformation, besides exposing electro-clash's debt to Mr. Greenspan, reveals that the rock 'n' roll group has always been an expression of expansion and settlement, linked forever to property and real estate. "Punk rock," for example, began in NYC during a famous economic blight when space was readily available in the form of "lofts." It can be thought of as a form of homesteading or

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