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While lecturing on Tristan Garcia's chapter on history today I couldn't help but remember  this essay by Adam Curtis on music and youth rejection in the Soviet Union.

Curtis explores the psychic fallout of the widespread failure of communism to deliver on the very promises that legitimated it (e.g. we keep breaking all these eggs and nobody I know is ever going to get that omelet).  He explores how the widespread recognition of civilizational hypocrisy lead to despair and a general collapse of belief in anything. His main thesis is that the same thing is happening in neo-liberal regimes now.

This seems plausible to me, both in the European Union and the United States. Consider the latter. With their constitutionally affirmed right to buy and sell politicians, Shelden Adelson and the brothers Koch are very close to becoming nothing less than our version of late Soviet era gerontocracy (Brezhnev/Andropov/Chernenko, etc.). To see what happens when American politicians are commodities, look at West Virginia. This kind of thing is going to get much worse.

The real problem is that these people (successful Soviet apparatchiks and our 1%ers) are very good at gaming the system so that they land on top. But, for various reasons, the system is not very good at putting people on top who will be very good at running things. And at some point the population starts to see through the relentless propaganda about how great everything is becoming.* And then, according to Curtis, rock and roll ceases being rock and roll. It becomes phony.

For rock to be rock, there must be an audience base that believes in the possibility of liberation. Once that is gone, rock isn't really possible. And when rock stops being rock, its parents (blues and country) get a divorce. And, like a lot of children of divorce, rock gets angry and starts acting out. It becomes punk.

Above is Kommunizm's "Stop the Rolling Stones." It's a hilarious song in part because the singer commits so fully to its absurd premise. He really does hate rock and roll now, but he realizes the impotence of his hatred and that makes him all the more despairing. First, nothing he will ever do could possibly stop the Rolling Stones. Second, even if he could it wouldn't change anything. His very opposition is already co-opted.

And so all he can do is try to make something beautiful and non-hypocritical** out of this situation. It's genuinely hilarious the way he focuses all of his despair on getting Mr. Jagger to just shut up and stop dancing around all over the stage. A lot of punk is funny precisely because the ability to make fun of oneself is one of the few ways genuine authenticity can be approached (I don't know if Adorno got this).

Curtis has a video from Letov's other great band Grob for the song "Everything is Going According to Plan" and then part of a wonderful punk/folk song by Yanka Dyagileva's that includes the lyric "the television is hanging from the ceiling, and no one knows how fucking low I'm feeling." Here's another song by Dyagileva, at right.*** Russian punk was an amazing thing.

Punk is great art, but the nihilism leads to Putinism. Again, consider the United States. We had two punk eras, punk proper and grunge. Analogous  to Russian punk and Putinism, punk proper led to Thatcher/Reagan and grunge to Bush the younger.

Our current economic recovery is almost entirely going to the 1% even as the poorest 93% get poorer and life expectancy decreases for the first time in the history of the United States (here and here). And our politicians continue to demean us with pangyrics of American exceptionalism as the late night talk show hosts continue to interview vapid plastic surgery disasters. This can't be going anywhere good.  

[Notes:

*If I was Zizek, I would at this point begin an entertaining rant about the new Lego movie and the way the song "Everything is Awesome" is ironically appropriated in three different ways corresponding to the Schellingian (but not Hegelian as he has traditionally been interpreted) notion of dialectic. But I'm not Zizek. That's O.K. I'm happy to be me.

**Some very preliminary meditations on hypocrisy here. Yesterday a philosopher sent me a dynamite e-mail about Kierkegaard, hypocrisy, and Robert Brandom in response to that and I"m trying to convince her/him to do a guest post. The above was occassioned both by teaching the Garcia and by thinking about whether or not hypocrisy is self-defeating if it gets too widespread. This kind of self-defeat isn't just part of a thought-experiment when using Kant's ethics like a machine to tell you what to do. It actually happens in pathological social institutions.

***Aline Simone did a wonderful cover album of Dyagileva's songs that I'll be blogging about some time in the next vew weeks. And God bless Simone for not putting a bunch of commercials in her youtube videos. At right is one of my favorite songs by her, "My Love is a Mountain." As long as we can get stuff like this without commercials**** rock has not died.

****Nearly every video by Red Aunts has commercials, as do many of the videos for Dyagileva's songs! Do you see now why the Rolling Stones must be stopped? Jesus wept.]

1. [Punkrockmonday #1] The White Stripes – Jack the Ripper (orig. Screaming Lord Sutch), Black Math, and the Big Three Killed My Baby
   
2. [Punkrockmonday #2] Roy Cook – Saint Paul Cathedral, Minneapolis Capitol Building, Aayla Secura Mosaic, and Firefly Class Spaceship
3. [Punkrockmonday #3] El Général- Rais Le Bled (President, Your Country)
4. [Punkrockmonday #4] Charlie Patton -High Water Everywhere, Part 2
5. [Punkrockmonday #5] Henry Rollins- What Am I Doing Here; Willie Nelson- Me and Paul; Rainbow Connection (orig. Kermit the Frog)
6. [Punkrockmonday #6] Philip Larkin – Church Going
7. [Punkrockmonday #7] David Bowie – Time
8. [Punkrockmonday #8] P.J. Harvey – When Under Ether; White Chalk; Broken Harp
9. [Punkrockmonday #9] Allison Kraus and Robert Plant – When the Levee Breaks (orig. Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie)
10. [Punkrockmonday #10] Doog – Famous Blue Raincoat (orig. Leonard Cohen); sElf – Back in Black (orig. AC/DC); Johnny Cash- Down There By the Train (orig. Tom Waits)
11. [Punkrockmonday #11] John Lee Hooker – Hobo Blues; Weird Al Yankovic – My Sharona; Edgar Cruz – Bohemian Rhapsody
12. [punkrockmonday #12] Pixar Studios – Cars 2; The Bang Bang – Sitting in a Car; Angry Samoans – Hot Cars; Black Flag – Drinking and Driving; Gary Numan – Cars; Queen – Bicycle Race
13. [punkrockmonday #13] Betty Bowers – Betty Bowers Explains Traditional Marriage to Everyone Else
14. [punkrockmonday #14] Sesame Street – Sure Shot (orig. Beastie Boys)
15. [punkrockmonday #15] Neil Degrasse Tyson – Stupid Design
16. [punkrockmonday # 16] C.M. Punk – run up to Money in the Bank victory
17. [punkrockmonday #17] Dead Kennedys – Riot
18. [punkrockmonday # 18] Cookie Monster – God's Away on Business (orig. Tom Waits)
19. [punkrockmonday # 19] The Legendary K.O.- George Bush Don’t Like Black People
20. [punkrockmonday #20] Mance Lipscomb- Ella Speed
21. [punkrockmonday #21] Iggy Pop – Lust for Life; Iggy Pop – The Passenger; Iggy Pop – I'm Bored; Iggy Pop (orig. The Stooges)- I Wanna Be Your Dog; Iggy and the Stooges – Search and Destroy
22. [punkrockmonday #22] Iris Dement – Easy's Gettin' Harder Every Day
23. [punkrockmonday #23] Louis C.K. – Are You a Lizard?; U2 – Maggie's Farm; Pink Floyd – The Post War Dream; Morrissey – Maggie on the Guillotine; Newtown Neurotics – Kick out the Tories
24. [punkrockmonday #24] The Maria Bamford Show 01 – Dropout; The Maria Bamford Show 02 – Maria Gets a Job
25. [punkrockmonday #25] Blind Willie Johnson
26. [punkrockmonday #26] Some songs about Death
27. [punkrockmonday #27] Gillian Welch – Look at Miss Ohio; Iris Dement – Easy's Gettin' Harder Every Day; Fiona Apple – Oh Sailor
28. [punkrockmonday #28] Nirvana/Terry Jacks/Jacques Brell, and Beck/Them/Bob Dylan