As far as cultural production in the United States is concerned, we have known very little of art outside of the context of capitalism or mass production. The modern Faust-like bargain of “selling out” is all-to-familiar to us in the US, only insofar as we know nothing else. The strange paradox of popular music is that it must employ the masters’ machinery in order to be re-sold and available to the masses. Much like the somber admission of defeat in the face of capitalist production, what Mark Fisher refers to as “capitalist realism,” modern music fans have accepted that no music is too sacred to be consumed by the hydra that dons the masks of the beings it consumes.

It is not an original observation that every social, cultural, or artistic movement is propelled by the mistakes of or as a reaction to the popular currents before it. What I believe made those around my age (an ilk composed of those currently in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties) so nihilistic about independent music was that almost everything felt like a revival, a tribute; nothing felt entirely ours unless it somehow wore the recognizable costumes of decades prior. That nihilism is bedfellows with our doubt and cynicism. Everything has been done before, everything has been co-opted, what’s the use of loving the woman on the billboard?

It is difficult to grow up with stores like Hot Topic or big-budget music festivals as a norm and not be at least a little disillusioned with the possibility of a DIY music movement. We knew very little of a time before every conceivable subculture could be packaged and re-sold like a collection of decades-themed Barbie dolls. It was easy for us to convince ourselves that rock ‘n’ roll was dead because we had never lived to see a time when it breathed and flourished with the same verve that we presumed it did in the past. We only knew the different waves of rock ‘n’ roll from MTV re-runs, video archives, books, films, etc. This past was a distant dream world that we escaped to for comfort only because we knew nothing of the banalities and horrors from the past that we escaped to.

I have always believed in music. I have faith in music that is Evangelical and all-encompassing. This is why, a few months ago, I was shaken to my core when I read the liner notes for the MC5’s debut album Kick Out The Jams. Poet and activist John Sinclair wrote the following words to accompany the album. I have copied them here in all their glory:

The MC5 is a whole thing. There is no way to get at the music without taking in the whole context of the music too- there is no separation. We say the MC5 is the solution to the problem of separation, because they are so together. The MC5 is totally committed to the revolution, as the revolution is totally committed to driving people out of their separate shells and into each other’s arms. 

I’m talking about unity, brothers and sisters, because we have to get it together. We are the solution to the problem, if we will just be that. If we can feel it, LeRoi Jones said, “feeling predicts intelligence.” The MC5 will make you feel it, or leave the room. The MC5 will drive you crazy out of your head and into your body. The MC5 is rock n roll. Rock and roll is the music of our bodies, of our whole lives-the resensifier, Rob Tyner calls it. We have to come together, people, “build to a gathering,” or else. Or else you are dead, and gone.

The MC5 will bring you back to your senses from wherever you have been taken to hide. They are bad. Their whole lives are totally given to this music. They are a whole thing. They are a working model of the new paleocybernetic culture in action. There is no separation. They live together to work together, walk down the street and through the world together. There is no separation. Just as their music will bring you together like that, if you hear it. If you will live it. And we will make sure you hear it, because we know you need it s bad as we do. We have to have it.

The music is the source and effect of our spirit flesh. The MC5 is the source and effect of the music, just as you are. Just as I am. Just to hear the music and have it be our selves, is what we want. What we need. We are a lonely desperate people, pulled apart by the killer forces of capitalism and competition and we need music to hold us together. Separation is doom. We are free men, and we demand a free music, a free high energy source that will drive us wild into the streets of America yelling and screaming and tearing down everything that would keep people slaves. 

The MC5 is that force. The MC5 is the revolution, in all its applications. There is no separation. Everything is everything. There is no fear. The music will make you strong, as it is strong, and there is no way it can be stopped now. All power to the people! The MC5 is here now for you to hear and see and feel now! Give it up-come together-get down, brothers and sisters, it’s time to testify, and what you have here in your hands is a living testimonial to the absolute power and strength of these men. Go wild! The World is yours! Take it now, and the one with it! Kick out the jams, motherfucker! And stay alive with the MC5!

• John Sinclair

John Sinclair, Minister of Information. White Panthers

Friday December 13th 1968, in the first year of Zenta

And, in doubt of any type of true revolution sprung from music, I was resensified. John Sinclair presents music as a great liberator. But, more than freedom and liberation comes a sense of community, togetherness, unity. Sinclair recognizes the way that capital creates atomized subjects, separated in lonely cells, using music to isolate rather than to ignite a fire, to start one million quiet revolutions in private rather than to move the course of the ocean’s current. There is no separation. Music is all. Music is the glue, the missing string needed to tie us together. There is no separation between the life that the MC5 carried out and their music. There is no separation between audience and performer, between each individual, between you and me- there is no separation. To create a future means we must connect. Reimagine cultural capital, not as a means of hoarding wealth but as a way to connect with your fellow human. There is no separation.

There is a moment from my past, that I think about quite often when I consider what it means to have music taste, or rather, what taste is as an entire concept.

It was the last semester of my senior year of college. My friends and I were cramped in the side room of a larger Victorian that had been fashioned into a bedroom. We drank beers and talked whil…

Read more

'“It began as a mistake” is one of my favorite opening lines for many reasons. One of which is the line’s unforgiving bluntness. It is succinct and jarring. It is a line that forces the reader to confront an event that must be solved, a moment in time that may or may not have dire consequences. From its thematic implications to its rhetoric intrigue, the narrator has managed to impact their audience in exactly five words.

I lead with this line because it briefly sums up the nature of how I make decisions. While I am strategic in the manner of how I follow through with my ideas, the general conception of a said idea almost always arises out of an impulse or a feeling. My impulsivity, when combined with a destructive state of mind and pure bad faith, has (in the past and present) lead me to dark or life-threatening outcomes. But, with a touch of whimsy, a dash of optimistic curiosity, and healthy self-confidence, I can create something that I can feel…proud of? excited about? has infinite possibilities?

So, here is the beginning of what I hope will be a fruitful endeavor for both me and you (the reader).

This Substack (is that what we call it?) is partly a project of nostalgia, a yearning for a form of internet-based expression that I see very little of today- the personal blog.*

So, to riff on the title of an Alice Cooper album: welcome to my dreamscape.** As far as what this blog is “about,” I am sorry to inform you that I am as unsure as you are. Roughly, it will be a catalog of thoughts on cultural phenomena that interest me: music, fashion, television, film, twitter rhetoric, trends, the internet ect.

I am still figuring out what this whole blog is “about” or whether it should really be “about” anything at all. I only hope that you will join me in this adventure and trust that, if anything else, at least I will extract a few minutes of boredom from your wait at the doctor’s office or airport terminal.

So, give me your hands, if we be friends and ALC***shall restore amends.

Notes:

*I want to use the term “personal’ loosely here for, this blog/project/endeavor is only “personal” in so much as the ideas are more or less emanating from one narrator (me). However, I intend for it to not be entirely personal in that any details of my lived experience are merely jumping off points to talk about everything else but myself. Maybe, in time, there will be more explicitly personal narratives, but, for now, know that you won’t be signing up for a dairy or a chronicle of my daily life.

**I’d honestly be scared of anyone whose dream it is to start a personal blog, but alas, here we are.

*** See what I did there? Shakespeare! Come on, I’ve got to put my literature degrees to some use.