"Imitate the Immutable Decrees of the Divinity"

By what inconceivable art has a means been found of making men free by making them subject; of using in the service of the State the properties, the persons and even the lives of all its members, without constraining and without consulting them; of confining their will by their own admission; of overcoming their refusal by that consent, and forcing them to punish themselves, when they act against their own will? How can it be that all should obey, yet nobody take upon him to command, and that all should serve, and yet have no masters, but be the more free, as, in apparent subjection, each loses no part of his liberty but what might be hurtful to that of another? These wonders are the work of law. It is to law alone that men owe justice and liberty. It is this salutary organ of the will of all which establishes, in civil right, the natural equality between men. It is this celestial voice which dictates to each citizen the precepts of public reason, and teaches him to act according to the rules of his own judgment, and not to behave inconsistently with himself. It is with this voice alone that political rulers should speak when they command; for no sooner does one man, setting aside the law, claim to subject another to his private will, than he departs from the state of civil society, and confronts him face to face in the pure state of nature, in which obedience is prescribed solely by necessity.
-Rousseau, Political Economy.

So what about the laws of war?

I want to smash your house, I want to scratch your car, I want to fuck your wife, I want to break your life, I want to feel you snap, I want to HEAR YOU FUCKING CRACK.
I don't like the world today; I'm going to rebuild it my own way. I'm a man, I am society, I don't like you so I'll turn you into me so you'll just have to learn it's for the best. I've heard it only hurts for a moment THE BAITING OF THE PUBLIC.
You can't stand the sight of me and all the troubles I bring. I showed you what it's like to fucking hate your life now you see things like me and you will never be the same. We cancelled all your plans, you want to give up man. You ruined life for us; we'll ruin life for you. Shout, cry asking why you feel like shit. You want to die.
--Fucked Up, Baiting the Public

Idea #3 coming up: Fanatical Doubt

Music scholarship tends to share a style with its favorite pop performance: a delight in ambiguity and hints, a winking joy in multiple meanings adopted or cast off like clothes, personae or lovers. It also looks a lot like a lack of belief: if identity or truth is a performance, it's all side effect. This is how MIA albums with pictures of tanks on them are political.

Over against this style of belief is a style of unblinking certainty embodied in US politics: the satisfying conviction born of baseless knowledge that Kant called Fanaticism. Its hard mystical appeal wends back through beefy 19th-century muscular Christianity to Puritan fasting. These shows of force and unyielding conviction tend to make professional doubters feel both superior and impotent.

But the sunny years of Reaganite conviction gave birth to at least one kind of doubt that walks and talks like fanaticism: Hardcore. As an alternative to fundamentalisms of both ambiguity and certainty, this talk will trace what you could call violent agnosticism or fanatical doubt. Looking at the performance, belief, and, hell, band names of The Middle Class, Minor Threat, Poison Idea, Born Against and Fucked Up you get a style of embodied conviction that starts with Puritanism, then goes somewhere else.

to be presented at the 2009 EMP Pop Conference--hope to see you there , it should be a blast .

Idea #2, from 2006: Tomorrow's Outsider Art--Today!

Subtite: If You Want Blood, You've Got It

The MC5 once talked about kids being locked up "for living the words we sing." If (contrary to what critics tell us) there's an essential core to rock fantasy then this is it: actually doing what the song talks about. This talk will explore a group of songs and acts that got kids (deservedly) locked up, and how they turned into a successful Whitney Biennale show. Is Banks Violette, whose visual art slyly references the church-burnings and stabbings of metal subcultures, just continuing an exploitative tradition of PR violence—Nerf terrorism for cool kids? Framing publicity-seeking murders for gallery audiences makes for some pretty guilty pleasure. So what does it mean for him, and us, to be "a tourist in someone else's tragedy?" (like those 9/11 soundtracks in the Village Voice, as if the most important thing for writers like Eddy and Christgau was to hit on just the right thing to *listen to* to accompany a moment like that?) Violette claims to be doing something more, and here he connects with the bands themselves, and an old tradition of stoking grief into something sublime. I will suggest that you can't understand music without those things. But if so, what the f**k is the deal with Matthew Barney and Slayer? I'll try to open up the spectrum (really, Pandora's Box) of moral and aesthetic possibilities that the use of Metal as "outsider art" invokes.

core concept stolen from a random conversation I had on a library payphone with Weasel Walter, presented at the 2006 EMP pop conference.

Idea #1, from 2004: The Dream of Totaling the Sun, Moon, and Mountains by May 1968

Does heavy metal, and rock in general, have anything concretely to do with evil? Are we even allowed to talk about the sweepingly, and embarrassingly, theological themes that the music repeatedly imagines? Fans and bands certainly take such liberties, but the conceptual resources of rock criticism-usually a mix of sociology and progressive politics--don't seem adequate to the task: we all know about the false accusations of Satanism and the typical solution has been to just censor it out. There is a peculiar sort of rationalism at work in this, which has tended to restrict the admissible range of thought and feeling about music to certain safe themes. What lies beyond these barriers, or is it just too horrible, or stupid, to contemplate?
From Black Sabbath's durable, symptomatic, and utterly narcissistic visions of the Apocalypse (secularized in other music of the time as the Revolution) to Earth's unpleasantly literal account of flirtation with fascist imagery ("spent the night with Joseph Goebbels/think I'm coming down"), there is a major strain in rock music, clearest in Metal, which fantasizes about the destruction of the present order. This paper will look at the apocalypse in Doom Metal and asks if this might tell us anything about rock's political romanticism in general.

-Given at the EMP Pop Music conference in March 2004

Can Anything Make Up for Being Named after a Morrissey Song?

The light alone does it for Let the Right One In ( Låt den rätte komma in). But first the words: The title itself is delightfully misbegotten, the result of a translation into Swedish and back again; in English, this phrase feels slightly, ominously wrong, and is wronger in the original song title, "Let the Right One Slip In;" my dim Germanist instinct is the Swedish smoothed it down, where "right one" is just a noun, not a phrase, and you can't shove the verb under the carpet.

The lighting is really bright, really dull, and works like an overwhelming moral force. Without anyone telling you, it mirrors, extends, and maybe transforms the plot. The hero is a pale, translucent picked-on boy; the first shot shows him, with his limp blonde hair and stunned expression, looking through his bedroom window at the the washed-out, insipid Swedish public housing landscape he's confined to. The love interest is, apparently, a girl he meets in the next scene. She's haggard, has dark spots under her eyes and black curly hair, and appears without much explanation out of the night behind him on the playground. The relationship builds with a series of increasingly open gazes, where they look at each other across a transparent pane or mirror, or communicate in Morse Code by tapping through a wall.

The mirrors and barriers turn out to be between this world and the next. The boy's climactic near-death and rescue brings this pattern to a head by violently shattering a mirrored surface. The movie's very bleached-out beauty ends up making the argument: breaking into or out of this pale world takes something that the world itself can never quite tolerate.

What do you call it when cinematography does something markedly different from, but intimately related to, the characters' words and actions? An almost inarticulable harmony across media? A completely valid excuse for being named after a Morrissey song?

Happy music from sinew strung on bone in the winter night (Total Holocaust of All Poseurs)

The dog and I run on trails through the woods at dusk . The trail is packed snow; it gets soft and deep the second you step off. The firmness underfoot is a signal that we're still on it; the sensation tells us enough to navigate in complete darkness. The trail is a dim white, the trees black scratches, the sky a colorless glow. We're running together through a winter forest at night.

After a couple of miles the regular swinging and pounding in my legs is like scratching an itch. I constantly renegotiate my tempo with the topography: with a little thought I fit my moves to the terrain. I gallop down a smooth slope, bounce around a curve or slowly push up a steep hill. The dog amuses herself investigating something I'll never see through a hole in the snow. then scampers back to catch up. Her tongue and tail are flapping like crazy flags of dog nation.

Running through the winter night, I realized the analogy between making sound and moving: a string is held taut between two points on the neck and body of a wooden instrument; its pitch is set by the tension, its volume by the force that plucks it. Each muscle is held taut between two points on my bones; their tension, the resistance they encounter, and the force with which I meet it make me move. The sensation I feel is the echo of the action.

It's a repetitive thrum punctuated by reflective slowdowns, soaring bombast and agonizing surges of merciless blastbeats. Running plays soundless music inside my body. And you know what?

It sounds  exactly like the middle of the second Emperor album, Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk. Yes: I must explain to the dog that she and I represent the only authentic Black Metal in a vast forestful of posers.

Best Rock Criticism Ever IV

a) It is counterrevolutionary not to like Led Zeppelin.

b) But it is ultimately the case that "The bigger the problems in society, the more crashing the guitar chords have to be to make up for the perceived lack of power or satisfactory achievement in real life."

Hence, while we learn the lesson of the extremes to which electricity can be applied in music from Led Zeppelin--or face being counterrevolutionary in our attitude to music-- in the end, heavy metal fantasy like Led Zeppelin is a competitor to the revolution, not a friend.

The Long March through the Hot 100

The best rock criticism ever, but with Stalin and Mao instead of Meltzer and Tosches.

As is fitting for someone with a Disney contract, "Metamorphosis" is low on the pornography quotient relative to Amerikkkan standards; although even so, it will be too much for many Third World parents thinking about their teens.
...
Overall, there is not much to say about this album positively or negatively. While Iraqi teenagers are figuring out how to kill wealthier and technologically superior U.$. troops occupying their country, most Amerikkkan teenagers are like Hilary Duff singing, "Sweet sixteen/Gonna spread my wings. . .Drivin' down to the club where we go to dance. . . Bright stars shine above me/My blonde hair is everywhere." Although change is the subject of the album, it is the contented sort distracting youth from real challenges that require their energy.

Why 80s bands were loud

When a band was lunging for credibility or running out of things to say, they turned up the volume.

-Mike O'Flaherty