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 .