The point of making sense, of fitting a line of logic that is clear, clean, and cut through with fine precision, of parts fitting nicely together with artistry and hard work; I respect all of this very much. But I equally am drawn to mess, to garbage and filth and disgust and failure, nonsense. When David Bryne breaks out and says it, sings "Stop making sense" in Girlfriend is Better, I think "here's a call to action, perhaps a punk manifesto for a band that in no respects should be as culturally well-known as they are." Do we understand that, Stop making sense? I doubt that a culture can really celebrate confusion, because there are elements of confusion that are devoid of humanity. Murder, rape, and racism all don't make sense, unless logic is warped to say that killing is justified by abstraction number one, two, three, and so on. America can kill because we are good, and those that die are evil. Thus, the good killing the bad is not wrong, but an example of justice.
These things make sense, perhaps, but only in a frame of logic, and that frame is a construct of society, which exists out of survival needs, but persists further beyond these very basic modes of sustaining the body, the mind, of nurturing the body till it has moments to think about its own existence. The convenience of survival, the take-for-granted aspect of life, is not really taken-for-granted, but merely the expectations are realigned. This is a culture completely disconnected from natural effects, of fitness being tied to purpose. No one hunts except for game - no one farms without the help of technology. The body is formed through science, exercises that have no end but to give to the body what it has lost in luxury. For ourselves, we need only to get into the car and drive quickly, an unhuman quickness that has no resemblance to life. This convenience: what effect does it have on the body? We go to the store and purchase milk, a plastic white container which is ours for a mere $3 dollars, and these are the ends of endless calculations, of distribution and temperatures, of life being bred to produce for such a purpose and then perfectly timed to die (Life Is Cheap)
Outside this context, these parameters of time, place, emotions; of cycles and prior engagements (promises, mothers and fathers, moments of revelation); beyond these details, there are future historians who examine the evidence and come up with different verdicts. The guilt is distributed, the reasons and actors presented bullet style on some Powerpoint in the classroom. The logic is simplified into text books and test questions, with correct answers and open-ended essays that are graded on how well they make sense. The logic is represented, the figures and dates and theories relocated into a kind of baseball game where the score will be figured, and the play will go off without a hitch. By the ninth inning, we have settled something for future games to redefine.
Long hours are spent in the library pouring over obscure books that recalculate the literature, reexamine controversial notions and the values of certain cultures, politics, and humans who have adopted their ethics from experience.
And so I see all of this as a means of getting to Flipper, to bridge a gap where art and trash and everything in between exists and takes on value only through its relation to what has come before. If we begin with Robert Johnson, and end with the Sex Pistols, things have been left out, somewhere. Nothing is omnipresent; mistakes are made, people forgotten. So why or how did Flipper exist, a band so raunchy, so senseless, who could write a song called Life and sing a line like "Life is the only thing worth living for" and make it sound endearing. I find it endearing, and I am lead on a long trail of an identity crisis.
Do I really want to be outside the norm? Did I choose to be outside the norm? Was it just a way to distinguish myself, because I wasn't special enough in the scheme of thing? Everyone enjoys the Beatles, everyone understands the Beatle, because there's not that much to understand. "All you need is love" and LSD and a certain innocence that quickly dissolves into something much darker, and that is Flipper. From the Beatles to Flipper and beyond. There I said it and now all my pretensions and long-winded attempts to be meaningful are stripped and made bear. (From LSD to Acid to Heroin)
I enjoy Joy Division, along with the Smiths and Gang of Four and every other post-punk outfit that you might hear on a cell-phone/ car commerical or some Apple product. But I'm pretty certain I will never hear a Flipper song either A) on any normal format radio-college station (God bless WFMU), or B) on a commercial for some product that knows the scene.
Not that those points are a litmus test. Just because a commercial quotes a song doesn't make the song irrelevant. But it does tamper with the associations that song holds. Commercials are never simply playing a song for the enjoyment of the consumer; there's a reason, a logic to the message, and the song gets wrapped into that logic as long as I can remember the two were one (which, speaking for the power of advertisements, is pretty long.) Consider that much of classic rock has been spoiled by its use in car commercials: what revolutionary quality, rebellious attitude a song by the Who or Iggy Pop might have once had, it's now swallowed by the ironic factor of the ad executive persuading us that product so and so is revolutionary, being associated with a the "punk" expression. In actuality, our very consumption of that message realigns both the product, ourselves, and the "punk" culture with a ritual of consumer identity. I have an Ipod, you have an Ipod, we all are one happy collection of Ipod listening civilians.
Hyper-instant gratification takes the aim of associating itself with the underground, because the underground is the very definition of righteousness. No longer is mainstream culture the standard-bearer; the references to obscurity are the new cult of power.
The act of rebellion, or perhaps the art of rebellion, is not in denying or challenging the rituals of consumption. A complete lack of self-consciousness, the ability to return to a child-like state in which identity still lives with constant curiosity, and there are no assumptions or beliefs that are never expressed, that seems the closest we might come to escaping the fashion. The fashion is more than clothes; it's an ideology of the look, of beginning at the surface and letting the surface give root to everything else. It's living in a belief in presentation and seeing only that as substance, and never questioning that because questions are a waste of time.
Too much is lost in the present, where a million facts exist, and yet are indecipherable. These are like adjectives coating a relay of actions: their bearing can only at times get in the way. We select, choose information that is relevant, so we are not lost in the unending stream of details. In this choice, our identity is formalized; from what we choose to say, not say, and all of the gestures in between. The silences can express more of a person than the actual utterances.
And then we try to make sense of the surface, and there is no sense at all to any of it, only the enjoyment or displeasure of the surface. There's pain, comfort, and a million variations and extremes that color them in between. Can there ever be closure, or is everything superficial and disappointing? What do we stand for, if we stand for nothing but the surface, of words that tumble and fall and the roots are missing and decayed? Is this tree dying a slow creaking death, shaking in the wind at night, forever threatening to fall?
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