Paper Scissors
http://www.ontaponline.com/view_article.php?article_id=10193 Paper Scissors
The Argument: My Little Sister Thinks I'm Cool
written by
Joseph Riippi
Paper Scissors is a new monthly column, born out of wedlock between two star-crossed genres: Editorial and Art Criticism. Like a struggling dolphin in a tuna net, Music, in its proper noun sense, is only part of a greater system â?? the myriad of pummeling forces that affect this art form are the subject of this column. Politics, Disaster, War, Love, Crime, Weather â?? the connecting Causes of Music are the Paper and the Scissors. For without them, there would be no Rock.
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I went back to the West Coast to see my family for the holidays. Picking me up from the airport, my younger sister â?? who'd just gotten back to Seattle from college in Oregon â?? commented on how she'd been bragging to friends about the trip she was going to take to visit "her cool big brother on the East Coast." I was trying to figure out why she thought I was cool.
Fugazi is often remembered beyond CDs on a living room shelf â?? there are the $5 shows, the LPs printed with a maximum sale price. Their cathartic live sets and anti-corporate ideology was absorbed by a massive Youth, searching for something and someone worth listening to â?? someone articulating that which they themselves could not. In retrospect, Ian MacKaye, Dischord Records, and D.C. hardcore in general (Scream, Jawbox, others) have attained a sort of legendary status; they infected listeners with a vaccinating subterranean culture, a culture that could vibrate beneath the see-sawing foundation of what was considered Cool.
Now, it seems that being "anti-" has risen as the fulcrum of the Coolness See-Saw. Maybe it's because all those who grew up listening to D.C. hardcore are now big brothers and sisters â?? or parents, perhaps â?? and the tastes of the past have been assimilated by the present. Regardless, the youth of this Bush Administration's America have become a less informed, less opinionated simulacra of the more active past. Today's anti-corporate ideology has been drained into a bloodless, indoor Instant Message conversation about how Bush sucks. Action on college campuses drowns after an election; compilation CDs to benefit Change are shelved, pre-dusty, alongside high school yearbooks. The Daily Show is no longer a supplement to real news, but is watched and interpreted as though it were CNN itself.
In early 2005 I was reviewing a Bright Eyes concert at The NorVa in Norfolk, VA. I had been an avid fan of Conor Oberst and the rest of Saddle Creek for a few years; Liftedâ?¦ was one of my favorite records when it was released in 2003. I'd watched Bright Eyes flourish, suckling the nutrients of success like a scrawny and depressed dandelion weed.
Two new Bright Eyes records had just been released â?? the decent I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, and the repulsively terrible Digital Ash in a Digital Urn â?? and both were selling well, despite the latter being a blatantly bad decision: a pseudo-electronic collection of noise eagerly attempting to capitalize on the success of the Postal Service and make its way onto an Old Navy muzak collection. It was a success, and Bright Eyes was cool.
It was an all-ages show. I remember seeing a kid who couldn't be more than 15 wearing a Ramones t-shirt with very clean, mohawked hair. It pissed me off, really, the naïve hypocrisy. When the kid starting screaming along, raising his fist in the air to Oberst's terrible protest song, "When the President Talks to God," (released that week as an iTunes exclusive single), I visited the melancholy bar upstairs, where I stayed. I felt like an elitist, and that made me as miserable as a good Bright Eyes song.
It was just after the inauguration, and becoming anti-Bush had become fully Cool. Even Green Day was getting huge again, thanks to their American Idiot concept-protest record, but little action actually took place outside of internet hits and compilation records benefiting the internet sites getting the hits.
Mohawk Ramone at the NorVa might not even be old enough to vote in the next election, let alone this past one, and despite all indications that the post-9/11 Middle East could be this generation's Vietnam, the general feeling towards the President amongst the The All-Agers was of Dislike, not Disagreement.
One must have a reason to disagree. But to dislike? Never.
Songs of protest should educate, not masturbate; inform, not perform. "When the President Talks to God" was little more than a collection of witty puns mocking President Bush's religious beliefs; it should have focused strictly on whatever his beliefs had to do with the present (e.g. gradual attempts to usurp State with Church). "When the President Talks to God" mocked not just Bush, but his God and his beliefs as well. Picture a sold-out NorVa singing along, happy to be out on a school night:
"When the President talks to God I wonder which one plays the better cop? / 'We should find some jobs the ghetto's broke' / 'No, they're lazy George, I say we don't / just give'em more liquor stores and dirty coke!' / That's what God recommends."
I love free speech, even if a songwriter I once admired makes a fool of himself.
Fugazi and the hardcore scene of the 80s stood up for beliefs; there was action and work for change. They preached Thought and Decision. Fugazi songs were affecting anthems for effects; they made listeners think and let them choose to Disagree. But their ideas were not "cool." Since then, the gradual popularizing of anti-establishment has lead to a posturing NorVa youth, where being Cool is hating the establishment without knowing why. And worse, without caring.
