mekons – Brooklyn Bugle

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Remix: Is Music Ready For The Apocalypse?

February 23, 2015

Listen, no person, no matter how much they froth with opinions, should be above an occasional mea culpa, and here’s mine: I should have known a bit more about Mr. Kanye West’s catalog before jumping to some of the conclusions I espoused in last Friday’s column. Having said that, pray allow me to state this: I had some very important points to make in that column, and the stuff about Kanye was really just a small part of it – goddamn small, actually. In fact, waving my arms about Kanye was honestly just the equivalent of a carny barker trying to get you through the door of the tent.

So, here’s the remix. I want to re-state the stuff from that column that was actually important, without the distraction of the fumbling Kanye stuff. Thank you for listening – I mean that.

America, I am a member of your luckiest generation: Those of us born between (roughly) 1956 and 1975 were born into an era pregnant with prosperity and endless invitations to escapism, and we came of age in a time when this nations’ penchant for invention and daydreaming soared without the clouds of impending disaster and involuntary conscription. We are the luckiest generation: we have lived the rough bulk of our life in the downy-soft years after the threat of Vietnam yet before the apocalyptic Goliath of the caliphate wars and environmental catastrophe. Personally: I was 9 when the shadow of the draft ended, and it is likely I will live most – and perhaps all – of my active life before things become really dark, both figuratively and literally. Our children, our grandchildren, and you (if you are under a certain age) are going to grow up and grow old in a very, very different world than the dynamically inventive and often wonderfully trivial era that has is ending.

Every freedom we have taken for granted, whether it is the freedom to practice our religion, the freedom not to practice any religion, or the freedom to drink fresh water, will be assaulted.

Will your music, your art, and your culture rise to the task?

From Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Ragga, Syria, from the West Bank to Paris, from Manhattan to your hometown, the corpses of those killed in the name of religion are going to pile high in the streets; the bodies of 88,000 and more children, slaughtered hysterically because of the country or creed of their birth, will be laid at the feet of 88,000 mothers; hysterical statesmen, waving testaments old and new, will demand allegiance to a holy land; weapons created by cold-blooded scientists in the last century to defend freedom will be used by hot-blooded hysterics in this century to end freedom; the flashing, shattering scythes of the middle ages and the darkness of the Toba Extinction will return to our world, grim twin revelators riding the pale horses of virulence and deprivation.

Will you be watching the Kardashians?

It is entirely feasible that we will soon find ourselves returning to the constant state of religious war that existed throughout most of history (remember, as recently as 1683 Ottoman troops were at the gates of Vienna); simultaneously, assaults to the environment will force our children and grandchildren to radically alter the way they live and ration things their ancestors took for granted; and continuous breaches of internet security will compel us to redefine the word privacy, and even more likely, force a sizable portion of the wise men and women of this planet off the grid, into an existence that both denies and combats progress.

This is our future.

Will music meet the challenges of this new world? Will music motivate the people of raped Gaia to fight for positive change? Will music mobilize armies to stand up for the disenfranchised, the hungry, the frightened, the abused? Will music provide amiable distraction that somehow creates joy but avoids numbing? Will music incite courageous and productive dissent? Will music underline atrocity and suggest solutions? Will music rouse brotherhood, and combat ignorance?

The model for a utile, user-friendly, informative and provocative pop has existed in the past, and must be recalled and implemented again. Let us consider Phil Ochs and the MC5, performing in Lincoln Park in Chicago during the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention; let us recall the theories, screeds, pranks, and radical distribution models of Penny Rimbaud, Crass, Woody Guthrie, Will Geer, Billy Childish, Alan Ginsberg, Paul Krassner, the Mekons, and everyone else who thought that art could inform, balm, spotlight the truth, highlight hypocrisy and witlessness, provide facts, and inspire accord.

In the future, entertainment can continue to feed escapism and act as the clown distracting children on the way to the death camps; or it can be a utility, a bridge to unity, information, and power. From the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement to the cotton fields of the old South, from Welsh mines to lunch counters in Mississippi, from Lincoln Park in Chicago to the Compton, the story of music and the story of activism is inseparable. And the story of every single aspect of our pop, whether you listen to country, death metal, or rap, is synonymous with the story of America’s disenfranchised. Seriously, friends: the DNA of every goddamn thing you listen to can be found on slave ships and in the hollers of Appalachia. American music is the sound of those who had less, the sound of those who had to fight to be heard, fight to eat, fight to vote, fight to survive. Whether you’re Jack White or Lightning Bolt or Bon Jovi or loathsome Paul Simon, when you make music, you are echoing the noise of America’s disenfranchised screaming to be heard, or seeking joy in their toil, or setting a melody to the fight for equality.

Our music is a talking drum, passed down from the disenfranchised of the past for the use of the desperate of the future.

And that future is near. Our children, our grandchildren, ourselves, will need the Utility of Music more than ever. Music must mean something, say something, fight for something, take risks, announce agendas, denounce lies, and tell the truth.Music is beauty and power. Do not fucking forget it. Honor it. Playtime is over. Rock’n’roll is just beginning.

Be Woody Guthrie. Be Crass. Be Phil Ochs. Be Jon Langford. Be Victor Jara.

You owe it to the future.

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Tim Sommer’s Letter to Blink 182 Fans

January 29, 2015

I understand that Tom DeLonge of Blink-182 has written a long and heartfelt letter to his fans, explaining and apologizing for his group’s dysfunction and inactivity. I respect that kind of outreach. In fact, I respect it so much I thought I would write my own letter to Blink-182’s fans.

Dear Blink-182 Fans:

I have never really listened to Blink-182, but I respect them.

Maybe that surprises you. Well, a long time ago, I learned there was an unspoken brotherhood amongst musicians and music geeks. Whether you are a member of Bon Jovi or Lightning Bolt, chances are you were the guy or girl in your high school who had the coolest record collection, who new insane and arcane details about your favorite musicians, who followed about fourteen weird bands for every one group in the pop charts. Seriously, it’s an odd secret, but I guarantee it’s true: Pretty much anyone who’s put the time and effort into learning an instrument, pursuing a career, and putting up with all the bullshit surrounding the music business is bound to be a serious lover and student of music. So, regardless of any personal relationship I may or may nor have with Blink-182’s music, I respect them as brothers, people who cared deeply about music, and who made that obsession into a lifelong career.

And I respect their fans.

See, I am not going to play that game where I look down on you because you like Blink 182 but don’t like hipper, older, more obscure, or more credible bands. For instance, I enjoy 20^th Century neo-classical music; I like, oh, Aaron Copland, Krzysztof Penederecki, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Iannis Xenakis, etcetera. But there’s definitely someone out there who will go “That guy is a douche! He doesn’t know any Morton Gould or Benjamin Britten! What a Neanderthal that Sommer cat is!” Now, the fact that I can’t name any compositions by Benjamin Britten doesn’t mean I love or enjoy Terry Riley any less. And the same goes for you. Just because you can’t name any songs by, oh, the Dils or Crass or the Weirdos or the Pointed Sticks doesn’t mean that you aren’t as moved when you hear a song by Blink-182. If a song reached your heart, if you heard something and thought “I cannot wait to share that with my best friend!” or “Looking forward to hearing that song got me through class today,” that’s all that matters! What possible difference does it make how famous or how obscure it is. Shit, I spend a lot of my time listening to music you probably couldn’t even spell, but it still makes me deliriously happy to hear “Ray of Light” by Madonna, and I have no trouble screaming that fact to the world.

I am not going to look down on anything that moves anyone, provided it doesn’t espouse any hurtful or hateful bullshit or dogma.

See, there’s nothing wrong with popularity, nothing wrong with liking the popular. Regardless of whether you listen to the most obscure noise from Brooklyn or the most mainstream pop, you probably listen to it for the same reason: it moves you, it distracts you, it makes your day better, it gives you something to talk about with your friends or the people you want to be friends with, it says something for you that you cannot say yourself. I feel that way when listening to “Fiery Jack” by the Fall or “Brando” by Scott Walker; someone else may feel the exact same thing when listening to Nickelback or Darius Rucker. The messenger may change, but the listener’s motivation and heart stays the same. A song that creates an amazing shared memory for someone is a spectacular gift, and I am not going to ridicule it, whether it’s by the Mekons or Miley Cyrus.

Now, as long as I have your attention, let me tell you a little about punk rock.

To me, more than anything else, punk rock means the freedom to be yourself and have your own opinion, and dream big dreams and love those dreams with all your heart, despite the naysayers; I believe punk rock is literally the opposite of conformity and bending to peer pressure. More than a “sound,” it is just the idea of an unfettered, un-tethered imagination. I also believe it is essentially a simple art form, where you discover and express beautiful, strong, powerful, intensely creative dreams that others might say are “too obvious” to express; in other words, people looked at the work of Picasso, Mondrian, and Pollock and said “My kid could do that,” or they heard the Ramones and said “Shit, anyone could play like that.” But NO ONE had painted like that, no one had played like that. If you could do it, why didn’t you do it? If your kid could have done it, why didn’t you encourage him or her to do so? Often, beauty, genius, and invention are as obvious as the air we breathe. Punk Rock artists discover a new country, the one that was in front of us and under our feet and in our dreams the whole time; the one whose beauty and power was so obvious, it was like discovering a delicious, nutritious fruit just sitting there hanging from a low branch of a tree, and everyone else said “If it’s that easy to pick, why hasn’t someone already eaten it? It must suck.”

Having said that, consider your love for Blink 182 a doorway. Let that door lead you to the soul, spirit, joy, compassion, simplicity, artistic adventure and discovery, and immediate magic of Punk Rock. Don’t mourn the demise of your favorite band; instead, celebrate what you loved about them and let that door lead you…

To the truth: Punk rock, first and foremost, is an expression of what moves you, without the shadow of peer pressure.

To the visceral: punk rock is about discovering the beauty and power of the obvious and everyday; the hum of a refrigerator can be punk rock; the ticking of a signal indicator can be punk rock; the one-chord passion of an old rockabilly song can be punk rock.

To the adventurous: blow it all up and put it back together any damn way you want, any goddamn way that has the power to move you; and if it moves you, there’s a very good chance it will move someone else. That strange sound you want to hear over and over? I bet someone else wants to hear it, too. Trust your ears and heart.

Perhaps you have the desire to be a “real” punk. If so, please note: A lot of the visual and iconic language of your “movement” is borrowed from the language of rebel politics and the battles of the disenfranchised to gain equality and socio-economic power. Go to the roots of this iconography: Don’t just “say” fight for your rights; actually fight for your rights, and other peoples. Literally nothing is “more” punk rock then helping those who have less, those who have no power, and protecting those who are in harms way. It’s not enough to “give the wrong time/stop a traffic line” as the brilliant Johnny Rotten wrote in “Anarchy in the U.K.” Ideally, a punk should give the right time to someone who can’t afford a watch, and clear traffic in front of an abortion clinic.

Oh…if a band you like has ever done anything intentionally racist, sexist, homophobic, or refused to condemn any section of their fans that have done the same, then none of this applies. Any band that doesn’t defend the disenfranchised, that is the artistically, economically, socially, sexually, politically disenfranchised, are just posers.

Good luck to you. Timothy A. Sommer

P.S. Here are some records you might like: “Teenage Kicks” or “My Perfect Cousin” by the Undertones; “Where Were You” and “Memphis, Egypt” by the Mekons; “Into the Valley” and “The Saints are Coming” by the Skids; “Babylon’s Burning,” “Staring at the Rude Boys” and “West One” by the Ruts; “Hurry Up Harry” and “Hersham Boys” by Sham 69; “Endangered Species” and “New Barbarians” by the UK Subs; anything at all off of the albums Damned Damned Damned, Machine Gun Etiquette, The Black Album, or Strawberries by the Damned; “Nobodys Hero” or “Alternative Ulster” by Stiff Little Fingers; “One Chord Wonders” by the Adverts; “The World the Day Turned Day-Glo” by X-Ray Spex; the entire Pink Flag and Chairs Missing albums by Wire; “This is the Modern World” by the Jam; and a thousand and eight more, especially the Metal Box/Second Edition album by Public Image Limited, the greatest and most creatively brave punk rock record of all time.

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I tell The Turtlenauts of Zond 5 about the Replacements, Joe Ely, Phil Ochs, the Mekons, and the lack of a true self

August 29, 2014

Although tortoises are not mammals, humankind should remain in awe of the achievement of Bek and Lek, two tortoises who circled the moon on September 18, 1968.

This is not fantasy: In 1968, the Soviets Russians were frantically attempting to beat the Americans and the Apollo space program to the moon. They launched the Zond 5, with Turtlenauts Bek and Lek on board, to see if living creatures could survive a trip to the moon and back. They did, and our two shell-back friends became the first living creatures ever to reach the moon. The Soviet’s plan to follow up Lek and Bek’s pioneering adventure with a manned flight was abandoned when it turned out the Apollo program was much further ahead of schedule than the Soviets had imagined.

Yes, I said Turtlenauts.

Recently, I asked myself the following question: What if Bek and Lek returned from space as fully sentient creatures, but Soviet secrecy and the equally obfuscating bureaucracy of the post-Soviet Russian governments prevented them from leaving the grim lab in the Urals where they had been ensconced for 45 years? When finally exposed to the daylight of the modern world (having been freed by a quirk of the very same bureaucracy that had imprisoned and forgotten them), what kind of questions would Bek and Lek have that I, a noted pop-culture and music authority, could answer?

Bek & Lek: Tell us about the fabled American Beauty, the Mayim Bialik.
Tim Sommer: She inspires great men to stirring deeds. In this sense, she is like Zipporah, the wife of Moses, or Jolene Brand, the wife of Laugh-In producer George Schlatter.
B & L: I know of this show Laugh In! “Sock it to me,” and suchlike hijinks.
TS: Yes.
B & L: Tell us a little about this band, The Replacements.
TS: Every musician must recall that at any given show, perhaps 80 or 90 percent of the audience is seeing them for the first and likely only time. Whether they are playing in front of 8 or 8,000 people, a performer needs to treat their audience as the only audience they will ever play in front of, the best audience they will play in front of. Therefore, an artist must never throw away a show, and no band, not even the freaking Beatles, is better than the worst show they play. Personally, I saw the Replacements play five times; I guess I saw five “off” nights. If they were a truly great band, and I understand a lot of people feel that way, the band simply didn’t feel that every audience was important enough to know that, and that’s just horrible. Also, the alternative music fanbase in the 1980s was largely made up of geeks and the bullied (myself amongst them); I think the Replacements fulfilled a certain need we may have had to believe there was a Van Halen-esque licentiousness and devil-may-care attitude within each of us, when really, we were just people excited about finding out-of-print Lyres 45s and over-paying for Echo & The Bunnymen import 12-inch singles because they had non-album b-sides. The Replacements are also romanticized for a few over-sensitive ballads, but I can show you a dozen artists from that period who did that sort of thing far better, or at least as well, and they did it without despising their audience and abusing the extraordinary privilege of being able to play original music in front of people for money. I mean, start with Chris Bailey and the Saints, listen to their fucking ballads.

(Two Sentient Soviet Turtles now know The Saints are infinitely superior to the Replacements)

B & L: Tell us about Joe Ely.
TS: Excellent question. Joe Ely, Joe Strummer, and Bruce Sprinsgteen are all essentially the same artist, and that’s a beautiful thing. Each has attempted to channel Woody Guthrie via Sun-era Elvis; each wants to tell the story of the American experience via the character of a muscular guitar-slinger, sensitive but with sand in their teeth. Each wanted to simultaneous wear Dylan’s wise-ass bookishness and Marlon Brando’s muscle-tees, each wanted to feel the world through the boots of the workingman yet see the world through the owlish-eyes of Ginsberg.
B & L: That’s a very impressive description.
TS: Yes, I thought so too, thank you. If you want to turn that trio into a quintet, add Patti Smith and Paul Sanchez, each of whom have a very similar worldview and ability to translate that vision into extraordinary art. Patti adds some shady, shadowy art to the mix, Paul adds some hot sauce.
B & L: Speaking of “devil may care,” Is there a God?
TS: You are sentient, talking turtles that have been to the moon. Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?
B & L: No.
TS: Well, there is Abba, and there is Nick Lowe’s production on his Jesus of Cool album — these may be a sign of some higher power.
B & L: Who are the quintessential American artists?
TS: I’d have to go with Louis Armstrong and Phil Ochs. Each told the story of rich, troubled century, spotted with joy and tragedy. Each spoke in an essentially and exclusively American vocabulary, discarding the frippery of England or San Francisco. Here, you should listen to the Ochs’ song “When In Rome.” It tells the story of America, a place of hope and disappointment, through the eyes of one deeply troubled troubadour, a once optimistic man that experience has turned cynical.

B & L: But it’s 13 minutes long. Are you going to make us listen to that whole thing?
TS: You watched eight straight episodes of American Horror Story Coven last night, I think you can spare 13 minutes.
B & L: We’re not sure.
TS: Tell you what: just listen, at your leisure, to Ochs’ Rehearsals For Retirement album. It tells the story of the death of idealism in America.
B & L: Gee, that sounds like fun.
TS: If you want fun, listen to Slade or BTO. By the way, “Hey You” by BTO is an extremely satisfying song, plus it is essentially the template for all Nirvana and Pixies songs.
B & L: If we only have time to listen to one song right now, what should it be?
TS: “Where Were You” by the Mekons. It reduces rock’n’roll to its absolute essence: two chords and thwarted desire.

B & L: I count four chords.
TS: I am not counting those passing chords between the verses and I don’t think you should, either.
B & L: We have to go to lunch, and then someone is going to show us how to set up a Kindle account and explain to us the cultural context of the British “Carry On” film series.
TS: Don’t bother buying Ulysses by James Joyce just because you think you should. You’ll never read it, or much of it, anyway, and if you want to feel smart yet still be entertained, you are far better off reading Rushdie or William Gaddis.
B & L: — Before we go, Tim, do you have any final words of advice?
TS: Whenever even the most cursory examination is applied, one finds that the self is made up entirely of non-self elements. Seriously. Remove the word “I” from any idea, or dialogue — especially a self-dialogue — and very remarkable things happen. That’s because there is no “I.” There is no homunculus sitting somewhere in our brain consistently infusing some consistent or permanent idea of self into all our actions and decisions. There are just an infinite number of ever-moving, ever-changing parts adding up to the constant reality of dependence arising. As Chandrakirti said, “Afflictions and faults arise from the false view of a transitory collection. Having understood that the object of this is self, negate self.”
B & L: Homo-what-culus?