We Can't Make It Here Anymore

H

hundredmillionlifetimes

Banned
Perhaps it is simply yet another manifestation of one of those cruel ironies of our lost pomo times that it takes a music video from such a deeply conservative, sentimental genre as country rock to remind us that music is so-easily capable of being so much more than mere music, mere narcissistically indulgent insularity. Dubsteppers and hauntologists please take note.

Below, James Mcmurtry's "old fashioned" ("Will work for food. Will die for oil.") cynical music video (cue Kristopherson/Dylan) serves to re-displace that sad genre by re-assimilating contemporary issues of America's political and economic corporate control, the struggles of workers, the forgotten conditions of war veterans, the quagmire war in Iraq, and the prison industrial complex, among others.



 
G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
>not bad... (more bluesy roots rock than country I'd say)

...I agree music ought to engage with matters beyond its own po-mo solipsistic narratives, but surely such an old-skool protest song fails to excite enough precisely because the methodology of its engagement with its subject is so over-familiar that unlike, say, Dylan in the context of the 60s, its ability to communicate is hampered by the hackneyed format (not so much in terms of the style of the music, but rather the interrelation between singer and subject) no matter how valid the message... presumably I am to take it that the scare quotes surrounding "old-fashioned" are indicative of your contempt for the view that such a format is outdated...

I'd be interested to hear your views on how the "protest song" can be mutated into a new form which enables the listener to connect to the raw shock and catharsis that is now missing... I would perhaps posit Scott Walker's most recent works as along the right lines... but maybe they are simply too obscure to function as protest--- the message obfuscated behind veils of intertextuality perhaps? But some innovations are necessary to to avoid the cringe worthy and over-obvious... Or is a certain heavy-handedness necessary...?
 
H

hundredmillionlifetimes

Banned
gek-opel said:
>not bad... (more bluesy roots rock than country I'd say)
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Accepted.

...I agree music ought to engage with matters beyond its own po-mo solipsistic narratives, but surely such an old-skool protest song fails to excite enough precisely because the methodology of its engagement with its subject is so over-familiar
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Of course. Its a reactionary form, as I said, but you're implicitly suggesting here that there is some other - emergent/existing - form that overcomes this reflexively chronic resignation. Sorry to disappoint you, but there isn't. You're forgetting that the ostensibly less-familiar is pomo-instantly appropriated and assimilated into the "over-familiar."

...that unlike, say, Dylan in the context of the 60s, its ability to communicate is hampered by the hackneyed format (not so much in terms of the style of the music, but rather the interrelation between singer and subject) no matter how valid the message... presumably I am to take it that the scare quotes surrounding "old-fashioned" are indicative of your contempt for the view that such a format is outdated...
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No, that the time-suspending quotes are indicative of my contempt for the view that the formats - many of them paraded in this politically, socially, and artistically conservative forum - of today are any more "new" or progressive.

I'd be interested to hear your views on how the "protest song" can be mutated into a new form which enables the listener to connect to the raw shock and catharsis that is now missing...
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Sorry, but I don't agree with your positing of the presuppositions here: raw shock and catharsis is precisely what we do not need. Such a reassuring affect is the very definition of old-fashioned reinforcement of the capitalist status quo.
 
G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
[good to have you back, btw]

Let us engage with the (im)possible here... you are correct to suggest that there is indeed no emergent form that "overcomes this reflexively chronic resignation" but is this any reason to necessarily reject such a proposition? On reflection I agree that "raw shock and catharsis" are perhaps the wrong terms for what I was aiming at here... it was rather the ability of song to engage the listener, and the problem we are ultimately dealing with is the ever-rolling wave of familiarisation, and familiarity always breeds contempt... the numbing of the synapses to every common stimulus that is one of the core problems of humanity... if catharsis is not what we need (and after all the feeling of release that is implicit in catharsis is not the optimal response to art designed to provoke a political reaction) then what is needed for a song to begin to re-engage the listener...? what is very noticeable about most attempts this century at protest song has been their ineffable cringeworthyness--- my question is whether this is a function of a lack of aesthetic innovation or a culture which views all political engagement as innately suspect... or are these perhaps two sides of the same particular coin?
 
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