Simon Reynolds K-Punk Memorial Lecture

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
people always say ideally with therapy but never most probably. and in that sense it reminds me of the orthodox textual religious person. ideally our society should look like so-and-so. or even the Stalinist, for that matter. ideally. but what about 'really?' I've had therapy on and off since the age of 12, granted fairly basic nhs shit but if we're talking about mass liberation then we have to grapple with the fact that not everyone is going to get top draw Reichian group therapy.

reminds me of this datacide review of DiJ

There is a notion that explains a great deal not only about punk rock in general and Crisis in particular, but also the subsequent evolution of both Pearce and Wakeford. – and that is a hankering after “authenticity”. The motive force in everything Pearce and Wakeford have done as “adults” is not politics but aesthetics. It was an aesthetic desire for “authenticity” that led them to join Trotskyist groups despite the fact that they were dandies. Pearce, in particular, has always behaved as though it is possible to live differently in this world – a prima donna act in which he pretends to have risen above capitalism while the commodity economy is still intact – and all of anarchism is evident in this aesthetic pose. Aesthetically (and therefore politically) Crisis were much closer to anarchist noise merchants such as Crass than later “Trotskyist” bands from the Redskins to Blaggers ITA (whose bolshevism was an outgrowth of Bakuninism, whereas both Pearce and the Crass are much closer to the anarchism of Proudhon). Crisis wanted to be “real” and utilised politics as a short cut to realising what is ultimately an aesthetic position. In chasing the chimera of personal authenticity rather than the reality of revolutionary transformation, Pearce and Wakeford came to believe their political posturing was sincere. This fanatical but nonetheless deluded self-belief in a political mission was the basis on which Crisis sold themselves to their fans (some of whom were actually attracted by the hilarious gap between what Pearce and Wakeford believed about themselves and what they actually represented). Given the inability of the aesthetically driven Crisis to deliver on what they’d declared as their political positions, it is hardly surprising that the dominant members of the band ended up breaking with RAR and ultimately conventional Trotskyism.


While there are commentators who have become hysterical about Pearce, the best way of dealing with his scam is to expose him for what he is – an anarchist dry goods salesman.
There is a continuity between Crisis and DIJ in terms of both imagery centred on fascism/anti-fascism and a desire for authenticity that is aesthetically driven. It is difficult to imagine Crisis ever making much of an impression without RAR to mediate their presence on the punk scene, or DIJ existing at all without Wakeford and Pearce being slowly seduced by the ideas and imagery RAR set out to oppose (a seduction that began with these two musicians learning the power of political symbolism – at least partially – through their involvement with RAR). I would stress symbols and imagery in all this, both Crisis and DIJ were aesthetically overloaded to the detriment of both their politics and their music. Although very much a product of RAR, Crisis were also in many ways an anomaly – within a punk culture that thrived on confusion about identity and political belief, Crisis were far more confused than most of their peers. The Art Attacks appear to have been unmoved by their brush with RAR, Adam and the Ants merely ruffled. In contrast to this, Wakeford and Pearce provide examples of “individuals” who were transformed by RAR, but their deep involvement produced effects at odds with the avowed intentions of those who’d set up the organisation.

https://datacide-magazine.com/we-mean-it-man/
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
like i wouldn't argue my aesthetics are political, or can be used to analyse politics, but they reflect my personal political beliefs. someone else could find subversion in lonnie liston smith, and Grover Washington jr, in fact many people did in the 90s.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I think the subversion personally is much more oblique, much more dispersed and much more long duration. for instance i would say hardcore/jungle/acid/80s hh/disco etc changed me, but not in this sense of a 6 hour zone of liberation. that never happened and is unlikely to happen unless it was 100% certain one would not go broke or be cornered by cops or bouncers, etc etc. But it's rewired my brain in terms of thinking about gender, the cosmos, religion, science, relations of sound to each other, language etc etc. It's much more subtle than attaching a clunky name to it like temporary autonomous zone. ultimately the only thing you can systematise in music its formal structure but not how it disperses through the physical constraints of time and space. obviously these sense perception through computerised technology can become much more intense and rapid.
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
Hey, man, you don't talk to the Beagle. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll... uh... well, you'll say "hello" to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you. He won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say, "33 pages and no Craner? Waste thread"... I mean I'm... no, I can't... I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's... he's a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas...
 
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luka

Well-known member
The enclosed space, like the magician’s circle, is a given. Within the circle the magician is protected. The demon is safely contained. The therapist’s room, like the magician’s circle is a special kind of space. The rules are suspended. Reality is more malleable there, and experiments can be made in relative safety. Old habits are sloughed off, new selves are tried on for size, like costumes plucked from the dressing up box.

This is the frame. The bubble. It is unimportant whether the frame is formally demarcated but it is must be there, at least implicitly. By sealing off the outside world, what is formed is analogous to the bubble universes of speculative physics. Ideally, what happens in the bubble universe allows the client to be stronger, wiser, kinder and more contented on returning to the wider world.

It's an extension of this famous principle

"the door to the teenage bedroom is always closed as it is the first space we learn to expand into. within those limits we extend consciousness beyond the skull walls. it is a training programme."
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I would almost like to psychoanalyse you Third. on the basis of your resolute hostility towards any of the positive manifestations of rave culture. You seem determined to boot the fading neon glimmers of peace and love out of the decaying corpse of rave culture. Why is this? Moreover, does it say anything about you? Open question but the orientation of my training and thinking mean that I very much associate stances taken with the person.

I don't object hugely and don't have a dog in the fight re. TAZs but these things were absolutely part of the discourse and lived experience at the time. There was a direct crossover for me from being aware of books like "Gateway of the Heart" and MDMA therapy and the exhilaration experienced taking MD for the first time. This was part of the cultural conversation, it provided some of the energy which drove the culture. It's ahistorical to say otherwise.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I would almost like to psychoanalyse you Third. on the basis of your resolute hostility towards any of the positive manifestations of rave culture. You seem determined to boot the fading neon glimmers of peace and love out of the decaying corpse of rave culture. Why is this? Moreover, does it say anything about you? Open question but the orientation of my training and thinking mean that I very much associate stances taken with the person.

I don't object hugely and don't have a dog in the fight re. TAZs but these things were absolutely part of the discourse and lived experience at the time. There was a direct crossover for me from being aware of books like "Gateway of the Heart" and MDMA therapy and the exhilaration experienced taking MD for the first time. This was part of the cultural conversation, it provided some of the energy which drove the culture. It's ahistorical to say otherwise.

im not against people having a good time but it's been beaten into the ground hasn't it? 87 ibiza boys, Chelsea knobs, (they are still no match for our ailing team) primal scream, BBC 6 music. peace and love is a church now, just like rock and roll. and every church has its ahistorical cannon. for instance noone talks about Dungeons on Holloway road between 89-91, even though in retrospect that was probably one of the most important venues for the coalescing of the hardcore continuum. all the junglists got their breakthrough there, not in the west end! it's a bit weird to think that there wasn't a racial/class division in london clubbing, even in acid house times. it's so convenient to be like MDMA ended football hooliganism but we know the real reason was police getting better at crowd control. and now we can't even stand at games, let alone afford them!
 
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