RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,256
(subaltern hip-hop redundant)
I always hated those guys
in 'rock' bands (The Geologists?),
who used single names that
weren't really names. Rather
they were actions, qualities, or
whatever oddball message was
meant. Slash. The Edge. Bono.
There are probably 30 others,
not counting the rap and hip-hop
guys, who seem to prefer the
size-nomenclature and volume-
values they use for name - 'Lil
This or Lil That, Big This or
Big That. Never have seen Big
Dodo Brain for any of them,
but it would probably be apt.
-
There's a self-conscious interlude
that everyone goes through, and
eventually comes out of. Usually
it starts at about age 13, and it's
over by 19, one hopes. Though
it doesn't always happen. The
best band name I ever heard,
nicely capturing the actual reality
of that situation, was 'Arrested
Development.'
-
This entire idea of 'rock music'
has very little to do with me, nor
with my personal histories, but
I'm touching on it here as an
adjunct to the entry-channel of
a form of cultural-criticism for
a 'culture' that's never really had
one to boast of - other than the
ephemera of passing fads. In the
entire run of western philosophy,
I don't think America has ever
offered much. (Really, what's the
old America that gets celebrated?
Elvis? Josie and the Pussycats?
The Jackson Five?
-
Edmund Wilson said (1953, at
Princeton University), said: "a '
Prophet is someone who calls
people to their defining, truest,
deepest, or most resistant values:
that is, those values hardest, or
least possible, to live up to." He
was lecturing about Lincoln and
the literature that grew out of
the Civil War, I don't think
we've had any of that in a
very long time. Pop drivel and
disposable music (words) just
repeat and reinforce the status
quo, reflecting the usual hedonism
and materialism which drives
commerce. When I first arrived
in NYC, that drivel was rampant.
Peaches and Herb; Strawberry
Alarm Clock. Eventually the
best thing I ever hear was 'The
Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,'
which at least had a basis in
a geographic reality. Not that
anyone cared.
-
I eventually tired. Yes, even I
got sick of girls' bare breasts and
the rampant nudity that passed for
Off-Broadway drama. Sleeping in
doorways, churches and missions,
and dining out of dumpsters, wore
thin, and quickly. I found myself
amidst a new place of decadent
nothingness, and little made sense.
A poor boy from the provinces, me
facing bombast : Songstresses
in denial about their real issues,
and toad-men, prancing about as
if no one else in then world ever
had a penis before. The culture
was a corrupted maze of sickness,
and people were freely handing
out more. was, to the mind, what
the AIDS crisis was to the body,
25 years later.
-
'The prophetic figure may seem
to predict or call forth the future,
because he or she embodies his or
her place and time - his or her
commonality, and all those who
make it up. The prophet looks at
the present and the past, at promises
made and promises broken - and
asks what fate is appropriate for the
commonality. More than that, the
prophet may embody both the promise
and the betrayal, embody the fate
of his or her nation - 'nation' because
for better or for worse the idea of
Prophecy has been bound up with
the idea of a nation, a commonality,
a people who are not like everybody
else, ever since prophecy emerged
from the mouths of Isaiah and
Jeremiah and Amos. 'You only have
I known, of all the families of the
earth'. When the prophet speaks
to the nation, the nation speaks
to itself.'
-
All jumbled up as some of that may
be, it fairly well summons the sense
of absence or loss we now inhabit,
and that I then only saw beginning.
We abide by the void we've created.
A fellow may call himself Bono, as
an instance, yet inhabit some fleeceland
of pretension that never really owns
up to its truer qualities: professing
empathy while dicing wealth; to the
effect that a person just gets sick
of seeing him and having to hear
his awful, unguided, gibberish.
Any of them and all; the same.
-
It no longer matters why the building
now being eaten by termites was
ever built in the first place.
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