roachboy

i watched "we jam econo" last night---a documentary about the minutemen (you know, d. boon, mike watt, george hurley).
it was made in 2005.
d. boon was killed in 1985. december 22, actually.
i came late to the minutemen, but double nickels on the dime is still an amazing record.
anyway, i mention this for a couple reasons, which i am making up as i go.

turns out that these gentlemen are the same age as i am so watching the film was also kinda like watching a generational piece.

mike watt said something on the order of having been listening to captain beefheart and the stooges in high school, so in 1976--when uk punk broke--he wondered about the punk "rebellion"---"what's the big deal?--these others guys did it already..."

later, watt went on at some length about the effect that d. boone's mom had on the band in her insistence that they invent their own activites, make their own music, not copy, learn for themselves.

you provide too much structure, he said, you create a generation of robots.

and he talked about just going your own way, doing it, and continuing to do it, fuck what other people think---which made sense in a new way (to me at least) of the minutemen's politics. and the difficulties of going your own way--little symbolic moments like opening for black flag and getting spit on by the audience of punk "rebels" because they weren't "punk enough" or "punk" in the right way...

so argument number one: we operate in a smothering culture of copies.
if there's a problem with "the kids" it's servility, the willingness to subordinate themselves to models, to conflate copying and thinking.
trick is that there's nothing in itself problematic about copying---keeping with "we jam econo"--the minutemen covered blue oyster cult and creedence tunes for example---its the relation that you imagine obtains between what you are doing and what is. if you do more inventive stuff and then cover something, it's not the same as making yourself into a copy of what already is.

thing is---linking this to the op--that the culture of consumer servility isn't new--it's what in the main americans confuse with freedom.

and there's an interesting segment in "we jam econo" during which watt and d. boone talk briefly about an imaginary alternate future in which minutemen music was mainstream and so was the ur-copy of a host of sub-minutemen.

kids are not encouraged to take chances. they aren't given the tools to think independently. creative work has to be safe. it has to be "normal"--it has to fit somewhere. but this fitting somewhere enables folk to slot what they are doing straight into something that already is, and to use that framework to simplify the process of considering what you do, why you do it. it truncates process. to my mind, the major result is a strange inflexibility in thinking. it gets paradoxical when groups of the inflexible band around a style and understand themselves as being "in revolt"...


in an interview, d. boone said that he felt that there should be bands in every apartment block, clubs on every corner where musicians could play, record labels in every neighborhood--cultural production should be radically decentralized, kids (and everyone else) encouraged to go their own way, get the chance to play, acquire discipline on their own terms---and not to think in terms of being "stars"-----but do what you love in your way. do something that seems new to you. fuck what other people think. if they like it, cool. it they dont, it doesnt matter. ultimately, it's not for them.

i graduated high school in 1976.
it was already like this.
i teach in universities and see lots of good kids. good smart kids, kids who contradict every last generalization that has run through this thread about "the youth of today"....but i also see that their modes of expression--and worse of thinking--are off the rack, chosen like jackets from a range of pre-fabricated alternatives, and that they have trouble getting their heads around the fact of this and imagining how they--or anyone--could be otherwise.

i think that it is wrong to imagine that revolt happens amongst 18 year-olds.
my experience teaching...and being in the world myself--showed me that working your way out from under the smothering effects of a culture of copying takes time, and that more radical stuff happens as folk figure their way out. i also think that there is no particular time-line nor is there a particular way to move through to get to a different relation to process.

hell, the minutemen were collectively there when i was still foundering about in new hampshire. they were there in their early 20s and i think in many ways i'm only just figuring out what they already knew and i'm--well--older. and i think that's the case because the way out is in the doing--you can't sit around watching fucking television or consuming shit and wait for someone to hand you a template.

the most efficient form of domination is convincing people--particularly without ever having to say as much--that they should dominate themselves.

folk dont take themselves seriously, they dont take their process seriously, they dont see thinking as a basic activity that opens up options for how you are in the world--they think it's work, something imposed on them from outside--and when they figure out that this is auto-lobotomy time, often they dont have the tools to do much about it. this simply because they dont understand how much is in the doing, how much is in projects---they miss the simple fact that thinking is a form of creative work (it must not be confined, as it is in academicworld, to generating commentary on texts by legitimate Authorities)--they---no we----undervalue creative work and overvalue it at the same time--they think the idea of doing such work is to be a star and quit your day gig----when its an end in itself. it's the process that matters. it's the doing that is important.

if there's a single cause, i think it's in the simple fact that education is social reproduction.
we have an educational system that at every point de facto imposes an image of a dysfunctional social order--in the widest sense---as an image of a natural order.
we allow a system that is geared around fear of change to stamp us.
we look to that system to legitimate us.

and we collectively reap what we sow.

i dont think there is particular drift amongst "the youth of today" into any heightened state of mediocrity--we're already there and if we stumble across a path that seems to lead us out from under it, we are working our way along that path. same as it ever was. but to the extent that the servility of auto-emulation runs deeper, glen brown has it right:

you better watch out
you better watch out
the youth of today
will be the youth of tomorrow

except it applies to ourselves as much as to "kids these days."

it's easy peasy to pass general judgments on others.
there's some line that jesus said about the mote in your eye.
it's a good line.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite