Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock 'n' Roll Group

by Ian F. Svenonius

So, like medieval flagellants, we should suffer for our art? It’s easy enough to say, “We shall suffer in the interim for the sake of our future glory.” Suffering is perhaps second only to righteous indignation as the most enjoyable pastime for mankind—if one adopts the burden willingly and for a cause, no matter how abstract, pitiful, or lost that cause is. Ask any junkie, mom, monk, fakir, kamikaze pilot, or “lone-nut” gunman. They revel in their wretchedness, misery, and isolation. But group-making isn’t the same as simple martyrdom. Nihilism—described by Nietzsche as “despair of meaninglessness” where “everything is permitted”—though an intrinsic element of group-making, is never its primary ingredient. The group must—at least at its inception—be Apollonian. It must build the foundations for the ruins that future species will gawk at in bewilderment.

Politics don’t require talent, intelligence, or good looks. In the beginning, you won’t even need to own a suit. Just announce some “provocative” (creationist, bigoted, or otherwise reactionary) vitriol into a microphone, and you’ll attract financial backers who will arrange television appearances, fundraising events, and bespoke finery. Your notoriety will be more long lasting and more pervasive than any fame you could achieve in music. Truly, someone like Donald Rumsfeld, a mediocre government functionary with no discernible talent, intelligence, or charm, is a greater international celebrity than rocker Mick Jagger, who has reached the apex of his craft. Rumsfeld, despite being a has-been, is known in every corner of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa for his insanity and arrogance, while Jagger is admired by a mere couple hundred million music enthusiasts, huddled mostly in the first world.

Now, the modern rock ’n’ roll group is as disconnected from what was once music as their Dada forebears were from what had been art. But they don’t share the self-awareness of their modernist art-world predecessors. The rock ’n’ roll group, being a creation of capitalism, has been forbidden any explicit ideology beyond an institutionalized nihilism or a vague contrariness, and thus it lives in a fog, semiconscious of what it is attempting, oblivious to the great struggle of which it is a part. The groups shuffle about like would-be Incroyables and Merveilleuses, partly ashamed of their endeavor, partly smug, with an inherited and wholly misplaced air of elitism. They despise the squares they endure each day. But why? What is it about rock ’n’ roll—which seems to have failed utterly in its promise to deliver humanity from bourgeois hypocrisy and tedium—that affords them this conceit? No one knows anymore. And yet they intuitively sense its larger meaning, its vast potential. Even the most illogical and incurious understand that rock ’n’ roll is altogether different from music. They know that rock ’n’ roll is tribal, the group being a commercial version of the neighborhood street clique with the same self-aggrandizing, illusory worldview and paranoiac obsessions. They recognize that the group is familial, a radical restructuring of the family unit from the nuclear model to something more akin to a hunter-gatherer tribe or a Stalin-era collectivist farm. And they know that it...

Once again, as far as membership, you will have to make do with the raw material you are presented with. These wretches might seem like nincompoops, squares, dodos, or goofs. It doesn’t matter. They are lumps of clay, and you must mold them as you see fit. Don’t get discouraged. People are quite plastic and can be bent and twisted to a surprising degree to make them conform to your vision. You are Dr. Frankenstein to your group’s monster. Utilize the lightning. These prospective members might just need an extra jolt or three. But remember: being a single parent is a lot of work, especially when one is playing God and engineering life itself. You will choose the members to complement each other, just as Frankenstein chose limbs—an arm here, a torso there—until the creature was complete. As with the famous doctor, your offspring might end up in various compromised positions—playing rough with children, burning to death in an abandoned windmill, floating alone on a boat into oblivion, and so on. Whoever they turn out to be, you must prize them and treat them with respect until such a time that you end the group relationship. Don’t cuckold your group like some discontent Madame Bovary, or walk a dozen paces apart from them at the truck stop.

Since the rock ’n’ roll group was a child of the Cold War, proliferated internationally to serve as a weapon of propaganda by the capitalist countries, it’s no surprise that the use of portmanteau and neology in ’50s and ’60s rock ’n’ roll descends from its use in the US and USSR’s militaries—particularly their intelligence apparatuses. The Soviets started futurizing their language in this manner immediately after their revolutionary triumph, peppering their terminology with words like “agitprop,” “gulag,” “spetsnaz,” and “Smersh” (the organizational precursor to the KGB, its name was derived from the words “smert spionam” or “death to spies”). Soviet ideologues insisted on the “scientific” correctness of socialism, and were convinced of technology’s ability to deliver not just the USSR a victory against their imperialist tormentors but also mankind from its woes. Their language reflected this approach to nature and the world in its modernistic word-mashing. “Psychotronics” was the name the Soviets gave to the study of mind control through hypnosis, suggestion, linguistics, and parapsychology (ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy, etc). When discovered by the CIA, it led to great fear in the agency of a “psychic warfare gap.” Since the Cold War was a competition of concepts and style, as well as propaganda and military hardware, the US Army therefore followed suit.

This kind of neologistic wordplay is considered by psychologists to be indicative of psychotic mental illness, such as schizophrenia, or a sign of a severe brain injury. Since rock ’n’ roll performance is both celebration and playacting of irrational, schizophrenic, manic-depressive, and other “crazy” behavior (James Brown’s “I’ll Go Crazy,” Buddy Guy’s “Crazy Love,” the Shirelles’s “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”), this mimicry of mental illness/military linguistics is no coincidence.

While in the service, the rock ’n’ roller was schooled in sociopathic behavior including mass murder, dousing humans with napalm, dropping bombs on villagers, and eradicating personal feelings of empathy. Simultaneously, he was trained to rely on various amphetamines and sedatives to stay awake endlessly for “maneuvers” or to sleep when convenient. The soldier had to be a bloodthirsty death machine, and his trainers used the latest in psychological and pharmaceutical science to transform him appropriately. US soldiers were in a state of psychotic hallucination for much of their service terms, whether they were stationed overseas or not, and were often used as guinea pigs for the latest opiates, psychedelics, and synthetic cocaine derivatives. When they were discharged, these government-made Franken-soldiers with their army-instituted addictions and dismantled morality created the drug culture which defined the ’60s (at least in the popular imagination).

Indeed, the content of much rock ’n’ roll music can be seen as a traumatized recital of drill shouts. The nonsense, vulgarity, alienated sexuality, and shrill insanity of much rock ’n’ roll is a flashback or therapeutic attempt at recovery from martial abuse. The hierarchical, patriarchal, and pitiless operational model of early rock ’n’ roll is learned behavior from these repressed origins as well.

Groupie-ism was a preview of the dismantling of prostitution and other independent means of earning a wage under advanced capitalism. Just as the groupies gave it away for free, so would the punk bands of the next generation insist on playing for nothing. Punk groups and their enthusiasts created a model of free labor—based on enthusiasm for a cause—that has become much copied by corporations in the modern age. These businesses convince interns and web types to pitch in labor unpaid for the “community” (e.g., Huffington Post) while their venal bosses rake in millions.

And yet there is no actual demand for this world of sewage. Furthermore, the commissioners of the new gum wrappers/condominiums/automobiles don’t believe they are improving things. They understand very well the shock and horror they inflict on the public. They design this horror purposefully, in fact, with the express intent of manufacturing nostalgia. Nostalgia for a bygone era and a lost sensibility. But to invoke such longing, they must first exterminate the prevailing sensibility—suddenly, violently, and in cold blood. Why? Because nostalgia—the longing for the familiar—is the most potent of all emotions. As such, it is an invaluable asset to be manipulated by the ruling clique for social control. But our natural nostalgia—for dead relatives, one’s own youth, social circumstances which inevitably change—is too personal to be of use to the elites. In order to manipulate nostalgia, the ruling class needs to control what it is, and therefore they manufacture it out of commodities, the availability and appearance of which they determine via their capital and ownership of the means of production.

The flag waving and army worship which are fixtures of the modern landscape are really an enactment of some fairy tale told by Fascists about how people belonging to the “Greatest Generation” were all jingoistic, self-sacrificing patriots. But, in fact, the so-called Greatest Generation was better read and therefore more politically radical, cynical, and diverse than today’s USA, which resembles a drugged-up, sci-fi, mind-controlled, mass-hypnosis nightmare. Unlike that bygone time, there is no longer any Communist Party, CND, Esperanto, or actual political diversity of any kind. Unions are powerless and normal intelligence is considered a malignancy, hopelessly nebbishy, and a fatal impediment to one’s sex life. Despite their relative literacy and idealism, though, the Greatest Generation were a segregationist lot who unleashed the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, and the rape of Nanking—to name a few of their greatest hits. Just imagine what today’s illiterate degeneration is capable of.