Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock 'n' Roll Group

by Ian F. Svenonius

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...