Fuck This: Post-Modernism is Over, and Punk Probably Killed it: How My Own Subjective Worldview is Credible. Because I Say So.

“We made a death pact, and I have to accomplish my part of the deal.  Please bury me next to my baby.  Please bury me with my leather jacket, my jeans and my biker boots.

Goodbye.

With love, Sid.”

The best definition of Post Modernism I’ve ever heard didn’t make sense.  That, and it probably wasn’t the same as the best one you’ve ever heard so before you jump down my throat and tell me that I’m wrong and Post-Modernism is something else entirely, allow me to please humor myself and stress the importance that subjectivity played in any Western movement since the mid 1800s, or at least since Schopenhauer.  Stop reading now if you disagree, and visit your local library, or at least Wikipedia.

…

Oh good.  You’re back.  Now you know that the Romantics and the Transcendentalists, the Naturalists, the Symbolists, the Decadents, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, the Modernists, and yes, the Post-Modernists were more concerned with what a person much wiser than I referred to as THE PRIMACY OF SUBJECTIVITY, or THE SUBJECTLESS SUBJECT.  That being said, Post-Modernism is over, and anything we might give an educated guess to be “Punk,” if not the primary subject, is at the very least an accomplice.  Fuck your nostalgia and quit your denial. It’s time to move on to another stage of grief: agreeing with me.

But before I continue to tell you that Post-Modernism is a dead horse with a broken leg that we’re still shooting, let me tell you about the time I heard the best description of Post-Modernism as it was in its heyday: a living horse with a healthy gallop in its hoof.  A very disorganized former writing teacher of mine was having us do a writing exercise in class in which we were to write the opening of a story in the “Post-Modern Style,” or so he called it.  We had been reading Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 under the lens of fiction in terms of humor and colloquialism.  Somebody asked good old Jimmy—my teacher—“what the fuck [writing in a Post-Modern style] meant.”  Paraphrased and condensed, Jimmy said, about Post-Modernism:

“Well you’re trying to discuss meaning, and you’re being bombarded with different things from every direction, trying to make sense of it all, so given all of these things you’re experiencing…and the question of meaning…if it—your experiences—mean anything, and what meaning is, and and if there is meaning at all, and you’re writing about all of them and this gives you the ability to…play.”

Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is a complete attack on meaning, and it becomes pretty damn obvious when he goes from dropping “Cornell University” in the middle of a run-run-run-on sentence about something else entirely, going on and on about a woman named Oedipa and a fictional city in California (San Narciso) and the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) in comparison to human meaning systems (like MATH, AND ALSO POST-MODERNISM or SOCIOPOLITICAL/AESTHETIC MOVEMENTS IN GENERAL), and there’s a whole fucking section in the story where the primary narration cuts out, and Pynchon Narrates a bloody play about the Trystero’s troubled past, start to finish.  That is a Post-Modern novel.  It doesn’t mean anything.  The Trystero and its horn symbol aren’t important even after hilarity ensues in Oedipa‘s efforts to expose them.

Even though The Crying of Lot 49 was enjoyable, for Pynchon himself to go through all the trouble to write out a meaningless play inside a novel about meaninglessness was annoying, and rather than tell you how annoying it felt, I’m going to do the same thing.  I’m going to go through all the trouble and take the next page or two to talk about and how noise is the new folk almost entirely through sensory reactions to Merzbow’s “Minotarus.”  Then you will see how it felt because, in the words of Randy Newman, whom Dunesbury Cartoonist Gary Trudeau quoted at a commencement ceremony for the Muhlenberg College class of 2007, “I just want you to hurt like I do.”  That, and we can thank Punk for making this possible.

Merzbow’s “Minotaurus”: Noise as Folk Music.

For months now, my Seagull has been in open D tuning.  A friend told me it was the most versatile tuning, but tonally, I find it the most beautiful I know so far.  Open G major is great, but in some ways I find it limiting: maybe because I’m relatively familiar with the five-string banjo, so I find myself sticking more to the higher strings with the same banjo chord shapes.  Open D major is similar in that I can use the same chord shapes if I shift up a string, so that the string tuned to the highest D can resonate and drone along with the song I happen to be playing.  Most of the songs I play are folk songs, country songs, or punk rock songs that happen to sound OK when played on an acoustic guitar, but I can also play me some dirty, angry blues in open D.  I’ve always found American roots and folk music—traditional songs, pre-war folk, folk-revival, psychedelic folk, sacred harp, &c—to be the most accessible because in some way they speak to a cultural background of which, as an American, I was previously unaware: I never feel more American than when I can watch YouTube videos of Bessie Jones singing “Little Johnny Brown” to a circle full of children on Rainbow Quest with Pete Seeger.

Chuck Bettis of All Scars, Brown Wing Overdrive, and Metamatics did an improvised noise performance in a class I took on Punk Rock and Noise, and in the brief talk that followed, he (paraphrased), said something like this, “Now I just use whatever I can fit in my backpack for live shows.  If it doesn’t fit, I can’t use it.   I mean, noise is the new folk.  Anybody can make it if they can use a computer.”  Maybe in the Colonial days of early America, when the Colonists would gather at meeting houses and sing sacred harp, or when music was the only real social lubricant—no books except a bible, no phone, no internet, no TV, no movies, no escort services—folk was music that anybody could create.  Folk deviated from popular highbrow music at that time, but still had its roots in singing for Jesus.  Now we are less directly religious when viewed as a main stream, and we have countless distractions that prevent us from music, or at least music that is thought-out without accumulation of capital as an ultimate goal: hear anything of value on Z100 lately?  Me neither.  With noise, we have begun to assess our mindless distractions that permeate our radio frequencies, billboards, televisions, commercial districts, and Internet browsers.

This brings me to Masami Akita who, under the pseudonym Merzbow, is regarded as one of the most important artists within the noise genre. “Minotaurus,” off Hybrid Noisebloom, immediately after having been brought to my attention, threatened to bleed my ear canals like everything else Akita has done.  It is a piece that, despite its disjointed surface, is as carefully orchestrated as any symphony.  To someone with my music taste, training, and background, “Minotaurus” is more or less inaccessible: what tones that do exist in the noise piece are not emanating from banjos, guitars, mandolins, or throats—at least in a way I am familiar.  The piece itself appears to be void of form or construct on first listen.  Because of this, I find it fascinating, and usually choose not to press the “next song” button on my iPod during the ten minutes and forty-four seconds of mayhem that is “Minotaurus.”

What draws me to noise is my roots in hardcore from my angst-filled teenage years, but eventually I got sick of all the politics and then the apathy so I stopped drawing X’s on my hands and picked up my dusty acoustic guitar and started learning songs from which Bob Dylan drew his influences.  Hardcore got boring, and I grew to believe its noisy elements needed a better platform than the ultra sped-up pop and blues models on which punk rock is based.  Early punk is pop on cocaine.  Early hardcore was punk rock on amphetamines.  Merzbow is hardcore on Beethoven.  Without restricting himself to simple models that evolved in the twentieth century, Akita is able to expand his ideas, playing with the idea of noise and its communicative properties.  When I say that Merzbow, specifically “Minotaurus,” is hardcore on Beethoven, I’m not talking about chords or tones: I’m talking about complexity.  On first listen, the sounds like a demolition site in 4/4 time.  Subsequently I find the static, the aggressive changes in pitch and tone, and other elements I have no idea how to even begin to describe are limitless.  Merzbow achieves what Throbbing Gristle explored: complete and total freedom.

“Minotaurus” is universal.  “Minotaurus” is visceral.  “Minotaurus” is abrasive and inexplicable, but somehow catchy.  Maybe it’s that I can count “one and two and three and four” to what might be construed as a beat, or a wrecking ball running around in nylon pants.

Could I do a folk cover of “Minotaurus” next time I’m forgetting a verse to Loudon Wainwright III’s “The Swimming Song,” on stage?  Probably not.  I can’t quite nail the transition from 4/4 construction site to the underwater battle between aliens and mythical creatures in an alternate universe about halfway through.

Whatever the sounds, “Minotaurus” is time (or dimension) travel.  It is omniscience.  On good enough speakers, I might be able to decipher every sound heard throughout history up until the end of the twentieth century.  Just listening to it now, I’ve figured out the following: Jesus Christ was never resurrected, Sir Francis Bacon wrote a lot of tragedies and comedies under the pseudonym William Shakespeare, and the CIA assassinated John F. Kennedy.  Can it also tell the future?  I’m not sure.  My speakers aren’t good enough.  All I know is this: when the song ends, so does time.
When I think about music and its limitations in regards to time and place, I usually reach the conclusion that whatever the style, it is universal in that it will appeal to somebody somewhere because it is a manifestation of a certain part of something.  What I find “Minotaurus” to be doing is capturing the totality of noises, of tones, of music, of people.  American folk music often speaks to the history of common man and his own subjective experience, and while its themes can be appropriated for whatever cause, it mostly concerns a specific type of person or place, be it the open road or ocean, the city or the country.  “Minotaurus,” and most Noise, actively works to collapse any boundaries that may exist, yet its complexities and infinite interpretations allow for common man to connect with one another through capturing the subjective experience through limitless, abrasive din.  This is what “Minotaurus,” says to me: existence is beautiful, and existence is cruel.  Either way, here it is in eleven minutes or less. 

See how annoying that was?  You’re probably not any the wiser for reading it, and you’re going to get even more annoyed because I’ve still got one more thing to say about Thomas Pynchon, and that he is important because he says nothing is important.  The Punks said that in the beginning, except in saying “nothing is important,” they wondered, “what’s the point?” don’t tell me “NO FUTURE” doesn’t ring any bells.  That’s what those crackpots the Sex Pistols used to sing about clad in expensive, offensive, ripped clothing.  I’m not here to discredit the merits of a very important band in the Punk movement in London in the late 1970s, but I still think they’re a bunch of talentless hacks that let Vivien Westwood and Malcolm McLaren throw whatever they wanted on them to cover the translucent skin on their backs, and the heroin tracts all in the name of—and let’s face it here—money.

Now we have Lady Gaga for that.  And Punk hasn’t died; it’s still kicking and screaming, branching out of control like everything else.  The beginning of Punk (even the “circa” is nebulous) is the trunk of the tree, but its roots probably go even further back.  But really, I saw in the woods there was a tree known as the Punk Rock tree (Idowhatiwantus fuckyouis) that had grown so tall that my friends and I could jump from limb to limb and still exclaim, “these branches are all stemming from the same trunk!” Wow!  Sometimes we even jumped from the Punk Rock Tree to surrounding trees.  Landing safely, we said to one another, “well, they’re in the same Genus…”

I had another teacher, not Jimmy.  He tried to explain that Post-Modernism as a movement is, more or less, over.  “Haven’t seen anything since the late 1980s that I’d really call “Post-Modern,” he said one day in class.  While it would be hilarious for me to try and even begin to explain how much less experienced I am in the art of reading than he is, I still consider myself educated and well read enough at this point to justify agreeing with him:  I know about Stephen King, Dorothy Parker, Kurt Vonnegut, Zadie Smith John Irving, Allen Ginsberg, T.S. Eliot, Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Howard Zinn, Carl Sagan, and Jhumpa Lahiri.  Not Jimmy also talked about the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy) in relation to human meaning systems (like CAPITALISM).  He knew about meaninglessness.  He knew about the end of meaning.
You know what is a dumb thing to say?  This: “When you’re dealing with a ‘post-‘ movement, especially something like Post-Modernism, you can’t say anything comes after that.  We can’t get past what has passed the Modern era.”

Okay I get it, the Enlightenment is long dead so we’re now living in a Post-Enlightenment era, but this gives far too much credit to faulty nomenclature, and the people I hear yelling it through megaphones from ivory towers made of plastic are metaphysical Neanderthals.  DON’T THEY REMEMBER THAT BALD ENGLISH GUY WHO WROTE THAT PLAY WHERE JULIET SAYS, “A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD SMELL AS SWEET?”  Well, he knew more then than they ever will now.  All it means is that the person, whoever they may be, credited with coining the “Post-Modern” term is just as much of a Neanderthal.

How do you follow “Modernism?”  How do you follow “Post-Modernism?” I mean it’s true, what do you want to call it, “Contemporary-ism?”  “RIGHTFUCKINGNOW-ism?” Please.  Don’t make me come over there and kick my boots around.  I’m gonna get on Black Berry Messaging and tell Lester Bangs to go buy a pie, go over to your tiny excuse for an apartment, ring your buzzer, walk up the stairs to your apartment, knock on your door, and when you answer, he’ll personally shove it in your face.  That’s right, I own a phone that can summon dead music journalists.

That other teacher said that there was actually a new name being kicked around (just like my boots).  “We’re in a new paradigm.  The INTERCONNECTIVIST paradigm,” or movement or whatever he said.  You don’t think the Internet is playing a huge role in this?  When railroads began connecting coasts in Tolstoy’s time, he hollered (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Change’s a-comin.”  Well if Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet, he certainly said something similar about it.  If Interconnectivity is a credible title, it differs from Post-Modernism in that meaning is suggested.  What are the implications of Otherness?  Of immigration?  Who are you without your cultural upbringing?  We shouldn’t have called it Post-Modernism, because whatever it was is over.
The great thing about Post-Modernism is that it died like it started: nobody can give you an exact year.  Punk certainly had something to do with it.  My good friend Lester Bangs (listed in BBM my contacts as “Lesty”) said of Iggy Pop and the Stooges that they “actively try and make themselves obsolete.”  NOBODY WAS DOING THAT BEFORE, everybody said, so everybody paid attention.  Now we can’t seem to think of anything new, so we just go with old tropes.  Not to say Punk was new, but nobody used to pay attention to those people.  Because before that we didn’t have John Lennon or Mick Jagger or Robert Plant or anybody else who stuffed cucumbers down their tight pants during live performances.  “I don’t need anyone’s approval,” says my friend Chris, who ups the punx even in blinking.

Punk lived to die, because it knew it had no place in society.  I don’t have a better definition of punk than that.  X-head in The Decline of Western Civilization, Part I said he felt alive when he was being violent.  My roommate says he likes going to punk shows and hardcore shows and noise shows because he goes there to be attacked.  Punk (and more so noise) is music that aims to attack, aims to disrupt.  It aims to make the listener feel uncomfortable.  Jack Kerouac and other Post-Modernists, in my experience, would just talk about riding around America and the open road and trains and the neon signs and life after World War II.  Somehow it all was a problem but we didn’t know why.  Punk and Noise and anything similar take those problems and instead of attempting to say, “What’s happening? I feel weird! We’re lost!” redirect these feelings of discomfort and displeasure at their audiences in the name of banding together.  In their live performances, Throbbing Gristle was known to intentionally play dissonant frequencies to irk their audiences, and their masochistic fans absorbed the pain.  There is meaning in that.  There is meaning in the reaction to a meaningless existence.  Post-Modernism highlighted intrinsic meaninglessness in existence. Amphetamine Kerouac and Beardy Ginsberg called it Beat and Buddhism and then went to Boulder.
Punk knew it was meaningless.  There was meaning in that.  Punk wore the problems of Western post-industrialism on its sleeves, and threw it back with distortion and anger.  The string I see linking the Post-Modernists is that they just shunned them altogether.  Would you call punks Post-Modern?  I wouldn’t, but down in non-existent hell (that I picture to be a lot more fun than imaginary heaven), Sid Vicious and Jack Kerouac are drunk at a party and yelling at each other while Satan guffaws from his throne made from carcasses of sacrificed goats.

Punk began around ten years before Post-Modernism “ended,” according to my literature professor, but like Post-Modernism, nobody can really say when punk began, either.  Maybe with Death in the mid 1970s, or with John Sinclair in the late 1960s, but the popular belief is somewhere between 1976 or 1977, depending upon the city.  Maybe Punk just doesn’t exist at all and we just say whatever we want is Punk, but if you had to define something as Punk, why not categorize it as anything that actively tried to attack the status quo of Post-Modern society?  With one nebulous movement, you need another, equally vague category to end it.