the mute article also got me thinking about derrida's ideas about improvisation which you can see here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT106qB65-A
'It's not easy to improvise, it's the most difficult thing to do. Even when one improvises in front of a camera or microphone, one ventriloquizes or leaves another to speak in one's place the schemas and languages that are already there. There are already a great number of prescriptions that are prescribed in our memory and in our culture. All the names are already preprogrammed. It's already the names that inhibit our ability to ever really improvise. One can't say what ever one wants, one is obliged more or less to reproduce the stereotypical discourse. And so I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation. But always with the belief that it's impossible. And there where there is improvisation I am not able to see myself. I am blind to myself. And it's what I will see, no, I won't see it. It's for others to see. The one who is improvised here, no I won't ever see him.'
JACQUES DERRIDA
UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEW, 1982
and this explains why thurston moore churns out so many noise releases, because he thinks he is doing something artistic, but he is just the guitar hero of noise. he's a post modern version of an 80's gtr god who still gets to fretwank pointlessly because it's apparently arty. when kim gordon sings about getting her poem published in good housekeeping it's the height of conservatism because its making an irrelevant detail "art" simply because it is art. she's saying that this is important because you don't know how important it could be too me, so don't dare try to impose on me, stay away and let me bask in my individualism. sy are never really influenced by anything, they are immersing themselves into an underground that is never doing anything new, only sylistically altering itself because new people are doing the same thing as someone else already did. i think sy copied this kind of approach from the fall. when they say that they are releasing an album on starbuck's because it's "perverse" who are they fooling? they are only saying that so we know they are at least pretending to have some sort of individual autonomy and freedom that is supposedly represnted in their music when in actual fact they are just americans grabbing whatever oppurtunity for cash they can just like the rest of us. as if it matters. some punk hates the corporations and refuses to have anything to do with them? so fucking what? what do they care? it doesn't affect them at all. its not as if he's going to take them down or his money doesnt end up back with them anyway. the illusion that is being shattered is that the punk form of expression is somehow "pure" when it is just reactionary. when thurston says that the republicans "refuse to listen" to his and ecstatic peace's protest art he is only trying to keep alive the dead idea that this form of protest actually matters anymore. he knows noone in power will take it into consideration, he is simply trying to keep alive the idea that this protest matters simply because it is being done. it's the approach that "well things might be fucked up but we can at least protest and prove to ourselves that we care even though we have no interest in changing anything". it's trying to make the point that "you can take away our freedom but you can't take away our right to express artistically that we feel our freedom has been taken away and we don't like it but we don't want to do anything to change it". because nowadays freedom is seen as something that has to be imposed rather than just a description of an actuality that can only be changed by outside forces. oh please america make me free i'm too afraid to do it by myself! we are protesting impotently because our real beliefs lie in narcissitic individualism not actual freedom. this is why the idea of punk is more important than the reality of what punk ever was. it requires an individual to experience it and it feeds off the idea of a constantly regenerating individualism but it will only ever lead the individual in question to the point of "well im killing myself but at least I'M killing myself!" this is where it lead me anyway. and i think it has a lot to do with peoples idea of god and the increase in athiesm in society. the idea that there is no god because god doesn't exist leads people to think they are the only thing in the universe, the problem is that they are concieving of god existentially. by definition god is not existential. he has to be beyond existance. but people conceive of the modern world as being completly created by and composed by individuals, far too many for them to know. punk seemed to be a reaction to this, the idea that the individual is generated by the society and so each of us can be and do whatever the hell we want because we can act as if there is another individual that we never really know or meet but who all our actions are being done for. this is the distance between the performer and the fans, they act as if they are trying to enlighten somebody and spread some message to someone in order to wake someone up. but actually they are just enshrining their own individualism. its very appealing. it's the attitude that if there is no god (existentially that is) then i die alone but i can at least die alone by myself if that makes sense. punk should be remembered as a very athiest movement, it may not be so clear that that was the case now but it definitly was for people.
but what is so spectacular about this punk attitude is that in spite of any social reality it can still sneer and lead you to a stance away from the world and in (semi illusiory) opposition to it and this can open up a kind of narcisstic drive that can vindicate your decisions retroactively and give you a healthy distance from the world. it opens up a way of evaluating the motives of others actions from a standpoint that isn't morally superior but marks you out in relation to others and helps you stay true to the parts of your soul that otherwise would get lost in the milleu of all the other reasonable rational realities of other people. you would just drift along and loose your dreams without it. but maybe this just reflects our growing knowledge of the frightening reality that the self is increasingly becoming a commodity itself. maybe this was foreseen by the punks and they tried desperately to regain some control over it. certainly the state we are in today seems to dwell from the corruption of punk but also its weird kinda fufillment. all the difficult bits have been cut out and sanitised so it is crucilly important to remember it for what it really was and what was really being said at the time instead of just a vague palate of fashion styles. i think the parts of punk (mostly the lyrics) that are important are the ones that we mostly oblivious to and forgetting about. the ones that make us the most uncomfortable.
but you can see the blatant bias in this post because some of my criticisms of sy can equally be levelled at the fall. and there's a lot more i havent said about the fall that shows them up as well. it's just that i still care about the fall's music because it can still have an affect on me. whereas sy are just about keeping up with the latest so called art trends.