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Alright, so reading all of this over again I think I may have jumped the gun. This isn't so much about the bands themselves, but larger societal issues. You have some valid points. I, too, abhor it when people think their protest is substantive and worthwhile simply by virtue of its existence. Some political groups in my school have "subversive art" listed in their description.. which seems really depraved because it valorizes the reactionary as the best form and assumes a need to constantly be reactionary. Shouldn't one aspire to a status quo where the need for being reactionary isn't there? Art with a rhetorical-political basis shouldn't be judged any higher or lower than art without this kind of motivation, but the art alone isn't going to bring about political change.
The stuff about individualism interests me, are you are a Marxist? Some would say it is a myth to assume some kind of self-autonomy in art or any other aspect of life when one is always going to be firmly tied to a class positioning, and that configuring oneself as an "outsider" is a bourgeois notion. There is a constant fetishization of the "outsider"/underground. I think that's why CASSETTE TAPES have come back and people are churning out 10 billion subpar noise releases with their pet project bands. I wouldn't mind this as much if people didn't attach their outmoded notions of authenticity to it.
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