The Last Rockers on Earth
Sermons! Vol 10: Too Young To Die, Too Late To Live: For Al Lester
Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re showing off what thousands upon thousands of dollars in student loan debt bought us.
I had to read a lot of shit in art school. Not art history shit. Post-structuralist shit. Foucault, Lacan, Derrida…gems like this Judith Butler riddle that makes the rounds:
“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
You said it. Whatever it is that you actually said.
I’m not writing this to brag of any smartness, just pointing out that I have an education— one that I’ll be paying off until I’m burned into a gazillion particles of ash in the crematory, and spread across a variety of locales by trusted friends whom I am banking on to outlive me.
Don’t get it twisted.
I love having the ability to read an artwork. But then again, so much art is created to fit within the framework of how one could read it because we have had to read so much post-structuralist shit. Post structural theory in art has given the lead to the cart, instead of the horse. It prioritizes curators™ and critics, even as it gives artists better tools for decision making—which is what art making is: a series of decisions that result in an outcome that is then defined as art.
In art school, I thought this was so enlightening, but now after years of bleeding so much of my available energy back into the veins of the artworld™ heart that keeps up this systematic pipeline of art students into art laborers, I think I’m back to just appreciating art that I simply find interesting to look at or listen to.
My relationship to art is simple, my relationship to art is complicated. One thing I carry with me, other than a firm philosophical devotion to Guy Debord’s method of the dérive, is Roland Barthes’s punctum, as written about in Camera Lucida (THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS in student loans).
But my ADHD-diagnosed brain1 really can’t be bogged down by details, so for me it’s defined as simply as: a certain point that draws my attention, as a viewer, and as a listener. I mean, that’s all it is, right? That book could’ve been a pamphlet.
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A few weeks back, my friend Al and I were DMing about the modern French Oi band Rixe. I never liked Oi when I was younger. Hated the whole street punk, bonehead three chord singalong stupidity of it. I love Caveman Death Metal, hate Caveman Street Punk.
Probably because most of the guys I knew that were into that music when I was growing up were total fucking idiots. Kitchen staff at the vegetarian restaurant I briefly worked at when I was 19 counted a few—which meant that they could at least hold jobs, but that doesn’t vindicate them enough to move them out of the total fucking idiot category. I think they also reminded me how much I bought in to the punk caricature when I was young, something that embarrasses me to this day.
Al, of the above paragraph fame, is a drummer. His actual fame should be for the band he plays in, Spell, and not for being the topic of a paragraph on a music blog on Substack. He was excited to share that Rixe with me because of the drum machine on Tir Groupé. It reminded me of Métal Urbain, who I think aren’t underrated as much not really known. Classic French punk doesn’t have the best rap, but beyond Plastic Bertrand’s Ça Plane Pour Moi, one can find some pretty good stuff, like Métal Urbain or Les Olvensteins—honestly nothing sounds as punk as slurred filthy French. We also chatted about listening to more punk music during stressful times.
Of course I told Al I’d make him a playlist because that seems to be how I justify avoiding the task of writing or making art—that ADHD again, apparently.
Which brings me back to Barthes, his punctum (that feels dirty to write) and my morgage, ahem, student loan debt.
What I made turned out to be less focused on Métal Urbain education and more directed to punk adjacent music with something that catches and holds my attention, something that sets it apart. Like the drumming on Grim’s Old Town Mall (particularly the ride cymbal in the bridge). Or the bizarre and amazing vocals of Personality Crisis’s Mitch Funk. There are a few songs thrown in just because I love them, like Really Red’s Too Political with it’s opening verse:
Middle class liberals all make me sick
The communist party is a load of shit
The KKK can kiss my ass
They're all dangerous morons tied to the past
Each one tries to dictate their own point of view
Telling everyone their way is true
Each needs a ghetto to put their opponents in
Each needs a ghetto to put their opponents in
NO MORE GHETTOS!
And then there’s the absolutely feral Toronto band S.H.I.T. (Sexual Humans In Turmoil, but also an acronym with no meaning, depending), showing how perfect hardcore is in speaking to any current moment, with the nightmarish Corporate Funded Killing Technology—a song that makes me want to smash every single piece of hardware I own into my skull.
There is a bit of a lyrical thread stringing it along, so as always: it plays best in order and not on shuffle. In the most predictable expectation, this playlist operates like an artwork, but I’d leave that for a curator™ to get into.
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Still not sold on ADHD, even if I have been given a diagnosis years ago. Again, a case of the cart leading the horse. Until there was a framework for it—a framework established around labor, productivity and its relationship to capital—did people think, “Fuck, I’m having such a hard time focusing on the right things, something must be wrong with my brain’s wiring”.
The answer is no. I’d bet a majority of the inventors society hails as brilliant were neurodivergent. So beat it.
Great piece, Jamie! I love this paragraph so much (and, having also gone to art school, it relates deeply!):
"In art school, I thought this was so enlightening, but now after years of bleeding so much of my available energy back into the veins of the artworld™ heart that keeps up this systematic pipeline of art students into art laborers, I think I’m back to just appreciating art that I simply find interesting to look at or listen to."
Having just been to Vancouver and seeing the 'Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s' exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, I think your playlist would have been a great soundtrack, as many of the artists were saying similar things that Really Red was on "Too Political." Substitute, however, some of Really Red's lyrical details with the Eastern Bloc artists' protests aimed at state-sanctioned control, surveillance, and fear, and the similarities are scarily present.
Ultimately, we all just want justice, equality, and to be able to live our fucking lives in peace without fear or oppression (or having to fork out obscene amounts of money to a college so we can wrack our brains over whatever Judith Butler is trying to say!).