Punk Rock Mafothers
Caryl Phillips reveals blind spots of investing
in solely economy-based means of social restorative potentials (The European Tribe 127). Perhaps, it is
not official politics, but something that can be characterized as a sense of
the era bringing about a cluster of issues that started burgeoning at the onset
of postvictorian / postedwardian world and were later to be further
transfigured into the polemic constituent of and shaped by cultural vocabulary
of the twentieth century. In Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (1986), Terry Eagleton focuses on the peculiar
dialogues between modernism and postmodernism to portray an aspect of the
modern day discussion:
From modernism proper, postmodernism
inherits the fragmentary or schizoid self, but eradicates all critical distance
from it […] From the avant-garde, postmodernism takes the dissolution of art
into social life, rejection of tradition, an opposition to ‘high’ culture as
such, but crosses this with the unpolitical impulses of modernism […] An
authentically political art in our own time might similarly draw upon both
modernism and the avant-garde, but in a different combination from
postmodernism. (146-7)
Again, rather than participating in the
acceptance of a distorted projection of how ideas can relate to cultural flows,
Eagleton proposes “the emergence of a
transformed rationality” (Against
the Grain 147) as a means of
solidifying the conviction in the vibrancy of roots. Although such an insistence
might invoke an inclination contrary to docile, amorphous polyphony of cultural
vocabularies, it is important to acknowledge its focus being on criticizing hypocrisy
and superficiality. Accordingly, in his book Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory From 1950 to the Early 21st
Century (2010), Nicholas
Birns points out deceitful streaks within “an
ethic of indiscriminate tolerance” (317)
and “easy pluralities” (317). Likewise, in Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections
on the God Debate (2009), Terry Eagleton observes:”A culture which
results from the active participation of all its members is likely to be more
mixed and uneven than a uniform culture which admits new members only on its
own terms. In this sense, equality generates difference” (153-4).
How repulsively uniforming
individualism is. How incomparable with its linguistic false pair. How,
conversely, unity resonates in the key of individuality. Distinctive enough to
cleanse the blurring boundaries threatening to sweep the distinction between
the very notions of difference and sameness. McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday
Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011):”The
twenty-first century is the culmination of two forms of individualism. In the
first, individuals are all the same; in the second, they are all different. The
first is classically bourgeois, the second distinctly bohemian” (11).
A typical “rationalization” of such an
unfolding of historical narratives is an explanation based on the belief in
revengeful historical shifts and turns. However, such a personified causality
infused in historical flows does little good to history and is even less
beneficial for either storytellers and / or audience of such tales of history. McKenzie
Wark presents to the reader kindred resistance:”Capitalism or
barbarism, those are the choices. This is an epoch governed by this blackmail:
either more and more of the same, or the end times. Or so they say. We don’t
buy it” (The Beach Beneath the Street:
The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International 1).
We
don’t buy the cacophony aiming to delude one to think that there is no
disparity between the words difference and sameness. We don’t buy cultural
realities imposing on one a deceitful idea of one-way communication being a
proper articulation of fruitful exchange. We do not accept usurpation. Neither
do we agree to be persuaded in its skillfully variable verbal mimicry. Terry
Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays
1975-1985:
The
depthless, styleless, dehistoricized, decathected surfaces of postmodern
culture are not meant to signify an alienation, for the very concept of
alienation must secretly posit a dream of authenticity which postmodernism
finds quite unintelligible. Those flattened surfaces and hollowed interiors are
not ‘alienated’ because there is no longer any subject to be alienated and
nothing to be alienated from, ‘authenticity’ having been less rejected than
merely forgotten. (132)
Among
the sounds constitutive of Temple’s documentary is punk rock. Once a musical
and subcultural vocabulary frequently perceived as a genuinely novel expressive
mode, which some of its factions claim to be, it can be more comprehensively
and adequately understood in the context of its constructive dialogue with the
legacy from the past. The conversation between and among fresh, highly
energized, socially and politically engaged, emotionally charged, lyrically
laced punk rock sound on the one hand and, on the other, reggae, ska, dub, rock steady, pop,
rockabilly, and other interlocutors belonging in countless genres speaks for
itself and is a truly genuine specimen of hybrid narratives engendered in the
intersection of the time axes within the communication channel as noisy as it
gets, and yet, quite clearly articulating agendaless politics firmly anchored
in powerless strength.
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