Next time you see a commercial with one of your favorite band's songs in it, just tell yourself, "cool, a band I really like made some money and now I can probably look forward to a few more records from them."
It's impossible to be a sell out in a capitalist society. You're only a winner or a loser. Either you've found a way to crack the code or you are struggling to do so. To sell out in capitalism is basically to be too accommodating, to not get what you think you deserve. In capitalism, you don't get what you think you deserve though. You get what someone else thinks you deserve. So the trick is to make them think you are worth what you feel you deserve.
which might seem as much realistic as it is terrible until you see exactly what he means by "winners" and "losers":
The thing is, I like capitalism. I think it's an interesting challenge. It's a system that rewards the imaginative and ambitious adults and punishes the lazy adults.
let us henceforth call this "barnesian economic theory." my immediate response, of course, is to call this sentiment crypto-fascist. barnes' capitalist economic determinism is reminiscent of adorno and marcuse's writings on the totalising regime of capitalism in dialectic of enlightenment and one-dimensional man, respectively. only, for adorno and marcuse, there are always aporias (and, of course, they didn't "like" capitalism or tout its survival of the fittest rhetoric). as with benjamin, there is always hope, a way to resist the totalising structure of capitalist society; "every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter." neo-frankfurt school theorist peter sloterdijk was more pessimistic (though his theory of kynicism also resisted the immutability of capitalism's total structure) and barnesian economic theory is most of all reminiscent of what sloterijk characterised as "the age of cynical reason." for sloterijk, late-capitalism marks the point at which capitalist consciousness ceases to be false consciousness, or, rather, at which it becomes an "enlightened false consciousness": the subject of late-capitalism knows capitalism and his/her alienation for what it is, but, instead of being compelled by this knowledge to revolutionary action, s/he contents him/herself with this knowledge qua knowledge. which is to say that the pursuit of this knowledge, while potentially useful and enlightening, turns out to be immobilising and a fool's errand. kevin barnes is that fool.
one response to barnes might be that his premises are all wrong. and this might be the one salvagable thing about barnesian economic theory, that its complete misunderstanding of what punk rock is begs for a critique that sets the record straight. barnes on punk rock:
The pseudo-nihilistic punk rockers of the 70's created an impossible code in which no one can actually live by. It's such garbage. The idea that anyone who attempts to do anything commercial is a sell out is completely out of touch with reality. The punk rock manifesto is one of anarchy and intolerance. The punk rockers polluted our minds. They offered a solution that had no future. [...] Maybe the punk rock ethos made sense for the "no future" generation but it doesn't make sense for me.
so, it seems, barnes has reduced punk rock to a conflation of "anarchy in the u.k." and crass. there was a utopianism to crass (and the crass commune) that can't be translated to bands like the sex pistols, who sought to transform society through mass media. to put it vulgarly, crass' project to was to teach everybody that they could live in little crass communes outside of advanced capitalist society. in the crass commune, presumably, one could escape capitalist alienation, harness one's labour power, and live in harmonious art-into-life labour-praxis. the sex pistols were something different altogether. but these two poles of critical punk rock illuminate what barnes is really talking about, which is the american independent punk rock puritanism (think: fugazi) that claims total autonomy from advanced capitalism (though, of course, most of its proponents know this to be an unreachable ideal and aim for pragmatic, ethical compromises within advanced capitalist society). for these people (including the elephant 6 collective and other of the athens pop scenesters who were of montreal's milieu when they emerged a decade ago), participation was the key point of punk rock. their resistance to the music industry/big media concerned its blocking of what they felt to be substantive and participatory real social relations, things like pen pals, house shows, mix tapes, and all of the other unofficial punk rock culture that bands like of montreal (and the shins, the decemberists, death cab for cutie, etc. etc.) have long left behind. this is what kevin barnes has to answer to — and what he refuses to answer to.
but, you know, i like of montreal. when they emerged a decade ago, the gay parade was one of my favourite records ever. they wrote some great songs in those early days. their recent stuff is less thrilling to me, but i'm not picking on them the way i pick on those aforementioned shins, decemberists, and death cabs for cutie. unlike them, there is nothing about of montreal's music that is intrinsically morally reprehensible. this intrinsic moral reprehensibility is the crux of barnes' definition of selling out:
Selling out, in an artistic sense, is to change one's creative output to fit in with the commercial world. To create phony and insincere art in the hopes of becoming commercially successful. I've never done this and I can't imagine I ever will.
that's what the shins, et alia did: dumb down the (arguably vital) music of their subcultures and offer it for mainstream consumption and television advertisements. and here we get to that other thing about big media and television commercials, and this is irrespective of artistic integrity. kevin barnes the artiste must be — and demands to be — separated from kevin barnes the businessman. me, i don't care. i have long since given up my investment in their music as the cost of doing business. two years ago, i wrote this about colin meloy's own mea non culpa concerning selling out:
it's not that the decemberists are betraying indiedom and i'm not lashing at them for selling out. to quote brent dicrescenzo, "You guys, just sell out! Independent music does not need you." i could care less what label releases the decemberists' boring music. and if you guys have college loans to pay off, if you want to buy houses, if you want to put away money for your kids' college funds, if you always wanted to do blow between lobster courses in five star restaurant bathrooms, then go ahead and grab that brass ring. what do i care about your lives and your motivations? if time/warner university approached me and offered to pay me $500,000 per annum to study at their research institution, i'd consider it. i have to pay for my own health insurance too, you know. but admit it, colin. don't sign with the man and lie through your fucking teeth about the untenability of staying independent. it's an insult to the very community that almost thirty years of punk rockers have been building which allowed you, colin meloy, to quit your dayjob and which put you in the position to sign a lucrative recording contract with capitol records. this — and not selling out — deserves an unironically heartfelt fuck you.
the circumstances aren't the same here, but there are some striking similarities. there are also some striking similarities here to dave eggers' infamous selling out is for lovers essay. i took on that particular bit of drivel two and a half years ago, with all the juvenile rage and easy critiques that come with a blog entry that basically served to say, "shit dude, i got into my top choice Ph.D. program. cum feel my mental muscle." to colin meloy and dave eggers: i don't care. i don't care about them at all, nor do i care about their cred.
to kevin barnes, well, i was once a pretty big fan. but, for all the real social relations that the band once stood for, that's not what of montreal is anymore. my girlfriend's ringtone is the keyboard line from "heimdalsgate like a promethean curse"; that's the kind of band they are now, the kind whose c.d. you buy at the store or whose mp3s you download. kevin barnes isn't going to play in my basement, he wouldn't put up my (hypothetical) band at his house if i were on tour and passing through where he lives, he isn't going to trade 7" singles with me, and... well, as we've seen, he's okay with telling his fans how to act. he's part of that traditional performer/audience divide that the athens pop scene of montreal came from sought to eliminate. and, so, he believes that it's his god-given right to make a living as a professional indie-rocker. maybe it is; i don't know. i was having this very conversation this summer with a bitter ex-indie popster who (gasp) had to have a job while making her "art." barnes' take:
Why commercialize yourself? In the art industry, it's extremely difficult to be successful without turning yourself into a cartoon. Even Hunter S. Thompson knew this. God knows Duchamp and Warhol knew it. Some artists are turned into cartoons and others do it themselves. I prefer to do it myself, at least then I can control how my cock is photographed. Why should it be considered such an onerous thing to view the production of art as a job? To me, the luckiest people are the ones who figure out a way to earn a living doing what they love and gain fulfillment from. Like all things in this life, you have to make certain sacrifices to get what you want. At least most of us do. If you're not some trust-fund kid or lotto winner, you've got to slave it out everyday. People who wanna be artists have the hardest time of it 'cause we are held up to these impossible standards. We're expected to die penniless and insane so that the people we have moved and entertained over the years can keep us to themselves. So that they can feel a personal and untarnished connection with our art. The second we try to earn a living wage or, god forbid, promote our art in the mainstream, we are placed under the knives of the sanctimonious indie fascists. Unfortunately, there isn't some grand umbrella grant that supports indie rockers financially and enables us to exist outside of the trappings of capitalism.
well kevin, as you said, we make sacrifices. not all of us are lucky enough to do what we love for a living (though, admittedly, i am). some of us do what we love on our own time. i'm not going to go all art-into-life on him and i'm not going to moralise and say that punk rock shouldn't be a profession. i will, however, remind him that some people operate on another level and that maybe shitting on them because some kids are calling him a sellout is not the most productive thing to do.
11/14/07
AUX ARMES, CITOYENS
granddaughter of jacques parisot (not jacques parizeau):
The head of the [country's] main employers' association, MEDEF, called the strike embarrassing to France's global image. Laurence Parisot urged the French to "abandon this taste, which I think is a bit masochist, for conflict, for struggle."
my last entry was about benjamin buchloh indirectly calling joseph beuys a crypto-fascist by comparing him to the italian futurists. that said, i want to embed two things. the first is a well-known and oft-reproduced photograph by ryan mcginley.
the second is berek, a video depicting a game of tag played in a gas chamber by polish video artist artur zmijewski, whose work i haven't formed a solid opinion of, though i can safely characterise it as, to borrow a line from buchloh, marked by a return of the repressed "encountered in or projected onto culture." but the playfulness, what to do with it?
the question is of priority, and whether to look to mcginley to illuminate zmijewski's playfulness, or to look to zmijewski to uncover something unsaid about the escapist lifestyles mcginley represents. in particular, at the end of berek, when camera seems either to be mimetically representing the euphoria of the game, beginning to get noxious from imagined gas, or beginning to take part in the game, what does that tell us of mcginley (and his neo-nan goldin ilk), or vice versa?
