Ian Svenonious, former Minister of Information for underground covert
revolutionary subversives
Nation of Ulysses
, and now lead singer in
mAKE-uP, explains why rock`n'roll is far from being anything like a
radical force intent on rebellion against the mainstream. `You have to
remember that rock`n'roll is an industry; it's an industry just like being
a miner, or a dishwasher. You have to remember that our role is as
workers within a system, and there's all these myths that the industry,
our bosses, have propagated to keep us down; what I'm talking about are
things like the romanticisation of hard living, of drug addiction, and all
that culminated with punk rock; y'know, with the idea that authenticity
demands that you sleep on floors, and that you are a mangy dog, that you
live in a hellhole. And that's why rock`n'roll took over from jazz,
because jazz musicians wouldn't accept those shitty conditions, the music
was too expensive to produce, and to minimise cost and maximise gain, the
industry determined that rock`n'roll would be on the radio and thus gain
ascendancy, and when they eventually started writing about rock`n'roll as
an art movement, there were all these industry ghouls who felt important,
and it became a dialectic for them.'
You may ask if mAKE-uP have a
solution to the exploitation of the workers by these industry ghouls; they
do, and that answer can be found in the call and response of gospel,
inverting the relationship that capitalism has with the industry by
involving the audiences in the music. In reaching out to include the
crowd, to make them part of the performance, they are making a profound
statement against the cult of the star, against the perceived dividing
line between `blessed' performer and lowly, `unimportant' audience member.
As Svenonious says, `we want to blur the line between performer and
audience member; that's why I enter the crowd, because I see myself as a
vessel for the songs, for these messages. We haven't achieved our
dialetic goal in gospel music yet, but that's what we're trying to change,
we want to include everybody.'
At this point, the cynical non-believers
start the catcalls, claiming that mAKE-uP are frauds, as they participate
in that which they condemn, but it is they who are the hypocrites, buying
into the industry myths, falling for the ploys of the powers that be.
Svenonious takes up the thread: `They want to cow everybody into
complacent death, a death-like consumer state. They always say `Oh,
you're not authentic'; that's why politics in the eighties became a choice
between Coke and Pepsi, because the only way to really be political was to
vote with your dollar, to go out and buy this, buy that, which just
reinforces the system, like, `I'm a good person because I buy this brand
of vinegar'. In the end, people are ultimately motivated by guilt and
they're really pedantic about it all.'
His point is proved by the case of
Arthur Lee, former lead singer and guitarist
of Love, imprisoned for a
misdemeanour (firing a handgun in his own home), but ruthlessly ignored by
most of those whom he inspired to languish in a California jail because,
as Svenonious comments, `of a prison industry that's private, that isn't
interested in reformation or rehabilitation, it's interested in
incarcerating people for profit, and in California the have the
`three-strikes' law - three misdemeanours, minor things, constitute a
felony and so for possession of a handgun Arthur got this inordinate amount
of time. I don't know about the legal nuances of the case, and neither do
I care, because he's a symbol. If Arthur Lee was David Crosby, there's no
way he'd be in prison.' Lee's problem was this: he was too much of a
counter-culture figure, but a man who was still seen as part of the
disposable capitalist rock industry, and he never became part of the
corrupt hierarchy that he set out to obliterate through music, in the way
that many did. Svenonious explains what he means: `These people referred
to as innovators, who weren't given their due credit, like the Velvet
Underground or whoever, their myths have been recast so many times now
that they're now seen as the underdogs who `prevailed against all odds',
because now that they've succeeded, the industry has a vested interest in
them. Like Lou Reed, he's seen as this real underdog in rock`n'roll, but
he was protected by the industry throughout the seventies; he's a little
industry ghoul, y'know? He wrote garbage popsongs and then decided he
wanted to be a social realist Dylan and write about hell. I mean, I love
the Velvet Underground, but I'm just saying that our role in history will
be nil because we don't have these industrial associations.' The industry
behind the exploitation of figures such as Arthur Lee mean nothing to
mAKE-uP; being written into a history formulated by multinational
conglomerates which has been twisted to their own ends is not what mAKE-uP
stand for; rather they stand on the opposite side, a lone voice amongst
the consumer rush for product, any product, to satiate wants and needs
invented by shadowy figures aiming to control the masses through
consumerism, to push their agenda so far that the governments instituted
to protect citizens become part of the controlled mass, just so many more
consumers to be exploited and worked to the bone. Among this chaos, the
Gospel Yeh-Yeh of mAKE-uP stands out like a shining diamond amongst the
blackest of coals, the only voice diverting from the norm, willing to take
risks and inform the masses that they are being sucked under like so many
lambs to the slaughter, in the hope that the true spirit of humanity can
prevail over that false consciousness that has gripped civilisation like a
vice, in the hope that people will eventually take notice and at once rise
up to claim their true rights.
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