All Hail Pussy Riot!

So the verdict has come down: Two years in the clink for the three band members of Pussy Riot, convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for singing their punk prayer, “Mother of God, Cast Putin Out” in an Orthodox cathedral. But of course, in another sense, Pussy Riot have already won, attracting more attention and sympathy from around the globe than all the other thousands of Russians who have been protesting the policies of Vladimir Putin combined.

Pussy Riot also demonstrate the ongoing vitality of punk rock, both as social statement and musical style. The current brouhaha over the band is part of a global phenomenon, the latest in a series of headlines where autocratic societies have attempted to squelch the musical voices of their youth. Last December, the Guardian reported on a drive by the police in Aceh,Indonesia to arrest local punk kids and have them undergo rehabilitation, which involves forcing them to have their hair cut, bathe in a lake, and pray to Allah. In March, the Huffington Post reported that at least 58 emo kids in Iraq had been murdered by Islamic militants, who perceived their lifestyle as “debauched” and potentially gay.  

As depressing as these headlines seem, they are also exhilarating, as they demonstrate that the enthusiasms of the young remain as unquenchable as ever. Green shoots continue to pop up in surprising places. And, some 35-years after its initial wave first took England, New York, and Los Angeles by storm, punk rock remains a potent voice for the voiceless.

I lamented the first great American heavy metal revival in the mid-1980’s, as it was a signal that the early wave of punk had run its course, that the angry young kids coming up behind us had chosen a different soundtrack for their rebellion. But, all these years down the road, it is now clear that contemporary youth cultures are accretive, that almost all of them get recycled, with a new one joining the mix every decade or so. Hippy, punk, rapper, rude boy, you name the subculture and the musical style, they will all return, often with a vengeance, in good time.

Unfortunately, right now, America seems to be recycling 1974. Everyone, even in the supposed “underground,” are grooving to overwrought ballads about the travails of love. It’s ubiquitous. I would point to The Airborne Toxic Event as exhibit number one, encapsulating the highhanded pretentiousness of the current age. I had hoped that long, self-important songs about the tortured relationship between sexual romance and one’s ego had gone out of style with Joni Mitchell. But add a loud guitar and some keyboards to the mix, along with a violin player or two, and you’ve got what amounts to probably 20% of the bands at this year’s Lollapalooza.

Pussy Riot give me faith that today’s kids, at least in some parts of our planet, still have the urgency to shout their yawp to the world, that they have more interesting things to sing about than perceived romantic slights and tawdry love affairs. So all hail Pussy Riot who, at least for the moment, might hold the Clash’s old title as “The Only Band That Matters.”   

The 96 Eyes of the Devil

The writing has been on the wall for awhile now, but 2012 probably marks a turning, the tipping point by which most of us have been herded into a handful of corporate e-towns, where we become captive consumers. The folks in Silicon Valley have a euphemism for this phenomenon: “Walled gardens” is what they call it. From Amazon to Apple, Facebook to Google, we are being invited into these wonderful e-gardens, places of seemingly boundless information and even beauty, but whose long-term function is to make us dependent on the proprietor of our garden of choice for our interactions with the rest of the world. As we become more dependent on the internet and our smart phones for these daily exchanges, we become electronic peasants, buying, reading, and consuming what our new lords are offering.         

Take the publishing industry. Everyone, or at least everyone under the age of 70, either has or will soon have some kind of tablet on which to read what back in the day was known as a “book.” Which device you choose to read these “books” on largely dictates who will be selling them to you, so there are a handful of big corporations falling over one another to give you their highly subsidized version of some fancy technology, figuring that once they’ve got that shiny new device in your hands, you are theirs, a captive customer, at the very least for the life of that machine. So Amazon is hard at work pushing its latest version of the Kindle, while Barnes and Noble has essentially turned its brick-and-mortar stores into giant marketing spaces for its Nook.

Actually, from day one, Amazon was a Trojan Horse wheeled into the midst of the publishing industry, intending to destroy it from within. Operating virtually their entire book catalog as a loss leader, counting on deep pockets to help it outlast its competitors, the online retailer is well on its way to eviscerating the business it cut its teeth on, sacrificed to the greater god of its Kindle, millions of whose owners are now dependent on Amazon to supply them with information.

It’s clear that Amazon is one of the 96 eyes of the devil, part of that cavernous maw out to remap the world. But virtually all of the massive tech companies are suspect in one way or another, as they look to corral millions of consumers, chronicling each mouse click, attempting to categorize your every decision into definable parts.

My upbringing in the church kicks in here. Yeah, I’ve read the scholarship; I understand that Revelations was first and foremost a screed against Rome, not some kind of time map predicting the end of the world 2000 years down the road. But my hair still stands on end when confronted with the manifestations of Babylon. And in the history of the world, there has never been a Babylon, supplying us with all manner of products, cataloging our hopes and fears, controlling what they mean to control, like the Babylon our civilization is building right now.

It’s the Rastafarians, of course, who first updated the concept of Babylon to contemporary times, making it a symbol of everything corrupt about Western Civ. I remember going to a Jamaican music fest back during my halcyon days at UCLA. A local ska band was playing, and a bunch of us pale, dorky white kids had commandeered the stage, skanking around the band with abandon. At one point, the bouncers decided enough was enough and that it was time to bring the festivities to order. Just as we were being herded back into the audience, my friend John, sporting a bright red Mohawk, grabbed the microphone and blurted to a rather bemused mixture of Caribbean immigrants and college students: “Babylon’s taking over the stage.”

I want to scream it from the ramparts today: Babylon is taking over the stage. Except this isn’t about the right to dance to a local ska band. It’s about the dynamo that is driving our future, and the future of our children. And there isn’t a rampart in sight to scream from. Just a series of walled gardens, competing for your allegiance in the coming feudal age.