Friday, July 10, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
The Body Politic of Jefferson Airplane
As a general rule, I hate all political discussion, at all, ever, because it all comes across to me as little more than spoiled rich children arguing with one another about how best to ruin the lives of everyone outside their gated playground. It seems obvious that the institutional structure of things as they are totally precludes the obvious "solution" of, uh, actually embracing both social AND economic values as being important, and until that changes, why bother meddling with the broken machine?
It's a surprise to me, then, that I enjoy Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers" (aka "Volunteers of Amerika") as much as I do. The record (in particular the tracks "We Can Be Together," "Wooden Ships," and "Volunteers") is, and I say this with more than a little animosity and resentment, the late 1960's answer to the 2000's "Wake Me Up When September Ends". Only, where "September" fails utterly with a hackneyed lyrical scenario and delivery (especially in the music video) designed to tug at the heartstrings of pampered youth, "Volunteers" actually succeeds in giving the political dialogue the injection of humanism it sorely needed (and still needs today).
"We Can Be Together" is presented with all the optimism and musical bombast of what the title suggests: a love song. The lyrics, on the other hand, are overtly political in nature. This contrast takes advantage of expectation to place the emphasis of the political discussion on the body itself in an almost Foucauldian way. The Airplane dispenses with talk of abstract forces and instead speaks directly of the people involved:
We are all outlaws in the eyes of America
In order to survive we steal cheat lie forge fuck hide and deal
We are obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent and young
But we should be together...
When art speaks in these terms, the notion of "possibility" starts to outstrip lesser concerns like "resources," or "practicality," or, worst of all, "probability". Emphasis is placed not on the particulars that define "obscene" or "lawless" (largely meaningless anyway), but instead on the potential of any given person to be a vessel for the ideology of their choosing, whatever it may be:
We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are we are
And we are very
Proud of ourselves
Up against the wall
Up against the wall, motherfucker
This bodily, humanistic emphasis continues on the title track in just the same way, eschewing (worthless) ideological persuasion in favor of boldly asserting the foregone conclusion that revolution is necessary and that one performs a patriotic duty by "volunteering," on the individual level, to help it along:
Got a revolution Got to revolution!
Come on now, we're marching to the sea!
Got a revolution Got to revolution!
Who will take it from you?
We will and who are we?
We are volunteers of America!
After "We Can Be Together," "Wooden Ships" is probably the best statement of this sort on the whole album, depicting the perceived human cost of "staying the course" in '69, without any reference to ideology at all, by depicting the meaninglessness of arbitrary cultural divisions in a post-nuclear setting:
If you smile at me you know I will understand
Cause that is something everybody everywhere does
In the same language.
I can see by your coat my friend that you're from the other side
There's just one thing I got to know:
Can you tell me please who won?
My personal favorite lines are perhaps the strongest in the album in terms of casting issues in a "bodily" light, just by choosing to highlight some seemingly irrelevant detail of "life after the nukes". It becomes memorable by the choice to include it rather than the more obviously "striking" imagery lesser artists would go for:
You must try some of my purple berries
I been eating them for six or seven weeks now
Haven't got sick once
Probably keep us both alive
While it may be obvious in retrospect that this is the seed of power of all "revolutionary" art, it's still a great trick on this album, setting it up to depict the human reality of the political turmoil of '69 in a way that still seems relevant today.
Some might be curious: why do I care about this 40 year old album in the first place? Well, despite how obvious it might be to others, this is the first overtly political statement in a work of art that I can be bothered to give a damn about, whatsoever. It's honestly a huge surprise to me that I even have to question whether or not "Volunteers" is, as an album, superior to its predecessor, "Crown of Creation"; "Crown" is all about the spiritual and psychological side of the same social divisions and conflicting forces being examined here, and, for the reasons outlined in the first paragraph up above, it would normally be a foregrown conclusion that I would prefer such an approach to a political one.
AND YET!
This "bodily" approach to integrating a political statement into a work of art in a palatable way can't be some "magic formula" or whatever, because there are plenty of works that try it, and fail utterly. Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" is a pretty great example of a similar aesthetic being employed, and it leading to an unmitigated artistic disaster that is at once extremely unconvincing and incredibly unengaging. That book mangles one of the greatest artistic devices conceived in recent years (the concluding flipbook) in such a way that one wants to weep for the squandered opportunity.
What, then, is the difference between "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and "Volunteers" (besides personal taste)? Can this effect be consciously replicated in 2009, and if so, how?
This is the question that made me 30 minutes late for work this morning, pretty much.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
First Post - Testing
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"Why?"
"Give me the grenade."
"I can't."
"Why?"
"I can't."
"Give me the grenade."
"There is a snake on it."
"Give me then the snake."
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