Updated 3 weeks ago
Ed. note – I found this old Xerox in my Brooklyn storage. I remember it well from 1991, when I had just come to New York. To say it was seminal for me was an understatement. It was a paradigm shift, a blueprint for my life and a harbinger of the whole era that was unfolding all around me.
Fall 1991
by Frank Owen and Carlo McCormick
PUNK’S NIGHTMARE
Popular culture still carries the most spiritual reverberations.
—David Wojnarowicz
By the time we got to Stanhope, New Jersey, we were 15,000 strong — a compendium of youth cultures drawn to Lollapalooza, one of the few profitable tours of a recession-ridden summer. Goths rubbing shoulders with metalheads; razor-cut industrial fans shaking it next to thick-necked frat boys; white homeboys standing in the Porta-John lines with East Village trendies. Fusion and musical miscegenation were in; purism and cultural apartheid were out — a story told throughout the summer, with critics announcing (or ridiculing) the birth of a neocounterculture. And though it wasn’t from the Butthole Surfers’ overhauling of psychedelia’s musical vernacular and Nine Inch Nails’ mutation of technology (one of psychedelia’s founding principles) to Jane’s Addiction’s Styx-meets-Sly-Stone shtick, it was evidence that the disengaged irony, decadent artifice, and earthbound materialism of the ’80s were on line for the Porta-Johns of history. Whatever else it was, however successful it was, Lollapalooza was sincere. Most of the kids gathered here had been untouched by punk nihilism and had rejected postpunk miserablism; now they wanted to be part of something more life-affirming, even redemptive.
They’re not alone. A whole series of seemingly diverse new artists points to an emerging sensibility. Equal parts hippie. pomo, multiculti, and high-tech pagan, it’s punk’s nightmare: the return of prog rock. From Seal—a ’90s r&b singer who eats health food, carries an electronic Filofax, and spouts vague nouveau-hippie mystical positivism like “In a sky full of people only some want to fly/ But that’s crazy” – to Queensrÿche – whose artistic bombast was last fashion-able around the time of Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans, from neosoul outfit Massive Attack‘s name-checking of Pink Floyd to P.M. Dawn’s utopian hip-hop; from King’s X’s Sgt. Pepper’s/Sunday-school power ballads to 808 State’s new-age house music, the New Transcendence is in effect.
And it’s not just in the realm of pop music; it’s pop culture generally. Despite the best efforts of drug warriors nationwide, America still loves to trip. But these days, antidrug hysteria has sublimated that desire in such hallucinatory technological phenomena as Sony Walkmans, MTV, blockbuster movie special effects, the new generation of interactive games, increasingly tactile home stereos, brain gyms, virtual reality, even the Stairmaster. Today’s high tech surrounds us, merges with us, and offers proof that the human desire for transcendence is perennial no matter how harsh the season.
Quasi-, pseudo-, and partial versions of the full-blown psychedelic experience these things may be, nevertheless. they all illustrate the way the lessons of the ’60s drug culture have been assimilated into the mainstream. Like the pre-Christian religions fueled by hallucinogenic mushrooms, they are evidence of the age-old urge to continually invent socially sanctioned forms of tripping that subvert accepted notions of reality. From televisual to physiotherapeutic, these stimulators and simulators are the latest examples of humankind’s ambivalent relationship to the body, confined as we are by its meager limits.
Spirituality is the effort to transcend those limits, to escape the mortal dimensions of our being. Because organized religion was made to live within the limits of reason, it was assumed by many that spirituality was dead. But spirituality didn’t die; it was forced underground, relocated in disguised form. That’s why a Saturday night at a house music club like Sound Factory or at Madison Square Garden when the Grateful Dead roll in are holier .experiences than mass at St. Patrick’s on Sunday Morning.
Pop situationists Fred and Judy Vermorel call it consumer mysticism—the attempt to cultivate something like mystical ecstasy in an accelerated culture of cynical commodities. Who has the time, the patience, or the attention span to devote a lifetime to spiritual seeking? One of the major functions of contemporary pop culture is to provide shortcuts to transcendence, often involving hallucinatory machines. Of course, the level of transcendence varies widely, from the slight uplift provided by banal but effective radio-pop to the out-of-body experience that can be achieved after hours of physical exertion, sensory overload, and rhythmic repetition in a late-night dance club. It doesn’t even have to be a particular song or place that induces such altered states. When an accelerated culture reaches a certain speed, the very texture of everyday life takes on a quasi-religious aura: The TV becomes a personal shrine, the nightclub a cathedral, a rock and roll arena show a gathering of the tribes, the computer screen an illuminated manuscript, and special effects become our modern-day miracles.
The interface between hallucinatory technology, consumer mysticism. and popular culture isn’t just a retro-rehash of the ’60s, The New Transcendence is perhaps the inevitable response of American and European culture to its present evolutionary state, where language, symbol, and communication have been dematerialized into fiber optic and satellite signals, where media and information have multiplied and accelerated to a level of ecstatic overload, where simultaneity and complexity dictate the ceaseless manufacture of ever more hybrid, fluid,. and contradictory multiple realities. As the Western superpowers begin to crumble, as modernity unravels, the doors inevitably open to mutated, non-Western, neopagan ways of walking through the world that utilize technology for spiritual ends. Aleister Crowley’s famous dictum “Our method is science, our aim is religion” has never been more pertinent than it is today.
ROCK AND ROLL AS 20TH CENTURY MAGIC
In the ’60s, rock was a shortcut to the psychedelic experience, much the same way that acid was a shortcut to the mystical experience. At the time, hippie philosopher Chester Anderson said “Rock music engages the entire sensorium, appealing to the intelligence with no interference from the intellect. Rock is a tribal phenomenon, immune to definition … and constitutes what can be called 20th Century Magic.” Nostalgic baby boomers like Oliver Stone may think the magic of rock and roll has been replaced by crass commercialism and drum machines, but those with the eyes to see and ears to hear know the raptures of rock remain, as do many of its techniques of transcendence.
1. Echo: The extensive use of echo and reverb, part of rock and roll from the beginning, is evident today and still carries a recognizable otherworldly charge that can be traced back to pre-Christian pagan cults who used subterranean caves as sound chambers to amplify feelings of awe during their religious rituals. Brian Eno, commenting on the religious feeling and, in his own words, “the overpowering sense of wonder” that gripped him when he first heard Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” as a youth, has said: “I think the echo is better than the song itself…. It turns the studio into a cave.” Paradoxically, it was reggae musicians on the relatively technologically underdeveloped island of Jamaica who first fully explored the radical possibilities that rock and roll’s use of echo bad opened up in the world of popular, secular music. In the ’70s, the primitive recording studios, of Kingston were transformed into eerie and magical dub caverns. When dub eventually found its way to America, it was a major influence on house and hip-hop.
2. Feedback: From the Yardbirds to Sonic Youth, feedback is a striking technique – allied with noise and therefore the antithesis of musical reason and meaning – that utilizes our entire body’s response to sound. Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna claims that feedback produces a feeling analogous to the psychedelic state by vibrating the body like a plucked string. Made to resonate thus, our bodies act as amplifiers and speakers for the music, helping to erase the boundary between musical subject and object. Instead of consuming the music, we become part of it. Jimi Hendrix’s use of feedback was particularly innovative, helping to steer rock away from a one-dimensional, unidirectional sound toward an omnidirectional sensurround sound, i.e., an environmental music. Like bass in hip-hop, feedback privileges the physiological effects of music over its meaning, a principle recognized by oldster Neil Young (whose new album includes a full EP of in-concert feedback) and youngsters Pavement (whose indie EPs use radio static as feedback).
3. Stereo Porno Sound: Using domestic sound systems to get high is nothing new. In the ’70s, a bong hit was a necessary sacrament before donning the headphones to commune with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. These days, the bong hit is superfluous—the technology is trippy enough. The breadth and depth of sound, its clarity, and power have increased with the digital revolution, to say nothing of the Mega Bass that even a Walkman now offers. Erotic, too—the listener merges, via headphones. into the technology, creating a blissful stereo porno comingling.
4. Drugs: Broadly speaking, drug use in rock can be divided into two categories: transcendence and transgression. Rock music and much of the rhetoric associated with the youth culture of the ’60s emphasized the mind-expanding qualities of hallucinogenic drugs. In the ’70s, as the utopian ideals of the counterculture soured, a shift occurred from transcendence to transgression, a trend bolstered by disco hedonism and punk nihilism. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, transcendence has resurfaced. Mind-expanding drugs—from the Ecstasy-drenched British rave scene to the acid-drenched frat parties at the University of Virginia—enjoy a new visibility. The transgressive impulse too often degenerates into a macho display of immature self-abuse designed to scare the grownups and amuse jaded consumers. That’s not to say that a true debasement of the self can’t produce a type of transcendence. It’s just that the stakes are so much higher and the effects so much more difficult to control. Ask Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, or Sid Vicious (if you could). Shocking the bourgeoisie through the copious and indiscriminate use of drugs is a relatively new idea, dating back at most 150 years, that sounds old. Developing a sophisticated use of drugs—for the purposes of experiencing realms of otherness – is an old idea, as old as religion itself, that sounds brand new.
Rock and Roll Arena Shows: As science more and more began to exclude things unseen from daily life, the desire for a new form of magic and myth grew. Rock and roll fulfills that need, representing a return of the repressed and providing everyday ritual within a society that supposedly no longer needs such things. Fundamentally irrational. rock and roll is an affront to the Cartesian universe of fixed subjects and objects. Its pumping beat and field of energy dissolve separateness, as well as Christian morality with its sickly and inhuman virtues of restraint and holding in. The architectural shape of an arena is particularly conducive to rock and roll’s neopagan assault, since pagan ritual, then and now, inevitably begins with the casting of a circle to create a sacred space. In both rock and ritual, it’s a circle of involvement, containment, and self-reflection in which the spectators themselves are incorporated into part of the show, their very presence an act in and of itself.
6. Sampling: “Sampling has made music psychedelic again,” says Lady Miss Kier of Deee-Lite. Like postmodern telecommunications in general, sampling collapses time and space so that pop history enters into both a sonic one-dimensionality and an eternal music present. Samplers are musical hackers—part of a DJ-driven underground network with a global reach. A kid in Manchester sampling a Funkadelic record in his Moss Side bedroom has more in common with a Brooklyn homeboy sampling that same record than the Mancunian has with his friend down the street playing in a heavy metal band.
CHILDREN OF THE NEW TECHNOLOGY
“We live everywhere already in an aesthetic hallucination of reality,” says philosopher Jean Baudrillard. It’s everywhere and nowhere, that placeless postmodern terrain where traditional notions of space and time, and thus community and history are collapsed by the emergence of a global information culture cum network. New Agers see it as a new era of electronic interconnectivity and community. a “global village.” But pomo pessimists see the media bath as the reduction of human beings to relays and sockets, little more than flesh to complete the circuit. Steering a path between radical pessimism and wild and woolly optimism, Orwellian manipulation and utopian emancipation, it’s possible to see the development of new and vibrant subcultures. Call them the children of the new technology.
The house nation is one example. Typically postmodern, house music is archaic and futuristic at the same time. Archaic, because it goes back to the roots of why music was invented: to step outside the confines of our body vehicles. using motion in order to reach ecstatic and visionary states of consciousness. Futuristic, because it employs the latest musical machines to achieve its aim. More than music, house is a technique using lighting, environment, drugs. sleep deprivation, and music to experience otherness. What house music means is irrelevant; it’s what it does that’s important.
In this country, house music’s core constituency remains primarily gay African Americans but in Britain, it’s been adopted by a new subculture—an offspring of the rave scene—that Fraser Clark, editor of England’s Encyclopedia Psychedelica International, has christened Zippies (Zen-inspired pagan professionals).
Mark Heley, of Mondo 2000, describes them thus: “Half hacker and half hippie, they represent a schizophrenic but creatively charged new underground. House music forms the aural focus for a social activity wherein location, lighting effects, and the quality of pharmaceuticals are equally important components.
Toss in computer-generated fractal displays, brain machines, occasional visits to shiatsu centers and sensory isolation tanks, and the growing force of herbal stimulants, like the Brazilian bark guarana. and you’ve got an elegant new sensibility—part hippie, part New Age, and part New Edge.”
MAKE ME MACHINE
Postmodern technology has been likened to a nervous system—external yet connected to our internal nervous systems by machines that increasingly blur the boundaries between technology and flesh.
David Cronenberg’s Videodrome imagines a “new flesh” (the movie turns on the reverse birth of the new flesh, in which a human stomach splits open to receive a pulsating videocassette); recent research on the effects of computer terminals on their users suggests his sci-fi fantasy has a basis in reality. Some studies suggest that the monitor’s radiation can cause cancer, others that monitors can alter DNA. “What may be happening is that human beings create computers,” writes Mark Poster in his new book, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context, “then computers create a new species of humans.”
Scientists researching what is known as “postevolutionary development” suggest our senses live in the future while our bodies reside somewhere in the past. Using telescopes and microscopes, we witness distant stars and subatomic particles our naked eye cannot see. We transport our bodies beyond our world but cannot sustain them there. We exist in a world that our fragile anatomy can no longer conceive of or handle. Our entire evolution seems on the brink of anatomical alteration—either by augmentation or modulation.
Bodybuilding, for example, predicts the new flesh. Like house, its spiritual dimensions are hidden behind the facade of mindless repetition. “I like the atmosphere when I’m hanging out at the gym,” writer Kathy Acker says. “There’s an almost Zen-like focus people have that’s kind of pleasurably stupid and mindless.” By merging with workout machines. bodybuilders isolate muscles and improve them, doing away with the old humanist notion of the body as an organic whole. Bodybuilders refer to well-defined muscles as “cuts.”
Unlike the old counterculture, which eschewed the body for the mind, in the New Transcendence there’s a strong interest in the body. a growing recognition in the neocounterculture that the body itself is a gateway to transcendence. That’s one reason why the greatest development in popular music—from Gang of Four to Public Enemy, from disco to house, from hardcore to industrial—has been the ever-increasing emphasis on rhythm. As John Leland has pointed out, the drums and bass on a new John Cougar Mellencamp record are likely to be more in-your-face than they were on any disco record of the ’70s. And industrial rock, originally a music of bleakness, now concentrates on beats and effects as much as alienation. As industrial turns into dance music, a white subculture gets hip to a black subculture, and technofascism is displaced by technotranscendence.
SEE ALSO: The Death of Melody
Part of the charge of industrial music is its recognition that technology both attracts and repulses us. We find machines to be both funny and horrific, a double-edged feeling that’s been with us since at least Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Machines are paradoxically comic because in their pure state they’re highly disciplined entities devoted to undisciplined ends. In other words, they have a “natural capacity” for endless flow, reproduction, and repetition but never know when to stop except when constrained by the organic human consciousness. What happens when that consciousness is absent? Rock and roll—the noise machine that can’t be turned off—is one of the things that happens, at least according to many conservative critics (both left and right) who in the music’s early days condemned the deadening mechanical beat and the apathy it was said to produce in its audience.
The fear of the machine monster that can’t be stopped has a cultural history that stretches from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to The Terminator. from Kafka’s “Penal Colony” to HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, from the runaway trains of early Hollywood silent films to Disney’s Fantasia. This fear of out-of-control technology is in reality the bourgeois fear of being condemned to the machines and the class that operates them.
SEE ALSO: PUTIN’S MONSTER
The threat that workers could gain real revolutionary power through their association with machines was a palpably real one in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To prevent the workers from taking advantage of that power, bourgeois ideology reconstructed them as subjects with souls, hearts, and spirits—all the soggy paraphernalia of liberal humanist capitalism, traits that machines were said not to have. In contrast, the Italian Futurists saw machines as a truer expression of workers’ selves—a profoundly antihumanist position that was unfortunately assimilable to fascism but was nevertheless substantially antibourgeois.
Today, in New York City, the distant cousins of those Italian Futurists are the Italian American techno kids who regularly pack Limelight, the Building, and Danceteria. Shirtless, muscles bulging, frenetically dancing to a fiercely mechanical sound from which human elements have been excised, and oftentimes high on acid or Ecstasy, they are disciples of the New Transcendence, living proof of the release that can be achieved through technology. They combine bodybuilding, machines, rhythm, and spirituality into what they refer to as a “new breed.” Hail the New Flesh, the New Techno-Body, where technology is not a site of alienation or dread but a source of possibility, a virtual reality of infinite artificial intelligence and imagination.
You can read more Frank Owen on his Substack.
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