Hi blog, long time no see. The crushing weight of my impennding thesis has eliminated most joy from my amateur hobby of blog writing, but I am nevertheless honored to make a triumphal return. Perhaps my widely heralded return to the dying blogosphere will be accompanied by a regal fanfare, and critical acclaim. As more creative outlets become oversaturated with corporate, AI-generated content, I find true enclaves of popular culture to be all the more necessary. Thankfully, I'm not bearing this weight alone. A few months ago, Geese's album, 'Getting Killed' was skyrocketed into indie rock fame, rightfully accompanied by trumpeting melodies, critical acclaim, and perhaps most interestingly, a revival of 'traditional' indie music culture.
Even the album cover itself is striking when approached from a critical lens.
The figure (perhaps band member Emily Green) is depicted simultaneosly holding (presumably playing) a trumpet, and a revolver, being pointed directly at the viewer. A cover with a weapon pointed at potential listeners is not inherently welcoming, but nor is the title of the album. Simply by observing visual aspects of the album, potential listeners can gain a solid understanding of the band's M.O. - yes, this Geese album mught have the intent of killing (challenging) the presumptions of its listeners, but at least you can enjoy some cool tunes, exemplified by the trumpet on the cover, and enjoy the process (Getting rather than Got Killed) in the meantime. What follows is a shoddy, but genuine attempt to understand this album as a piece of critical theory, that actively comments on how art is pursued during times of chaos and upheaval.
A bit ago, I watched a documentary called The Act of Killing (I highly recommend) that began with a quote from Voltaire:
"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
Following most normative ethical guidelines, it is wrong to kill. History, religion, and Voltaire are in agreeance here. however, Voltaire makes some satirical exceptions: murderers may not be punished when there are too many victims to reasonably receive just desert for, and when the crime itself is justified or influenced by popular cultural or social factors, which are in this case, represented by the "sound of trumpets". Although I think Voltaire intended to make reference to the actual physical act of killing a person, resulting in the loss of life, I will extend his musings on killing to the cultural sphere.
Let's think about popular culture now. Typically, all that we perceive to be 'popular culture' contains an underlying element of consensual popular legitimacy that precludes opportunities for criticism or dissent of its status. Just by affirming your knnowledge of a person or thing, you are therefore affirming its status as 'popular' culture. Pop culture does not ask its audience to agree on how it is perceived, but simply asks that it is perceived. It's got some kind of intrinsic value. Thinking about Taylor Swift: even if I may disagree with someone about the quality of her music, the fact that I could have a conversation with most of the public about her points to her status in the volksgeist (I love using that word I feel so pretentious).
Naturally, what counts as 'popular culture' is dependent on who you are asking. MTV fans and execs might boil 'pop culture' down into the winners of Friday Night Video Fights, but countless academics and theorists have dedicated their life to exploring more complex explanations: here's a brief history of some major ideas, and some lecture notes for anyone interested. I don't wish to ascribe to the brutally aggrandized consensus as declared by MTV and the likes, but I also do not have the time to seriously weigh scholarly theories of popular culture. Eliminating all nuances, I think that a piece of media can be considered part of 'popular culture' if there is reasonable expectation that a random bystander would have heard of it, or even has developed an opinion on it. Inversely, something is probably not considered to be a part of popular culture when critical discussions regarding it cannot happen naturally, or without providing additional context or information.
Returning to Voltaire, informed by some baseline knowledge of what popular culture is (or even differences in how we define it), articles with titles like "The Rise and Fall of the American Monoculture" can be viewed in a new light. If we adjust his statement to the cultural sphere, it might read something like this: it is forbidden to criticize, therefore all critics are punished, unless they criticize widely and harshly, and to the sound of countercultural anthems. I'm taking a lot of creative and intellectual liberties with that one, but surely it's what he advocated for, right? I think the general sentiments are still the same: actions can be justified based on one's position and influence. In my extended metaphor, said action is criticizing, or making and expressing judgements related to a piece of media. But what happens when everyone becomes a critic? Can popular culture, and even counterculture continue to exist in a traditional sense?
Traditionally, those with the power and status to criticize, accompanied by 'sounds of trumpets' were studio execs, DJs, Pitchfork writers, etc. Examples of, in the most explicit sense, cultural intermediaries. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu presents cultural intermediaries as taste makers, or need merchants, whose work is part of an economy that requires the production of consuming taste and disposition. Read more about that here. But, as the piece about the rise and fall of monoculture explains, "the monoculture had been built on limited distribution"- fully reliant on others, on traditional cultural intermediaries, to determine what we see and hear.
Enter the Internet.
The internet, in all of its idealistic glory, perhaps briefly existed as a place where ideas and conversations flowed naturally between people in different parts of the world, facilitated by technology meant to connect, not capitalize. I know nothing of that place. Now, the once promising autonomy and access that the internet provded has been wholly replaced by algorithms with ulterior motives. But, these algorithms aren't even aggrandizing a cohesive popular culture. They are individualistic, user-focused, and profit-driven, always showing the users what they want to see so their attention remains.
That got a little dark sorry. Ok here's something nicer to consider- clearly, traditional means of cultural intermediation are shifting (see Webster 2016, Webster 2019, and Prior 2013). As the work of intermediation is being taken away from those with economic or cultural authority, individuals have a significantly greater opportunity to determine and express their own preferences. At the same time, the role of cultural intermediary is being delegated to algorithms, and back to ourselves.
And because there is no central group of intermediaries, its probably quite difficult for there to be central components of 'popular culture'. We now have the power to choose and interpret material. But can the choices we make, largely assisted by personalized algoritms, amalgamate to a clear center? I don't necessarily think so. I'm reminded of a Yeats poem, 'The Second Coming'. Take a look at this first stanza:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
Is Yeats suggesting that an expanded worldview or access to information disrupts a 'center'? Maybe. I don't really know Yeats like that, but its fun to think about. Anyways, if we are hesitant to identify an ill-defined 'center', or popular culture, then we surely must be even more hesitant to identify counterculture. If we can't find a center, can a fringe even exist?
I'm going to talk about counterculture now- I promise I'll talk about Cameron Winter soon enough. If someone came up to me and was like "Laney quick tell me the absolute first thing that comes to mind when I say the word counterculture", I would probably say hippies, the 60s, punk, Bob Dylan, or anything else in that wheelhouse. Maybe you'd think of something similar too. My point here is surely not that counterculture only existed in the 60s, or that Bob Dylan was the only singer to really be against the man- but rather common conceptions usually refer only to historical examples, and fail to articulate a clear definition of what counterculture actually is. I think to say that 'Bob Dylan is a great example of counterculture' is at least a little contradictory. If someone is that famous, and benefits from revitalized interest in their work from new audiencs (I'm looking at you, A Complete Unknown) how countercultural can they really be? I don't have an answer for that- but I do know that somehow, timeliness, and responsiveness to current social and political situations factor in to this whole thing.
Same as it.. ever was?
Luckily, I'm not starting from scratch here- more thoughtful and articulate scholars have addressed this before, like psychologist Timothy Leary, who proposed that, "The mark of counterculture is not a particular social form or structure, but rather the evanescence of forms and structures, the dazzling rapidity and flexibility with which they appear, mutate, and morph into one another and disappear." Sick. Leary proposes that adherents to counterculture embrace change, rapidity, and flexibility. I can rock with that. But some inconsistencies emerge pretty quickly- media theorist Thomas Sutherland argues that, "this demand for change as an end in itself is inextricably capitalist in its orientation, and as such, cannot be meaningfully understood as a structural externality to the capitalist processes that it strives to interrupt." Let me quote a few more passages to fully sort out his opposition.
"The dominant culture is associated with a particular form of repression, based upon the false sense of freedom imposed by the exigencies of the market. "Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom,” argues Marcuse, “if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear” (One-Dimensional 10). ... The late industrial society, in other words, is presented as driven by a repressive desublimation which does not merely replace the objects of a so-called “high culture” with those of an inferior mass culture, but totally liquidates any such distinction, reducing all culture to a mere process of consumption, divorced from any higher goals or purposes.”
“ This necessary dynamism, and the creative destruction that goes along with it, is a result of the basic laws of competition: the need not only to generate profit, but to maintain this profitability means that new avenues for growth must constantly be laid down. What we are seeing then, as these processes of production and demands for consumption accelerate, is not so much the maintenance of the comfortable and carefree life ,conversely, this acceleration is engendering a sense of disorientation and even groundlessness that leaves us in a state of continual anxiety and disquietude.”
Geez. I’m feeling so anxious and disoriented by the and ever-changing cultural materials I have access to, it almost feels like, theres a bomb in my car.
Sutherland continues,
“Raymond Williams expresses this frustration well when he observes that “it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture […] and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it” (123). In other words, given that capitalism as an economic system and hegemonic cultural formation is so effective in producing the novelty that we crave—creating objects, ideas, and practices often vastly different to those residual traditions that preceded them—there is no obvious metric for determining when we are looking at a genuine alternative to this hegemony, and when we are looking at yet another variegated product of it.”
Ok great so maybe there isn’t even a counterculture anymore. And if there is, its genesis was through the very system that it traditionally opposed. Once again, there's something very A Complete Unknown going on here. Here’s a blog post that provides some insight, and questions the period of modernity, or post-modernity we are in, because of the apparent disappearance of counterculture. Author Cameron Summers (Cameron Winter’s evil twin, perhaps?) distinguishes between countercultures and subcultures, and explains,
“It’s clear to me that a counterculture is a type of subculture – and it should be considered more as a role that a particular subculture plays than as any sort of content of that subculture. Specifically, they act as a counterweight to the dominant culture, a sort of gadfly that forces a reaction. They might be best thought of as a culture-oriented version of what Antonio Gramsci called a “counter-hegemony”, that is there is something called a hegemony – a dominant, self-justifying set of beliefs, practices, and agencies – to which it is in opposition.”
To expand, here’s Summers’ explanation of what a subculture is: “A subculture is a culture – a set of beliefs, practices, aesthetics and arts – that differentiates those who adhere to it from the mainstream, dominant culture. I’d argue that the vast majority of subcultures are not inherited – they’re things that one joins, or is adopted into, not things one is born into. The vast majority of them have some element of dandyism involved: expensive clothes of a particular style are a common trait of most subcultures (see the Teddyboy and Mod obsession with suits,) though this can be flipped on its head – after punk, dandyism seems to have disappeared from American countercultures, though punk practiced a sort of abject anti-dandyism in its sartorial aesthetic, an obsession with intentional ugliness that you also find, to an extent, in metal and its paradoxical obsession with embracing corruption. The aesthetic also tends to extend beyond the merely sartorial – into music (around which many of these subcultures gravitate originally,) and the visual and linguistic arts. It always seems to me that poetry and literature are the least elements of a subculture to truly develop: one can point at punk art fairly easily, it seems, but any punk literature one finds is generally confined to underground zines, though one could easily see punk visual aesthetics midwifing it into being through the underground comix movement.”
Much to consider. Why don’t more subcultures grow into countercultures? “In the theories put forward by Debord and his confederates,” Summers explains, “the dominant culture was the Spectacle, which Debord defines as "the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign." The Spectacle works through Recuperation, which we can call (more simply) “capture”: everything outside of itself is encased and forced to work towards its ends (the Situationist response détournement is a sort of counter-capture, hijacking the mechanisms of the Spectacle and working towards another end.) Fundamentally, this means turning a subculture into a group that can be marketed towards, what I’ve called elsewhere a Horizon of Extraction (a place from which value can be taken.) A subculture that resists capture for too long gains strength and challenges the dominant paradigm.”
Ok fine I’ll bite. One more question. How does this capture work? I’m picturing some Dr. Seuss-esque ‘culture trapper machine’ but surely that can’t be right.
Something like this, maybe?
“...the capture functions differently for each subculture, fundamentally. Sometimes it works just by finding out what the people who are involved in it want to buy and selling it to them (call it the “Hot Topic killed Punk” theory of subcultural death). More often, and more costly to the establishment, though, is inviting the subculture into the dominant culture in one way or another: the hippies take up computers, and now we have Silicon Valley to worry about. In this situation, the mainstream is, itself diverted (détournement is the root of “detour”,) but not enough to unseat hegemony. Sometimes, it’s done through culture war – I’m reminded of the Disco Demolition Night, when white metalheads were given a spectacle of their own, given the chance to enact their brutality on a cultural enemy to both them and the mainstream. This, of course, was imperfect and might be part of why metal has such endurance – you could see this as a way of peeling off the least committed to the subcultural vision, leaving only the most committed.”
However valuable I find Mr. Summers’ explanations to be, we disagree on the future prospects of a countercultural existence. I’m naively idealistic. I’ll return to this point later.
As if we needed anything else to really drive the point home that the existence of counterculture as we know it is contradictory and subversive, this article, aptly titled, “Coachella Style Is Trash” provides a succinct prognosis:
“Counterculture” and “subculture” have been assimilated into a commericalized “pop culture” product.”
I guess I could have just led with that, but I think its important to recognize that these patterns and ideas have a historical background that others have previously investigated. Like much of subversive culture, I’m not trying to ‘reinvent the wheel’.
Returning to one of my initial inquiries- what happens to countercultural production if there is barely a popular culture in the first place? My guess, would be that it would be sparse in existence, difficult to find, and surely would be responsive to a world that has lost its sense of cohesion. Surrealism is the most suitable respite for this sentiment. Surrealist movement leader Andre Breton argues that surrealism allows for the unconscious mind to express itself, and opposing voice George Bataille would say that Surrealism recognizes that absence of myth has become the myth of the modern age. Regardless of their differences, both theories produce similar material qualities- surrealist works usually possess non sequiturs and niche references, and usually, have a unique relationship to the audience that recognizes alienation, but is socially alert. As Theodor Adorno would put it, surrealist music permits “ social flaws to manifest themselves by means of flawed invoice, which defines itself as illusory with no attempts at camouflage through attempts at an aesthetic totality", destroying any kind of intrinsic, immanent value, moving into a purely literary realm.
Wow. That’s some pretty Heavy Metal stuff man.
Which brings me to Geese. Cameron Winter’s contradictory style has already been well documented in an interview with Sophie Leigh Walker. She observes, “He is prone to long silences, present in body but gone entirely elsewhere, before coughing up a pearl. “I don’t know. I’ve gotten more questions about that than anything else. Everybody asks, ‘Are you serious?’ Like, read the lyrics. Does it seem like I’m kidding? I literally say I’m not kidding.”
“But, you know, he might be. When the presiding instinct in music is to confess, Winter’s is to obscure. Those who were privy to the press release for Heavy Metal will read a section titled ‘About Cameron Winter,' which proceeds to another section, ‘More about Cameron Winter,' then, ‘Even more about Cameron Winter,' and so on. The story of Heavy Metal is woven from contradictions and the inextricability of truth and lies, reality and fiction.”
CW appears to be pretty aware of what he’s doing. All the more reason for us to investigate what he’s saying.
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