On the Vein.fm side project’s full-length debut, these hardcore musicians melt down an entire CD binder’s worth of alt-rock classics and sculpt an alternate timeline out of the pliable remnants.
The album that catapulted Nirvana to stardom still stands as a symbol of resistance to consumer capitalism, drudgery and alienation, even as it has been co-opted by these very forces.
18 Gen 2021 di NedCuttle21(Ulm) • 0 commenti
We’re Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America, l’ultimo lavoro dello storico statunitense Kevin Mattson.
In music, ubiquity breeds misunderstanding. The minute any genre breaks into the mainstream, its gestures and aesthetics become diluted, mass-marketed. The meaning that gave them urgency is boiled away. An insurgent scene, full of rebellion and creativity, is suddenly not so rebellious anymore, and far less creative.
This is what happens when art is commodified. Questions raised by this process are enough to stymie anyone preoccupied with the role of artistic expression. Does “turning rebellion into money,” as Joe Strummer once put it, necessarily neutralize authentic rebellion? Can a scene “go mainstream” without being sanitized transforming the mainstream rather than the other way around?
Punks at the Georgetown Roy Rogers fast-food restaurant in Washington, D.C., 1985. (Photo by Bettmann / Getty Images)
There are some people those of a certain age and a certain disposition, mostly middle class and white, often male who will always remember just where they were when they heard the news. I was working as a bike messenger in San Francisco that spring day in 1994, and I can still recall locking up outside City Hall, getting ready to make a court filing, when the boss came on the two-way radio and blurted it out. “It’s all over,” he said, delivering the grim news with an air of barely restrained, mordant self-satisfaction. “Kurt Cobain killed himself, put a shotgun in his mouth.”