What do I mean when I say ‘underground’? Historically, the underground could include 1960s psychedelic music of the US hippie counterculture, the DIY anti-corporatism of 1970s-era punk rock, the early 1990s-era of grunge rock, or 1970s and 2000s-era hip hop. Running through these styles is an emphasis on authenticity and a comparative lack of commercial appeal, but the underground I’m talking about is distinct from these. Though underground music sometimes crosses paths with popular music, its ambitions lie elsewhere. My own view is that contemporary improvisers, noise musicians and drone artists, broadly, make up the underground of today, and though the field is large and the styles broad, these musicians’ general aesthetic ambitions, combined with their comparative lack of public exposure, means that it still makes sense to consider them together as a discernible international scene.
Key to the underground philosophy is that it represents an aesthetic third space, one which eludes conventional boundaries. The ancestry of both this idea and today’s underground musical style can be traced to the eclectic activities of such sixties musicians as the Nihilist Spasm Band, Henry Flynt and Captain Beefheart (and further back again, to Dadaism). The American music journalist Ellen Willis called the Velvet Underground ‘anti-elite elitists’, expressing something of the underground’s peculiar mix of high and low cultural practices.
The underground is a guerrilla philosophy that is mostly defined in relation to the mainstream, and so could be anything at any time. Defining it in concrete, practical terms is therefore a tricky business. Frank Zappa tried: ‘The mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground’. In the sixties, seventies and eighties, the fact of having to go to the underground was more clear cut, but since the advent of digital technology and the web, such a relation has become confused. MP3 blogs and file sharing websites, in addition to social networking platforms such as MySpace, have all facilitated the spread of underground music in a way that was inconceivable in the pre-internet age, when small fanzines and bootlegged tapes dominated. Everything has become available, everywhere, all of the time: culture has become flat.
Audiences no longer have to go to the underground in the same way that was required of them in the seventies, for example. As Martin Raymond, co-founder of trend forecasting company The Future Laboratory, says: ‘Trends aren’t transmitted hierarchically, as they used to be. They’re now transmitted laterally and collaboratively via the internet. You once had a series of gatekeepers in the adoption of a trend … but now it goes straight from the innovator to the mainstream.’
But the idea of the underground lives on, despite the possibility of general access. The word ‘underground’ connotes a sense of concealment, even of contraband, and this is at the heart of what still defines it as a musical philosophy. The music’s general abrasiveness repels the mainstream; the distinct willingness of the general public to either turn away or ignore its existence in the first place is what gives underground its identity, not some farcical public inability to locate it.
I’m a little less interested in the way the article wraps up. Everyone’s a critic, right?
You happened to me. I was happened to like an abandoned building by a bull- dozer, like the van that missed my skull happened a two-inch gash across my chin. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse. A new- born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone, swaddled in strange air I was that alone again, inventing life left after you.
I don’t want to remember you as that four o’clock in the morning eight months long after you happened to me like a wrong number at midnight that blew up the phone bill to an astronomical unknown quantity in a foreign currency. The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me. You’ve grown into your skin since then; you’ve grown into the space you measure with someone you can love back without a caveat.
While I love somebody I learn to live with through the downpulled winter days’ routine wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine- assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust- balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust that what comes next comes after what came first. She’ll never be a story I make up. You were the one I didn’t know where to stop. If I had blamed you, now I could forgive you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox- imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind, want where it no way ought to be, defined by where it was, and was and was until the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled through one cheek’s nap, a syllable, a tear, was never blame, whatever I wished it were. You were the weather in my neighborhood. You were the epic in the episode. You were the year poised on the equinox.
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon— midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote, read Polish history, and there was a woman whom I thought about; outside the moody, humid American sublime—late in the afternoon, toward sundown, just as the sky was darkening, the light came up and redwings settled in the cattails. They were death’s idea of twilight, the whole notes of a requiem the massed clouds croaked above the somber fields. Lady of eyelashes, do you hear me? Whiteness, otter’s body, coolness of the morning, rubbed amber and the skin’s salt, do you hear me? This is Poland speaking,“ era of the dawn of freedom,” nineteen twenty-two. When I ran, it rained. The blackbirds settled their clannish squabbles in the reeds, and light came up. First darkening, then light. And then pure fire. Where does it come from? out of the impure shining that rises from the soaked odor of the grass, the levitating, Congregational, meadow-light-at-twilight light that darkens the heavy-headed blossoms of wild carrot, out of that, out of nothing it boils up, pools on the horizon, fissures up, igniting the undersides of clouds: pink flame, red flame, vermilion, purple, deeper purple, dark. You could wring the sourness of the sumac from the air, the fescue sweetness from the grass, the slightly maniacal cicadas tuning up to tear the fabric of the silence into tatters, so that night, if it wants to, comes as a beggar to the door at which, if you do not offer milk and barley to the maimed figure of the god, your well will foul, your crops will wither in the fields. In the eastern marches children know the story that the aspen quivers because it failed to hide the Virgin and the Child when Herod’s hunters were abroad. Think: night is the god dressed as the beggar drinking the sweet milk. Gray beard, thin shanks, the look in the eyes idiot, unbearable, the wizened mouth agape, like an infant’s that has cried and sucked and cried and paused to catch its breath. The pink nubbin of the nipple glistens. I’ll suckle at that breast, the one in the song of the muttering illumination of the fields before the sun goes down, before the black train crosses the frontier from Prussia into Poland in the age of the dawn of freedom. Fifty freight cars from America, full of medicine and the latest miracle, canned food. The war is over. There are unburied bones in the fields at sun-up, skylarks singing, starved children begging chocolate on the tracks.
Since the September 11th attacks have become the issue du jour in American politics again, I figured I’d post some grim predictions from The Good Doctor. Mahalo.
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It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV.
Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day.
The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster.
And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four commercial jetliners.
They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and Dulles in D.C. and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully-loaded fuel tanks — which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan’s World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that.
The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.
It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive “figurehead” — or even dead, for all we know — but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.
Read the whole thing after the jump.
It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV.
Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day.The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster.
And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four commercial jetliners.They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and Dulles in D.C. and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully-loaded fuel tanks — which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan’s World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that.
The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive “figurehead” — or even dead, for all we know — but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.
Nothing — even George Bush’s $350 billion “Star Wars” missile defense system — could have prevented Tuesday’s attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.
We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.
Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job — armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing.
The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators.The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don’t say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.
The moon came to the forge wearing a bustle of nards. The boy is looking at her. The boy is looking hard. In the troubled air, the wind moves her arms, showing lewd and pure, her hard, tin breasts. ‘Run, moon, moon, moon. If the gypsies came, they would make of your heart necklaces and white rings.’ ‘Child, let me dance. When the gypsies come, they will find you on the anvil with your little eyes shut tight.’ ‘Run, moon moon moon. I can hear their horses. Child, let me be, don’t walk on my starchy white.’
The rider was drawing closer playing the drum of the plain. In the forge the child has his eyes shut tight. Bronze and dream, the gypsies cross the olive grove. Their heads held high, their eyes half open.
Ay how the nightjar sings! How it sings in the tree! The moon goes through the sky with a child in her hand.
In the forge the gypsies wept and cried aloud. The air is watching, watching. The air watched all night long.
