In memory of Jarred and Cameron who ended their journeys in 2016. Keep singing the songs that you love, your voices have not been forgotten. For the most part … branding’s insatiable cultural thirst just creates more marketing. Marketing that thinks it’s culture. – Naomi Klein, No Logo It’s 1995 and a man appears from the shadows on my TV screen. His sunken eyes are offset against a face which, despite being pallid and slightly doughy, is far from being unattractive. He’s wearing space-ship silver pants and a black, long-sleeved shirt which reads ‘ZERO’ in sans-serif block, printed above a 5 pointed star and he shines in haphazard glory from beneath a casually dishevelled mop of hair. “The world is a vampire,” the boyish man drawls in nasal monotone to his audience, a slight smile forming on his lips as he approaches me, his gaze descending, his rrrs slurring, “sent to draaiiaaaiaaiin.” Thus begins The Smashing Pumpkins’ ode to frustration Bullet With Butterfly Wings, a song that would place them in the spotlight of the alternative rock scene which defined the face of counterculture through the 90s and into the early 2000s. The statement itself has always rung out as an ominously self-defeated admission: the world stage set in the pull of consumerism to which bands like The Pumpkins seemingly stood in defiance, the term ‘vampire’ alluding to the cannibalistic nature of social existence, be it in the form of self-representation, or through passive consumption as a viewer (and perhaps by implication, fetishist) of brands, cultural constructs and celebrity personalities. In this way, the band acts as both the drained and, in part, those doing the draining. As the song continues, it’s the angelic animalistic furore of Corgan and co. interspersed with images of near indistinguishable pit workers—faces and bodies covered with dirt and digging trenches—that visually reinforces the song’s underlying division and the resultant discordance of separation. Like most forms of imagery it’s enough that the two parallels are associated through proximity and repetition: the thesis of the production is rendered through the whole emotional spectrum of its (apparently) individual elements. In such a way, the band members are double-cast as fallen angels and celebrities, begrudgingly accepting (and at the same time defying) their role as commodity. Yet as Corgan sits askew on a makeshift barebone throne of debris and sings “but can you fake it/for just one more show?” it’s made clear that he and his circle are still firmly immersed within the struggle depicted in the pits below. Between the singer’s bratty posturing and the beastly de-humanity of his body language—spitting, spinning, gnashing his teeth—the frustration in his words is accentuated and catalysed through the realm of a kind of aesthetic anarchy. The clip achieves its message of beauty through—or in spite of—frustration via this hybrid space of sound, word, image and intertextuality: Job in his cave filled with a furious hope that his faith is not misplaced; the miracle of a butterfly discovered amid chaos; endless layers of dirt and an incessant compulsion played out through repetitive hammerings of the earth. Of course, none of this would occur to me back in 1995 as I’d first sat enraptured by Billy’s gorgeously cherubic—yet at times nasally—voice. My extended relationship to Bullet With Butterfly Wings, and its video directed by Samuel Bayer, would develop over the course of 1999-2001 watching The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s long-standing music program Rage during many a late night/early morning investigation into some kind of post-adolescent cultural understanding, in which my restless mind became compelled to reimagine the outlines of an ever-shifting self-identity. Bullet was one of the many songs I’d pieced together on an old VHS tape which comprised a personal pseudo-narrative connecting the rock anthems of the 60-70s, the neuromantic/goth waves of the 80s through to the grunge and industrial aesthetic of the 90s and early 2000s of my then-present tense. I was intrigued by the raw animality of a song like Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love, yet wondered how its spirit of rebellious libido had, over time, translated into the careful disquietude of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence, both of these appearing as bridges over the decades between which they were released. The sadness of Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged cover of David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World somehow underwrit much of the casual self-loathing indicative of the grunge era. Finally, the vitriol of Nine Inch Nails’ Starfuckers Inc. —replete with body caricatures of Corgan, Courtney Love, and Fred Durst among a slew of others being smashed carnivale style by frontman Trent Reznor and his briefly reconciled protege Marilyn Manson—pointed towards some imminent climactic moment of discord, at once exciting and overwhelming, yet ultimately short-lived. There were also pieces such as Bjork’s Big Time Sensuality and Tricky’s Christian Sands; songs which somehow seemed relevant to the journey while subverting the contours of the narrative I’d developed. Sadly, this collection was decidedly un-Australian, with Stagger Lee by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds being the only exception, pieced onto the tape’s conclusion with its exuberant swagger and its rapid descent into a distinctly cataclysmic dread. Now it’s 2017, and lacking the time I once had to search through the undercurrents of culture, everywhere I look I see and hear the same fixtures and formations in the tunes, tones and faces of musicians and artists. Over Calvin Harris’ discernibly homogenous beats, Rihanna’s graceful form sings of an idealised woman who has eyes only for me, and rapper Future waxes post-intellectual about becoming accustomed to life with mansions, casual wealth and a ‘stack of booty bitches’. It seems they’ve largely transformed into sublime women adorned in fine clothing, or scantily clad, or just as often they’re young gentlemen covered in shiny baubles and dollar signs. I notice the language has changed from a generalised sense of rage against the machine (of the social order) into a kind of intrapersonal spirit of competition with perceived rivals; the very fabric of society painted as a short-fused melting pot of uncertain personalities, vying for attention, or else a yearning for something not fully explicated: a sense of love, recognition (or acceptance?), a wistful bodily connection ever out of reach. It’s not that these songs don’t have their own form of substance, or that these musicians are any more (or less) implicitly constructed than were the Smashing Pumpkins or Nirvana or Trent Reznor, or any other of the artists I played on that old VHS tape—and I’ve grown beyond the smug belief that the cultural forms which shaped my growing years were somehow more real or relevant than what today’s recipients of Mass Media engage with. Rather, it’s as if an unconscious language of disconnection from some imagined autonomic state has superseded the explicit norms of our cultural diversification, and sometimes it almost seems like we all have to pretend to be someone else to feel whole—to be intertextualised, cross-promoted and draped in age old narratives; the implied manicheism of the hero myth and its assumed antagonists. I notice it’s this same yearning to be other than I am that sometimes keeps me going back for more when it all feels lost to me; food, cigarettes, coffee. Nights of sleeplessness. It has me remembering long strenuous nights, high in dark rooms, searching for something I couldn’t yet possibly perceive, and the seemingly brief faces of others who never stopped searching; their journeys and their songs now lost to us, but for the labyrinthine pathways of our collective memories. I’m sure we all have our own pantheon of songs that helped shape our personal understanding of ourselves and our respective places within the world. But I feel there’s an immanence beyond the rage and melancholy which we’ve yet to reach, some unexpressed—and as of yet unarticulated—emotion that lies dormant beneath the trappings of symbolic intrigue without end. And I’ve learned that there’s nothing so self-seductive, so innately deceptive, as waiting in anticipation for someone else to define it. In dreaming of a future, I find myself waiting for the emergence of a generation that commands an awareness of the simulacrum that incessantly seduces and begs for (or just as often, demands) our attention; that can circumvent and redirect its intent; some lucid collective consciousness which can find its own voice and redefine its own story without resigning itself to the cynical void of hypercritical solipsism, nor further exacerbating the dangerous platitudes of creating monsters out of others. But it’s not enough for me to wait and resign myself to the role of spectator. While the monetising and monopolising of culture persists, we’re all piecemeal appetites searching for an intangible dream. Perhaps the only dream left unimagined is the recognition that it’s human culture (in its present form), not the world which drains, and that it’s within our power to change the way we act and the journey we’re embarked upon. Of course I’ll keep listening to the songs and artists I love, even the ones that seem to me trapped in a moment of eternally recurring anger and confusion. But, in time, I’ll strive to sing my own songs too. Bio: Jon Anātman is a journalist of the secret, a lover of the statistically infrequent and a pilgrim in search of the unconscious aspects of human experience. His work explores media, storytelling, language, fringe ideology and junkyard philosophy. He's currently completing a MA of Publishing at the University of Sydney and is an editor at @thistlemagazine. Comments are closed.
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