Dada and Punk: Towards Real Opposition Music

Again, not necessarily the views of White Heath as a whole -

"No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing." - Louis Aragon

It starts with Dada.  Say it: Dada.  The name of the movement itself is nonsensical, designed to captured the chaos of our pre-linguistic childhood intelligence; it’s primary goal was to refute the logical assumptions that allowed the brutalities of modern capitalism and warfare to function so smoothly, and so rupture ‘the motor of the world’.  Defeating the spirit of gravity with child’s laughter – great idea – if not entirely theirs…

It was the ruthlessness of their approach that was wholly original.  From collages and signed urinals to sound poetry and those guys from Le Six, Dada encompassed a wide spectrum of truly wonderful art.  At the core of it, however, was an idea and an ethos that was designed to be a function rather than a fact, that is, an effect rather than an object.  In society’s failure to recognize this, we are facing serious problems in our contemporary culture.  I want to talk about how this affects us as modern popular musicians, and the problems that face us within this sphere.

Read this:

“Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them - with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least - with the same intensity in the thicket of one's soul - pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE” - Tristan Tzara, "Dada Manifesto".

KABOOM!  It reads like the manifestos of the Futurists, full of Nietzschean gaiety and a love for the possibilities created in the new century, with it’s weird-ass technology and crazy ideas.  Only, whilst the Futurists were primarily interested in battering each other (there's a great story I wanted to link in here about their form of protest: the 'punch-up'), Dada was tied up with progressive and humane political ideals which were far removed from the Futurists’ celebration of fascism and the triumph of machines.  The thing that the two movement’s share is their sincerity in their love of the act of creation, which they see as the most precious potential in the human condition.  To both of them the word ‘future’ does not imply an imaginary time ahead, but instead an ideological interpretation of what to do with the time at hand.  Both manifestos urge us to cast off all our ideas, traditions, preconceptions and rules, to stare proudly and defiantly at a blank page and create a new set of values - a new meaning for beauty. 

But did this happen?  Did Dada ever make anything beautiful?  So tied up in destroying things, it was difficult for them to actually build upon the rubble they created.  Unlike Futurism, the Dada folk did seem to succeed with some of their claims; but all too often the quest for mindlessness, childishness and violence led to nothing more than further statements of intent, albeit seen through a visual, artistic medium.  Check this out – Man Ray’s ‘Object to Be Destroyed’. He advises:

"Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow."

Amusingly, it was destroyed, but not in the way Man Ray suggested.  A group of ‘Jarivistes’ shot it after stealing it from the gallery, drunk on some knew ideology about hyper-realism, or whatever.  

But the metronome - amazing, intoxicating, yes.  Though, it’s not some glorious standard for a brave new world, is it?  It represents a negative, destructive force, far removed from the dancing poetics of their wordy manifestos. 

This would have been fine: the advent of modernity dictated a need for an explosion that would make space for what technological and cultural advances had made possible.  But as I said above, we have digested this in entirely the wrong way.  Listen to Max Ernst:

"A Dada exhibition. Another one! What’s the matter with everyone wanting to make a museum piece out of Dada? Dada was a bomb … can you imagine anyone, around half a century after a bomb explodes, wanting to collect the pieces, sticking it together and displaying it?" Max Ernst

The art of Dada is brutal and dangerous.  Like 'Object To Be Destroyed', it was not intended to last, to be celebrated, to be ossified in museums as one of the ‘traditions’ that it set out to wreck and sabotage.

This would be fine, only…it’s not really dead!  Which, I guess, is almost worse.  Dada has had an overwhelming influence on all areas of modern life.  It’s given rise to many amazing and life-changing things, but has sired a rotten legacy that has served to cripple modern western art in all its forms.  The most damaged, however, are those of fine art and popular music.

The latter is an obvious target. Designed to deal in the currency of hedonism and easy pleasure, rock and roll’s willful abandon of meaningful artistic experience in place of immediate ecstasy is why it has become so popular.  It has caught the hearts and minds of a newly democratized public by providing them with an easily digestible and highly rewarding art.  This is it’s greatest strength: it’s ability to fashion magical and memorable artistic experiences out of three minutes of noisy sound. 

However, this primary value of the art form is also it’s greatest vulnerability, and it leaves it open to influence and manipulation from the mindless and the untalented.  Modern music journalism feeds upon the corpses of bands like Oasis and The Who to create some bollocks grand narrative about the importance of pop; within this, anyone can make any claim they want about the significance of anything.  There are no standards or canonical worth if the broadsheets and critical establishments can suggest that a band like The Libertines or Arctic Monkeys are worth even the slightest amount of consideration.  But this is not the most worrying thing: the worst of it is that rock and roll can be seen to be a genre embodying an ideology opposed to excellence – which brings us back to Dada, and the reason that this came about.

At some point or another, you will have probably read an article about the relationship between Dada and Punk, or heard a soundbite about it on one of those insufferable BBC4 documentaries concerning popular music.  Unlike most of the spin involved in mainstream cultural commentary, this is a pretty salient point.

Punk music cunningly adapted the spirit of Dada to respond to the destructive establishment that embodied the 80’s, transposing the intellectual maneuvering of the Dadaists into the real world.  Punk was not a theory or a movement: it was a lifestyle.  It found it’s greatest expression in ferocious rock music that was at once terrifying and uplifting.  More than any work of Dadaist art, Punk embodies the will to life through the moment itself, discarding all knowledge of the past and future as it does so.

Which means, of course, that Punk should be long fucking dead.  But the genre stumbles on; like Dada, it has become petrified by pop culture, it’s infective life force long since spent and depleted.

The problem I’m talking about doesn’t come so much from the pretenders to Punk’s crown, but the influences that Punk’s Dadaist ideology has had on the musical landscape which it preceded.

Western culture’s continual misinterpretation of Punk and Dada have given the media and musicians a faux-manifesto for being, in a word, shite.  Punk had a very specific ideological motive in it’s rejection of talent: it was part of a larger renunciation of society and the world.  The modern popular musician, however, believes that one can cherry pick his renunciations.  They are as fashion accessories: there is no belief or purpose behind any of them.  Dada’s heritage has been perverted, cut into a thousand parts and dished out to form a myriad of trends and fashions.

Recently, more than ever, there has been a resurgence in all forms of ‘alternative’ music that glorifies this particularly awful heritage of the Punk and Dadaist ethic.  It has given musicians an excuse for creating half-arsed music that is unimaginatively written and sloppily played.  With the ascent of what is loosely known as ‘Indie music’ towards being the dominant genre, it is now almost considered a stylistic concept to not play one’s guitar properly.  This has translated into the alternative market as the ‘lo-fi’ movement, characterized by poor production values, poor instrumental technique, minimalist songwriting styles, and singers who can’t sing.

Look around you.  How many bands do you know that embody this description?  Do we want to live in a world that glorifies the mean and the quotidian, rather than the excellent?  It wouldn’t be so grating if it wasn’t trumpeted as an actual artistic decision, and celebrated as a triumph in it’s resignation and defeat.  

Now, one can say that this is all very well: there is always amazing music being made that asserts itself, pushes boundaries and revels in it’s own creative skill.  But we shouldn’t have to look to the classical tradition and the more out-there forms of rock and roll to satisfy us.  More importantly, the majority of the public won’t.  Popular alternative music should be presenting itself as a worthy choice to the mainstream; one that is as inviting to the layperson as it is surprising, one that is a instantly recognizably beautiful as it challenging and strange.  Instead it is embarrasses itself with cheap attempts to lure consumers through image-conscious representations of pastoral nonsense and emotional struggles.  Again: resignation, defeat, apology, reticence. 

With the atrocities created by fascism in the first half of the 20^th century, it is no surprise that people shy away from the artistic movements that became associated with it.  But perhaps what the 21^st century needs now are the uncompromising artistic values that folk like the Futurists argued for.  What could be less democratic than a desire to infantilize the electorate through meaningless noise?  Rather than a descent into an abyss of post-modern nothingness, as envisaged by this article’s opening quote, we as musicians need to help create a world that knows what ‘good’ actually is, that knows what ‘beauty’ is for.  Artistic relativism is as barbarous as it’s moral counterpart.  Don’t stand for it.

Al.