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Square holes and round pegs

No matter how "controversial" some recording artist, filmmaker or other media personality likes to pretend to be, there are certain things that just aren't done. For example, few wannabe Tarantinos would even for a moment dream of showing a pony or a dog being killed (of course, simulated the same way that killing humans in films is simulated) or using an islamic terrorist as the villain in his movie. Again, all "cool" people know perfectly well where the line of acceptability lies, and despite all their posturing of how "rebellious" and "independent" they are, they a careful never to cross it for real.

You might recall a while back the two little singing nazi girls, Lynx and Lamb, and how they stirred up quite a ruckus in the blogosphere. In our jaded era, it's astonishing how much instant notoriety you can still achieve by simply being "extreme", "countercultural", "controversial" and "breaking taboos", "rebelling against the mainstream society" and being "outcasts" who don't "fit in" at an appropriate moment to launch a massive viral buzz. (It feels so totally... weird to use all those expressions in a situation where they actually apply for real, and are not just forms of posturing marketed to adolescents or libertarian sci-fi fans. Can anyone really be any more "extreme" and not "fit in" than an actual nazi?)

I wonder what would have happened if the girls had had some actual money and professional production talent behind them, and a songwriter who is able to write catchy hit tunes. And the girls had been, say, eighteen years old and looked the way such singers usually look if they gain any fame.

The recording industry has always been good at sanitizing and milking the vague idea of rebellion, so perhaps there is a market available here waiting to be exploited. I actually wonder if some record producer isn't currently at least thinking how to profitably mainstream racism as a music genre by first throwing away the historical nazi imagery and all the crappy nazi skinhead one-chord "bands", and starting from scratch with a professionally polished sound and vision. This idea come to me from an article I once read at Arts & Letters: when all other forms of rebellion have essentially become acceptable mainstream trends, the only way left for a teenage boy to really rebel is to become a neo-nazi. Talk about being "politically incorrect", which I understand was supposed to be something "cool". (Someone tell me, why exactly is being incorrect a good thing?)

As a hypothetical, let's see how this could proceed. Perhaps some "edgy" punk band could start by being just a little bit racist between the lines in the lyrics, as a test, and proceed from there one step at the time, milking each step for what it's worth until proceeding to the next step, a little bit more extreme and shocking than the previous one, but not too much more so that the change would be too shocking for the intended audience. Boiling the frogs and so on. And besides, this maximizes the revenue that can be extracted from the trend, which is important.

The whole genre could be marketed as some kind of "gang", with all the little "inside" made-up words, hand signals and graffiti tags and other necessary things. But absolutely do not use any real nazi or neo-nazi imagery whatsoever. Blend and mix patriotic imagery and idealized violence against unspecified, vague "threats" that a teenage male instinctively understands, and serve it in a package similar to the way that, say, the character that the man known as "50 Cent" pretends to be is currently marketed. At the same time, create a lite-version for the teens who don't want to go all the way but who like to have something little shocking on them (as in, the teenage girls who currently wear Playboy shirts: when that edge eventually dulls, I guess they'll graduate to Hustler). As the last step, get some prim, proper, whiny and wrinkly people, well-dressed of course, who maximally remind the teens of their parents to condemn the genre on TV (they'll do this for you for free if it gets this far), and you are all set.

But let's hope that the recording industry will draw the line well before that. It's far more profitable to sell things to adults than to kids, after all. You'd think that they already painfully learned their lesson about advocating the youthful rebellion, disobedience and the mistrust of authority, after that rebellion came back to bite them in the ass in the form of illegal music downloading. I can't help but laugh at the recording and movie industries' pitiful and futile appeals to make the youth obey the copyright law. Funny how all that disobedience isn't really so "cool" anymore, now is it Jimbo?

2 comments

"Someone tell me, why exactly is being incorrect a good thing?"

See Paul Graham's piece "What you can't say".

http://www.punk77.co.uk/groups/punkthe.htm

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