Credit in the Straight World

Sun glare on the windshield after dropping the kids at school. They seemed a little lagged and draggy, their mother putting on more pressure dragging them repeatedly out of state to try to build some affinities. They want no part of it. They want time to be home, wherever that is.

The Hole CD is still in the player from yesterday, and the day before, and the day before. Waiting at a light, I press play. Weighing the time between stopping at the post office and getting to work, I accept that there isn't any to spare to stop at the cafe.

I forward to track 12 - the most anthemic of the anthems on the disc.

Well I went to school . . . oh
Well I went to school in Olympia . . . (laughs)
(guitar surge)

I'm in the music. What's the feeling? I've rarely asked. It is abandonment of all the pretenses and niceties. I used to do this all the time: dive deep into the music and feel the energy like a burning ball. Fury and love at the same time. I feel the flush. I mouth the words, then speak the words -

What do you do with the revolution?

What are the alternatives if not revolution? The question is rhetoric. There are few and the ones that exist are merely different levels of compromise.

Fossil Fuels will be consumed. Products will be bought. Children will be warehoused in something like education for the day. Stupid make-work will keep you in the economy.

Or you could be a punk rock star - living various levels of compromise between your lyrics and beliefs.

Fossil Fuels will be consumed. Products will be bought. Children will have tinnitus.

Or you could be a punk rock star on the fast track to suicide or death by misadventure. Children will be orphaned.

I probably stopped listening to this music because I kept running into the same walls. The alternative economies I could see were desperately unhealthy ones.

Throat constricting, blood rising through my cheeks, mouth stretching to form the syllables - I'm not really in the car, driving. I'm in the song.

Everyone's the same
And so are YOU!

Somehow I'm still managing to drive, though my body is keyed up to thrash, to slam dance. My heart is pumping. I'm pulling around to the parking lot. I notice that the first available spot is right next to a colleague's car, and she's in it, head nodding, probably listening to that last segment on NPR before switching off. I turn the music down not wanting to be seen wailing and flailing in my car. Then I have a better idea and circle around to the next row of parking with the music turned back up, where I can be unseen and unheard.

Daily compromise. For all I know she was listening to Ice-T. We could have discovered that affinity, found common cause in our egregious work circumstances, gone on from there with an email tree and podcasting, rallied hundreds, rallied tens of thousands, and stormed some gates somewhere to make the bastards pay for what they've done. Not likely. At 5:30 the kids need to be picked up from after-school program.

I never stopped listening to this music, or any music. I stopped listening to it in the same way. The music was the bridge to an exquisite bloom of imminent fulfillment: a flow of endorphins, like a shot of some drug that allowed me to soldier on, live life, vote the democratic ticket, work in nonprofits trying to improve someone's lot.

But some of this music was just a road to doom. At some point, the crest of emotion, the flashing visions of change, must subside into something sustainable and meaningful in the long term. That is where things can go so wrong for people. After the concert, after the political rally, after the demonstration and mobilization, once you've made the big statement, how do you keep the energy going in meaningful ways? How do you not simply crash into the nearest wall and self-medicate, self-mutilate, self-immolate?

Is it that the most compelling visions capture the negative, the anger, and then let us fall, offering no viable alternative? I know people have struggled with this through thousands of years - meaning and passion in life vs. self destruction. And here I think of Greil Marcus's (was it Marcus or Lester Bangs? - forgive me both or either) short article about the Sex Pistols in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (1986 edition?). Twenty years have passed since I read it, but I still remember his interweaving of the lyrics of the last song of the last Sex Pistols' show into an indictment of Rock and Roll, commerce, the rotten foundations of Western Culture. In the song's moment, in the lyrics he was emoting, Johnny Rotten was digging himself under the Berlin Wall. His screams took you there with him - the crushing weight of the barrier between one ideaology and another. He pulled you with him, making you dig deeper into the black pit of the chaos of the twentieth century: the death, the concentration camps, the imagery of Holocaust as a metaphor for our slower, less obvious complicity in systems bent on destroying human spirit, replacing it with one type of soulessness or another, down down, down down. Hopeless and helpless to do anything except dig deeper, deeper to the finality you know you will reach one way or the other because of the horrors you have seen or read about: past Bergen-Belsen, past Bhopal, past Kent State, past South Central LA on fire, past the AIDS Holocaust in Africa and Asia. Rotten offers one revolution that cannot be co-opted - our revolution is to deny them our soul. Keep digging.

In a decade of punk music we went from an empowering DIY ethic - "a mic and boom in your living room" (The Clash, Hitsville U.K.), to Kurt Cobain's shotgun blast in his living room - brought to you in your living room by the Media that wants you at that remove. Consume this moment.

So I turned the CD off after the song, and listened to the tail end of an NPR segment until it was done, laughing about human foibles and why someone would feed a twizzler to a giraffe. It had been one of those light NPR stories.

And as Joe Strummer said - "You can either laugh or give up!" The punk rock Voltaire he was. The funny radio story is done. I get out of the car. One row away, my colleague gets out of her car, too. No, not into Ice-T.