Escape From Vancouver

Thursday afternoon, I found myself at 31,000 feet, roughly above Blue Earth, Minnesota, having abruptly left Vancouver 22 hours earlier than expected because of the government shutdown, more specifically because of the threat of cancelled flights Friday.

META-SPIEL readers may know that this was not my first unexpected early departure from Vancouver!

And I started writing about it while on the plane, and I thought I would go on to write about the absurdity of it all, the shutdown and so forth. And I returned to the piece I’d started and couldn’t really figure out what else to say about it, even though I had a lot to say. It was difficult to detach the immediate absurdity of the situation from the menace underlying at all, and I think now as I try and reorganize my thoughts, the thing is that everything carries with it more and more anxiety, and to be more on point about that, this forced anxiety is a form of outright psychological assault that these authoritarians are perpetuating against us, all of us. Kidnapping people off the streets - going so far as to stomp into a daycare center and pull a teacher out in front of horrified children - while this isn’t exactly happening to all of us, the trauma is very much broad and absolutely impacting everybody on some level.

But then this further makes the idea of hurrying up to get out of a place where this isn’t happening all the more absurd.

I have things to say about last Tuesday’s elections, about how stunningly great Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was, about the limits of gerrymandering… and I might get to some of those later this week. Tuesday night felt like a beacon in the darkness.

This morning, though, there’s palpable rage over what seems to be Senate Democratic leadership deciding to go ahead and cave, to try and end the government shutdown with no concessions at all. And I have thought about all this too, but right now they’re muddled, but, I guess that I’m not going to let that stop me:

I urge people not to get trapped into thinking that politics is some sort of linear spectrum where some Democrats are “moderate” and others further to the left are “progressive”. It’s never been that clean and it’s definitely not that clean now. What’s on full display is that the Democratic establishment is bankrupt - not so much morally bankrupt as intellectually bankrupt. Nobody is more beholden to the prevailing myth of how American governance works than these people are, and therefore nobody is more clueless about how to navigate. They are entirely beholden to all of the trappings of their compass, and unable to reconcile what it says with the land that is plainly visible from the ship that can no longer steer. They think of their compass as an instrument of both morality and realism, but they’re so detached that they don’t understand broad aspects of the reality of the current condition, and that includes being able to make coherent moral judgments. The problem isn’t that these people are “moderate” or that these people are “old” or any other adjective that carries some sort of agenda of its own behind it. The problem is that they’re outmatched, that they lack imagination, that they’re badly out of step, that they’ve been in a particular kind of echo chamber for too long. I want to especially emphasize that it’s not that they’re “too old” because I think that makes it sound like they’re just like millions of other Americans who feel like things are moving really fast and who are fearful of being left behind and who by extension are expected to be fearful of youth and youthful ideas. That’s a discursive trap and that’s not the way to think about it at all.

No, the correct way to think about it all is that economics has always been something of a sham science, and neoliberalism has always been something of a sham philosophy, and all of these very smart people trained in all of this are unable to pivot away because this is what they know, and yet what they know was bullshit in the first place, it’s been bullshit for 50 years, and now more so than ever before it’s all been thoroughly exposed, and yet they just can’t let it go. And for all of our sakes, it has to be let go, because they don’t know what they’re doing, and it’s very painful and very difficult for these people to own up to that, so we have to do it for them, and tell them all it’s time to step aside. Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin… they should resign now. They have nothing to offer now except more of what helped get us here in the first place, and they can’t even do that well anymore, because they’re not honest with themselves that they’re part of the problem.

But this wasn’t what I was going to write about. I was going to write about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

I usually take a couple of days off right around this time of year for various reasons. My plan had been to take Thursday and Friday off, before the Vancouver trip came up. I shifted my days off to Monday and Tuesday.

I also try - though do not always succeed - to catch my breath this time of year. Seasonal affective disorder is a real thing! And I was also coming off a long work trip. So I wanted this to be a lot of down time over the long weekend.

This is how it came to pass that Saturday night, doing not a whole lot, and pleased to be doing not a whole lot, I caved in and we flipped over to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Somehow I watched to the end, three and a half hours later.

A whole lot of people have said a whole lot of things about the preposterousness of the RnRHoF and I don’t disagree. But the thing is that rock & roll is what it is because of its deep inherent contradictions at least as much as in spite of them. The Who released “My Generation” 60 years ago, and yet Townshend and Daltrey are still out there playing, and more to the point, people are still showing up for it, and even more to the point, young people are still discovering The Who. We can regard this all cynically - and we wouldn’t be wrong - or we can regard this all in some other way, and I suppose as I’ve gotten older I’ve become less cynical and more, well, some other way.

So this truly bizarre ceremony, where they inducted everyone from Joe Cocker to Outkast to Cyndi Lauper to Nicky Hopkins to Chubby Chucker, well, it was really kind of great.

Going from a Salt-N-Pepa performance to David Letterman’s emotional induction of Warren Zevon was… thrillingly American. The greatest excesses of the American experiment were on full display, to be sure, but what is America without its excesses?

And please understand I’m not being flippant or ironic here. This grand finale of the event included Post Malone singing a stanza of “With a Little Help from My Friends” which was complete off-the-rails lunacy, but of course it was.

The Killers and Waddy Wachtel took the stage and did a rousing version of “Lawyers, Guns and Money” some fifteen minutes after, on the very same stage, En Vogue appeared to join Salt-N-Pepa on “Whatta Man”, and it all seemed perfectly normal, even though it was absolutely not normal.

Societies are not like diamonds or pearls, see. In societies, flaws aren’t to be so easily lamented as unfortunate imperfections. They are instead the source of the character, for better and for worse. And for all of the flaws, for all of the decisions I might not have made, for one night it actually seemed like this absurd awards ceremony was imbued with the true spirit of America (with a little England thrown in).

Over the past several years there’s been a lot of hand wringing over the idea that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has been inducting all of these people who were absolutely not “rock” musicians. Not everyone can or should agree, but what I think is clear is that an expansive read of “rock & roll” as not merely a musical form but instead as a broader cultural form was the right thing to do, and while it’s been something of a struggle to “get it right”, I’d argue that the people who put this ceremony together exhibited a hell of a lot more creativity and understanding of the evolution of the times than the goddamn Democratic leadership. And pointedly I’d say that creativity extends to at least trying to find a through line across the generations… some way that we’re all connected. After all, aren’t “Feel Like Makin’ Love” and “Let’s Talk About Sex” about the same thing?

The following night I finished reading Lay It Down In Full View: Collected Writings on Silkworm and Their Music, after having read the bulk of it on the flights to and from Vancouver. There’s almost no bigger aesthetic shift from going to a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony to going to a song by song essay about the entirety of It’ll Be Cool complete with reference to Jacques Derrida.

Silkworm, well, they’ll never get inducted into that particular hall. Most of my favorite bands won’t. (I didn’t mean to but I’m foreshadowing a bit here… to something you’ll all have to wait another day for.)

If there is one overriding theme to the book, it is that Silkworm always consciously chose to do whatever they wanted to do. If musically this meant decisions which didn’t exactly bring out roaring crowds, and wouldn’t exactly put them on the fast track to Cleveland, oh well. (I did see them play in Cleveland once, though…)

As a cultural force, that’s what rock & roll is all about, right? It’s about choosing to do what you want to do. As a commercial force, of course, it’s something different. The thing is that you can’t truly separate the two, unless you’re legitimately content to never leave your own garage.

I don’t think that as a kid I was steeped in “authenticity”. It’s not that the important people in my life were phonies. They were so goddamn who they were that it probably didn’t always serve them very well. But there was no attitude about it. In the midst of a very artificial sociocultural moment the corrective mechanism was to just carry on.

When I got to college though, “authenticity” was a thing. Not to everyone, certainly, and for damn sure not all the time. But getting into music then, and getting into that particular culture, that wasn’t just about taste, it was also about politics. I mean, maybe the single most formative text on me politically was written by Steve Albini.

Music isn’t always a political act, but it often is, and that extends not just to the creators but to all participants. And for a while, as I was forming a consciousness in that nexus of music and politics, I was forming a nexus that was sort of exclusionary. When I use the word “exclusionary” I mean it in an active sense… not that I might have liked some things and not other things, but rather that I might carry active disdain for things for “political” reasons. For some people, the word “snob” might have come to mind. The thing though is that I always tried to have an open mind to the music itself. I would listen to anything. I just reserved the right to hate it!

I think for a lot of people, whatever that chip is on their shoulder, it just grows and grows and grows over time. The big chip I had though - a contorted amalgam of superiority and inferiority - has shrunk. And it’s because they have been constantly reinforcing one another. I couldn’t move on from my childish sense of superiority without also moving on from my childish sense of inferiority, or vice-versa. It’s not as though that chip has vanished, but instead it’s become manageable… even purposeful.

My deep, passionate, abiding love for the kind of music that Silkworm made doesn’t require contempt for something else. It’s not a statement about someone or something else that doesn’t happen to be in the room. If I want to listen to Silkworm and then Neil Diamond, I’m free to do so. If I want to listen to Warren Zevon and then Outkast, I’m free to do so, and, it seems, everyone else is too.

This isn’t how the current authoritarian regime would have it, of course. But it’s also not how the “opposition” would have it. Authoritarianism wants to suppress cultural exchange. Neoliberalism would tacitly tell you otherwise, and might even mean otherwise, but deep down, neoliberalism is about putting up with where people are from so long as everyone is headed to the same place, presumably some kind of board room.

What I’m increasingly convinced of is that the long-term solution for what ails us as a society is the same as it’s always been: the audacity of creativity. What’s plaguing America today is a deficit of institutional creativity, either because the colossal corporate and tech beasts just want to keep becoming more and more colossal, or because the powers that be want to maintain control in whatever form they can. Or, if you need a different way of thinking about it, consider: America simply doesn’t make things anymore, and so much of the collective anxiety we carry with us has to do with the inability to find or get to an appropriate creative outlet.

For me, one of the great struggles is that I’m not satisfied with the idea of creating “just for myself”. Expression is about communication and I want to be heard! And there’s nothing cheap about that! But it can constrain as much as it can inspire. I can get to a point in an essay like this, so far removed from where I expected to be when I began, so uncertain about how exactly to tie this up so that it hits like a magic chord instead of a shambolic mess… and I can lose it, and bury it, and look, aren’t we all like this? Don’t we all suppress too much?

For Silkworm though the edification came in that some people got what they were doing and appreciated them just for who they were and for what they did, and that’s such a wonderful thing to have achieved.

Well, I actually have a lot more to say than I tend to give voice to, and… you probably do too! So say it! Play it! Build it! Create it! And revel in what others say and play and build and create but never think that you have to be constrained by someone else’s limited imagination.

If in the end my most recent escape from Vancouver proves to have been incomprehensible, well, I’m going to flip it upside down and make it into something inspirational anyway. I’m tired of being constrained by all of the limited thinking - from wherever those limits may have been imposed - and we should all be tired of these constraints. Let’s not just take our country back, let’s take our imaginations back, because we can’t do one without the other.