April 26, 2009
here are three chords (chapter three excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
“Learn not to play your instrument,” Kurt Cobain wrote in his notebook in 1990, a slogan handed down from indie rock dogmatist Calvin Johnson...
Nirvana’s rollercoaster ride had yet to begin when Cobain copied out the “Calvinist” (as was said of Johnson’s followers) negative formula. If he was pushing back against the metallic lineage by way of testing exactly what grunge’s inheritance might include, he was echoing the other main genealogical line by insisting on grunge as a kind of punk reformation. “Learn not to play your instrument” consciously lays claim to a 1976 invocation that became one of punk rock’s formularies: a crude diagram and a few words in the British fanzine Sideburns. “THIS IS A CHORD,” it reads in scrawl over a quick rendering of fingerings for an A, E, and G. “THIS IS ANOther. This IS A THIRD.” And then the underscored conclusion: “NOW FORM A BAND.”
The imperative logic is straightforward enough: Anyone can do it. Don’t bow down before the band; be the band. Don’t wait. Don’t get stuck at home practicing scales. Raw power is enough. Urgency is enough. Anything more might just make things worse.
This rhetoric of the amateur is historically ambivalent (and not simply becausethe punk/D.I.Y. community’s real advances in inclusion, predictably enough, failed to dissolve imbalances of access and participation). Even if punk’s rejection of technocratic specialization offers a romantic solidarity with manual labor, the gesture mirrors in part the deskilling of the work force. In the stagnating economy of seventies Great Britain, this becomes a problematic identification with wage rollbacks and Labour’s “social contract.” Nonetheless, the formulary is an early calculation of punk’s social aesthetics. It pre-exists the more explicit social polemics that would follow (especially in the U.K.), which Jon Savage has eloquently argued come from Rock Against Racism, “The organization that had inserted the Left discourse into Punk.”
The distinction is not so easy to draw as Savage suggests, however. Sideburns’ diagram has a “Left discourse” and more kernelized within it, not polemical but material. Training and technique aren’t purely abstract barriers to entry; they bear the concealed ideological payloads of the moneyed middle class, of bourgeois dauphins with their home lessons and fab gear — barriers that implicitly do all the traditional work of exclusion along lines of class, race, gender.
The diagram, and the aesthetic form it commands, do not overtly express a political position. But neither do they offer a mere system of style (though one is never surprised when things end that way). Rather, the formulary takes part in the dialectical formation of politics and style, each giving definition and direction to the other. As we have seen in Chapter One, the logic of amateurism, with its low-cost conversion of consumers to producers, has — regardless of express rhetorics — a political potential within it, as surely as it has a sound.