jane dark's sugarhigh!

"When you've decided - Meet me at the airport"

The problem with rock is that it is premised on being a problem. Mostly it’s little more than problem-as-passion-play; rare is the musical moment which has stakes such that you could actually, say, alienate friends and colleagues by taking certain positions offered by rock music. There’s a reason the dinner-chat prohibition exiles politics and religion, but not Rage Against The Machine.

Greil Marcus has been, among other things, the chronicler of such moments, when the stakes of rock music seemed so high they threatened the social order. There have been a few...but not so many. Mostly just simulations thereto. It’s unclear if there are at this late date any rock guys at all with, for example, Stockhausen’s chutzpah.

This is why rock, the edifice and institution, has failed so dramatically to deal with the new age of terrorism. Country music can do it exactly because Nashville never promised to be radical, not even fake radical. So they can make “Have You Forgotten” and “The Angry American” and so on and so forth and no one feels like country failed the test. Boring liberal humanists, boring vigilantes: kill’em all, let Johnny Cash sort’em out.

Rock, however, is bound to fail its test...

The gravity of sentimentality is massive in times of anxiety, and rock knows its business is not to yield to that temptation (though the steady rise of fundamentalist Christian “rock” might one day be seen, rather dismally, as what rock had to say about 9/11). But the risk that bad-boy provocations might be taken the wrong way, what with everyone so on edge, is a keen one; we all know about ClearChannel’s blitzkrieg blacklist of September 2001. As of now, the middle ground where rock thrives, between banality and actual bad voodoo, is as thin and convoluted as a spiral jetty. No one even wants to try to dance on the borderline. The only viable choices right now are to be utterly unproblematic or an actual problem; the phase of mediating between the two, also known as the rock era, is in deep abeyance.

It might be the case, however, that the work is already done. There is a genius rock record about terrorism already; it just happens to have been made in 1996. Well, “antennae of the race” and all that.
On this record, the terrorists are the heroes, if not altogether pleasant ones, German kids who have traded in dropping acid for anti-state warfare, hanging out with the PLO, jail breaks, and killing. Episodes wander in and out of fragmented consciousnesses, as an incredibly odd arrangements of electric bass, violin, synthesizers and tabla dust off the seamiest kingdomns of the world. Characters like “Captain Martyr Mahmoud” and “the Holger Meins Commando” smoke cigarettes and hijack planes, loiter just beyond the floodlights at the edge of the army base hissing “you’re going home in a fucking ambulance.” Or moaning "Do you remember Petra Schelm?" as if a young Berlin hairdresser killed in a police gunfight was still pacing the stage of everyone's amphitheatrical imagination, an unfinished moment still awaiting its final soliloquy. These are the characters. You are not invited to judge them. You can walk a minute in their ears, in the bad conscience of a continent, or reach for another record.

No one really cared about this record at the moment. It was too idiosyncratic, or too much of a put-on, or just too creepy. In 1996, who actually wanted to talk about Baader Meinhof anyway? But then 9/11, and then the Richter retrospective featuring the series October 18, 1977; eerie paintings from Baader Meinhof photos, ending with corpse after ghostly corpse, gray blood running across the gray floor of Richter’s Stammheim, the strange and massive public funeral, the terrifyingly interior psychic apparatuses of the terrorists having completed their ineluctable course toward spectacular public images...