A Fufkin.com Manifesto: Think for Yourself, Defy Categories and be a Cultural Amoeba, or "Are You Going to be Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?!" circa 2001

You know what you are?" asked my by now rankled friend Lucas. "You’re a fucking elitist, an obscurest, and an old goddamn curmudgeon. That’s what you are. Who the hell died and made you Cary-fucking-Grant? Huh?"

I glanced at him and pressed my thumb down on the remote's "up" arrow. The deranged and discordant yakety-yak of the Electric Eels Agitated plowed through the decibels right on up into gonna-blow-them-shit-speakers-to-bits distortion. I leapt onto the couch and screamed in concert with the Eels; "I’m so agitated. Sooo agitated!" I then pounced leopard-like from the couch back, severely twisting my booze numbed ankle, and danced around the living room like a wounded buck grazed by some ten-year old hillbilly being shown the pleasures of huntin’ an shootin’ daddy’s guns. Ignoring any pain and circling Lucas, I prowled, raving on adrenaline in this laconic moment.

"Jesus man, you’re worse off than even I thought," Lucas said. "Call me when you aren’t so fucking negative anymore."

"Negative?" I moaned from the floor, clutching my already swelling ankle. "Negative? What the hell does that mean?"

"Forget it." Lucas grabbed his keys and turned for the door.

The Eels were still at jet volume so I did a dead man’s crawl to the remote, clutching my ankle with one hand and finally fumbling the remote with the other. "Wait! What did you mean by ‘negative’ you bastard?"

Unable to find the volume button, I pressed 'off' and the silence seemed to knock Lucas off his stride. "What did you mean asshole?" I must have been screaming because my throat burned. My ears rang. "You can’t just fucking walk out after saying that. Not without me at least throwing a punch."

Lucas laughed. "Look at yourself. Just look at yourself. Christ man, you’re a wreck - unrecognizable. Shit, I don’t even remember who you once were."

"What," I said laughing, "on earth does that dime store psychoanalysis mean, good doctor? Or should I just front enough cash to just have "cliché" tattooed right on your fucking forehead?"

Lucas gently eased the door closed behind him. The silence hit me like a heavyweight sucker punch. I stared through the door for a moment and then got up and limped over to the mirror on the door to the basement. "Just look at yourself… you’re a wreck." I looked and smugly muttered, "pretty good looking guy for thirty-four." Nodding agreeably with myself I figured I’d look even better with another beer in my hand.

It took a few days for the whole scene to play itself out. Winding its way through my pomposity, conceit, and smug denial, the whole ordeal and all of its implications started making sense after some serious (quite a feat for me) thought.

I was listening to ex-Thelonious Monster frontman Bob Forrest muddle through what was sounding like a strikingly similar set of life circumstances on You Come and Go Like a Pop Song - a set of now year old tunes Forrest has stamped out under the moniker The Bicycle Thief.

In Thelonious Monster, Forrest was always a beacon for me; a light illuminating some much needed introspection that seemed to have been completely stripped from the late post-punk alternative movement at that point. Now here he was at roughly my same age (he 35, me a year junior) singing the sort of white middle class pathetic suburban mall culture blues that have haunted me in recent years, and making complete sense doing so. Not sensible in the way of each and every word he sang, but in the way he seized that place in life where and when you are willing to – or honestly, you just need to - bury a good chunk of the "I-know-I-know" naïveté of your post-adolescent early adulthood and get on with what’s important in life.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s called getting fucking old, I've known that all along. It’s just that it’s a fucking tough thing to adjust to sometimes, and it's a bit freakish to hear someone singing what could amount to your own life's story. Hell, up to this point I’d figured I was getting over in the aging department.

At least I wasn’t one of these old crotchety rockwrites facing up to the tombstone blues and singing like a dying sow about the death of rock’n’roll, part IX. I mean, fuck, I was feeling positively prepubescent while trying to slog my way through grampa Jim Miller’s recent rockroll tome Flowers in the Dustbin - a truly first-rate piece of shit and a hideous rockroll death certificate of a book. Hey Pops, just get out of the game and keep your trap shut why don't ya? Just because you stopped listening don’t mean it's dead – it just means you’re a little closer to death yourself, you old windbag.

So it was in those terms that I took my pal Lucas’ snide "negative" comment to heart and found it offensive. Negative my ass. Hell, if anything I’ve gotten too goddamn soft in my old age. I certainly listen to music with a less cynical ear, and I’ve become tolerant of others musical, um, taste. I rarely cringe visibly (I’ve learned to "internalize") when attending barbecues at a friend's house who happens to be the planets most devoted Supertramp fan. I tend to just ignore the more vacant mainstream, and I never commandeer other peoples stereo systems in an attempt to "educate the tasteless" anymore. I’m so soft you could push your arm halfway through me these days.

But I still understood what Lucas was getting at. He was dead wrong, but what he saw as negativity and conceit was in honesty my own dazzling display of resourceful, pathetic, semi-adult confusion. Caught in between who I was once and who I am now. Lucas, the poor soul, just happened to be ensnared in my frightful cocoon when the hideous anguish of "metamorphosis" was at its boiling point.

"I still love Rock ‘n’ Roll / I play it everyday / hummin’ along singin’ the song / It’s the only way / I know how to say / what’s on my mind" sings a somewhere near sixty-year old Ian Hunter on the opening yarn from his new platter Rant.

I’ll be damned if I don’t get that same groove on every morning I wake up. I’ve still got a hard-on for rockroll noise, and I always will. It is still the only way I know how to not only say what is on my mind, but also how to figure out what the hell should even inhabit my fried dome. Rock n’ roll is still my life’s beacon; that green light out there on the end of the pier. The only real change between me and music is that I’ve finally figured out that there’s no reason to expect or hope for a revolution anymore. That ideal has been bought, neutered, cleaned-up, and re-packaged for wider public consumption. The revolution is…trendy.

Maybe we were fooled all along. Maybe the "revolution" was a ruse to suck in outsiders who hadn’t bought in to the more typical corporate rock’n’roll culture. Or, more likely, the revolutions, all revolutions, are merely a twinkling, a short intense spark that signals the start of something.

Whether it be bop jazz in the late 40’s, avant noise jazz in the late 50’s through early 70’s, British invasion era rock, protest folk throughout the twentieth century, punk, grunge, garage, acid house, trip hop, hip hop, electronica, etc. etc. etc. – the revolutionary charge only exists in authenticity during that single white hot second that it sets its fuse.

It is a pure but naïve "mistake" that can't be revisited, lost to the ethers. As it is, it takes only that split second for the brilliance of such a spark to attract the larger culture like sharks to a chumming. Co-opted, the 'mistake' that seemed a revolution becomes the "property" of tastemakers and trendsetters and is stripped of any edges it may have as to become inoffensive and more palatable. They win; we lose. Or rather, we’ve been had.

Hamilton Liethauser, formerly of the firebrand farsifa rocknchaos group Jonathon Fire*eater, knows the score. His new band (which is his old band rearranged a bit) The Walkmen have just released a frighteningly good four-song ep that features an equally as good a take on the cultural morass and confusion that getting older reveals.

"We’ve Been Had" opens with carousel piano stripped right from Springsteen’s "Incident on 57th Street". As the drums and bass come rolling gently in Leithauser surveys his rockroll life with an unerring eye. "I’m a modern guy / I don’t care much for the go-go / or the retro image I see so / often / telling me to keep /trying / maybe you’ll get here / someday /keep up the work kid / okay / I close the book on them right there /I see myself change as the days change over / I hear the songs and the words don’t change / I write them out of the book right there / We’ve been had / you say it’s over / sometimes I’m just happy I’m older / We’ve been had / I know it’s over / somehow it got easy to laugh out loud".

It’s an earnest, brilliant analysis that bears serious consideration. It’s not a bad thing to age and become more discriminating. In fact, the process - the coming of a particular age in which you can move freely from punk to polka, from bebop to hip hop, from red hot pop to white noise - is perhaps the ultimate sort of revolution.

Freeing oneself from the constraints of form or genre, no longer forming identity from a closed set of cultural ideals, and responding to the many tiny sparks of creation that occur in both the obvious and the obscure is, in and of itself, the decisive revolt. The massive, controlled cultural climate is extraordinarily fond of labels and categories and the perfect commercial beast is the one that is easily controlled, tagged for tracking, and very predictable.

They know (or they are at least pretty damn sure) who the audience is for the latest U2 mega-disc. They know how to market it, where to market it, and when to market it.

They also know who the cultists are - the Brian Wilson fiends, the dismayed post-punk Westerberg-ians, the proto-glam metal heads, the goth-ers, the alt.country twangs, and the ravers. The industry understands subcultures better now than ever, and they know how to seep in and control them enough that they now represent no real alternative, thus, no real threat.

The industry is easily able to subvert - marginalize, then divide and conquer - any real movements toward the people controlling their culture, and they are able to shape any independent movement into a commercially viable form.

It’s no wonder that during the TimeWarner/AOL merger a big wig stood on the steps of Time’s headquarters and proudly proclaimed that the company’s goal would be to "provide cradle to grave culture and entertainment." It’s also no wonder that I headed straight for the commode to wretch in a murderous tizzy.

So what is the alternative? Well, we’re living it my friend. The alternative is to breeze through the contrived cradle-to-grave cultural mess like it’s a wild apple orchard. Plucking the ones that look good to you, tossing aside those that taste foul when bitten into, and just taking things in. Trying the many flavors offered.

The alternative is to ignore the hype when a blaring fanfare accompanies the release of a new U2 record like so many hosanna’s and find out for yourself what’s really there. The alternative is to feel free to tell everyone that Radiohead is an overblown and boring band, and that Kid A was a mess of a record, whether you "got it" or not.

The alternative is for you to tell me that you think the Mekons are witless and dull and for me to tell you that I don’t hear anything worthwhile in the your entire "new power pop" movement. The alternative is for you, me, us to feel free to venture through a diversity of records, books, films and new media - for us.

The only real alternative is to become a cultural amoeba. Seeking and absorbing. To harvest a smidgen of life from everything and anything that gives you a good 'ol kick in the ass, and leaving behind the shit they're selling. The revolution starts with separating yourself from a phylum that the powers that be are sure you fall into.

Defy categorization.

Like the brother David Bowie wrote about, and Ian Hunter sang of, being back home with his Beatles and his Stones, if you never get enough of the revolution stuff you’re bound to hit too many snags. And it is one king-hell of a drag. This is not a revolution of the collective; it’s one of the individual – the only kind that ever really works. Common causes are moot, but the power brought to bear by hundreds, thousands, or (yeah right) millions who make an abrupt turn toward thinking for themselves, forming their own opinions, and actively engaging in the ensuing debates with an open mind toward the diversity of the arguments is insurmountable.

I’m thirty-four years old now and I have had my fill of a certain sort of cultural gullibility. I think I’ve finally broken through the foolish sense of being part of a "movement" and have quietly bought into the more reasonable expectations of dialogue. One that opens up to a community who prefer the intriguing edification of the underground (which by no means implies a erudite hipness anymore – the underground is basically everything else that isn’t served up merely as product), and not the spoon-fed mainline bore that has now reached glorious financial heights in stupefying fashion.

We’re not talking hippy-dippy communal shit here; we’re facing up to the fact that in a fractured world nobody gives a shit whether you or I get what we need. It's become a buy what they’re selling, that’s the only fucking deal on the lot culture. So it’s sink or swim time for those who prefer a little something more than what the current greedheads are offering.

This whole fucking rant amounts to nothing more than a plea to the others out there just trying to survive the vacant, hideous, and genuinely abhorrent cultural abyss that exists not only in rockroll, but in all aspects of life to show some fucking signs of life! There’s no need to march lock step on anything, but rather the need is to stand firm for something worthwhile - yourself. Start with you…your own identity. That’ll shake the bastards up more than anything.

So beyond the din of oh-so-familiar voices claiming the death of rock and roll (over and over and over), outside of this disdainful monopoly game that’s become far too sickening to play, you gotta go and make your own rockroll kicks people, because you aren’t who they think you are – that is, unless you’ve given in, and if that’s the case, well then, you’ve already given up.

"Hope you don’t mind if I just sit here awhile / well I’ve been off the beaten track for a long long time / don’t know if I was mislead or just got lost / but I know nothings never ever gonna be ok again no how / because everything’s just closing in / and I don’t know that I have one single friend" sings Bob Forrest, his voice dripping the soulful anguish of his "Boy at a Bus Stop".

It’s apocalyptic, its harrowing, but the boy is you, me, and anyone else who has been dragged into the new American millennium that promises nothing and delivers on all of its promises. I couldn’t recommend a song (or album for that matter) more strongly in these Days of Fear. Bob Forrest crawled up inside of the cultural ass of the "American Century", and although his is a distinctly Southern Californian experience, its one we've all dealt with for far too long, and quite frankly, it stinks to high heaven.

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