Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Building on Cyril's bitch-slap on Crystal Castles and their tacky art theft...

To be honest, I'd managed to avoid hearing anything by Crystal Castles (I've somehow worked myself into a strict diet of Jesu, Current 93 and Dr. Octagon) until now. I'll give it a "meh". Would definitely work in a club full of girls with brown bobs, knee-length olive dresses and those unfortunate wide belts. Not offensive, but certainly not deserving of any serious comparisons to The Knife, as will be proven in the aforementioned cage match. Yeah, you heard me right Cyril - this Sunday the Unnatural Boy Alex Kennedy and The Devastatin' Deconstructionist are comin' for you!

...Anyway, Cyril's more than bang-on about the cheesy art theft - read all the recent bloody details here. A clusterfuck all 'round to be sure, but the apparent lack of common courtesy is depressing. As Alex said, "Way to go indie scene, way to act worse than the fucking majors". The whole snafu calls to mind the infamous "This Is Not A Fugazi Shirt" shirt that was ubiquitous in the 90s. The legend goes that since the band had (and still has) a strict no-merch policy, Ian MacKaye regularly contacted those making bootleg Fugazi shirts, asking them to cease and desist. After receiving such a call, one particularly enterprising fellow came up with the "This Is Not" design. Impressed by the sheer cheek of the act, MacKaye came to an agreement with the printer wherein the portion of proceeds from the shirts that would normally go to the band were instead diverted to a women's shelter. See? Channels of communication are opened in good faith, and DIY ethic and entrepreneurial wiseacre coexist peacefully. Had common courtesy prevailed, maybe the Crystal Castles debacle could've ended similarly. This, of course, wasn't the last time that Ian MacKaye would garner ink fighting to keep his legacy free of crass commercialization - this bloke has a nice run-down on the great Minor Threat/Nike dust-up of ought five. Let's not even get into Converse's tasteless hijacking of dead rockers who never even wore Chucks in the first place.

Seeing the Fugazi shirt without knowing the back story confounded me. As an aspiring devotee of the band shirt (I'm now hard-pressed to think of five preferred tops that aren't band shirts, much to my mother's chagrin), I needed to know - was it a Fugazi shirt or not? Some have cannily noted that this recalls Magritte's "this is not a pipe" dilemma. The response made by Nirvana (or at least whoever was designing their merch around the "In Utero" period) seemed to argue that it wasn't. A shirt was produced which was covered with seahorses, with no indication that the shirt was "about" anything other than seahorses. On the back was a lengthy essay about the behavior and life cycle of the seahorse, which ended with the words "by the way, this is a Nirvana shirt". Those with a linguistic or philosophical bent might want to gloss JL Austin's "How To Do Things With Words" and his notion of performative utterances.

I'm not aware of any similar merch hubbubs ever erupting around any goth/industrial or related bands, be they license-based (Crystal Castles) or ontological (Fugazi), although I'd love to hear of any people might be aware of. This might have something to do with the oft-cited criticism that there's a profoundly consumption-oriented ethic at work in the bedrock of goth. I finally picked up that recent collection of academic essays on goth, which seems to set itself up as a reaction to Hebdige's book on punk in much the same way that goth was a reaction to punk, so watch this space for more on the commercialization of subculture. All that being said, I still want a pair of those fresh Joy Division kicks.

From Ground Zero to Year Zero

Alex: If you're the kind of person who reads music blogs on the regular, you've probably already heard that Nine Inch Nails have taken the ARG route with the promotion of their new concept album Year Zero. For those unfamiliar with the term, ARG stands for 'Alternate Reality Game', a kind of interactive narrative which rather than being presented as a whole is pieced together using real world resources i.e. websites, phone numbers and printed materials. In this case numerous websites (a comprehensive listing of which is currently available at Year Zero's Wikipedia page) have been found via clues in new NIN merchandise, which in concert with one another build up a pseudo-dystopian world that serves as a backdrop for the record's concept. Additionally, fans can call 310-295-1040 to hear a short message and clip of a new NIN song which serve to further flesh out the near-future setting. Even cooler, a spectogram analysis of the last few seconds of the leaked song 'My Violent Heart' shows 'The Presence' a hand like image(pictured above) referenced on iamtryingtobelieve.com and other websites.

What's most interesting to me about Year Zero as presented is that it suggests an enormous thematic departure from the standard angst-to-anguish spectrum that has been de rigeur for Trent since Pretty Hate Machine. Even a casual perusal of the near-future world suggested in the various Year Zero websites would seem to indicate that the overriding themes of the work are paranoia and disillusionment. Couched though it may be in the clothes of speculative fiction, the idea of despondency in the face of neo-conservative/religious zealotry, the continuing erosion of personal freedoms and a runaway military industrial complex doesn't sound all that far-fetched to me. Frankly, as much as I generally feel topical songwriting runs a high risk of smug sanctimony, I can’t think of any subjects that are much more relevant or deserving of artistic discourse in our current political climate. This persavive atmosphere of distrust and doubt is an incredibly fertile creative ground to sew, certainly more than the increasingly unconvincing adolescent turmoil Trent was still leaning on as recently as With Teeth. That's right: Trent Reznor has made the switch to a pundit cum prophet of post-millenial tension. I never thought I'd see the day either.