iq magazine (issue 2, november 2003)

IQ_layout_3 17/9/03 1:24 pm Page 3

intellectCC oo nn tt ee nn tt ss

PoetryVictoria Walters p.7Richard Ferron p.22

DebateThe Nation: Myth or Reality? Keith Cameron p.6Crash Cultures Jane Arthurs and Iain Grant p.10The |Death of Rock? Sean Albiez p.24

FictionRite of PassageAnthony Nanson p.8

SceneBangers & Smash Sarah Chapman p.18Streetstyle in |Devon p.28

© 2003 Intellect Ltd. No part of this publication may be reproduced,copied or transmitted in any form orby any means without permission ofthe publisher. Intellect accept noresponsibility for views expressed bycontributors to iQ; or for unsolicitedmanuscripts, photographs or illus-trations; or for errors in articles oradvertisements.

Volume 1 Number 2, November 2003ISSN 1478-7350Printed at Emtone - 01225 330894

qua rt erly


Dear Reader

It has been a tremendous oppertunity to publish this issue of iQ! New to magazine publishing,Kate and I have liased with contributors, arts centres and lecturers to make this possible.Issue 1 of iQ was published in February 2003 by Intellect from their base in the Bristol andBath area of the South West. Following the suggestion of its editor we decided to produce,as part of our Publishing course, an edition from our base in Exeter and Plymouth. As we arebased at the University of Plymouth, we wanted to reflect our university’s enthusiasm forexperimental design, and so recruited the expertise of Visual Arts students. A big thank you toMike Endacott for his support. He has listened attentively to our suggestions and turned theminto this new exciting magazine!

We hope iQ’s fiction, poetry, debate and scene will inspire you to engage in the arts, boththeoretically and visually. Using cutting edge photography and digital techniques, we havetried to present information in an original way. We hope you enjoy this first Devon edition,and if you have any comments on how to advance iQ please do get in touch.

Many thanksEmma Catherall

Guest EditorsEmma Catherall, PgDip/MA Publishing Kate Macefield, PgDip/MA Publishing

Guest Art DirectorMike Endacott, Visual Arts

PhotographyPete Langdon, Visual ArtsSarah Chapman, Lecturer for Visual Arts

All are at the University of Plymouth

Editor and PublisherMasoud YazdaniIntellect LtdPO Box 862Bristol BS99 1DETel: 0117 958 9910Fax: 0117 958 [email protected]

Design Support Gabriel Solomons


In a Europe, which overthe last decade has seenthe demise of totalitarianregimes and subsequent-ly splintered up into newstates, the concept ofnationhood and what itreally signifies hasbecome one of burningrelevance. Britons,Bosnians, Ukrainians andRussians have at leastone thing in common,their wish to keep theirdistinct identity and todistance themselves fromthose of another nation.The British, while wishingfor closer ties betweenthe member states of theEuropean Community,are still anxious not tolose their sovereignty.

The word nation isbandied about consider-ably; we talk of theFrench nation, theSpanish nation, etc. Inmany continental coun-tries the concept of the‘patrie’ is part of theircultural heritage.President de Gaulle whenaddressing the nationwould virtually alwaysallude, in the course ofhis allocution, to‘Francaises, Francais’,thereby reminding his lis-teners of their nationalaffiliation. How manycountries have allusionsto common national ori-gins in their nationalanthems? e.g. ‘Land ofmy fathers’, ‘Enfants dela patrie’, ‘Deutschland

uber alles’. Yet what constitutes a nation? Is it an eth-nic division? Is it a political one? a geographical one?a linguistic one? a combination of all these?

The term is certainly loaded with political force. Intimes of threat, when a group of individuals feels indanger from another, then it would seem that the spir-it of the nation is revived and fomented as a unifyingfactor of defence. Since time immemorial, ancestorshave been invoked as an encouragement to the living.Where no knowledge of ancestors has existed thenleaders or would-be leaders have not hesitated toinvent them. During the Renaissance in Europe fami-lies employed men of letters to invent a genealogy forthem and their followers, a legacy from the EmperorAugustus who found a worthy singer of Rome’s past inVirgil.

There is a strong correlation between politicaldemands made by minority groups and their economicand political standing within the greater community.Linguistic autonomy or rather movements which haveas their avowed aim the maintenance of a minoritylanguage are often associated with political ambitionswhich once they are achieved or palliated can lead tominority languages being left to fend for themselvesand, ironically, to perish. In the former Soviet Union,Stalin realised the unifying factor of a single languageand tried to impose Russian upon the whole country tothe detriment of local languages. This led to the rightto speak one’s own language becoming one of the pro-claimed aims of the emergent independent states. Itwill be interesting to see how they fare in the future.Should we be like Dr Johnson and feel ‘sorry when anylanguage is lost, because languages are the pedigreeof nations’?

Is the ‘nation’ therefore myth or reality? Are our ownBritish characteristics a result of our society or part ofa pattern which has been imposed on us? The bound-aries of a nation, can they be justified? Or are they theresult of political activity, which subsequently tries toprovide a raison d’être for their existence? We allbelieve that it exists, but is it just a socially acceptedparadox?

To read more about this topic go to: www.iqmagazine.co.uk

TThhee NNaattiioonn:: MMyytthh oorr RReeaalliittyy??

BByy KKeeiitthh CCaammeerroonn

6


Template PoemBy Victoria Walters


The last dance of child-hood, the sun goingdown, the drumbeat driv-ing it down, and you boyswho would be men danceto the beat, your sixheartbeats, your twelvefeet stamping on theearth, the whole valleyspinning, its black edgespiked with thorn tree sil-houettes upon the fadingred. And in the east thepurple night rises, the ter-ror the night brings ofbecoming a man in bloodand pain, red pain likefire, throbbing in yourloins. You stamp andleap, animal skins flap-ping round you, as thefires' heat strikes yourdangling organs andbrightens the beadsstrung by slim-fingeredgirls, now dancing in thedarkness, chanting,taunting your courage tobe men.

There is no otherway, no choice; no placefor you in the otherland ofthe soul stealer, thewhiskered one who rideswhen the sun is high, whospeaks strange tales innasal tones, and hiswoman and his daughterwith their stiff whiteclothes, so tightlywrapped you wonder howthey breathe, and medi-cine that sometimessaves an infant's life –saved at the cost of itssoul should the mothersuccumb to the

whiskered one's madness and away she and her littleone go, over the ridge and never return; no longer willthey chant to the moon or swing their hips in thedance, they are lost and no longer belong. You must dowhat is done: the dance of boys, and then the cutting,and then the dance of men, down the valley's length,stamp with your spear and kill the wild beasts.

Dance till the whole world is spinning, up anddown and round and round, till there is stillness at itscentre, your heart, your soul, your manhood to be, spin-ning so fast you know not where you are, you are onewith the valley, and rough hands are guiding you awayfrom the women, the girls, and little boys; gone nowyour last childhood day. Come to the forest you whowould be men, six hearts pumping in fear, twelve feettreading the broken leaves, as frogs scream likecrazed demons in the night and stars flash through thetangled trees; but then the frogs go silent and there isonly the rushing of the stream from the mountain, andthe trees dark, the sky dark, the water flowing dark,the men's masked faces dark. They are more than mennow, they are lords of destiny and bear the secret ofnew life. Sixteen long rains past, women gave youbirth; now is the men's turn.

Rip off your animal hides, your beads, let yourflesh feel the night air, your cold baptism in the moun-tain-born stream, then kneel dripping upon the earthand, as the wind slices through the trees, wait for theknife to slice away your child flesh, a sacrifice to thewild beasts you will hunt. Let the knife cut, let theblood spurt on the earth; but do not scream, do notflinch, for you who would be a man must not act likea child – unless you would be a child always, never tonourish a woman with your seed as now you mustnourish the earth with your blood.

Here comes the knife, it cuts, it cuts, you hearthe sharp intake of breath, the barely inheld scream.Three times the knife cuts. Three men and three boys.Then the fourth. You feel your whole being in thisdrooping flesh. Is there no other way? The fifth, youhear his almost gasp, you see his blood streaming,your head is spinning, the dark spiky forest of the earthis spinning and insect shrieking, you want to dance butyou are on your knees, waiting for the knife, the pain —

Suddenly you stand and men like gods are

rriittee ooff BByy AAnntthhoonnyy NNaannssoonnppaassssaaggee

8


hardness of rock, soft-ness of flesh, thecrawling dance, push-ing forward, ever for-ward, squeeze upwardand on, breath shorterand harder like yourhearts' pulse, thrust-ing, pushing, rhythmrocking to the beat,please trust me, haveno fear, just stretchand pull and twist upand in and through,like pain tense and tin-gling, let the tearscome for what is gone,let go now, let go andbe free, see the lightahead glowing,through this momentfor ever . . .

Face the daz-zling daylight, stumbleout blinking, clutchingthe other, to the greengrass of morning, thesun high, and gaze atthe slopes descending,the streams converg-ing into sinuous loopsacross a great plain,and beyond the plain,its scattered hills andwoods and vales,beyond an immeasura-ble distance a deepinfinite blue thatmerges with the sky.You lie down in thegrass, no dancing now,and stare in terrifiedwonder.

houting, youtopple back,grab a branch,

and dive running intothorn bushes, armsthrashing ahead for theavenues of deepestblack. You must not flee,not now, at this momentof moments, but you arefleeing, you encompassthe world with yourbounding feet, your fleshpresses through the for-est mesh, thorns scoreyour skin, but your legsare pumping, dancing,uphill you run – till youhave left behind the may-hem of shouting and youcan slow down, alonenow, find a more carefulway through the thorns,but flinching in fear fromevery squeak and gruntand patter, for there arewild beasts here and nomen to fight them.

You climb thevalley wall, but there isnowhere to go beyond theworld's thorn-crestedrim; you are too drainedof strength to keep walk-ing and at last you flopdown in long grass, a softbed for sleep or death,too tired to care anymore whether wild beastscome, for there can be nobelonging now, no being,only dying.

Sunrays on yourbare skin wake you, thesun rising on the wrongside of the world. Is itsunset already, have you

slept the whole day, have you woken in some land ofthe dead where the sun rises where it should set?You push yourself upright and your heart floodsearthward with the memory of what is lost and can-not be redeemed. Shiver in the ridge-grazing wind,then freeze; a figure plods up the grassy slope, run-ning her fingers through the flowerheads, her facepink and tear streaked: the soul stealer's daughter,she looks up with glinting alien eyes the colour of thesky. An instant of comprehension: the sun is risingafter all and this valley before you is the soul steal-er's land, see the pink sunglint on his metal roofs.Two valleys back to back, like worlds reflected inwater.

The girl is alone, no other soul in sight buttwo circling larks, and she keeps walking towardsyou, nervous like you, greets you in a nasal tone, andshe is trying to smile, but so sad, tears trembling inher eyes. She tries to talk with you, looks at yourwounds, but she has no medicine, she cannot stealyour soul, offers only a thin white cloth to clean yourcuts, all the time talking and you can hardly under-stand what she is saying, only that she is fleeing likeyou are fleeing, she is running from the whiskeredone who will not let her spirit breathe. Her eyes likethe sky seem to see your soul and to see beyond thetwo valleys to a third, other world.

Come this way, let me show you. Along theridge to the mountain's spur, to crags and caveswhere wild cats lair. This one, she says, I've nevergone inside, but sometimes I've felt a breath of airblowing through. It is true, a breeze comes from thecave's maw, its odour organic but not the stench ofdecay.

She pauses at the threshold, so it is youwho must step ahead into the darkness, then holdout your hand to lead her between the dank rockywalls; but she cannot follow with her long skirt drag-ging in the mud and trammelling her legs, she can-not climb or crawl or dance, so unwrap the bindingfabric, let her body breathe like yours, let her reachwith her arms, thrust her legs, clamber over bouldersand squeeze through gaps; together through thedarkness, the slimy wetness on skin, and ease a waythrough, with hands clasping, whispered encourage-ment, heartbeats thumping inside the mountain,

S


Iain Grant: There are two ways of dealing with a crash.

One, the cars are obliterated, the roadis resurfaced, stratums to be discov-ered by future archaeologists. This iswhat happened in May 1997 on a section of the M42 in dense fog whenthe biggest road traffic accident in UK history took place. One-hundred-and-sixty cars were involved in this pile up,they burst into flames, and the heatwas so intense the cars melted into thetarmac. By six o’clock the next morningthe road had been cleared and the roadresurfaced.

Two, it’s emphasised, it’s made obvious, it becomes a race to acquire adeath. It becomes a race to die insome spectacular fashion. Three daysafter Diana’s death in 1997 Daihatsubegan an advertising campaign in theUK. It pictured their car, their latestmodel. Underneath it had this slogan,‘there are three steps to heaven’, which took me by surprise, but maybethey had grasped, getting into a carand hurtling down the motorway wasthe risk of death. Perhaps this is whatdriving is all about, perhaps getting intoa car was never innocent, perhaps

This is the transcript of a debate held on 25

November 2002 at the Watershed, Bristol

inspired by the book Crash Cultures edited by

Jane Arthurs and Iain Grant.

10


racing down the motorway knowingthat could happen around the nextbend, maybe that’s part of it. Maybe inother words, the heaven that Daihatsusaid there were three steps to was notthe heaven you enter by way of death,but by hurtling at uncontrollable speedsdown a concrete ribbon to a more orless certain death. Maybe the heavenwas here on earth.

You’ll notice that neither of these waysbelong to the way in which our culturepays attention to crashes at all. It’sbizarre. In an industrial civilisation, in atechnological civilisation, the onlyaddress we have to the phenomenon ofa crash, which happens every day onevery section of road on every highwayon every surface of the globe, the onlyway we have of paying attention to thisis through the scandal of the accidentinvestigation. You know what happenswhen there’s a crash.

You get a flurry of people. It’s like amagnet. Everyone races towards thecrash scene, grieving relatives, emergency services, insurance peopleworking for the corporate people whomust be responsible somewhere downthe line. Everyone rushes to the crash.Once they get there their sole voicedconcern is let’s learn all the lessons wecan, let’s find out why this happens andlets make sure it never happens again.And there’s a bizarreness in this. Ofcourse this is every day that we recog-nise, this must never happen again.What, however, is behind it is the ideathat an accident, the crash, is not anaccident at all. It happened for a rea-son!

Jane Arthurs: What would happen ifyou started from an event rather thanfrom a set of theories of how we dealwith crashes? What about the crash asan event as witnessed in Crash filmsby Cronenberg and Ballard?

Iain: The Crash is a fertilizing event forall kinds of reasons, there’s the obviousconnection between death and sexuality which is played out in it.There’s the idea of truly bizarre trans-species copulation which sends me intoa frenzy and turns my legs to jelly,quite apart from that it is somethingthat has a certain life span, it’s a collision, it’s chance.

Ben Highmore: Ballard chooses tocouch his Crash in an archaic religiouslanguage. And I was wondering, whatdoes a culture, a secular culture, lookfor that is out of control with its surroundings having to rely on beliefthat has no religious form to it? Theculture we have, look to the televisionand the ‘dumbest car chase ever partthree’, it’s kind of a staple diet.Something like the dumbest car crashever, is normally couched in road safetyrhetoric, but nobody watches it for that,do they? We watch it because weknow we are living on the edge of afragile world held together by belief.

Iain: It’s fascinatingly put, but thewhole idea of an anthropology of a culture, that there’s nothing but belief.Our belief really has nothing to do withit. In a sense the increase in powerful-ness of the technologies around us isquite simply the recognition that this istruly a secular age, that the belief systems by which we sought to justifyour hold on the world have shatteredand left nothing in their place. In theirstead, however, comes a power whollyinvested in the machines themselves,which is physical. There is for the firsttime, if you like since extremely primitive times, a world which is controlled by fates, by necessary laws,by unalterable things, where our beliefsdon’t matter. The only thing that makesa difference is that now we are more powerless than the primitives were,because we no longer believe in magic. F

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David Roden: I want to move to modelsof agency, the relation of the subjectwith the technology. I suppose themajor ethical question is, if in a sensetechnology enlists us in some kind ofdesire in action, which we can’t articu-late, are our actions are built into therelationship?

Iain: One reason that crashes are thesignificant things that they are, i.e. oneof the reasons why people bother toresurface roads so quickly, is that theydo take place in a conjunction of twopowerful symbols of modernity. Ballardgoes on about the car, but the car ismore than symbolic of modernity; car issymbolic of freedom, car is symbolic ofreasoning determining our actions.

The car makes us the cause of our owneffects as it were. A vehicle like anytechnology makes it possible forhumans to have massive effects on theworld. Place is no longer subject towhim or accident, but absolutely subject to determination and direction,and therefore grounds agency. When acrash occurs, it’s a collision between asense of agency, between the possibili-ty of an idea of freedom and a kind ofanimism attaching to objects. Did Icrash because I wasn’t fully in controlor did I crash because this car took ona life of its own? I suppose my positionon this is fundamentally opposed tothat conception of agency.

Our essential passivity in the face ofevents has vanished from discoursesurrounding our politics and our ethics,precisely because it’s an embarrass-ment to their very possibility. How canwe found a politics based on passivity?Since when is doing nothing an accept-able response to anything? The very criteria of legal responsibility presup-pose the efficacy of our individualresponsibility. So in part the crash is

not only a collision between the cultureof abject passivity on the one hand andimpossibility of the concept of agencythrough the grounding of freedom. Soinstead of looking to explain the crash,in terms of these things, we go for thepassive view that you have suggested.

Karin Littau: One thing one could do isto look at different moments whentechnologies are invented and see whatkinds of effects they have had, ratherthan seeing those technologies as agreat human achievement but seeinghow they changed the ways in whichwe see, the ways in which we think, inwhich we write. If you look at theeffect of print technology on the indi-vidualisation of us and how this is inturn linked with Lutheranism and equal-ly then with the internet, the effects ofthose technologies, how they changedthe way we are, the way we feel, howin effect they change our bodies.

Michelle Henning: I’m not connectingthis in any clear way but the relation-ship about gender in that sense, interms of sensory responses to the filmimage or to the experience of crashinghas been left out. Also what about theBallard film? When he talked aboutthose car designs, they were predomi-nantly designed by men, and based oncertain images of both male andfemale bodies. But the whole thing ofthe camera tracking the car and theeroticisation of the car, what you couldread from that was actually a lot abouthimself...

A member of audience: What I’veheard today is this idea of technologyinteracting with us, as a society. Weseem somehow to be at its mercy. Icompletely disagree with this. I justturn it off! I’m in control of it, it is notin control of me!

Iain: I have never heard of a clearer

12


statement of that position. There areseveral things that I think are so keenlyimportant about what you suggest. Yeswe can turn things off but the scope ofour arms is restricted, i.e. the wholething can’t be turned off unless, as itwere, we blow up the lot, in which casedo we fulfil our own will or the catastrophic will of the machine? Itdoes become circular at a point. Eitherwe blind ourselves to what’s going onimmediately beyond arms reach or weallow the technology to take us placesthat technophobes tell us it inevitablywill or where it’s inevitably going as amatter of physics.

Tom Gunnig: This brings up a number ofthings, that are key. One is that there’snot just one technological environmentbut that it’s multiple and that one ofthe ways that I think we deal with onetechnology is by mediating it throughanother. It struck me that one of themost interesting things in the Ballardfilm is that he looks at the car and hegoes ‘and so we realise that we eter-nally think the future has fins’. There’sthis realm of historical change andactual fashion change where alwaysthe future is what wasn’t last week, itis always going to be reacting againstitself. I think you’re absolutely right, wecan never turn the system off, but theidea that it’s a totalising system, whichinteracts and changes within itself, issomething that is really important tokeep in mind.

Michael: My friend who’s a psychoana-lyst said that if he had somebody whocame to him for therapy and thoughtthat they were really having a conversa-tion with a computer, he’d say hecouldn’t help him. He would needsomebody who knows about madness!So in the analogy with cars, ‘did Icrash that car or did it crash me’, atwhat point actually does our unarticu-lated relationship to technology pass

over into something, which is a kind ofcollective madness? It’s very easy inone’s individual life to believe that youcan turn it off, but in our collective lifeit’s not so easy.

Iain: Is it broaching madness to suggest that we really have no controlwhatsoever, the car crashed me so onand so forth, whether the extension ofthat concept constitutes mass psychosis,or is it simply a question of realism?And I think these two questions areconnected in the following way:

One reason why belief is effective isbecause there is no doubt when there’sbelief, so that for example, the explana-tions that anthropologists give of primitive religions in so far as they are animistic, in so far as they are magical,is not the belief as Freud said in theomnipotence of thought, it’s the beliefthat thought is a component of theworld around us, thought is a naturalis-tic event to be naturalisticallyexplained. And this is fascinating in sofar as it both mirrors and is distinctfrom our own view of the accident.

The primitive explanation of the accident is that it is no accident at allbut a highly bizarre and improbable collision of two necessary tracks ofobjects. How else could a crash haveoccurred unless something had causedthese two entities to come together inthis very space at that very moment, tothink otherwise is to think the absolute-ly improbable. So the primitive view ofthe crash is that ‘something’ causedthis buffalo, in this place, running atthat speed, towards this man, movingat that speed, at this time. What ‘thatsomething’ is we don’t know.

In so far as ‘that something’ is an ele-ment of the natural world, in so far asit is necessary and deterministic, thenyou know the only way that you can


affect it is by encouraging or discouraging it. When it works it’scalled magic, when it fails it’s also called magic! What persistsin both instances is belief.

In so far as we occupy a secular world we tend to think thatpolitics is the very contrary of theology, what is theological canhave no effects on politics, as it belongs to theories of anotherworld and other classes of entity. It’s absolutely not true to anypolitical theologian. The conjunction of politics and belief, theconjunction of politics and religion provides a way of tacklingthe world which is infinitely more imaginative but not at allimaginary. This is the contrary side of belief. This is belief thatoverrides reason. This is belief that says the world is reshape-able and what’s more we’re going to do it. There is no hesitationthere. This is a question of belief we are not prepared to tolerate. So in so far as we live in a culture that is not preparedto tolerate that conjunction of irrationality coupled with politicsand theology, then we are never going to grasp how it is thatbelief can have any effect whatsoever.

Jean: There are plenty of forms of belief that can coexist withdoubt, so I don’t think you are at all right. I’m worried abouttechnology with a capital T, I simply don’t know what it means.What is or what is not a Technology and they’re so different,and sometimes contradictory in their implications, and the ideathat there’s some kind of grinding logic that we are just irresistibly carried along this tide by it, is one that doesn’t seemto make any sense to me. How do we talk about car crashesand build good wells in villages in Africa and say the same thingabout all of them? I think you have to be really careful here.

But it’s also agency. I decide not to drink and drive but if wejust completely give up on the idea of any kind of intermediatelevel of agency which is neither not drinking and driving, norsome global active resistance which supposes that you can justswitch it off, then I think one thing that goes completely out ofthe window is politics. I think unless we find some space whichraises all the philosophical differences about agency, I think weare just in danger of losing any possibility of any rationale forany politics, call it political theology if you like, but we needsomething in there and for me that was one of the things thatcultural studies used to think it was about. I wouldn’t want it todisappear.

Iain: Just a question in response, it’s rhetorical but is addressedto everyone. Do we think if we really stop believing in agency itwill disappear if it’s a real thing?

Jane: Anybody want to take up the challenge?

14

Crash Cultures:Modernity Mediationand the MaterialEdited by Jane Arthursand Iain Grant

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CCoonntteennttss iinncclluuddee::• Remodelling Education• ICT Capability and Initial

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EducationCultural Studies

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SSmmaasshh In the middle of a rural landscape stock-car enthusiasts have carved out a tarmacheaven where old write-offs are given acolourful new lease of life. These petroleumfuelled occasions are full of fraternity androbust competition in equal measure.


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Sarah Chapman, photographer and artist, teaches parttime on the Visual Arts programme at the University ofPlymouth. The work illustrated here is drawn from arecent photographic documentary which explores theculture of stockcar racing and aims to capture the fre-netic atmosphere and sheer visual impact of this vividand entertaining sport. Recent exhibitions include‘Essential Maintainance’ at the Exeter Phoenix gallery(April 28th - May 24th) and a summer 2003 show atthe Blink gallery in Soho, London.

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s rock dead?Not according to theNME. In November 2002the paper included a freeCD, ‘The New RockRevolution’, which herald-ed a new dawn for ‘rock’.NME editor ConorMcNicholas wrote ‘Oncein a generation some-thing so revolutionaryhappens in music thatafterwards nothing isever the same again.Right now, that’s exactlywhat’s happening’.

Is it? Anybody noticed?The bands featured onthe compilation includedsome half-decent US andUK bands (The VonBondies, Radio 4, BlackRebel Motorcycle Club,The Coral, The Music) aswell as New ZealandersThe Datsuns. The musicwas neither new (beingvariously ‘sourced’ fromPiL, The Jesus and MaryChain, NY post-punk ‘no-wave’ and ‘mutant disco’)nor revolutionary. Despitethe NMEs attempts to sellthis idea (literally,through t-shirts) the‘rock’ public remainedunmoved. Everything wasstill the same, the mar-keting hype failed, andNME sales fell inexorablywhile Kerrang!’s rose.

But what constitutes a‘rock revolution’? The his-tory of rock music sincethe 1950s has been lit-

tered with revolutionary rhetoric around key historicalmoments. Whenever rock (and roll) seemed to be limp-ing to an early and deserved grave, upstart musiciansforged a new sound that reinvigorated rock music.

When revolutionary Elvis joined up and turned out to bean all-American-God-fearing-boy after all (the first‘death of rock’!), a bunch of scouse lads took blackrhythm and blues and the cool of Gene Vincent toHamburg, and returned with a sound that was to shakeup the USA and inspired the 60s British invasion. This‘Britishification’ of US culture by a mutant Anglo-American music seemed revolutionary in itself, but thegreatest rock revolution is said (by rock journalists andacademics then and since) to be when the Anglo-American axis transformed rock and roll into ‘Rock’.

This transformation occurred when the cultural weightplaced on the shoulders of showbiz rock and rollbecame too great and required an intellectual anti-mainstream ordination. By the late 1960s, rock music,through The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan et al wassaid to have caused a ‘revolution in the head’. That is,youth culture had the false consciousness of con-sumer society, parent culture and mainstream politicslifted from it - by opening the doors of perception anew society could not only be imagined, but also built.Rock, it has been argued, was central to this revelato-ry cultural moment, but others suggest that it merelysoundtracked social transitions and changes that werehappening anyway. Whatever, Psychedelia and protestmusic became associated with revolutionary counter-culture. With the increasing amplification of rock, thegrowth of festivals, increasing numbers of music mag-azines and papers, and the introduction of rock radio,rock became increasingly audible and visible through-out the 1960s. It did so on the back of frenzied com-mercial exploitation that did not sit easily with rockartists (who had greatly benefited from it!). The anti-music industry and anti-mainstream rhetoric of rock(borrowed from the 1960s political folk movement) hasbeen a feature of rock ever since, but one that eachgeneration feels it has discovered for itself.

Pop and rock music has also been viewed by culturalcritics as a mere product of a mind-numbing corporatemusic industry. Despite some suggesting 1960s rock

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Sean Albiez

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much later KurtCobain) who producedawkward and incendi-ary music that was asfar removed from Yesas can be imagined,and yet is still called‘prog’.

Arguably punk didn’taim to destroy ‘prog’as such, but wanted todestroy the compla-cency of the ‘Old GreyWhistle Test’ school ofrock (Nils Lofgren,Peter Frampton) andthe pomposity of sta-dium rock - with LedZeppelin (non-Prog) asguilty as ELP (uber-prog).

Punk reinvigoratedrock music by simpli-fying it and speakingto the audience in aprosaic and directway. The poeticromanticism of progwas implicitlyridiculed by punk, andthe music bore littlerelation to symphonicrock. However, it wasfar from a working-class rebellion againstthe middle-class occu-pation of rock by prog-gers. The Sex Pistolsmay have been work-ing class Londoners,but the organisingforces behind punkand its spread weremiddle-class Artschool and higher edu-cated entrepreneurs(whether MalcolmMcLaren, Vivienne

marked a revolution ofperception, others arguedthe music industry hadfigured out how to sellrevolution to consumerswho had grown out of therock and roll of theiryouth, and who were hun-gry for more weightymusic that they could calltheir own. So the revolu-tion of 60s rock was alsomarked by a revolution inthe music industry. The 7”single was no longer theprimary format - albumorientated rock becamethe vehicle for music thatmaybe took itself far tooseriously.

Early rock and roll had acertain ‘authenticity byassociation’ for the rockaudience - it had a her-itage in black rhythm andblues and country, andthis heritage was reaf-firmed in the late 1960swhen The Band, NeilYoung, The Beatles, TheByrds and others turnedaway from Psychedelia toa simpler blues and coun-try based rock. In somerespects, ‘gutter pure’rock was felt to havebeen sullied by the LSDfuelled manic drivetowards innovation andthe celebration of individ-ual genius. Rock wassupposed to be about ‘thestreet’ - or at least aboutmusic created from‘three chords and thetruth’.

On the other hand Yes, Genesis, Emerson Lake &Palmer and other rock bands of the 1970s felt thatrock should be about conceptualism, complexity andhave an art aesthetic - it should aspire to be a newrevolutionary ‘classical’ music that replaced the old.Progressive rock therefore had competing and con-tradictory drives - both to ‘smash the system’ of oldcultural values while employing the tools and atti-tudes of elitist culture (such as the symphonyorchestra). Progressive rock intended to have a revo-lutionary project, and some bands more than others(Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson) did makemusic that assaulted the audience and mainstreamculture. However, it was felt by rock critic LesterBangs that progressive rock betrayed everything thatrock was supposed to be about. In the film ‘AlmostFamous’, ‘Bangs’ suggests that the early 1970smarked the death of rock.

John Rockwell in the Rolling Stone IllustratedHistory of Rock and Roll elaborates on this suggest-ing ‘There is a morphology to artistic movements.They begin with a rude and innocent vigour, pass intoa healthy adulthood and finally decline into an over-wrought, feeble old age. Something of this processcan be observed in the passage of Rock & Roll fromthe 3-chord primitivism of the 50s through the bur-geoning vitality and experimentation of the 60s tothe hollow emptiness of much of the so called pro-gressive or ‘art’ rock of the 70s’. However, progres-sive rock itself contained the seeds of the next rev-olution that for some resulted in the undisputeddeath of rock music, and for others marked itsrebirth.

Punk Rock, it has been suggested, looked at thewalking corpse of rock music as represented in pro-gressive rock, and decided to emphasise theDionysian rather than cerebral pleasures of rock.And yet, some areas of progressive rock containedsuch desires. Van Der Graaf Generator’s PeterHammill released the solo album ‘Nadir’s BigChance’ in 1975. It was a call to arms that not onlyquestioned the excesses of progressive rock, butalso did so with a proto-punk noise that seems nowastoundingly prescient. King Crimson, throughRobert Fripp, influenced many artists (including


as well as ska, reggae,Motown, northern souland funk, had been cen-tral to club and danceculture that was all butignored by rock critics(unless, that is, a rockartist (Bowie and YoungAmericans) showed aninterest in these forms).From the 1950s onwardspop and dance music hadbeen sidelined as inau-thentic music industryephemera, and yet wasthe experience of themajority of the recordbuying public. Rock, byplacing itself at the pin-nacle of popular music,had reduced largeswathes of music cultureto footnotes in the histo-ries of rock.

When NY Electro, DetroitTechno and ChicagoHouse hit the clubs andstreets of Britain in the1980s, British youth wascontinuing its long termobsession with musicfrom these contexts (NewYork Disco, Chicago elec-tric blues, DetroitMotown and soul) - thiswas not a ‘dance revolu-tion’. What was revolu-tionary was that therewere magazines such asThe Face and ID whowere documenting thefleeting club scenes, andbringing them to anational audience. In the1970s, sociological stud-ies suggested that dance

Westwood or, outside the capital Tony Wilson and theBuzzcocks). Their predecessors were equally a mixedbunch of college kids slumming in the rock dives ofNew York - whether Patti Smith, Television or theTalking Heads. And Johnny Rotten/Lydon was a progrock (Peter Hammill), dub reggae and Neil Young fanwhose musical tastes were not dictated by his workingclass background.

Punk, through the Pistols, momentarily shocked someof the UK public in 1977, and later the USA - but by1978 punk had been fully co-opted by the music indus-try with novelty punk hits such as Jilted John’s ‘Gordonis a Moron’ (a precursor of Linkin Park) outselling punkbands who were ‘keeping it real’. And sadly for thosewho believe that punk changed the world, it has to benoted that despite Morat’s claims in the 2000 KerrangPunk special that ‘way back when dinosaurs (Emerson,Lake and Palmer, Genesis et al) ruled the earth, it wasthe Pistols who drove them to extinction’, the onlything dead in 1978 was punk.

Far from the whole world going punk in 1976-77, punkwas a minority taste. Punk could not commerciallycompete with Pink Floyd, Genesis or Yes, pop/rockartists ELO, Abba and David Soul, and disco in the late70s and early 80s - The Pistols were extinct wellbefore Pink Floyd. The progressive dinosaurs remained,on the whole, undefeated and arguably reinvigoratedby punk. Yes, Genesis and Phil Collins (regrettably orotherwise) in one way or another found their greatestcommercial success in the 1980s. Therefore, the long-term impact of punk in Britain is arguably over-ampli-fied and ironically, in the post-punk era, JohnnyRotten/Lydon and his new band PiL pursued a dis-tinctly ‘progressive’ path in an attempt to bury punk.So in what sense was punk a revolution? Like the1960s counter-culture, maybe punk propagated forsome a new ‘revolution in the head’ which only playeditself out in the 1980s through the growth of indie andalternative rock - and many bands inspired by punk(The Smiths, New Order and the Cocteau Twins) did notactually play punk rock.

By the 1980s, any claim that rock was the primaryexperience and vehicle for youth cultural expressionbecame unsustainable. As suggested previously, disco,


musics, since the 1960s, had appealed to British work-ing class youth, whereas rock was the primary experi-ence of middle-class youth and students. By the 1980s,this social stratification of tastes was unclear (if itwas ever really true). Bands such as New Order enact-ed the shift from guitar based rock into music thatcould encompass aspects of Hi NRG and Electro. Itcould be argued that Manchester club the Haciendaeducated its audience into an acceptance that rockand dance boundaries were meaningless, resulting inthe cross-over music of the Happy Monday’s‘Madchester’. Dance culture, through house, techno,acid and rave became a mass movement by the early1990s (that is, mass because of the scale of its organ-isation - 10,000 people dancing in a field), and itseemed apparent that youth culture had diversifiedinto a range of lifestyle choices. Rock no longer couldclaim to be the central experience of youth - asLawrence Grossberg suggests ‘people no longerdanced to the music the liked, they liked the musicthey danced to’.

In the 1990s rock seemed to gain a new lease of lifein the US and UK through Nirvana and ‘grunge’ but itbecame difficult for these artists to come to termswith the fact that the challenging music they weremaking was given the corporate tag ‘alternative rock’,and by 1992 was the mainstream rock format of theUS music industry and MTV. The British response togrunge was the guitar orientated Britpop ‘movement’which was deeply nostalgic, retrogressively nationalis-tic and a throwback to 1960s British rock. In the USA,after the breakthrough success of Korn and theDeftones a new form of hard rock that embraced ele-ments of Hip Hop culture became the primary formatof American rock as Nu-Metal. Through carefully honedmarketing and presentation, these bands seemed torepresent a new anger, an alternative to mainstreamthought and lifestyles, but in the final analysis are cor-porate rock for the noughties. Nu-Metal is sanctionedrebellion - in the case of bands such as System of aDown, anti-capitalist anger marketed through a capi-talist corporation - capitalism will sell anything as longas it can be packaged with a free sticker and fold-outposter for the teen-angster.

Kerrang may now be thebiggest selling weekly maga-zine, guitars may be flying outof music shops (and DJ decksand groove boxes left lan-guishing on the shelves) butthis does not necessarilymean this recent revival of‘rock’ is a vital authenticexpression of an oppositionalculture, as opposed to danceor any other culture. It is alifestyle choice. Rock mayhave kidded itself that it wasonce the voice of a genera-tion, but in the present it isthe inarticulate voice of a gen-eration without a script. Punk(at least punk not representedby Blink 182 and Sum 41) mayremain as an oppositionalspace with its own independ-ent network, and there maywell be evidence that in thefield of electronic music thereare ‘dance’ artists creatingindependently minded work(Alec Empire) that ask difficultpolitical questions. But wefirst need to work out what itmeans for rock to be alivebefore we can suggest it isdead. Maybe rock was neverabout politics anyway, but wasalways really about the pleas-ures of noise, dance andyouthful insolence. In thissense, it still fulfils the samepleasures enjoyed by the kidswho trashed cinemas in the1950s while watching ‘RockAround the Clock’, and isn’tquite yet on its way to theemergency resuscitation unit.

SEAN ALBIEZ is subject leader of BA Popular Culture, University of Plymouth. Forthcoming publicationsinclude: 'Know History: Lydon, Cultural Capital and the Prog/Punk Dialectic' in the journal Popular Music(Summer 2003); 'The Day the Music Died Laughing: Madonna & Country' in Madonna's Drowned Worlds:New Approaches to Her Cultural Transformations (UK, Ashgate 2004); 'Sounds of Future Past: from Neu! toNuman' in Pop Sounds (Germany, Transcript Verlag, Autumn, 2003). Main research interest is the history ofelectronic popular music in the UK, US, France & Germany from progressive rock to techno.


Bill, 20Studying Popular Cultureat the University of Plymouth

Streetstylein Devon

illustration by Mike.E

Popular CulturePopular Culture will be useful for those exploringemployment opportunities in the creative andcultural industries (music, film, arts, televisionetc.) by providing a contextual understanding ofthe contemporary cultural terrain. It will alsosupport practical work in other areas by provid-ing a broad grounding in issues and debates atthe heart of the investigation of contemportarypopular culture.

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Bob, 21Studying Visual Arts

at the University of Plymouth

Visual ArtsRecent graduates have exhibited photographic artwork nationally, for example at the ‘FivePrincelet Street Gallery, E1’. Another has recentlybecome an in-house designer for Tate Modern. TheVisual Arts course has also seen many graduatesbecome website creators, including a recent grad-uate who now works for ‘Sony CompleteEntertainment’, while others have progressed tohigher degrees and further research.


Doris, 20Studying Art Historyat University of Plymouth

Art History

A degree in Art History combines the bestof both worlds. As a subject in thehumanities, it appeals to the employers inbusiness and industry who value commu-nication skills, intellectual creativity, self-reliance and powers of analysis.Vocationally, it helps prepare students forwork in galleries and museums, auctionhouses, arts publishing, heritage andrelated arts organisations. Many of ourgraduates have found jobs in all of thesefields; some have gone into teaching andothers have undertaken higher degrees.30


The University of Plymouth is planning a number of exiting new developments,including the concentration of it’s academic activities on to the Plymouth campus in the city centre. This will bring together related disciplines and provideenhanced facilities to enrich the student experience. Arts & Humanities courses,currently based at the Exeter & Exmouth campuses, will be moved to thePlymouth campus in September 2004. The University, however, has a specialisttheatre teaching space in Exmouth, and so Theatre & Performance will not bemoving until 2006, when new facilities will be ready. We will be working very hardto ensure the transition to Plymouth is smooth: for instance, there will be orientation visits and assistance with finding suitable accomodation.

The School of Arts and Humanities is a significant provider of humanities and creative artscourses in the reigon. It offers a wide variety of subjects and a range of different approaches to undergraduate and postgraduate study and research. Undergraduate courses in the School of Artsand Humanities are organised in a group of subjects known collectively as the combined arts

scheme. This is uniquely different from many you will find in higher education. It isa modular scheme in which you can negotiate your own pattern of study. We

offer a wide range of choices, and guidance to help you make those choices.

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Admissions, University of Plymouth, Faculty of Arts & EducationTel: 01392 475009 / 475010Fax: 01392 475012E-mail: [email protected] eb: http://www.fae.plym.ac.uk


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iq magazine (issue 2, november 2003)

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