Anarchy Bang: Introducing Episode 43 – Anarchist Music

From Anarchy Bang

It used to be that the anarchist space was also a cultural space. Music was a big part of that space and mostly is no longer. Why is that? Or if not then why is the space that is about music seems to not exactly be about other aspects of the anarchist space. This week let's talk about anarchist music and about music that appeals to anarchists. Did anarchist music end at Tub Thumping? Or should we take heed at anarchist music lists like this one? https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6ddept8PXHsXGmtPgNCZU0

There are 35 Comments

u too

and chumbawumba is pretty nice so far...

i applaud you all for having a show on this, it's better than repeating questions about the clique and their futile activities.

part of the problem with anarchism these days is the ideological/intellectual feature is over developed, let's start the movement that doesn't even need the fucking words lol.

there's so much in the way of generic pop-rap beats, so much BS as about weapons, it's overall a crappy playlist.

and it's a reflection of generic edge-lord crap that anarchists turn out on a regular basis. If you're not gonna kill someone, then don't front like you are. If you're not gonna attack the state, don't pretend like you are. I feel the same thing over and over again, anarchist rhetoric and ideas has so much that can help people live better lives and not get addicted to money and work, but it's mostly not being used for that purpose. It's mostly being used so pathetic people can play hierarchical ego games with each other with sarcastic aragorn being the king lol.

There is no point in attaching the anarchist label to whatever you do: don't be an anarchist, be an egoist, and do whatever it takes to enjoy this short life you have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqdJJTDVxYw

No need to punch down or sideways tho! I largely agree with you but like … every set of ideas has this problem? Every genre of music is 75% garbage at least? People are disappointing. They play silly games and miss the point and masturbate while staring deeply in to the mirror. The INTERNET ...

"don't be an anarchist, be an egoist, and do whatever it takes to enjoy this short life you have."

Got it! Why bother any longer with those pesky antiauthoritarian ethics, when I just can go around kissing cuties and grabbing them by the butts and pussies whenever I feel like, no matter the age. Coz yolo, bro!

You sound like a nerd who doesn’t get it. If this was high school I’d be stuffing you in a locker. Keep listening to chumpawumba you weenie.

yeah that's when I started to scare the shit out of you with philosophy and especially fundamental philosophy questions that completely undermine your thin-layered fabric of reality based on testosterone bravado and making these loud brain farts to make you sound edgy to the chicks.

"don't be an anarchist, be an egoist, and do whatever it takes to enjoy this short life you have."

wat if i enjoy being an anarchist?

being an egoist isn't about "grabbing butts and pussies", it's about anything you want it to be about. Egoism takes the training wheels off of everything, whereas anarchism is about some sort of political struggle. I really wish that stirnerian thought could be decoupled from the racist patriarchal monetary and legal system that anarchists think that they're fighting. As un-wealthy egoists, we must acknowledge the egoism in other beings as well. My tuxedo was donated, i didn't make anyone give this to me.

The only way to fight this bullshit is to react to it differently. There's also the dropping out and making better friends part but that's more anarchy 102. OR, there are no levels! I'm just trying to save you from yourself! There are no ethics!

or .. if you prefer a framing that is harder to rationalize awful shit with, make your own ethics

DoubleLife was making it pretty clear he's rooting for that rapist view of egoism, and that was my point in bringing the complete ethical dead eng it leads to.

I'm 100% with that stirnerian egoist position you're expressing here. 20th century capitalism -from Rand to macho liberal boomers to Madonna, among other moral entrepreneurs- has found ways to confuse that egoism with... this egoism. Where commodity cult has turned the self into a commodity, its glorification is amalgamated with the emancipation of the individual on the social markets.

i.e Self-value is entirely defined in relation to its external exchange value within spectacular relations, yet the value of the self, for itself (or its ownness) is regarded as irrelevant to the social equation. Coz if you don't sell albums and don't have orgies in your Manhattan loft, why the fuck would you matter, right, Madonna?

Yet the Madonna figure is a shallow, dead commodity like the rest of commodities. It is reflecting life yet not manifesting it.

"dead end" lol

the "hatin anon" comment does not normally reflect about how i feel about "the anarchists", i was just in a bad mood when i posted that. Sometimes i feel anarchists are shallow hipsters, who have venom in their rhetoric but are just normal prejudiced people like everyone else. I sometimes find the stupidity of the trolling on this website to be pretty stunning, and the mind games of the id-pols to be deeply disturbing and sinister [most likely they don't even understand how bad it is]. I'm of course kinda stupid too. I used to have an anarchist friend but i recently stopped talking to him because i realized he basically just goes along with group think and i wouldn't trust him in situations where things got really dramatic and ugly.

I also think that Aragorn! a lot of the time just uses his shows to recycle identity labels sometimes in a mildly prejudiced and not so nuanced way, kinda like he basically shapeshifts with popular opinion in the scene. And that was still funny when he went down to wisconsin and got fucked with by the edgey vegan kids! I mean what do you expect when you start criticizing someone else's diet?

DoubleLife is a euphemism for aggressive schizoid who goes from one peaceful life into a radical hateful sneering put em all up against a wall lunatic.

there's this letter of an anarchist explaining what anarchism is to john cage

it's on t@l

4′33″ is meme

lmao

music amirite

(only interesting?) for the historical (and maybe international) references. there's one song that i had to read the translation for that is funny. i think it was the bad reputation (in french) song. there might be other gems buried, but any list that includes sole is rally going to have to work hard to make up for that.

John Cage was an interesting guy, anarchist-mycologist-Buddhist-pianist. He gets hated on because his music lacked familiar structure, harmony and was meandering, he's also, somewhat recently, become a meme over his song 4'33".

I also want to say that I'm glad that @bang brought up Tubthumping, the money Chumbawamba gets/got from that song funded a lot of awesome anarchist projects.

Some of the money from Fall Out Boy was also used to publish green anarchist literary projects, like Cumbawamba used for Earthfirst!, & squatting legal defense. The motive to use recuperation for advancing discourse is to me an interesting tactic. If we have the creativity that boring leftists lack, why not use it to funnel into the machine & then reap the financial rewards to generate into our own non-recuperatable projects?

You could go the Camatte route & argue everything we do will help capital, & I would tend to agree with you, but there is something to being an anarchist sugar daddy.

pshhhh...be a sugar daddy regardless.

everything’s recuperable regardless.

(this is not defeatist, or discouragement, it’s just how it works. what you use against an opponent will be in turn attempted to be used against you, be neutralized, or be diverted by them)

fuck camatte regardless!

you mean like avant-garde music or just music made by anarchists?

I just don't think that there is a specific "anarchist music" outside of the rumblings and echoes which reverberate within one's own audio dimensions. The external sounds are catalysts for rehearsing innate instincts if we still remember or value them.

@incognito that's point of 4'33" that some other guise mentioned on here.

Yes I was trying to articulate more concerning 4'33" as Ì am away of the culturally acquired tonal customs John Cage attempts to critique. Dare I mention the concept of Weltanschauung?

atonality, 12 tone technique (degenerate music!), microtonality and NOISE!

In atonality there is no "12" but rather a fluid spectrum of vibrations.

The playlist is fine. Not really music I'd put on otherwise, but who cares? I enjoyed looking through it and playing a couple songs.

Yall just hate fun light hearted stuff. Everything needs to be snarky, mean spirited and with way to much thought put into it. Does it not get tiring ever? Its been decades of this and most people cringe at it.

i saw the list at magpie’s twitter before it was posted here. have not listened to it yet, but my immediate reaction was not “hey, these are not my beloved artists and genres!” but “hey, cool! it’s nice that someone went and did this!”

people are too spoiled and/or snobbish as consumers/spectators of music nowadays.
back then before mass culture, music was part of sharing good moments and ceremonies. not noises a machine reproduced so you could bear with traffic or work/study, or you could write a video essay about in your vlog.

lot's of very fun songs, i don't know what the fuck i was going for before, just paranoid and dumb i guess haha

mostly a good playlist, but there is a block at the beginning P.O.S. between machine gun kelly is pretty much trash. POS is a great name for a rapper though, i wish i had thought of it myself! I'd rock it.

Keep being scizoid assholes anarchists, it's better than being one person all the time! Woooooooo! (goes into generic party chants)

Despite misleading first glance impressions of those who experienced it first-hand, the discussion in this episode (IRC and emails included, of course) is quite revealing and profound upon reflection.

It interesting to see the strong emotions that music evokes in people; this much is a truism.
But then often in our anarchism-centric discussions we turn very "rational" and turn to examine the content of the lyrics, the effects of the lyrics on the listeners, the definition of anarchy, the definitions of musical genres, the origins and trajectory of styles, and other minutia, all while getting very invested and heated about the particularities of each of the points and counter-points being made by the interlocutors.

A song (a hymn or anthem), a flag, a place, a few stories (myths) are all it takes (it seems at times, + other ingredients, like genocide, proselytism etc.) to make a meme of a (national or sub)culture with a strong enough emotional pull to make people kill and die for it. Sometimes we minimize the importance, thinking of failed subcultural scenes, but in the IRC someone mentioned Wagner, and there's a line of thought that can be discussed there.

Perhaps what was evident in the conversation was how anarchist do not currently share a common music referent as a sentimental and cultural anchor or point of unity. How many wildly different types of music can evoke the same type of intense feeling and attachment to the idea of anarchy or anarchism, and how treasured that is by each to the point of defending it ferociously. This makes sense, as anarchy is not a nation, nor a national project, and we value individuality and diversity.
There's not a single defining musical aspect that should be common to all of us as anarchist, but music does link us to a place and time and people

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