Whatever Happened to Rock 'n' Roll?

Nov 03, 2024

The nature of rock and roll has always contained a death cult. .. When you're young, death and life can feel smushed up against each other.

-Bruce Springsteen, interview

Even if you vote and then pass away, it’s worth it.

-Donald Trump

Like you I watched the events of January 6th, 2021 unfold on the television and over the internet. Probably like you I spent the hours before 6 pm wondering whether the National Guard would arrive or if I was seeing a legitimate coup take place. Maybe entirely unlike you, after 6 pm, when the rioters were sheepishly ushered out and the broken glass was being swept away, when the Axe Body Spray canisters were being recovered from the scene and the crowd filtered out into the DC night, I was asking myself, “All this for a rich guy?”

I remember when culture was dangerous. Skinheads would turn up at the punk shows. It was awful. You never knew when things would go really sideways. Drag queens were the toughest people I knew. They had to be. I had friends with terminal HIV who would carry handguns and police the neighborhood against gay bashers. Nobody else was doing it.

Even the boomers had a real go of it. Kids would die at rock concerts, dragged under in the crush of unholstered mania. It would happen pretty often. Then there was the draft and the cold war. Life was lethal and precious.

Now, to get their kicks, right wing conspiracy theorists coalesce around magical stories of pedophilic bloodletting and pledge their dying breath to protect a billionaire windbag who is locked in a quixotic bid to retain executive power, telling each other “It’s ride or die time, brother” And I find myself wondering, Whatever happened to Rock n’ Roll?

I decide to go and see Donald Trump in his most natural medium: the political rally. It would be his return to Pennsylvania, not Butler but Johnstown, after a young man took a shot at him at the site of the former.

Johnstown, PA, of the much storied Johnstown flood is a southwestern city up in hill country, coal country, drained and neglected, a former and lagging human settlement with signs of having boomed during some of the more tasteful moments in American architecture. The namesake flood is in fact multiple catastrophic floods and the locals are quick to point out the high water mark from ’77 still visible on City Hall.

The trip is five hours long and the organizers suggest getting there at one p.m., so that makes for a long day. Besides all that, I’m anxious. My car is a late 90’s model and wobbles dangerously at highway speeds and I’m undergoing treatments for cancer, which can be quite uncomfortable, but to tell the truth, it’s the crowd that makes me nervous. Scenes from Jan. 6 and selfies of white supremacist militias are ripe in my head.

The drive is a meandering stitch that chimeras both highway and interstate and if you’re lucky enough to live in the outer reaches of Appalachia that connects my home to Western Pennsylvania, you’ll know a landscape that is so picturesque, so much the idea that America has of itself that it’s like a joke.

I’m on I-80 around lunchtime and pull off to for something to eat. Just past the cloverleaf of on-ramps begins a strip mall with a McDonalds in it. I recently discovered that McDonalds’ french fries taste less like chemicals and more like fries if you get them fresh from the cooker, so I take a gamble on a large order. Everyone is at the drive through for the lunch rush, but I’ve been in my car all morning so I go in to find a slickly redesigned interior of futuristically drab colors, a narrow stainless steel counter serviced by a fidgety teenage boy with a divergent class of intelligence and two six-foot touch screens that encouraged you to place your order using their hi-def renderings of dewy soft drinks and cheeseburgers brimming like cornucopias. I navigate the touchscreen with a native deftness but make the mistake of paying with cash and that antiquated gesture nearly ends to the whole transaction.

Two mothers sit in the booths, feeding their two daughters who wear princess costumes and I peer across the street at a two-story Dutch Colonial with boarded up windows and a towering dead spruce leaned broken against the porch. Another teenage boy hands me my order, this one handsome and bright. I decide to eat my chemical fries and drink my Coca-Cola sitting on the bumper of my car and watch the drive-through parse its assembly-line crawl.

I am watching footage from the riot on Jan. 6th when the acolytes of Donald Trump storm, then breach, then vandalize the capitol building while threatening lethal violence against elected representatives who don’t surrender to the outcome of their will.

There is a gallows hastily assembled from pressure treated 6”x6” wood and though it could use some gussets against racking, the only oversight in its form is the short distance between the noose and the deck.

I am watching the crowd trample Rosanne Boyland to death at the bottle-neck of the breached entrance. I am watching the orgastic experience of a crowd overwhelming a fence, a feeling I myself know.

I am watching the crowd chant “U S A!” in the capitol entrance hall.

I am seeing the point of view as an anonymous cameraman yells, “Where are the fucking traitors?! Drag them out by the fucking hair!!”

I am watching a crowd move through the halls to the chant of “Prepare for liberty, prepare for death!” Another woman screams out “Seventeen Seventy Siiiiiiix!”

I am watching a crowd chant, “Whose house? Our house!” until they peter out, milling around the senate chambers, looking for the substance of the thing they came for, looking for the vestige of power that democracy functions by, the means by which it collects and distributes power, a collection of laws and institutions, interruptible but not tangible.

I am watching a raven haired woman with a nose ring, after sweeping her hair to one side, take a panoramic selfie video with the walls of the rotunda behind her. She says to the camera, “We did it.”

I am watching Ashli Babbitt being shot to death by a capitol police officer and the incredulousness of the crowd when reality intrudes on their fantasy.

I am watching numerous men call out for Nancy Pelosi in the halls. One picks up the phone as if on a direct line to her and then mugging for the camera, says, “Pelosi? We’re comin’ for ya, bitch!”

I am watching Ivanka Trump walk from the backstage of the rally outside the Capitol to a black SUV while wearing a black trench coat and heels after her father exhorted a crowd to attempt a coup. YMCA by The Village People is playing. Ivanka waves at the crowd and they cheer her name. Her hair is blond and shimmering. She wears no hat, though it must be cold in the D.C. January. The rest of the Trump family follows and waves. They think they are going to the capitol, but they will not.

I am watching a choir sing about the Lord, fighting the battle for His people and crushing their enemies.

The rally is being held at the 1st Summit Arena on the concrete banks of the Conemaugh river, downtown, the kind of place where a flood would drain to a mountain’s lower basin. The street leading up to the event is choked with merchandise and the line for entry trails off endlessly in the other direction. so I start to hoof it, across a bridge, around a corner and up a hill along a steep wooded street that all these western Pennsylvania towns seem to have. I am immediately accosted by a reporter from the Post.

“Who you shootin’ for?”

“It’s just my camera”

“Yeah, who you shootin’ for?”

My cover was nothing. Though a bona fide working-class, rural, white male, I feel as conspicuous as an air raid siren. She tells me she’s from Johnstown and then lowers her voice conspiratorially, “Everyone’s really nice, actually.”

I find my way to the end of the line. Behind me is a couple who own a tattoo studio. They have the marked-up faces and hands to prove it. Two kids scamper around their legs and the woman tells me she won’t put them in public school. I have trouble disagreeing with that. I didn’t learn much in school besides hazing and ritual displays of power. Another woman is walking the line charismatically. She pronounces, “I’m a nationally recognized artist, but I wouldn’t dare tell anyone I’m here. It would be the end of my career”.

The mood is jovial, as though everyone is being honored by name at the community picnic. Ahead of me is a grandma, trim and able bodied. I hold her place while she buys a $5 water and she tells me she won’t let her grandkids get vaccinated. She says the last time she came down to the Arena was ’86.

“What was the occasion?”

“Bon Jovi.”

The vendors are all black men. The crowd is mostly white. The sellers have prepared lines for barking and plying the crowd, “Don’t get mistaken for a Democrat, get your Trump hat!” There are buskers and a ‘Koreans for Trump’ contingent with a portable PA broadcasting sharp peals of pop music. One young salesmen is goofing on a dirt bike, taking advantage of the vacant roads. When the air currents pull his MAGA hat off, he circles back to find a middle aged white guy has picked it up and hands it to him with a smile. At the entrance to the venue there’s a sniper in desert fatigues on the back of a civilian truck that is wrapped in an American flag decal. It reads, “Merry MAGA, you filthy animal” and features a picture of trump over the rear window of the extended cab.

Have you ever read Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto from 1909? Compared to Tristan Tzara’s drab and droning Dada manifesto, it’s impossibly sexy, fuming with death wish and illuminated by the sodium fires of its appetite for devouring the corpse of an aged culture, breaking it down to its concomitant proteins and selling the rest for parts.

This may seem odd at first blush - the Futurists’ only recognized philosophical progeny being Italian Fascism with its cult of terminal order, and Dada casting its long shadow into the riots of Sorbonne ’68 and punk rock - but really this is just a failure of taxonomy. Fascism can never be decoupled from its theater of the absurd, its narrative of destructive groundswell, its deputized street gangs or its incendiary vitriol for power structures past.

The painter Tullio Crali wasn’t at the signing of the Futurist Manifesto, he was born a year later. He wasn’t a theoretical technician of the movement’s high-octane, misogynist anti-sentimentalism, he was instead its perfect product. It’s as if Crali walked straight out of Marinetti’s open-letter dream — a youthful creator who’d lay to waste the previous generations of culture in his insatiable appetite for the hot magma of creative essence. When those guys met Crali, it must have been like the Sex Pistols first encountering Sid Vicious - Like, Oh, shit. This is a real one.

His expressionistic nexus were his aeropittura - warped dimensional, porno-maniacal hagiographies of speed, flight and distortion. In Crali’s world, exaltations of twisted metal peel the skin from punished air, revealing the folded, fetal erotics of space, individual kernels of electric potential luminescing like flayed nerve endings in a colonized sky.

One of his least imaginative but nevertheless most engaging paintings, Nose Dive on the City, 1938, is a gasping view onto a spindle of modern high rises with a sidewalk bullseye obscured by the back of a pilot’s head at the center. It’s been criticized as being, of its time and place, a view that was only the privy to the Blitzkrieg bomber, its thrill and magic derived from the murderous power there.

But, I think I disagree. When you look at the painting, the cityscape structures completely obscuring the skyline in every direction, the stone and sepia forms blotting out any sliver of natural sky, even a child could explain the physics of the situation to you:

You ain’t pulling out of this one. The painting takes you to the slipping edge of annihilation to gaze at the unnameable. It isn’t Blitzkrieg, it’s suicide.

The flight toward the fatal singularity, the wildness and nihilism in the suicidal impulse, the religion of fire and the terminal addiction to acceleration are what give this work its power. Crali knows what the Dionysians, Rimbaud, Robert Johnson and the whole of the 27 club knew - Your proximity to the lethal flame is in direct relationship to your sex appeal.

There’s a day drunk contingent outside of the rally who are lit up like it’s the 4th of July, everyone exuding a real togetherness and belonging. This is a special day. I wonder if you could remove the man at the center of this experience and if folks would still get the majority of the benefit.

One fellow, in his late 60s, 6’4” maybe 220 with a wet smile and a spirit of warm largess says to me, “I don’t know who you’re with, or what you’re about, but you’re a gentleman. You’re all right…” This is the political equivalent of, I don’t know if you like boys or girls, but you’re ok with me.

He tells me he was a coal miner and then a heavy equipment operator. I say, “Heavy equipment? That’s good money!”

He tells me coal mining was good money too, before it went away. I’d never thought of it before, but once organized labor got to it, coal mining was a pretty good job. You were compensated for the danger. I asked if he’d seen anything crazy back then.

“No….. I got caved in on. They had to dig me out. Broke my leg,” pointing to his left, lower.

I said that sounded pretty crazy to me.

In front of us a woman with dyed red hair holds up her phone and with a dejected frown says she just got kicked off of Facebook Live. The big guy says, “Boy, they sure hate us, don’t they?”

“They do,” she agrees.

He tells me, “No one has more fun than us, conservative poor people.”

There’s a guy walking around with a t-shirt of Trump, bloody and defiant from the shooting in Butler. The shirt reads MISSED. I want a picture of him, but I’m hesitant. He looks a little keyed up. Militia? Amphetamines? Both?

Behind me is another retiree with a braided goatee. He’d worked as an EMT during the flood of ’77. He said he would follow the flies to find the bodies. He found other work after that. Too much horror. He tells me, “I’m not voting for Trump, I’m voting against communism.” But when the conversation turns to unions he says, “Unions gave us wonderful things - like the weekend and the 40-hour workweek. But let’s see the unions go down to Mexico and China and organize them.”

He’s right, of course. This is Neoliberalism in a nutshell. The free movement of capital has vastly outstripped the free movement of labor. Whereas nation states hold fast to the borders that contain their workers, capital has been freed to move, liquid and electric, to find the cheapest possible markets for exploitation and extraction. After the bloody civil war that we benignly dub the Labor Movement, we had just about 60 good years of power sharing that created the American miracle before NAFTA opened the floodgates and made sure that capital never had to come to the table again. To be effective, unions would have to be a globally organized entity. Until then, labor really isn’t in conversation with capital at all.

I am reading the Complaints and Statements of Fact against the defendants of so called Capitol Breach on the Justice Department’s website. There are 1243 defendants listed there.

Nearly every defendant has social media content that is being used against them in the case.

One from Chicago reads, “Be There. Trump needs us.”

There are photos of men in tactical vests flashing white supremacist hand gestures.

I see photos of a man from White Plains, NY assaulting a Metropolitan Police Officer. He has been sentenced to 10 years.

I see a member of the Oath Keepers militia who resides in Georgia has plead guilty to two counts of Seditious Conspiracy.

I see a young man from Indiana with a cross tattooed on his forehead and cursive lettering beneath one eye.

I see a man from Alaska with a shirt that reads Courage is Contagious.

I am reading an indictment,

“At approximately 1:36 p.m., the officers succeeded in bringing the barricades back down onto the ground, causing several rioters to fall down and/or backwards. S— emerged from the crowd, wearing a black gaiter across his face and holding a megaphone and a cellphone. S— stumbled backwards then raised the megaphone towards his face and shouted into the megaphone at the officers, ‘How dare you? How dare you, traitors? How dare you traitors?’”

I see a realtor from Ft .Worth in selfies from a private plane to D.C.. She wears sunglasses in the cabin and captions her post “weeeee”.

I see a man from Wilmington carrying a Confederate flag bigger than himself in the Senate chamber, as though rewriting history where the vanquished nation of Dixie is suddenly the victor after a 156 year pause in hostilities.

I see a man from Ohio has posted pics of protest signs that read “ The only good communist is a dead communist,” and “Make Guillotines Great Again.”

I see a man from Las Vegas and a man from Farmingdale, NY take selfies while smoking a roach in the Senate Gallery and Capitol Rotunda, respectively.

A sheriff on the security detail comes by and tells us we won’t be making it inside the rally. I move to the shade as Trump appears on the giant outdoor video screens provided for the overflow. I eat a $12 sausage and drink a cola, but even after my blood sugar normalizes I can’t follow his speech. It’s erratic and meandering, though he assures us it’s quite brilliant. The jovial mood is over and the audience has lost interest in each other, but is now fixated on the man. Like me, they’re shifting from foot to foot on the hot concrete, all eyes narrowed in concentration. He gets a few laughs when he gives his adversaries funny nicknames, Comrade Kamala or Gavin Newscum, but it’s like the picnic is over and the sermon has started.

About 45 minutes in he starts on the idea of death penalties for drug dealers and this gets a rise out of the crowd. Pale young women wearing braids and Sunday clothes start to furrow their brows and scream, “Yeah!” Trump polls strongest in districts that are most prone to fentanyl overdose. Surely someone here has been effected by the opioid crisis. I can’t square the idea of that bear-hugging granddad or my EMT friend calling for heads on pikes, but then again, there’s plenty I can never really square about America.

There’s a young man in black shorts and black t-shirt with a Gore-Tex backpack. His movements are trim and orderly. Not like someone with military training, but the real thing. He’s the only other person besides me with a camera and I have to think he noticed as well.

As the speech meanders again I find it harder to stay focused and I wander across the street to a grassy lump in front of an apartment complex where folks are sitting, smoking cigarettes and I lie down in the mottled grass and drift from corn syrup and exhaustion. I try to follow the speech but his words are like spinning carousel chairs, lifting and bobbing, fueled by an engine of anxiety and disquiet. I can’t remember what questions I came here with, but as I’m leaving I think: wherein lies this man’s power?

I’ve long suspected that Trump’s unique trait was his emptiness, an icon of perpetual motion in the bottomless and thoughtless appetite of self. Capitalism can never have a fulfillment narrative because its psychology runs on vacuous pressure circuits, imploring and directing the individual through what they lack. In addition to economically exterminating its citizens through streamlined production, capitalism must also never produce a fulfillment narrative, or the consumer becomes obsolete. The closest it will come is the promise of eternal life on this earthly plane - talismans against death and aging in the form of medical marginalia - and for those of us living in the evaporating space between the middle class and the working poor, there isn’t enough money to want to live any longer than we already have to.

For the generation of young adults living now, the only escape from the cruelty of a world devoid of social safety nets is the narrative of getting rich, to dream of escape velocity that will lift you from misery and sickness. But for the poor and aged, there’s no time for any of that. They need to be rich NOW. They need immediately to feel the attitudes, gestures and bellicose verbiage of the man who calls the shots, who owns the story, who isn’t cowed by the constraints of reality. This is the performer in his magical aspect, our hero on the high-wire, for while he has our attention in total, we can become him and in those un-lonely hours when the stage becomes sublime, we commune and transform and afterwards, when the ticker tape has descended and the ushers are sweeping the floors, we begin to wait again for the next chance to ascend. This is the Trump show.

From Life by Keith Richards, 2010

I was never more in fear for my life than I was from teenage girls. The ones that choked me, tore me to shreds, if you got caught in a frenzied crowd of them—it’s hard to express how frightening they could be. You’d rather be in a trench fighting the enemy than to be faced with this unstoppable, killer wave of lust and desire, or whatever it is—it’s unknown even to them.

they weren’t reacting to the music…you couldn’t hear the voices, you couldn’t hear the guitars… What they were reacting to was being in this enclosed space with us—this illusion, me, Mick, and Brian. The music might be the trigger, but the bullet, nobody knows what that is. … a few did get hurt, and a few died. Some chick third balcony up flung herself off … broke her neck and died.

… the limp and fainted bodies going by us after the first 10 minutes of playing, that happened every night. Or sometimes they’d stack them up on the side of the stage because there were so many of them. It was like the Western Front.

In a later chapter of his biography, Richards recalls being outflanked by a dozen teenage girls in a hotel lobby. He looks left, he looks right, but there was nothing for it. They had him surrounded. So he had them up to his room and served them tea. They sat primly and asked him questions about what he liked and what he ate. Whatever was on their mind, it wasn’t sex. They wanted to know what was beyond the veil of images.

It’s just so hard when you can’t touch the icon.

On Pentecost Island they assemble hundred foot towers out of bamboo and leap toward the earth with vines lashed to their feet, snapping back from the precipice of death just inches above the plowed earth. The Maasai of Kenya will prove themselves by hunting a male lion with nothing but a spear and the Matsé tribe of the Amazon will initiate young hunters with a gauntlet of poisons and beatings that take him to the brink of death.

On Easter Sunday, in Sulmona, Italy, The Confraternity of Our Lady of Loreto runs a statue of the Madonna on a ceremonial bier towards a statue of her son, the Christ, as doves are released and fireworks explode and the crowd cheers, for if the run is successful it merits a good year, though if it be perilous and the statue should drop, it is a portent of doom that can only be lifted with a successful run next Easter.

Two hundred and sixty miles north, the wealthy industrial center of Emilia-Romagna, where Mussolini was born and is now buried, is rich in reliquary but light on running them through town. The iconography usually stays put, on cathedral walls or consecrated cabinets, except for the logos of Ferrari, Lamborghini or Maserati which prowl the streets after rolling from the factory floors.

Il Duce himself never made for much of an icon, except for the jawline, except for the salute. He struck his most iconic pose hanging by his feet, his head a slumped leather sack after Partisans had kicked the brains and bones into pulp.

They certainly got to touch the idol.

I hear music from a bluetooth speaker Dopplering past and it rouses me from glucose fever-dream. I wake to see MISSED stepping over my little patch of sweaty lawn, and he’s agitated. The trim military youth is also present, sitting just behind me and his unblinking eyes keep me conspicuously inside his peripheral view. For the first time today I think,

Am I going to get jumped? Jeez, Don’t they know I’m a sick man? I should have brought my cane.

I sit up and blink at the sidelong sun. Two girls in their 20s pose for selfies on the sidewalk in front of me with a yard sign that reads FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!!! One is wearing saddle shoes, knee highs and Jackie Onassis shades. The other is in track pants. I nod briefly and when I open my eyes she has fixed me with the blank sneer that young women reserve for men who look at them, and men who don’t.

I get up to leave. MISSED is standing between orange barricades with a wetted cloth wrapped around his face and he’s staring forward, toward the screen, but somehow not looking. He’s vibrating to a frequency I cannot hear.

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