Punk - the Highest Stage of Hip

 

The title here is a play on Lenin's famous pamphlet, "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" - that is, "highest" in two senses - its apogee, its greatest accomplishment as it were, but also the high point, after which it is all goes downhill.  After the crisis of imperialism, Lenin speaks of "decadent capitalism," "moribund capitalism," that is, capitalism that is about to end.  As Lenin sees it, imperialism and its crisis foretells the approaching end of capitalism.  

Similarly, after punk, we can speak of a period of moribund hipness - a zombie-like carryover; living dead hip.  Hip no longer functions as a value, but it persists, lifelessly, mindlessly, responding with knee-jerk reflexes, in much the way that you can cause a disembodied finger to twitch with the right stimulus.  

1991 - "The Year Punk Broke" as the movie title put it, was thus also the death knell of hip.  The world was introduced to "Nirvana," (literally, "extinguishing," "annihilation," like the blowing out of a candle), that apotheosis of a contradiction, Kurt Cobain later blowing his brains out in a grotesque literalization of the mind-blowing experience, clearing the mind of its desires and illusions.  The movement died from getting what it desired - fame, fortune, the sincere respect of the artistic world - like that episode of The Twilight Zone in which a gangster is in hell, a place where you get everything you desire, forever.  This exposed the fundamental contradiction within hipness itself, which had always been a value born of ressentiment, and thus a value that did not want to receive what it desired, that did not want what it wanted, like all the most delicious desires.

People shook their heads in the wake of that tragedy: why would someone who had it all end it like this?  The more interesting question is: why did the powers that be allow that brief moment of glory in the first place?

The question answers itself: they allowed this moment of the "alternative" gaining popularity, precisely because they no longer had anything to fear from it.  And why did they have nothing to fear from it?  Because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the western victory in the Cold War, and the "End of History".  Since their unitary power was now completely unchallenged, they could afford to allow the rabble a moment in the sun, without concern.  They wore Kurt Cobain's mangled corpse as medal of honor, like a Roman Triumph.  

The crisis and collapse of hip - the exposure of the contradiction of hip - is inextricably tied to the crisis and collapse of democracy, and the exposure of its own contradiction.  The U.S.A. and its allies, at the end of the Cold War, claimed to be fighting for "the free world" against the forces of "totalitarianism" and "authoritarianism."  But successive history has revealed that the democratic states needed those antagonists to maintain even the illusion of democracy.

Of course, hip was not merely a passive spectator in this struggle, but was directly involved.  Bands like the Plastic People of the Universe in what was then Czechoslovakia had been playing their Velvet Underground-inspired rock since the 60s, defiantly embracing the hyper-capitalist, decadent values of Andy Warhol's Factory in the face of their Leninist overseers, and creating a real underground of music (Charter 77) that eventually led to the "Velvet Revolution," which itself paved the way for the collapse of the broader Eastern Bloc.

Hip had always been a consumerist value, but a walking, talking, functioning contradiction of one.  Thus, punk, which is a form of hip and its highest form, was also a form of consumerism, and laid bare its inner contradiction: an elitism of anarchy, the superstars of non-hierarchical society.  Nowadays, in the world after the collapse of hip, anyone can be hip to everything - just google it, and you will learn all the inside gossip.  There is no inner circle - no "Circle 1" as the Germs used to say.  It is a circle whose circumference is everywhere and whose center is nowhere.  And thus hip has lost its value.

Nirvana had erupted into public consciousness on the original "Kill Rock Stars" compilation - which was explicit in referencing its Zen predecessor in the 9th century master, Lin Chi: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."  To fetishize a master outside one's own Buddha Nature is already to create an illusory division in non-dual reality.  In the wake of Cobain's death, some tried to reverse this, such as Marilyn Manson, who, in a (pseudo-)Nietzschean gesture sought to make himself into a fetish, to embrace the role of "Rock Star" unapologetically.  (Darby Crash, of the Germs, had been into Nietzsche, too.)  Of course, nowadays, Manson is taking communion with Kanye West....

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