MISCmedia for 2/28/00
Improv Nation Ascendant

LAST THURSDAY AND FRIDAY, we discussed some essays by Henry Hughes and Dennis Rea in The Tentacle, Seattle's periodical guide to avant-improv and other "creative" music.

Writing about their experiences during the anti-WTO protests, Hughes and Rea posited that global business and the governments it owns are just the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of "hierarchical power relations."

They then present the type of avant, free-improv, and experimental music praised in The Tentacle as exemplifying a different model for social relations--one based on equality, shared pride, spontenaity, and free expression.

A sociocultural movement based on the principles of DIY culture (real indie music, real indie filmmaking, real indie publishing) would probably never lead to any singular mass uprising that would seriously threaten the United States government or the World Trade Organization.

But consider the legacy of Czechoslovakia's "velvet revolution."

Having seen the 1968 "Prague Spring" reform movement crushed by Soviet tanks, some underground musicians, writers, and thinkers set about, in spite of heavy censorship and repressions, to form a permanent alternative culture. A culture in which the very premises of authoritarian, top-down thinking would be replaced by notions of self-expression and voluntary association.

When the Soviets' grip on eastern Europe finally loosened in the late '80s, it was these folks who filled the void in both political and cultural leadership. The result: A country that made one of the smoothest post-Soviet transitions, that has a relatively healthy economy and political system, that even allowed the Slovaks' bloodless secession.

The situation here's much different than in the old Eastern Bloc, for sure.

Back there, back then, all non-official cultural expressions were tracked down and stomped on. Here, indie culture's treated as corporate culture's minor leagues (film festivals are promoted as showcasing "tomorrow's Spielbergs;" indie rock scenes used to be hyped as "the Next Seattle"). If something shows no prospect for being "mainstreamed," such as difficult-listening music, it's ignored, left to wither in the shadows.

But the situation's changing, at a speed faster than so-called "Internet Time."

As this online column's oft mentioned, the Net's one-to-one and one-to-few modes of expression make standard U.S. notions of mass entertainment and mass marketing seem woefully outdated. The oldline TV networks, daily papers, movie studios, and record labels are only keeping their stock value up by consolidating with one another. The record giants in particular are losing market share worldwide, especially in places where local acts are taking back local audiences, away from the Anglophone superstars.

Folks everywhere are hungering for something more immediate, more personal, more "tribal" if you will, than the Time Warners and the Wal-Marts are equipped to provide.

This means an opportunity for avant-improv music (as well as other ground-level genres, from bluegrass to straight-edge) to form new audiences and alliances. And because I believe politics leads from culture and not the other way around, I also believe this is our best hope for forging a decentralized, bottom-up political movement the likes of which America's never really had.

TOMORROW: Results of the latest MISCmedia questionnaire.

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