Lester Bangs (or his cousin or something) wrote the lyric: "I don't wanna be a hero; just wanna be a zero." That's a different story, even though it can be turned into a Hero Story (if Lester/Lester's cousin forms a band and basically evangelizes this point and we take him as a model)...and it's one that keeps me in Hero Story mode. To me, zero means giving up and shutting down, taking a flunky day job, not writing or thinking or listening to music, and not having to take ANY of my work home with me, including my intellectual work, which is twenty-four seven. Intellectuals do have this option* (even if it feels like they/we don't), and have it in varying degrees: "well, this conversation is fun and I'm glad to have contributed my piece, but I've got real work to do." Which is totally understandable, but it also says (in respect to rock criticism anyway) "I don't wanna be a hero (at the moment), just wanna be a zero (to pay my bills, to alleviate the pain of this ulcer, to take my kids to baseball practice). I only use "zero" here (since yes, yr kids and health come first) in the anti-hero story sense; zero thought (for the moment), zero probing (until I finish this, hands are full), zero restlessness (so I can sleep).
A lot of necessity comes into play here, but people want to create this story, too. The story goes, "At sixteen I thought music changed the the world. At twenty I wasn't convinced it could change the world, but that maybe I could change the world. At twenty-four I realized that I'd been in the dark and came into the light and wanted to change the world, but differently. At twenty-six onward I got married and got a mortgage and had kids and realized I wasted too much time on this stuff and I had real work to do, so the flights of fancy had to make way for the grind of the everyday." This denies the possibility of having it both ways, of having a zero and a hero life simultaneously. Harvey Pekar is a model here; so is Frank Kogan. Blurring the zero/hero divide, finding a way to navigate both worlds (and I should reiterate here that I *do* think that paying your bills is important -- not actually worth "zero" -- but what "zero" means is to remove yourself from the Hero Story; it's zero-in-relation-to-the-HS:M**). But at some point, people either say, "I don't really want to be a hero who puts his/her energies into the HS:M; I want to be a zero who dabbles in heroism." Or, they might say "I have comfort and security in my zero life, but it's not enough. I WANT TO BE A HERO." And you realize that it's much easier to make a living as a zero, and this is something that a Hero Story, no matter how well it's told, may never be able to change. (At least it won't change the world; it might change your world and the world of the people you bring with you. Maybe we can all potentially achieve our own visions of utopia individually -- but you have to be a dreamer for this to happen, since the world doesn't naturally tend toward utopias.)
*A clarification, I don't really believe this myself. I do believe we can shut down in degrees though. So there's no absolute zero, but we can tend toward zero. Coincidentally, this is also what I thought my blood sugar was doing all the time til I cleared my head a little and realized this isn't REALLY the case; I was just telling myself the story of it being the case.
**Hero Story: Musical
NOTE: I'm really interested in other popular stories/narratives told in popular music. I batted around an idea that never stuck that I called the Congenial Anarchy Story (congenial in the sense that no one really gets hurt/blown up, even if it does make your brain hurt), which basically went "let's go crazy, folks" and listed enjoyable (or not) music in seemingly arbitrary categories with no real semblance of (consistent) order. Fun fun fun, and not necessarily anti-canonical (though usually canon-skeptical and -revisionist). But my example was Chuck Eddy, who isn't so much an anarchist as a sort of modest player in his own Hero Story -- he basically lays it down in the last chapter (first post-script?) of Accidental Evolution, which is probably the most important "framework"-type chapter but also the one that people are most likely to skip or take with a grain of salt:
If anything, this book will probably just get me in more trouble. Nowadays, rock criticism tries its damnedest not to raise a ruckus, tries not to be funny or surprising or to hurt anybody's feelings. It's not supposed to be messy like the world; it's supposed to be respectable like a grad-school symposium, or the goddam Rock of Gibraltar. A great party idea has backslid somehow into a somber institution that I can't imagine luring in any adolescent with half an I.Q.
No comments:
Post a Comment