with the frills and indulgences of old-time design, this doctrine of socialistic simplicity swept away the clutter of the old world’s baroque and courtly sex play and distilled it into the highly efficient erotica that is now standard fare. From its late-sixties beginnings (when Denmark led the world in decriminalizing smut), Norse pornography has been, like a science expo, brightly lit and clinical. An exposition of dispassionate technique and disregard for feelings, touch, communication, and affection. Form furiously follows function. Porn action, instead of being a lascivious sleaze-fest (replete with contrived story arcs) as it was in the “blue” era of “smoker” flicks, began to resemble lab work with moans and groans inserted like test data; pellets fed to rats.
What was the purpose of bringing sex into the light? Scandinavian design was an art of transparency. No obfuscation or sentimentality. Proscience and antireligious. Absorbing this philosophy, Danish and Swedish pornographers spearheaded the well-lit, unsentimental nudes which appeared later in hardcore “triple-X” features, ridding the world of the sentiment, treacle, and pretense of the Pompeo Posar/Bunny Yeager “cheesecake” era. The “girl next door” was duly evicted and her place rented by brusque sex workers in an assembly-line brothel. Ikea shelves are storage’s unsentimental analogue. Frank, dispassionate shelves concerned with getting the job done, eyes glued to the bottom line. Beds are futons, a type of mattress originally used in Japan by prostitutes. Finnish cloth by Marimekko eschews plaids or complex patterns for simple, uncomplicated Rorschach blobs so one’s living room becomes a psychiatrist couch of lurid—yet frank and clinical—revelations. Swedish and Danish furniture looks like the gear from a low-budget film production: director’s chairs, boom lights, and simple pallets.
Facebook—and other devices for social control, neighbor spying, and mass surveillance—get their great power and ubiquity from the promise and lure of sex. Easy sex for free from multiple partners is the inferred reward. If people are coupled, in domestic bliss, this is less easily manipulated. Ikea wants to keep the population in a state of romantic flux. This is the reason for the hawking of sexual freedom, caprice, and whimsy as a bedrock of liberal civilization, as opposed to old control models which relied on sexual repression.
Ikea is ultimately a junior partner of the ascendant Apple megapower, which wants to erase history, strip people of all their belongings, and rehabilitate total poverty and cosmic displacement as modern, sleek, and fun. All this for complete control and ownership of the entire globe. Ikea has accepted the lieutenant’s role in this unholy alliance. Like Apple, Ikea sneers at planning, permanence, and real possessions, beyond their ephemeral bric-a-brac. They suggest that the dorm room or living room or bedroom is just a momentary resting stop before we all become ultraefficient digital matter, buzzing at, around, and within each other in an eternal orgiastic cyber-cum-athon. But always orbiting the Apple deity: life-giver, death-merchant, illusionist; that from which all else originates.
How long before we’re convinced that hands, arms, legs, and appendages are just bothersome? The cyberlords have already convinced us that maps, paper, pens, and even push buttons are somehow incredibly inconvenient and clumsy, leaving us scraping and pawing like drooling bug life on their flat and sleek digital dildos. Google’s search engines, maps, etc., have likewise taught us to refrain from using our apparently out-of-date and hopelessly inefficient brains. What’s next? Giving up all thought, consciousness, history, and agency? It’s all just in the way.
“Hoarders” are the only thing standing between these incomprehensibly rich, all-controlling, degenerate, digital despots and the absolute destruction of any deviant or alternative consciousness—and indeed any nonofficial history or interpretation of the world. We must therefore say: ALL POWER TO THE PACK RATS!!
Help a “hoarder” consolidate and safe-keep their things today. Lend them money to rent a storage locker. Volunteer to help them keep their things at your place. Their stuff is the final shred of resistance to the destruction of all non-Apple-approved human endeavors.
4
The Rise and Fall of College Rock
NPR, Indie, and the Gentrification of Punk
OF ALL THE TYPES OF ROCK MUSIC, perhaps the one that is least considered and most overlooked is “college rock.” Like today’s “indie rock,” it was named for the circumstance of its proliferation, rather than some characteristic or aesthetic of the music (such as heavy metal, noise, punk, grind, et al). Anthemic and clever, college rock produced clean pop songs which still resonate with listeners today. But what was college rock exactly and why did it disappear? And why is there no cult of stalwarts who maintain its legacy, as there is with nearly every other subcult of rock ’n’ roll (goth, ska, mod, punk, rockabilly, etc.)? There is, for example, no Robert Gordon (seventies rockabilly revivalist) or Paul Weller (the second-wave “modfather”) figure of college rock rallying a “college-rock revival”; at least not on the near horizon.
Though usually associated with groups of the early 1980s, college rock existed for a short time before and afterward as well, through the heyday of college radio. The genre’s groups, though often signed to major labels, did not typically enjoy mainstream popularity but were instead cult favorites—a musical counterpart to the then-popular “midnight movie” craze where gonzo flops and campy outrages were displayed to a knowing, fun-loving, and unpretentious audience. (Of course, some of the college rock groups—such as Talking Heads, Violent Femmes, and REM—eventually became very successful.)
The genre wasn’t called “college rock” because it was produced exclusively for or by students but was instead named for the radio stations which were its champion and proponent. In the sixties, when FM radio was less typical, the FCC issued many Class D radio licenses to universities, which allowed them to create noncommercial stations on the little-used left side of dial (typically 88.1–90.5 FM). Despite residing in the hinterlands, many of their signals were powerful, with tens of thousands of kilowatts.
By the late seventies, FM had become paradigmatic, and the college stations were burgeoning and sometimes influential. As opposed to commercial stations, which were committed to a highly restrictive “Top 40” format, college radio was fairly free-form in its programming. College stations saw promulgation of lesser-heard groups as their responsibility; their sacred mission. They were staffed by music enthusiasts who worked without pay, and who saw college rock as a desperately needed alternative to the platinum tedium of “classic” and Top 40 drivel.
While university students certainly comprised some of the audience of college rock, all kinds of people were potential listeners. Still, because of its ivory-tower associations, a certain type of education and class background were assumed of both the producers and consumers of college rock. If Lou Reed and Iggy Pop are the “godfathers of punk,” Roger McGuinn and Jonathan Richman could arguably be considered the alpha college rockers.
College rock often had a vaguely political or satirical bent. After the campus takeovers of the sixties and seventies, universities in the 1980s were still considered progressive institutions, places where social consciousness and political activism could be found alongside toga parties and keg-stands. Universities had deftly weathered the culture wars of the sixties by pretending to be outside of commerce—benevolent institutions created as places for pot smokers to congregate and talk trash. By the eighties, St. Elmo’s Fire, Animal House, and the Reagan-era frat revival were incinerating all traces of campus radicalism, but there were still a few lingering totems of the student power movement; one was college radio. College rock could therefore be seen as a last gasp of the revolutionary student movement of the sixties.
College rock could be defined as a middle-class and art-conscious permutation of radio rock, without the Year Zero pretensions of punk. Though just a scant decade earlier rock ’n’ roll or “rock” had been vaunted as the vanguard of a new revolutionary consciousness, by the seventies it had become codified, established, and even conservative; particularly since its courtship of the country music audience with its “Southern rock” gambit (which begat Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers, America, Molly Hatchet, Crazy Horse, et al). At the other end of the spectrum from rock’s Southern affectation was rock’s punk mode, which—though initially entertaining—had become alienating,