Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock'n'Roll Group
Considering one of my main goals this year (& for the last 2 years) has been to create a rock band, this book title caught my eye while visiting Pitchfork. Disregard the fact that I don't play an instrument currently, a book where I could learn some supernatural strategies that could then be put into play could probably help my predicament and goal for rock stardom; albeit on a slightly less ambitious scale. To be honest, I would be happy with a gig at a local bar.
The book Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock 'n' Roll Group is written by punk enthusiast and musician Ian Svenonius. Svenonius has been involved in the Washington D.C. music scene for a little over 25 years, with his start coming in 1988 with the outfit Nation of Ulysses. Described as a Marxist and anti-autthoritarian (punk band remember), his music and writings veer off into a realm of philosophy that would be safe to say is not shared by most people at your work place. If that were the case though, then Svenonius would probably need to change it up and rage against another type of machine.
With that said, Svenonius centers his new book on reporting the advice and wisdom given to him by dead rock stars through seances to find out the basic how-to's of forming a rock band. According to Svenonius, "I tried to interview living people who I thought would be of help, but I really got no satisfaction from these establishment characters that I talked to. Because of that, I had to resort to speaking to the dead, and I found they has less political motivation to spin things in any particular direction. And they had lost their fear of insulting the living, so I got a lot of really honest feedback from the ghosts" (1).
Naturally, the question for most readers would be, is he serious? Fair enough, writer David O'Neal of the Los Angeles Review of Books wrote a great review of this book and commented, "Svenonius acts as an enervated docent in the rock 'n' roll hall of fame, more interested in torching the wax dummies around him than in getting them to speak. And Svenonius is not a very skilled ventriloquist, anyway, or, really, he's not trying to be. (For example, this is from a surprisingly sober and analytical Jim Morrison: "Surf groups exploited actual surfers and objectified them as fetish dolls in order to give the lost and desperate post industrial teenyboppers of Southern California - and via them the entire teenage nation - an identity"). So, the seance joke soon sputters. Svenonius's autodidactic prose style, his dazzling jump cuts, and his glib-serious tone sounds off-key when it's (supposedly) filtered through a dead icon. Brian, Buddy, and Jimi all sound like Ian - and he's the one we want to hear from, anyway" (2).
So, it's safe to say that the advice and insight presented in this book are not that of Jimi Hendrix's or Buddy Holly's ghost. What is the book about then? Well, really what the title states, startegies for making a rock 'n' roll group. I was able to read 3 chapters from the book online, each with a rather non-extraordinary title.
One chapter is dedicated to the discussion of how one should determine goals in a rock band, how to practice and hold rehearsals, and finally how to prepare for performances. On determining the goals one should have in a rock band, Svenonius states there are generally four goals that most people have in forming a rock band: (a) to be famous, (b) sexually popular, (c) to write songs in the style of another particular group and (d) to advance a particular ideological system.
On the goal of starting a rock band to become sexually popular, "If b), to be an amorist, is your goal, give up the group as a means to carnal buccaneering. The best thing for you is to pursue a job in advertising, medicine, or the field of "law". These professions are celebrated by televised propaganda (in programs such as Law & Order, Grey's Anatomy, and Mad Men), and will provide you with the financial incentives - in the form of real estate, luxury cotton sheets, and perceived stability - required to seduce your prey..." (3).
Now, I left off the last part of the quote because it went on to rant against a "capitalist society" with the implication that some how being an amorist, one who is dedicated to sexual love, necessarily entails that one live in a capitalist society. I can't for the life of me see why that would be considering one living in say a Communist regime could equally be dedicated to the pursuit of sex (I just want to toss out to all my friends who work for the government, Yay America! Yay Capitalism! Haha).
As you can see, of course, these seemingly mundane sections on determining goals, band practice, and performances take on a more lively tone due to the interesting and unique thoughts offered by the author. If you weren't paying attention in that last passage, the aim of the book isn't so much to just offer practical advice on how to form a rock band but more as a medium in which to share an ideological viewpoint.
Reading just 3 sections of his book, I can say that Svenonius views are not my own, but I still found the writing interesting and did find points of agreement with him even though they were from a very different perspective. Take the following passages for example from the three sections I was able to read:
"The change you will effect using a group is not unlike a magic spell. Whatever your intention, your conjuring will invoke something deformed and accidental. It will unleash uncontrollable forces or it will snowball slowly, insidiously, into something monstrous that will torment you for eternity."
"Therefore, if your group is fervently ideological, aware of the implications of its aesthetic presentation, and committed to its cause, it will be almost unbeatable. This kind of faith is hard to muster in our blase, cynical, intellectually paralyzed, narcissistic, pornoholic, and postideological word..."
"Because the group is not really about music - it's a model or an ideal. All life is practice when one is "in" a group...One must learn to be as directly indirect, unselfconsciuosly self-aware, poetic, loose, dynamic, and charming offstage as one is when one is "treading the boards." One must delight, captivate, entrance, and seduce whether one is in the coffee shop, sitting room, or the office cubicle" (3).
Lets see, how can I sum up those last three passages. Obviously the focus is on the concept of a "group". According to the passages, a group can be extremely powerful, unleashing accidental effects that can be either positive or negative. A group that is committed to a cause to the point of faith is almost unbeatable and rare. Finally, life is really a study of how to interact within a group, with the caveat that a person's individuality might become secondary to the group or enhanced (can't quite tell from the last passage - concern might lie in the fact that personal behavior is often a show for the group and not necessarily true or genuine).
Ok, got it...check...let me start that rock band now lol. If I picked up anything from reading Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock 'n' Roll Group, it's the sense that a group or being a part of a group is some how intrinsically bad. If I had to disagree with a major implication or rant of the author it would be about that point. For as long as a group strides for the common good and is aware of its unique pieces for that mission, then the ugly mechanistic and cruel depiction of a group is lost.
On last note before I wrap up this post that started out about discussing the advice a person was said to have received from dead rock stars. This is a quote from Svenonius:
"A rock 'n' roll group should not be respectable, nor should it be bourgeois or prestigious. If it's to retain any power or any threat, its status must hover somewhere between that of the vagrant, the doomsday prophet, the street urchin, and the prostitute" (4).
Funny enough, I agree. The best artists, whether they be dead or alive, have always sought to tell the stories of the downtrodden, weak, abused, and hopeless. For in those stories the group's power would become manifest, freeing the individual from the chains that bind them, if only for a brief moment in time. All courtesy of, you guessed it, a group.
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