6 August 2009: "Peace,"

This post is about syncretism. Carles composes an ironic encomium to Woodstock in order to problematize its organizing principle, that musical taste can somehow correspond with a suppression of violence. "I remember when ppl used to unite around ‘the best music in the world’ instead of getting ‘all divided’ abt it," he writes, mockingly positing the turbulent late 1960s as a golden age of togetherness. From the monolithic viewpoint of youth culture there was a cultural consensus in favor of marijuana-fogged mediocrity in pop music, and this was idealistically misrecognized as an artistic renaissance that would fuse aesthetics with progressive political goals, the pacifistic sublimation of war and capitulation to the totalitarians masquerading as socialists foremost among them. Instead youthful pacifism was transformed into consumerist passive-ism, and a generation learned to associate lifestyle branding as a sufficient surrogate for a civil society and individual liberty.

As Carles is all too aware, musical taste is the field on which violence among the self-conscious creative class is currently conducted, internalizing a struggle to the cohort that was once fought between generations, and distracting them from actual political engagement. "There really is more to life than ‘peace’, ‘love’, and ‘music’, and they don’t really have much 2 do with 1 another," he correctly notes. They shouldn't be fused in a falsifying synthesis that undermines the accomplishment of any of them. It is as false, Carles suggests, as the Bolshevik slogan upon which it is based: "Peace, Bread, Land." And so Carles subtly and somewhat surprisingly aligns himself with the right wing in the foundational split among the young Hegelians in the 1840s. He would rather ascribe a religious significance to the traditions concretized in the state than champion the dissolution of those ideals into an anarchic mob, as one may readily witness at any contemporary music festival, no matter how putatively progressive or, alternatively, mired in corporate sponsorship.

Efforts to celebrate the allegedly univocal music festivals of the past are nostalgic exercises in false hegemony. Carles declares: "It seems like people honor them as ‘being authentic’ but they seem ‘krappy’ 2 me." Festivals, then as now, merged incompatible cultural elements together in a bewildering amalgam that passed for coherence, modeling how the unified self-concept would come under pressure to disintegrate into disparate channels that mimicked the variety of entertainment channels being marketed to it, all while the presumption that this entropic decay was progress to a more-perfect union was upheld. Better, Carles explains, to regard meaning as a "gimmick", a spectral emanation from the genre-fication of popular culture and the niche-ification of reflexivity. Rather than trap oneself in the conundrum of competitive "specialness" --a contest for the purity of the ego -- one should resist the syncretic impulse for an embrace of unsublated free play: "In order to feel special, u must make 99.9% of the world feel unspecial. I am okay with the way things are 2day." I'm kay, you're okay, Carles is okay.