Not Economically Viable
hey friends,
Sorry for the relative radio silence. I’ve got several posts started for this lil blog o’mine but I’m lazy, busy, and tapped out so I don’t finish them. I write enough to get interested in the ideas sketched out, make some notes, then save the file and get on to various obligations/TV shows. Anyway tonight I was goofing with a buddy on The Twitters and remembered this wonderful record by The Methadones: https://undercomm.bandcamp.com/album/not-economically-viable I love this band like I love my cats and close friends, I’ve got no critical distance and no interest in having any, so your mileage as a listener may vary (especially if you’re a bad person! no offense! just saying I take personal tastes as a measure of personal character, as is my God-given right as an American! [please excuse my failing sense of humor]).
Anyhow I had a couple three thoughts on this that I thought I’d waste your time on. First off, if you don’t know, the singer and rhythm guitarist of this band is a musician’s musician in punk circles. Like, there’s some cliche that goes something like ‘only about five thousand people ever saw The Velvet Underground but all five thousand started bands.’ Similar with this guy. He was in bands that influenced and inspired bands that influenced and inspired bands that got rich and famous. There’s something deeply unfair in that and also something incredibly beautiful about that dedication to a higher pursuit despite the manifold lowness of the world. Second, I dunno man, this shit just fucking matters. I know it’s just a piece of regional low culture but it’s my regional low culture and it has deeply lit up my life over and over and over and it means so very much. I don’t know how else to say this: think of a time when everything in your life felt fucked and you were trying to keep it together and a friend gave you a hug and an ear - what matters more than that? (I’m not saying this outranks everything else, I’m saying it’s a singular kind of worth that isn’t outranked by anything else. That this is hard to talk about and undervalued has a great deal to do with some of the forms of poverty that proliferate in this rotten society that treats all human goods as commensurable and rankable, and treats many as simply not valuable at all - the ones that aren’t economically viable.)
Third, I’m constantly embarrassed about how much I’m a product of 90s and 00s punk and local music, I talk about it in all the wrong settings but that’s to a significant degree because it made me who I am (was a big part of making myself who I am), helped me through a lot of hard times, for a long time was a major pursuit of mine in the way that going to church is for some people, and little else that I know of speaks to my life and needs like this stuff did and still does. So if I’m gonna talk about my life and how I see the world, especially in relation to the tension between intrinsically and instrumentally/commercially viable values (which comes up a fair bit in my life as a slowly downwardly mobile academic enduring higher ed’s being stripped for parts), I’m gonna talk about this stuff. “Here I stand I can do no other.” I’m really of two minds on this, on that I want to stay embarrassed as it speaks of the ways in which I’m not entirely of the contexts I’m inserted in, which I think is a good thing - that’s not just my being a Groucho Marxist (“I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member”), these professional contexts are worth being uncomfortable insofar as the discomfort is an index of not being fully at home in the logics of prestige and socializing young people into being pliant, salable labor power, and it’s good to keep something of higher meaning apart from all that: this is mine, it’s not for those instrumental purposes, kinda thing. On the other hand, this stuff has meant the world to me and to a large degree still does, part of making me what I am and speaking to who I am now etc etc as I just said and this stuff is also low culture, relatively disqualified, and I don’t think that’s accidental: there may well be high cultural products that speak to the same but I’m not of a class background and time and place - I just haven’t had the fucking time, resources, and freedom - to be richly versed in a lot of more respectable repositories of intrinsic values. So in a way in being embarrassed about this stuff I’m going along with, agreeing with the dismissal that goes with this work’s relative disqualification. So I guess I’d like to stay embarrassed about it but only for the right reasons.
Fourth (it’s not a couple three ideas, it’s a couple four, I lied, or can’t count, or both), listening back through this record I hear even more of the singer’s own struggles with being economically viable as a musician - there’s multiple lines about job hunting, trying to make ends meet, financial insecurity, seeing other bands get big breaks, etc. He eventually ended up giving up on trying to make a living on music and getting a job at the post office, which is a fucking crime - not on his part but on the social and institutional context that said such a talented, dedicated artist isn’t commercially viable and so will get less freedom and time to make art that has meant the world to so many of his fellow social nobodies. It’s less important than smart bombs and underfunded hospitals but it flows from the same basic social circumstances: what matters most in terms of the reigning social priorities is making money into more money, further enriching the rich, and so the regular shortages of bread and of roses that social nobodies are threatened with.
One very quick story. At around 38 I started making something like a living wage on a relatively stable basis for the first time (the stability and degree to which it’s a living wage are both now in question to some degree again since, as I said, higher ed’s being stripped for parts). Before that I hit something like a living wage for a total of two non-consecutive years. That’s a lot of how I ended up in grad school. When I found out I’d been admitted my girlfriend (we’re married now) said “congratulations! you won’t have to job hunt again for like five years now!” which was genuinely a huge relief. I think people who haven’t been through the wringer like that don’t get how long-lasting is the insecurity that this kind of precarity causes and how much it can get in your head. So, the story, in my 20s I’d once again gotten laid off (from a job I already couldn’t live on) and felt like a huge fuck up with no future to speak of. We’d already gotten tickets to see The Methadones that night so we went. Right before they played “Bored of Television” the singer said “this song’s about getting laid off.” That went a long way to pushing the sense of being a fuck up out of my head - since the singer was definitionally not a fuck up as far as I was concerned and we’d had the same experience therefore I too wasn’t a fuck up. That went a really long way. (Having a marxist analysis of how capitalism operates helped a lot too, though that’s more intellectual and less visceral.)
Alright, I’m out. I’ll be back eventually with more depressing thoughts on social murder and covid and whatnot.
Keep on keeping on, dear friends and gentle hearts!
Warmly,
Nate