sub01: "GIVE PHILISTINISM A CHANCE" - preamble for the new barely human zine & tape
+++reclaim philistinism via NO TREND, FLIPPER, THE CRUCIFUCKS and THE URINALS
The GIVE PHILISTINISM A CHANCE zine is complete and ready to ship, delayed in part due to typewriter issues, the frantic rollercoaster ride of being on a book deadline, and the joy of taking a fucken break from things. The below is an idea of what lies within, but unlike the zine, has had some light editing to try make sense of what is (again) a very shaky thesis. If you would like a copy of the zine and cassette tape (featuring music and archival interviews with the bands discussed), email me and I’ll sort you out. All paid subscribers to the substack within Australia (if you’ve provided an address!) will receive one in the post shortly. Maybe I’ll try to launch it somehow or do a pop-up stall to help move back catalogue, but also I am tired.
Malcolm Bull’s 2011 book Anti-Nietzsche (a book based on the line: ‘the philosopher seemingly opposed to everyone has met with remarkably little opposition himself’) begins with a section on philistinism. This was the first time I’d contended with the idea that what I’d only ever encountered as a putdown (“what are you, a philistine?”) could be associated with an -ism at all, but Bull’s approach to the topic generated an interesting lineage: beginning with the atheists, to the anarchists, to the nihilists, and ending here. Bull notes that when each of these groups were first discussed, it was done so with fear and horror from the powered of their time (church, state) yet no group had ever identified by the terms they were fingered with. There were no self-identifying atheists who believed in no god, no anarchists who believed in no state, and no nihilists who believed in nothingness, until the accusations were made that their supposed thinking was a threat to society. Bull claims that it was only after the fear of these systems of non-belief that they found a way to rally behind the terms, later forming the ideas and structures that are now accepted and easily recognised. The contemporary concern then, is that while we’re witness to accusations of philistinism (a position against aesthetics, which are expressed through ‘art’) being rife in society, no one’s putting their hand up to claim it. Bull doesn’t really discuss reasons behind why this might be the case (and doesn’t look to the oppositions to hardcore punk for answers) but I’ve been dwelling on it lately. Why do the principles Bull outlines in the context of Nietzsche’s revulsion at the idea of a philistine—a philistine who to Nietzsche, is against ‘ubermensch’ exceptionalism, whereby subhuman philistines threaten to drag society’s potentiality back into the mud—feel so familiar?
These thoughts were sparked by some of the (often pearl-clutching) discussions around a ‘new wave of philistinism’ that have cropped up here and there in recent years and made me feel a bit ruffled. These discussions tend to situate the cultural philistines among us as:
those who redirect funding from the arts;
studio executives responsible for the franchised superhero filmic universe complex;
those demanding that museums and galleries reckon with their history and rethink, return or dismantle their contents;
people with ‘bad taste’ who don’t appreciate the masters of art, music, literature, etc;
sports fans
It’s clear to me that few of those things are the same, or related at all, and are really a conflation of philistinism as an umbrella term with:
neoliberal arts policy (e.g. deferrance to the free market) disguised as culture war;
ultra-capitalist tendencies enabled by monopoly;
radical leftist moves for social justice;
something resembling critical tastes;
more traditional working class pursuits
None of those are the same either! So there’s an opening here: if we can generally accept that the arts have already been wholly commodified after decades of neoliberal retooling of their form and function (Audi presents…THE ARTS), then it’s not so clear where to point the finger. But I’ll leave that to the zine.
GIVE PHILISTINISM A CHANCE circles this idea via four bands of the 1980s post-punk period: FLIPPER, NO TREND, URINALS and THE CRUCIFUCKS. Each are more or less uncategorisable, being labelled, loathed or misunderstood with tags from hardcore to anti-hardcore, punk to anti-punk, and at some points (as the electric eels were described, bands who “didn’t fit in with the bands who didn’t fit in”) even considered ‘art’ bands. So it feels to me like something is missing here…and as a rabid fan of music that exists solely by virtue of their wanting to be something other than what they end up resembling (anti-anti-anti-antagonism,) I feel like the rumoured existence of a philistine grouping is one missing piece of the puzzle. These bands were defiant anti-hardcore acts who formed to either oppose the speed and violence of the genre, or to oppose contemporaneous trends entirely. A nihilistic bent joins them thematically (“life is the only thing worth living for” - FLIPPER / “you breed like rats and you are no better” - NO TREND), and it’s hard to resist stories like the CRUCIFUCKS touring on the US hardcore circuit with hardcore bands and agitating audiences with critiques about “the pointless spectacle that hardcore is today,” or the URINALS forming with the motivation of entering a punk parody band into a dorm room talent show in 1978. So this zine enables me to scratch an itch, while (let’s be honest) getting to listen to and make tapes about four of my favourite bands.
+++other updates___
__reply to this email if you’d like a copy of the zine & tape! if you’re not down for a subscription I can probably do them for around $10-15AUD on a Pay What You Can basis, and can package them with items from the back catalogue that can be perused here.