Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  For most people, action is the easiest thing in the world. If you walk up to a normal, healthy, natural man and insult him, he responds in a ‘natural’ way — he gives you a swift kicking, and the matter is settled. ‘I am green with envy of such men,’ says the underground man.5 How do they do it? Because they’re stupid, of course. Dostoyevsky explains:

  I repeat, and repeat emphatically: all spontaneous people, men of action, are active because they are stupid and limited. How is this to be explained? Like this: in consequence of their limitations, they take immediate, but secondary causes for primary ones, and thus they are more quickly and easily convinced that they have found indisputable grounds for their action.6

  Where is the underground man supposed to find the grounds for action? Let’s say he did run after the man who insulted him and managed to kick him in the pants. Would it teach him a lesson? No, quite the opposite; and even if it did, so what? There’s always going to be violence in the world, always someone big picking on someone small. Surely it’s just foolishness to imagine that this act is of some great importance, simply because it has meaning for you, when there’s so much aggression in the world that goes completely unchecked. And okay, so maybe every little bit does count. But in the end, what does it matter? We all die eventually, after leading long, painful lives punctuated by occasional moments of joy, and as far as we know, there’s no point to any of it. And in any case, in five hundred million years time, this whole planet will crash into the sun, which means there won’t even be anyone around to ask all these stupid questions — and won’t that be a relief.

  This is the great legacy of the Age of Reason, the underground man’s birthright. He has the extraordinary ability to reason his way out of every natural impulse that comes his way. In the end, he can find no convincing argument for any kind of action at all. So he does nothing. He sits underground and stares enviously up at the men of action as they strive and achieve, turning his loathing and resentment of them over in his mind.

  Morrissey: Still ill.

  How Soon Is Now?

  ROCK AND ROLL is full of natural men. Elvis Presley — whose genius resided not in his mind, but in his voice and his body — was the first of these. Part of the importance of Elvis as a rock myth is his almost divine naïvety, the way he seemed to act without thinking, to change the world without knowing what he was doing.

  Elvis, the man of action, makes an appropriate figurehead for early rock and roll, because for the first ten years of its life, rock was all about action. The songs were invitations to dance, incitements to riot, or none-too-subtle propositions for sex. And the singer’s desire was always backed up by the music — the most intensely physical music a mainstream white audience had heard up to that point. Sweat, exertion, desire and spontaneous action created the foundation on which rock and roll was built, and over this the music’s architects constructed their machines for dancing and doing. By 1965 these included the Chuck Berry duckwalk, the Sun Studio slap, the Phil Spector Wall of Sound and the Bo Diddley beat.

  Bo Diddley’s ‘shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits’ rhythm is, as Toby Creswell says in his book, 1001 Songs, ‘one of the essential parts of the vocabulary of rock and roll’.1 The famous beat first came to light on Bo’s 1957 hit ‘Bo Diddley’. His producers, the Chess brothers, made him change some of the song’s lyrics so it would get played on the radio:

  Bow-legged rooster told a cross-legged duck

  Say you ain’t good lookin’ but you sure can…crow2

  But even if he’d scrapped the lyrics entirely, no-one who heard the music would be left in any doubt as to what the song was about. The Bo Diddley beat is pure desire.

  In 1964, Andrew Loog Oldham overheard Keith Richards singing snatches of Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’ over a Bo Diddley beat played on his acoustic guitar, and knew he was listening to the next Rolling Stones’ single — it was recorded two days later.3 ‘The Bo Diddley feel is a suggestion in Buddy’s version,’ said Tony Calder in Andrew Loog Oldham’s 2 Stoned, ‘and a call to arms in the Stones’’.4 ‘Not Fade Away’ heralded a tough and threatening new sex drive in the Stones’ music which would become a hallmark of their sound from this point on. ‘I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be,’ sang Mick Jagger, not messing around any more, ‘you’re gonna give your love to me.’5

  The Stooges’ ‘1969’ is also built on the Bo Diddley shuffle. But while the desire in the rhythm is still strong, the simple sense of purpose it had in the Stones’ hands is gone: the song still thrusts and kicks, but in a flailing, hopeless fashion. ‘1969’ seems to go on forever, locked in its two-chord drive to nowhere, and the wah-wah guitar solo sounds more like a tantrum than a come-on.

  In 1984 the Bo Diddley beat was back — though in barely recognisable form. On The Smiths ‘How Soon Is Now?’, the sound that had framed a litany of desire in 1957 and a call to arms in 1964 seemed finally to have worn itself out — the song sounds like ‘Not Fade Away’ played on a Walkman with a dying battery. This was a dance record for those who find dancing — along with any other form of spontaneous action — impossible. The singer introduces himself in the first verse:

  I am the son

  And the heir

  Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar

  I am the son and heir

  Of nothing in particular.6

  Self-loathing, self-pity, bad jokes; we’re a long way from ‘you’re gonna give your love to me’. Where would an underground man find the grounds for a statement like that? As the song unfolds, the gloomy young man gets some unsolicited advice. Don’t sit there tormenting yourself, say the men of action, go out there and have some fun. Dance! Enjoy yourself! ‘You could meet somebody who really loves you.’7But the singer knows even before he gets in the car and drives to the club that things will end badly. In fact, he’s so smart that he’s seen into the future, and knows that everything, everywhere will end badly.

  As with Dostoyevsky’s basement-dweller and the singer’s own subterranean hero Howard Devoto, Morrissey’s world-weariness is a result of his intelligence — which he would gladly trade for the ability to act. ‘I’m obsessed by the physical,’ he told Simon Reynolds in Blissed Out, by way of explaining his ongoing fascination with criminals and toughs, ‘it always works — instead of creeping around and relying on your thesaurus.’8

  But Morrissey has not succeeded in making an insect of himself, he is decidedly not what Dostoyevsky refers to as ‘l’homme de la nature’. ‘I don’t feel natural even when I’m fast asleep,’9 he sings in ‘Sweet and Tender Hooligan’. Time and again, in Morrissey’s songs, the hero is about to take action and finds, for one reason or another, that it’s impossible. And this would be fine if he’d somehow managed to transcend his earthly desires — to make himself into the Buddha of Manchester. But as he reminds us in ‘How Soon Is Now?,’ he is still human, and he still needs to be loved.

  Why Bother?

  IN 1997, RIVERS Cuomo went into retreat. He moved into a small apartment under a Los Angeles freeway, disconnected the phone, sealed up the windows and painted the walls black. The singer’s decision to isolate himself has always been seen as a reaction to the embarrassing failure of Pinkerton. But Cuomo’s new monkish lifestyle was, in a sense, the inevitable result of that album — the philosophy of Pinkerton put into practice.

  In ‘Why Bother?’ the singer thinks about finding a girlfriend, but finds insufficient grounds for action. It’s like a super-pessimistic version of Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’. Before he’s even picked up the phone he’s reasoned his way to the following summer, when she’ll no doubt dump him and break his heart. So he remains alone. The singer has proved his intelligence while ensuring that he remains miserable. This line of thinking leads to greater and greater inertia — taken to its logical conclusion, the singer must renounce the search for happiness entirely and derive whatever kicks he can from monkish self-denial.

  Music journalist Chuck Klosterman described Pinkerton in Spin magazi
ne as emo’s Sgt Pepper. ‘Philosophically, it defined what emo was supposed to feel like.’1 Emo songs had always rated the ability to feel much higher than the ability to act, but Pinkerton sealed the deal, by suggesting that there was something truly noble in being broken and beaten. The intelligent but highly emotional singer has seen the horror up far too close — how can we expect him to act, let alone fight? We can’t, of course, but we can applaud his inner resolve as he shuts himself away from the rest of the world while everyone else carries on with the meaningless comedy of existence.

  The Get Up Kids are one of the scores of bands who followed the example of Pinkerton, exploring the lonely landscape Weezer had discovered long after Cuomo himself had moved on. In The Get Up Kids’ ‘I’m a Loner, Dottie, a Rebel’, the hero tells us that last night he was in love, and that the possibility is still there. But sitting by the girl’s bedside in the morning, he reasons his way out of whatever future they might have together. ‘I’m afraid to try,’ he admits, ‘I’ll keep my hands by my side.’2 A real man, a natural man (a jock, a Limp Bizkit fan) would do something. But for The Get Up Kids and their fans, this kind of ‘action’ is deeply suspect. As Trevor Kelley and Leslie Simon have observed in their book Everybody Hurts: An essential guide to emo culture, non-athleticism is one of the sacred commandments of emo.3 It’s reflected, on a very simple level, by the fans’ fashion accessories. Emo replaces nu-metal’s trainers and baseball caps with black-rimmed glasses and Penguin classics. And it means that the heroes of the scene tend to be of the static, intellectual type — Rivers Cuomo, not Zack de la Rocha; Morrissey, not Metallica.

  In Nothing Feels Good, Greenwald argues that emo’s roots can be traced back to an unholy coupling of Washington DC hardcore with The Smiths that took place in the late ’80s.4This partnership is not as odd as it might first seem. Hardcore, essentially, is about resistance. But as Greenwald points out, there are different types of resistance. Hardcore in its pure strain made a spectacle of political protest. But The Smiths’ music, in its fey, unassuming way, mounts a much more challenging refusal. Morrissey might not be a ‘natural man’, but his stance is, in its way, as tough and intractable as any of the thugs and gangsters he admires so much; and more than a match, as Greenwald insists, for the hardcore bands he found himself sharing shelf-space with toward the end of the decade.5

  Morrissey, in his songs, demands the right to be miserable and alone. This doesn’t sound like too much to ask — but the world keeps telling him he has to cheer up and get over it (‘There’s a club, if you’d like to go’).6 And since he steadfastly refuses to do this, his position has, over the years, become more and more entrenched. What started out as a polite request has turned into a war of attrition, with Morrissey as the unlikely heroic general, who refuses to give up one inch of his territory no matter what the enemy throws at him. You might say he’s taking it too personally, but what other way is there to take it? The world has refused to accept his personality. No wonder he’s determined not to give up the fight. In this war, what’s at stake is nothing less than the human soul.

  Dostoyevsky: Smashing things can sometimes be very pleasant.

  The Crystal Palace

  THERE’S A GREAT deal of masochism in the underground man’s miserable stance — he enjoys his suffering, and enjoys complaining about it even more. And since his pain is now his only real source of pleasure, he refuses to get over it. Reasonable people could reasonably accuse the underground man of being horribly self-indulgent. But this accusation raises a question — why are reasonable people so offended by an individual who demands nothing more than the right to be broken, bitter and dissatisfied? Whether he set out to do this or not, the man under the floorboards has exposed a terrible flaw in modern society.

  By the time Dostoyevsky sat down to write Notes from Underground in 1864, reason, empiricism and mathematical perfectibility should all have been well and truly trashed by almost a century of romantic philosophy — from the counter-Enlightenment of Rousseau and Kant to the view of life as chaos and flux expounded by Schopenhauer (who had, by this time, become one of Europe’s best known and most quoted thinkers). But while romanticism did much to form popular taste and opinion in the nineteenth century, for all the difference it had made in the world of industry and commerce, it might just as well have never happened. While the romantic individualist was developing his philosophy of feelings, dreams and the irrational; the businessman — who could have no use for this sort of stuff — simply continued the project of the Enlightenment, but to quite different ends.

  This time the goal was not the perfectibility of human life, but the perfectibility of human life in the pursuit of profit. Business, with its eternal worship of the bottom line, will always look to rationalise and systematise human behaviour. And since the fate of nations was increasingly tied up in the fortunes of business, the shopkeeper mentality gradually spread to influence every aspect of modern society during Dostoyevsky’s lifetime. Goethe had remarked, a few years before his death, that ‘wealth and speed are what the world admires and strives for’.1 By 1864 belief in technical progress had become a sort of secular religion in Western Europe, the idea being that the perfection of industry would lead to greater profit, and greater profit would increase the amount of human happiness in the world accordingly.

  The triumphant symbol of this ideal — the St Paul’s cathedral of progress — was the Crystal Palace, a shimmering glass and steel building created to house London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. This, according to the marketing puff, would ‘unite the whole world in the quest to apply the latest advances in science and industrial production for the benefit of all’.2 But who was really benefiting? William Morris walked out of the place disgusted, seeing nothing but mass-produced junk, entirely lacking in that particular, personal sense of beauty that had guided the hand of the medieval craftsman in days gone by. The individual’s feeling for expressive form had, it seemed, been ruthlessly snipped out of the manufacturing process for the sake of a better looking profit margin — a more efficient machine. For Dostoyevsky, the Crystal Palace was equally hateful, but for slightly different reasons.

  In 1864, Dostoyevsky had had forty years to think about man’s ability to reason and where it had got the human race so far. For him, the Crystal Palace was a monument not to progress, but to stupidity, the extraordinary stupidity of a culture that had convinced itself that the application of reason and commonsense would improve the lives of human beings.

  What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in finding out…but man’s nature acts as one whole, with everything that is in it, conscious or unconscious, and although it is nonsensical, yet it lives.3

  The application of reason could guarantee that a railway will run on time or that a factory will produce more ceramic plates per year. But human happiness, he insisted, cannot be calculated mathematically. Our desires are, and always will be, irrational; and a society that tries to systematise every aspect of life will not be able to accommodate them. In Notes from Underground, the underground man — in one of his many imaginary confrontations with the surface dwellers — puts forward the case against the positivists and their cathedral of commonsense:

  You believe in an eternal and indestructible crystal building, in which you won’t be able to stick out your tongue in secret, or even make a rude sign in your pocket. But perhaps I fear that building precisely because it’s indestructible and made of crystal, and you won’t be able to stick your tongue out, even in secret.4

  Dostoyevsky saw that the attempt to rationalise all of human life ‘for the greater good’ would eventually lead to a situation in which bad behaviour is no longer tolerated. Spite, malice, shoplifting and the irrational desire to smash things are all bad for business and bad for the state. But all of these things make us happy — as the underground man, who loves nothing better than to complain, knows all too well.

  And why are you so firmly and triumphantly certain that only what is normal
and positive — in short, only well-being — is good for man? Is reason mistaken about what is good? After all, perhaps prosperity isn’t the only thing that pleases mankind, perhaps he is just as attracted to suffering…whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, smashing things is also sometimes very pleasant. I am not here standing up for suffering, or for well-being either. I am standing out for my own caprices and for having them guaranteed when necessary.5

  How much of our happiness are we prepared to give up for the greater good? And what is the greater good if not the sum total of human happiness? We’ll never know, because you can’t calculate happiness. Scientific analysis might prove that a henhouse is enough to keep a man dry when it rains. But that won’t stop him from wanting a mansion.6 You can only stop human beings from wanting what they want, says the underground man, by altering their nature. This, Dostoyevsky believed, was impossible. We are not perfectible, we are ridiculous, and a society that pretends this is not the case — that tries to tell a man that he is better off with a henhouse when he wants a palace or that he should be cheerful when nothing makes him happier than being miserable — does so at its great peril. Eventually, he warns, desire will escape whatever restraints the positivists place on it.