Wednesday, December 22, 2010

I'm reading some absolutely fascinating articles about neo-folk, apoliteic music and attempts to build a fascist, green, anarchist synthesis.

Very confusing and scary. Like Michael Barkun's "improvisational millennialism" without the flying saucers (yet).

Fits right in to conspiracy theories and netocracy though, doesn't it?

Further thought. Is hauntology a kind of left-wing apoliteic music? With the myths of a cosy, Reithian, paternal modernism replacing the the folk-tradition celebrated by the rightists?

4 comments:

Manuel Simoni said...

Anecdotally, one of Austria's most notorious neonazis, Gottfried Küssel, is now owner of an organic food store in Vienna.

Manuel Simoni said...

One more anecdote: H.C. Strache, the new leader of Haider's Freedom Party of Austria produced t-shirts copying the Che Guevara "brand":

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/files/images/080930_strache1.jpg

John Powers said...

I'm scared and confused.

"Is hauntology a kind of left-wing apoliteic music?"

The question disturbs me, makes me think it's an important one.

Anton Shekovtosov quotes Roger Griffin about the mission of fascism: "bringing about an alternative modernity and temporality (a ‘new order’ and a ‘new era’) based on the rebirth, or palingenesis, of the nation."

I'm probably confusing things but thought about postmamboism-I know it's not hauntology. Anyhow contrast this principle of postmombism:

"Postmamboism is activist, in that it seeks not merely to describe the world but to improve it, by applying the corporeal, communitarian, and spiritual power of music to contemporary thought and action."

Really I'm out of my element and don't quite know how Oswald de Andrade's anthropophagy relates to Brazilian nationalism. I do think anthropophagy fits in here somehow. de Andrade distinguished between ritual cannibalism and cannibalism by hunger or greed. In ritual one devours culture to inherit the qualities of the other.

My sense of things is that hauntology music demands an immersion, requires a sort of cannibalism. It's not impossible, I suppose, for a rebirth of nationalism to emerge from it, but far more likely some sort of new mongrel or mutt.

Composing said...

Editor's note : I managed to delete John's second comment to this post, but rescued it from my email. Here it is :

Sort of OT but was reading an interview with a Pittsburgh musician, Ernie Hawkins, who studied guitar with Rev. Gary Davis. Thought of hauntology reading this:

"On your teaching DVDs, you often mention that Davis was “deeply inspired.” How did that manifest itself?"

"Songs would come to him in dreams, or right in the moment when he was possessed by the spirit. When he was preaching or playing, he’d just get hot. And you know what’s funny? He comes to people in dreams himself. All the time. Many of his students talk about him showing up in dreams playing songs. He’s still around, visiting lots of us."