Cultural Programming Dictates National Mood
and hopefully could be improved!
I was at an AI event last night (they continue to fill rooms, no matter the niche), and on the train home had an interesting experience overhearing the conversations of others. There was a trendy Dalstonite chatting up another trendy Dalstonite, talking about his cool new band while she talked about her cool gig booking business. It felt like looking into a window to 10 years ago when I was hovering about in the Dalston region trying to convince people to check out my band.
Anyway, I had some general amusement with the presentation of rock n roll star circa 2025, but was able to discern from the snippets I could overhear what the name of the geezer’s band was. Lo and behold, I excitedly load my laptop at home to see if the music was all that, ostensibly to keep my finger on the pulse of contemporary culture. I gotta keep ‘with it’ after all.
On video, the band had all the ingredients: ironic clothes, worn out guitars, some weird dude fiddling with complex electronics (that’s the usp). Now to my ears, the singer was out of tune, the chord progressions a bit obvious and the basslines basic beyond compare. The drumming was fantastic though, and I was pleased to see that it was the drummer I was overhearing on the train.
The story then becomes interesting when I started to decrypt the images seen on the video. If I was taking an archetypal, narrative approach to understanding the images in my life, then I had to consider that this image was important somehow. There were four people in the band, and each was telling me something new about what the punk scene is generating in our current context:
The Drummer: wearing a retro England shirt. Also fantastic, incredibly gifted at hitting the drums.
The Singer: out of tune, wearing a shirt that says ‘Kill Me Now’
The Bassist: very basic, wearing a shirt that reads ‘Sunn’ that is black.
The Electric Guy: wearing camo with a Palestine flag badge attached.
So then to decrypt the image we have to say that punk rock in Britain circa 2025 is promoting male suicide, the Black Sun (eg everything is shit now), war in Palestine and then some kind of nostalgia for a England of the past.
Now for me I’ve done my time in punk circles and understand the aesthetic, and I guess from a distance it feels a bit disheartening to see that this is the type of messaging that comes out of contemporary culture. I also don’t think this is specific to the punk scene, because more generally the UK’s cultural organs seem to enjoy producing demoralising material. It’s fashionable to talk down our current context, leading to an infinite melancholy for some idea of ‘Albion’ England that perhaps never actually existed.
When you think about our perception and how we see the world, we can broadly agree that our mind visually sees things in the material plane, and interprets it via our contextual knowledge, which then allows us to look at a chair and understand that it is a chair. We understand our time of life within contextual history that we consume from external sources which allow ourselves to place ourselves in a particular time and place. But this is all from visual information hitting us and being translated through our internal computer into the idea of knowledge.
We then navigate through this sea of visual data and do whatever it is that we would like to.
But then thinking about history, and how history is inherently unknowable from a first hand perspective. What if I were to be born in the Roman times, for arguments sake, and I look at the same institutions that exist in modernity, and perceive them to be the same in antiquity. Eg the football stadium is fulfilling the function of mass media entertainment the same way as the colosseum would do, just the aesthetics have evolved with time. There would be municipal buildings, brand new technology, friends, foes, pubs, restaurants etc. Functionally, from a dramatic standpoint, all of these arenas are the same.
So then I can come to the conclusion that all of history, to some level, is identical, and the stories we are told are somehow there to influence my behaviour and how I interface with the world. If I am fed a consistent stream of bad news in the form of news media, entertainment media, social media etc, it appears bad because it is referencing a historical context (eg happy 1930s Britain aesthetics) that I cannot verify ever having existed. I must place my trust and belief in external sources that, frankly, have not done enough to earn my never ending trust and belief.
Winding this back to the punk band, I then get to thinking about culture in general, and how politics in the UK is essentially a big pissing contest to see who can say England is the most crap its ever been. Foundationally, if England was working perfectly, then most of the economy would disappear. Legal professionals would not be needed as people wouldn’t be doing crimes, media people would shut up as people wouldn’t feel the need to read the news, politicians wouldn’t exist.
So then actually, and especially with regards to the rise of AI, the main problem with England is population numbers: if England became automated and was operating perfectly, what would the people do? They couldn’t become artists, because without struggle the art has low aesthetic value (monetary value is a different story, of course) and if everyone was an artist there would be no meaning to the infinite sprawl of art (eg see AI image generators turning everyone into artists over night and the amount of dross that this enabled). But then they also couldn’t be a crisis PR person (which is an art in itself).
What my point is, is that the chaotic nature of the state seems to be necessary until we can answer the question as to what people would actually do if we lived in a functioning society. And then also how would we design a shared national identity that was not based on misery and top level political incompetence, but on heroic deeds and gallantry.
I was not granted entry this week to an event that required I wear a jacket and a tie. You can tell that I have ingested too much punk rock for my own good in that I don’t believe in submitting to some jobsworth’s idea of what I should wear, or what constitutes ‘smartness’. But it was their club so I can’t complain. They hold the keys. But I am reflecting on this whole experience of life, and trying to work out what it all means, and how my attention can be directed in a positive way. I think all of this is related somehow, but I definitely know that if culture was positive, intelligent and inspiring, then the masses would create positive, intelligent and inspiring projects that would sort this country (and perhaps the world) out. Until then punk rock tries to get me to off myself.