Discontent
If you're feeling bad, that's fine
So, you are feeling kind of frustrated, shitty, uncomfortable … discontent. That’s good, really. Not amazing, of course, but not bad either. There is something way worse than that: feeling nothing. Apathy. And believe me, most people are not discontent. Neither are they happy.
Freud was really clever in many subjects (yes, not all the time, but who the fuck is?) . His book Civilization and Its Discontents from 1929 is superb. The main plot is: civilization makes people suffer. Yes, to be “civilized” means you have to let go of a lot of your own primal instincts: instant pleasure, desires, aggression impulses. That’s the super-ego controlling the id. We suffer, civilization prevails. This discontent very often manifests into neurosis.
He then extrapolated this idea. Civilization, as an entity, developed its own “cultural super-ego“ that is going to be so strict, so against people’s id (instincts), that civilization is destroyed by the discontents. That hooked me because, where are the discontents? All I see is apathy. Or this is a pre-stage that will feed the future discontents. That makes some sense.
There have always been discontent, and art was always a way to manifest it instead of burning the whole thing down. The id’s raw energy (libido, aggression, the forbidden) gets redirected into something culturally valuable. This is an escape valve. Without that, the pressure starts to get too high.
Culturally, we are now stuck in a dead end.
Want an example? Rock ‘n’ roll started in the early ‘50s. Go back twenty-five years from it, to the mid ‘20s, and compare what popular music was. That’s a fucking million- year jump. That’s young people , crazy to have fun, dance, have sex, drink. That’s the id at full throttle. Do the same now, go back to 2000.
Yes, there is nothing.
The valve is clogged.
So, if you are discontent, we are in this together. Let’s not passively listen to some shitty harmless Spotify playlist as background sound. Art is not background, art is us, our discontent.
I’ll let you go with the intro speech from a concert. That’s MC5 playing at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom on October 30–31, 1968.
Brothers and sisters, I wanna see a sea of hands out there.
I want everybody to kick up some noise. I wanna hear some revolution... Brothers and sisters, the time has come for each and every one of you to decide whether you are going to be the problem or whether you are going to be the solution!
Right now, right now, right now it’s time to …
Kick out the jams, motherfuckers
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