My God, but punk rock from the Soviet Union was great.
Fantastic essay HERE by Adam Curtis on music and youth rejection in the Soviet Union.
Curtis is motivated by the thought that the widespread failure of communism to deliver what it promised is currently being repeated by neo-liberal regimes in the west, and that this is going to lead to the kind of collapse of belief that produces such great music in the Soviet Union.
To right is Kommunizm's "Stop the Rollin Stones." It's fantastic, Curtis has a video form Letov's other famous band Grob for the song "Everything is Going According to Plan" and then part of a wonderful punk/folk song by Yanka Dyagileva's that includes the lyric "the television is hanging from the ceiling, and no one knows how f***ing low I'm feeling."
In the current epoch, we are all in danger of becoming exactly like Hamlet, as Curtis says, "someone who can see through the superficiality of the present age, but is unable to have any beliefs or even feelings about anything."
Genuine punk is paradoxical because the manner in which it asserts that we are all Hamlet promises the negatation of the assertion. It probably doesn't really work, but this kind of performative contradiction may be all we have left, the only way to recover some smidgeon of beauty and autonomy in a world without rock.
