Peripathetic, p.9
Peripathetic, page 9
It was also around this time that the small businesses that the underground had so lovingly nurtured – record labels, screen-printing services, band bookers, et al. – began to run themselves like monopolies, resulting in a chilling effect. You couldn’t possibly call out that one alternative record store in town for underpaying its staff because its very monopoly transpired in a rhizomatic structure that operated like a corporate leadership structure: my friend works there, my band’s records are stocked there, my other friend has done artwork for them, et cetera. I have participated in conversations where someone sees the truth of what I’m saying yet they cannot agree with it due to some kind of personal investment involved, usually to do with social or financial capital. There remains the impression that the entire ecosystem may very well collapse if anything is put under too harsh a scrutiny; the most important thing is that these businesses are ‘keeping the scene alive’, their owners’ capital providing a backbone for the internal economy to continue functioning as planned. The alternative seemed too unknown, too scary; there was absolutely no way we were going to risk being even a tiny bit responsible for destroying our precious havens, and more so if there wasn’t a large enough consensus. But Walter Benjamin had already put it an entire century prior, that ‘the logical outcome of fascism is the aestheticisation of political life’. It ‘seeks to give them [art] an expression while preserving property’.
Mark Fisher writes: ‘At a certain point – a point that is usually only discernible retrospectively – cultures shunt off into the sidings, cease to renew themselves, ossify into Trad. They don’t die, they become undead, surviving on old energy, kept moving, like Baudrillard’s deceased cyclist, only by the weight of inertia.’ He continues naming forms such as jazz and opera: ‘… no longer historic or existential, they become historical and aesthetic – lifestyle options not ways of life.’
We used the language of neoliberalism to advertise ourselves, even if we were outwardly and explicitly against capitalism. At least we had made that clear. We inhabited a peculiar microcosm of the world, comprising the things we rejected against those we tried to reject but ultimately crept up. It was a real-life version of the multiplayer online game Second Life, which converted to a real-estate model a year after its launch. While players could still visit for free, those who wanted to own and define elements of the virtual worlds had to pay. Landowners could do anything they wanted: erect a billboard, build a skyscraper, dig a mine, run a company. This could be exchanged for real-world money. Some users opened stores filled with virtual outfits while others became estate agents, selling or renting land in sought-after locations. Not too long after, BusinessWeek featured the first Second Life millionaire on its cover. The rentier economy had arrived.
Like the SARS-Cov-2 virus, whose varying mutations we now understand emerged from the excesses of capitalism, capital’s manifestations were mutating ever more quickly. Was refusal simply enough? How can we update our politics, apply them to the present so as to not regurgitate the past? The underground has always been about what could be; we can only keep having fun and fuck shit up. Hope as a daily practice; something we have, not something we do.*
It was the cultural equivalent of the galaxy brain, something that would only continue transmogrifying due to and in spite of counterculture’s uncapturable fleetingness. You could keep stacking narratives atop one another – if you lived in one corner of the world you’d see one iteration, but there were many others too, depending on where the dominant culture was situated on capitalism’s spectrum. Steampunk made sense in Poland. Vaporwave did not in India. Go further into Asia, and you would encounter scenes that had yet to – as it’s described – ‘mature’,† and which would feature primarily metal and metalcore, as those genres were more universally mainstream due to their having sprung from the less ironic, modernism-worshipping corners of the western world.
As such, the first skinhead‡ band from China was worthy of celebration. Slayer worship bands in Indonesia. My Chemical Romance–influenced type music from Vietnam. Indian Cannibal Corpse soundalikes. Through this we can draw parallels to how, in the global north, aesthetics and symbols from the underground would gradually make their way from inner-city areas to far-flung suburbs and country towns. You could wander from city to city – and in some cases, towns – and encounter a completely different aesthetic, a completely different sound. Yet it was evident that bands from the United States and Western Europe generally led the charge. It was exciting to discover a ‘Philly sound’, or listen to the familiar sounds of crust-punk or hardcore in a language that wasn’t English: Italian, Swedish, Danish, German, Spanish. Being able to intergrate this anglophilic underground culture into local languages and scenes carried a sense of exoticism, especially as it worked with europhilia and japanophilia to bring about what seemed a rounder whole; despite a certain degree of political awareness the imperialisms were too entrenched to reject. That said, some scenes – in Indonesia, for example – really have made it their own.
Still, there was something much more high stakes about it in our tiny corner of the world, particularly in the 2000s when social media had yet to take root in the way it has now. While the sociopolitical conditions we had to grapple with were not particularly exceptional, as there were similar societies in neighbouring regions, the nation-state’s cosmopolitan veneer saw capital flourishing in a way that came at the expense of human rights and the majority of its residents. Migrants from other parts of Asia would uproot their entire lives and livelihoods in order to get a chance at seeking their fortune only to learn it was all a lie. The streets had never been paved with gold.
There was that saying that was circulating then: that we were living in a first-world country with a third-world mentality. While these are questionable terms, it became a shorthand to express the frustration many were feeling. Going against the grain in any way was considered a triumph: punx is resistance and we felt it. To be able to pursue art and curiosity to its very ends, in subterfuge, obliquely sidestepping the existing state of affairs while trying to get the message across, but also while being ensconced in riches – a ‘Disneyland with a death penalty’, as one sci-fi author identified.* There was so much more to lose. It wasn’t just put on your battle jacket post stream of consciousness anti-government rant on social media playing like cool cats. It wasn’t quite like that at all. Put an Asian band next to a western band and sometimes the distinction is so obvious: the energy, the affect. Some of us really wanted to smash imperialism. It wasn’t just a slogan. Writing and singing songs about it was our way of wanting to actualise it, scream it into existence. We were so angry we wanted to tear everything down, but it was a learned helplessness, too.
Q: Have you ever had any dodgy interactions with bands on tour? Have you ever noticed people acting sexist, racist, tokenistic, patronising or privileged/bratty? Please tell us about those interactions.*
A: Definitely. I’m not going to name names but I have personally witnessed [these things]:
Bands who didn’t want to understand the different cultures they were facing but instead chose to make inappropriate comments they thought were hilarious;
People who exoticised the cultures they were experiencing, for e.g. ‘I wish we had these little carts selling food where we came from!’ and ‘I wish I was Asian!’, etc.;
People who thought it amazing that I speak English ‘so well’ (countless times);
Bands who didn’t appreciate the hospitality that was being shown to them and wanted things to happen on their own terms or based on what they were usually comfortable with where they came from, for e.g. insisting to sleep in a hotel instead of at someone’s home, because it didn’t match their level of comfort or cleanliness;
Bands who chose instead to stick among themselves instead of making an effort to interact with local kids for whatever reason;
Bands I felt were simply using Southeast Asia as a ‘stepping stone’ of sorts to either gain credibility with their friends and scene back home or who wanted to use the region as a primer of sorts before embarking on ‘bigger’ tours in the United States and Europe – seeing our scenes as an ‘Other’, so to speak;
Bands who saw the tour as some kind of ‘exotic adventure’, where they could do all this wild and crazy shit they wouldn’t normally do in their safe white countries;
Bands who blatantly or unknowingly got off on the post-colonial adulation of the west that occurs in Southeast Asia, which then enabled them to feel like rockstars;
People commenting that I had ‘no accent’ like it was meant to be a compliment;
Men who made me feel uncomfortable because they made me feel like I wasn’t really part of the tour or show organising, merely ‘helping out’ the dudes, or invaded my personal space with too much touching.
Q: Have you ever felt like you were representing or being a spokesperson for ‘Asia’ or ‘Asians’ to people from bands that have been on tour?
A: Oftentimes I get asked about Japanese or Indonesian culture like I am supposed to know about them. Or SE Asia gets lumped into this one monolithic mess where the people from the different countries are one and the same.
Q: Do you feel that there is a cultural hierarchy when it comes to bands/politics from North America, England or Australia/Aotearoa, and how does that play out that you have seen?
A: As a friend of mine summed it up, ‘We fight American culture with American subculture’. Many kids are first exposed to zines and bands from the States, so SE Asian scenes are definitely heavily influenced by that. I think as a result of imperialism and globalisation, western outputs are paid more attention to. That said, I think this is shifting somewhat in the past few years, especially as many more Southeast Asian punks have become more critical, working to create and build scenes that move away from the romanticisation of western subcultural resistance.
It was how I began to even know anything about the world beyond the limits of the borders I was born within. Beyond authoritarianism, beyond anti-globalism, beyond multiculturalism. It wasn’t so simple such that we’d annihilated the borders between us, but a more complex unravelling of them. Some people didn’t even know that was the objective. That was probably what made it strange.
As the late countercultural novelist Katherine Dunn once said in an interview about her first novel Geek Love, ‘… within a social structure, a familial structure, or a cultural structure of various kinds, there is a substitute for actual freedom. […] we have no idea what it means, except within a context – freedom to do what? So […] freedom becomes defined by power, your ability to make choices, and the power relationship within a family, any family.’
I guess it was a way of escaping the limits of the nuclear family. We wanted to arrest the connection that many of us grew up lacking, so we’d go in search of it. Things would just happen. Often there was no plan. You either couldn’t or refused to. It didn’t matter in the end: paths would converge.
Accordingly, there were no allegiances other than the repressed, entrenched ones which would worm their way in via elaborate acts of subterfuge. People learned to conceal what they thought were politically incorrect opinions and choices. In lieu of that, they wore them proudly on their sleeve as if they were statements; being a contrarian of any kind had a certain cultural cachet with particular sub-sects. That should have acted as a foreshadowing for the people we would lose to right-wing conspiracy theories later. In the midst of wanting to conceal desires and motivations considered shameful and sacrilegious, we would end up surrounding ourselves with sexual assault, emotional abuse, long drawn-out arguments which focused on trivialities that were not too dissimilar from a social media blow-up.
Those early online arguments were a kind of proto digital outrage, which as Byung-Chul Han writes in In The Swarm, ‘admits neither action nor narration […] devoid of the power to act’. Perhaps it’s part and parcel of the alienation that increases in a capitalist realism, in a subculture that encouraged and thrived alongside its conception, doomed from the start. It’s what Fisher describes as a ‘reflexive impotence’, where our many opposing knowledges end up inducing an immobilisation. This might be the reason why some of us break away only to continue creating microcosms that replicate the exterior. A fun and funny lifestyle that’s an ongoing and fluctuating vortex and we’re all sucked in.
Here we see the wheel reinvent itself: little replicas of replicas with a few minor parts shifted around. Frederic Jameson refers to this as ‘a series of pure and unrelated presents in time’ – an echo chamber merely reacting to its own structures, and which had been derived from the dominant paradigm anyway. It was always going to be about the present, and multiple ones at that. A little decontextualisation here, a little appropriation there; at the end of the day the image is slightly different, tweaked such that it resembles a computerised image, an uncanny valley.
When I moved to Australia in 2012, it wasn’t difficult to find a network immediately. I had already packed up 40 kilograms of my worldly belongings; I was simply moving to another community. Upon arrival I threw my backpack onto the ground of the warehouse space I was moving into – I was home again. It didn’t matter that the rooms had no windows save one; any room can be a bedroom if you consider yourself a creative thinker. Migrants search for people from whence they came; punk migrants search for people from whence we came. Often all it takes is a contact, a friend of a friend who would point you somewhere, if they didn’t go so far as to want to meet you themselves. People come together for various reasons: shared nationality, a passion for a specific sport, devotion to religious faith, the necessity of prioritising work. Others get together due to their mutual sense of social alienation.
Here, it was as if I had unlocked a new level in a game, but with cheat codes that I’d managed to gather from the same community of cheaters. Someone gave me a masterclass on navigating the dole. We didn’t look at the fine print – it would be another decade or so before I would be deemed eligible. Another helped us find a house to live in when it was time to move on from the warehouse. Someone else helped me out with a job. Another gave me advice on how to seek recourse after I had been ripped off by a crooked employer.
It felt like the freedom I was looking for. Here I could say anything I wanted and not feel fear. I could join herds of people in mass protests where we were permitted to explicitly display our stances against the state. But it was also where I began to notice that resistance was somehow even more of a lifestyle; how it seemed for some to be merely an identity and nothing more. People would say one thing in public and do something else in private. Then there were others who did the opposite: going out to the forests to blockade, organising in secret, quietly building political alliances. But that would give in to infighting as well. It just seemed so much more ludicrous. To live in a place that felt like things were so easy – people were generally safe and complacent in a way that filled me with both hope and despair. So much inertia, complaining … when it could have been all for the taking. Do you even understand?
It was a kind of jam: a paper jam, probably, in how it was a frustrating triviality that kept on returning, and which needed fixing in order for the task to continue irrespective of your feelings. There was the sense that history was being created through the unrelenting foregrounding of the present, ready to be picked up again by whoever happens to take up the new mantle. It is, as Schulman observes, ‘a distorted sense of them[our]selves as timeless’, and what McPheeters sees as ‘reacting solely to its own brief and deep past’, a cultural amnesia that is simultaneously revisionistic and ahistorical yet celebrates past heroes to the detriment of the present. As always, that was highly dependent on the level of capitalism one saw themselves within, but we were going to be in deep shit whether we foresaw it or not.
Of course, as it goes, some gentrifications were so complete you’d never see any of their traces. You wouldn’t think that there was a pre-existing history that had been scrubbed out. Whole suburbs decimated and uprooted, entire organisations gutted and restructured, minds that saw the totality of assimilation.* Radio stations that used to be independent but have now become a meme deployed for ribbing. DIY spaces turned into co-working lofts and craft beer breweries. Ex-revolutionaries converted into mouthpieces for start-ups and NGOs.
It was around this time when it began to dawn on me that those precious times had vanished. Those times in which you’d enter a house, notice a particular book and know immediately that that person was your people. A band t-shirt spotted across the street or in a random airport somewhere in the world. It almost goes without saying that a friendship would be started not long after, or there and then. It was a kind of signalling. A dog whistle of sorts. That is, until the right co-opted it, took our anti-establishment ideas and postures and turned them inside out. Some of them came from inside the house. In a sense the contemporary alt-right is considered adjacent to the underground. ‘Abuse of power comes as no surprise’, so goes the Jenny Holzer aphorism.
I read punk memoirs and think, am I going to sound like this, a wet rag continually bemoaning the underground’s recurring demise? Shut the fuck up, Greg Graffin! There was a break in mass culture every time someone announced this supposed death. The announcement was a part of the spectacle. Sometimes it was a way to cash in.
It was a Marxian metabolic rift, except the natural environment wasn’t the thing that was being alienated. We were using the language of capital to refute its logics. By then it’s become entrenched, you’re in too deep, it’s too late to step off the train now, which is exactly like how you got into it in the first place. The spin-cycle of lifestyle: what saves you entraps you further; the land of no return – your mind has already been moulded by its structures and affects, which makes reintegrating into so-called ‘regular’ society comparatively even more onerous – ‘a very poor preparation punk rock had been for later life’.* You’ve already spent so much time within it. The contrast becomes jarring: to extricate yourself and not experience its lingering effects, how it used to shape the entirety of your world, your understanding of reality. It’s the Schrödinger’s cat of the psyche: both things are equally true, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time, a rudimentary drawing of quantum mechanics superimposed on a mind. We were all addicted to these environments. There is something so captivating about always being on the edge, on that shaky precipice of promise – something new and something cool is just lurking around the corner and we’d arrive at it if we kick around long enough.
