Godspeed You Black Emperor! As Anarchist Agitators

[SRR]

An excuse for this post: Booze + late nights + sprawling avant rock + random google searches = Tinfoil Hat Café post. And I'll leave it at that.

http://zuihitsu.org/etc/archives/2002/0 ... -of-chaos/

Fiona Sturges, writing in The Independent[21], accurately observes that the people who listen to Godspeed! believe that “their wordlessness embodies a greater political statement than all the proselytising of Gillespie or Bono.”

The eternal anarchist dilemma is that of creating a positive force that doesn’t reproduce the structures (and therefore failings) of the institutions that are being opposed[22]. The approach Godspeed! have taken and are taking in this respect is to demonstrate in action the possibility of alternatives, with alternatives here meaning ways of operating that displace and disorient power in the way Lyotard suggests when he writes in The Postmodern Condition that:

Reactional countermoves are no more than programmed effects in the opponent’s strategy; they play into his hands and thus have no effect on the balance of power. That is why it is important to increase displacement in the games, and even to disorient it, in such a way as to make an unexpected "move" (a new statement).[23]

That is, the superficial alternative (the reactional countermove) is merely an opposition within the standard game. Within the world of contemporary music, I take an example of this to be, for instance, major record companies selling nu-metal within the framework of all other pop music, in order to cater to a largely homogenous market by altering little more than surface detail – a shift towards “heavier” music while having no overall effect on the power structure in the industry at large. The work of Godspeed!, in contrast, while staying broadly within the same game (regardless of the resistance they offer to standard ways of categorisation and analysis, the forums in which they are discussed are consonant with them being considering rock or pop, in the broadest sense of the terms) demands displacement, causes disorientation. They offer something unexpected, a new move in a tired game.

From this perspective it is natural that anarchism be marked by spontaneity, differentiation, and experimentation[24]; that it be marked by an expressed affinity with chaos, if chaos is understood to be what lies outside or beyond the dominant game or system. Because of the resistance to definition and categorisation, the anarchist principle has been variously interpreted as, rather than an articulated position, “a moral attitude, an emotional climate, or even a mood”[25]. This mood hangs in dramatic tension between utopian hope or dystopian nihilism[26], a tension that can be easily read into the sweeping trajectories of the Godspeed! sound. Mendelssohn once said that people “usually complain that music is so ambiguous, that it leaves them in such doubt as to what they are supposed to think, whereas words can be understood by everyone. But to me it seems exactly the opposite.”[27] The unambiguous message from Godspeed! that I read is one of desperate hope for the future in the midst of an almost overpowering disillusionment with the present. As the message they flash onstage at the end of every show reads, suggesting that saying so helps make it so: "FREEDOM CAN BE ACHIEVED". The official website[28] is equally unambiguous with the opening message, which has the struck-through text godspeed you black emperor! over a simple glowing crucifix followed by one word: hope.

[Woodsman]

Hell I feel like i drank a bunch of booze just attempting to read that.

[coldharvest]

Gopi and I listen to that album frequently.

[redharen]

Do your kids listen to it?

[denise]

Happy Birthday, Redharen!

[redharen]

Hey, thanks. 28 down, 122 more to go.