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Another Vaccine Side Effect: The Death of Rock 'n' Roll
Music, once a powerful vehicle for social change, is now just another tool by which the establishment perpetuates a culture of spirit-crushing conformity.
I like to think it a symptom of healthy psychological development that, as a man grows older, he should come to more closely resemble his father in two key areas: namely, politics and music.
By my own admission, I am not altogether convinced that my dad and I’s opinions on government ever much differed, at least along any other lines than maturity – the same distrust that informed his large ‘C’ conservatism fueling an adolescent anarchism which, truth be told, I owed less to the philosophy of Max Stirner than to the rants of GG Allin.
My taste in music has followed a similar trajectory. Although my heart will forever remain, deep within this baby carrier-wearing chest, that of an unrepentant punk rocker, I am no longer sure whether my listening habits can best be described as ‘omnivorous’ or ‘insatiable’. I like to consider myself literate in everything from the UK folk scene to early two-tone ska, as receptive to Tchaikovsky as I am to the Sleaford Mods, and yet as I near my contemplative mid-thirties, the more I find my playlists comprised of the same renegade country music me and my dad listened to each time we made the weekly journey to grandma’s.
Despite this general confluence of styles, however, there is one name which remains conspicuously absent from both our record collections: Neil Young. As best I can recall, the only times his voice ever came out of my father’s stereo was on the semi-occasional Cosby, Stiles, Nash, and Young album, and had it not been for the recent Joe Rogan/Spotify saga, I might have gone the rest of my life without ever again hearing the now palpably insincere Rockin’ in the Free World.
And that is precisely why the episode struck the chord it did. You see, while back in the smoke-hazed ‘60s and acid-crazed ‘70s, Neil Young might have been an avatar of youthful rebellion, the reality is that some fifty years later and untold millions of dollars richer, that is a far more difficult mythology to maintain. In fact, it might easily be considered a more accurate description of Rogan himself. After all, if one’s rock ‘n’ roll credentials are measured by the force which opposes them, then today in 2022, there really is no comparison – Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the MSM getting their collective panties in a twist over the podcaster’s zeitgeist-shifting success.
Of course, Neil Young has no idea that the establishment’s shrieks of “misinformation” are purely their panicked projection. He, quite lamentably, is just another old man befuddled by their propaganda. But whether or not “the Godfather of Grunge” possesses the wherewithal to see it, far from the anti-authoritarian icon he so clearly imagines himself, he has instead become, for an entire generation of young people, the face of a dying cultural and political paradigm.
Nevertheless, as I listened to commentators pour scorn on the ageing rock star and skimmed through a newsfeed of merciless memes, my schadenfreude began to wane. It’s not that I felt bad for Neil Young. It’s hard to feel bad for any censorious jackass, least of all one so willfully and triumphantly ignorant.
Who I did feel sorry for was his unvaccinated fans. Understand, I am not for a moment trying to equate the loss of a favorite artist to the litany of shattered friendships, strained marriages, and poisoned family dynamics that have been precipitated by the Covid Hoax. Neither am I suggesting that any self-respecting adult put stock in the musings of some bought-and-paid-for celebritard. What I am saying, however, is that as a music lover, and one who has relied heavily on its soul-restoring properties over the last two years, I cannot help but think there is something uniquely tragic in having a once cherished song – perhaps that Jim Bryson number that got you through your high school break-up, or one of Chopin’s nocturnes which invoked your daughter’s first smile – forever tainted by the same rot which has seeped into every other aspect of our society.
Of course, this misguided zealotry was a feature of music long before Covid. I can still well remember my first encounter with it, when at sixteen years-old, decked out in my high-cut Chuck Taylors and dutifully self-torn Pennywise T-shirt, I went down to my local record store in order to pick up the first Rock Against Bush CD.
I was, to use the parlance of the time, pumped. This, after all, was not long after the death Dr. David Kelly, a British scientist effectively murdered by Tony Blair’s government for exposing the lie of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and I was experiencing, as many my age were experiencing, the first (entirely disjointed) murmurs of political consciousness.
Nevertheless, the more times I pushed that CD into my Walkman, the more I came to realize that the bands on there – bands my teenage self so thoroughly lionized – had fallen for Dubya’s schtick worse than anyone. They didn’t criticize Bush for cheerleading the corporate war machine. They were even careful to avoid bad-mouthing George fucking Soros. What NOFX, Alkaline Trio, and the rest of these pop-punk stalwarts seemed to be railing against, was the flag-wearing, freedom-loving patriot Bush so demonstrably wasn’t, their ugly anti-redneck rhetoric dripping with the same noxious classism that, some thirty years earlier, had given rise to punk in the first place.
Safe to say, even this was nothing when set against the reception the music industry had in shore for Trump. I’m sure that most everyone recalls, particularly among those who consider themselves his supporters, the tedious uproar as virtually every mainstream entertainer professed undying loyalty to the state-sanctioned, corporate-funded “Fight against Fascism”. It wasn’t just music. Whether your hobby was, knitting, comic books, comedy, or sports, it seemed as though even the most apolitical facet of our lives was catapulted to the frontlines of a still-raging culture war. But however inconceivable it would’ve seemed back then, even this wall-to-wall Trump Derangement Syndrome was merely a prelude to the last twenty-something months of Covid bed-wetting.
Now, there may be some readers capable of enlightening me, but to the best of my recollection, I know of no public figure, not even rock’s wildest of alleged wild men, who back in March of 2020, ever pushed back against the newly imposed restrictions. One image in particular stays with me. At the time, I was back living with my parents in Northern Ireland, waiting for US Immigration Services to at last rubber-stamp my Green Card application. Without going into specifics, my case had been dragging on for well over a year, much of which I’d spent separated from my wife – a separation I dealt with by drinking more Caribbean rum than I should’ve and obliterating my eardrums with Michigan psychobilly band, the Goddamn Gallows.
The day lockdowns were announced, I was on the band’s website checking their tour dates. As naïve as it now sounds, I was still holding out hope that I might be in the US in time to catch one of their upcoming shows, however, far from the fuck-this-bullshit messaging I’d expected, I was instead greeted with a statement from the band announcing yes, all gigs had been cancelled and that fans should stay home, stay safe, and wait for the government’s directives.
Wait for the government’s directives.
I must have read the message five or six times. I believe that was the moment the gravity of the situation truly hit me. I’m not at all claiming, as I clicked back to the doomsday news headlines, that the compliance of these self-styled mavericks was anything like my primary concern. I was, I believed back then, cut off from my wife amid the outbreak of a global pandemic, and although it would be several weeks later before I came to recognize that this bat-borne virus was really just the pretext for a wave of technocratic tyranny, I can still remember the distinct feeling of unease upon realizing, temporarily at least, that the world had been purged of contrarians.
Since then, the Covid narrative has continued to crumble with ever-increasing pace but remarkably, many musicians remain not only unquestioning of the dogma, but some of its staunchest defenders. Foo Fighters, arguably the most impactful band of the last twenty years, were among the first to play shows demanding vaccine passports. The Drive-By Truckers (unlike actual truckers) penned a song about how we should all cower at home, sucking our thumb. The Offspring – a band which featured prominently on the soundtrack to my own teenage melodramas – first fired their unvaxxed drummer and then rewrote their lyrics to encourage fans to get the jab, countless other artists taking to Twitter to demand listeners shut up, bend over, and do what the officer says.
It is obviously impossible to say how any of the bona fide hell-raisers from rock ‘n’ roll’s heyday would’ve reacted to absurdity of Covid theatre. I try to avoid projecting my opinions onto anyone, least of all the dead, but still, I don’t think it much of a stretch to say that Iggy Pop, Nikki Styx, or Jim Morrison probably wouldn’t have been donning a face-diaper each time they popped out to score heroine.
Rest assured, dear reader, I am in no way claiming that any of these folk should be looked to for medical advice. I will meet Fauci halfway on this one, and acknowledge that Big Bird is arguably more trustworthy than someone who huffs gasoline with breakfast. What I am saying, however, is that it must surely must merit some concern that whenever tyranny arrived, with all its sirens and flashing red lights, even our society’s most rule-averse proved themselves as docile and obedient as anyone.
It is a truth that has become only more self-evident since my arrival Stateside. Back in Northern Ireland, a country still characterized by its sectarian divide, musical subcultures in general (although punk in particular), have long provided an outlet by which young people can identity outside the Protestant/Catholic dichotomy. It is at once subversive and unifying, performative and purposeful, and yet here in America, at least within my admittedly limited experience, an individual’s rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic appears to be a surefire sign of their political orthodoxy.
Take just a couple week ago, for example. I was at the barber’s, waiting for the short-back-and-sides which for the last decade has been my staple, when, flicking through the coffee table newspapers, I came across a story about a young lady who was threatening legal action after being turned down for a bank job due to her having green hair.
Now, I’ve had green hair. Back in my younger days, I had pretty much every color of hair you could think of, and let me tell you, throughout none of these ill-advised fashion choices did I ever want to work in a fucking bank. No doubt this aspiring teller, with her neck tattoos and septum ring, considered herself part of the long lineage of free spirits which included the likes of Johnny Cash, Sid Vicious, and Merle Haggard. But unlike those original badasses, she did not want to defy society – she wanted to be accepted into it. When once music had set out to challenge the established order, it has now been commandeered by the elites, first to push their agenda, and then as a means of plying adherents with enough mindless hedonism and sexual degeneracy that they need never confront their own towering conformity.
In the face of this infiltration and subsequent corruption, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if rock ‘n’ roll is not dead, then the attitude which birthed it assuredly is. Constricted by the tentacles of corporate power and crushed beneath the weight of unremitting Covid propaganda, the raw nihilism of two guitars, a bass, and some drums possessed neither the willingness nor the capacity to fight for the freedom that was once its essence.
What did, however, was love. For no matter what professional smear merchants might label us, no matter the lies of so-called heads of state, we within this Global Freedom Movement know that, at its core, this is what drives us. There is no other force that could compel ordinary people from every corner of the globe to rise up and resist in such colossal numbers, and yet, over the course of just a couple years, without ever changing their hairstyles much less their opinions, these ordinary people have woken up to discover themselves just as maladjusted to the societies in which they live as even the most untameable rock stars. What’s more, we are every bit as proud to be.
We are proud to be maladjusted to a society that would force masks upon its children.
We are proud to be repulsed by a government that would coerce its citizens into an unwanted, unnecessary, potentially damaging medical treatment, and we are proud to be enraged by their corporate lackeys who would silence dissent.
We might be nothing more glamorous than farmers, truckers, and nurses; Christians, tradesmen, and parents, but make no mistake, when we come for these petty tyrants – and make no mistake, we are coming for them – we will come not just with love and the love of freedom in our hearts, but with the same joy and fearlessness that is the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.
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