1 KommentarWoodstock war keine Revolution
Aus dem Text über Woodstock in dem soeben erschienenen grandiosen Sammelband "Out Of The Vinyl Deeps" mit den Popkulturtexten von Ellen Willis, die 1968 erstmals in der Geschichte der Wochenzeitschrift New Yorker den Posten eines Popkritikers bekam:
Abbie Hoffman interrupted the Who's set on Saturday night to berate the crowd for listening to music when John Sinclair, a Michigan activist, had just been sentenced to a long prison term for giving some marijuana to a cop. Pete Townshend hit Hoffman with his guitar, and that is more of a commentary on the relation of rock to politics than all of (the subculture magazine) Rat's fuzzy moralizing.
What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of blues. It is bourgeois at its core, a mass-produced commodity, dependent on advanced technology and therefore on the money controlled by those in power. Its rebelliousness does not imply specific political content; it can be - and has been - criminal, fascistic, and coolly individualistic as well as revolutionary. Nor is the hip lifestyle inherently radical. It can simply be a more pleasurable way of surviving within the system which is what the pop sensibility has always been about. Certainly that was what Woodstock was about: ignore the bad, groove on the good, hang loose, and let things happen. The truth is that there can't be a revolutionary culture until there is a revolution.
Ellen Willis, September 1969
Foto: University of Minnessota Press
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Sehr gut! Hier zeigt sich die Paradoxie der Kulturkritik und der Popphilosophie, die auf Adornos Satz "Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen" zurückzuführen ist. Trotzdem bleibt die Argumentation ein Vexierspiel, weil sie, negativ gewendet, fatalistisch in die Selbstaufgabe führt. Sich auf dem Flatscreen Marx-Reportagen angucken, mag widersprüchlich sein - andererseits wäre es doch schade, wenn jene kritischen Stimmen gänzlich ausblieben und man der unreflektierten Finanzökonomie alle Deutungshoheit überließe, oder? Kunst hat ihren berechtigten Platz, auch im Kapitalismus.
Comment by Tomek — Mai 16, 2011 @ 11:48