{"id":4595,"date":"2009-04-23T04:31:05","date_gmt":"2009-04-23T09:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4595"},"modified":"2009-04-23T04:31:05","modified_gmt":"2009-04-23T09:31:05","slug":"hey-gabba-gabba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4595","title":{"rendered":"Hey Gabba Gabba"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Breitbart says Republican is the New Punk rock<\/a> – by which he presumably means less “Richard Hell passing out in a\u00a0 puddle of his vomit in the dressing room at CBGB”, and more “anti-establishment”.<\/p>\n

And the premise makes sense:<\/p>\n

Johnny Cash was punk rock. The birth of rock came when Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Cash toured small towns and set the youth on fire.\u00a0Parents were outraged. The long dippity-doo hair atop gyrating men \u201cdancing like the negroes\u201d\u00a0 before frothing young girls set mainstream culture against this rebellious little movement. It was our first smell of anarchy and it scared the establishment.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

“God Bless Ronald Reagan and God Bless America” – Johnny Ramone, longtime closet Republican on his induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame <\/font><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Breitbart notes that, whatever “rebellion” rock and roll may have embodied forty or fifty years ago has long since diluted into cultural background noise.\u00a0 Rock is part of the “establishment” <\/em>today:<\/div>\n
\n
Never before has rock been so central to the inauguration of a president. Bono is an ambassador in sunglasses who still knows how to pull a string and get an audience of thousands to put their fist in the air. <\/div>\n

But rock cannot be both establishment and anti-establishment. It can\u2019t be a rebellious underdog while endorsing and distributing the status quo. And yes, President Obama is the status quo of unlimited spending and government expansion he supposedly opposed during the election…This is the mainstreaming of the bad boy, complete with rat-pack suit and cigarette in hand. A snappy skin spread over the boring, failed, liberal Democrats of the sixties. Hope and Change was nothing more than a repackaging of policies that have no right to be associated with hope or change.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ll cop to it: I initially thought Breitbart had a stretchy thesis.<\/p>\n

But one of the conceits “artists” cling to is that they give people a different approach to perceiving the world around them – both physically and intellectually.\u00a0 And for much of recent Western history, art in its various media and genres (to say nothing of the culture of the “artist”) was by nature critical of the “establishment”, whatever that was.\u00a0 This predates rock and roll, by the way; Beethoven thought that societies needed, and needed to exalt, artists precisely because they were uniquely qualified to look beneath the surface of society’s institutions.<\/p>\n

Of course, in the past two years America’s “artistic” community has pretty much abandoned that role to serve as shills for Barack Obama. Indeed, American “art” follows three tracks: academic “art” is beholden to a politically-correct academic establishment that is inextricably tied to the left; non-commercial art has turned itself largely into an entitlement-driven industry that is financially beholden to, and uncrically supportive of, the left; commercial art (think music, movies and publishing) have been in the bag for, and uncritical of, Obama all along.\u00a0 Beethoven may have had a point in 1815 Berlin; what passes for America’s artistic community today is little but cheerleaders for the newest incarnation of the Establishment.
\nBreitbart:<\/p>\n

The arts have failed. They no longer keep mass culture in check with thought-provoking art that challenges the establishment. Now they\u2019re in charge of spreading the mainstream mandate of the Liberal Vatican. There isn\u2019t an original thought among them, just a thousand-mile stare, a blue logo and the drone-like vocabulary of emotive, vaguely inspiring chants.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was about to write “think Socialist Realism” – but then Obama-based art basically resembles the old official genre of the Soviet Union anyway:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Breitbart:<\/p>\n

We\u2019re the new rebellion against the majority juggernaut that doesn\u2019t take kindly to dissent. Make a fist and show them what happens when they tell you what to think, feel and believe.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Uh oh, Andy – that’ll get you labelled an “extremist”).<\/p>\n

If you want me to unite to your cause, then end abortion, give the people back the money they earned, fight terror, keep your hands off free speech on the radio and enable job creators to make more jobs. Until then, screw your hope and screw your change.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m totally the Mick Jones of conservatism.<\/p>\n

But I digress. Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n

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Andrew Breitbart says Republican is the New Punk rock – by which he presumably means less “Richard Hell passing out in a\u00a0 puddle of his vomit in the dressing room at CBGB”, and more “anti-establishment”. And the premise makes sense: Johnny Cash was punk rock. The birth of rock came when Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","category-conservatism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}