RED WEDGE VS. ORANGE WEDGE: SXSW & ART IN THE TIME OF DORITOS

So I had just finished Morrissey’s autobiography and Tony Fletcher’s A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths back to back, in a 1000+ page winter vagabondage into a Manchester of the soul. The conclusion of which occurred as the annual cavalcade of SXSW tweets emerged like a legion of spirits in the night… boring, buzz-obsessed spirits in the night.

As I fatigued of reading about Morrissey’s petulance, and the fact no one knew exactly how Craig Gannon got in The Smiths, it was actually a page and a half account of 1986’s Red Wedge tour in Fletcher’s book that stayed with me as I turned away from it to engage with SXSW tweets much the way a paranoid schizophrenic engages with trick or treaters.

I learned that Doritos gave Lady Gaga $2.5 million dollars at SXSW to ‘be bold,’ which she interpreted as giving them the middle finger with her right hand whilst stuffing the check into the back of her leather underwear with her left. SUBWAY sandwiches, which are to food what bus stop overhangs are to housing also had a visible presence. I couldn’t tell if the big ironic music blogs were embracing or critiquing SUBWAY by tweeting out pictures of it’s massive signage, before accepting that most of them are kind of incapable of doing either. They are not so into committed relationships

The list of SXSW ‘SUPER SPONSORS’ certainly has a  ‘monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey’ like presence. You see it, it’s big and shadowy and it gives you bad vibes. Then you just kind of walk around it. Here are a few of them; CHEVY, ESURANCE, SUBWAY, PENZOIL?!?!, MILLER LITE, AT&T, AMERICAN EXPRESS. And something called DELOITTE CONSULTING which “helps clients take decisive action and achieve sustainable results. No matter how complex the business question, we have the capabilities and experience to deliver the answers you need to move forward.” Future sponsors rumored to include SKYNET, WOLFRAM & HART, VOLDEMORT and Alex Rodriguez.

But for some reason I had become particularly obsessed with DORITOS’ participation in the festival. A few weeks before SXSW began, I had launched a sort of concept art image/idea/hashtag called the GLOOMINATI, which was basically me just having fun and trying to unite the melancholy fans of my first band MY FAVORITE around a vague sense of dissatisfaction and powerlessness. ‘Beautiful Losers,’ was the tag The Swedish fans gave the band (and themselves for liking us) when we toured there from 2001-2005. I created a lot of satirical tweets about a mythical DORITOS HYPE TENT, and a SLIM JIM BUZZ SHACK. This was before I actually knew Doritos was involved in SXSW. I began to believe that my GLOOMINATI incantations actually manifested DORITOS presence at SXSW, our whispered nightmares calling forth the Leviathan Cthulhu from his cosmic crypt. And he had the munchies.

So with all this corporate corruption tentacle deep in an ‘alternative music festival,’ it was hard not to be somewhat struck by the juxtaposition regarding the RED WEDGE tour of 1986. RED WEDGE was a collective of musicians who attempted to engage young people with Socialism, siding up with the British Labour Party in particular, during the period leading up to the 1987 general election, hoping to defeat the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. 

Led by Billy Bragg, Paul Weller (at this juncture fronting The Style Council,) and openly gay Communards lead singer Jimmy Somerville, they put on concerts, gave interviews, and generally supported the Labour Party campaign. In addition, designer Neville Brody created iconography transforming Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge,  (a 1920 lithographic Soviet propaganda poster by artist Lazar Markovich Lissitzky) into an appropriately NEW WAVE bit of visual phantasm.

The list of RED WEDGE ‘SUPER SPONSORS’ is a little more exciting than SXSW’s. In fact it makes up roughly 73% of my record collection. In addition to the previously mentioned troika, participants included Jerry Dammers, Madness, Heaven 17, Bananarama, Prefab Sprout, Elvis Costello, Gary Kemp, Tom Robinson, Sade, The Beat, Lloyd Cole, The Blow Monkeys and The Smiths. The main irony was that these were artists mostly on Major Labels, with some to A LOT of both critical and commercial success who none the less exhibited both a pluralistic creative freedom and clearly... political freedom. With the gang at SXSW you have mostly unsigned bands or bands on a variety of semi-tangible indie labels, exhibiting a generation wide anxiety over what (or who) the hell to sound like, and whose main response when questioned about getting into a sleeping bag with the greasy lads and lasses of PENZOIL was to say ‘I didn’t play that show, it doesn’t affect me, I don’t really think about it.’

So what am I even saying? I mean this turn inward, this dissociation from activism didn’t start at SXSW 2014. It likely began with the legendary skepticism of my Generation X, of PAVEMENT playing Lollapalooza while recognizing it’s absurdity. Many of my peers existed on desert islands of ironic indifference, but I prided myself on living in a tenement house of ironic engagement. In 1994 when my band MY FAVORITE released it’s first 7” (GO KID GO/ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS AGAIN,) I was defiantly anti-slacker, trying to channel 80s ‘Shout To The Top’ activism through Riot Grrrl/DIY community tactics. I didn’t think MALKMUS shrugging was enough. It took me years to realize that, in the midst of his Faustian moment, MALKMUS may not have ripped a picture of Perry Farrell in half, but he did write one of the greatest, most innovative protest songs of all time in RANGE LIFE.

Is that what one these bands is going to do? Write the story of the Millennial Malaise, put the compromises in context?  I hope so. I’d love to hear someone talk about what a SONG could be, what a SONG could do. It’s beginning to feel like bands shouldn’t even name their songs anymore. Perhaps bands should just release pieces of shiny colored vinyl with no actual grooves. This way the records could function simply as mirrors, and the kids could finally see themselves in their record collections. I mean I get it. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you. BUT IT’S NOT FEEDING YOU. It’s not even really petting you. You’re selling your cat’s organs on the black market for plane fare so THEY can take you for a walk  while wearing a choke collar. I mean you don’t need to be a musicologist to recognize the chilling effect the current corporate culture has had on artists. The only MONEY available comes from dubious partnerships outside the industry itself. Thus artists must create work which is pliable for recontextualization in Wheat Thins commercials, or maybe if you’re lucky, background music while two young Tv stars make out. Seymour Stein may have been a company man, but he loved music and understood that pushing  cultural boundaries is what created Rock & Roll. I’m not sure the Vice-President of Dorito Penetration has the same passions, or vision. So while ‘Alternative’ bands know they need to engage with some exotic or transgressive aesthetic element in order not to be BLUES HAMMER, more and more that defining gesture is mumbling under a sea of reverb, or putting some quasi-racist druidic rune on your album art, or naming your band something provocatively anatomical. None of that ‘Opening Ceremony for Hot Topic’ schtick challenges the corporate power structure one bit. Look at the politics of the people that own Urban Outfitters itself. Naughty Nihilism is Nothing. It’s not Elvis Costello singing ‘Shipbuilding’ at a striking miner’s Free Trade Hall. It’s not Morrissey wearing hearing aids and NHS specs to sanctify the plight of the plain, the dignity of the ill. Ian Curtis dangling from a beam while Iggy Pop’s The Idiot skips in a locked groove can not be reduced to simply wearing an expensive black t-shirt.  Band after band got interviewed beneath a glowing Dorito, asked the same fucking stupid questions ‘What’s the wildest thing you did here?’ ‘What’s the coolest thing you saw here?’ WHO FUCKING CARES? That floating, glowering neon DORITO is the the new eye of the Illuminati, and it doesn’t want you to be a RICH KID OF INSTAGRAM, it wants you to get diabetes.

I have recently resurrected my band MY FAVORITE, because I thought maybe the current nostalgia for the 90s could be exploited, could be weaponized. That I could continue to try to make confrontational art in the form of pop and someone might accidentally review it, causing people to accidentally listen to it. So here I go again. Meeting in basement studios with the GLOOMINATI symbol scrawled above us.

If I wanted to do a RED WEDGE tour now, who could I ask? Franz Nicolay would probably do it. Everyone else would realize that the BRAND SYNERGY between themselves and an aging synth pop playing beatnik would not be (to paraphrase what a chum said was the focus of nearly every day time seminar) an optimised, activated use of their personal potential. Thus the DORITO wins right? TRUE DETECTIVE becomes TRUE REJECTIVE. But what if our new RED WEDGE festival, NOWHERE BY NOWHERE crashed their party, created an alternate reality, a tangent universe with songs and ideas as heavy as that jet engine that plunged through Donnie Darko’s bedroom ceiling? “Well The DORITOS seem to have a lot more territory,’ you’d say. “Well…” I’d say in my best Austin, Rust Cohle drawl. “You’re looking at this the wrong way. Once it was only DORITOS, I think the GLOOMINATI is winning.”

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Michael Grace Jr is the Gloominati founder of cult indie pop groups My Favorite & The Secret History. He has written for Newsday, The Long Island Voice and Maura Magazine and was featured in the latest print issue of ION. He is an Adjunct Professor of Art at a Long Island Community College and is currently writing a young adult novel called “The Detectives Of Suburbia.” Follow Michael on Facebook, Tumblr and at @michaelgracejr