Standing in an underground
railway station
built alongside a highway
in the middle of summer
slippy-hot
that falls on you like
a damp blanket
your mother had been
heating in the over
on the lowest
setting to lie over
you when you were
sick

the cars themselves are
no better
the air conditioning
roaring helplessly
against the heat
a tired old man
begging for mercy
his button-down shirt
open to his flabby
man-breasts drenched
in sweat

i fall in love with
colorado in weather like
this

the lovers’ spat
of the little miseries
of winter forgotten
behind us

palmer shouts in my earphones
about relationships and
insanity
and how can
i enjoy this music
when i have never had
my heart broken
i have never had
a heart to break
for one
never opened up
enough to find out
what heartache feels like
for other people
only inchoate longing
for people i cannot
know and never touch

the bright star and
the dubliner both
died virgins
didn’t they

“who needs love when
there’s law and order”

a sheen of sweat
but no discomfort
the sun has set finally
i think about a girl
i used to know
and wonder where
she is and if she
ever thinks of
me.

Not everybody lives in the monoculture, of course, but it takes a very specific effort to not fall into it. Since one of the qualities of culture is that it is ubiquitous, the monoculture cannot simply be removed; it has to be replaced with something else every bit as encompassing and central to the identities of those who live in it.

The only large alternatives to the secular mainstream that the monoculture presents are religious fundamentalist movements. The two most powerful cultures outside of the western secular humanist capitalist tradition are Protestant Christian fundamentalism and conservative Islamic theology. (Contain your hate mail; I’m not equating the two strains of culture, just noting that they contain similar responses to the cultural hegemony of the monoculture.)

Monoculture is worldly and sinful, goes the argument from conservative Christian groups, and the general response is two-fold. On one hand, they attempt to realign the broad culture more along what they consider proper, acceptable lines (see efforts to push into law various restrictions on gay marriage, or street preaching, or pamphleteering. These efforts could all be loosely encapsulated under ‘missionary’ work to a sinful world). The other response is to build a parallel cultural structure for themselves.

The effort of American conservative Protestant groups to build this secondary cultural environment for themselves is not readily apparent to the outsider, because it’s not aimed at the world. It’s entirely built for the believer’s benefit, with little pieces crossing over into the mainstream occasionally. Veggie Tales. Bibleman. Fireproof. Conservative Christians have their own movie industry and its own version of the Oscars. They have their own radio stations and websites specializing in content specifically for their consumption. The have their version of Roger Ebert, even, reviewing movies based on their religious message as opposed to any artistic criterion. They have their own bands, own concerts, own section of the bookstore. It’s a vast drop-in replacement for the monoculture, each piece of the secular culture having its analogue in the spiritual mirror.

That’s one response to the overweening ubiquity of the monoculture, relatively benign but hard to maintain. The other reaction is exemplified in the reaction of the Islamic fundamentalists in their war against Western culture: a complete rejection of the secularization of everyday life and the moral relativism that the monoculture has at its core. Instead of the parallel design of Christian counterculture, Islamic fundamentalist reaction centers on a destruction and replacement of the monoculture with a similarly monolithic and ubiquitous cultural edifice.

The roots of this can be found in the reaction to the secularist governments that were instituted across the Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century with Islamist group like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Rulers across the region imported secular-oriented governments to the region, some under pressure from Western powers eager for governments (not necessarily democracies) at least theoretically aligned with their interests, others under the leadership of rulers who equated the collapse of the region in power and importance with the role of Islam as a governing force. This secularization policy was strongest in Turkey, where Ataturk imposed a regime of cultural secularization on the still very Muslim populace.

The blowback from this divorce between the governments of the region and their citizens’ religious beliefs would result in the overthrow of the (corrupt and oppressive) Shah of Iran and the assassination of the (repressive and fatally-conciliatory-toward-Israel) President of Egypt Anwar El Sadat in 1981, among other reactions. When a radical cleric preaches death to the unbelievers, he is not only calling for the destruction of citizens of the West but of an entire culture — the western postmodern monoculture, to be replaced by an Islamic hegemony. For these radicals, it is not enough to co-exist, as the Evangelicals attempt to; they understand, implicitly, that the monoculture will bleed through and eventually absorb/co-opt competition. There can be only one winner.

I don’t believe that there are any other broad movements against the monoculture. Even punitive actions against the mainstream — not owning a television, not listening to Top 40 radio stations — are simply part of the narrative of mainstream vs. outsider that the monoculture encompasses. And they’re generally negative actions, a rejection of some part of culture, and not a construction of a replacement or alternative.

The monoculture exists and is perpetuated because, deep down, this is what we wanted. It is not imposed upon us, but created implicitly through our acceptance of it. So next time you complain about what you see around you, remind yourself that it’s up to you what that environment is. The monoculture is ruthlessly meritocratic when it comes to its contents, providing us with exactly what we want, all the time. The only way to change it, then, is to change ourselves.

“This is a good vintage.” He scooped a handful of soil and let it run through his fingers. It fell in loose clumps, a dark brown shade, and landed back in the rough burlap bag on the floor. “It looks fantastic. That color is so rich, so deep.” He licked the few remaining moist flecks from his fingers. “Delicious.”

I was standing in a dining room that would not have looked out of place alongside the highest temples of haute cuisine in New York City. Geophagia opened last week alongside the San Francisco waterfront, and the proprietor and head chef, George Godson, was showing me around in the morning, as bags of soil and dirt arrived on trucks from around the world.

“As a culinary people, we’ve collectively lost contact with how our food is grown, where it comes from. You walk down the street and tell people that carrots grow underground, and they look at you like you’ve shit in their coffee.” The new restaurant is Godson’s way of reminding people that food comes from the earth. “Our ancestors were raised on food that had dirt on it. Dirt’s good for you. It’s got vitamins, minerals.”

Good, clean dirt, that is. Godson works with suppliers around the world to have specially-irradiated dirt brought specifically to his restaurant. “All the harmful microbes have been scrubbed out of this soil. It’s fine to eat.” The Food and Drug Administration has issued a tentative statement about the concept of dirt-eating, saying, in part, that “soil is not a proper source of nutritional value, and should not be a replacement for actual food in a normal diet. However, soil that has been properly treated would likely not be harmful in small quantities.”

Godson isn’t waiting for bureaucratic approval to start serving paying customers dirt-covered food. “About three-quarters of the menu is standard fare, with soil provided as a side-dish, as a way to enhance the flavor and texture of the meal itself. It’s like wine in that way, in that pairing it is of extreme importance.” The soil from Napa, for example, is good when paired with braised chicken breasts. A blend of soils from China do well alongside veal. “It’s all about pairing.”

The other quarter of dishes are “made with soil as the main ingredient, or central flavor or texture.” The purest of the dishes in this category that Geophagia serves are the ‘mud cookies’, which are simple patties of dirt with just enough water to make them solid enough to eat. “They’re a last-resort food in disaster-hit places like Haiti after the earthquake, where food is impossible to come by, and people are desperate to fill their stomachs with anything at all,” Godson explains. “By offering them here, in the lap of luxury, I want people to think about what the differences in context that take it from a diversionary meal to a staple of a diet.”

I sample a slightly less outré menu item, the braised duck with sea cucumber, with an extremely fine sand from the beach near where the sea cucumber was fished in Alaska on the side. While the dish itself was executed very well, the sand introduced an extra layer of complexity into the proceedings. I tried it both separately and with the meat, and found that, while alone, the sand was simply too gritty to be at all enjoyable, adding it to the dish as I ate, as if it were just another condiment, changed the texture and made it altogether more interesting, the roughness waking up my tongue to better taste the other ingredients.

Opening night was a big hit, Godson reports, with the line of the adventurous eaters backed up throughout the evening. Time will tell if he can turn this momentary curiosity into a sustainable business venture.

1.

Half-price Easter chocolate
tastes strangely
of dusty bread
and a hint
of sour
grapes.


2.

and to tell the truth,
I love you.
and to tell the truth,
when I say that
I’m lying.


3.

When you came on the television
chopped off at the waist
and speaking in tongues,
I wanted to turn away
but I knew already
that there was nothing else on.
So I watched you
for about fifteen minutes
until something happened
and they cut back to the studio
to report on it instead.


4.

Just before I fell asleep
(last evening)
I composed a set of lines for you.
(I did not write them down.)
They were fluid and lyric
(and full of my longing)
but when I awoke
(this morning)
they had fled in the night
(taking with them some silverware)
and so I only have these lines
(sorry as they are)
to apologize.

I wonder what history will call this part of our age, this crumbling disaster movie played over and over before us? Will there be a history as we know it? Or will I live on as nothing more than a background character in the epics that wandering bards will tell of the fall of mankind? They’ll gather beneath the towering structures we built, for food and warmth, and talk about how we destroyed ourselves.

My iPod finally died last night. The clicky-wheel doesn’t recognize my fingers anymore. The screen stopped working months ago, but I could navigate well enough without it by memory, until now. Now it’s just a worthless piece of metal and plastic. I’ll crack it open tomorrow to salvage what I can to use for decoration. These prefab houses are so drab otherwise.

This is the revenge of the 20th century, these stinking houses. I suppose they were dreamed up by some high-flying architect in some remote office building in what used to be New York a decade ago, as temporary housing for disaster victims in the third world. Some humanitarian venture. I’m sure he felt good about it, doing his part for the poor brown masses around the globe. Maybe he even won an award or something for them. We all applauded that effort. Go help those huddled idiots, yes, mm-hmm.

I lived in the wealthiest nation in the world. I ruled it, no less. I was the man, the cock of the fucking walk, mister big-shot banker with my four cars in the garage and a driver for every one of them. And now I’m pulling apart my iPod for shiny bits to hang on the wall, just like my ten thousand neighbors in this refugee camp on the outskirts of the burned-out shell of Topeka, Kansas. Those damn pricks in Zimbabwe are laughing their asses off at us white folk.

At least we’re not going to starve. Everything is provided. The computers and the food-printers can render any delicacy you want, any time. The power is always on, our homes shaded by those vast power cells facing the stars, listening to beams of power coursing down off the satellites. Everything is provided, and we have nothing. I went to school for a decade to learn how to shovel money from nation to nation, becoming the best damn capitalist you’ve ever seen. And now nobody needs money, nobody needs me.

They say that post-scarcity was supposed to free up our leisure time. Well, it did that alright. I’ve got so much free time these days I’m about to kill myself. I tried to burn my house down the other day, but as soon as it caught a little robot came flying down the street and put it out. Then it pulled me out of the place, gathered everything up, and ate the house. I stood there for a minute until another, slightly larger robot came rolling over and spit out an identical copy of the damn place I’d just been living.

We’re the New Poor, they call us. No talents that anyone wants. We refuse to play by their rules. The travelers, those New People. They dick around building towers to nowhere and playing music for each other. They stopped recording it, too. “It’s not worth anything. Why bother?” They stopped having kids. All they do is fuck each other, over and over, giant orgies of mechanical pleasure. “We want to enjoy ourselves. Why strain? We have everything. This is, truly, paradise.” They’re immortal. Goddamn them. They won’t even let us die anymore.

I tried to plant something yesterday. Asked a food machine for some raw fruit, and it spit out entire watermelons. I planted them behind the house, but woke up to find a little cleaning machine carefully picking them out of the soil. “Litter is to be disposed of in the internal waste bins, sir,” it politely reprimanded me. “Further food supplies can be gathered from the dispensary at the Central Hub.”

We scrimped and we saved and we tried to make the world a better place to be, and somehow I have ended up in hell.

I prostrate my mind before you tonight after hours upon hours of television-watching with the dog, which has given me a headache that could kill the pope and still have enough left over to take down a couple of those fancy Swiss guards of his. And I do this for your amusement.

At least try and look grateful.

What I want to talk to you about tonight is the strange things that the hyper-connected world that we now inhabit — that we’ve allowed to come into existence around us — produces all sorts of strange privacy implications that we could never have imagined.

I’ve been playing around with Foursquare lately. (My account, which is quite boring since I don’t go out to bars, which is the target market for an application like Foursquare.) It used to be that Foursquare was only available in selected cities, but now that it’s opened up to use from basically anywhere, there have been a flood of somewhat… interesting ‘venues’ added to the service. Many people appear to be adding their houses, and it was in this context that I noticed this venue: “House of skanky bitch“.

I first saw in on the mobile app on my phone, and chuckled, building up an entire history for the location. “I bet whoever set that up for that location knows that the chick who lives there doesn’t use Foursquare, and really does consider this the house where you go for booty calls.” I imagined a check-in list as long as your arm of various guys marking their territory, a digital record of the, yes, skankitude of this residence.

A side-note, getting back to my incredible headache: I wonder if this is what people with coprolalia feel like. This headache is making me feel like typing fuck over and over again. Fuck. Doesn’t make my headache feel any better, though. Fuck.

I pulled the House of Skanky Bitch up on my computer to actually, you know, check my raving, sordid imagination against reality, and it turns out I’m a horrible misogynist. If I’m guessing correctly from the fact that just three people have ever checked in there, all female, it’s self-titled and entirely self-deprecating. All three have obvious homes of their own that they’ve checked in at as well, with similarly horrible titles.

The broader point here is this: I now know an awful lot about Christina A., Sammy B., and Sonia M. that I doubt they’re comfortable with me knowing. For Sonia there, a prodigious Foursquare user, I now have not only a list of places she’s been lately, but I could, conceivably, work out when she’s out drinking and either track her down all stalker-like or go rob her guaranteed-empty house. I have her full name, via her Facebook page, as well as her major. She has a formspring page where people can ask her anonymous questions, a twitter account, and a blog. Googling her common username soniamonia turns up a further wealth of information.

My point is, we regurgitate an enormous amount of information into the world about ourselves these days without even thinking about it. Sites exist to call attention to this: Please Rob Me got a lot of press attention when it was launched as a proof-of-concept automation of mining Foursquare listings to find empty houses, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a page on location-based services that’s an interesting read.

It doesn’t matter, of course, what groups like the EFF say, or the dire warnings they give. These services are too tempting to stay away from, and their default settings won’t be changed by 90% of their users, and everyone will eventually know where everyone else is all the time. Who knows if that’s a good or a bad thing, but it’s the next step in the evolution of the internet.

Now, I’ll let you know where to find me for the next, oh, 12 hours or so: in my bed, praying to whatever god might be listening that my head stops pounding long enough to let me go to sleep. I swear, I’m never watching television again. Stuff rots your brain. Literally.

The speakeasy exists in American culture as a wonderful relic of the Prohibition era, when gathering together under the same roof as a bunch of other people in order to get sauced was completely illegal unless you all happened to be drinking wine and having little crackers to go with it.

It’s a relic of a time when not every piece of information was archived and easily searchable, as it is today. Except for some minor exceptions, where venue owners want to either create that exclusive atmosphere or are engaging in actual illegal activity, that sort of thing simply doesn’t exist anymore. It’s only possible to be obscure through an act of will in the Age of Google; thirty years ago that was the default condition. This is not a judgment — it’s merely an observation. Perhaps this state of affairs is better than the alternative, perhaps it’s ruined our sense of proportion. It’s hard to tell when we’re in the middle of it.

In any event, with the death of obscurity, the counter-culture lost its ability to be underground in any real sense. This isn’t a new problem for the counter-culture. After all, accusations of selling out have dogged those arrayed against popular culture for as long as there has been a division between what the masses enjoy and what the elite, self-selected seekers enjoyed. (Did ancient tribes, sitting around the campfire, accuse their shaman of ‘dumbing down’ the esoterica of the rites for mass consumption? Might rivals have risen up as ‘purists’, claiming to be closer to the ‘source’, where yet more esoteric mysteries awaited for the striving seeker?)

“Counter-culture” is a neologism, really. It sprang into existence in the late 1960s to try and apply a name to the social upheaval that was marked as anti-war, pro-sexual-freedom, and most definitely interested in toppling the dominant culture of the time, that of the growing bureaucratic technocracy of JFK and Johnson. Subculture, although an older word (originally used to simply describe, in a technical sense, the various currents within a society), also took on the somewhat negative connotation of something illicit at this time.

The counter-culture existed for a deeper reason than giving the disaffected of every generation a refuge, where they could meet other alienated citizens and try and figure out how to combat what they saw as structural rot. It stood as the challenge to a consensus — any consensus, be it a political one, or an economic one, or even simple broad cultural agreements. When that vanished, and the counter-culture merged with mainstream culture, that dialectic was lost; there is no longer any large-scale systematic way of seeking truths that the mainstream does not accept or recognize. Worse, there is no longer a way to speak Truth to Power from an ‘uncorrupted’ position — everything has been touched by the mainstream now, and there is no hiding place from its reach. No one has the moral high ground.

So there is no counter-culture anymore. Fine. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as generic British characters say on the television. I don’t need a counter-culture; I have my niche grouping, where everyone already gets me, and likes the same bands that I do, and reads the same blogs, and we all follow each other on twitter. The echo chamber is complete, total, and suffocating. And if we don’t consider the deeper meaning of our acceptance of the mainstream, well, that’s alright. I’m sure somebody’s thinking about this stuff, right?

Right?

Part 1: Whose Monoculture Is It, Anyway?
Next: Discontents; or, Handle With Care

Trent Reznor is a big, scary dude. Best known as the man behind Nine Inch Nails, as well as having tackled a major addiction to drugs and alcohol in the mid-’90s, he decided to set up, in late 2008, a twitter account. “Hanging on the bus,” he announced. He started using the short-message service seriously starting in January 2009, initially monologuing about the tour he was on, but soon he was holding contests for ticket giveaways and promoting various charity works, and, almost incidentally, humanizing himself.

If you’re looking for a pet, consider rescuing a greyhound. I have two and they’re awesome (and slightly insane!)
hahaha, nice one crew guys… hahahahaaaa haaaaaaaaa YOU’RE ALL FIRED.
This ‘being madly in love’ thing is weird. Feels bad being apart.

After using twitter for a while, Trent explained in a post on his website that he had started his twitter because he wanted to “lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality.”

I joined Twitter about six months before Reznor did, initially to follow one of my favorite writers, who had just set up an account of his own. I didn’t quite understand the point of twitter at first — why would anyone want to force themselves to talk only in 140 character snippets?

Part of the problem was that I was using it wrong, because I was focused only on listening instead of dialoguing with other users. For another thing, the tools which make twitter really usable didn’t exist yet. It took a good three months before it clicked for me.

“It’s a new means of interacting with and entertaining fans,” says Jeph Jacques, author and artist of the popular webcomic Questionable Content (a relationship comic about 20-somethings living in New England) and prolific twitter user.

He maintains not only his personal account for communicating with “fans and friends and colleagues,” but also maintains twitter accounts for ten of the characters from his comic, as well as a comedy account called Yelling Bird, which is “simultaneously my id, a loving homage to the webcomic Jerkcity, and one of my favorite characters I’ve ever come up with. He is my pressure release valve.” The account posts offensive images and all-caps sexually-explicit statements, generally involving the reader’s genitalia in some fashion. “It’s fun to use twitter as a performance space! It’s another means for me to entertain my audience, and the bigger that audience gets the more fun it is, for me, to do things they will find funny or weird or whatever.”

I’m addicted to twitter now, and have it always open on my computer desktop. It was one of the motivations for me to buy an expensive new smartphone at the end of last year: I wanted to be able to tweet on the go, as things happened to me, as opposed to recapping in three or four posts at the end of the day. I follow 175 people, and receive anywhere from five hundred to a thousand tweets a day, and am closing in on 10,000 tweets posted.

Twitter itself has grown into a cultural juggernaut over the past few years, with major trend-setters and thought-leaders from many fields either setting up automated promotional accounts — such as the ‘one deal, one day’ web store woot.com, or CNN’s breaking news feeds — or engaging more directly with fans and interested parties — like the author Neil Gaiman, or rapper P. Diddy, or the man who introduced millions of Americans to twitter during the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama.

“I get the occasional snarky comment or rude person, but by and large my replies are positive. It seems like a lot of the people who catch flak on Twitter are also the people who respond to the flak, which then empowers the guys giving it, which only encourages them and others to do more of it.” Jacques’ main, personal account has just 31,000 followers, compared to Reznor’s 600,000. Not all of Reznor’s encounters on twitter, which has no checks on account creation or verification, meaning anyone can sign up for an account instantly and begin messaging other accounts, were as positive as Jacques’.

Reznor began to catch flack from some of the stranger members of his fan-base, which he referred to as “the Metal Sludge contingency” in his farewell rant on his website. “Metal Sludge is the home of the absolutely worst people I’ve ever come across. It’s populated mainly by unattractive plump females who publicly fantasize about having sex with guys in bands. [...] It would be kind of funny in a sad and pathetic way except the fun doesn’t stop there – hate and good old-fashioned outright blatant racism are also encouraged to spice things up and remind you how truly ugly these scourges are.”

Part of the problem stemmed from his support of the fundraising efforts of then-CNN anchor Veronica De La Cruz for her brother Eric, who was dying of heart failure and caught in an insurance industry Catch-22. At the same time, Reznor was often openly hostile to his followers and fans, at one point calling out a woman he claimed was a “stalker” who was now following his twitter account, posting her real name, address, and mentioning he had a restraining order against her on the account. Reznor was stuck begging for support for a third party from the very people on which he heaped abuse in public.

Finally, in June, Reznor semi-closed his twitter account, instituting a policy of no longer reading replies. The account limped along for another month, but it was obvious that his heart wasn’t in it anymore: “Twitter is pretty boring using it this way.” Finally, a month after switching over to broadcast-only, he tweeted “I believe I’ve done all I care to do here at this point. Flesh and reality and silence are calling,” and the account sat dormant for three months. His final verdict on his website about social media was that, in the end, “idiots rule.”

I haven’t encountered the same level of hostility that Reznor did — but then again, I’m not a chart-topping recording artist. Most of the nonsense I’ve run into is in the form of spam accounts — which simply spew replies to anyone they can find — or the ubiquitous “network marketing experts” who want to try and connect with as many people as possible, even if they have nothing in common. But generally, Twitter is populated by people I want to listen to, and there are enough people who find me interesting that I don’t feel like I’m shouting into the void.

Jacques doesn’t have to worry about that sensation. One of the positive effects of both his twitter account and the constellation of other accounts by other artists working in the same medium — that is, webcomics — is that it’s fostered a much greater sense of comradery, both among the creators and among the fans. “I think it has both strengthened our little ‘community’ and given a much stronger image of our community.” This is something that hadn’t been visible to most fans before twitter, or was only on display when the artists and writers gathered together, at conventions and the like, and only then for the small percentage of fans able to attend.

The playful banter of the artists giving each other grief about updating — Jacques and another cartoonist, Danielle Corsetto, were racing earlier this month to see who could finish and update their comics before midnight, and ‘shouting’ at each other on twitter about it — is one of the beautiful things about twitter that keeps me interested in the message service. It’s both a handy way to be amused at odd hours of the day, a great way to communicate with people whom I’ve never met who live on the other side of the world, and a useful pressure-valve for creative energy — a place to stick half-baked notions in short-form to return to later.

Even the annoyed and discouraged Reznor has been unable to resist twitter’s siren song; in December, he revived the account with “Is this thing on?” and has since dribbled out ten more posts about both official Nine Inch Nails news and his own churlish opinions, including bashing the Grammys. For better or for worse, Reznor has decided that it’s maybe not the worst torment in the world to let people see how you really feel.

Los Campesinos! – Romance is Boring

Wales hipsters trade in clever optimism for clever heartbreak.

Los Campesinos! made their high-energy debut two years ago with a pair of albums about six months apart: Hold on Now, Youngster… and We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. These immediately made them critical darlings of the indie press, showing off both exciting enthusiasm — Youngster was an explosion of pop-rock-punk couplets, clever to the core — and a good sense of the possibilities of pathos available in pop songwriting — Beautiful was a much more tortured statement of the longing and loss that is the flip-side of the falling-in-love that was chronicled on their first disk, and a very strong pairing with their initial offering. Plus, it was two albums in quick succession. Two albums in a year? Who does that anymore?

So the jury was out on what’d they do for a sophomore excursion. A return to the manic energy and musically-adventurous form of Youngster, or a continuation of the more dismal Beautiful? We got our first hints when they released a cut off their new project on their website late last year, titled “The Sea Is A Good Place To Think About The Future”. It was a brooding, melancholic track, about longing and a troublesome relationship, with lots of watery imagery and a good shouty ending.

The new album, Romance is Boring, dropped on the 26th, and, while that initial glimpse was somewhat accurate, it fails to actually present a complete idea of what the album’s all about. Instead of picking between either of the two possibilities offered by their first two albums, they go harsh.

Los Campesinos!’s songs had, until this point, been marked by a measured gloss. Although busy and stuffed with instrumentation, they generally were somewhat clean. On Romance is Boring, they muddy up their sound, with the lyrics shouted as often as not, the guitars shredding into fuzz at points, and the entire exercise revealing the turmoil of the singer not just in the biting lyrics but the music as well.

The bass is more prominent (noticeably so on “There Are Listed Buildings”), and Gareth Campesinos! continues to be taking the lead on vocals, as compared to their first album, which had him sharing vocal duties more equally with the now-absent Aleks Campesinos!. “Plan A” is a manic explosion, the horns going crazy, the guitars all on overdrive, and practically every line in the verses shouted and the choruses topped with the girls singing in falsetto above Gareth — and yet it works just fine.

Not everything fits. “Who Fell Asleep”, although a fine song in its own right, doesn’t fit into the album, its vaguely country-twangy-loopy guitar out of sync with the rest of the songs. And there’s the constant complaint about Los Campesinos!’s songwriting: its wordplay can sometimes obscure itself with its own brilliant wit.

Overall, the album gives a sense of a band still trying to nail down exactly how they want to proceed. The album doesn’t fit perfectly cohesively, but it’s an aggressive statement of intent, and further solidifies Los Campesinos!’s position at the forefront of indie rock.

Spoon – Transference

The kings of minimalism go even more stripped-down.

Spoon are comparatively old men on the indie block, having been started back in 1993. Compared to Los Campesinos!, which constantly experiments with more instruments and consists of seven members, Spoon is a standard 4-piece, and has been consistently trimming back their sound over the years, becoming the recognized lords of deliberate, crafted, rattling indie rock.

The latest Spoon offering, Transference, starts off with a song with a giveaway of a title: “Before Destruction”. The first minute sounds like it was recorded in someone’s bathroom, until it snaps into production-quality sound. But there’s no major shift of style. Whereas Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, their previous album (2007), was Spoon at their most expressive, painting with broad musical strokes, here Spoon explores the bare minimums of what they can get away with. In fact, this opening song nearly over-promises what’s coming, with honest-to-goodness chorus parts near the end.

They won’t be that layered again throughout. Rarely does the music spread beyond vocals, guitar or bass, banged-out piano, and drums, swapping in and out as needed and never a second more than absolutely what they want. Several songs just full-stop in the middle of what sounds like a third verse — they just decided they’d said enough and that was that for that song! On to the next. No long setups, no long wind-downs. The overriding philosophy appears to be: get in, do it, get out again.

The album is at its strongest early on, with the trifecta of “The Mystery Zone”, “Who Makes Your Money”, and the album’s first single “Written In Reverse”. Spoon doesn’t sink to the same minimalist levels that mumblecore darlings The xx do — the lead singer Britt Daniel’s vocals are always audible and front-and-center, if the meaning is not always entirely transparent. But there’s no denying that this is a band who, after exploring the fringes of mainstream rock and roll on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, have consciously decided to return to their roots in minimalist rock.

The balladic tendencies of Spoon crop up near the close of the album, with the relatively expansive tracks “Goodnight Laura” and “Out Go The Lights” allowing Daniel to exercise his voice in less destructive ways. They follow it up with “Got Nuffin”, a rattling, claptrap ramble  from the 2009 EP of the same name, and close out the album with the odd “Nobody Gets Me But You”, with electronic drums and strange little Casio keyboard-esque flourishes.

With Transference, Spoon turns away from the experimentation and expansiveness of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and returns to music as minimalist as the 2001 album Girls Can Tell, and it’s glorious, revealing just how much can be done with just a little bit.

“Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted”

– Hassan i Sabbah, through the pen of William S. Burroughs.

To begin, a story:

Two 20-somethings walked up to the customer service desk at work a few days ago. They were both dressed all in black, the guy in what I’d call ‘casual gothic’, black jeans and a loose unbuttoned black button-down shirt over a black t-shirt with a subtle graphic, the girl in ‘look-at-me gothic’, painted-on black eyebrows and tight pants and a tight shirt on her very thin body, at least three piercing in her face alone, two on her lips, one in her nose.

“What can I help you find?”

“Paint It Black.”

I looked. We didn’t have it, but two of our other stores in the area — one of the more conservative in the country, the Red part of the Purple state that is Colorado politically — did. “Or I can just order it for you, and it’ll be here in a week or so.”

“No thanks.” And that was that. They wandered over to buy some coffee.

Why did I tell you this story? And what does this have to do with “monoculture”, the big, ugly, kludge-y word that titles this piece?

The point is that we now live in a culture where it is not only accepted that someone can walk around in public with metal hanging off their face and wearing nothing but black and ask for a book on ‘gothic homemaking’ but even praised as “being themselves” or simply “another type of normal.” In fact, short of barging into the store naked or brandishing a weapon, I can’t think of anyone, dressed in any fashion, or acting in any way, that I would consider outside the limits of ‘normality.’ The counter-culture has become culture without a new counter-culture springing up to take its place.

At some point in the last two decades, then, Hegel’s dialectic broke. (Hegelian Dialectic, for those of you who don’t know– aww, just go read about it!) Early forms of counter-culture existed in such movements as Romanticism, Bohemianism, The modern era has had a major form of counter-culture since, I suppose, the end of World War I and the death of the large-scale consensus. Starting with the Lost Generation of writers, such as Hemingway between the wars, into the Beats in the ’50s and early ’60s, the student protests of 1968, the growth of the gay counter-culture in America after 1969, punk in the late ’70s and ’80s, and so on.

These counter-cultures would challenge the existing status quo directly as the antithesis to the broader culture’s thesis, which then merges (using crunchy German words like “Aufhebung” and “aufgehoben”) with the antithesis, producing the synthesis, which in turn becomes the new thesis for an antithesis to arise against and so on ad infinitum.

But in the late ’90s, I believe, suddenly decades of conflict between mainstream culture and counter-culture ended when, through the rapid democratization of the means of cultural production by the growth of cable television, the internet, blogs, twitter, social networks, etc etc etc, the counter-culture suddenly found itself in charge of everything. A Hot Topic in every mall, a tattoo shop on the main drag of every city in America. And what did the counter-culture do when it found itself in charge? Well, look for yourself: Jay Leno is still on late night. We still love pop singers and celebrity spectacle. “Culture” doesn’t seem all that different for having been altered by the counter-culture’s entrance into respectability, even if marijuana is about to be legalized in California and lesbians can make out on a street-corner in any big city in America and not get beaten to a pulp.

We live in the Monoculture. (Monoculture is a word taken from agriculture, where it referred to a system of planting a single species of crop over a wide area. “Polycultures” and “heirloom gardening” are considered reactions against the practice, which is associated with agri-business and corporate farming.)

Walk to a street corner in any major city in the world today. Go ahead, close your eyes, imagine it. Whatever city strikes your fancy. One you’ve been to would be best, but whatever. If you’ve seen pictures of a major city you’d like to visit in your mind for 30 seconds, go ahead.

I’ll wait.

Got it?

Alright.

What do you see around you? Likely, unless you have a very good memory for places, it’s something of an amalgamation of famous buildings and things you ‘expect’ in the place you’re imagining. A cafe in Paris next to the Arc de Triumphe. Big Ben towering over the river Thames. The hyper-crowded streets of downtown Tokyo. The Statue of Liberty brushing up against the Empire State Building.

McDonald’s.

An anonymous model wearing clothing you can’t afford. Maybe a cigarette ad, if you’re imagining somewhere outside America, where those are still allowed in public. Toyota and Ford cars on the street.

This is the monoculture.

200 years ago, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, you traveled halfway around the world, and things were different. The people who lived there had their own culture, completely separate from yours, and the counter-culture in other cultures could pull from that to challenge its own culture. Think Jack Kerouac and the Beat poets carrying around the Tao De Ching and the Lotus Sutra, or Hemingway drinking in Parisian salons, the punks importing German stoicism and nihilism.

Now, however, through the magic of the internet, television, and globalization, that variety has been conglomerated into the vast networks of knowledge that we use as our backup brains. There’s no such thing as the “other” anymore. We imported it, examined it, dusted it off, and stashed it on the bookshelf alongside everything else. Mozart and the Ramones, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon and How To Make Love Like A Porn Star, Saw and Audition. Everything is hip, everything is part of the culture. (I mean, when they can make jokes about BDSM in prime-time — Barney on How I Met Your Mother has a ‘whip guy’ — they can do anything.)

Next: Subculture Killed The Counter-Culture Star