For those about to rock we salute you!

How shitlibs lost the spirit of rock and roll and what it means for the culture

Robert Plant, cock rock at it’s finest used without permission

I Cock Rock

The peak of rock and roll was “cock rock,” in the early 1970s. Bands like Led Zepplin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Blue Oyster Cult and ZZ Top in their early days, rocked out hard, balls out rock and roll. Yes the male sexual imagery is intentional, this was not nerdy intellectual prog rock like Frank Zappa, or King Crimson from the same time period, this was sweaty, bare chested, primal and sexual music. It was urgent pre-verbal music that tapped into Dionysian pre-civilized impulses not easily controlled. It was in a strange way warrior music, like the beating of tribal drums before going off into battle. It was and still is music you feel in your gut, not in your head like Pink Floyd and psychedelic period Beatles. This was the start of head banging and losing your head in music.

This music was being made during a time period when the left had elements of a real revolution against the suits in the suits in the suites and “Vietnam maaaaaan! Obviously this terribly frightened the establishment, it was the bursting forth of the male ID, unchained from the demands of work, obedience to the state, the bourgeois family, etc. ₁ This was the antithesis of the buttoned down sexually repressed Victorian culture that had served the professional managerial class very well in keeping people productive within the system. Something would have to be done about these wild young men, who were openly in full primal battle mode, and ready to “burn the system down maaaan.”

II From cock rock to clubbing the emasculation and division of the left begins

Fortunately for the establishment a new music subculture was forming in New York that would later be called “disco,” that was much more flashy and effeminate than the cock rock subculture. Disco had a much larger gay influence, was more urban, and had more women singers and dancers, and it was basically apolitical and fun music. Whether there was a sinister plot, or merely an organic cultural shift scarcely matters, what happened on the ground was a channeling of cock rock male warrior energy into a more flamboyant, less masculine and less political culture seen as being “cool,” by trend setters, people we would call “influencers” now.

A lot of regular guys who were still into cock rock knew something shitty was going down, “disco sucks,” became the rallying cry. The more well to do urban part of the left was being divided from the more blue collar and rural left over the fringe leather jacket hippy cock rock v.s. polyester suited disco club preference. Not everyone was buying it though, and some young men still wanted to rock out with loud guitars.

From a New York Times article, used without permission

III Punk and grunge- young leftist men make their last rock musical stand, metal the birth of right wing rock

This is where the story becomes more personal for me. I was 14 in 1980 in northern Michigan and a long haired geeky kid who liked nerdy music like Pink Floyd, psychedelic era Beatles, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, etc. Basically my parents music. Then I discovered punk rock and I liked it, I liked it a lot. I liked the energy, I liked the “fuck the man,” attitude, I liked the DIY spirit, and I liked that young people my age had our own thing. I cut my hair short, made it stick up with hair gel, and got a Dead Kennedys t-shirt, and a leather jacket. I know that sounds cringe now, but it was fun at the time. I was even in the worlds worst punk band the Jolly Cadavers, we practiced in the bathroom of the school gym. Our little group swapped cassette tapes of punk albums, and some new wave stuff like The B-52s, and because we weren’t just trend followers bands like Rush.

Rush? Yes really, I appreciated their musical chops and I wasn’t a total insular leftist kid. The more right leaning kids were listening to metal and I shared some tapes with them as well, at least of bands like Rush that appealed to my dorky intellectual side. This was really a new thing the rise of the right wing rock fan. Metal dabbled in dare I say some of the iconography of the mid century Austrian painter at least in its font selection. It also tapped into the Dionysian pagan battle spirit of cock rock. Right wing rock will be important later in the story so make a mental note of it.

I could go on now about how I went to college, grew my hair out, cut it again, had a cringe and pretentious radio show on the college station, and discovered grunge after college. But honestly that all isn’t that interesting. What is interesting is that punk, grunge and metal were an attempt to keep the spirit of rock alive for young men, and the rise of the right wing rebel in the rock subculture.

IV Rave music, chill, and electronica, “kids,” and more clubbing, the establishment left goes full gay collegiate urbanite postmodern in the mid to late 90s to early 2010s, Hip hop as the last popular music for young leftist men with any testosterone

Fast forward now to the mid 90s, grunge is dead among the left “cool kids,” and the elite left crowd considers heavy metal fans to be sexist, racist, “maggots.” The cool kids then went clubbing to rave music, which in essence is just disco for robots with no soul, and listened to ambient and chill music like Aphex Twin, and Future Sound of London for deeper listening. I will confess to actually enjoying some 90s ambient like the above mentioned groups/DJs and The Orb, though I think earlier people like Brian Eno, Low period Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Krautrock bands like Tangerine Dream, and Neu did it better first. What I did not enjoy was the attitude that went along with the electronica scene. The “scene,” then and yes it was a self conscious scene always a bad sign, was very classcist, cliquish and exclusive and looked down on rockers of all types with haughty disdain.

This was the beginning of the rise of what we now call, “woke,” which was about sheltered upper middle class white kids who considered themselves “hip” leftists loving all things gay, black, female and postmodern, and hating on rural white straight men and other poor white people actually suffering material deprivation. Many people look back on the 90s with fondness, I actually thinking about it do not. I was too awkward, and from a rural background to really enjoy hanging out with the “cool kids” in the rave scene even if I had wanted to, yet I had not broken out of my leftist intellectual pretensions so I wasn’t really comfortable around heavy metal rockers either. I also wasn’t gay, while I do not hate gay people, and have a live and let live attitude, I do find the effeminate gay male attitude and culture to be cloying and fake in much the same way I find the postmodern urban culture to be the same. I do think this is interrelated.

All this left me without a peer group, though I did find some other misfit friends and we made music and listened to a mish mash of indie rock like The Throwing Muses The Pixies, Bjork, Sonic Youth and The Breeders, old experimental weird music like Zapa and Beefheart, and Can, some industrial adjacent music like Dead Can Dance and Nurse with Wound, old funk music like Funkadelic, some of the new ambient music mentioned above, and the new “world music,” like Fela Kuti, gamelan music, eastern European brass band music, etc. We were too much outcasts to be a scene, but we did keep each other good company while listening to “real music,” not made by robots.

I would finally note that during this period that while I was not wild about hip hop and “ganster rap,” that it became the only acceptable music for straight lefty kids with even a trace of testosterone coursing though their blood. The spirit of rock was dead on the left and the woke authoritarian boring shitlibs were on the rise.

I stayed on the left through the end of Occupy Wall St. when I finally couldn’t take it anymore and started reading paleo-con and what was then called alt-right material on the internet like Mencius Moldbug. By 2012 the spirit of rock and roll had migrated to the right, this had been foreshadowed by the rise of heavy metal I talked about earlier, and not coincidentally many people on the alt-right were metal fans.

Cover of the 90s ambient album Lifeforms by Future Sound of London, used without permission

V Trump, the great meme war, the spirit of rock fully shifts to the right and to the internet

By 2015 I had been involved in the alt-right community for roughly 3 years. It embodied the spirit of cock rock, but it’s guitar solos were Pepe memes and trolling what were becoming the uptight humorless self identified “woke” shitlibs for the lulz. Into this potent stew dropped the campaign of Donald Trump. In a way Trump whose only real genius was and is self promotion, was more a canvass for young men who were being emasculated by woke to paint their frustration on, than an organized political leader. This didn’t really matter though, Trump could tell which way the wind was blowing in a way the stiff obvious shill for the establishment and for woke emasculation Hilary Clinton simply couldn’t, and thus Trump strode over the competition and became President of the United States.

The period between 2015 and the start of Covid was a golden age for meme culture and long form video essays on YouTube. This was the new rock and roll though admittedly with more than a bit of an autistic nerdy slant to it. Nonetheless taboos were broken, shitlibs were rightly mocked, and lulz was had by all who were in the know.

Like all great and fun things this was not to last. Trump was deposed by the senile hair sniffing war monger in an election of questionable integrity, there was a protest at the capitol with some mild window breaking and 1000s of American were arrested and many have been given decade plus prison sentences for minor rioting. Censorship at behest of the government was instituted at Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, as was revealed in the Twitter files. A lockdown took place over the disease of Covid which was highly exaggerated in virulence by the establishment and used as an excuse to crush wrong think and small businesses. “The great reset,” was on the march. It seemed the party was over,

VI Where are we now? Post-Covid, the great awakening, BRICS and a new rock warrior spirit?

So we have come to the present day, the end of Covid and perhaps the end of the senile Biden tyranny. Looking back over the last couple of years it looks like a period of rebuilding a rock and roll resistance to establishment tyranny to me. We have some new social social media now that support freedom of expression like our own Substack, Rumble, and to a lesser extent Elon Musk’s fairly recently acquired Twitter which he re-branded X, a name which everyone hates months later. :-)

There seems to be a spreading public awareness that the great reset, CBDCs, trying to shut down farmers and other globalist machinations are wrong and must be stopped. Populist right media by people like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones is reaching millions of people. Whatever you may think of Jones and Tucker and the limits of their thought, I think this is overall a good thing. The Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin calls this The Great Awakening, and I highly recommend his short book The Great Awakening v.s. The Great Reset. The BRICS nations are on the rise and pushing back in a strong way on globohomo, the contrast between Putin’s strong performance in his interview with Tucker and Biden’s bumbling gaff fest after the government special council basically declared him legally senile was breathtaking.

I feel a mix of optimism and despair. On the one hand the world seems on the brink of WWIII, inflation is making life incredible difficult for many including myself, our President is clearly and obviously deep in dementia and making the U.S. a laughing stock on the world stage. On the other hand I feel like many people are waking up from the daze of the Covid years and are damn angry about what has been done to us. Farmers in Europe are dumping poo at corpo restaurants, and government buildings, truckers in the U.S. and Canada are forming convoys and are out protesting what they perceive correctly IMO as tyranny. All this is great, but it needs a loud energizing soundtrack yo!

What that soundtrack for real cyberpunk hours is going to sound like is hard to know for sure, but I think we can hazard some guesses looking at the music of Melt Banana and Atari Teenage Riot, it may also feature some real country by Oliver Anthony. Young men₂ of the 2020s are you ready to rock loud and hard?

Thanks to

Morgthorak the Undead

,

Fukitol

and

Obsidian Blackbird.

for the inspiration to write this essay.

1. If it sounds like I am glorifying the cock rock period, I am not, it was loaded with problems like drug abuse, the start of the shallow hook up culture and neglect of family life, and a naively romantic irresponsible unsustainable worldview in general. This was real peak boomer hours. However the loss of the romantic spirit of rebellion against the establishment has made the culture more humorless, boring and dreary

2. I am not saying women can’t rock. Janis Joplin, The Breeders, The Throwing Muses, and Sleater Kinney say otherwise. OTH I do think our culture needs an unleashing of virile young male energy like was seen in the cock rock era.

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