No More Heroes

“Rock & roll on automatic sort of desensitized my rebellion”

– Dee Dee Ramone

As a teenager in the mid-90’s, digging deep to unearth and learn all I could about punk and other subcultures I was growing to love, I would always see them through the lens of movements gone-by, taking up positions against the circumstances of their day. It didn’t feel like they had direct and pertinent meaning for my life and times as so much had seemingly changed since then. When Johnny Rotten sang “no future” it sounded outdated, in that it could only exist as a response to the drabness, absurdity and violence of living in 1970’s Great Britain. The way punk styled itself as extreme, with its slogans of anarchy and chaos always came across as over the top, almost childish. It may have been the 90’s cynicism that was so cool during my adolescence, but ideas like The Strangler’s “No More Heroes” seemed so bound up in their time and almost silly, because we knew, looking back, that this was all pretty obvious. It wasn’t until shortly after the 2004 American presidential election that those lyrics and song titles starting floating back up into my consciousness and I began to depressingly realize just how very right and relevant they had been and still were. Watching George W. Bush get re-elected and the situation in Iraq worsen and persist in Afghanistan, made me realize that all the optimism and opportunity that was felt after the end of the Cold War was definitively dead and buried. I remember having the epiphany, by myself while watching the news, that there really was no future for me, at least not the one I had been led to believe there was. Events and culture at large since then have made this realization seem almost quaint, and the words “no more heroes” have come creeping up in my mind over the last decade. Again, the calls of the 1970’s punks ring true and are actually more appropriate than ever today.

Our political systems run on the fumes of days gone by, crumbling and lurching towards self-destruction. Culture is nothing but a vast echoing wasteland. Bands never break up, the never-ending stream of big budget movies are shit forever, we gather around and applaud the slop that media outlets throw in our trough and seemingly no one can relieve us from the hell that is our modern culture. Even our underground subcultures have failed us and exist almost solely as parodies of themselves. Having been sucked dry of meaning, or run their course (or both), people play the pantomime of underground culture, but it is shallow and tepid. We watch all our cultural figureheads grow old, lose their grip and lose face. As a generation of idolized superstars and thinkers die out, they leave us with a shell of their thought-up world and empty thought constructs as useless weapons against the brute force of today’s echoing emptiness and rising populism and ignorance. There is no future, there are no more heroes. We would need a new group movement, a type of punk rock cultural happening, a shift and shoring-up of society as we value it, but creative culture is dead and culture at large has hung itself out to dry. Useless, useless.

There was an idea during the various explosions of “alternative” cultures in the 1990’s that the underground could somehow revolutionize the mainstream. In the end, with the dawn of widespread access to the internet and outlets such as Vice Media, it wasn’t that underground culture changed mainstream society, but that the mainstream swallowed the underground and made it marketable. This is, of course, what always happens, but just that in our current time there is no clear orientation, no line in the sand for whatever values of cultural integrity an underground may have, no up or down, just a vast ocean of various creative cultures spilling over into one another, forming a self-indulgent beige mass to be sold or to help sell. Mainstream and underground cultures merge, giving birth to strange hybrids. Take bro culture, for instance, which has seemingly filtered into all areas of life - whereas before it was limited to sports, finance and hardcore punk, now we have indie bros, feminist bros, philosophy bros, yoga and mindfulness bros, all fist-bumping their way to transcendence and gender equality.

In the millions, people gather to celebrate pop culture figureheads for making an album or having a baby. In the past people did this with stars because they made very accessible music, there was no political aspect really. Now pop stars are held up as icons of progress, whose political views we want and need to hear. There is, of course, a role they can play in empowering groups and pushing back against stereotypes and ‘isms’ in their many forms, and celebrating these figures is all well and good, but they are still multi-millionaires who we are then supposed to get excited about when they “inspire” or show impulses that allude to them having the same emotional spectrum as any other normal human being? There are plenty of less popular and less rich people doing this. Why cheer the winners? Why cheer? Especially now, in the current global political landscape where they have proven themselves to, ultimately, be ineffectual and have only really succeeded in lulling people into a state of self-satisfied complacency. This doesn’t mean that this culture should go away, but do we really need to be celebrating this mass-produced, mass-marketed, self-congratulatory construction while the world falters and we are all slumping towards the abyss?

 The once rebellious generations all went on to form or join the huge shiny corporations that structure our daily lives and fuck us over with their products. We celebrate individuality and tech companies deliver hippie drivel to rope us into a shabby-feeling, atomized world where we know we are all being watched. The rebels failed us. We are subjugated to cultures of nothingness all around us and on every level, with each possible answer to this nothingness a door to a world of even less meaning. The once underground cultures, in any form or genre, no matter how experimental or “out there” they were, are now just caricatures of themselves, going through the same old movements, listening to the same old sounds and wearing their tired uniforms. Art is full of hyper-individualized concept pieces, essentially a person looking in the mirror, or the results of a particular therapy session, but coming at an insanely expensive price – pieces that can only do good for a select few who live in enough affluence to be able to spend hours pondering and misquoting philosophical and scientific concepts they half understand, so as to justify whatever navel-gazing they are currently undertaking to feel better about themselves. Even the reactionary voices are caught in their own loop, like an Adam Curtis retrospective they preach endlessly to the converted. This goes across the board and, in that way, we actually have achieved some type of true unity among the disparate: we are all useless.

This could be tolerable if we were only dealing with the cultural void we exist in today, but political and societal cultures the world over are heading in a similarly closed-off direction. After Brexit, signs seem to point to the UK becoming the shithole it was in the 1970’s, the rise of racist violence, the threat of recession…Just like the good old days. Maybe our cultures just reflect ourselves – our culture is dumb, childish and vacant because we all are. Never has there been so much knowledge available to such a broad section of the global population and there are so many intelligent people around the world, yet we choose to be legions of idiots reacting to the next stimuli with jubilation, tears or outrage, only to have it evaporate in the next instant. With people confused and scared, news media parrots headlines and runs around like a chicken with its head cut off, asking viewers to tweet in their opinions or call up if they happen to be near whatever disaster just happened. Why are they asking us, that’s their fucking job! Meanwhile entertainment media only seems to be able to churn out ephemeral garbage. Who can even remember what happened in shows they were obsessed with 2 years ago?

Through reality shows, social media and landscapes built out of hot air, we have learned the hard way that all of our heroes are very human and, a lot of the times, complete idiots. It’s a painful lesson, but maybe these are just growing pains. If we had the chance, we might be able to see that all the heroes and geniuses from ages gone-by were assholes and morons too. We might just be the unlucky ones who are having the curtain pulled back and have to witness increasingly clueless cultural actors lose the plot in real time. The reason people celebrate heroes who died young is because we didn’t have to watch their slide into mediocrity or some strange, racist outburst.

Our heroes are dead or should be. It’s time to wipe the slate clean. The time is rife for a new cultural movement, a new kind of punk rock. We are in dire need of a new beginning. Tear it all down, get rid of the subculture clowns and bring forth an intelligent, new counterculture. We need true meaning to fill our starved minds and souls, as an antidote to the vast emptiness of mass culture, the hollow echoes of musical and artistic vacancy, the meaningless political statements screamed out into the world, second by second. Everyone has given up, everyone is filled with an unhinged positivity for who they are, what they think they stand for and whoever is celebrating the cause they happen to be championing, but are simultaneously filled with paranoid suspicion and rage for any possible dissenters. This applies to everyone, from the most close-minded bigot to the supposedly enlightened. We were supposed to be happy and free, but there is no shaking the queasy feeling of disorientation, everyone has it and it is turning into a sickness. So who do we turn to? The movements and figureheads have discredited themselves as far as any deeper meaning goes… so here we are, still running on the fumes of the 20th century. We have been forsaken. This is the hangover of the bullshit rebellion and identities we have been sold for decades. It’s over. There are no more heroes. We need to relearn how to build authentic movements and not temporary feel-good get-togethers, to create a new type of something, a place to hide away from the vast shittiness of our society that isn’t itself just a cartoon or some identity being sold to us. We have the need for real meaning that moves beyond the hyper-personal because, as it stands, all of our cultural conduits are null and void. It won’t be music in its current form, it won’t be art in its current form, it won’t be film or literature. Until we can find a spark to light the fire, we will be left stuck between the old drivel and even older extremes of idiocy and violence. Welcome to the apocalypse of mediocrity.

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