IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING
On Modern Love’s Tross Alt
Zachary V. Sunderman
Og ruller steinen opp / igjen og igjen og igjen
​-“Ekstase”
And roll the stone up, again and again and again. Could Kaluza, Modern Love’s vocalist and lyricist, have had Albert Camus in mind when he wrote these lines? It would certainly be appropriate. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus took the fate of the legendary king, condemned to roll a stone fruitlessly up a hill for eternity, to be a metaphor for the human condition. Absurdity. We are faced with a world of no manifest purpose, beset by a host of conditions that we resent. And in this state, this confused, unfulfilled, denied state, we are tasked with living a life, with being a thinking, feeling, acting human being.
Where does this lead us? Does this radical openness of the world liberate or condemn us? Does the possibility of true self-realization follow from it, or does a fatalism from which no one can escape?
Maybe it’s both. Maybe it depends on us.
* * * * *
To conspire means to breathe together.
​-Say Yes! to Scandinavian Vandalism
Punk rock is about a lot of things to a lot of people. For some, it was nothing more than the expression of a profound alienation, a rejection of mainstream society so thorough that it ate itself, fed on itself so that it grew and grew and grew into destructiveness and decline.
There is something beautiful, something true, in that rage that devours itself alive, for it witnesses, it speaks the howling voice of the left-behind, the fallout of a world that does not care about its people. But it is unsustainable. It is suicide. And as E.M. Cioran observed, there is far too much optimism behind suicide. After all, isn’t optimism our go-to insult for that which can never achieve what it desires?
For others, however, it became about something else. It became not just about rejection, and not even just solidarity in that rejection, but about transformation. It became about envisioning better lives, building them in the modeling space of art, and bringing them to life in alternative communities. And it delivered these visions, these possible worlds, to the stage, for all to see, to hear, to share as realities.
The thought-provocations of 7 Seconds and Youth of Today. The emotional rawness of Rites of Spring and Embrace. This is the lineage to which Modern Love belongs.
If I am to charge nihilism paradoxically with optimism—I think Sartre and Camus would, too—then the inverse must be true: what appears as optimism in this strain of punk rock is actually realism. It does not imagine that there is any easy way out, any magical solution to our problems. It settles into the trenches. It prepares for the long fight. It engages with the world, it bears the weight of that world—the stone—and keeps going, keeps believing, keeps confronting. It asks us to be responsible and be sincere, not only to opt out but to opt in to something else. It asks us to be not blind servants of fate nor enlightened sacrifices to absolute rejection; rather, it challenges us to be agents, movers, people who both reject and create.
That was what made me want to call myself a hardcore kid, anyway. This basic aching for something more transformed into the pursuit of its realization. And I’ve kept that spirit with me ever since. Today I have a record in my ears that I can tell shares that spirit, more desperately than ever.
* * * * *
SĂĄ bli med meg / la oss dele vĂĄre oksygentanker
(So come with me / let’s share our oxygen tanks)
Vise vei / til hverandres
(Show the way / to each other)
​-“Nødinngang”
Camus wanted to know one thing: whether humankind can live without illusions. Is there such thing as worthwhile experience under such conditions—of not only having nothing to fall back on, but knowing that we don’t have it?
There is one illusion that magically believes in the achievement of a better world simply by the destruction of the current one. Over-enamored with the ooze of blood and the crackling of flames, it makes an impossible leap, where creation results from pure negation.
There is another illusion that lets people imagine wistfully, dream away their free moments, while in their practices they, as Bourdieu would say, reproduce the existing world over and over. Again and again. Another rock, another fate.
But what if there is a space between? A space where, in spite of the condition in which we find ourselves, in spite of the miseries we must undergo to sustain our lives, in spite of the seemingly insurmountable oppressions of power and responsibility, in spite of everything, we can do more than imagine another world, but in fact create it? A space where, in the way we live our lives, in the way we interact with each other, in the way we organize our relationships and our actions and our ethics, we begin to see beyond the stone, beyond the hill, beyond the endless slog, to new lands, new opportunities lying in wait for our arrival? A truly existential space marked by the radical embrace of our chance to live on terms of our own making, without retreating to the hindering power of the comfortably conservative?
Tross alt: it suggests not only the will to persevere, some heroic, masculine endurance in the face of pain; it suggests defiance, an unwillingness for the “everything” to remain what it is: all-encompassing, non-negotiable. For we are not, in the end, truly like Sisyphus, that is: condemned. To mistake what is for what has always been and what must always be is, simply, an error in reasoning. A mystification. A mythification—as Roland Barthes would have it. History has never been static, nor predestined. History is endlessly restless; the catch is that we decide where it moves. The thing is, we’ve actually been doing it all along. The trick is to get on top of it.
To move, with Arendt, outside our pinched position “between past and future.” To become, with de Beauvoir, creatures of our own creation, who do not mistake what we find around us for eternal, objective facts. To accept, with Kierkegaard, the responsibility of possibility, the possibility that leads either to the Fall or to our redemption.
That is: to reject inevitability.
To exchange “it is what it is” for “it is what we want it to be.”
To find the way forward, a way that is not darkened by sameness or failure, a way that is lit with the genuine difference we make together, moment to moment, on the ground, in real time.
To charge forward, as Laclau and Mouffe argued, not with the mistaken and monstrous guides of ideology and dogma, but rather the decisions we make together in our differences, the alliances we form as a people with each other’s interests in mind.
To reject nihilism, to turn its discontent inside out; as Kaluza told Just Say YO! Fanzine in issue no. 3 (July, 2016): to nurture “hatred for this world in love of what it might become.”
To embrace, with Modern Love, “the radical pleasures of (im)possibility.” And, in the meantime, to comfort each other, to experience with each other, to indulge the world-modeling, world-creating possibilities of art as we sing together, dance together, feel together, hurt together. To form the bonds of friendship, the bonds of solidarity, the bonds of true humanity—ah, at long last!—through the unparalleled ritual of passionate music.
After all, the creation of a new world should be a celebration. There should be music.
“Another world is possible,” they say. If it is, let Modern Love be its soundtrack. For I hear all of this philosophy coming to life in their songs.
New York City, 2017
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