The Underground character; doomed or heroic?

Fred de Vries

The last underground movement of real substance happened in the 1980s, stretching from New York's Jean-Michel Basquiat to Ljubljana's Laibach and Johannesburg's Koos. It was a final breath of fresh air, just before the acronyms of MTV, CNN, Aids and www successfully pushed for world domination; just before we lazily embedded ourselves in a bland global culture where celebrities are the new royalty; just before a feeble Kurt Cobain screamed, "Here we are now, entertain us" - and then committed suicide.

With this disconcerting setting in mind, the recent underground seminar organised by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in Johannesburg centered on the question of whether all this means "the end of underground".

The answer was "no". Underground may have shriveled, it may have lost some of its impact, but it will never disappear. The contrarian mindset of the Underground Man has always been, and will always be, part of the human psyche.

Just recall of some of the basic features of the underground: its freethinking; its break with tradition; its critique of the hypocrisy of the mainstream; and its feeling of being trapped by its surroundings. We can trace them to the days of the Greek gods. By disobeying the authoritarian Zeus, Prometheus was the first proper underground hero. He was swiftly followed by Abraham, the Jewish dropout, whose sojourn set the scene for eternal tales of exile and dissent.

In the course of the centuries we have seen a plethora of underground and counter-culture movements, including the avant-hippie philosophy of Zen Buddhism, the mysticism of the Sufis, the eroticism of the troubadours of the 11th century, the anti-clerical Enlightenment of the 17th century, the bohemian scene of the early 20th century, the Beats of the 1950s, rapidly followed by hippies, punks, hiphoppers, hackers and ravers.

Underground became synonymous with the French résistance during the Second World War. And the term finally made it to the cultural lexicon after Andy Warhol established his Factory in 1964, a space in Manhattan where writers, filmmakers and musicians would change the art scene forever. The Factory gave us bands like The Velvet Underground, doomed proto-celebrities like Edie Sedgwick, pop-art and seven-hour long cinematic experiments in which nothing happened. The Factory attracted hangers-on who ranged from bored millionaires to transvestites, skinny models and speadfreaks. Warhol's coterie of beautiful freaks and drop-outs set the tone for the decades to come: underground became a mixture of art, mind-altering substances and attempts at transgression.

All this happened exactly a hundred years after Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky had been the first to frame the Underground Man. In his short novel Tales from Underground (1864) he depicts him as a spiteful, narcissistic but highly intelligent character. The Underground Man, cautioned Dostoyevsky, is dangerous and unstable. What's particularly alarming is that despite his malice we admire him, because we see him as a genuine critic of our paltry bourgeois values. We see him as more truthful and authentic than ourselves. In his novel The Secret Agent (1907) Joseph Conrad covers similar ground. Both writers warned us about the hermetic, bitter and abject character of the Underground Man.

We ignored them. The Underground Man became a permanent and admired fixture in our culture and politics. Berkeley professor Theodore John Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, read Conrad's book a dozen times, totally missed the irony and based himself on one of Conrad's characters, the nihilist "Professor". He started a solitary bombing campaign, a crusade against the heartless industrial society.

Californian delinquent/drop-out Charles Manson and his murderous gang of followers, the Family, were perfect examples of the intricate contradictions in the Underground Man. In 1969 Manson and his clique were convicted for the murder of a group of LA socialites, including eight-month pregnant actress Sharon Tate. Some ten years later Manson became an icon for the new American underground, revered by people like punkrocker Henry Rollins. They saw Manson as a kind of prophet who had heralded the end of hippiedom and had exposed its hypocrisies.

The Manson case illustrates one of the essential differences between underground and counter-culture. Whereas counter-culture is basically a progressive, utopian movement seeking change, underground has dark undertones that go hand in hand with its secretive and clandestine character. Hence subcultures like Nazi skinheads, football hooligans and semi-religious cults may feel they belong to the underground, but not to any counter-culture.

This political ambiguity makes the underground murky and mushy. It has a symbiotic relationship with "the mainstream", which is in turn defined by the establishment. This implies that when the establishment becomes liberal and open-minded the underground will slowly surface and change, occupying overground space.

This is exactly what happened in the United States under the presidency of Bill Clinton. Suddenly there was a wave of optimism. Underground cultures came out of the woodwork, blinked against the daylight, and were embraced by the mainstream. A band like Nirvana, led by a dysfunctional boy from Nowhereville USA, became one of the most unlikely million selling bands in history. They challenged the corporate Devil, and the Devil naturally won. Despite attempts of Kurt Cobain to make their third album pretty unlistenable, it still sold millions. Similarly, his descent into a drugs hell didn't buy him a return trip him to the underground. Instead it glorified the use of heroin.

Something similar happened to the New York post-punk noise band Sonic Youth, who in the wake of the success of Nirvana gave up their long-term residence in the underground and joined Geffen, one of the world's biggest record companies. Their signature on the dotted line symbolised the underground peering overground, telling others to come along - and virtually destroying itself. As Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo put it: "In the early 90s in the wake of indie-rock and Nirvana, everybody wanted to be a rock star and write indie music that crossed over and could be signed by the major labels, so they could make a lot of money. That whole world exploded. The major labels signed all these Nirvana hopefuls and wannabes. It was an awful period and the indie culture went dark and underground music went further underground."

The underground dies when you get hangers-on and second-rate imitators, and when the movement is recuperated by the mainstream. "They turn it into a joke, anything that threatens them," troubadour Patrick Fitzgerald lamented the demise of punk as early as 1977.

Mass media are partly responsible for maiming the underground, due to their infinite need and ability to gobble up what's happening under the floorboards. These days the biggest worry of the post-Wall Berlin underground, which for a number of years was incredibly fertile, is to try and stay clear of the media. Hence you'll get galleries in former shops which open and close within days, and illegal pubs in private apartments or temporary squats.

Essentially this signals a return to the old Eastern European days under communism, when avant-garde galleries sprang up in Russian towerblocks and Slovenian people gathered in the railway station to discuss politics, art and philosophy. The main difference is that in those days the totalitarian regime was the enemy, while these days it's the insatiable media looking for new trends, new places, new sounds and new celebrities to fill the space.

An additional problem associated with 21st-century underground is that the tables have turned. The advertising industry consists of young people who know exactly how the underground works. Therefore you get tobacco companies like Lucky Strike organising concerts in secretive underground fashion, and Nike copying acts of hooliganism for their billboards.

Could the limitless and largely censorshipless internet be the saviour of underground?

It's both a tool and an impediment. On the one hand it connects people all over the world, from Iceland to Zimbabwe, linking tiny scenes and making them bigger and stronger. On the other hand it has diluted the underground to such an extend that most of these niches can happily frolic without making the slightest impact on the mainstream.

And then on 9/11/2001 came Osama Bin Laden, who managed to reduce every act of subversion to rubble by his attacks on the Twin Towers. It's probably still too early to judge the cultural fall-outs of the WTC bombing, but a few points can be made.

A huge chunk of the world, including the United States, Australia, Europe and South Africa, is experiencing a turn towards conservatism and xenophobia. The post-sixties values of multiculturalism, liberalism and permissiveness have been eroded. Simultaneously, decades of migration have structurally changed the population of the rich countries. All this will reflect on the shapes and contents of an underground. Globalisation and religious fanatics have pushed what was safely mainstream into the subterranean: cartoonists who depicted the Prophet Mohammed; Fokofpolisiekar who combined the words fok and God.

American artists who work with explosives have been arrested. Hip-hoppers who question the war in Iraq and hail Islamic resistance have had to seek refuge underground, where their products share a space with DVDs of radical imams, speeches of extreme right-wing politicians and hate songs by Nazi-punks. On a more local level banned praise songs for former deputy president Jacob Zuma occupy the same dodgy realm as nationalistic Afrikaners reclaiming rebel songs from the Voëlvry movement. In other words: it's hard to define what constitutes the contemporary underground.

The underground is a multi-faced, potentially dangerous beast. It's is more than a libertarian playground for the young and wild who want to experiment with transgression in art and life and who want to rail against conservatism and stay clear of the tentacles of the media and corporate money. It's also a refuge for people for whom there is no home in the mainstream; a place where chaos and anti-order rule, and where outlaws, lunatics, messiahs, narcissists and self-proclaimed prophets have found a sanctuary.

It's the inverse of bourgeois society, an anti-rational, deceptively romantic place, which will always hold an appeal for those who seek radical change, be it cultural or political. After all, to use the words of Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus, "the artist is the brother of the criminal and the madman."



LitNet: 06 June 2006

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