Thursday, June 26, 2008

The Coming Apocalypse according to Dan Deacon and Devo’s Gerald V. Casale


 
Gerald V. Casale: The present surpasses my darkest-held ideas about the future. Weird would be better than what it is: depressing and stupid. Despite any high-hoping message of better days ahead, it's way too late to fix what is broken. The kernel of decency inside much of the human species is no match for the sheer volume of evil, both intentional and otherwise, unleashed upon the masses in present culture. The very ideas of freedom and equality are being eroded both philosophically and by environmental crises resulting from overpopulation and corrupt government. Corporate Feudal control backed by military regimes will eventually become the norm. The earth will become so sick soon that it will regurgitate the shit back on to the humans who put it there in the first place.

Dan Deacon: I guess it depends on how deep into the future we look. I agree that there are way too many people and that the proper infrastructure to support them isn't and will never be there. I also agree that we are entering into a new Dark Age, far worse than the current imbalance between the elite and the masses.

I think companies like Monsanto, Blackwater, Microsoft, etc. and organizations like Federal Reserve Bank, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, etc. have mapped out the future, and I'm sure it involves about five billion less people alive on earth. But as evil and sinister as these human-corporate monsters are, they have always tried to alter nature and ultimately failed. If we look deeper into the future we'll see a world free from the torments of human domination. If we look at industrialized civilization as the fire and the earth as the forest that is consumes, I think we will see a new forest growing from our ashes.

What has influenced these future-negative ideas for the two of you?
GVC: Besides copious helpings from 30 years of anecdotal observation, people far more intelligent and disciplined than myself have been clearly warning us in non-fiction and in fiction regarding what was in store for a species attempting to avoid living in harmony with nature and refusing to regulate itself. Bush and his unholy junta had been predicted as far back as Orwell. B.F. Skinner's experiments in behavioral psychology and Wittengstein's musings on the atrophy of reason lent scientific weight to the worst dreams of fiction writers. From there, semiotics and postmodern deconstruction mapped the social and physical evidence of de-evolution.

DD: "Conspiracy" theory culture has always been a major influence for me. I guess I first got into thinking about the controlled and calculated mass die off was after my mother died of cancer. I started researching the history of cancer and demography, cancer's and heart disease's role in developed nations for maintaining a minimum population growth. That opened my eyes to a lot of evils that seemed to be implemented by the power elite. The parallels between industrial and corporate growth and the rates of human suffering seem too glowing and obvious to not see. Most recently "Ruled by Secrecy" by Jim Marrs and the recently made video "Zeitgeist" on Google video have really changed the way view system and patterns in society and media.
 
How do these ideas find expression in your music (not just via the word content of music, but maybe music technology as well [...Dan]), or does it?
 
GVC: Computers and digital software programs have not resulted in a higher percentage of good songs to bad songs. That percentage is a constant of the limits of human creativity. The sound choices have increased exponentially as a result of new technology, but the capacity for new ideas has inversely decreased. I include Devo in this equation. We did as well as we could as long as we could and at least we were so new that, while no longer ahead of our time now, we still manage to sound oddly relevant, being that De-volution is REAL.

DD: Beyond music technology, I think it's important to look at the context and setting that the music is made in. I think a lot of bands that are involved in DIY culture are focused on putting forth the vision of a sustainable and scavenger-based society; living in and performing in old factories or warehouses, building your own equipment, eating out of supermarket dumpsters, using society's wastes as the fertilizer for new art and ultimately new life. Experimental, noise-influenced pop music attempts to expand the boundaries of what pop music is and what it can do. Major-label pop culture is extremely similar to a rotting post-industrial city. Both of them provide the framework for new radical ideas to grow in. Even an expensive show like this, that the article is promoting, is in an old, broken down pool, a relic from when the city had a greater investment in the comfort of its inhabitants.
 
 

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