The thing about rock and roll is that, as a musical operation, it requires some capital expenditures; electricity is also pretty necessary. Most people of a certain age in the West tend to view rock and roll as an anti-capitalist entity, but the truth is that rock music has been some of capitalism’s best advertising. Fifty years ago this month, the Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, in a performance widely considered one of the most important rock and roll moments of all time. What exactly happened during that performance? Certainly, some talented songwriters and performers played some great songs to a televised audience that had rarely had the opportunity to see such mass-audience excitement. But more importantly, this brewing thing called rock and roll finally made itself tangible to the public at large, and a generation understood that they would need to go out and get some stuff if they were to participate in this new mass culture.
Planned obsolescence and subscriber services are key marketing strategies that rock and roll made bedrock principles of late-20th century life. New bands replaced old bands, new records made old ones seem quaint and boring, and loyalty to bands became the brand loyalty that all good rock and rollers pledged their life to. The rock unit relies on these things, because the sunk capital of starting a band, coupled with the need to be able to plan for future grosses in order to embark on the Manifest Destiny colonialism that is small band touring, requires an eternal cash supply. Thus even the most well-meaning anti-sellout performer soon realizes that their musical career is at most an altruistic cottage industry, and at worst a pact signed in blood with demonic corporate taskmasters.
Pussy Riot have continually presented themselves as anti-capitalist, which is probably why their guitars remain unplugged and their sound remains one of screamed protest. Generations of rock culture have deemed this approach “not rock,” because without instruments, and without a well-thought out plan for global domination, one’s act is teetering close to the dangerous waters of “performance art,” one of the West’s most hated artistic ghettos.
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Why do we all have such a knee jerk hatred of performance art? Does it have to do with the innate disdain our forefathers had for mimes? It certainly is no coincidence, for instance, that one of Pussy Riot’s most enthusiastic supporters has been Yoko Ono, attempting to give them life tips whilst backstage at the Amnesty International spectacular at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center a few weeks ago; after all, Ms. Ono’s penchant for performance art made her the bogeyman in rock and roll’s Fall From Grace mythology when she was perceived as having broken up The Beatles with her witchy ways and general being-a-woman vibe.
Like the women of Pussy Riot, Ono has an intriguing backstory that is often overshadowed by the controversy that made her famous: she grew up wealthy, saw her world decimated by war, was forced to beg for food to survive in war’s aftermath, and was dragged around the world by her family in a manner that explains her eventual success in the surreal world of experimental theater. Throughout the 1960s she was a central figure in Japan’s avant garde, but it wasn’t until she fell in love with a Beatle that she became interesting, mostly for the way in which her cock-blocking of the Western world’s 24/7 consumer access to John Lennon almost brought world capitalism to a screeching halt.
Post-Yoko, Western culture has had a love/hate relationship with performance art, mostly due to the fact that it’s central protagonists have been female. The 1980s saw two key figures introduce the arch-art-confrontation mode to a mass audience: first was Laurie Anderson, whose clear intelligence and erudite precision made even her battiest works seem towering and powerful; second was Madonna, who weaponized teen girl sexuality to lash out at almost every tenet of 1980s capitalism whilst also smoking a cigar on top of a mountain of cash money. Both figures, like Ono, rubbed their sexuality in the general vicinity of mid-America, while masking their feminist crotch-rockets in hit singles and catchy choruses (Madonna more so than Anderson, of course, but really, one can’t downplay the ubiquity of Anderson and hits like “O Superman” in the ’80s — anyone who was even the slightest bit hip at the time was bombarded with her stiff weirdness).
Nowadays, especially in a post-Lady Gaga universe, the tenets of performance art that once seemed so antithetical to rock culture are now utterly normalized: the branding inherent in the way that performance art views a “show” as a “piece” allows a modern pop singer to designate her staff as a collaborative organization, all working towards the promotion of the conflated identity of the singer-performer-as-art-piece. If rock music was a democratization of the big band, with amplified instruments putting an orchestra in the hands of a few dudes, pop-music-as-performance-art puts a corporation full of underlings backstage in service of a single hand on a single microphone, artworld-style.
Perhaps the grandest example of this isn’t even a musician: the atomic celebrity of Marina Abramović (a performance artist with an incalculable weird-factor who is completely integrated into our popular celebrity culture) has managed, through a lifetime of self-flagellation and artistic torment, to turn sitting in a chair silently into a branded pop culture behemoth. Her success proves not only that art is in the eyes of the beholder, but that it helps to use Madison Avenue psychology to make sure that your art is beheld by those predisposed to be moved by your silence. If rock and roll was all about forcing an ideology through the din of noise, the performance art approach is to emphasize the negative spaces.