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Ian Svenonious hosts an online talk show entitled “Soft Focus” where he sits down in his vintage suit and interviews musicians like Andrew W.K. and Henry Rollins, arches his fingers, nods sagely, and otherwise plays the roll of “rock-and-roll James Lipton.” And while the entire enterprise skews funny, the truth is that his interviews are often incredibly insightful and thought-provoking, even if the questions asked may be made partly in jest.
Perhaps his ability to spin academia out of pop culture cow-ploppy is how Ian Svenonius was able to fill his book, The Psychic Soviet, with essays such as "Rock 'n' Roll As Real Estate," in which he argues that Alan Greenspan's lowering of interest rates led to more real estate speculation by the wealthy, displacing the poor people who traditionally form bands, thus leading to both the boom in electroclash and the folk revival, as neither genre requires drums and therefore doesn't need a garage in which to set up equipment since the bands cannot afford the space to house a traditional band any longer. Therefore, Alan Greenspan is the father of electroclash. Give that man a master’s degree.
The Psychic Soviet aims to be far more than a simple collection of academic essays. Its compact size and design resembles a pocket New Testament or Quotations from Chairman Mao, and the author photo two pages in shows Svenonius (the frontman from such bands as Nation of Ulysses, The Make-Up, and Chain and the Gang) with his hand inside his shirt, Napoleon-like, staring regally out of the left frame, wearing what could be some type of military jacket. The book comes with "instructions," informing the reader that "[i]ts small size will make it easy to carry around so as to refer to in case of ethical quandaries, arguments, and social feuds." So is the book a bible? Political screed? Music journalism? The whole enterprise is exactly the kind of hip pranksterism that Svenonius has foisted on the world in the last decade or two, and it was made to defy easy categorization, lampooning all of the above while simultaneously making (theoretically) serious arguments.
It's easy to dismiss the entire thing as a fairly elaborate joke: a Dischord Records rocker writing joke essays with ridiculous assertions to get a laugh. An academic article on the idea that Hitler lost the war because he chose the wrong soundtrack ("The Responsible Use of Rock and Roll") sounds amusing, but considering the fervor and research that goes into Svenonius's argument, it becomes less clearly a joke (which, ironically, makes it even funnier). After the initial laugh of the premise, Svenonius spends a great deal of time exploring the artistic movements of various countries during wartime in such a carefully crafted fashion that the reader begins to be swayed by the logic Svenonius presents, even if it could just be some snake-oil salesman’s sleight-of-hand. Fact and humor intermingle in a stew of pop culture, conspiracy theory, militant pro-socialism, psychobabble, and academia. Svenonius’s ability to make logical sense out of a ridiculous thesis is impressive.
Even the more outright-amusing articles—such as "Mordor Dearest," about The Lord of the Rings being an elaborate anti-female sexuality cautionary tale—still retains Svenonius's fastidiousness to academic rigor. Readers are treated to such thoughts as this:
Gandalf won't even touch the ring, for he knows its power is too much, that he'll also be seduced. For the ring is none other than the dreaded "vagina," poised to destroy boyhood irrevocably and smash asunder the childish prestidigitations of the Shire-land. "Sauron" is actually woman and "Mordor" is motherhood. The "Gollum" is what occurs when a male is entrapped by a girl's charm; he's reduced to a pathetic, cooing parody of manhood.
And this:
The "fellowship" that goes to protect Frodo on his dangerous journey to wreck the ring includes the hobbits, an elf-dwarf couple, and an argumentative pair of male knights, Aragorn and Boromir. While the one knight is so chaste as to have taken a eunuch elf-wife, the other, Boromir, is constantly tempted and tormented by the power of the ring. He finally succumbs to its temptation, whereupon the orcs—Sauron's babies—destroy him. His momentary weakness leads him to fatherhood and banishment from the latent homosexual Tolkien boy-world.
Again, despite the humorous thesis, the entire exercise begins to make sense. With the rest of The Lord of the Rings read as metaphor—with the all-male cast and the Hobbits easily being depicted as young boys who would perhaps be most immune to feminine charms, unlike adult men like Gandalf and Boromir—it holds enough weight to give a reader pause.
Humor aside, the heart of The Psychic Soviet is Svenonius’s belief in the power and importance of rock and roll, wrapped in a leftist worldview, which makes sense from a guy who put out an album called “13-Point Program to Destroy America” on the dude from Fugazi’s record label. For all the tongue-in-cheek smirking and occasional goofiness, Svenonius boils down all his musings into a serious belief that art needs to be taken out of the hands of the ruling class and put back in the hands of good people everywhere, and those people need to be aware of the myriad assaults employed by corrupt governments and the wealthy elite. But rather than hammering people over the head with his true message, Mr. Svenonius is content to simply let readers come to his party, knowing they'll get the joke.
(March, 2010)
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