New Wave Nerds
or: Counter-Cultures do not Exist, but Counter-Revolutions Do
“Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.” - Dorothy Parker (via @womensartbluesky.bsky.social)
When i had watched a few Youtube videos of Lene Lovitch, i began to realize she definitely had the autistic vibe. At the time “inspired kookiness” (which had antecedents in comedy, if fewer in pop music) & now we would call it “autistic joy”…Especially when she sings next to Nina Hagen, & demonstrates the difference between acting weird & being weird.
Rock music, with its retrofit tribal trappings & cut-throat commercial culture, would not appear to be a good job for non-backup musicians on the spectrum (at least not since the Zombies broke up--& if you count Freddie of Freddie and the Dreamers, for whom Napoleon Dynamite might be the belated origin story--). But something changed in the waning years of the 70s. Keyboards replaced guitars. And there was an upsurge of various outsiders, whether gay, women, or neurodiverse, vanishingly sparse in the age just ended. Now, everyone knows about Gary Numan—but what if a whole genre could reflect, well, many of the characteristics?
The way i remember it: there was for short time a lot of really interesting New Wave music on Dallas radio--& then it stopped. (Clear Channel? Who can say now what happened beyond locked doors, who even remembers now? All I know is I pretty much, after that, stopped listening to American music). –Looking at this, I think maybe: 1986 was the year, locally. Heyday of the New Vampire.
That was the work of the Counter-Revolution, i guess. I’d gotten used to thinking of the “Reagan Revolution” as sort of like that, but more a surge of hostile antibodies than any strategic planning (cf their Iran Contragate fiasco). Sometimes I thought of Bruce Springsteen as the last good Roman poet, Claudian. (Patti Smith was a whole other thing, like a new religion breaking through.)
What came before, though, was not as if those who’d been left behind suddenly decided to storm the castle; more like, barriers put into place were gradually lifted, jimmied, slyly evaded. Not counter-culture, but whole culture, because the feelings & visions which constitute culture are not restricted to a single type of human being… In my more Phildickian moods i think the proper outcome of the Sixties got stolen from us and we are buried in the Black Iron Prison of its denial.
How are we not?
Having heroes who looked (or thought) like me wasn’t the point. And in an important sense, this desire is simply a surefire way to sabotage the cultural energy we still possess. (The other one was drugs. You know how that ended.) But the craving, once legitimized as the only path forward (the other being, unfortunately, to turn back time, or rather, cocoon in the fantasy that a person or a civilization can if they choose to), tends to invoke not merely presentday anxieties (some more motivated than others) but the immemorial will or Narcissus’s Task to find a representation of oneself that works.
We are used to finding faces in the flames & gods in the clouds, because finding friends in the nearest ape-squint is so much still a necessity for survival. We can’t stop yearning for Intelligent Life in the Universe, even as we finish eradicating the last other intelligent life (dolphins, whales, great apes, octopi) under our very feet. It’s what we do. We look for a mirror (of which LLMs are only the latest iteration). And we kill.
I cast off the latest mask that seemed to fit (“autist”), even as I cast off all the others. Because in that mirror of self-observation, notwithstanding the convention that one must depict everything surrounding my own face but not my face (yclept Objectivity), it is the combination of the two that is the true picture, maybe not what I seek (how can background be a god?) but what I need to see.