The Brechtian element of radical Pop

There is an unheralded modernist Brechtian aspect to some pop music. By Brechtian I mean a technique used by Bertolt Brecht, the famous playwright, in his theatre. This technique was sometimes called the 'alienation effect'. It was a way to distance the audience from too close an identification with the characters being played in the performance, so that they were not, in a sense, hypnotised by the narrative but relatively distanced. This technique is not to be confused with alienation in the more usual usage, such as by Marx or Durkheim, where it describes a negative state of mind or feelings. In fact, Brecht"s effect could be regarded as a kind of antidote to alienation in the ttraditional sense.

When I was young I found myself liking certain types of popular music across the genres that they belonged to, and this made some things a little awkward, given it involved transgressing specific fashions that went with the genres and different peer groups. There was a time when I liked Ska and some reggae of the Trojan records type, but also Jimi Hendrix and Cream. The fashions that went with these two kinds of music were completely different, the former being generally skinhead and the latter hippie. I had this way of being more of a skinhead at my school, a secondary modern mixed comprehensive, but out of school I could be more of a hippie (this sounds difficult especially with the hair but we had feathered haircuts that could be long). But the two fashions were more than just that, of course they were ways of acting and living. The media was critical of both but the more working class skinhead fashion and the music was often framed in the media of the time as racist, even though it was obvious we liked black music. In my school there was a black skinhead girl, she was tough.  Most of the free images of skinheads are of more recent origin, I don't remember seeing any swastikas on skinheads in the 1970s, later this was a punk thing and I suppose there was some crossover in styles then. Ironically the most white music was 'cock rock' with their anthems.

The attitude of the skinheads was, at least superficially, completely opposite to the hippies, skinheads embraced violence or at least did not shy away from it, and were cynical about liberal attitudes. The hippies were into peace and love and flower power, although of course they protested. My skinhead style was not the full on crew cut hair, red braces, whiteT-shirt, Levi 501s and boots, but the variant that was more common at school, Levi Sta-Prest trousers, loafers or brogues, Ben Sherman shirts, maybe a tank top jumper. It may seem, because of the media, that skinheads were right-wing in politics, but I was not aware of this personally, some were right wing, others were not, like myself, I was a socialist, my Dad was a shop steward, but skinheads were more from the working class, while hippies seemed to be more bourgeois.

So what about the music? You can see that the difference in these so called sub-cultures made it difficult to like music across this divide, but I did, because I found something similar in certain artists. For instance, I liked the sound of early Bob Dylan records, and I liked the sound of some of Ken Boothe, and Prince Buster. To just jump around a bit (probably in time as well as across these boundaries), Jimi Hendrix sometimes reminded me of Ska. The feature that made the similarities was, I would now say, the Brechtian effect, the rather raw, obviously also electronically mediated, 'mistake' filled, sound that 'revealed the transaction' between the techniques producing the sound and the listener. The Beach Boys had partially developed this sound, and so had others, the Shangri-Las, the Phil Spector wall of sound, it goes back to Leadbelly (Huddie Leadbetter) maybe. Ok, it is not just a sound, it is the arrangement, so partly also a studio product. Some of it merges into blues with Janis Joplin's band Big Brother and the Holding Company. 

Clearly, wI am not talking about such pop music being radical in what it says in its lyrics, its stories, the 1960s 'protest songs' for instance, but more its form, and this form was not specific to a particular genre. 

When I finally became an art student it was easier to negotiate these differences. Art students have their own weirdness and did not fit into anything very obviously, but it still bothered me, or to be more accurate saddened me, that my new peer group was generally more hippie and more embracing of that cultural position, because they were more bourgeois. In the meantime I was becoming more bourgeois, leaving behind my now proscribed skinhead past, and in a sense also my family. This made me want to understand what was going on with these categories into which I did not easily fit. It seemed to me that something was being censored by the media frame, not to put it too finely, and we were being channeled away from this Brechtian formal aspect of radicalism that crossed over these dividing lines.         

Reflections on the Killing of Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk, the far-right youth influencer and supporter of Donald Trump, was shot and killed at a college campus in Utah. Such an escalation was foolish and is to be regretted. The suspect, Tyler Robinson, a young man, has been held for trial. This has been in the news now for a few days.

Of course, the killing has provoked a lot of reaction in the US and beyond, and has had some heavy repercussions. – One is, just recently Jimmy Kimmel’s popular late-night show was suspended. In his comedic monologue criticising the Trump administration he mentions vice-president JD Vance as exploiting the assassination to attack political opponents of Trump. In this response to the killing, JD Vance said that the majority of violent acts such as this were by ‘lunatics’ on the left. This is not the case, in fact most political violence in the US has been by the right-wing, and it has been the right-wing that, through provocations and trolling, has primarily used hate speech to inflame the political climate, Vance was, even at this time, inappropriate by his own measure, just adding to this.

The shooter, Tyler Robinson, if the reports about him are accurate, appears to come from a Republican family, but his own politics are according to the reports more leftward, while also influenced by internet subcultures, and gender politics.  However, the case has not yet gone to trial, and we do not yet know the real motives, yet Vance and Trump have already blamed the ‘far left’ for this violence, jumping to their desired conclusion.

One of the outcomes of Trump’s democratic election has been the obvious triumph of the press and media over traditional politics in which its role has been kept in the background. Although Trump’s regime has regularly attacked the press and blamed the media for its coverage, it is clearly straining to appear to be an alternative rebellious force  while holding the executive power, and has meanwhile consolidated its power over these corporations and debunked the standard traditional ‘balance’ between left and right sides. It has also by doing this deflected attention from Trump’s own roots in the media, as well as his friendly relations with Epstein.

Hitherto the appearance of a balance, and the supposed checks on unbridled power that it defends against, has served the bourgeois class well as an image of fairness, but Trump now openly eschews this. The question is, where will this lead for the US? We can see the aim is to keep Trump in power as a dictator, but why would the bourgeois class of the US want such a dictatorship at this stage, and why would it be so willing to ditch this well-honed mechanism of managing its class power now?

The answers lie in the continuation of imperialist projects that never actually entirely left the room. Post WWII, we have lived through a time when the liberals of the bourgeois cultural elite, and its media, put a lot of faith in what they termed the rules based order and the universal values typified by the spirit of the UN at its pinnacle, despite the obvious flies in the ointment at the time. The continuing aims of the imperialist capitalists were put in the background and tended to be ignored while reconstruction after the war went ahead. But this could not last forever. What we see now is imperialism refreshed.

But it is imperialism dressed up in new clothes. In the old days, imperialist conquest and colonization for expansion and profit was mediated by the divine right of kings and queens, with missionaries projecting Christianity onto savages ‘for their own good’, for the salvation of their souls. This was the ultimate justification for the massacres, enslavement, and ethnic cleansing that it carried out, while undoubtedly bringing scientific advances to the world. But today this ideology and aesthetic can no longer hold water, it looks like what it is, a bunch of anti-scientific prejudices and bigotry. So, what can take the place of these old excuses for extreme violence in the modern world, when imperialist capitalist expansion is again rampant and obvious?

Curiously, we only need to look at a product of modern science, the internet, and social media, to see it. The troll is there to inflame debate towards the fascist perspective on everything. If Trump or JD Vance lie and go against reason and science, they are trolling, if they complain against things that they are simultaneously guilty of doing themselves, they are trolling. When they talk against the state apparatus while acting as the state apparatus they are trolling. When they rail against censorship but simultaneously blatantly censor their rivals, they are trolling, when they gush with sentiment over the tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s shooting, but are cold and callous about the killings of Democrats, they are trolling.

And this strategy is the same as Israel’s, the proxy of the US, when it tells Gaza Palestinians whom it is bombing where to move to and then also bombs these ‘safe areas’. This is also trolling, on a different level, indeed, but it is the same kind of thing. And what is it for? It is for the capitalist imperialist expansion of white western power into the Middle East where the oil and the trade routes are. It is to use Israel and Jews as its advanced guard, its missionary force, for this project. Does it care in any real sense about Charlie Kirk or the Jews of Israel? Is any of this for moral reasons? No. The US leadership is complicit in the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza. It is trolling everyone when it claims to be interested in peace, it even bombs an ally while it holds peace talks that it takes part in. Again, this is trolling.

And it is clear that as a strategy, trolling is what the US ruling class has opted for in the modern age, it is its media position. Yes, this is added to by certain evangelical Christian religious motives, and spiced up with a simple lust for violence, tainted by a strong desire for vengeance and retribution for perceived injustices. But it is trolling, writ large.

And yet trolling is inherently weak. It cannot really match the old ideologies and aesthetic practices. It cannot be consistent. It cannot be sustained, it is anti-science but must use science, it is anti-rational but cannot ignore, at least for long, the economy. It is doomed to failure, to implode. So, in this sense it, MAGA etc, is a kind of death cult that wants to take everyone with it, down. If President Donald Trump cannot succeed in his project, and he cannot, he cannot be seen to fail, so he must become a martyr, he must become a kind of deity that avoids all culpability. He is trapped in this loop. As many commentators have said already, the US is heading towards a very dangerous place, but we are all in this place.

On the Kimmel furore (we quote here from the Guardian online): 

"...The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has said that the ABC network “caved” to pressure from the US government.

The timing of ABC’s decision, on the heels of the FCC chairman’s pledge to the network to “do this the easy way or the hard way,” tells the whole story. Another media outlet withered under government pressure, ensuring that the administration will continue to extort and exact retribution on broadcasters and publishers who criticize it.”

In a statement, the advocacy group went on to say that the US “cannot be a country where late night talk show hosts serve at the pleasure of the president. But until institutions grow a backbone and learn to resist government pressure, that is the country we are.”

From:

<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/sep/18/jimmy-kimmel-charlie-kirk-comments-show-cancelled-suspended-monologue-trump-us-politics-live> 

- Note how this is a peculiar statement because in it it is seen as the responsibility of 'institutions' to grow a backbone themselves, when obviously the institutions have an existing backbone (in other words it is institutional) which is currently being used  to quell dissent and censor, so, according to this institution (the Foundation for individual Rights and Expression) the institution that censors has the merely moral responsibility to stop itself from doing what it is doing, and it is, kind of, a bit sad that this is not happening.