The truth of revolution, brother ...is Year Zero There is a crowd-sourcing project kicking around on punk FB pages trying to raise £15 000 for a glossy coffee table book on Punk Philosophy to be called The Truth of Revolution, Brother - minus the Year Zero. I will not be helping to fund it. Here is why... ‘The truth of revolution brother…is year zero’. The line is from the anti-revolutionary song ‘Bloody Revolutions’ by Crass. ‘The term Year Zero applied to the takeover of Cambodia in April 1975 by the Khmer Rouge, is an analogy to the Year One of the French Revolutionary Calendar. [Referenced by snatches of La Marseillaise in the Crass song] The idea behind Year Zero is that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and a new revolutionary culture must replace it, starting from scratch.’ [compressed from wikipedia entry ‘Year Zero’] Within punk ‘Year Zero’ refers to 1976 and the belief that punk marked a radical/ revolutionary break with previous music based youth subcultures. Central to this belief was an act of refusal. Punk was a DIY movement which refused to consume ‘punk’ as a product. Instead punk was an act of (self) creation in which punk invented itself ‘ex nihilo’ [out of nothing]. The book is therefore a spectacular commodity worthy of the Situationist International, a marketing ploy which wants to sell as ‘some product’ the very act of refusal itself. As such it is the negation of punk. Ex nihilo nihil fit - out of nothing, nothing comes.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 22:51:17 +0000
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