In our country, escapism is inescapable. The global film industry is dominated by Hollywood (take Bollywood as an obvious example of this), and MTV is at this minute inundating more than 375 million households worldwide with its perpetually commercial programming. And living inside the states feels like trying to breathe under the weight of the humid nucleus of distraction itself. Our president is planning on revamping immigration laws, allowing illegal immigrants to provide what used to be (and should continue to be) illegal work for big businesses, and all I could find on non-news programming was Britney Spears making out with Madonna.
For some reason, this abundance of lesbian-chic neo-softcore stuffed in between reality television and minute-by-minute coverage of the Hilton sisters bothered me. Not because it seemed obscene in any way — gay vague (which that really wasn’t; the Britney-Madonna-Christina threeway was more poseur-sexual than anything with remotely progressive undertones) has been selling Abercrombie lacrosse shirts to homophobic white kids for years — but because it made me ask what I was missing. It is a distraction that has lasted well past its plausible stay.
On an extremely tangential note, I used to live by the lyrics to an Operation Ivy song, “All I know is that I don’t know/ All I know is that I don’t know nothing.” Incorrect grammar aside, I was proud of my disconnections from the world, especially from politics, and sang the anthem silently during sixth, seventh and eighth grades. But while I was banging my head, I was missing the point. Op Ivy is confronting remorse about a lack of knowledge, and through some over-my-head reversal, they were trying to tell all those “no future for me” punks to absorb the world around them. Realizing this made me love the record (one of my first vinyl purchases and a record-store memory that I will never forget — I got the thing for 33 cents!) even more. Realization through punk rock.
Former University of Wisconsin professor and award-winning geographer Yi-Fu Tuan defined escapism (in his book “Escapism”) as “human — and inescapable.” He also declared it harmless “… so long as it remains a passing mood, a temporary escape, a brief mental experiment with possibility.” But too many people yearn (for the most part unwittingly) for a near-Huxleyan non-reality of constant bemusement.
On Cellar Door, a fabulous new album, singer/songwriter and indie-rock staple John Vanderslice asks a sad young actress, “Can you survive a look inside?” It’s an important question when looking at subjective escapism, one that everyone should ask frequently, just to keep some sort of perspective. Television, debatably the most unrelenting diversionary medium, could never answer this question itself without imploding. Its own nature would combust with the questioning of its purpose. A diversion that realizes itself as a diversion either dies or becomes a joke.
But don’t get me wrong; I do agree with Tuan when he says that escapism in moderation is healthy and needed. It is intrinsically human to displace yourself into a different, easier realm every once in a while, and many times it can yield very positive results. I’ll pull an example from the wreckage of the disco era, a musical form American in both its origin and demise (via capitalism and dehydrating over-commercialization).
Studio 54 became a caricature of the period, where nose-candy queens and velvet-rope fascists destroyed what was once a danceable fusion of tight-knit counter-community and rock, funk, world and rhythm and blues. Studio 54, with its hard-hitting founder Steve Rubell pushing the cult of celebrity to a breaking point, killed a part of an emerging underground club scene.
Eight years before the Studio opened in 1977 (which was also the year of “Saturday Night Fever”), disco began as a beautiful revolution and the antithesis of Studio 54’s excess. Manhattan’s Greenwich Village exploded into fevered excitement June 21, 1969, as a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, an underground nightclub refuge for gay New Yorkers, birthed a kinetic force that would eventually lead to gay pride movements and our now seemingly accepting (at least as a serious segment of the consumer market) current views of what was clinically considered a disease by the American Psychiatric Association until 1973.
The Stonewall Rebellion, as it would come to be known, was fueled by the heavily jangled beats of the nascent disco genre. Disco had thrived in an underground counterculture scene where gay men and women could shed their daytime façades and feel freedom, usually aided by an armory of amphetamines, downers and psychedelic drugs.
The music and the drugs were pure escapism, but they were escapism in passing (at a time when a suppressed segment of the population most needed release) and resulted in something beyond momentary distraction.
Now musicians and other artists, not to mention the rest of us, have a serious obligation to get our heads back in the game. Only a handful of notable songs in the past year have addressed politics, and most people view music and film as simply art for diversion’s sake — as simply entertainment. But without beefing up our entertainment — and without entertainment consumers beefing up their demands on entertainment — we’ll all be left behind banging our heads when we could be kicking out the chords of revolution.
