For Svenonius, a distinction should be made between the reaction to Trump as a person, and the philosophical opposition to the actions of his administration. While Svenonius is more interested in the latter, he concedes Trump’s personality is likely to provoke some interesting artistic statements. “[Trump] obviously is disgusting. Maybe that’s a good thing for art,” he says.
As a long-term resident of Washington DC, Svenonius is well position to ruminate on the political and philosophical machinations of the United States. Svenonius’ music, from the confrontational punk of Nation of Ulysses in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to the gospel rock of The Make-Up to the primitive garage of his current outfit Chain and the Gang, Svenonius has been infused with ideological and philosophical musings.
“DC does have a political aspect, obviously, but I try not to make political music. It comes out that way, maybe, but I’m just making songs with words,” Svenonius says. “I think of the material I write more as just songs, like a jazz song, an Ella Fitzgerald song. They’re not written to be a punk song or a hardcore song. People see them as political but I wonder if that’s more because I’m from DC, and there’s an idea that DC bands are political. As cliché as it sounds, all groups are political.”
If one assumes that politics is about power, the relationship between the performer and the audience is also, in a sense, a political relationship. Svenonius constructs his own music in the context of challenging the hegemony of political or marketing institutions, but in the interaction with his audience. “I strongly believe that as entertainers or performers you’re always trying to communicate with your audience. What that audience is, that’s your imagination. Are you imagining that you’re addressing the world, or what room are you addressing?” Svenonius says.
It’s this notion of a discrete audience that Svenonius believes has been eroded by the internet. He’s not complaining about it, merely pointing out the impact of pervasive technology once-discrete cultural groups. Hollywood movies and major label radio are insipid because they purport “to address the universal plight of humanity”. “They’re viewing it as Jungian archetypes. There’s nothing that can be specific, whereas all successful art can be very specific, like the Cabaret Voltaire, people entertaining the other.”
Svenonius is on a roll, and extrapolates his point to bring in the fascination with rare music. “It used to be that you felt a kinship with The Beatles because The Beatles were just average guys and they captured your imagination. Now no-one relates to The Beatles, they don’t relate to that indomitable success. They relate to Skip Spence or the person no-one’s ever heard of.”
With Chain and the Gang, Svenonius confronts one of the shibboleths of western political thought: freedom. In the context of Chain and the Gang’s rallying cry (and song) Down With Liberty – Up With Chains, I mention a quotation from the Manhattan Project my teenage son is fond of reciting: “Freedom is some kind of illusionary concept where the people in charge let you have comfortable distractions. Enough things so you don’t see your chains.”
The quotation resonates with Svenonius’ desire to expose the often-ignored barriers to our professed desire for absolute liberty. “We’re compelled to be with each other, we’re doomed to labour. The compulsion to create or express in a particular way is what’s at play. At the same time we resent the idea of freedom of expression because it’s like ‘I have the freedom to express myself in any way I choose – but do I really?’ Obviously I can’t express myself in the way that Celine Dion does, or content-wise, express myself in the way that DJ Quick does,” Svenonius says.
“There’s not really a freedom there, it’s an intrinsic thing coming out of you, and the idea of freedom or thoughts is a neutering thing or device that the government has to say that none of it means anything. You can say anything you want because ultimately it doesn’t have any meaning. In every historical society that wasn’t true because everyone recognised the power of art. I recognise the power of art.”
By Patrick Emery
