Tim Kinsella's classic letter asking bands to disband.

Beirut. The Patriot Act. Palestine. Africa. Wal-Mart. Clear Channel. Peak oil. Global devastation. The backward talk of those in power that dominates and suffocates our cultural discourse. Overpopulation. The dawning of neo-feudalist Theocracy in America. It's a busy, interesting place we've got here. Lots of information aimed at us. The hidden hand of power.

But beyond our control, dark energy, string theory, conceptions of an infinite mutiverse render any issues of free obsolete. We are really only allowed questions. WE can't understand anything. How could we? We live at the lip of the bubble of understanding of our own designs - never not curious, and never able to poke through.

So my point - I do have one - is that in our world, the most basic requirement we share is kept in balance only if it's shaken in many directions at the same time. And what can any of us do to help rectify the situation? We must integrate our politics into our lifestyle, acknowledge that every bridge, hook, melody and sales strategy has political demensions.

In short, I am asking that every band that appeared in the August 2006 issue of Alternative Press break up.

Sorry.

Desperate times require desperate measures. There's no good reason why "ex-rockstar" shouldn't be the most common job in the future. It's obvious from flipping through an issue of this magazine that there are too many bands, all trying in different ways to look and sound like each other. It's unsustainable. Why don't you guys all save yourself the inevitable worry and humiliation the future holds, break up now, and be the first mass movement in cutural history to self-consciously commit suicide?

There are pictures of maybe half a dozen people in that issue that I know, trust, respect and consider my friends. And I'm sorry to ask this of you guys, some of you have helped us in the past, and I appreciate it, but our country needs you. Your bands have to break up. You guys on the cover (one of you was 13 in 2001, so you're now at draft age), we need you to quit.

Even you guys that just had a thumbnail band photo in an ad, sorry. Collateral damage, I guess. However you each choose to understand it, let's all agree we need to draw the line clearly. Every band whose name is even mentioned in the August 2006 issue of AP must break up immediately. So, Cute Is What We Aim For, consider your new aim ansering the call of our country. Underoath, pledge allegiance to the freedom of your fellow citizens. Circa Survive, you ran an add, and I'm sorry, that's enough. You must not survive.

I know this seems like a bummer to you guys, but think about it. Throughout history, music has been at the center of every culture. Music is what people have always had between them to help each other understand how to live. The values of a culture are hiddin within its music. And I dont mean that in a Christian-rock or straight-edge way. I mean our culture is not only sick, but its taking the whole world down with it, and its symptoms are in song structures and rituals of performance.

The simplistic, sensational, emotionalistim of soaring crescendos - whose success or failure relate only to how familiar they seem on first listen - must become tired and redundant by design. When you reach your saturation point and can no longer react to these octave chords' urgent demands, then what? Will all displays of emotion seem silly? Mustn't it be true, like the boy who cried wolf, that every feigned-spontaneous emotional signifier thrust upon you by some band will just deaden your sense of empathy in the future? Perhaps even in a real-world situation, with real-world consequences? If TV and reality can be so interwined, past signifiers of rebellion is rebellion, and this is punk rock, why not?

Don't the sensationalist requirements of vicarious catharsis ask so much, that our empathy will be spent before it ever has a chance to blossom? I mean, I might not be able to understand when someone is hurting - and in turn know how to help them - if my formative experiences with understanding emotions is via these fashionable men and women.

But it's not too late. If the bands break up, maybe we can have music again in the future, and we will be able to hear it for what it is - not what it's being sold as.

I know this is a lot to ask of bands. And no one 22-year-old New Jersey kid is to blame - it's the design that is flawed. But one can't stay quiet. One has a responsibility to stand up for what one sees as god and right in the world, and if my plea can make a difference in even one young band's life - if just one band breaks up - my work here will have been worth it.

Oh, thats why I'm indecent

People really don't enjoy considering everything, or most of reality. Seriously. I was thinking about how most of the people in the world doesn't even consider alternatives to creationism accurate or rational. I don't think thats necesasrily because they can't sit down and think about what is here and what both we and the universe are made up of, I think its because they never do.

ANd I think they never do because of how consuming these kind of thoughts are. There are tons of songs about this type of thing that songwriters write while stuck heavily in a moment of debate about all that we are. Songs are often the results of those deep, cosmic moments when a feeling so deeply or engulfing is felt. Same thing people usually end up feeling about death. I think that gives us a strong hint at what depression is about. No body gets depressed about having to fucking buy a new keyboard. We get depressed about immense changes that occur and must force us to some how become, what we view as, another person with new characteristics, new ideologies, new abilities, new pass times, new loves, new hates, new boredom, and so on.

And this would explain my pain. To consider all the moments in life that I do does consume me on a day to day basis. In the words of Dostoevsky, "I don't want to lie. Ivowed to myself not to." I don't tell myself death is some transition to a sweeter pasture where God reigns, I also don't tell myself its a burning pit. I hold on to these thoughts about my own death, the death of others, the consciousness of rent/love/food/careers/pain and all else we feel. I guess thats why jokes give us so much solace at times. Make a joke about death, and it seeps out of your unconscious mind and seems less of a threat because it makes you laugh at someone elses misery or something.

And whats worse is I don't let myself misunderstand anything. Nothing. I don't have to know everything, but I want to be able to see the effects everything has on people. And there for every object, is an effect.

Which leads me to what I learned from an essay by Tim Kinsella of Cap n Jazz and, well, if you know Cap n Smhazz, you know what else he was in. He wrote an article about why a bunch of bands from some magazine should disband, but on a larger scale, why most music today is insincere and artifice and said "if TV and reality can be so interwined, past signifiers of rebellion is rebellion, and this is punk rock, why not?" Meaning if tv and reality can be so intertwined, the line between cause and effect blurred, symbols of past rebellions encouraging current rebellion, then why can't punk rock also have that same effect on people? Specifically, I believe the effect he was talkign about was rebellion, but it made me consider just how much we're manipulated by, even without knowing. From the way people talk to you growing up, to the way every fucking street has to have a billboard or some ideal a business believes you should covet.

To go back to my point, I deeply consider what the effect of everything is, and what role it plays in manifesting our perspectives about life and how to deal with tragedy, disappointment, and success. This is a lot to fuckign think about. I say that not as a cry for help or an acknowledgement of triumph. But I do feel that if we should actually make progress, we have to be willign to face our fears of feeling like pawns in the rich's hands or scared as fuck by the thought of what may be inevitable.

And to go back to my original, now almost completely forgotten, point: I suppose considering all this makes me indifferent to and hateful of a lot of things that are supposedly the best things this world has to offer. I may change my position in the future about somethings that I now hate, and as long as I have an appreciation for human life, love, indignation, and peace, I don't give a fuck. I've learned to welcome change in my philosophies, and changing the broad ones can only change me so much. This would be why I don't even consider most of the shit people say, because I know its backed by an artificial love for very unnecessary things in life. I might seem like a bigot, but I'm not. I'm just certain that people don't give a shit about anything important. Now I'm mad.

This moment of veiled narcissism is brought to you by god not helping, music helping, women refusing, and men controlling. Also by knowing that the biggest amalgamation of people in LA in most recent years has been parades in celebration for a fucking basketball team.