Helmet - Meantime

S: Bottle, can we wrap up this Marx thing soon? 

B: yeah, it's probably time. I'm dangerously close to sticking my finger in the socket and becoming real again. Nip me in the bud. Here we go. 

I believe it was Beavis and/or Butthead who said of tonight's 10/10 sophomore album "that drummer looks like a regular guy... If you, like, saw these guys on the street, you wouldn't even know they were cool." Said that then drummer is none other than now Battles drummer John Stainer. The band is of course Helmet, jazz guitarist Page Hamilton's Alternative Metal meets Noise Rock masterclass in harmonically and metrically complex dropped-d riffage. He really does have a hard time playing and singing this stuff at the same time. 

I believe it was a much younger version of me who upon seeing the movie Jerky Boys said "that band really sounds like Helmet. Oh, it is Helmet? Ok, i guess i do know what i'm talking about." They have a very distinct sound. I imagine it is not likable for a large number of humans or wildlife. I personally love it and so did most every rock/metal kid in the late 90s. People make a strong case for Nu-metal being the result of emulating Helmet. Obviously the extended jazz harmonies and metrical variety got lost in distortion, sorry i meant translation, so only the dropped-d riffs and anger survived. 

Lyrically, Page is obtuse. These aren't stories or diatribes or lectures, these things are inner monologue responses to experiences, situations, etc. It's completely possible to not understand any of it, and that's a big part of their idiosyncratic charm. What does come through is the very clear sarcasm, skepticism, frustration, and even awe we might logically connect to a kid from Oregon moving to New York City to study Jazz guitar and living right down at the bottom of the barrell. It's like the East Coast version of Axl goes to Hollywood, only much more metaphorically obscure. 

It also owes a large debt to Nirvana in the sense that labels were much more willing to give bands creative, if not financial, control of their output. That quickly ended as the new millennium approached, but the mid 90s were pretty spectacular in terms of wildly eclectic new music actually reaching a national audience. 

Why? Well, Mike Judge told us at the beginning of this review. This is a t-shirt and jeans band. I just straight up like this. No pretense, no image, no hidden agenda, no attempt to appeal to anything other than my brain cells via my ear drums. That is not a market that ever really existed before the post-modern apocalypse. A rapidly growing number of consumers rather than investors controlled the market by flat out not buying what the major corporations were pushing, we walked into stores and said "i don't want anything from your million plus inventory, i want this awesome thing i just heard, order it for me." Do that enough times and that inventory changes fairly quickly. MTV and commercial radio were the driving force behind that revolution because this was the pre high-speed internet era. 

All sorts of hallways branch off from that atrium, but my argument should be pretty obvious. Technological advancement led to the democratization of exposure and file sharing eliminated the need for the big business of creating a niche market in the first place. To put it in terms of Classical Economics, the internet eliminated scarcity, the supply of new music transcended all geographic and logistical limitations and eliminated any economic value from distribution itself. 

Said another way, the industry shifted from a Capitalist system to a Communist system all on its own according to the internal logic of Capitalism itself. The surplus value used to physically move music from creator to consumer was absorbed back into the savings of creators and consumers, and the total economy shrank accordingly. Labels in the new millennium were by and large forced to produce only that which was absolutely necessary to survive, rather than exploit the bourgeois mythologies that birthed  the recorded music economy in the first place. More and more middle-class independent labels crumbled and wealth consolidated into the hands of a few major corporations. As the cost of distributing the music itself fell due to this democratization, the cost of turning that digital information back into physical form consequently and equivalently rose creating the price inflation we observe over time: 8 to 10 1970s dollars equals 20 to 25 today dollars. The capitalist response is to legally and punitively reprivatize the digital distribution itself. We see it everyday in the rise of Spotify, subscription media, the shift from buying software to leasing software, the fight surrounding Right to Repair and planned obsolescence, the pay-to-play structure of the music business itself. Every human on earth is theoretically a record label, every person on earth a musician and a consumer at the same time, so we are conceptually trading the music we produce for the equivalent music we consume with no surplus economic value. I'll buy your album if you buy mine. Logically, the monetary flow evaporates and whatever government exists must switch from taxation to subsidization. If your elected representatives don't understand and try to prevent that like the Republican party right now, we're all in for a nasty surprise. Not saying Democrats are doing a good job at this exact moment, just saying they understand the situation slightly better. 

From a psychological/sociological perspective, having Capitalism creates a desperate need for the stress-relief of Communism and having Communism creates a desperate need for obtaining the propulsive power of Capitalism. We want the opposite of what we have. That's why i say wear a helmet, because we're approaching the point where it doesn't matter which side you're on, the car is going off the side of the cliff regardless. In the meantime, i'll just keep enjoying as much of the enjoyable i can find and throwing as much garbage into the dumpster as possible. 

We can't actually escape Marx because we're all just passengers in the self driving car. There's no AI steering, by the way, all we have is a brake pedal and a wrench to retork whichever bolts we think need it at the moment. The only real choice is to keep going or get out of the car and walk. We might find a better car to steal down the road, but it's still the same gamble. The car behind us could just as easily hit a pothole and take us out even after we've been happily walking for miles. 

S: jeez, Bottle, that's depressing. 

B: is it? Why? I don't find that part depressing. I find it depressing that so few people accept it and end up making the whole experience miserable for everyone else. I keep throwing away the garbage in any dumpster i can find, but people keep bringing it back to me like i'm supposed to love receiving intellectual garbage as a present. I don't mind the extra weight of useful things, and i don't mind carrying your useful things for a while if you need me to, but i don't want to carry your industrial strength hairdryer if it isn't useful for either of us. I want to throw it in the dumpster to lighten our collective burden. I'm not forcing you to walk with or even near me, but i'm also not screaming at you to go away. 

That's all metaphorical, by the way. I'm describing the entire socio-political apparatus using mundane terminology and real world relationships. The Right says life is better if all the money pools and the rest of us fight over it, Marx says no matter how you look at it that fight leads to its own destruction so it's better to let material wealth go and make the best of what's available, Bottle says pay me and i'll try to do a good job but i can't make any promises. 

Now, here's where it gets tough and you're going to argue. "Marxism" is nothing more than the recognition that Capitalism fails no matter which direction we take, and that we should take the direction that actually distributes the material wealth as equitably as possible, as opposed to legally because law always favors the lawmaker. 

For Helmet everything was going fine (minus breaking up in 1998 and not reforming until 2003) until Interscope dropped them for low sales in 2005. He signed with Warcon but they broke contract by not actually paying their share of tour support among other things, so ownership of the album they made returned to Helmet and everything was as well as it could be. They put out 2 more albums since then and they were making a new album as of 2019 and that's as much as i know. Page makes his actual money through other projects like film music, royalties, jazz concerts, etc. Hell, i could offer to pay for the next Helmet album if i really wanted to, i'm sure he wouldn't say no right off the bat except for the fact that i can't afford to. 

S: shut up, Bottle, you're meandering. 

B: no i'm not, it's totally relevant. What part of any of that is Capitalism? The label hopping part. The part where a guy with millions of dollars pays Page to make a Helmet album and a pressing plant to make physical copies and record stores buy them to sell to me and 900,000 of my friends. I don't have 900,000 friends, there aren't many record stores left, and there aren't any millionaires stimulating the economy by investing in a new Helmet album. I might not even buy it if they did. On the other hand, if there were some reasonable socialized system where i could submit an ongoing list of albums i wanted and they sent them to me accordingly as compensation for whatever i do, Helmet would certainly be on the list of bands i'd like my money to pay for. A Democratically Socialized music industry, it sounds ridiculous, but is the end result actually any different than walking into a record store once a paycheck and telling them exactly what you will and won't pay for? I submit that it is not, and am reasonably convinced that when properly administered the results are tangibly better than some guy in an office trying to figure out what i might buy from 3rd party internet search data. Feel free to debate.