“People are thinking different about the group. Rock and roll started as just pure exploitation trash. “Pink socks are cool, write a song about pink socks.” And exploit that. Or a dance move. Then in the art age — Emerson Lake and Palmer — everything became very precious, arty and in a sense punk…
“I do have a strict rule with the groups — five-year plan. I think of myself as kind of a socialist. And I’m an unreconstructed socialist. I’m like a socialist from the ’30s who takes their orders from Stalin and the Comintern. So I’m really into the five-year-plan model for a rock-and-roll group. Five or six. The Beatles did it all in six years, pretty much. And I think that’s a pretty good amount of time — or less.
But one aspect of a group — and I’m writing a book right now, it’s out this winter. It’s a manual, and it’s called “Supernatural Strategies For Starting a Rock ‘N’ Roll Group.” And one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about with rock and roll groups is how they’re very much based on repetition. Everything’s about repetition with a rock and roll group. And in a sense the rock and roll group seems like a post-industrial kind of way to become machines. I know Kraftwerk talks about this, they talk about this thing, “The Man-Machine.” To me the group is really like a bunch of people acting like a machine, trying to approximate machine parts. Where these kind of nothing parts form together and they make something. But one of the main aspects of the group is that there’s really no point. It’s just them repeating something over and over again is the point. Rock and roll is unlike a play or a novel or a film. Because it’s just repetition. When a group plays, it’s not like “Hamlet,” it doesn’t have a resolution. There’s no resolution to a group. And it’s really existential. And in fact, I coined a term for it. I call it “existential repetition.” Actually, if you read about machine-age philosophers like Nietzche, he talks about the “eternal recurrence of the same.” And that’s essentially machine-age philosophers talking about giving up the linear, Western idea that everything has to have a resolution. They were looking at the Norse and the Hindus and stuff like that and thinking about this whole cycle thing.” - I was a bit sniffy about the idea of The Make Up reforming, but as ever, Ian S. proves himself too cool too actually exist on our flawed earth.
