Rules Of The Game #7: Hero Story

[koganbot]

This week's column:

Hero Story

This is something of a prequel to my book, since it ends where the book starts, with the idea that we tend to define ourselves as corruptible and contaminated. Also, I think it's a pretty great piece; in fact, a desire to see it in print was one of my motives for proposing the idea of a column to the Las Vegas Weekly in the first place.

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.*

Also, when I get the chance (I'm going to the eye doctor first, which means I'll be blind for half the day) I'm going to see how I can relate the Hero Story to notions of social class, and maybe will respond on this thread to some of Alex's, Hazel's, Dave's, Mark's, Kat's, Martin's, Josh's, et al.'s comments about class in previous koganbot comment threads. E.g., is "Hero" just a role or is it also a class? I'd say it's at least sometimes the latter, though it's a class that people can enter or leave. I also think that class relations can help structure a social environment even when the people in that environment recognize that no one fits into the classes. E.g., high school students can believe that no one is actually a prep or a freak or a jock or a skater or a greaser or a burnout or a hood (that is, everyone has characteristics that puts him at odds with the categories he's supposedly near to) but also recognize that these terms can map the social landscape. And crucial to the idea of social class is that there be some inequality: of power, wealth, prestige, competence, jurisdiction, beauty, something. One thing that's going on in the Hero Story is a misalignment - prestige comes from opposing power (or creating your own power in opposition to some other power). And the Hero Story is really unclear as to who holds the power that the Hero is defying: is it the suits? the conformist masses? the conformist musicians? And the Hero Story being a story, it needs some problem or conflict or it has no plot, and since class implies inequality and conflict, the Hero Story would welcome the notion of "class," even when it's attempting to overthrow the notion.

*UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"class relations can help structure a social environment": yes, it's like a map helps you find your way, even though the lines on the map aren't always there in the world (some of them are but some of them aren't)

"hero as class" -- isn't the thing with categorisation when you want to use a description to help move a situation from A to B, so you map A (to show what's wrong with it), and it tends to freeze it in ppl's mind as HOW THINGS EVER WERE AND WILL BE -- the useful idea of hero is that it is a story, ie an arc, a journey, a movement, it embodies action-towards-transformation (of self AND of the world), but can (like any written description) get trapped in the first roleplaying tableau (description as prescription)

so "hero as class" is brilliant if it gets things moving, but horrible if it causes things to get stuck

Hero as class?

[koganbot]

I now don't remember what was on my mind when I asked "Is 'Hero' just a role or can it be a class?" Two possibilities:

(1) A class (or "class") can consider itself heroic. E.g., freaks in the '60s didn't just tell a hero story about themselves as individuals, but about themselves as a class. Punks in the '70s. Alternative and indie kids from the '80s on. Or a "vanguard" hero class can lead the "proletariat" (another hero class, working-class with class consciousness).

(2) (i) Hero as role = performer stands up and acts different and daring

(ii) Hero as category = someone is the sort of person who stands up and acts different and daring

(iii) Hero as class? = whole professions and avocations and categories (musicians, private detectives, dirt-bike racers, proletarians, freaks) are considered the sort of people who should act different and daring, even if many individuals within these professions and avocations and categories often fail to be daring and different (this is why we tell hero stories about musicians but not about phone repairmen) - so the hero class would be the aggregate of the heroic categories

(iv) Hero as class = once you do something daring and different you are now marked as belonging to a breed apart (in this sense, "hero" can be a class in the way that "celebrity" can be a class)(that is, if we're willing to consider "celebrity" a cast)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Isn't the answer to the question "Why do we tell the hero story?" contained in the first paragraph, about not talking about why music moves us - the hero story is the validation for our being moved by music, and its telling becomes a stand-in for the story of that emotion.

(That's what I'm arguing in my Pitchfork column that I submitted last night, anyway!)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

But the Hero Story is often true. Especially as it pertains to your role as a critic pointing out why "everyone else" using a Hero Story is sidestepping their emotions/movement-as-actual-person to tell a (dumbass) Hero Story. I don't often use the "characters" in my general critical re-mapping (as it were) as Heroes -- they're too flawed; this is part of what interests me in their music (Ashlee (and whoever else's) ability to alchemize mundanities into profundity doesn't make her a hero in a hero story; it makes her worth serious emotional and intellectual investment).

But I do admit to casting myself in a world of the "snookered" to get my points across -- usually because I'm right and my world is really small and manageable (i.e. I can pretty much Google the earth hyuck), but sometimes just to help the point along. The point is not to LOSE that emotional movement in the process, which is what I fear in some of my columns (but if the music wasn't really moving me, why would I bother? That's not nec. rhetorical; I actually ask myself this a bunch!).

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

If it wasn't often true it wouldn't be much good as a validation! One can tell a truth to avoid telling another truth, I think.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Truth.

[koganbot]

But the Hero Story doesn't just work as validation, it's part of my experience of a lot of music. "Heroin" and "Sister Ray" still sound risky to me, even though I know that for an indie band to make music that tries to sound like that now would be the opposite of risk, and that there's no longer any risk in my listening to it. (The risk in my listening to it then wasn't so much that all but two or three people I knew thought that it was utter garbage, but that I felt it was a challenge to me, that the music held me in contempt.) Of course, there's risk and then there's risk: some members of the Plastic People Of The Universe ended up in Czechoslovakian jails for playing music that sounded like the Velvet Underground, and Vaclav Havel used part of the band's name in his Velvet Revolution that overthrew the government of Czechoslovakia. But I still think that the relatively small risk that, e.g., Pink took to make "Don't Let Me Get Me" (an adventure that the song refers to in its lyrics) enriches the song, and I think you lose something by not knowing the risk is there. (I say this even though I prefer "There You Go," the type of r&b Pink jettisoned in order to make "Don't Let Me Get Me.")*

I could do without the critical context that makes my championing Ashlee and Paris slightly heroic, since I've got better things to do than think about the babies, bullies, bores, and idiots whose catcalls make my musical analysis a tiny bit "risky." But back in 1973 (see p. 121 of my book: "This was part of the atmosphere too, part of the event for me, standing up and dancing, withstanding the contempt") standing against an earlier generation of bullies and bores added energy to my love for the Dolls.

*It was while reviewing Pink and Shakira (who also fought her record company) that I got the idea to write down the Hero Story.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

The clip I saw on VH1 yesterday of Dee Snider saying (while washing his expensive car) that he can no longer conjure up the kind of self-righteous anger that inspired "We're Not Gonna Take It" springs to mind...

I think it's most certainly a role, because if it was a class it would be so gigantic as to be useless. Much of contemporary conservative discourse centers around various hero stories--see, for instance, David Brooks' recent column on Bush v. Tolstoy (!). It's not exactly absent from the left, either. I think most people use hero stories to make their day-to-day lives more bearable.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Funny, I wrote something about the Zero Story that we (the drudgey trodden-upon types) also tell ourselves in less, er, heroic fashion to rationalize NOT putting ourselves in a (tiring) hero narrative. Might post something about that later. (Frank, did you see anything in that exchange that was pertinent to your own points in HS? Felt kind of like quasi-aimless riffing to me, but it was fun to write and it's interesting to think that sometimes we extract ourselves from the Hero Story that might be more "truthful" in a given interest than the Zero Story [can't right now, too busy; what difference can I really make, anyway] we claim to be sorta stuck in -- i.e., it's not that hard to continually challenge yourself but, as Mike says, it can be unbearable in the day-to-day sense. I had a convo with my friend Ian on the phone the other day about lazy classical music critics in NYT, and said it's funny that cultural/art criticism seems to be one place where "this is really hard" is a kind of justifiable defense on occasion. "Writing about music is really hard, so here's this thought piece that dances around the subject instead." Ian's retort: "you guys, seriously, heart surgery is really hard sometimes!!")

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

"in a given situation," not "interest."

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

For reference.

Dereliction of curiosity

[koganbot]

Haven't had a chance to look at anyone else's livejournal in the last two weeks. Damn, I'm so far behind.