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

[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.