Is This The Modern World?

Over the past two years we've seen Virgin sell flights to China on the back of the Great Proletarian Revolution; Che bars and Revolution bars packaging Guevara and Lenin as a theme pub for facile media types; Kate Moss sport a Che T-shirt; Miss Selfridge adorn its shop floor with Soviet-style worker models; Red or Dead sell shoes under the gaze of Vladimir Ulyanov and Mao; style mags celebrate Paris '68 without referring to its politics; empty gestures from the People's Wardrobe; Harper's Bazaar send Naomi on a photo shoot to Cuba; Professor Head revel under the shadow of Baader's gun. A desperate desire for resonant - but sellable - symbols has permeated all areas of our 'lifestyle culture'. Consequently, our high streets and designer salons are awash with 'bourgeois anarchists' who claim they're not interested in politics while surrounding themselves with images of a generation who actually gave a shit.1 1. As soon as revolt is defined, it has provoked the measures for its own containment.. A. Trocchi

(Artwork by Scott King, words by Matt Worley)

Pol Pot Noodle

In the Nineties, the Bolshevik revolution provides the backdrop to a vodka commercial rather than the blueprint for our seizure of the means of production: Che advertises the internet. In everyday life, the actual term 'revolution' is now more likely to denote a change in banking practice than a transfer of power. As such, the most radical concepts in opposition to the capitalist spectacle are emptied of meaning and put back into circulation in the service of alienation - they become advertising slogan

(Artwork by Scott King, words by Matt Worley)

Prada Meinhoff: Carnaby Street Preachers

A predilection for radical chic has been omnipresent throughout late twentieth century culture - Warhol's Mao Tse-Tung, Joe Strummer and the Red Brigade, the Stone Roses' lemons, Public Enemy and the S1W, Black Grapes' Carlos etc. etc. etc. Concurrently, the astute revolutionary has always retained a sense of 'pop' - be it Lenin's celebration of cinema or the Red Army Faction's penchant for crushed velvet flares and white Mercedes. More recently however, due respect has been eclipsed by shallow parody as the once inspirational become an empty aesthetic for ad lads and art school fashion designers - people who, if their subject matter had their rightful way, would be swinging from the nearest lamp-post. The revolutionary has been repackaged as fashion accessory, and where Victorian dinner party hosts once invited Marx or Engels 'round for nibbles, today's chattering classes book a holiday to Cuba and purchase situationist style clothing from London's more fashionable boutiques

(Artwork by Scott King, words by Matt Worley)

Crash Essay # 3

"How Can You Think Clearly In A Record Shop?"

by Matt Worley

Pop, of course, is built on daydreams conjured up in suburbia. Pop comes from the outside looking in, from howling at the moon, from wanting a way out. Pop is a dream mass-produced, packaged and re-packaged, replicated, copied and sold back to us. It is the sound of creativity spawned from boredom; a source of ideas raised only to be pillaged. Pop is the last gasp before the day job get you, a scream in the face of nine to five, a futile alternative to washing the car. Pop is an inevitable failure, a second of brilliance and a lifetime of grey. Pop is disappointment in multiple.

(artwork by Andy Warhol)

"Crash Essay" # 2

"American Esperanto"

by Matt Worley

By which people around the world, from the Dutch to the Russians to the Japanese, speak English in an American accent; by which MTV defines indigenous culture; by which the war is fought against terrorism (when 7-11 became 9/11); by which we all wear Nike baseball caps; by which we all reveal our emotions on live TV; by which freedom is synonymous with economics; by which the west is best; by which the $ predominates; by which all determination is defined by an 'open door'; by which murder becomes a national characteristic; by which Christianity becomes a fundamentalism; by which a world series never leaves a country's shores; by which gluttony is a hobby; by which ignorance is bliss; by which the only good commie is a dead commie; by which the future is dead; by which creativity is shackled by the free market; by which god, guts and guns; by which freedom comes in a choice of fizzy drinks; by which business owns the presidency; by which the ghetto remains; by which 'soccer' is ignored and the worst world cup was '94; by which rock'n'roll emerged from the underbelly; by which civilization is surrendered.

(painting by Jasper Johns)

"Crash Essay" # 1

"What You Get Is No Tomorrow"

by Matt Worley

Perhaps there is more to admire in failure and the failed. Perhaps, in the uncompleted or the rejected lie the seedings of genuine originality. Maybe the fragmented life contains moments that remain untainted by the rounded, sanitised ordinariness of completion. If so, here's to glorious failure, to the attempted but discarded, to the misunderstood, the rejected and the dispossessed. Here's to those who aspire to nothing and so expect nothing, who forge their own criteria and reject the expected. Here's to the on-going struggle, and a pox on all those who feel they've "achieved"...

(Photo by Lantos Istvan)