“What would you like to see change?”
“The current administration!”

Below you’ll find a few choice snips from Mike Appelstein’s terrific interview with The Velvet Underground’s Maureen “Moe” Tucker, who disappointed aging left-wing hipsters everywhere when she dared step off the artistic thought-plantation to take a controversial stand against socialism. Prepare to fall in love. Like all the tough, smart women on our side, Tucker is informed, outspoken, articulate, and puts the awe in awesome.

I’m going to take things a little out of order to allow Tucker to address her despondent ”fans” first:

What are your feelings about the online reactions [to you being a Tea Partier]? Many people seem upset or outraged.

I’m stunned that so many people who call themselves liberal yet are completely intolerant. I thought liberals loved everyone: the poor, the immigrant, the gays, the handicapped, the minorities, dogs, cats, all eye colors, all hair colors! Peace, love, bull! Curious they have no tolerance whatsoever for anyone who doesn’t think exactly as they do. You disagree and you’re immediately called a fool, a Nazi, a racist. That’s pretty f’d up!! I would never judge someone based on their political views. Their honesty, integrity, kindness to others, generosity? Yes. Politics? No!

Musician or not, one of the first things you learn when you cross over into the light from the darkside is that conservatives were much nicer to you when you were a liberal than liberals are to you when you’re a conservative.

Anyway, before I turn you over to Moe, let’s all take a moment to wish Patrick Goldstein – the blacklisting bully of the L.A. Times – best of luck when it comes to diminishing  this resume… (more…)

 So Moe Tucker is a tea partier.

If you don’t know her, she was the drummer for the hippest band of all time, the Velvet Underground – managed by Andy Warhol and home to Lou Reed, Nico and John Cale. An inspiration to disaffected slackers, no band was cooler, and just about every group you hear these days ripped them off.

But now, blogs have found out that Moe hit a Tea Party rally last April, where she railed against the direction of this country. Check it out, check it outers…

——

So what happens when the coolest cucumber rejects those precious values held by the vintage tee-shirt wearing, status quo left?

Let the whining commence.

Here are some choice laments from bloggers after discovering Moe ain’t like them:

I was really really heartbroken cause i love her solo albums and had always interpreted the lyrics to be fairly liberal.I am spending the day in mourning for Moe.

I wouldn’t put it past Wal-Mart to put an additive in the employee’s water fountains that turns them into tea-partiers

Lots of working stiffs are Tea Party members, more fools they, so if indeed it’s Tucker she’s just getting shafted by a new boss now.

I still love Moe… I can only hope that she, like so many others, are being misled into voting against their own interests. Love you Moe; don’t be fooled.

Poor things. (more…)

Part 1 – Introduction

The bats have left the bell tower, the victims have been bled… - Bauhaus, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”

Goth is dead.

Well, OK, maybe not.  But if it is not dead, exactly, Goth certainly isn’t what it once was.  In this, Goth is rather like conservatism – with which it shares much (more on that later) – a glorious 1980’s heyday, followed by a confused 1990’s…and a disastrous 2000’s. 

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True, some elements of Goth limp along in the new millennium, having been cannibalized by, and absorbed into, mainstream culture.  In some instances, co-opted bits of Goth have been so deracinated as to seem entirely anomalous – witness the black hair, black eyeliner, and black nail polish of the latest American Idol runner up; like claws on a cow, once dangerous and distinct trappings draped on an entirely neutered and non threatening pop singer. (more…)

“They say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” —Andy Warhol

"I adore America and these are some comments on it. My image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, and practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us." —Andy Warhol, 1962

Americans love rebels, even without cause or clue. Enough hip, smart, young people who are tired of having their faces and futures pushed into to sewage of bad ideas, pointless existences, and totalitarian ideologies, with strong support and encouragement, could really make a difference in the world. In contemporary context, they would be true anti-heroes, rebelling against the brave new world of ersatz freedom and the all-powerful fascist state, against crushing conformity and the annihilation of the rights of the individual.

Such things can and do happen.  Some might say they happened in the nineteen-sixties.  And they did—in Czechoslovakia. (more…)