Title!

I watched the Against Me! DVD, We’re Never Going Home, last night while I was trying to sleep. It was mostly ridiculous (in a generally positive way). The disc is made up of both live performances of songs, miscellaneous footage from a 2004 East Coast tour, and bits of interviews with various people: band members, ex band members, friends, and fans. It’s a strange document which I don’t totally get. If it were interspersed with video of skateboarding I would understand it—it has that kind of energy and scatological presentation. But there’s no skating and the band members don’t come across as the kind of assholes that would make that kind of video. In fact, it turns out to be much more serious and, dare I say, genuine than I expected.

Half way through the disc two people from Universal Records show up trying to woo the band to the label. This launches a whole discussion about signing to a major. A surprising number of people express acceptance-tinged ambivalence towards the idea of Against Me! signing to a major—enough people seem okay with it that I started to wonder if the DVD wasn’t laying the groundwork for the band to make the leap. The last scenes, however, are snippets of the band members saying things like “if someone wants to buy me a drink I’ll let them buy me a drink. But as far as signing to a major, it’s all bullshit” and “I’m not going to sign my life away.” It seemed a very calculated maneuver which lends the sense of genuineness to the whole thing.

The major/independent discussion is yet again another example of the ethics/politics problem. To my eyes, staying on an independent label should be seen as a political strategy designed to build viable, local, not fucked-up economic and cultural institutions and practices. Instead it is cast as some kind of ethical lapse: your band is now a sellout and therefore sux, QED. What should be seen as collective political practice becomes personal politics (are you okay with it? do you feel like you are compromising your politics?), and what are personal politics but ethics? And, ultimately, doing the ethical thing is not doing the politically useful thing*.

So how to change this? How do we extricate the ethical from the political and start to build an explicitly political (that is, not-ethical) left/radical culture?

*There’s more to say here about the supposed parity between the ethical and the political. We often judge others’ actions because we think they are compromising a certain politics. But at a certain point the political context which made that parity logical shifts, rendering the politics no longer relevant but leaving intact the ethical framework.