Lord Larehip

Rap is mainstream. It hauls in BILLIONS of dollars a year. Guys like Jay Z and Li'l Wayne are so rich they have to portray themselves as pimps and drug dealers to justify their bank accounts and mansions so that their fans won't think they lost touch with the streets.

Rap and hip-hop have their own categories in the Grammys. When was the last time punk was honored at the Grammys? Jay Z has 17 Grammys from what I just read. Last I heard, Kanye West had 14. Disenfranchised, my ass. Carole King, one of the greatest songwriters of all time, only has four. Laura Nyro has written some of the greatest songs of the 20th century that made the careers of bands as Blood, Sweat & Tears, Three Dog Night and the 5th Dimension. She never won a Grammy or a Gold record. Never even released an album that cracked the Top 40. So what's so disenfranchised about rap or hip-hop? Nothing. It's music for sell-outs and posers. You've been duped. Time to wise up.

Dada gave birth to ALL those bands--all of them. Whether they or you realize it or not. Dada wasn't just about paintings--dada affected literature, graphic design, theatre, performance art, music, politics, philosophy. The earliest dada wasn't in 1916, those artists simply came up with the name. Dada really started no later than 1897 when the Grand Guignol theater opened in Paris. They put on plays depicting everything from rape to dismemberment to cannibalism to mutilation to gross deformity to incest. Gallons of fake blood were shed on the stage. Audience members often fainted because it looked real. They were the first splatter movies. They provided the bizarre, perverted sexual writings on Anais Nin.

These plays had an influence on Luis Bunuel. I'm sure you've seen this before:


Luis Buñuel: Un Chien andalou (1928) - YouTube

Bunuel made that with Dali who was, of course, a surrealist painter with close ties to the dadaists (like Magritte also was). Such movies inspired David Lynch to create "Eraserhead" in 1977 which was madly embraced by punk rockers the world over. You can't even call yourself a punk if you haven't seen it.



There was already a dadaist movement going on in New York by 1915. So by the time that Cabaret Voltaire appeared on the scene in Zurich in 1916, dada was already well underway. When surrealists as Max Ernst, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp ended up in New York fleeing the Nazis, the dada just came full circle because it was already in New York. That led to the downtown music scene which was actually started by Yoko Ono years before she met John. She converted her apartment to a place for the artists to play experimental music. It was located in a kind of slummy area of downtown New York while the upscale places like the Lincoln and Julliard were uptown, so they dubbed their music downtown music.

Artists and avant-garde musicians flocked to Ono's place to perform and talk. One of them was Andy Warhol who was so close to the Velvet Underground that he was a virtual member. And I think even you can agree that the Velvet Underground were a gigantic influence on punk. John Cale WAS an avant-garde musician--that's what he was. Sonic Youth was an outgrowth of Downtown Music with Lee Renaldo doing all kinds of experimental music. Laurie Anderson was another of the downtown artists and she was a great admirer of Beefheart and eventually befriended him. Beefheart was also an artist who displayed his work at galleries. If Beefheart's work isn't dada, it CERTAINLY has parallels:



The entire antiwar movement was dada influenced. The first people to take to the streets and tell their govt to go to hell, that they weren't going to fight their wars for them were dadaists. Cabaret Voltaire was born out of dadaist disgust over World War I (which Ernst fought in and it changed his whole outlook on life and his art).

While dada didn't invent nihilism, it embraced it and made its own contributions to it. That nihilism became a hallmark of punk whether it's the Sex Pistols chanting "No Future" over and over again or Fear's "No More Nothin'" or "After Death (You Rot in the Mud)" by (surprise) the Nihilistics.

Dada created the milieu that served as the soil from punk sprouted. No dada, no punk.