PRADA MEINHOF  Essay by Matt Worley. November 1999.

1. 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.

2. Pol Pot Noodle
Such a development has coincided with the domestication of the radical. 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 slogans.

3. 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

4. Lipstick Traitors
Irony, which began as the weapon of the outsider and has become the white flag of the thwarted idealist. J. Burchill

5. An Urban Guerrilla Called Barnsley Walks Into A Bar...
In a world where style necessarily overrides substance therefore, the flickering images of old Bolsheviks and situationist revolutionaries may offer a subconscious reminder of a cogent agenda and 'the good old cause'. For our 'useless generation' however, whose aspirations have been stunted by meaningless jobs and the proliferation of consumer comforts peddled by a collusive media, revolutionary icons appear to be just one more relic to be recycled alongside Abba and Kung Fu.

6. The Prada Meinhof
Juxtaposing radical chic with a pair of New Balance trainers and enormous turn-ups - and looking more like a Japanese tourist than Daniel Cohn-Bendit - the Prada Meinhof is the encapsulation of all this. Armed only with an undue sense of their own importance, the Pradas are the fickle victims and perpetrators of the encroaching 'lifestyle' culture. They remain proudly apolitical and eternally grounded in the halcyon days of university bar banality. Aspiration extends no further than Soho, designer glasses, and the replication of a media invented design for life - their appropriation of radical symbols no different to Chris Evan's 'anarchic' Noel Edmonds-ism. Pradas are so embalmed in both irony and post modernist vapidity that they wilfully succumb to the shallow regurgitation and appropriation of yesteryear with no desire or inclination to grasp the (in)significance of their activity. They are collaborators, spewed out of the home counties and 'middle-upper' London to perpetuate the steady commodification of our social and cultural fabric.

7. The Stoke Newington One
In a different corner of London, the insipid Prada perspective is exchanged for the equally loathsome bedsit anarchist. Reared on a diet of roll-ups and abstract notions forged from a half-arsed reading of cultural theory, our hero wallows in his/her own impotence. Dismissive of existing structures and any activity outside of their own, the bedsitter dreams of 'carving out his/her own space', of becoming 'post-theory', of existing 'outside of the mainstream' - while uniformly failing to formulate a cogent response. Subsequently, their 'opposition' falls into futility as they argue themselves into an ideological cul de sac that succeeds only in misanthropically explaining society's general indifference to themselves. Effectively, these armchair radicals are mere petty-bourgeois aesthetes for whom content is subordinate to intellectualism. While they look in the mirror and see some modern-day Debord/Burroughs/Solanas, the rest of us see the only valid argument for conscription.

8. Straight to Hell (Stars In Your Eyes)
The Stoke Newington's self-defined integrity has led to their irrelevence. No one likes you and no one cares. Given the opportunity to answer a direct question, or gain any relevance through participation, the Stoke Newington will descend into 'O' level pyschobabble, maintaining an aura of expertise while looking down on anyone foolish enough to show an interest with the contempt that only an old-holburn smoking, pseudo-anarcho, failed art college technician, stupid-hat and black 501 wearing, middle-aged, self publishing in editions of two (one for the archive), bus fare dodging, net-surfing, looking for the art in everything, major project planning (but never completing), modern-relic can. In every town, in the same clothes, in every pub next to the art school they attended fifteen years ago, a monologue of dissent - interspersed with questions of how to apply for lottery grants - continues until the locally brewed bitter takes its toll and the self-appointed 'Guy Debord' turns into Jeremy Clarkson', nicking proper cigarettes and groping foundation students - Cunt.

9. Portrait of a Serial Sipper
In between, the equally useless aesthete complements both the banality of the Prada's and the futility of the Stoke Newington. Sipping their bottled beer, desperately trying to keep their composure, the cultural aesthete can acknowledge the cultural significance of the first Slade album while Òrecognising that its seemingly inherent male aggression counters Duchamp's emasculation of art and embraces the underlying meaning of Countdown.Ó For the aesthete - as the expert on everything but the producer of absolutely nothing - both the revolutionary signifier and its recontextualisation are merely symbols of his/her own cultural knowledge. S/he is a cultural sponge: bloated and ineffective.

10. Who Makes The Nazis?
Capital's ability to appropriate and reterritorialise its antithesis has long been a source of its strength, and this is particularly evident in a climate where culture - or the leisure industry - plays a dominant role in the economy. As commodities are invented and consistently repackaged in an attempt to define our desires/ambition, the image of revolt is systematically incorporated into futile channels of ineffectiveness. Theories developed by those opposed to capital are transformed in order to strengthen those who disarm the people (Saatchi, Branson, Murdoch, Wagadon ad infinitum). As such, our discontent is thrown back in our faces in the form of neutralisation through saturation, alienation through nullification - as the demeaning, or recontextualising of the radical serves to both marginalise and commodify dissent.

11. The Internationale
Anna Key, Anna Key, she's the only girl for me. Anna Key, Anna Key, she's the only girl for me. From the late 70's sitcom Keep It In The Family

12. Jarvis Cocker: Tomorrow's Noel Edmonds
Nowhere is this more apparent than in pop, where signifiers are utilised to place creativity within a designated part of the spectacle. NME cover stars are forever eulogising their 'alternative lifestyle'in an attempt to personify the mythical 'outsider-artist'. Similarly, Hip Hop gangsterism has become an acceptable 'lifestyle choice' within the context of a CD case and a record contract - indeed, second hand 'bad boy' rhetoric/gestures now form one half of the boy-band hard/sensitive formula. Even techno (Underground Resistance) and drum 'n' bass (Terrorist, Krust's 'Warhead') regularly utilise radical and military terminology to designate a distinct attitude/position, although, more often than not, such rhetoric amounts to no more than a male fetishisation of the violent, as opposed to a cohesive agenda. In the same way that Punk Rock ended up selling Kit Kats and postcards, our 'rave generation' now deliver the soundtrack to deodourant commercials.

13. Consumption Is A Substitute For Democracy
In many ways, the re-emergence of revolutionary imagery - demeaned and recontextualised - underlines the paucity of i) our political choice, and ii) our desire to act. As revolutionary and radical imagery and language is utilised by capital to complement its own existence, the image becomes subordinate to its contextual label - the bar/shirt/bag. Moreover, the constant reterritorialisation removes the intrinsic value of revolution and effectively perpetuates the illusion that everything has been seen and done before. At the end of the twentieth century therefore, our political passivity mirrors our subordination to consumerism while reinforcing our social alienation. With the traditional channels of revolt no longer open, we lack the imagination to do anything but turn rebellion into money.

14.You Must Choose Brothers, You Must Choose - Whether You're Gonna Be Part Of The Problem Or You're Gonna Be Part Of The Solution
I identified with Ulrike Meinhof. The same blocked emotions that turn some people into junkies turn others into terrorists - A form of idealism that leads down different paths. Marianne Faithfull

EVER GET THE FEELING YOU'VE BEEN CHEATED?  
Essay by Matt Worley. November 1999.

King Mob: Football hooligans are the avant-garde of the English working class.

The cultural landscape has changed. One indication of this is the glossy document issued by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in July 1999 as part of the New Labour government's continuing attempt to subject Britain to a branding process. Flip through a copy of Britain's Popular Music Industry and the signifiers that jump out at you - the late 80s Hacienda nightclub in Manchester, Skint Records in Brighton, Creation Record's boss Alan McGee, the Manic Street Preachers, Glastonbury - offer a digest of anti-Thatcherite cultural resistance which has become the new heritage semiosis of the Blairite creative industries. In fact the document feels little different from the latest issue of i-D (a venerable style mag increasingly interested in curating its own past).

What's happened? It's the same old story. The noncomformist strains of British Pop Modernism offer a challenge to the discredited authority of established institutions by mobilising the spectre of mass insurrection. It is at this point - the revolutionary flashpoint - that a counter-culture begins to define itself as an avant-garde operating at the leading edge of history. Think of how the countryside raves of the late 80s provoked a police response comparable in its organised hostility only to the earlier crackdown on striking miners and flying pickets. Think of how punk's incendiary rhetoric of class war heralded the street riots of the early 80s. Think of how 60s hippies tuned into a crisis culture of mass demonstrations and wildcat strikes. Think of What Time Is Love?, White Riot and Street Fighting Man.

But then think of how easily avant-gardism slides into elitism as the agents of cultural barbarism take over from their weakened opponents, disown their revolutionary past and begin the business of reforming the institutions they once opposed. Think of Mick Jagger at the end of Performance prophesying his later incarnation as a businessman. Think of the Sex Pistols reforming under the Britpop flag of convenience. Think of the Prodigy generating a stadium rock brand name out of the "faceless techno bollocks" which the music industry once found so threatening. This is how the British power structure renews itself - through a game of seduction and abandonment which rewards the clever few and betrays the dull majority.

For the winners who go on to become the new caste of reactionary patrician aesthetes this may well feel like some guilty enigma of arrival. For the losers it's just business as usual. It's what twentieth century English avant-gardist Wyndham Lewis referred to as the "youth racket". How long has this racket been going on? Lewis suggested that the English avant-garde was always a disguised rear-guard eager to immolate itself before the precedent of some mythical Year Zero. For him it was 1914. For many of us now it's 1977 or 1988. But maybe for modern British culture as a whole it's 1649. This year marked the high point of the English revolution. It was the period after the sovereign had been executed when the institutions of church and state were not just up for grabs but ready to be demolished. It didn't happen. The counter-revolutionary roll-back of 1660 not only stalled the English revolution but also occulted the rise to power of a British middle class which by 1688 had cut its deal with the old aristocracy to take possession of the rotten institutions it had previously threatened to destroy. We still live in the shadow of this stealth coup. Whereas the French Revolution of 1789 saw a confident French bourgeoisie take the national stage as visible directors of their own affairs, the British middle classes have remained opaque. They understood early on the advantages of staging a disappearing trick from their own history and have been regularly covering up the signs of their faked death ever since.

The reality of the situation facing any serious agent of cultural revolution is that the British middle classes have always been avant-garde from the very start. Having no voice of their own they are condemned to ventriloquise their judgements in the accents of their adversaries which is why they signify in public as either mock prole or pastiche posh. The classic weapons of the avant-garde - dissimulation, provocation, terror - have always belonged to the British middle class who operate with what dissident English surrealist Patrick Keiller calls "an Orwellian cloak". They fail to do their antagonists the service of making themselves visible as targets and so the whole French avant-garde game of provoking a self-satisfied bourgeoisie with cavalier shocks and perfumed manifestos fails to work in England.

The English nonconformist has a harder task. They must resist the provocation offered to make themselves available as a potential middle class recruit and accept instead a condition of internal exile. They must pursue a doctrine of counter-insurgency in the cultural domain which see them perfecting the arts of nomadic warfare with its feints, vanishings, dirty tricks and sudden strikes. This may even lead them to experiment with the weapons of the occult - sympathetic magic, curses, action at a distance - as a means of demoralising the enemy. They must become more like the devils they behold in order to overcome them.

There have been signs of an occult avant-garde renaissance in 90s England. The Association of Autonomous Astronauts, the London Psychogeographical Association, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Inventory, I/O/D and Crash! have all in their different ways been active in the tears, gaps and creases of an increasingly homogeneous media landscape. But is this enough? Maybe what we need now are ecstatic revolutionary heroes who go beyond the proper bounds of success and failure into a sacred ground of collective gnosis skirted by the dangers of nihilism, suicide and amnesia. Maybe what we need are more people of the calibre of William Thompson.

Do you see him? There he is... it's 1649 and the English revolution is petering out into the mud of compromise and fratricide... the usual bloody chaos. The military proletariat of the New Model Army stand on the edge of pushing forward into a New Jerusalem but are betrayed by the familiar political cowardice of the officer class... Thompson's brother has just been shot for leading a mutiny at Salisbury... poor Jimmy. Fuck it! William raises the standard of revolt at Banbury with 400 cavalry but is forced to disperse... he escapes with a dozen guys and his troop pass through the night of the English rural industrial landscape... the long riders of a revolution still to come.