Quasi/Husker Du: Defect Ethics?
Jeff Rubard
Quasi: *Breaking Up* Is Easy To Do
"You always hurt the ones you love, that may be true/
but truer still, you always hurt the ones who love you"
The topic of "morals in art" is famously questionable, and in the
twentieth century the didactic style in literature went out of fashion
in favor of "realism"; and the value of cynicism as a guide for coping
with life ethically was massively upgraded. In the academic study of
ethics, however, a vogue began in the 1960s for studies of substantively
ethical behavior, also known as "virtue ethics"; and the major
practitioners of this art (Oxford dons) were fond of recommending great
works of literature as guides to developing an ethical sensibility. By
such standards the contemporary "substantive ethical life" (social
standards) of young people would seem impossibly poor, as they derive in
large part from pop-cultural tropes (and derivations thereof); but this
is arguably more complicated than it appears.
Here I would like to consider two recent musical acts, rather unpopular
ones actually, in this light; specifically, to consider what their
artistic praxis and its reception says about contemporary mores among a
subset of American youth. The first act, Portland's Quasi, consists of
Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss, formerly married to each other; that is,
married *before* the band began (when they were in other bands,
including one with another fellow). Coomes plays a variety of
instruments, but primarily a Roxichord: an electronic keyboard
instrument which is "period" rather than "vintage", as the sound
produces evokes no popular music of the past; Weiss plays drums, as she
does in the rather more popular Sleater-Kinney.
What is Quasi's music like? You could say it was gloomy; not a little
bit, a whole lot (all of it). The topic of much of Quasi's music is
their failed marriage, and the rest describes a life in an incredibly
hardscrabble sector of society -- young "creatives" without marketable
skills, yet unwilling to compromise their artistic vision.
Specifically, it's about a lot of unpleasant daydreams (which theme
predominates in earlier material) and recently unpleasant realities.
If we think about it a little, there's really no reason for Coomes and
Weiss to get along well; they once liked each other well enough, but
from the present vantage point this can be nothing but a problem.
But problems make good art, and Quasi is a band *privately* listened to
a great deal: their music is well-known and well-liked, but I have never
personally experienced a good response from playing a Quasi record for
someone else. What is really patent in Quasi's music is that Sam Coomes
is sensitive but not wimpy: he whines about a life which is much harder
than "tough" people are used to. But what is not patent is that Janet
Weiss, qua voice in the Quasi songs, "enables" the Sam Coomes character
to express this, and precisely by being a *bete noire* for him.
How can this be? Well, considering the semantic position known as
"quasi-realism" can help understand the ethical implications of the
Sam-Janet dynamic, and vice versa. Realism is the view that a set
of objective matters of fact outside the mind of any particular
person (in effect outside any human minds at all); "anti-realism"
the view that there are no such objective matters of fact.
Quasi-realism, developed by Simon Blackburn, is an intermediate view
which holds that the psychological *resonances* of assertions create
an effect similar to realist "facts", in that one can reason about
how something which is not the case would be by extrapolating from
things which are the case; and Blackburn recently applied this
stance to problems of practical rationality (reasoning about what
to do) in his book *Ruling Passions*, coming with something like
the skepticism of David Hume about ethical norms. But I would like to
suggest that quasi-realism, which parallels the
"transcendental-pragmatic" approach to language of Karl-Otto Apel,
can motivate another ethical stance: something like *hyper-realism*
about ethical norms, the view that not only are moral facts and norms
pertinent to ethical judgments, but also the "tone" (technical term in
Fregean semantics: *Farbung*, which is closer to the opera term
*coloratura* than "coloration").
What does this mean? Well, that in ethical life substantive actions,
*metaethical imperatives*, and the overall tendency of an interaction
all count in terms of moral evaluation at a given time. What does Quasi
teach us about this? That art can be moral, *because it is not
ethical*; it is obvious that Quasi comes out of a great deal of pain,
which the production of the music actually prolongs. But because this
is obvious, Quasi can serve as an "object lesson" about breaking up but
getting along: it won't work for either of you, but something good for
other people can come out of it. In other words, they are "minimally
moral" because the tendency of their artistic praxis is to reduce harm
generally (although harm of various sorts is involved).
Husker Du: Land Grant Records
"Government-authorized invitation don't mean a thing/
Saturation stars-and-stripes don't mean a thing"
But to make the argument that various forms of dancing around facts
are not all there is to thought, I will invoke a musical group which has
fallen out of fashion -- the Twin Cities "hardcore" act Husker Du.
Husker Du was one of the more popular "underground" acts of the
eighties: and although phenomena such as a piss-poor coolie-job in the
preening *Motorbooty* some years ago indicate that this form of "anti-FM
action" is not in step with the times, and Husker Du's earlier, even
angrier records received a positively unjust treatment at the untrained
hand of the SST Records recording engineer Spot one document of their
blistering glory does exist: the live album *The Living End*, in my
opinion the most exciting live record in any genre ever. *The Living
End* was recorded during Husker Du's final tour in 1986, and serves as a
retrospective covering all phases of their career: pure hardcore played
as fast as teenagedly possible, the pop-friendly moves of their middle
period (though their only hit "Makes No Sense At All" is not present),
and finally songs from their final records.
This last group of songs, which are extremely emotional by the standards
of popular music generally in that they are truly not introspective,
raises a very interesting question about "sentimental education":
namely, whether it is possible that some part of ethical cultivation is
necessary and some part absolutely despicable. Husker Du were products
of the unique political of the upper Midwest. These states had been the
stronghold of the Populists, who posed the first serious challenge to
the moneyed interests of the Eastern Seaboard, and as a result
land-grant colleges are the rule rather than the exception; and in the
early part of this century the Socialist Party flourished in Minnesota
and Wisconsin, electing officials all over the place.
Husker Du's music was explicitly political, and although the sentiments
expressed are for some reason somewhat indeterminate they felt
absolutely no compulsion to encode a critique of the existing order
into cultural tropes; they were the cream of the Midwest, well-fed and
well-educated boys who really didn't need help from anyone. In fact,
Bob Mould became the first openly gay American musician to be widely
accepted by youth culture precisely on the unerotic strength of Husker
Du records (although this took some time, and he has continued to be coy
with pronouns throughout his songwriting career). The romantic songs are
handled by Grant Hart, and are "power ballads" worthy of the name, but
the gender politics of Husker Du is interesting for this reason.
As I once said, Pere Ubu is "Not For Girls", because exposing them to it
creates mutual incomprehension; but Husker Du is not for girls, it's
aimed at people in power and the threat of their vociferousness is
palpable. Why not then? Because Husker Du are just obviously really
good guys: their routine (which makes big-scary contemporaries Big Black
look like Phyllis Schafly) was so aggressive on every level except
"tendentious" moral judgments about other people that they ordinarily
would just not be tolerated at all; it's quite clear they must have
built up an incredible reservoir of good will to develop the *chutzpah*
to record things like "Data Control", "In A Free Land" and "Divide And
Conquer" as in principle aimed at a mass youth market.
So if we are ever to consider the question of "natural goodness" in
connection with people encultured through American tropes, I think
Husker Du is exemplary of a small-r *republican* sensibility: the
natural adequacy of the citizen to the task of self-government, and I
think this makes a lot more sense in the American context than
recalibrating ethical discourse to a "play of presence and absence", an
excess of the former indicative of defective moral judgment. Must
murder advertise? It must advert *simpliciter*, and this is exactly
what the Huskers did not do. What was the cost? They were rather
obviously not ladykillers, start to finish; and this is no small thing,
but the passing of such a sensibility from the American scene is I think
to be mourned.