Goodbye Wave,

You Ineffectual Old Whore

     “The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.”

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

     Tonight marks the last night of the Wave Waikiki, which was launched in 1980, and featured a few of the early punky/new wave bands in Hawaii.

     But that was a long time ago. The Wave was always a tourist attraction that had little to do with the local punk, new wave, and other independent community music scenes that flourished outside its doors, before, during, and now after its existence. The club quickly devolved into a collectively self inflicted mini-police state, enforcing conformity, phony Aloha coated fascist aesthetics of MTV hipness with an “island flavor”, and all the worst aspects of the Spectacle, with no way to "talk back" to the shrieking, kick drum centered, Taylorist, dream-destroying derivative techno, and the barrages of puritanical porno-commodity alcohol hawking video imagery.

     Cheap conformity led to supermodel fashion cartoon advertising and snobbery, slowly giving way to reality television consciousness. Won’t they look back in twenty years and see all this “friends” based fashion armor, and false status flaunting class camouflage as nothing more than a return to the Cold War beehive, and the duck and cover delusions of a collective apolitical movement of fear? All the fake freedom; the centralized identity as commodity, nothing more than a cheap imitation of reality. The cocktail party, the forced laughs, the celebrity; all covering what? The market provided; we were all ENTERTAINED; we consumed our own desires when they were sold back to us in unrecognizable packaging.

     So the Wave became, for well over a decade now, a place where music went to die. The unchallenged and unquestioned supremacy of the trend found its ideological conclusion in the pathetic self-deluding pseudo-pleasure of the kick drum generation The electronic hipness, which had once been self aware of its own irony, gave way to the humorless self important impotence of club music just as the ironic spoofing of nazis in punk gave way to real nazi skinheads. The thought behind the music died and the reaction became the thing. A counter-revolution from above presented itself as if part of the “movement” itself. As long as something achieved its opposite this could be seen as rebellion against the past. The revolt against conformity and the hatred of boredom and apathy had to be replaced with those very things. From Dialectics to diarrhea.  We did our duty; we partied; nothing got broken, it was all safe and respectably “outrageous”.

     Goodbye Wave. We should dance on your putrid corpse, emerging from the sewer of your dead heart into the clear waters of our own desires. You’ll be replaced with another privatized and managed living situation, but we cannot pretend to mourn your passing. The Wave was only ever a cheap imitation of what was really needed. Outside, countless victories wait mostly unclaimed by the proletarian dreamers. Autonomous cooperative adventures, unlived, call out to us all.

Comrade Motopu, May 2006