I first came across The Stooges music almost simultaneously as when I lost my fervent religious belief (no causal relation). The Stooges may have come from Detroit, but their music reverberated through the environment of the Southern California beaches of my youth. It whispered to me that all was not what it seemed to be and fueled a sense of being in a decaying amusement park (S. Ca, but the USA in general). The spectacle during that time was full of cracks and exposed, before it was once again locked-down during the Clintonite 90s and the rise of the corporations. My main desire was to run, swim, skateboard, bodysurf, ski and bike - constantly (and find interesting people that wanted the same). The burn of constant motion was a salve for my soul. This song, more than anything, is a distillation of what I was feeling at that time and in this video you can see the S. California beach skateboard rat culture of that time (from the documentary Dogtown and the Z-Boys). Skateboarding for miles at a time, taking the unusual routes, and seeking out abandoned places to express myself physically, alerted me to the 'derive' long before I read the Situationists. The opening guitar riff, Iggy's deep voice telling us he wanted to "feel our disease" and as he mentions the "it hits me like the ocean breeze" a background vocal yells out "hey" (so familiar, as I grew up floating up and down a miles long boardwalk - that "hey" would alert me to friendly people when I was going by). When I listen to this song I feel the rush of being bodily lifted/launched by a wave and for a moment learning to fly before plowing back into the water. In a way, the boardwalks of that period, were like Times Square in New York City of the same era, before it was locked down, sanitized, and robbed of its cultural force.
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Everytime I listen to this brilliant song, I flash on the epic nights we had (my teens and early 20s) on Fiesta Island in San Diego on the weekends. No buildings, no businesses (well, no corporate businesses - underground open for business), just people having big bonfires, cars parked in dual rows, and loads of people, partying, talking and dancing. At a certain point there was so many people there on the weekends they would shut the island entrance down (one entrance in and out) from 10pm - 6am - a good thing as it was warm and if you were there you probably needed the night before you drove off.
I remember a particularly memorable 4th of July when my cousin James Benton was visiting (he was living in North Carolina at the time, we were probably 15 or 16). We went down there and thousands of people showed up to watch the Mission Bay fireworks with a local radio station musical simulcast. At a certain moment Bob Dylan's 'Rainy Day Women #12 & 35' came on and in between the dual car rows, with massive speakers all down the line, hundreds of people spontaneously lined up in two rows facing each other, arm in arm, with their arms linked chorus style, and legs kicking as if they were rockettes, singing as loud as they could, laughing our asses off and kicking our legs. At the end, I remember enveloping Jim in a big bear hug and laughingly asking him if he was having a good time.
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Anderson, Katherine J. "On the Absurdity of Ethical Capitalism." Public Books (May 3, 2019) ["Some critics have categorized Riley’s film as “over-the-top-madness,” deciding that it devolves into the “preposterous” despite its strong start. What it shows us, though, is fundamentally real. The problem, as ever, is whose life gets to count as real, and whose does not. In the same way the Western literary canon defined “realism” as a tidy linear narrative about everyday middle-class white life, and dismissed the stories that didn’t fit that narrative as something else—magical realism (postcolonial literature), Afrofuturism, multiethnic literature, and so on—some have characterized this film as absurd, in the sense of “ridiculously unreasonable” or “extremely silly.” What many others have rightly noted, however, is that Sorry to Bother You should be considered in the tradition of absurdist fiction, which depicts the world as having no rational or orderly relationship to human life, often through satire. That is, though Riley’s film relies on an absurdist aesthetic, its relationship to human life is entirely rational, because it narrates the precarious reality of certain lives as a logical and very real extension of Western capitalist history."]
"Finding the Life of the Party in Cold Water." Current (September 16, 2018)
McCarthy, Tom and Ed Pilkington. "The Missing Six Weeks: How Trump Failed the Biggest Test of His Life." The Guardian (March 28, 2020)
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