Tropige Trauben

Curating can have an important function to play, but with SY there has been a conflation of art and curatorialism - the alibi for their music's increasingly poverty at a textural and textual level is the way it supposedly makes a wider audience aware of marginal material. Sonic Youth are 'art' in all the worst senses (they possess a certain insitutional prestige, a certain standing and position, a cetain set of meta-rationales for what they do); but they are not art in the sense that there is a compelling reason for them to exist - there is no more at stake here than just another cool leisure product with all the right credentials. 

On Monday (20/04/2009) an independent student initiative for the right to free education started a peaceful occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, Croatia. They organized this action demanding the right to free education for all and the elimination of all tuition fees, at all levels of higher education: undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate. During the occupation, everyone is free to enter and leave the Faculty building, but regular classes will not be held. Instead, students have organized an alternative educational program, which consists of lectures, public discussions, workshops, movie screenings and other happenings. Everyone is free to attend these happenings, whether they are students or not.

Every evening, a plenary session will be held, at which students will decide whether they will continue with the occupation the next day. Everyone is free to attend these sessions, participate in discussions and vote, whether they are students or ordinary citizens. The issue of the right to free education is not one that concerns only the students, it is an issue of relevance for the future of the entire society, therefore every member of the society has the right to participate in decision making at the plenary sessions.

So between dubstep’s inclusion, wonky’s exclusion and funky’s limbo status, we find the central crisis that undermines the hardcore continuum in 2009: not that it has broken or is invalid, because it describes accurately in many cases the musical heart that beats in urban London and other UK urban multicultural centres. But its inflexibility in the face of edge cases and fragmentation, is causing it to be presented as fact but actually be used as a theory to make value judgments in order to preserve its own existence.