CHAPTER 19

COMMUNICATING WITH THOSE OUTSIDE OF THE GROUP

Communicating your ideas to your band will be a challenge, whether they are practical, political, or musical. Communicating musical ideas in a band can be an especially humiliating experience for those who haven’t had musical training. Often a group will consist of some members who know musical jargon and others who don’t. While the obvious solution would be for the novices to learn the basic vocabulary of notation, chords, and the like, the unlearned are often superstitious—even fiercely proud of their inability to comprehend the elite patois of the craftsman. And there is something to this.

After all, the more one knows about the craft of music, the further one is tempted to steer one’s ship from the clichés that comprise popular songwriting, with its inherently satisfying and comforting verse-chorus structure. While on paper this seems like a good thing, it might not actually be, for the music-listening population is often a passive body, not at all invested in the nuances of creation or expression, but hooked on a feeling to which they were introduced in their formative years, a feeling of titillation unmatched for them since Casey Kasem’s Top Five Countdown at ten.

The simplicity and naïveté of the novice’s inventions lead to pop winners, as opposed to the muso’s compositions, which appeal more to a select group of sophisticates. This is a niche market but it can still sustain a career if the instrument one has mastered is popular enough. There are enough guitar players that a guitarist could sustain him or herself by selling exclusively to other guitar players, for example. Bassists, being more self-effacing, have a harder time seeking out an audience or “community.”

Even more difficult than speaking to your group, though, will be the experience of talking to those outside of your group, be they musicians in other groups, people in management, booking, club ownership, or, of course, spectators at your concerts. These people might have no idea “where you’re coming from.” There are also those who work at gas stations your group might use, restaurants you’ll have to dine at, and the police, who will harass your group for its troublesome attitude. In fact, despite your elitist conceits and artistic introversion, the group will often have to communicate with people outside of the group, people who don’t share your understanding of what is and isn’t important, reasonable, or “cool.”

Therefore, this chapter will deal with methods of communicating with the hoi polloi. This is a neglected topic. There is much talk these days about “conservationism,” but little about “conversationism” or “the science of conversation.”

Conservation is obviously a pressing need, as the Earth struggles to deal with its most audacious and out-of-control inhabitants. Many people have gone “green,” seeking to placate the rage their mother planet feels at their selfishness and wastefulness with offerings of specially sorted trash.

Meanwhile, with recent video game innovations, the advent of cyberscatting, robust new online dating sites, the promise of actual sex robots, video-blogging, and e-trading, conversation now seems as scarce as some of the endangered species the conservationists warn us about. In fact, people rarely engage in discourse at all anymore, preferring instead to grunt incomprehensibly in the throes of sensual abandon or narcotic-induced emancipation.

Of course, there are the cell phone users that you see on the street, but they are not engaging in conversation. They are doing something more akin to smoking, as we’ve mentioned previously in this text.

Anyway, even though right now it seems like a tiresome pose or a party trick, conversation will be necessary for the group, as it was in the Dutch coffeehouses of the seventeenth century. Indeed, to meet the challenges it will face, the group shall need to be not only versed in the ways of conversation, but be masters of it.

This is a brief guide on how to conduct a discussion or “conversation,” for those who are new to the form or just a little bit rusty. If the group member strictly adheres to the guidelines provided, we are confident that he or she will master the challenges particular to engaging in conversational discourse.

To start with, let’s talk about what conversation is. Basically, conversation is an exchange between two people using language. One of the first things to consider when discussing conversation, then, is language itself. What is it?

 

I. WHAT IS “LANGUAGE”?

Simply put, language is sounds that are made by talking. And as the saying goes, “People will talk.” Indeed, language—whether spoken or signed—is what makes people “people.” Other creatures may or may not have language (humanity is fiercely divided on this issue), but regardless, it is our names for things that make humans feel distinct from the brutes of the forest. Without these names for other things, people would be in Zen oneness with the universe and all matter would be equivocal—mere objects to stick in one’s mouth to test edibility.

Just as people’s identities are based on language, so is organized conflict often based on the words one group of people share as opposed to another.

This is often “intralingual”—or “within one language”—and it usually involves one economic “class” crushing another. The plum-in-the-mouth English aristocrat subjugating the slang-rhyming Cockney yob, for example. Popular song dramatizes such problems as irreconcilable (i.e., “You say tomato, I say tomahto/Let’s call the whole thing off”).

Conflicts arise between similarly classed speakers of the same language over very small differences in dialect. Serbians and Croatians, for example, are ancient antagonists partly because Serbians drop an “h” in the medial position of certain nouns.

Nationalism and wars based on national expansion are often language-based affairs. The first thing an imperial nation does when consolidating power over recalcitrant tribes is to eradicate their language (i.e., Catalan and Basque by the Spanish, Welsh by the English, and so on). It’s no minor detail that the first order of business for Zionists was to develop a working, everyday version of Hebrew (formerly an esoteric rabbinical tongue) when establishing Israel. Without a distinct official language, a country is in an eternal identity crisis (just look at San Marino, Canada, the USA, Paraguay, and Liechtenstein).

Each language betrays its speakers’ concerns and obsessions. The Inuit Eskimos, for example, famously have three hundred words for snow but only one for cocaine, while for North Americans these statistics are reversed. Verbal language is central to who we are.

 

II. STRATEGIES: WHAT TO DO WHEN SOMEONE TALKS TO YOU

As we have shown, language is not always “just talk.” Sometimes it is quite dangerous. It often leads to hurt feelings and bloodshed, as in the case of the Balkan countries. Therefore, it is advisable to avoid conversation. If it can’t be avoided, one must learn to best one’s opponent, ruthlessly and efficiently. Conversation can be seen as a kind of fencing, a delicate and highly stylized duel between competing intellects. It is a boxing match between brains, with the knockout punch delivered by the withering rebuttal that has no retort—a “bust out,” in street argot. In this kind of struggle, knowledge is power, and so one must spend many of one’s nonconversational hours learning about just about everything.

Since you are not looking for trouble, you should avoid eye contact, which could be taken as an invitation to talk. But sometimes, as with a mugging, discourse will be initiated by another party without any prompting. Usually it will be in a seemingly innocuous way revolving around the weather or a recent event, such as a competitive ball game. Weather and sport are the subjects which humanity considers “within bounds” because they are supposedly apolitical, nondenominational, cross-cultural, and impersonal. But because of their meaninglessness, they are actually highly suspicious things to discuss. Indeed, however sympathetic the rhetorician, supposedly innocent forays such as these are almost certainly a Trojan horse—guised as a gift but concealing an invasive intent to plunder. But don’t be alarmed. There are ways to protect oneself.

Since knowledge is power, it’s important to verse oneself on the travails of the local team so as to be ready for such gambits. If one cannot bring oneself to do so, remember that the local team is almost certainly 1) in a period of rebuilding; 2) gonna surprise a lot of people this year; and 3) not getting any respect. They never do, not from the national press or the referees, or even the goddamned commissioner! Shake your head wistfully when you discuss this.

Weather as a conversation is really just a series of exclamations, grunts, and wheezing. Sometimes an exaggerated gesture is appropriate. Hay fever is something to invoke too, as are allergies that just appeared this year. Also usable is the difference between dry heat and humidity and the conditions of this season as opposed to the one just past. Or you can just drool and babble incomprehensibly, since it’s the same thing.

If you can keep the talk centered on the bogus pretense your attacker has chosen until you can engineer your getaway, you have “won” the confrontation. It’s the equivalent of burning the Trojan horse at the Gates of Troy as its cloistered army screams in agony, the flames consuming them in a tomb of their own construction. Take that, Thrasymedes!

 

III. CONVERSATION and MIND CONTROL

We see in the above situation that the inane amplifier of bogus chitchat is easily shut down by the intrepid student of conversationism. But there are other scenarios that are more complicated. One danger comes when one is asked to do something.

Let’s consider a scenario: You are standing “in the way.” Someone needs to “get by.” “Excuse me,” the passerby says. On first inspection, the asker seems to be begging to be forgiven for asking you to move. How satisfying for you to be deferred to! As you bask in their subservience, you deign to move in compliance with their wishes. But hold on a moment! On closer inspection, the passerby is (albeit obsequiously) barking an order for you to get out of their way. Now suddenly it is “their” way. How did it become their way? What about your way? Or at least, what it was in the beginning: the way.

The duplicity, difficulty, and disingenuousness exemplified by this exchange is what conversation is all about. It is also an insight into the reason that conversation is being abandoned by so many monks and nuns and silence-vowing holy figures, who have simply decided, “Enough is enough.” Unfortunately, however, one must converse with other humans to a) get what one wants; and b) to get stuff one sort of wants. The stuff “one wants” could be an answer to an important question (“Where can I get a cup of coffee?”), the seduction of a potential mate (“I like the Cure too”), or solitude (“No thank you, I’m quite happy with my church”). The stuff one “sort of wants” is really anything and everything that’s not outright harmful—what Heidegger called stuffenlieber.

When viewed in such a disarmingly frank way, we see that conversation can be explained in the same scientific terms that game theorists use when they study other human pastimes.

Indeed, almost all “mind control,” as practiced by the CIA—which, incidentally, spends billions on research into it and the application of it every year—takes its form as mere conversation (albeit highly choreographed conversation with you, the victim, similar to the rube witnessing a shell game). In fact, since the USA is a corporatist government, its intelligence services actually take their cues from their cohorts on Madison Avenue (the Earth’s mind control mecca). To really understand mind control, one need only view television and see the best minds of a generation at work hypnotizing the masses and corralling them cynically toward this or that “lifestyle choice.”

So, when engaging in conversation with most people, one must be wary of subliminal or suggested manipulation. This type of mind control, since it is so ubiquitous, is now second nature to many inhabitants of Earth. Young children are particularly adept at the cloying manipulations of the ruthless hucksters of daytime TV. In engaging in discourse with children, one must think of a brick wall. As they speak, your mind will attempt to wander and even engage with them, but you must keep it fixed on a BRICK WALL. What? They want to tell you about the plot of some Pixar film? BRICK WALL. And about their pet hamster named Percival? BRICK WALL. Or about . . . THINK OF A BRICK WALL. It’s your only hope.

But it’s not just children. It’s everyone. As your friends and acquaintances try to persuade or “suggest” things to you, you might notice them inventing new words by putting old words together in a way they imagine might make you more susceptible to their desires. For example, when they want to stay with you, they might call it “couch surfing.” They have learned this from the pharmaceutical companies, the same nefarious minds that conjured the suggestive product name “Viagra” from “virility” and “Niagara.” The same people who created the acronym “Prilosec” from the highly charged words “passionate-romantic-incredible-love-oral-sex-enhancement-cream”—and this for a drug that treats heartburn, no less! If someone asks you to “couch surf,” point them to the ocean and insist that they provide their own couch for their waterborne adventures. It’s the proper response to these newfangled and quite insidious conflated words.

They might alternately ask to “crash,” a slang term they know will play on one’s fears for the safety of their friends. While it might seem like a reasonable request, you must say, “No, no, no; a thousand times: NO!” A true friend simply wouldn’t attempt such manipulations on you.

 

IV. EXPERT’S CORNER

Next to remember when preparing for conversation is to watch out for “experts.” Though language’s use is to communicate and express ideas, sometimes it undermines this primary function purposefully, so as to communicate power. Indeed, one of the principle modes of social control through the ages is by the particular use of language.

This can range from the obviously oppressive machinations of church and state to unconscious everyday social modes, which may or not be intentional but which reify power relationships vis-à-vis race, gender, and class.

The most egregious and glaring examples of control through the use of language would be the institutionalization of one particular tongue as a clerical or sacred language which is unknown to the layperson (such as Latin in Christian Europe), the destruction of languages by a colonizing power (the list is endless), impressing a foreign tongue as an official language on colonized peoples (e.g., in the Americas and Africa), and the favoring of one tribal tongue over another (an imperial technique called “divide and conquer”).

While the Church’s use of an esoteric “dead” language was instrumental in keeping its flock mystified and retaining the proper aura of omniscience in order to explain privilege and wealth, the imperial destruction of language is a kind of genocide, destroying culture in a bid for absolute material and psychic control.

These uses of language are not what we are discussing, however. Instead we will talk about the commonplace use of language in modern life reinforcing invisible and unacknowledged power relationships that are central to what we call “society.”

The most obvious of these, of course, are specialized terminology and nomenclature. These are most recognizable in the fields of law, medicine, and academia, but they exist in almost every professional field. While much of each vocation’s specialized language is necessary for discussing the nuanced and particular concerns of their pursuit, it is also often used to obfuscate and confuse the layperson, to draw a demarcation between one group—an “elite”—and the outsider, who is ignorant or “vulgar.”

Dealing with the expert might be the conversationalist’s most difficult task. Even more difficult than the child, discourse with the expert will require the discipline and seriousness of the samurai, the cunning of the ninja, the self-sacrifice of the monk, and the devil-may-care attitude of the renegade ronin.

When one deals with the so-called “expert,” there are two techniques one can employ, either separately or simultaneously. First, one must remember: the expert’s expertise is their armor. And when one attempts to confront an armored opponent, one doesn’t strike directly at his bulwark, does one? Indeed, the Maginot Line was never considered by German war planners, who eyed a right hook through tender Belgium instead. Likewise, if a dreaded “Tiger” tank bore down on you in your frozen trench, you wouldn’t waste your grenade on its impenetrable front side, with its 150mm sloped and interlocking steel plates. You would try your luck on its soft underbelly.

The expert’s equivalent underbelly consists of nonprofessional things—their taste in clothes, film, and music, their personal appearance, their hygiene, and their opinions on things besides their field. These aspects of their lives have likely atrophied or have been little considered due to the expert’s exalted position in society. They are accustomed to subservience from the “unwashed” or civilian population, and so a challenge from outside their academy is almost unheard of. Inside the academy, there may be a theoretical battle here or there, but it is done in a formal way, which merely reinforces the experts’ high opinions of themselves.

Therefore, one must draw the expert to a battleground of one’s choosing and, once they are there, disarmed and helpless, confuse them in their new milieu. You are Sitting Bull and they are General Custer. If the expert is an art or music type, for example, confidently holding forth on every aesthetic trend, bring them into the chasm of nature, with its timeless refutation of such ephemera. If they are a doctor, take them to a place without a piece of paper on which to offhandedly dash a prescription for one of their insidious chemical panaceas. If they specialize in copyright law, take them to Cuba or North Korea, where such laws are moot. When one traumatizes the expert in this way, they may rage for a moment, but soon this will give way to stunned silence. They will hate you, but hate is a sign of respect, and certainly better than the indifference and bemused contempt they doled out to you earlier.

The other technique is to become an expert oneself and do battle with your nemesis on a professional level. Then you are a specialist battling another specialist, like two knights of yore matched evenly on a tiltyard. Meanwhile, you can condescend to the rest of the population who will seem, to your expert’s eye, to be so many insects and larvae.

 

V. PARTY CHITCHAT

What about semifamiliar conversation, such as at a party? After the unpleasant experience with the expert, a party seems like a relaxed place where all are equal and little is at stake. But beware! For while expert terminology is off-limits at a party, acquaintances will still try to measure you up, browbeat, dominate, and humiliate you conversationally.

In fact, parties are full of power-tripping svengalis, embittered former football stars, California astrology buffs, infantilized paralegals, and health food beatniks of every shape and flavor, all trying to strip off your clothes and violate you in whatever world-weary, porn-besotted way they can think up that day. So, as ever, be on guard conversationally at a party. Here are some things to remember:

A) At a party, one way for language to express power is via proper language versus slang, or one accent versus another. The accent or idiom used by a person is often reflective of a particular upbringing or education and all the class specificities that come with it. Because we live in a culture that teaches us to worship wealth and status, these signifiers can be very powerful in determining one person’s power relationship to another.

But sometimes class relationships are flipped, such as with slang, whereby the vulgarities of street talk are a signifier of “realness” and are affected by upper-class admirers. In interactions away from officialdom (such as school, prison, or, yes, a party), the power dynamic with regard to language might be class inverted, turned on its head.

Just to be safe, use a fake accent to confuse people. Or mix two or three accents, such as Persian with Chinese mixed with tidewater region Virginia. If you confuse people, they can’t pull their shit on you.

B) Tone is another power signifier in language. Women and men are expected to speak to one another in particular tones, which intimate submission or domination. Policemen speak with studied condescension to their subjects, and if one wants to get away from an encounter with an officer of the law, one must affect a tone of deference and exaggerated respect.

Try to speak to everyone using the strange dialect of the police officer and see if you can attain the same result (e.g., instead of “area,” say “vicinity”; instead of “person,” say “individual”; instead of “car,” say “vehicle”; and so on).

C) Disk jockeys and musicians: still another mode of expressing power relations is through sound and volume. The most egregious example might be with disc jockeys and rock ’n’ roll bands who play their “music” so willfully loud as to actually make conversation or any other sort of communication between onlookers or those sharing the space with them impossible. Elitism in their case is conveyed through their occupying a stage, which implies a relationship with the management or ownership of said space and a sense of importance.

D) Your assumed group identity, an aggregate name that is akin to that of an official organization (such as a corporation), is yet another method of making the outsider feel excluded. The lights, musicianship, and special clothes which your band may affect all add to this general unfortunate, oppressive paradigm. While other power roles are socially recognized through wealth, titles, and deference, rock ’n’ roll bands’ power is being asserted not necessarily officially but rather by themselves. People may or may not choose to submit.