There's still a bit more class analysis to tease out. The small town music scene to which the coffee shop and the college belonged was part of a wider regional music scene. The nearest city with a mall and regular metal shows was about two hours away, and a relatively well-known indie metal label was and is headquartered there. This label plays host to several Red/Anarchist Black Metal acts, and its Trotskyite owners are renowned for the drama they cause. They've hosted a relatively large (well, for RABM at least) festival every year for the past several years, and if you don't know who I'm talking about already, count yourself lucky.
We all sort of made common cause against the bourgeois music kids infesting my little college town. But the Trots running the record label demonstrated their own bourgeois class interests over time through their individualist, self-aggrandizing ethics. They would attract drama from actual fascists, which was all well and good, and boosted their fame. But whenever that failed to show up, they would seek out drama by mocking anything from the working class. Working class butt rock. Working class t-shirts from truck stops. Working class people addicted to drugs by big corporations. Working class religious beliefs. All of it was open season for their mockery. Yet they couldn't take the gentlest mockery back - I was permacancelled by these twits for saying "Hail Jesus" in public once. I have literally watched in person this Trot tell homeless people asking for change to fuck off, but nah, "Hail Jesus" was a bridge too far for the fedora atheists who know better than the working dumbs. Ever since I removed them from my life, these Trots have sent flying monkeys to violate my privacy and gossip about me. According to them, developing Marxist-Lincolnist theory is a sign of the collapse of my mental faculties; communism will be achieved only by mocking every MAGA hat I find in the wild, and any attempt to destroy actually existing capitalism is revisionist and authoritarian. If nothing else, their antics have let me know which of my comrades aren't really comrades.
I didn't bring these losers up to subtweet them, however, but to make a broader point. This Trot metal label is an example of how insidious the bourgeois false consciousness in the music industry has become. Ostensibly leftist acts join up with the most elitist, pretentious, gatekeepy genres and then instead of changing those genres, they become just like them. Instead of making music for the toiling masses, they alienate them. This Trot label is the exact opposite of the workers and their butt rock, but on balance I think I like the workers' butt rock better. I've never felt anything but acceptance by a Nickelback fan; I have to perform theory to exacting ultraradical standards or else the Trot laugh reacc brigade rolls out, and anything I've ever said in confidence to friends gets twisted and narcissistically weaponized against me.
These ridiculous haters are an example of bad praxis, of slapping a red patina on bourgeois praxis and calling it good. So what then is good praxis? Well, how does the mass line work? Go to the workers, and do what they do, but with socialism; preferably with socialist messages derived from their own experience and their own subcultures whenever possible. Fortunately, we have an excellent preexisting guide for this praxis: Christian rock.
Christian rock is the mass line applied to pop rock, but by and for conservative workers. Christian rock acts copy the aesthetics of popular rock, first classic rock and now butt rock, and then insert their own Christian message inside the music. Is this praxis effective? It was mocked once, but as time marches on I see Christian rock bands like Skillet and Anberlin obtain more mainstream acceptance every year. Right-wing evangelical Christianity may be dying out in the current generation, but evangelical Christianity as a whole is adapting to that by becoming less political, and maintaining its relevance. Christian rock has played its part in this equation. It belongs to the workers as much as butt rock does, and is equally maligned, ultimately for the same class reasons.
If anything, nowadays Christian rock is the best of the working class genres. Talented musicians never fled Christian rock the way they fled butt rock for indie rock, because talented Christian rockers had an ideological reason to stay within the genre that talented pop rock artists never did. Christian rock offers a hope of sorts to help the workers survive the ravages of capital, while butt rock mostly reflects the misery and anger of the daily excesses of capitalism back at them - an anti-gaslighting tool that doubles as an emotional release valve. The workers ultimately need both to do what they can't afford to pay therapists to do.
Communist musicians should learn from the mass line successes of Christian rock, and make music that appeals to the workers. Our red bops should uplift them, commiserate with their fury, tell their stories, and glorify their sacrificies. A single album of red butt rock telling stories about the workers who went to Iraq and died for oil will do more to end the empire than many anti-war leftist groups have ever accomplished in their entire existence. So I'll end this article with a call to arms to those comrades making serious plans to become musicians: use your microphone for the good of us all. Amplify the workers and their interests and their needs. Be a fount for class consciousness, and help us unite and mobilize the working class.
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