EDITOR'S NOTE: This Screen Door essay originally appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of No Depression. We're sharing the perpetually relevant piece now in honor of the cross-cultural, folk-punk band Gogol Bordell's new album, We Mean It, Man!, which arrives today via Casa Gogol Records.
After all the trials of the last years, once again music has a chance to become a thing that is revelational. Something that is uplifting in a way that makes your spirit indomitable. Something that offers insight you can’t get from analysts. Something that cuts through all the conceptual formations in your mind and sharpens your emotional intelligence. Something that allows you to take back your free will.
Of course, all of that can happen provided music-makers will deliver. But will they? Are they focused enough to conjure anything up from the collective unconscious? Coined by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, the idea of the collective unconscious is widely accepted and entrenched into pop culture. It's a common thread of human experience that feeds all revelations — artistic, prophetic, or scientific.
There is that mystical wire that runs deep into our collective self, and some of us have a knack for retrieving what’s urgent and crucially needed. Strangely though, it’s been so long since that wire gave us anything revelatory that it makes one wonder if that collective unconscious has expired. Has it been completely dispersed by narcissistic pursuits of instant gratification? Are writers and music-makers — those “technicians of the sacred,” as poet Jerome Rothenberg described them in his 1968 anthology — all now sellouts? Well paid-off, like judges sometimes can be?
In literature, everybody knows and appreciates George Orwell’s revelation, 1984. Some also know that Orwell was retranslating the message of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, who in turn, shared the same warning of Yevgeny Zamyatin, the anti-Soviet and anti-fascist author of dystopian novel We. All three masterpieces predict the now — the manufactured consent for the rise of fascism.
