This Weekend You Can Blow Up Some Records at a Baseball Game, Just Like in the 70s

It's hard to believe, in our innocuous era, that rock music was once thought to be an actual tool for social liberation, or that a lot of people thought heavy metal shows were essentially fascist rallies designed to numb and subjugate their audience before sending them out into the world to wreak cretinous violence. We're talking, here, about the 70s, when a lot of things changed in a very short time. Start the clock at Halloween 1968, when the MC5 hit the stage to this intro:

"Brothers and sisters, I wanna see a sea of hands out there… I want everybody to kick up some noise, I wanna hear some revolution… Brothers and sisters, the time has come for each and every one of you to decide whether you are going to be the problem or you are going to be the solution! You must choose, brothers, you must choose. It takes five seconds, five seconds of decision, five seconds to realize your purpose here on the planet. It takes five seconds to realize that it's time to move, it's time to get down with it. Brothers, it's time to testify. And I want to know… Are you ready to testify? Are you ready?! I give you a testimonial: The MC5!"

In 1972, Lester Bangs passed on this assessment of Black Sabbath shows: "Nobody in the audience could even stand up, barely managed to applaud, and bodies were sprawled everywhere." By 1979, even Pink Floyd was both capitalizing and commenting upon the charismatic-leader/violent audience vibe and, yeah, I've actually seen The Wall pretty recently. Not bad. Four or five of those tunes really hold up.

Putting aside both the dress-up fantasies of power and the parodies of them (and they're usually pretty hard to tell from one another in this venue: see Bowie, David and Cult, Blue Oyster), easily the most fascist music-related moment of that decade came July 12, 1979, when a race-baiting, reactionary dick named Steve Dahl decided to toss some red meat to his base of "rock fans," who saw that disco was enjoyed by and made by extremely suspect types like blacks, browns, gays, and women. Dahl convinced White Sox owner and P. T. Barnum-wannabe Bill Veeck to host a "Disco Demolition Night," in which a box of disco records would be blown up between the two halves of a doubleheader. The event, unsurprisingly, was a shitshow.

Proving that remembering history is no sure defense against repeating it, a minor-league GM in Charleston, South Carolina has decided to pay homage to America's grand tradition of using baseball as the launching pad for a bunch of right-wing horseshit, and this coming Saturday, GM Dave Echols and his Myrmidons will be blowing up the "merchandise and memorabilia" of innocuous pop-music-makers Miley "girl" Cyrus and Justin "appeals mainly to girls" Bieber, for some reason. In the words of his press release:

"Like so many, we have taken special exception to Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus's music along with his numerous run-ins with the law and her controversial performances. 'Disco Demolition 2' is dedicated to the eradication of their dread musical disease, like the original Disco Demolition attempted to do. We are going to take Bieber and Cyrus's merchandise and memorabilia, put it in a giant box, and blow it to smithereens. It is all in good fun."

Taking for granted for a moment that it's probably not actually possible to be offended by the music qua music these two make*, it seems most likely that the politics here are mostly accidental. It's just a way to get a minor-league team's name out there, and now we've all heard of the Charleston RiverDogs. The most offensive thing about it is that it's a stolen joke, but at least it's not "Our City Isn't Bankrupt Night". Could have been worse.

*NOTE: It is possible to be offended about the cultural appropriation Miley Cyrus engages in, but (a) that's probably mostly external to the music qua music she's making and (b) one suspects that's not exactly what's exercising Mr. Echols.