Hard To Explain Two Julians

Now that Julian Assange is indisposed, probably forever, it falls to Julian Casablancas to fulfill the prophesy for, as it is written in The Book of Myra Breckenridge, by Vidal the Gore, some sort of radical named Julian will come to lead us out from the darkness, and we shall know him by his hair. Distinctive hair is not all they have in common.

Julian (Casablancas) shares many of the same cultural and political views as Julian (Assange). Casablancas reads Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges. Not only has Casablancas, the former lead singer for The Strokes, almost certainly also read Vidal’s Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, but he recently flew to Hamilton to interview Henry Giroux, the theorist, for Rolling Stone. In an interview with Vulture, Casablancas neatly summarizes the fatal harm caused by the unchecked proliferation of new communications technology.

• Why are you disappointed in the internet?
  I really believed that the internet’s capacity to let people access the best of the best of music — from underground stuff to music from all over the world — would’ve been a positive influence, that music would’ve evolved like never before. Instead music has been co-opted by some kind of capitalist profit game. I thought the internet would help balance the relationship between quality and the mainstream, but it’s gone the opposite way. Quality is being sucked out of music. One Direction will have 4 billion views and the best artists of today will only see a fraction of that attention. I’ve talked about this before, but there’s an exact parallel between music and politics.


• What’s the parallel?
  People thought that the internet would lead to more information and more truth. It’s the opposite: People are way less informed. It’s dark. Capitalism is a great idea but it’s changed. “The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism” — my favorite philosopher said it.[That philosopher is Martin Luther King Jr.] It’s all a bummer. The forces that push truth and quality down were supposed to be negated by the internet and instead they’ve gotten stronger.