Daily Archives: April 2, 2022

When a man proclaims nature malignant in all its parts and professes to hate life itself, ones first suspicion is that something is profoundly wrong with him. The mans grievance against creation must be the effect of some personal deficiency in body or soul or both, rather than a sound conclusion reached by a powerful, disinterested mind. Few things disturb ordinary, contented people more than the spectacle of a moral desperado (to borrow Thomas Carlyles phrase) ormetaphysical berserker raging against the order of the universe. Such raw and comprehensive loathing seems downright demonic. Human beings, however they might suffer, are expected to demonstrate some gratitude for the existence they have been granted. To scorn the gift of life, to regard it as a prescribed ordeal at best or a pointless torment at worst, strikes at the deepest human desire, which is for happiness. Normal people want more and more life in the hope of better things to come, in this world or the nextnot a prompt end to the whole tiresome business of living.

Giacomo Leopardi (17981837), revered in his native country and elsewhere in Europe as the foremost Italian poet since Dante, may be the great modern writer least known to an English-speaking readership. He was perhaps the most lugubrious man of artistic genius who ever lived, and he pretty well matched the description of the consummate nihilist sketched above. His works are the sepulcher he built for himself, and in which he entombed, while he was still alive, every last hope he had of love and light. His mind was as bleak as the arch-pessimist Schopenhauers in its rejection of revealed religion, its disdain for the nineteenth centurys philistine belief in endless progress, and its unstinting contemplation of human nullity and everlasting meaninglessness.

What held his mind back from a program of total spiritual annihilation was the hearts belief that art could provide solace to a great soul even in the abyss. No matter how certain Leopardi was that human suffering takes place in a void, that hope is futile, and that chaos is master of all, there remained the consolation that high art can irradiate the darkness with flashes of beauty and greatness. Works of genius can do this even when they represent vividly the nothingness of things, even when they clearly show and make you feel the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most terrible despair. They induce a passion for beauty and greatness even as they demonstrate the irredeemable vanity of all beauty and greatness. Nothingness taken straight up kills the spirit with an arctic blast, but nothingness rendered artfully by a master lifts one out of despondency and heats the blood. For these therapeutic purposes the encounter of Achilles and Priam, Petrarchs Triumphs, and Goethes Sorrows of Young Werther are more propitious than certain narrative poems of Lord Byron, though they all lay bare the vanity of everything. Byrons repellent coldness of soul infects the reader Leopardi and leaves him more wretched than before. The southern European temperamentwith which Leopardi even credits Goethe, whose midlife Italian journey saved him from fierce depression and left him the paragon of vitalityis life-affirming in its artistic handling of nihilist material, as northern iciness is not.

So Leopardi averred in October 1820 at the age of twenty-two, writing in the journal he called the Zibaldone, or hodge-podge. He kept the Zibaldone from 1817 to 1834, filling 4,524 manuscript pages with his ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical philosophizing; observations on men of action, who tended to be ancient rather than modern; shrewd aphorisms after the ironic worldly manner of La Bruyre and La Rochefoucauld; homely moralizing anecdotes of family life; ejaculations of horrific boredom, which made him want to kill himself; encomia to the wonderful precision of the ancient Greek imagination; subtle distinctions between crime and heroism; comparisons of the wickedness of Christian princes with ancient villainy; expositions of exemplary and unfortunate style in Italian prose and poetry; animadversions on ordinary persons instinctive denigration of truly superior spirits; eruptions against the wearisome unnatural graces of French literature; etymologizing turns, as only a philologist adept in six or seven languages can perform them; meditations on the various sorts of beauty to be seen in landscapes; and assorted other thoughts on the world at large, which gave Leopardi the unenviable reputation in his backwater hometown of being super-encyclopedic. The Zibaldone, as remarkable an omnium-gatherum as one will find, remained unpublished until the late nineteenth century and received its only complete English translation in 2013an admirable and somewhat frightening editorial feat. This vast book records the uncontrollable twitches and grimaces of a man in severe psychic pain, but also his tireless dedication to the life of the mind that takes all learning as its province and is curious even about the daily round of ordinary life, which most intellectuals consider beneath their notice.

Leopardi had nothing like the life he wanted. The life he did have comprised, according to his formula, equal parts suffering and boredom. Only boredom relieved his suffering, he declared, and only suffering relieved his boredom. Yet the long disease that was his life had started quite agreeably. As a little boy he dwelt for a Wordsworth-like moment in the enchanted world where fauns roamed the woods and lovely naiads disported themselves in crystal springs, and he could imagine himself one of the great Greek or Roman men of action, performing mighty deeds worthy of every available glory. His relentlessly pious mother brought his pagan fantasies up short. From the age of six, Leopardi was dressed in the black robes of a little abb, and at twelve he was tonsured. Instead of a noble warrior, he took to picturing himself a renowned saint, whose holiness would astound the multitudes. The aspiration to saintliness ran its course soon enough. The desire to astound never left him.

At fourteen, it seemed he had found the life he was made for when his father opened to the townspeople of Recanati the impressive library that occupied the third floor of the family home. The citizenry never had much use for this public benefaction, but young Giacomo found a trove of wonders. The library held all he needed. To the knowledge of Latin and the rudiments of grammar, rhetoric, and logic he had acquired from the age of eleven with a tutors oversight, he soon added self-taught Greek and Hebrew of the utmost nicety and picked up some modern languages on the way to a precocious passion for philological erudition. Dreams of martial heroism and dazzling sanctity gave way to the earnest labor of scholarship and the pursuit of whatever glory ardent bookishness can win. At fifteen, he wrote a History of Astronomy, then turned out in rapid succession a translation of Hesychius of Milo (whoever he was), a commentary on several second-century Greek rhetoricians (who shall remain nameless), and a translation into Latin of PorphyrysCommentary on the Life of Plotinus. Unwilling to be thought a mere pedant, eager to show that he had the common touch, he then produced a long Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients, slumming a little, in the hope of winning a wider audience. This deliberate dumbing-down failed to make the desired splash, but praise for his work and predictions of grand success rolled in from Roman eminences. His triumphant career as a marvelous mandarin looked to be a sure thing, if only he continued his perfervid studies.

But then, at sixteen, he discovered a hotter passion. Poetry had never excited him before; indeed, he had rather looked down on its supreme virtuosi. Now he breathed it. As he wrote to a friend in 1817 about this unlikely change in direction, My head was full of modern ideas, I scorned and rejected the study of our own language. . . . I despised Homer, Dante, all the Classics. . . . What has made me change my tune? The grace of God. The conversion, as he called it, was gradual but decisive. Reading Homer or Anacreon or Virgil now made his mind whirl joyously with a crowd of fantasies, which people both my mind and my heart. The verse translations he presently composed of portions of the Odyssey and the Aeneid were snapped up by a Milanese literary journal. These maiden efforts were no more than competent and dutiful, but soon he was inventing verses of his own, in Latin and Italian, posing as translations from Greek originals that never existed. And then came poems from the very soul. Later in life, he would say that the years of obsessive work leading up to the discovery of his true vocation were the only time in his life he knew happiness.

At eighteen, however, this happiness began to seem a bitter delusion. The quest for a limited mental excellence, seven years of mad and desperate study, had left him physically misshapen and unfit for the normal life he wanted. The years he had passed bent over his books and papers had aggravated his inborn scoliosis, a curvature of the spine that formed a hump on his chest and another on his back, wreaking havoc on his heart and lungs, which would give out completely in his mid-thirties. Leopardi had turned himself into a gobbo, a hunchback, something less than a whole man, a target for childrens gibes and missiles, and a hopeless loser with women, who averted their eyes when he came too close. I have miserably and irremediably ruined myself, by rendering odious and contemptible my outer appearance . . . the only part of a man that most people take into account. No one would love, he lamented to a friend, a man in whom nothing but his soul has beauty.

Leopardi for his own part did not readily fall in love with women whose souls were their most winning feature. Physical beauty drew him, and beautiful women tend to prefer comely men, as he understood only too well. The little gobbo was cut out for a lifetime of frustration and anguish. His first infatuation, at nineteen, was with a married countess who was visiting his family for two days; the sudden fever, the breathless anxiety to impress, the thwarted longing for something ineffable, and the sense of loss when she left for good established a pattern of false hope and inevitable disillusionment. He came to realize he was chasing a phantom that would always elude his grasp: la donna che non si trova, as he called her in the ode Alla sua donna, the woman who is not to be found. From repeated futility he learned to disparage all desire, all hope. Better to expect nothing when nothing is what you deserve. One would be hard-pressed to name another man who hated himself as ferociously as Leopardi did.

He began to see clearly that love would mean a perpetual seeking after happiness without ever possessing it. I need love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life, he exclaimed in a letter to his brother Carlo at twenty-four, and the vivid life he craved was what circumstance denied him at every turn. Unable to earn a living through his poetry or his scholarship, Leopardi remained subject to parental regulation throughout his brief life. His parents expected obedience amounting to reverence from their children, and they dispensed misery with a free hand. Leopardis mother, Contessa Adelaide, believed the kindest human fate was death in childhood, when an undefiled soul ensured eternal peace. His father, Conte Monaldo, held that a wise and Christian education had no place for such pernicious frivolities as dancing, riding, fencing. Irked that the boy Giacomo boorishly cut his meat with a fork, Monaldo would cut it up for him the proper way at every mealuntil his son was twenty-seven years old. In the annals of paternal petty humiliation, that one is hard to beat; and it is staggering to imagine how thoroughly disconsolate and defeated Leopardi must have been in order to put up with it. Gustave Flaubert observed that in creating the life of Emma Bovary he had tried to evoke the color of a woodlouse; and it is by such an ashen atmosphere, the worst of oppressive provincial dreariness, that one imagines Leopardi engulfed.

He was not entirely docile in captivity and made various attempts to break free of his parents grasp and taste the delights of the larger world. His friendship with the Abate Pietro Giordani, which began with an effusive letter written by the eighteen-year-old Leopardi to the Milanese writer and patriot twenty-four years his senior, certainly affected his spiritual trajectory. Leopardi bewailed his misfortune in having been born into the back end of nowhere:

The glories of nature and the magnificent works of man beckoned him from the distanceAnd must I say at the age of eighteen, In this hovel I will live, and die where I was born? Giordanis visit to Recanati in 1817 upended the Leopardi family proprieties. When Leopardi went to meet Giordani at the inn where he was staying, it marked the first time he had ever ventured out into the street alone, and Conte Monaldos hackles rose. Matters worsened when Leopardi joined his friend on an unprecedented day trip to Macerata, a town thirty miles away. Leopardi returned unrecognizable, according to a highly respectable lady of Recanati, appalled by the change; and family lore would blacken this day as the infamous occasion of Leopardis transformation from a dutiful Catholic believer into a pestilent freethinker. Conte Monaldo never forgave himself for having permitted his son the liberty to know that miserable apostate, whose breath contaminates whoever dares to approach him. One feels the fathers sorrow at his sons prodigality, though one suspects that Leopardis nature was not transformed suddenly, but that his unbelief had been brewing for quite some time.

After Leopardis death, Giordani described how his friend had steeped himself from youth in the wisdom of classical and biblical antiquity. He came to know the world of two thousand years ago, before he knew that of his own time; and what is more surprising, from this lost ancient world he learned what his own was, and how to value it. That is, in his research, Leopardi had gathered ammunition for his frontal assault on modernity, with its misconceived cult of reason, unreasoning belief in the perfectibility of man, supersession of religious faith by philosophy, extrusion of excellence by egalitarianism, and obsession with material progress. Although he remained an intractable unbeliever, his attitude toward Christianity sometimes conveyed a peculiar sympathy: Faith in the Redeemer was sheer illusion, but it was a life-enhancing untruth, and its loss extinguished an invaluable source of warmth and light. Nature had been surprisingly kind to humanity in its childhood and youth; only when reason had usurped the place of the most precious illusionreligious beliefas the fundamental guiding principle for human beings did life reveal its unendurable gruesomeness. For there is reason and there is reason: clarity of mind as Leopardi understood it, incapable of being deceived and sweeping away every falsehood in its path; and on the other hand, Enlightenment pandering to unreal visions of the earthly paradise. The triumph of cold reason at nihilistic absolute zero would blight forever the hope of human happiness.

Leopardi wrote as a prophet who believed he saw more deeply into the constructions of human intellect and the abominations of inhuman nature than the most exalted thinkers of his time, and thought he could foretell the direction mankind would take. The truth would set no one free. It was a terrifying sight to behold, naked reality in its most unflattering lightnature indifferent or even hostile to human needs and wishes, the invisible world simply a fantasy, the existence of God the greatest con job ever, all sentient beings born and bred in pain and horror, and extinction the universal end. The end all human beings strive for is happiness, but happiness eludes every pursuer: It is an impossibility, an illusion. The true end, which no one can fail to reach, is death. As the impossibility of happiness becomes apparent, death is what human beings will seek in its place: RIP QED.

Such is the teaching Leopardi propagates in all his major works: the Zibaldone, the collection of essays and dialogues he calls the Operette Morali, and the poems that made his illustrious name, the Canti or Songs. He sings the song of everlasting human woe at every opportunity, and in doing so sees himself as a benefactor to mankind, the most honest and most forgiving of humanists. As he declares in the Zibaldone entry for January 2, 1829, My philosophy makes nature guilty of everything, and by exonerating humanity altogether, it redirects the hatred, or at least the complaint, to a higher principle, the true origin of the ills of living beings, etc. etc.

George Santayana, who also remarked the brute stupidity of nature but was more appreciative of its glories than Leopardi, and who was rarely wrong about the bleakest writers, wrote that Leopardi was a hybrid of the Romantic and classical: Leopardi lived in a romantic tower, a dismal, desolate ruin; but through the bars of his prison he beheld the same classic earth and Olympian sky that had been visible to Homer, Pindar, and Sophocles. His romantic longings unfulfilled, Leopardi struggled to come to terms with the world the supreme Greek poets described, which was the world as he found it; and his art is the record of that struggle.

Leopardi enforced upon himself a discipline of mental austerity and took it to the point of desolationas though Homer or Pindar renounced all heroic glory, or Sophocles spoke his own ultimate truth when his chorus insisted that the best human fate was never to be born, a theme that echoes throughout Leopardis writings. For him, the best of men is he who accepts his fate even though he knows his life is meaningless; he fears nothing and tolerates no saving illusion. His satisfaction lies in his contempt for nature and fate, in the philosophic iron in the soul, which at least provides strong men with the fierce satisfaction of seeing every mask torn from the hidden and mysterious cruelty of human destiny, as he declares in the Dialogue between Tristan and a Friend in the Operette Morali. How to live without hope of happiness or even relief from misery in this life, or without hope of anything at all after death, is the true philosophic art. What Christians would think of as despair, Leopardi honors as lucidity and the courageous denial of all consolation except that provided by the beauty of the poem he creates.

And there are moods in which Leopardi strips away even that last stay against nothingness. Truth and beauty are incompatible, he writes in Memorable Sayings of Filippo Ottonieri, Leopardis alter ego in one of the Operette Morali: It is certain that truth is not beautiful. The Keatsian formula for combined aesthetic and epistemic rapture does not apply. Facing the truth is a thoroughly disagreeable experience; whereas Aristotle considered the theoretical man to be not only happy but godlike in his contemplation of the eternal things, Leopardi finds such philosophizing devoid of any pleasure. What he discovers is cause for sorrow, confirmation of mans negligible place in the universe. Of course, one may wonder whether Leopardi is legitimately laying waste to the beauty of the mind at its most ravishing, or whether he is concealing a secret joy in his own beautiful and great intellectual powers, which have revealed the eternal truths.

Mostly, one sees a soul thrust into an ordeal and weary of the fight, trying to summon the will to go on. It is hard even for a committed spiritual renegade to resist the hope that mans suffering does not go unheeded by the eternal Powers. The poem Alla primavera, o delle favole antiche (To Spring, or On the Ancient Myths) gorgeously evokes the time when the mythic world was real, when willow tree and nightingale were tormented women whom the gods had mercifully given a new form of existence, so that seemingly inhuman nature was in fact imbued with human sensibility. Today things are quite different, and the closing lines measure the unbridgeable distance between human and inhuman nature. Leopardi senses the importunity of human creatures in pain, who ache for their sorrow to be recognized by some more fortunate being. Addressing lovely Nature, the poet does not ask for anything as rarefied as compassion from her but would be content with a mere acknowledgement that he hurts: if indeed you live, / if there is anything / in heaven, on sunlit earth, / or on the oceans breast that, if not pitying, / can testify at least to what we suffer. So he wrote at twenty-three, knowing already that the evidence is definitive against any trace of sympathy from the clockwork universe, which operates on strict mathematical principles. (I have used the lovely and unexceptionable translations of the Canti by Jonathan Galassi.)

Nature vibrates at a different frequency for Leopardi than for the notable Romantic poets among his contemporaries. When Shelley listens to his celebrated skylark, from the incomparable joy, ease, truth, and depth of its crystal stream of song he hopes to learn the harmonious madness of poetry so superb that all the world will listen to it raptly. When Leopardi watches and overhears his solitary thrush in Il passero solitario, in comparing himself to the simple, happy creature he ends up mourning his own past, present, and future. Every stage of life holds its appointed pains, and the young man whose youth gives him no pleasure anticipates his old age, when he will reflect grimly on a wasted life: When these eyes say nothing to anothers heart, / and the world is blank to them, and the day to come / duller and darker than the one at hand, / what will I think then of this wish of mine? / And of my life? And my own self? / Ah, Ill repent, and often / look back, unconsoled.

Sometimes Leopardi sets aside the lyric poets conventional accoutrementsthe rose-lipped dying maidens and the infinite shining heavensand delivers his unsparing summation of a lifetime plagued by sorrow, boredom, and failure. In the sixteen lines of A se stesso (To Himself), the poet is terse, mordant, implacable, utterly disillusioned: forgiving himself nothing, but saving his richest hatred for nature, which hurled him so ungently into unwanted being. He does indulge in one traditional poetic maneuver, apostrophizing his heart, which he offers eternal rest:

The Italian original is even more chillingly unpoetic. Leopardi says what he has to say in short order and is done with it. Byronic world-weariness, the soul wearing out the breast, is peacock self-display by comparison.

For Leopardi, unlike Shelley and Keats, nature provoked no ecstasies, so he might seem an Olympian mind of an antique cast, icy, sublime, and forbidding. Yet in a crucial sense he was a Romantic rather than a Classicist. Whereas Sophocles saw the world steadily and saw it whole, Leopardi beheld his own pitiable self wherever he looked. What he touted as the rarest magisterial vision of the world exactly as it is was in fact the special pleading of an unfortunate whom nature had selected for a very hard time. Rather than a disinterested neo-pagan sage, he was a soul in torment, who could not forgive the Creator for his deformity and loneliness, and therefore preferred to cut God out of the picture altogether, replacing him with immemorial philosophic abstractions such as cruel Nature and inexorable Fate.

This does not mean that Leopardi was not a great artist and an intellect to reckon with. His principal artistic persona, the spirit who negates and who takes pity on human beings for the agonies they must suffer, is the most straightforward of nihilists, alluring in his clarity of vision and unwavering fortitude. In the closing lines of Leopardis best-known poem, La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto (Broom, or the Flower of the Desert), he addresses the only plant to grow on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius and praises its good sense as against human folly: Far wiser and less fallible / than man is, you did not presume / that either fate or you had made / your fragile kind immortal. Men choose to live within reach of the volcanos devastating eruption because they are foolish, whereas the broom lives and dies there because it cant do otherwise. And unresisting, / youll bow your blameless head / under the deadly scythe of the lava flow. To know your place in the world is to recognize that nature can snuff out your life in one terrifying instant, and when that time comes, men are as helpless as the broom. Acceptanceof sorrow, boredom, failure, and deathis the hardest part of wisdom.

It is of course Nietzsche who urges his readers to build their houses on the slopes of volcanoes, to live dangerously and say yes to life no matter how awful it gets. Leopardis is the more honest nihilism, the purest distillation of nothingness. Accepting ones own particular portion of the universal lot is a far cry from love of life. Whereas Nietzsche preaches the supreme wisdom and moral excellence of amor fati, loving your fate so intensely that it seems entirely the working of your own will, Leopardi sees nothing to love even in the fate of the man who is clear-sighted and strong enough to gaze imperturbably upon life and death stripped to their hideous core. Leopardis is the more severe teaching, offering no hope of transcending Christian transcendence (in Erich Hellers phrase) as do Nietzsche and his acolyte Rainer Maria Rilke in their glamorous prospectus of free-spirited modernity. One sees in Leopardi what godless life really is.

Algis Valiunasis a fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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Nihilism for the Ironhearted by Algis Valiunas | Articles - First Things

But until then, we have, as the name suggests, Therapy?s oft-postponed So Much For The 30, 31, 32 Year Plan tour.

And my word, is it a big, beautiful cathartic release of a gig.

The Northern Irish trio come roaring out of the traps for a career-spanning set leaning heavily on their singles.

As such, tracks from their 90s commercial peak feature prominently no less than six tracks from the 1994 album Troublegum get an outing.

From their roots in chugging industrial rock to the punk/metal/alt-rock they soon settled into, Therapy? have never been shy of turning bleak subject matter into crowd-pleasing singalongs.

And Kakistocracy, a highpoint from most recent album Cleave, with its chorus of It's okay not to be okay is more apt than ever with frontman Andy Cairns devoting it to the events of the past couple of years.

Die Laughing is prefaced with a tribute to and their memories of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins the news of his tragic death at 50 having broken earlier in the day.

Their cover of Husker Dus murder-ballad becomes even more turbo-charged than usual, before rolling into the brutal riffage of Teethgrinder.

The main set finishes with 1992s Potato Junkie, which remains the best song ever with an obscene chorus about author James Joyce defiling the singers sister.

But its not all backwards-looking we get a debut outing for a new track, Woe, and it fits in nicely.

Of course they finish with their best-known hit the indie disco staple, Screamager.

The chorus goes: Ive got nothing to do but hang around and get screwed up on you, but as this sell-out crowd will happily attest, when hanging around with Therapy? nihilism is rarely this much fun.

A message from the Editor, Mark Waldron

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Review | Therapy? at The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea: 'Nihilism is rarely this much fun' - Portsmouth News

(Janie Airey/DigitalVision via Getty Images)

People with disabilities or dementia may not get timely or appropriate treatment when they have a stroke, according to a new report that says those conditions can make it challenging to assess the severity of new symptoms.

But treating a stroke quickly could help prevent additional disability and other health and financial impacts, an American Heart Association scientific statement finds. It was published Monday in the journal Stroke.

"The long-term consequences and costs of additional disabilities due to untreated stroke in people with preexisting neurological deficits are staggering," Dr. Mayank Goyal said in a news release. He is the statement's writing committee chair and clinical professor in the department of radiology and clinical neurosciences at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

Often, treatment of strokes caused by blood clots may be delayed or not given at all if pre-stroke dementia or disability symptoms cause doctors to mistakenly believe the stroke is more severe than it is and outside the window for optimal treatment.

But treatment still can be effective for this group even though there is some evidence they have a higher risk of death, the report said. It notes that clot-busting therapy and clot removal were as safe and effective in people with pre-existing disabilities or dementia as in those without. Treatment is considered critical for preventing further disability.

In the U.S., physical, cognitive and intellectual disabilities affect about 22% of the adult population. The statement offers advice for how people with these conditions and their families can develop plans for health emergencies, including strokes. This includes discussing quality of life concerns and care preferences before a stroke happens. If a stroke does occur, the committee suggests families discuss the risks and benefits of treatment with health providers to fully understand the spectrum of possible outcomes.

Biases such as ableism and therapeutic nihilism, which is the belief there is no hope for effective treatment, may play a role in delaying or failing to begin treatment in people with disabilities or dementia, the statement said. The writing group said greater awareness of these biases is needed and offers guidance on how to improve patient-centered care.

It also calls for greater inclusion of people with disabilities and dementia in stroke research.

"The people carrying the greatest burden of illness have been traditionally excluded from research," Goyal said. "Expansion of the dialogue and pro-active research on acute stroke therapies should include people with disability and dementia to optimize their potential to return to their pre-stroke daily living and to reduce the potential long-term care and financial burdens."

If you have questions or comments about this story, please email editor@heart.org.

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Pre-existing disabilities, dementia can interfere with stroke diagnosis and treatment - American Heart Association News

Rock n roll is supposed to be fun, Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten told British rock journalist Charles Shaar Murray in 1977. Youre supposed to enjoy it. Its not about taking a million fucking years to learn a million fucking chords on the guitar.

That clarion call sounded as their anti-royalist diatribe God Save The Queen was getting him razored in the streets, and the group banned from Englands airwaves and concert halls probably formed more bands than anything else the Pistols did in their brief lifespan, November 1975 to January 1978. It bears repeating that they didnt invent punk rockso much as helped refine one approach to it, and served as a popularizer. But damn, what a great, powerful band they were.

Ignore the fashion aspects of the group, or (mis-)manager Malcolm McLarens misinformation campaign via the woeful yet entertaining mockumentary The Great Rock N Roll Swindle claiming he manipulated them into existence. The Pistols were a great rock n roll band at their core. Drummer Paul Cook understood the power inherent in not getting terribly frantic with your grooves. He held them a midtempo, at the swiftest, yet with an insane amount of drive, played hard. Guitarist Steve Jones applied heavy metals huge roar to the garage six-string ethic of the Stooges and New York Dolls. Original bassist Glen Matlock was the bands composer before Sid Vicious replaced him. He infused their songs with his 60s mod/pop ethos and the swagger of the Faces (equally a Jones and Cook favorite).

But Rotten, who reverted to birth name John Lydon post-Pistols, was the bands X-factor. He brought a sinister outsider gaze to the band, brought to life in his ferocious lyrics, abrasive vocals and unnerving stage presence. Without him, the Pistols would have merely been a good rock n roll band. With him, they were something else entirely.

In 26 months, the Sex Pistols disrupted British society, rock n roll history and the music business. They were a subject of debate in the worldwide press and the Houses Of Parliament. And they inspired just as many bands as the Beatles, the Velvet Underground andRamones did, and not just punk groups. Here are 15 of those bands, alongside the most Pistols-esque highlights from their discographies.

There was an almost instantaneous rivalry between the Pistols and the Clash, the band that usurped them as Englands Top Punk Group after their 1978 breakup. But it was the Pistols who showed the way to the castoffs of attempted Dolls clones London SS and pub rockers the 101ers singer, Joe Strummer. As soon as I saw them, I knew that rhythm and blues was dead, that the future was here somehow, Strummer told Melody Makers Caroline Coon in 1976.

Every other group was riffing their way through the Black Sabbath catalog. But hearing the Pistols, I knew. I just knew. It was something you just knew without bothering to think about. A number of such early Clash anthems as Clash City Rockers had more than a little Pistols to em, and Sandy Pearlman imbued second album Give Em Enough Rope with the same huge rock production as Never Mind The Bollocks, Heres The Sex Pistols.

Bolton Institute students Howard Trafford and Peter McNeish attempted to form a Velvets-inspired band in late 1975. Reading about the Pistols in the music press, they traveled to London to see them in February 1976. Blown away by what they saw, Trafford became Howard Devoto, McNeish rechristened himself Pete Shelleyand their band transformed into Buzzcocks. They organized the Pistols Manchester debut in June 1976, where they met their future bassist (and later guitarist) Steve Diggle. There, future members of Joy Division, the Fall, the Smiths and the founders of Factory Records all found their calling. The Spiral Scratch EP, driven by Devotos nihilistic intelligence, was Buzzcocks most Pistols-ish moment. Though if you dig deep into the chainsaw pop that marked them after his exit, you can hear the Pistols beating in their hearts.

Despite their proud initial amateurism, the Slits might have been the ultimate homeland embodiment of the Pistols influence. In fact, McLaren wanted to manage them after the Pistols split. Rotten later married singer Ari Ups mother Nora Forster, becoming Ups stepfather. And if the Pistols connections dont run deep enough, Cook drummed on the Slits 2006 comeback single, Number One Enemy. His daughter, current English pop star Hollie Cook, was a latter-day Slit.

Mari Elliott saw the Pistols playing on a pier in the summer of 1976, on her 18th birthday. She then transformed into one of punks greatest frontpersons, Poly Styrene. The band she assembled, X-Ray Spex, combined a huge Jones guitar sound and dedication to big riffs with a cocktail lounge saxophone reminiscent of Roxy Music. Like all the best post-Pistols bands, X-Ray Spex took the influence and created something unique from it, likely explaining Rottens high regard for them.

When Joy Division emerged from the other side of that June 76 Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall Pistols gig, they dubbed themselves Warsaw and displayed the same dedication to heavy riffs. In fact, New Jersey ghoul-punks Misfits half-inched the chord progression from the song Warsaw for Horror Business. As singer Ian Curtis internalized his nihilism, going from fuck this to Im fucked, Joy Divisions music similarly imploded. They helped invent post-punk as they evolved, until ending with the dark, jangly beauty of the epic Love Will Tear Us Apart. The post-Curtis version of the band, New Order, wandered even farther afield from that initial Pistols blueprint.

Joan Jett displayed likely the first American evidence of the Pistols impact. While leadingthe Runaways, she arrived at a 1977 photo shoot in a homemade Pistols T-shirt, safety pins festooned in the neckline and spikes cut into her shaggy mane. Following the Runaways dissolution, Jett flew to England to record with Jones and Cook, including an early take of I Love Rock N Roll, the obscure glam B-side that eventually became her first solo chart-topper in 1982. From that point, Jetts trademark glam blasts featured the enormous Pistols guitar crunch and swagger.

D.C. hardcore innovators Bad Brains have repeatedly indicated the Pistols music was among that which transformed them from a jazz/funk outfit to fire-breathing punk rockers. Its easy enough to spot the influence on the early demo tape Black Dots. Redbone In The City is God Save The Queen with rewritten lyrics, singer HR rolling his rs like Rotten. Then you get blinding debut single Pay To Cum the following year, which sounds like a Pistols 45 played at 78 RPM. Bad Brains are a spectacular example of how taking Rotten and crews influence to an extreme yielded fresh results.

Hard to believe, but 80s British indies flagship band the Smiths are yet another outgrowth of that June 1976 Manchester Pistols gig. Morrissey, then a famed New York Dolls die-hard and prolific writer of letters to the U.K. rock weeklies, was definitely at Lesser Free Trade Hall. Did he like them? Hard to tell by what he wrote to the hapless editor of whatever rag he was thumbing through at the moment: The bumptious Pistols in jumble sale attire had those few that attended dancing in the aisles despite their discordant music and barely audible audacious lyrics, and they were called back for two encores. The Pistols nevertheless catalyzed the Smiths, the influence manifesting most audibly in the monarchy-skewing The Queen Is Dead, especially live.

Its impossible to listen to Orange County punk titans Social Distortion and not hear the Pistols lurking somewhere within. Mike Ness has acknowledged the influence many times, and its especially audible in their earliest, most punk material, as on debut LP Mommys Little Monster. But with their entire history flashing big, crashing Gibson chords, bent guitar strings and a dont fuck with me attitude, even Social Distortions most countrified material bears the mark of the Pistols.

With their breakthrough albums title sounding suspiciously reverent to Never Mind The Bollocks, at least in part, how could Nirvana deny any residual Pistols damage? Kurt Cobain expressed his gratitude in the book Dead Gods: All the hype the Sex Pistols had was totally deserved they deserved everything they got. Rotten was the one I identified with, he was the sensitive one. He also admired Bollocks production, calling it the best of any rock record Ive ever heard. It liberated the grunge royalty to fully take advantage of that major-label recording budget and allowed Butch Vig to make Nevermind sound as big, loud and clean as possible.

Rock n roll in general has sucked a big dick since the Pistols, Guns N Roses guitarist Izzy Stradlin told Rolling Stone in 1988, explaining why Appetite For Destruction laid waste to 80s corporate rock. The bands raw power, chaotic energy and explosive Gibsons felt more like punk in the Pistols sense than the well-manicured, polite hum of 80s mainstream metal a la Poison. Band members Stradlin, Axl Rose and Duff McKagan all repeatedly acknowledged the influence. Jones sub-metal post-Rotten riffer Black Leather made the punk covers record The Spaghetti Incident?s tracklisting. McKagan also later rounded out Jones mid-90s all-star outfit Neurotic Outsiders, playing Black Leather in the clip below.

OK, do you really think Green Day would exist without the Pistols? Billie Joe Armstrong has addressed this: The Sex Pistols released just one albumbut it punched a huge hole in everything that was bullshit about rock music, and everything that was going wrong with the world, too. No one else has had that kind of impact with just one album. He went on to call Bollocks the root of everything that goes on at modern-rock radio. Its certainly at the root of Green Days enormous guitar sound and crash-and-burn energy, as well as the wide-screen production of records such as American Idiot.

The Jesus And Mary Chain crashed onto the sedate London indie scene with surly attitudes and unruly feedback-laden guitars, dressed in black and ready to rock. They didnt play concerts they played riots. They couldnt be bothered to entertain. All this, plus exciting records like debut album Psychocandy, garnered them all manner of new Sex Pistols notices in the press. The JAMCs Jim Reid admitted the Pistols were a starting point for them, but also daunted them: We heard the Sex Pistols and all that, and we wanted to be in a punk band, but were very confused. The punk ideal was that you shouldnt be able to play your guitars very well. He went on to explain that the Pistols fully formed chops were the source of confusion, in light of punks anyone can do it rhetoric. The Jesus And Mary Chain just got on with it.

Its hard not to listen to Bikini Kills rowdy riot grrrl anthems and not hear the Pistols at their heart. That disorderly spirit? The collision course guitar work? Kathleen Hannas ferocious commitment to tearing down the old order? Is this not the Sex Pistols in spirit, if not deed? Bikini Kill took the best parts of the Pistols ethic, changing the swaggering machismo Jones brought to the band into fierce feminism. Its most evident on their absolute classic Rebel Girl, especially the version produced by Jett, featuring her extra guitar power.

Who defined the 1970s, Oasis Noel Gallagher once asked Time Out magazine. You could say David Bowie, but if you say that, youre gonna go, Whoa, what about the Sex Pistols? What about them, Noel? Hes never made any bones about the Pistols impact on the Britpop megastars. One only has to listen to early Oasis tracks, especially Rock n Roll Star. Debut album Definitely Maybe is all beefy Les Pauls, short tempers and cocksureness. If thats not an embodiment of the Sex Pistols, what is?

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Bands influenced by the Sex Pistols | Oasis, Nirvana - Alternative Press

In the pilot episode of the Michael Schur-created sitcom The Good Place, Ted Dansons archangel Michael walks Kristen Bells newly-dead Eleanor through the afterlife. As they stroll around paradise, or the good place, Bell turns to Danson. Whos in the bad place that would shock me? she asks. Mozart, Picasso, Elvis, basically every artist ever, Danson quips in return. Its an offhand joke, but Schur has grappled with the moral obligations of art and artists throughout his highly successful career.

A television mogul who has long dominated prime timein addition to creating The Good Place, he co-created Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks & Recreation, and wrote on and produced The OfficeSchurs feel-good oeuvre posits that television can, and ought to be, ethical. Now that Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place are over, Schur has translated his principled vision to the page with his new book How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question.

In How to Be Perfect, Schur is an ethics TA desperate to relate, guiding his readers through centuries of philosophical texts by answering questions ranging from Do I have to Return My Shopping Cart to the Shopping Cart Rack Thingy? (Chapter 4) to Making Ethical Decisions is Hard. Can We Just.Not Make Them? (Chapter 12). The book is something of a Cliffs Notes to philosophy, written in the puerile awesome-sauce prose that has become his trademarkhes prone to phrases like thingy, gibberish sandwich, and gobbledygook. Its also a manifesto of the ethical principles hes spent his television career investigating. Schur has said that he favors television with a beating heart at its center; the thesis of much of his writing is that goodness at an individual level has the power to redeem bleak, and even malignant environments.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Parks & Rec follow coworkers-turned-family members at a police bureau and in local government. During Schurs tenure, The Office abandoned its British predecessors nihilism in favor of a more saccharine American sensibility. Indeed, hes arrived at a magic formula for sitcom success, relying on a combination of goofy ensemble casts, typically in workplace environments, where, as in How to Be Perfect, the conclusions are always neat.

Having been nominated for 19 Primetime Emmys, Schurs television programs are some of the most popular and lauded of the past two decades. His output has inspired a recent surge of similarly moralizing situational comedies: Ted Lasso, Schitts Creek, and Superstore are not Schur productions, but bear the stench of his trademark feel-good workplace mockumentary. How to Be Perfect is Schurs most potent distillation of this one-good-deed-can-change-the-world philosophy, but in his attempts to make art that is moral he fails on both accounts.

The moral universe Schur envisions is more similar to an expense report than it is a fully lived-in human world. In The Good Place, characters actions in life are assigned a series of point values that determines whether they go to heaven or hell, a conceit he returns to in his book. Imagine that you [could] call on some kind of Universe Goodness Accountant, Schur posits in How to be Perfect, to give you an omniscient, mathematical report on how well you did. Hes being facetious, but only somewhathe employs moral tabulations throughout the book. Schurs main philosophical contribution is his coinage of the phrase Moral Exhaustion to refer to his feeling of fatigue at every choice bearing ethical weight. Every day we are confronted with dozens of moral and ethical decisions, he writes.

Theres an environmentally best toothpaste we should buy, an ideal length of time we should leave the water running when we shower, a most ethical car to drive, and a better option than driving at all. Theres a more responsible way to shop for groceries, a worst social media company we definitely shouldnt use, a most reprehensible pro sports franchise owner we shouldnt support, and a most labor-friendly clothing company we should. There are expensive solar panels we should put on our roofs, low-flow toilets we should install, and media outlets we shouldnt patronize because they stiff our journalists.

If Schur intends this list to exemplify the endless ethically fraught crossroads we arrive at daily, it serves as more of a reminder of our relative impotence. In the face of growing global catastrophe, the decision to shop at Everlane over Forever 21 is meager resistance, if not moral posturing. Neoliberal economists have been telling us to vote with our dollar for the past half century; Schurs only intervention is to add that this sometimes gets tiring. This isnt to say that we should empty our recycling bins into our trash cans or skip the organic produce aisle, and Schur is correct in his diagnosis of a cultural moral exhaustion. But its not our endless choices that fatigue, its their futility.

Schurs emphasis on the individual also infects his television, set at sterile office enclosures like corporations, local government, and police headquarters. The cognitive dissonance between the power of the individual and the institution bursts when characters in Schurs moral fishbowls confront the real world. Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a zany comedy about an NYPD precinct, experienced this puncture most profoundly, when Andy Samberg in police uniform mugs, Im one of the good ones, after the murder of George Floyd made the topic of police brutality unavoidable for the show. The joke is partially on Sambergs character, who, by the episodes end, is disillusioned with the institution, but he nevertheless returns without further questioning for the remainder of the series run.

At the beginning of that same episode, the shows resident badass bisexual and audience surrogate Rosa Diaz leaves the precinct to become a private investigator because of police brutality and corruption, but continues to help out her friends as needed, in something of a liberal fever dream. Schurs creation of a nominally progressive Brooklyn police force is less grating than his insistence that the intentions of the individual police officer can correct the entire systems moral fabric.

In How to Be Perfects eighth chapter, Weve Done Some Good Deeds, and Given a Bunch of Money to Charity, and Were Generally Really Nice and Morally Upstanding People, So Can We Take Three of These Free Cheese Samples from the Free Cheese Sample Plate at the Supermarket Even Though it Clearly Says One Per Customer, Schur dedicates two pages to an internal debate over whether or not he should leave his bank because of the conduct of its CEO. He investigates CEOs at other banks and concludes that these dudes (and theyre basically all dudes) are essentially interchangeable, only to amend the chapters conclusion by noting that after the books first draft, he did ultimately switch banks to an institution whose practices he deemed more ethical. Hes armed himself with a tepid self-awareness that renders him less oblivious than Sambergs character, but his self-effacement registers more as PR than as genuine ethical inquiry. Again, no one could fault Schur for wanting to switch banks, did he not insist on receiving a good deed credit.

As Schur evaluates Kant, Bentham, Aristotle and the existentialists within the context of modern life, his mission shifts from guiding readers on how to be a good person to proving that he himself is one. How to Be Perfect is an attempt to show that Mike Schur is Good (unlike Mozart, Picasso, or Elvis, all of whom find themselves in the Bad Place). Hes assuaging some guilt: Schur reminds readers three times throughout his book that hes a well-paid TV writer, and repents for his crime of being a white dude. Under a subhead titled The Gods of Luck Demand Tribute! he walks readers through a twenty-point list describing the ways in which good fortune has propelled his career, including that he was accepted to Harvard (though through hard work, certainly), had friends from the Lampoon who helped him land a job at Saturday Night Live, and was selected for small writing staff position on The Office.

But theres no real need for him to self-flagellate for what is, by all metrics, a successful career. His attempts to signify that hes one of the good guyshe bemoans that feminist literature is so often published with pink covers and chastises ancient philosophers for relying on male pronouns in their writingonly reinforce his role as cloying moral referee, penalizing Aristotle for failing to maintain standards set by Instagram infographics.

Though Schur apparently attempts to atone for his blessed life every time he enters a grocery store, he would be the first to admit that he feels his greatest moral contribution to the world has been his television output. At a 2019 University of Notre Dame panel titled Can Television Make Us Better People? Schur answered the events titular question with an emphatic yes. If television cant make us better people, then nothing can, he said. Thats the explicit goal of [The Good Place], and if Im wrong, this whole last four years of my life has been for nothing.

Schurs astronomical Nielsen ratings dont betray any slide, but his supercilious focus on improving the moral character of his audience comes at comedic cost. The Office lost its bite once its characters gave up on despising their jobs and started to treat their colleagues at a paper supplies sales company as family. Andy Samberg is irresistibly charming in Brooklyn Nine Nine, when he isnt tasked with becoming the worlds nicest police officer.

Because Schur conflates a code of ethics with an elementary school classrooms code of conduct, this decline in humor has no correlation to actual moral improvement. Schurs quest for goodness is a narrow one, limited to the scope of a like-minded audience, who, similar to the characters that populate his shows, are largely middle managers with little reason to question the status quo. His gentle optimism and lighthearted humor are opiates for the masses desperate to have their worldviews confirmed, a feedback loop where being a good person is tantamount to watching one on TV. Filtered through his infantile sensibilities, this lack of pathos emerges most vividly in The Good Place (later revealed to be The Bad Place), where expressions of anguish are limited to holy forking shirtballs, because heaven censors swearing.

Social realism only ever infects the Schur bubble by absolute necessity, and always awkwardly, like when he refers to the politically-connected billionaire child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein as a nightmare person. His preaching, reserved for an audience with a car full of groceriesand thus a functioning carand the luxury of posing philosophical questions leaves viewers with a product roughly as thorny and as funny as an after school special.

When The Good Place aired in September 2016, two months before Trumps election, film and television producers were frothing at the mouth for bland content that reflected kindness, positivity, and something called radical empathy. Recycling, good manners, and returning your grocery cart were all part of The Resistance. Paddington 2 was declared a brave rebuke to Brexit-era xenophobia. Schurs television programs have dabbled in explicit political involvement: then-Vice President Joe Biden made not one but two appearances on Parks & Rec, the first of which Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope bumbled through, so overwhelmed was she by her sexual attraction to the militant warhawk rebranded by the media as anodyne grandpa.

In the run up to the 2020 election, Schur told SFgate that Knope wouldve done everything in her power (and that the Hatch Act allowed) to get Joe Biden elected. Under the Biden administration, with niceness in office and little change in the way of material circumstance, Schurs moral promises ring especially hollow. Maybe life during the Trump era was an Onion article, but now its a Schur-22-minute sitcom, where decorum blithely persists against a backdrop of chaos, and signaling goodness is just as good as the real deal.

In a 2018 article about The Good Place, New York Times writer Sam Anderson recalls observing to Pamela Hieronymi, a consulting philosopher on the show, that American culture was losing touch with ethics. Hieronymi disagreed, explaining, Its amazing to me how moralized and moralistic we seem to be. In this way, Schurs fastidious moral accounting echoes the culture writ large, where minute differenceswho posts what, when and how soonaccount for massive distinctions in character. Like the askew t that dangles cheekily below How to Be Perfec on the books cover, the moral challenges Schur envisions are matters of presentation. As he tells his children in the books earnest coda, Im placing a decent-size bet on the idea that understanding morality, and following its compass during decisions great and small, will make you better, and therefore safer. But in a world where our individual choices mean less and less, we delude ourselves in pretending that they mean more, and Schurs insistence on the power of simple kindness feels less brave than desperate.

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Why Do We Have to Feel Good? On Michael Schur's Cloying Moral Universe - Literary Hub

The video of a Tigrayan man being torched by men in uniform, then thrown into a smouldering pyre and literally cooked has stunned Ethiopians and shocked the world. The blackened pit shows other human remains, suggesting he could be one of a number of prisoners executed in similar fashion.

The macabre spectacle would not have been known about were it not for the ghoulish fantasy of one solitary soldier and his desire to show off his war trophy. His colleagues partake in this dark ritual while making tasteless cannibalistic jokes. His grilled flesh would be good to eat with injera, says one of them. With bread, retort the others, amid guffaws and further insults.

The barbarism and atavism of this latest atrocity speaks to the nihilism and dehumanisation that now disfigures all involved in this conflict combatants and noncombatants alike.

Implicated in the massacre are federal units supported by a motley collection of ethnic forces: the Amhara Fano militia, special forces from the Gambela, Sidama and the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region. The Fano, in particular, have been among the most vicious and prolific perpetrators of rights abuses.

The incident, which occurred in Metekel, Beni-Shangul Gumuz state, has been widely condemned. The state-funded Ethiopian Human Rights Commission termed it an act of extra-judicial killing. A senior official from the commission told the BBC that a joint security team arrested 11 men nine of them Tigrayans and seized radio communication sets, cash and weapons. The men were apparently on a covert mission, he said.

Other media reports suggested the men were from a commando unit of the Tigray Defence Forces sent to blow up the Grand Renaissance Dam. The claim is outlandish, not least because there is no overt hostility to the dam in Tigray and the president of the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) Debretsion Gebremichael was actually intimately involved in the early stages of the project.

The human flesh barbecue horror is part of a long chain of documented atrocities in the 15-month conflict, with all parties to the conflict complicit. The pattern of mass killings was established barely weeks after the start of the war in November 2020.

Eritrean troops killed hundreds of civilians in the town of Axum in what Amnesty International called the single worst documented atrocity of the war.

The Ethiopian state outsourced the war to ethnic militias and turned the conflict into a violent ethnic grudge match. Incendiary rhetoric and hate speech by politicians against Tigrayans, the collapse of the professional army and its chain of command, the absence of any meaningful system of accountability, all contribute to a culture of impunity that embolden combatants to commit mass atrocities.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his inner circle feed the anti-Tigray frenzy. Mass arrests of Tigrayans, purges of Tigrayan public servants and the shutdown of Tigrayan-owned businesses is now routine across Ethiopia. Hate is sanctioned at the highest levels of the state.

In July 2021 Abiy vowed to remove the weed. His spiritual adviser, Deacon Daniel Kibret, in September 2021 told Ethiopians the TPLF should be erased and disappeared from historical records. Another senior regime supporter said the enemy does not deserve your compassion or your mercy.

The Metekel horror ought to serve as a wake-up call. The world must end its conscious denial of the gravity of the human rights crisis in Ethiopia and hold all the belligerents accountable.

This article first appeared in The Continent, the Mail & Guardians pan-African weekly newspaper designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here.

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Atrocities on the rise in Ethiopia - Mail and Guardian