https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNdOsL4Xe7Q
In high school, tales of dystopia are oddly thrilling. We're shown a dictatorial world in which teens are forced to memorize official fictions and have few choices over the content of their lives, and we get to pretend this is escapist fiction, full of heroic resistance, instead of our daily routine. (I suspect dystopia becomes a more and more attractive theme the more assigned homework a given student completes.) These days dystopias dominate Young Adult novels (the Hunger Games and Divergent and the Giver and Chaos Walking and Maze Runner series, and on, and on), and get turned into hit movies as often as not. In 1988, we mostly just had Aldous Huxley and George Orwell -- winning us over through sheer persuasive brilliance in the absence of targeted marketing. Joined, occasionally, by a rock band taking inspiration from them.
Operation: Mindcrime was Queensryche's emergence as a major band -- an album that still shows up on magazine-compiled lists of Greatest Rock Albums or Most Important Albums or even Albums You Must Hear Before You Die lists (Kerrang! apparently fancies itself the music magazine of a dictatorial state itself, although its threat of "hear these albums or we won't kill you" shows, to my mind, an incomplete grasp of their task). It has, by rock album standards, a fairly complex story: protagonist Nikki, a would-be political radical, is seduced into a revolutionary movement whose cult-like leader takes control of him, using hypnotism and heroin addiction, and turns him into an assassin. Nikki falls in love, is ordered to kill his love, refuses, runs away, and barely escapes with his life; as he lies catatonic in the hospital, a wave of political assassinations linked to his old movement continue without him.
As in a good Broadway musical, the songs are snapshots, capturing scenes and emotional states rather than trying to explain every plot twist. Unlike Broadway musicals, most of the songs are electrifying hard rock/ heavy metal. On "Revolution Calling", Michael Wilton's guitar plays power-chord riffs and extremely brief versions of hair-metal solos; Eddie Jackson's bass is fiercely staccato; and the drums, played by the awesomely named Scott Rockenfeld, resound like an 1812 Overture in which Tchaikovsky was all "Fuck it, if we just ditch the brass and woodwinds and strings, there'll be room to fire the cannon a WHOLE LOT". In between chords, there's empty space for the singer to shine. Geoff Tate almost certainly could sing on Broadway, but brings instead to Queensryche both a powerful tenor vibrato and an unmistakably audible swagger.
"Revolution Calling" doesn't really pretend its dystopia is fictional. It's explicitly set in the USA, where "I'm tired of all the bullshit/ they keep selling me on TV/ about the communist plan./ And all the shady preachers/ begging for my cash/ Swiss bank accounts while they give their secretaries the slam". Like Bernie Sanders (already in his 40s at the time) would insist in his 2016 presidential campaign, "Now I've seen the payoffs everywhere I look/ Who do you trust when everyone's a crook?" "Now the holy dollar rules everybody's lives/ Gotta make a million, doesn't matter who dies".
George Orwell wanted the title of his greatest novel to be 1948 -- those bombed-out postwar homes and primitive view screens were never supposed to be a projection of the future, any more than "We have always been at war with Eastasia" was supposed to be an abstraction in the "We have always been at war with the USSR" world -- but his publisher made him switch the last digits. EMI Records, on the other hand, didn't care if listeners thought "Everybody's using everybody, making the sale" was about EMI, as long as Queensryche finally did sell.
The catchiest songs on Operation: Mindcrime are musically kind of interchangeable: if I say "Revolution Calling" sounds like "I Don't Believe in Love" sounds like "Breaking the Silence" sounds like "the Needle Lies" sounds like "Eyes of a Stranger", I'm not exaggerating by much, and even "Spreading the Disease" and "Speak" are mostly distinguished by (respectively) their rap section or their spooky, disjointed chorus melody. I'm not complaining, much -- it's an electrifying album while it lasts, although I wasn't surprised to find future Queensryche records unnecessary beyond their lovely hit power ballad "Silent Lucidity" -- but it does mean that which song to write about came down to texts.
*****
It took me awhile to decide what to do with "Revolution Calling"'s striking opening line: "For a price I'd do about anything/ except pull the trigger/ for that I'd need a pretty good cause". And how the hell to relate it to "I used to trust the media to tell me the truth": why should Nikki expect the world outside him not to reflect the coolness of his own for-sale bravado? As has often been the case since I bought my kids the complete 4-volume Calvin and Hobbes for Christmas, I first recognized my favorite 6-year-old philosopher at play, the Calvin who insists that the people of the world should learn to be less selfish, to spend less time thinking about their own needs, and more time listening to others, namely Calvin, while he talks about *his* needs. (It's the general application of Sarah Silverman's mock-racist "You have to be able to laugh at yourself. I tell Asian people that all the time.") Then I started recognizing the syndrome in real life.
The United Airlines case I wrote about last week, for example: how is it that airlines keep putting out more abusive delays and overbookings, worse customer service, less comfortable seats, tinier portions of food? Well, decades of behavior have seen customers reliably buying the least expensive ticket they can fit into their schedule -- voting by "the holy dollar", then watching Southwest and Delta and America compete by that standard alone. (Granted that the Democratic Party has frequently tried to protect fliers from their worst collective impulses and improve airline behavior through regulation.)
Wal-Mart moves into a town and sells everything more cheaply and all-in-one-place conveniently than the local stores do (in part by hiring very few customer service people, and paying them horribly). The town's citizens flock to Wal-Mart; the locally owned stores close; unemployment goes up as profits are spirited out of town into the Walton family's pockets; not rarely, too, Wal-Mart's prices go up, because now even the people who hate the experience have nowhere else local to shop. For a low, low price, we'll do just about anything -- and then affect astonishment when our overlords do the same.
Bernie Sanders, Vermont-based senator, perceived with Nikki in 2015-16 that "The time is ripe for changes/ There's a growing feeling/ that taking a chance on a new kind of vision is due". He even talked about "revolution". That's where I started to feel uncomfortable, although I'd been a longtime fan of his legislative achievements, and although at first he balanced his cranky shouting voice with a pixie smile and a willingness to defend frontrunner Hillary Clinton from the "scandal" about her using a private email server to send non-secret messages (exactly like her job predecessor Colin Powell had done and like her co-workers, who showed her the ropes, largely did themselves, because she was a near-septugenarian liberal arts type with no interest in asking tech-geek questions).
As he went from perceiving himself as a symbolic candidate to seeing a real shot at the presidency, his campaign turned increasingly harsh, portraying Hillary's friendliness with Goldman Sachs (while supporting tough banking reform) as equivalent to Donald Trump's lifelong career of fraud and bankruptcy; her support for a raised national minimum wage of $12/hour as equivalent to Trump's erratic proposals to maybe get rid of the minimum wage altogether; her cautious, within-the-mainstream positions slowly embracing LGBT rights with the Republican party's fierce opposition to them. Sanders essentially reduced what seemed to have been a thoughtful career in lawmaking to a Geoff-Tate-like cry of "Got no love for politicians/ or that crazy scene in DC/ it's just a power-mad town".
It is my opinion that Bernie Sanders's decision to spend several months, before and after Clinton's nomination, equating her with the Republican Party was, by itself, decisive in electing Donald Trump. I think his campaign was decisive by persuading enough Democrats, and Democrat-leaning independents, and apolitical people who thought Trump was an idiot, that Hillary Clinton -- lifelong policy wonk with a decades-long record of (moderate, incremental) achievement on behalf of the poor and the handicapped and the female and the illiterate and the defrauded -- *must* be exceptionally corrupt because "both sides say so". In other words, that the net effect of Sanders's political career is dominated by "he made Donald Trump president". You can tell me that FBI director James Comey made Trump president, and I'll agree; or that Steve Bannon's clever employment of advanced analytic voter-by-voter data did, and I'll agree; or that certain stupid decisions by Clinton as a campaigner did, and depending which ones you choose, I may agree there too; and that does not matter at all to an evaluation of Bernie Sanders. A race that narrow (I mean, she won by 3 million votes, but Trump's ascension was narrow) could have been swung by any number of factors, but the one Bernie Sanders controlled, he put Donald Trump in power with.
It may prove revolutionary, in a way: a bad way. Good government is possible -- when it comes to public spheres I'm jealous of Sweden, and Belgium, where formerly-Republican friends of mine live happily -- but it rarely comes about by indulging our worst instincts, the ones where we put all the blame on our enemies and recognize none of our commonalities with them. I believe that Operation: Mindcrime knows this; that Nikki's rants in "Revolution Calling" and "Spreading the Disease" are contra-indicated in terms of the path he takes. Not because his diagnoses were wrong; they're broadly on-target. But because they divide the world into us-versus-them, while doing nothing to improve the us except arm us better.
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