Om provokation – Oseriös musik möter seriös politik: Fallet Philemon vs Grammis 1972

Abstract

The essay deals with a specific case of provocation in the Swedish music counter-culture of the 1970’s, where, in 1972, a few representatives of said movement – due to the apparent popularity of their actively non-mainstream music and the records released on their fully independent labels – were invited into the jury of the nascent Swedish Grammy Awards (Grammisgalan), at the time only four years old. With their anti-capitalist revolutionary marxist ideas these historical actors were determined to destroy all signs of bourgeois values, in this case regarding popular music. The ongoing debate would showcase prevalent opinions suggesting the Grammis as being a way for the huge international record companies to award and congratulate themselves, to advertise their own commodities. Moreover, the counter-culture agents in the jury here succeeded in shutting down Grammisgalan, for 15 years. One central event often gets mentioned: their choice to hand the award for ’Group production of the year’ to the debut album by the anonymous duo Philemon Arthur & the Dung, released on one of their own labels. This album, as will be shown, in nearly every aspect (music, production, lyrics, design, the artists etc) opposes and contradicts most of the common (commercial) mainstream record company values, as well as basal (linguistic, existential etc) issues of the dominant Western culture, but does so humourously, or unseriously – in absurd ways that end up contradicting even the serious statements of the independent music movement itself. It is precisely this difference between the serious, political expressions of the counter-culture and these more unserious, funny forms of expression the investigation will focus in on, with its primary perspective oriented towards language and (bodily) use – and the borders inbetween. It will proceed from starting points in more current ’counter-cultural’ theories and readings (Agamben, Spivak, Bachtin, ecocriticism) in order to expand and extrapolate these theoretical concerns using abductive reasoning on a few central concepts around the specific case (’provocation’, the ’unserious’), which in turn will form a basis for the interpretation of the case, of the ideas and characteristics its main object gives rise to, in comparison with the explicit ideas and procedures of, as well as the contexts and ’dispositifs’ surrounding, the Swedish progressive counter-culture itself. Lastly this is all encircled by a summarizing outer framework that – applying transhistorical patterns similar to the ones concerning Roman law in the essay’s central inquiry into the concept of ’provocation’ – connects its indications to the facticity of the essay itself: its place within the currency of the humanities.