Maureen, Maureen, I'm beggin' of you, please don't take my band

She's the one at the back. Yeah, that you can barely see.

After hearing the apparently world-shattering news that Maureen Ann “Moe” Tucker was a signed-up member of the Tea Party we’ve seen a hell of a lot of commentary on the issue. There’s those who are now totally distraught over the loss of one of their idols by political association to a “movement” that’s well documented for its anti-masturbation, witchcrafting, “I’d give Anne Frank up to the Nazis ‘cause lying is a sin", socialism-is-commu-facism gestalt. Then there’s Alexis Petridis’ pseudo-formalist riposte of “separate the art from the artist”.

And, as Petridis points out, this isn’t exactly unexpected. Rightly or wrongly, there’s outcry whenever a previously radical figure suddenly appears head in The Man’s lap, throat-deep on his profit margin. Whether they’re voting for George W. Bush (yes, we’re looking at you Tom Wolfe), or gadding around LA with their puppet-self in a roofless car insured by Swiftcover, there’s a sense of betrayal— that their idols have gone against, maybe even reversed, those anti-conformist freedoms they typified, restructuring the staid taboos and rigidities that they uprooted as often as their genital appendages (we do wonder what Iggy’s puppet penis is like b/t/w).

Now, that a woman named Maureen is the latest subject at the epicentre of this cultural conjuncture should be restated. We’ve got a neighbour named Maureen; she’s a lovely old lady who we’d suspect never spent days on end stratospherically-high on LSD playing second-sexual-fiddle to Nico in one of the most celebrated rock bands of the last century. She’s kind and always asks us how we’re doing. Her husband’s a decent guy. We don’t think she likes the Tea Party. But you never know.

A true tea party.

The point being that Maureen [Tucker, not our neighbour] is a metaphor for what’s going on with this debate and kind of reveals why the thing seems never-ending. Just as no one named Maureen could be a far-out radical, the sixties and seventies rebellion of identity politics and it’s aestheticisation in popular music was never, actually, as anti-establishment as is generally thought.

Adam Curtis has been making this point for years in so far as the central tenant of individual liberty that the hopeful 68ers so readily took up and perpetuated in the name of worthy political causes was co-opted by some more active malevolent business types to leave us with self-obsessed, consuming, fearful Nixon-like societies. [Here he is making a side-line into this debate on the topic of Mad Men.]

For the theory buffs out there, the names Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and so on should ring a bell as these guys have been arguing for this way better than we ever could and concerning far more ubiquitous shit than Adam Curtis. But let’s not tumble into that whole area and let’s get back to Maureen.

To remind ourselves of just how good The Velvet Underground were, we went to listen to some CDs we found back in our old rooms (from a time before we became pirates). We listened to White Light/ White Heat and remembered that it’s actually pretty awesome—the muffled production’s pretty charming and it has a lot of the repetitive swirling melodies that they’re famous for yet they’re far more docile than is the case elsewhere which then work into the noisy finale of ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ and ‘Sister Ray’.

BUT, after that we discovered that the & Nico disc was missing. We hate that. Why not put it back in its box? It’s not hard is it? For fuck’s sake, some people have no respect for our personal, private property! Fucking hippies.