Rebelion For Sale; The High Price of Sticking it to the Man

     Once upon a time I was a production assistant.  One of my first gigs as such was on a music video for a rock band called Rise Against.  They were, and possibly still are, considered a contemporary punk band, a nice way of saying over produced, demo study drenched, MTV creation.  My description of them may be considered unfair by some, but fuck those people. 

     I was hired as an "intern", or slave if you believe in the whole truth thing.  My task on this shoot was to cast extras in the music video, coordinate their call times/report details, and wrangle them on set.  The night before I was slaving, I mean interning, at the band's show whilst they played a packed Metro on Chicago's north side.  The producers told me to seek out very "punkish" looking Rise Against fans and convince them to be in the video shoot taking place over the next 48hrs in the city.  The pay; you get to be in the video!  With your favorite band!  That's cool right?!  Maybe after the shoot you can lick their balls and take their kids to the zoo!  So like a good exploitable drone, I did just that.  I collected about 100 names and numbers from fans who looked like they fit the hot topic demo MTV or whatever shit head record label was going for.  The next morning I spent hours racking up a huge cell phone bill reaching out to all these starry eyed rebels so that they can get their chance to work for free!  The first location was the brown line train that circled the loop.  1171 productions was the gracious host of this event, and while they could have paid the standard day rate per extra, which in today's dollars starts around $75 for 8 hours of work, but they decided that just being around the "band" was worth sooooo much more.  They also would be generously providing cold chicken fingers and chips, along with all the room temperature water these kids could stuff down their faces. 

     So me and my band of pop culture clothing models/slaves/interns/set dressing with ears, boarded the brown line for the evening's work.  As I suspected, all the kids had a blast "rocking out" with one of their favorite bands as the song "Give it All" blared over the PA system and Rise Against lip synced like the anti-establishment cherubs they are.  They had a blast...for about an hour.  Soon there after the fatigue set in, the el car reeked of b.o., and faces got punched.  Time is money on a film set, so bathroom breaks for the slaves were not on the schedule.  Soon, those with, and without a penis were forced to piss in water bottles, bottles that had no where to be discarded but at their feet.  Like good unsullied soldiers, the punker kids still gave all their energy, moshing and pogo-ing over and over again to the same three cord shit-bomb of a processed "punk" song.  Then suddenly, the first actual punk thing happened that evening.  As I am standing by the doors of our el car, two female punk extras decide they had slaved long enough.  Now keep in mind, part of my pitch the night before was not only "you get to hang out with the band", but also, "you get to be on MTV".  I stopped the two women and asked why they were leaving.  Their reply was something to the effect of, "this is terrible, you can't treat people like this, it's too dangerous."  Ah, but lil ol' wanting to get ahead me tried like a good servant to get them to stay, and that is when I said one of the most embarrassing things I have ever said in my life, "Don't you wanna be on MTV?"  The response was amazing, "Fuck MTV".

     Over ten years later, and it is just dawning on me now, these women saw what the rest of us were to blind to see.  Exploitation had finally reached its greasy tentacles into every facet of life.  What was so evil and crafty about this revelation was that the modern bourgeois had developed one of their sleaziest tactics to date; inverse exploitation.  Instead of leveraging needs like food, shelter, and necessities to exist over the heads of the unwashed masses hence forcing them into servitude, they were able to get folks to jump at the chance to be used.

The video was chalked full of anti-establishment memes and visuals.  Punker kids rampaged the city, posting fuck Bush stickers and vandalizing corporate imagery.  I watch the video now and it makes me sick.  Mostly because I am aware of how the video was made, but also the veiled hypocrisy it transcends.  I picture a room full of greedy shit heads laughing their asses off every time they review the profit margin their product gleans.  That product being "counter culture".  It's very disturbing to know that this generation is being duped, just like the previous one, into becoming another cog in the consume/debt/slave culture.  And that is the true counter culture; an inverse corporate totalitarianism to which people are unwittingly active in their own oppression.

So go on and buy the spiked bracelet, download the song about hating your parents, slather the hair dye into your head until the chemicals seep into your brain.  But as you do it, realize something;  you're the problem.  You have voluntarily turned yourself into the chattel that these leaches feed off of, the only thing now is, they profit from being the bad guys.