alternative media project: media is our most important product

alternative media project: media is our most important product

"We are a lonely, desperate people pulled apart by the forces of the death culture and we need the media to hold us together. Separation is doom. We are free men and we demand a free media, a free energy source that will drive us wild in the streets of Amerika yelling and screaming and tearing down everything that would keep people slaves."

John Sinclair (paraphrased from the liner notes to the MC5's first album, Kick Out the Jams.)

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problem of women’s liberation is one of the most pressing facing everyone, especially the often-sexist media. Many felt, however, that to subjugate every conceivable topic to the brunt of the women’s lib crowd’s admittedly potent but often superfluous attacks was too much of a drain on the energies of the conference as a whole.

A few enemies were made, or hatreds solidified, but far more friendships were formed and, by the fifth day, a true spirit of community had begun ,to develop. >

Hip capitalism also proved to be a favorite target for many of the participants; this topic generally ended with the record company reps and profit-motivated radio stations backed against a wall, occasionally literally. The attacks were sometimes justified, in the case of the few totally unrelatable personages who made their presence felt, but the extent of their personally-oriented vehemence was hardly ever called for.

Despite the fact that so many shades of revolutionary and progressive lifestyles were represented, it is important to note that the people were all revolving around the precept of a counter-culture. A basic decision that many emerged with was the return to community control of the media while at the same time using their particular media to attempt to pull the nation’s hip/radical youth together.

Incidents, some humorous, others ridiculous, others intensely productive and enlightening, abound. Goddard will provide the country’s media-freaks with anecdotes for years. LSD abounded, even in such supposedly college-con trolled areas as the cafeteria (sunshine flavored, electric kool-aid was the drug du jour for the final two or three days), nudity was rampant and all present seemed determined, at one time or another, to top everyone else in the depth of the Ozone they had managed to occupy.

Still, the primary reason for calling the Gathering was, at least in theory, to take care of some of the youth culture’s business. Larry Yurdin, co-ordinator and originator of the AMP, explained the purpose of the meetings:

“The conference was called to provide those most active in alternative media with the opportunity to meet with each other for the purpose of collective analysis, criticism and re-evaluation of our media.

“Actually the original focus of the conference was alternative radio but it grew in scope to include all the alternative media.

“What we intend to accomplish is to create a real alternative to the existing media in this country. Media that will not serve as an anesthetic for the broad masses of people but that will inform and involve the people.”

The personae who gathered represented no small coup for the hard-working, ex-Goddard student/teacher. “Everyone,” as Yurdin himself put it Wednesday afternoon, “who should be here is here and if anyone’s not here, it doesn’t matter anymore.” By Thursday night almost all the rest were there anyway, or on the way, for the final two days. AMP attracted such media notables as Nancy and Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, Bob Rudnick, Tuli Kupferberg, Robert Crumb and Baba Ram Dass. At one point, Yurdin expressed fear that the whole thing would degenerate into a semi-pop festival (Atlantic and a couple other labels had sent up a number of bands — Third Power, Cactus, Dr. John, Jay Giles’ Blues Band, Mighty Quick — to play for free) but the expected influx of teenybops didn’t materialize and by Wednesday night that little pasture of paranoia had been pretty much dissipated.

No, it wasn’t a pop festival; still, despite the fact that we were few in number, the implications of the Media Project are in some senses even vaster than those of Woodstock. The lessons that we learned, or the lessons that were there to be learned (whether they were learned or not seems a highly individual matter) reflected upon our culture as a media-based organism.

At any rate, the medium of the First Gathering was inexorably its message. And its message was community, Nation, Everything is Everything. For five days we saw the best minds of our generation standing startled, hysterical, naked in VW buses, tents, neo-collegiate dormitories, cafeteria lines and rock quarries. Some of them, to be completely honest, didn’t see it that way at all. Some of them were offended because not enough business (and there really is no bizness like showbizness, aint there?) wanted a convention; they got a mindfuck. Some of them were offended because they wanted a party; and, one would wager, even the Hog Farm got its collective mind blown.

If we are electric children, the children of the media, it would seem that it’s time to get back and discover our ruse. Dr. Hippocrates (Eugene Schoenfeld) discussed the matter in his article on the Media Project in the L.A. Free Press:

“ ‘Hey,’ one bright young guy says, ‘almost all the underground media was represented here. We could create any myths we want.’

“ ‘Hey’, I said, ‘there was another guy who thought the same thing, name of Goebbels.’ ”

Even so it seems (it is, obviously) ridiculous to suggest that the media doesn’t perpetrate myths. It is wise, therefore, that those who are involved with media become aware that they can’t help but perpetrate myths, and that, in general, unconscious perpetration of myths is the most dangerous and damaging variety of the myth.

We are daily subjected to the myths of history and culture of supermarket Amerika. We are mass merchandised, told what is takes to be a man/woman, inundated by a never-ending flow of superfluous excretion, dealt to us by masters of media, with history’s most advanced mass communications technology at their disposal.

It is our responsibility to be hip to our ruse/roots. We must become masters of our own media, develop and understand the dynamics and mechanics of the process itself and present these sundry forms with a content that truly educates and represents a real alternative.

Some of our people just ain’t hip to the differences between what the media can do to you and what you can do with it. That’s all. And it’s our responsibility to show that we do know the difference, to find out if we don’t and then go out and do something with it.

Too many of us were willing to let the media take us where it would, rather than realizing media as our most effective weapon, our most substantial tool in forging a new Nation, a new mass consciousness. Too many of us are willing, still, to be taken for a ride by any Madison Avenue shyster who comes down the pike with the right combination of baubles and beads.

The Alternative Media Project represents a continuum, a whole frame of reference shared by a culture. It is the recognition of our need for a free high energy source of information, change producing information. We are embarking upon an age in history that is neo-Renaissance, neo-Age of Enlightenment. This time our tools will be technological ones, largely media tools; and we must use them to rediscover our humanity, which has been lost in the bewildering swirl of the Amerikan supermarket subculture.

Get hip to your roots, people. Our culture is presently enmeshed in a pop consciousness that’s spaced, sticky and stagnant. Youth culture, and it’s accoutrements must break past the plateau of pop stardom/fadishness to the clean air of media consciousness.

We exist in an environment which reduces every element to the least common denominator. We’ve tried to fight the demon with our music, gatherings and lifestyle but we soon found “peace/love” merchandised, “pop stars” propagated and our mass-gatherings sacrificed on the altar of the Amerikan money-myth.

We seem to be lost in the superficial swirl of pop (read merchandised) culture. There’s nothing wrong with honoring and respecting our artists; they certainly deserve it. But it’s time to stop honoring those whom we’re told to honor and respect and to start choosing our stars with some consciousness. Consciousness of who and what builds so many of the diamond-studded, yet thoroughly bogus, POPstars. Every rocker who walks on stage just isn’t worthy of our respect. Not until he’s earned it. The star is the frosting on the cake but they’re not the cake itself. And we all know that too much frosting will make you puke.

Media consciousness both defines the problem and is a tool for its solution. We must use the media we now control consciously and conscientiously to smash pop consciousness and build a consciousness of our culture as the oppressed youth colony in Babylon. That’s the first step in building a Nation, a nation which, as we saw in Vermont, really already exists.

Somewhere out there in Amerika, everywhere out there in Amerika, are people whose heads are turning away from the glittered splendor of pop stardom and towards the unifying consciousness of youth as an oppressed culture. The Alternative Media Project (now set up with headquarters at Goddard) may be the first step in building that consciousness on a mass-scale. Certainly, it will be months before the concrete suggestions, the tape-exchanges, the merger of the previously competing television co-operatives, bear any fruit, if indeedf they ever do.

As with any gathering, perhaps more-so with this one, there are those who will say that there was too much rhetoric, too many opinions, too many superlatives, too much involvement with issues that others thought were skimmed over, and all manner of opinions in-between. They’re all right and it don’t matter. What does matter is that a whole lot of people in media around Amerika are now hip to what their counterparts are up to, that lines of communication (no matter how nebulous) have been established where none existed before, and most importantly that a sense of (more than community) Nation was felt.

Those are dynamite things to feel and experience and know. We think that the First Gathering of the Alternative Media Project was a stone gas.

Barry Kramer

Cheryl McCall

Dave Marsh