“The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power, and more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori ridiculous, or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest.”
—William S. Burroughs, 1979.
In 1995, a critic and academic called Paul Mann published an essay entitled “Stupid Undergrounds” in the May issue of the journal Postmodern Culture.
In it, Mann takes a caustic and distant view toward his objects of inquiry: scenes like “renegade churches, dwarf communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scientific research units, paranoid think tanks, unregistered political parties, sub-employed workers councils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac fanclubs, acned anorexic primal hordes.”
Mann’s list goes on. He proceeds with remarkable contradiction to at once lampoon and champion these subcultural epiphenomena, simultaneously attacking and defending the high-minded critical-theoretical fascination with them. “Why,” Mann asks sarcastically, would we “wade through these piles of nano-shit?”
An unkind but fair question.
The underground is a generic designation that we habitually take for granted to denote everything in contrast to popular culture. Underground to the majority of us characterizes minorities of us. Unpopular or underrated or misunderstood or underrepresented or deliberately unfashionable pursuits come under the aegis of the underground. The term goes back thematically a long way.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1864 publishes the novella Notes from Underground which begins with the line, “I am a sick man…” The underground for Dostoyevsky symbolizes refuge, an oppositional and often dark place positioned in comparison to the bright, clean, and implicitly artificial superficial world.
Jules Verne’s novel of the same year, Journey to the Center of the Earth, chronicles Professor Otto Lidenbrock and his nephew, Axel, who embark upon an odyssey into a subterranean Icelandic world full of prehistoric creatures and perilous adventures. The underground for Verne is a fantastic and limitless expanse that stimulates and challenges the imagination.
Roughly a century later, Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Bringing it all Back Home features the song “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which contains the lyric, “Better jump down a manhole / Light yourself a candle.” The underground for Dylan is a line of flight from the melancholy that begins to exemplify the 1960s counterculture’s response to modernity.
30 years on, The Prodigy’s 1994 album Music for the Jilted Generation opens with a sample from the 1992 film The Lawnmower Man, in which Dr. Lawrence Angelo, the mad scientist character whom Pierce Brosnan portrays, says, “So, I’ve decided to take my work back underground — to stop it falling into the wrong hands.” The underground for Angelo, and by extension for Liam Howlett, represents a site of resistance, a secretive space in which one can hone experimental pursuits without enemy infiltration and interference.
The contemporaneous science fiction film 12 Monkeys depicts a dystopian near future in which a deadly virus forces earth’s survivors to retreat underground. For Terry Gilliam, the filmmaker, the underground is a location that offers escape from peril and certain death.
For the past three decades, the underground has thrived in a zombie-like state, percolating while never boiling over as it did during the 1970s with punk, or the 1990s with rave — or the 1960s with psychedelia, or the 1860s with fantastic literature.
The task today of some artists is to grow up from the underground as seedlings flourish from the dirt. Others purposefully embed themselves underground to attain some ideal of legitimacy, rejecting conventional earmarks of success such as revenue and reputation. Ascension from the underground for the latter ostensibly requires an intolerable wager that sacrifices certain inalienable ideals like artistic freedom and authenticity, compelling corporate and political compromises, otherwise known as selling out.
To those corporate and political interests, the underground is most frequently viewed as a field to mine for surplus cultural and capital value. Enthusiasts of underground music and art tend to be more passionate and vocal than mainstream fans, becoming loyal advocates and lifelong supporters of their favourite musicians and artists. There is cultural significance to being an early adopter, just as there is financial advantage in purchasing stock in a fledgling company before it gains marketplace dominance. Treasure is buried underground, and one must only unearth it to extract and maximize its worth.
We must think beyond the underground’s traditional dichotomies of high and low, centre and margin, power and defiance to power. The antagonistic impulse that once chose to venture further out, and then further back, is now choosing to go further downward.
The question arises of whether a truly revolutionary underground can exist in the internet age when social media idealizes ever-increasing impressions, followers, likes, shares. Algorithms cannot understand nor correct for intentional niche-ness. It is counterintuitive for the underground press — a publication like NicheMTL — to attempt to shed light on underground artists as well as itself via these technical means while remaining underground.
A revaluation of value becomes necessary to perform the underground. In a post-capitalist framework, we must be careful not to reimpose the binary coordinates of success and failure, popularity and unpopularity, profitability and worthlessness. The measure of value in the underground is contradictory to its shallow analogue. Less is more.
The ultimate limit of the underground is, of course, the burial ground, the graveyard, not where life springs forth but where dead things are laid to rest. Underground is where we repress, discard, and recycle that which has outlived its welcome at surface level. As such, the underground is also where haunting originates. Perhaps this spectre subconsciously prompted Paul Mann’s scorn, preferring to reject undergrounds as stupid rather than accept them as sacred.
The underground is anti-mid. It is concerned only with life at its most nascent and very latest stages. Shoots emerge to break new ground. They inevitably wither and die and fall back into the soil and the cycle begins again. We wade through these gardens of nano-shit with delight.
Underground is a mode to embrace the fertile, the fundamental, the infinite.◼︎