Photo by Cheryl Dunn
Is Ian Svenonius serious? That question tends to come up in response to his writing. A few weeks ago, when The New Republic published an excerpt from his new essay collection, Censorship Now!!, some readers on social media questioned his sincerity and even his sanity. Many seemed to have already answered for themselves; their reaction was really less "is he serious?" than "surely he can’t be."
It turns out Svenonius’ writing is a lot more interesting if you keep asking this question—is he serious?—while you read, without ever deciding. Because it’s never quite clear whether his grand statements, provocative polemics, and jump-cutting through political and cultural history are genuine, ironic, deceptive, or heartfelt. At its best, his prose is all of the above, much the way his sloganeering bands Nation of Ulysses, Make-Up, and Chain & the Gang have served as homage, critique, and parody of rock history.
Censorship Now!! simultaneously deals in the heated rhetoric of insurgent calls to action, the seductive broad strokes of propaganda, and the clever winking of surrealist humor. Often when I’m really convinced Svenonius has gone off a paranoid deep end, the next sentence hits back with knowingly-hilarious exaggeration or profoundly spot-on analysis, realigning my perspective and making me wonder again.
The sincerity level of Svenonius’ last book, the thoroughly entertaining Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock 'n' Roll Group, was easier to suss out. Its insights were couched in a conceit so far-fetched—interviews with dead musicians conducted via séance—that clearly some humor was intended. Censorship Now!! is more conspicuously earnest. Aside from a few formal jokes (the back cover reads "INSTRUCTIONS: READ ONE WORD AT A TIME"), most of Svenonius’ absurdities are embedded in pointed diatribes that could easily be taken seriously.
In fact, some chapters in Censorship Now!! work as straightforward arguments. The lead title essay, wherein Svenonius stridently insists state approval of art is more dangerous than censorship, is the book’s most convincing piece. A chapter that touts the oft-mocked practice of collecting physical things as a counter to the homogenizing minimalism of Apple and Ikea rings true, as does one on the poisonous effects of tipping in the service industry, which essentially forces workers to pay each other.
It’s when Svenonius makes leaps through history that thinks get murkier. It’s hard to tell if his dizzying surveys across epochs, such as "The Historic Role of Sugar in Empire Building" and "The Twist: The Sexual Repression Revolution and the Craze to be Shaved", identify real cultural developments or intentionally cherry-pick the past for imaginary connections. Still, even those pieces have their share of thought-provoking points.
More memorable are sections where Svenonius combines worthwhile broadsides with bizarre conclusions. One hilariously biting chapter posits that modern documentaries—especially rock nostalgia trips—are dumbed-down messages for future alien races. "The documentary’s careful and childlike elucidation of events are calculated to be understood by an exotic sensibility, and their genial idiocy seems like careful consideration of an interstellar consciousness," Svenonius writes. "Why else would a film like Standard Operating Procedure (2008) be so asinine and simpleminded?"
Even funnier is a chapter on the purported deadly influence of the 1988 film Heathers. Does Svenonius actually believe that movie is, as he puts it, "on a par with Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, Star Wars and Titanic in capturing and shaping the attitudes of its age"? Either way, his outlandish claims house a fascinating interpretation of the film’s symbolism, akin to a video that claims, with tongue partially in cheek, that Back to the Future predicted 9/11.
At the end of Censorship Now!!, Svenonius returns to the more overt humor of Supernatural Strategies. Presented as a one-act drama, "The Backward Message" depicts four characters talking to "the voice of a backward record," which doles out sweeping philosophies on rock history. It’s fitting that a book whose intentions are ambiguous begins with a call to censor art and ends by letting art do the talking. Even more fitting is the book’s final line, uttered by a character who was asked what the record is saying: "Gosh. I guess we’ll never know."