by Amir Azizmohammadi
Let me tell you the truth about my
Friday night
I cut myself
Open. Open wide.
Because it felt right
for the first time in my life
I was honest with myself
Something incredible happened inside
I let go
I failed
and
I don’t apologize (Last Friday by Bradley Tyler)
If you live in Toronto and you are sick and tired of commercial-stricken TV channels and celebrity-ridden entertainment, if you cannot afford Cinderella and Billy Elliot because you are out of job thanks to the global recession, if you have become allergic to the Toronto cashiers’ meaningless clichés like “do you need a bag?” and the consumerist junk mail prose, if you are yearning for some organic entertainment with meaningful attempts to communicate rather than sell, you will find Toronto a treasure house of independent artistic expressions buried under the big media hype. The Junzi’s Last Friday is a random sample of the cultural products in Toronto that are toiled away at and sweated over practically for free, yet most remain largely unseen.
Last Friday is the first album by the Canadian-Japanese-American Toronto-based band Junzi, masterminded by the lead singer of the band, Tyler Bradley. What particularly makes works like Last Friday so attractive to a critic is the fact that in a world controlled by governmental and corporate publishing and broadcasting, such artistic leaks reflect our history truly. Last Friday and its like are the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” shouting out, “you are naked.”
Last Friday is a narrative. It is, in a very postmodern manner, too old-fashioned for a world impatiently tweeting and a music industry churning singles with ridiculously short half-lives. It is a coming-of-age journey framed in one of the oldest Western narrative structures: The Homeric Odyssey structure. Bradley Tyler uses the same structure but turns the concept upside down by turning Ulysses, and all his sharp-thinking, into an impotent citizen of the world trapped in the prison of Monster Global Recession with no brilliant solution whatsoever.
Yes. It is true. This is by no means an innovation in the history of art and music. Shaken by two world wars, the unproud early 20th century artists and entertainers did a lot of that. The Beatles’ “Lady Madonna” for instance, John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” and even Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” to some extent. One can also add all the antiheroes of the Theatre of the Absurd and of course Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman and his American dream bubble. James Joyce also did away with Homer’s Odysseus to replace him with a caricatured antiheroic modern man in his Ulysses.
The similarities between what is produced in Toronto in 2010 and what happened in the early-20th -century art world is exactly what makes it worthwhile to ask in what way Bradley Tyler’s antihero is different from Joyce’s characters. To answer this question might help us locate our place in modern history, and, with the mass media actively whitewashing, we seem to be able to do this most easily when studying independent products.
While James Joyce pictured the modern Ulysses as a character shocked by modernity, torn by the early 20th-century isms, intoxicated with the industrial revolution, slightly nostalgic, and puzzled by an identity crisis, Last Friday is about a postmodern Ulysses entangled in the unrivaled universal reign of late capitalism, having grown wiser and more bitter but less regretful and less self-deceptive.
Similar to the last generation’s tendency, the feeling of “alienation” is still the backbone of the work.
I’m just skin
Part per million
No one in particular
___
They’ll make you wear a dress
The only part that matters is
The part they test
This disease doesn’t have a name
I have to guess
I’ll never forget
This moment of self awareness
Spent my whole life being different
I’d give anything
To be just like you
___
Pathetique
Bundle of ribs
with
NO NAME
It try to lift itself up
but fall down again
However, there are three differences. First, Tyler’s Canadian Ulysses is much wiser than its fathers. He is less revolutionary. Less optimistic. And less nostalgic simply because the past he remembers is the same capitalist system only in an earlier stage. In his memory, there is no picture of “merry feudalism.” Also he has not experienced a world war.
There is a war, but it is a breakfast-TV-news war happening far away from our toast and coffee in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an honestly self-assertive failure, even disgusted at his rusty erection as the only reminiscence of a human past.
I let go
I failed
and
I don’t apologize
Second, the problem today is a universal problem. It is not any more “Western capitalism” but the “global market,” “global recession,” the “World Trade Organization,” and the “World Bank.” It is as much about Chinese neo-colonialism as it is about the American unemployment rate. While the West was feverishly importing yoga, kung fu, chopsticks, and the sitar, John Lennon consciously made the Ono cult in order to restate that the West was suffering from cultural anaemia. In his unsophisticated
“You Are Here,” Lennon points us to the disease-free East as a remedy. Like Lennon Bradley Tyler is married to a Japanese woman, yet he knows well that the infection is everywhere today. He sets his story in Tokyo rather than Toronto and he laments in Japanese as well as English.
The third difference is the alienating factors unique to our age of late capitalism. If for Charley Chaplin in Modern Times, the main concern was the factory and alienated manual labour, in Last Friday the focus is on the mass media and our monitory systems. The problem today is the alienating mass media watching us everywhere like Big Brother with the moustache off, and the bra or the tie on. On the other hand, Last Friday is Pink Floyd’s “money” plus what has turned into our identity today: the credit card.
Promised my parents I’d be the kid
On Teevee
On Teevee
___
World spinning without me
That can’t be right
That can’t be right
I’m a celebrity
I’m a celebrity
___
I’m in the shopping mall:
Convenient cemetery!
Women wasting on the walls
Stare vacantly
Cuz Phony so sexy
When it’s on sale
___
There are 5 ways out:
Rob a bank
Raise a child
Kill a cop
Use your credit card
Close up shop
Cut cut cut cut
I might be accused of comparing an unknown independent artist with a bunch of giants. That, I would argue, is exactly how historical circumstances have changed the taste of the audience. We the audience made those people giants prior to the gossip industry we call entertainment today, just years before the current practice of persistent silence on anything any deep. We used to put the Beatles on a pedestal and now the beetles.
