“Kill All Hippies”: Paranoia and Pastiche in Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR

Sam Bromer

Primal Scream’s 2000 album XTRMNTR has acquired a divisive legacy in the 20 years since its release.^[1] On one hand, the album has been mythologized by publications like NPR and The Quietus as representing a watershed moment in British rock music which challenged the boundaries of the genre and mounted a withering critique of 1990s ‘Third Way’ austerity politics, media spectacle, and the military industrial complex which maintains relevance today in an era of 24 hour news cycles, social media, and never-ending war.^[2] On the other hand, critics like Simon Reynolds have registered a degree of skepticism towards the band’s appropriation of aesthetics of industrial music and punk (détournement/the “cut-up,” harsh noise, narratives of high technology/global warfare/emotional suffering), alongside aesthetics borrowed from 1960s Afrofuturist and psychedelic pop music, towards its critique of its contemporary conjuncture.^[3]

In this essay, I want to focus on the extent to which XTRMNTR succeeds as critique, and explore the limits of this attempted critique, by applying two (heavily interrelated) critical lenses to the album. First, I will analyze XTRMNTR through the lens of mimicry, examining how Primal Scream deploy Situationist detournemént, repurposed Futurist aesthetics, and pastiche in the album’s lyrical content, musical sound, and visual materials (packaging, music videos, merchandise, etc.), arguing that the result is a deeply ambiguous work that contradictorily both succeeds as critique and exists as cultural commodity to be bought and sold on the marketplace. Second, I will apply the critical lens of hegemony, arguing that XTRMNTR’s attempts to identify and resist insidious forms of corporate and governmental control, exemplified by its paranoid, science fiction-inspired lyrical content and by its alternately psychedelic and industrial instrumentation, can be best understood to be in reaction to the transition between disciplinary society and control society that began to take place in the UK in the mid to late 1990s.

I. Mimicry

Primal Scream is a UK-based indie band which has been active since the early 1980s. While their early musical output was defined by an eager appropriation of the countercultural aesthetics of the 1960s and early 1970s typical of indie releases of the 1980s, their proceeding releases mark an ever-evolving attempt to reconcile a nostalgic attraction to sixties utopianism with a commitment to eclecticism and experimentation.^[4] As David Hesmondhalgh notes, their 1991 album Screamadelica “was the most successful attempt to fuse dance rhythms with a rock sensibility…” of the 1990s, an approach which captured the druggy zeitgeist of early ‘90s rave culture. ^[5] Primal Scream’s subsequent albums failed to recapture this commercial and (sub)cultural domination, and were defined by erratic jumps between genres. By 2000, the year of XTRMNTR’s release, the band occupied an ambiguous aesthetic and commercial space in ‘indie,’ at a time when this genre had become unmoored from its oppositional, institutionally independent signification, and the band had begun to abandon psychedelic and rockist reference points altogether. At the same time, Primal Scream gained an (arguably earned) reputation for “riding the crest of the zeitgeist,” a reputation which would inform critiques of XTRMNTR.^[6]

Among the most common criticisms levelled at Primal Scream, and XTRMNTR in particular, is the idea that their music exemplifies the glut of “pastiche” endemic to cultural production in the late 1990s and early 2000s -- in other words, that the album is little more than a symptom of the “intertwinement of nostalgia and the consumer-entertainment complex” which spawned a litany of retro-fetishizing rock bands in the 1990s.^[7] In his foundational 1989 book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson identifies pastiche as a novel, increasingly prevalent phenomenon in culture, marked by the “the cannibalization of all the styles of the past, [and] the play of random stylistic allusion….” He argued that this cultural symptom of an increasingly global, ‘high-tech’, financialized capitalist world order was contributing to the erosion of our perception of time, historicity and difference -- and ultimately, our ability to imagine potential futures outside of neoliberal capitalism.^[8]

By the late 1990s, this ‘novel’ historical and cultural phenomenon was nearly ubiquitous -- particularly in the subcultural music scenes occupied by Primal Scream. In Retromania, Reynolds identifies a phenomenon wherein bands of this era, including Primal Scream, Spacemen 3, and Stereolab, received critical adulation and mainstream success by replicating the sounds of an earlier era. While earlier groups like Throbbing Gristle or Coil had made their influences explicit, by the 1990s, “…the taste map was getting ever more explicit and exposed, to the point where the aesthetic co-ordinates were right there on the surface of the sound.”^[9] Bands of this era, in other words, were no longer merely influenced by earlier bands, movies, pop culture ephemera, etc. Instead, their ‘artworks’ were reduced to commodified copies or reproductions of culture produced in preceding eras, whose easily identifiable musical sources made them more readily consumable. Such bands’ fluency in the popular culture of the past granted them ‘subcultural capital’ but in the process drained any political or aesthetic urgency from their work.^[10]

It is easy to spot the cultural references in XTRMNTR which would evoke the critiques levelled here and elsewhere. The album’s second track, “Accelerator,” contains elements which sound very obviously sampled or borrowed from punk rock forebearers The Stooges.^[11] Elsewhere, the song “MBV Arkestra” telegraphs the influence of Afrofuturist musician Sun Ra in its title and instrumentation, while the penultimate track “Shoot Speed/Kill Light” plays off The Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat.”^[12] Such winking examples at the popular culture of the past are ripe for critique because they seem to place Bobby Gillespie, the group’s primary songwriter and lead singer, in a position of ‘curator’ who merely assembles and recombines found and repurposed sounds and references in a method that gestures at political critique but merely succeeds in enshrining the erudition and subcultural ‘genius’ of the band.^[13] In a variation of Reynolds’ critique, Hesmondhalgh identifies the cynical role pastiche played in indie’s development as a genre in his essay “Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre,” writing, “pastiche in the 1980s was a quiet challenge to the notions of authenticity on which much mainstream rock rested … [but] by the 1990s, the use of older sounds had become emptied of political meaning and was increasingly accompanied by a rockist self-indulgence…”^[14]

At stake in this debate is more than subjective taste: The question of whether art can redeploy aesthetic and political tactics of an earlier era without being fully subsumed by the logic of the marketplace remains vital. I want to argue that, while superficially, XTRMNTR certainly seems to employ many of the techniques of ‘pastiche’ that scholars including Hesmondhalgh and Reynolds have identified as reactionary cultural forces in the late 1990s and early 2000s, its deployment of Situationist-style interventions and Futurist-inspired aesthetic techniques cannot be purely reduced to a cynical attempt to fetishize such aesthetics in service of creating an attractive commodity for consumption. Instead, their usage throughout XTRMNTR underlies an attempt to reveal and attempt to resist hegemonic forces which derive their power by being taken for granted as ‘common sense’ within social discourse.

XTRMNTR can be said to be centered around the aesthetics and politics of the ‘glitch.’ Throughout the album and in its accompanying artwork and music videos, Gillespie and Primal Scream employ two central aesthetic practices -- the ‘cut-up’ collage and Futurist-inspired ‘accelerationist’ aesthetics, to reveal ‘glitches’ in imagery and sound that are usually experienced as natural or normal. These techniques defamiliarize and, metaphorically speaking, “reveal the operating system” which underlie such forces.^[15] In the music video for “Kill All Hippies,” which draws on the aesthetic used in XTRMNTR’s album artwork, archival footage of satellites, military drones, fighter jets, and police vehicles from a Vietnam War documentary are removed from their ‘natural’ context in cut-out style and placed against fields of garish color.^[16] This footage is interspersed with similarly decontextualized footage of uniformed NFL football players and NHL hockey players competing in empty fields of color and infinite space. The viewer is prevented from viewing the faces of any of the uniformed individuals depicted through the use of colored cut-outs, creating a differential in power between the faceless uniformed soldiers we cannot see, but who we observe surveilling one another and the surrounding fields of three-dimensional space.

Fig. 1 Still from “Kill All Hippies,” 0:46, YouTube video

The imagery of the “Kill All Hippies” video typifies the ‘aesthetics of the glitch’ encountered on XTRMNTR. The effect is analogous to, and heavily inspired by, the uncanny feeling one experiences when one encounters an error in a video game: The attempt at realistic depiction of characters is violated, and the code which underlies the game becomes visually apparent on its surface. The effect, in combination with the song’s refrain “You’ve got the money / I’ve got the soul,” as well as its use of a synth melody which sounds overdriven to the very edge of breaking up, is to create a critical distance which allows the viewer to notice the constructed nature of the media spectacle on display. While such techniques undoubtedly draw inspiration from Dadaism; William F. Burroughs’ textual experimentation; and post-punk ’zine culture, they are responding directly to the album’s immediate historical period. The superficial connections to earlier aesthetic experiments serves a specific purpose, beyond the creation of aesthetic pleasure by drawing such a connection: It draws an analogy between the historical conjuncture being critiqued -- one of intense, endless media spectacle, and the ‘flattening’ of popular culture’s depictions of military warfare, sport, and media into an endless stream of entertainment -- and an earlier period. The political structures of the new millennium are tied irrevocably to the past.

XTRMNTR’s deployment of the aesthetics of an earlier era consistently undermine and resist conventions of genre and the forms which inspired it. Its recombinatory approach invokes some of the superficially identifiable aesthetics of an earlier era to draw parallels between the historical conjuncture faced by artists in those eras to its own contemporary moment, while at the same time employing the conceptual processes favored by those artists towards new ends, in service of a radical rejection of its contemporary status quo and towards a critical opening of new potential musical and political futures. To make these historical resonances explicit, the album is itself a symptom of period of paradoxical historical continuity and disjuncture. By 2000, the hope and optimism that had energized youth culture at the beginning of the ‘90s – a freedom-rejoicing rave at the “end of history” -- was replaced by a new form of “fear, paranoia, and self-loathing” as the now-inconsequential battle lines of the Cold War gave way to increasing anxiety about the rise of surveillance technologies and the increasing commodification of such youth subcultures.^[17] Meanwhile, the spectacle of capital “P” Political ‘change’ had proven itself to be a ruse: Blairite ‘Third Way’ politics, premised on the demonization of the working class and marketed to the British public as a marketized, ‘pragmatic’ alternative to both the “strong state / free market” politics of Thatcherism and to the Keynesian welfare state, had opened the door for private capital to hollow out Britain’s public sector.^[18] At this moment of renewed crisis, it seemed that the confinements of Cold War containment had merely given way to new, more insidious limits of neoliberal capitalism. In the next section, I will expand upon how XTMRNTR is both a symptom and a critique of this moment of contradictory prosperity and containment.

II. Hegemony

Another related way of understanding XTRMNTR is as a symptom of a specific historical juncture -- one whose massive technological, political, social, and cultural changes can be explained by the transition between disciplinary society and control society -- which seeks to draw attention to the changes wrought by this transition, and to open the door to an alternate future in the face of challenges to this that seemed to herald its slow cancellation. In his 1992 essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze argues that the disciplinary society described by Foucault in his “Panopticism” essay was on its way out in the contemporary era.^[19] In a variation of the Jameson argument I eluded to earlier, Deleuze observes that accelerating technological changes and the replacement of Fordist production with corporations producing ‘higher-order’ goods necessitated new forms of power relations. Under this new regime, the mass/individual dichotomy would break down, as new forms of control meant that the individual would “embody conflicting desires of exploitation and comradery” and “the question of who was exploiting whom could not be answered easily.” The source of this change in subjectivity was, on one hand, the financialization and neoliberalization of institutions like the corporation, which replaced its administration of the mass with competitive “TV game show-like” rivalries between precarious individual workers; and on the other hand, the advance of data-aggregation and technology such that “the position of any element within the society can be known at any given instant.” The individual is no longer a prisoner of a series of enclosures, but instead appears to be “free” within a system which in actuality knows his every location and desire, and which has only (thus far) failed to colonize his dreams. ^[20]

Even leaving the legitimacy of such a theory aside, it is this techno-paranoia which shapes both the lyrical content and alternately intensely disciplined and structured and psychedelic and formless sonic experimentation of XTRMNTR -- in other words, at XTRMNTR’s historical juncture, this appeared to be the reality into which western society was moving. Such techno-paranoia, and the fading hope of escaping such a system, is best encapsulated by the title track, “Exterminator.”^[21] This song is an intense comedown from the previous track, “Accelerator,” which, to the tune of pitch-perfect ‘70s’ Stooges guitar shredding and exhortations to leave the past behind and “hit the accelerator,” embodies the pitch-perfect “retro” aesthetic Reynolds identifies in Primal Scream’s discography. “Accelerator,” then, is premised on the fantasy of a highway escape, informed by the oppositional politics of punk culture. Ironically, Deleuze himself designates such a highway escape as a metaphor for control society, arguing that while highways give the impression that one can “go anywhere at any speed autonomously,” in reality, one is always surveilled at all points through checkpoints.^[22]

In contrast with “Accelerator,” “Exterminator” is a reckoning with the realization that “the system” knows where we are and what we are consuming at all points -- that our desires are regulated for by coercion and surveillance for the sake of profit. The track opens with a languid synth line, atonal, aimless guitar gurgling, and malfunctioning/glitching machine sounds as Gillespie describes a future dystopia is under near-complete control under some nameless totalitarian government:

Control violence halluncinatory programmes

Septicaemic interzone, psychic distortions

Satellite sickness TV junk

No civil disobedience

No civil disobedience

This imagery, heavily borrowing from William Burroughs, evokes the despair and dread of a society marked by the use of violence to coerce its inhabitants, and invasions of the bloodstream by “pathogenic agents,” “hallucinatory programs” and “TV junk” distract the populace from such dreadful conditions. In the final verse, the narrator speaks directly to a child trapped under the same conditions:

So look out kid, you keep it all hid

You think you're free, but you ain't free, just free to be hit

You're an unchannelled frequency

Nobody's listening

You imbalanced permanent

Nobody's listening

No civil disobedience

No civil disobedience^[23]

The narrator exhorts the kid to reckon with the fact that his apparent “freedom” is just coercion. His condition seems nearly hopeless, and his mind appears irrevocably damaged by media spectacle and “psychic distortions” -- “nobody’s listening, you imbalanced permanent” -- but at the same time, the narrator calls the child an “unchanneled frequency,” and reminds him twice that “nobody’s listening,” which, upon being repeated, evokes a sense of continuing hope in the form of self-expression in spaces not yet conquered by the surveillance systems of the coercive regime.

XTRMNTR is an artifact of a historical conjuncture which was itself in transition. Less than two years after the January, 2000 release of the album, the pistons of the “military-industrial illusion of democracy” they had so viciously critiqued were beginning to speed up, as Tony Blair’s government turned to the militant nationalism Thatcher had mobilized in the 1980s Falkland War as a source of legitimacy for its own violent political project. 2000 was also a moment of transition for the indie subculture Primal Scream occupied, and XTRMNTR represented the last release by famed ‘independent’ label (‘independent,’ by that point, in name only) Creation Records. If, as Hesmondhalgh concludes, indie as a genre “represents the end of the post-punk vision of transforming the social relations of musical production via the medium of the small record company,” XTRMNTR arguably represented, if not the end of indie, then a potential new way forward for the genre -- to use Mark Fisher’s terminology, a “lost future” which is worth returning to at this current moment of neoliberal crisis.^[24]

Bibliography

1. Brackstone, Lee. “How Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR Delivered An Enema To The 1990s.” The Quietus. January 28, 2020. https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/primal-scream-xtrmntr-exterminator-review-anniversary/
2. Choi, Taeyoon. “Notes on the Control Society.” Accessed February 8, 2024. http://taeyoonchoi.com/poetic-computation/control-society/
3. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59, (Winter 1992): 3-7.
4. Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014.
5. Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 191-230 Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.
6. Goodwin, Mitch 2018. “Screen Circuits: Fear and Paranoia in the Sprawl (circa 1995).” M/C Journal 21, no. 5: doi:10.5204/mcj.1488
7. Hall, Stuart. “The Neoliberal Revolution: Thatcher, Blair, Cameron -- The Long March of Neoliberalism Continues.” Soundings 48,(Summer 2011): 9-28.
8. Hesmondhalgh, David. “Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre.” Cultural Studies 13:1, 34-61.
9. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
10. Perpetua, Matthew. “Pills, Police And Endless War: 20 Years Ago, Primal Scream Saw Our Future.” NPR Music. January 31, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/31/800807212/primal-scream-xtrmntr-saw-our-future-20-years-ago
11. Primal Scream, “Kill All Hippies,” YouTube video, 3:10. January 7, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFewfB333_Q
12. Primal Scream. XTRMNTR. Creation Records, 2000.
13. Reed, S. Alexander. Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
14. Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. 1st American ed. New York: Faber & Faber, 2011.
15. The Velvet Underground. White Light/White Heat. Verve, 1968.

Notes

1. Primal Scream, XTRMNTR, Creation Records, 2000.

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2. Lee Brackstone, “How Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR Delivered An Enema To The 1990s.” The Quietus. January 28, 2020. https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/primal-scream-xtrmntr-exterminator-review-anniversary/; Matthew Perpetua, “Pills, Police And Endless War: 20 Years Ago, Primal Scream Saw Our Future,” NPR Music. January 31, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/31/800807212/primal-scream-xtrmntr-saw-our-future-20-years-ago

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3. Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

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4. Reynolds, 91.

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5. David Hesmondhalgh, “Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre,” Cultural Studies 13:1: 46.

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6. Mitch Goodwin, “Screen Circuits: Fear and Paranoia in the Sprawl (circa 1995),” M/C Journal 21 no. 5 (2018).

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7. Reynolds, xxix.

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8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 18.

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9. Reynolds, 133.

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10. Reynolds, xxxi.

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11. Primal Scream, “Accelerator,” Track 2 on XTRMNTR, Creation Records, 2000.

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12. Primal Scream, “MBV Arkestra,” Track 9; “Shoot Speed/Kill Light,” Track 11, on XTRMNTR, Creation Records, 2000; The Velvet Underground, “White Light/White Heat,” Track 1 on White Light/White Heat, Verve, 1968.

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13. Reynolds, 130.

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14. Hesmondhalgh, 55,

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15. S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 10.

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16. Primal Scream, “Kill All Hippies,” YouTube video, 3:10. January 7, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFewfB333_Q

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17. Goodwin.

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18. Stuart Hall. "The Neoliberal Revolution: Thatcher, Blair, Cameron -- The Long March of Neoliberalism Continues." Soundings 48,(Summer 2011): 9-28.

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19. Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 191-230.

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20. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59, (Winter 1992): 5.

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21. Primal Scream, “Exterminator,” Track 3 on XTRMNTR, Creation Records, 2000.

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22. Deleuze, quoted in Taeyoon Choi, “Notes on the Control Society.” Accessed February 8, 2024. http://taeyoonchoi.com/poetic-computation/control-society/

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23. Primal Scream, “Exterminator,” Track 3 on XTRMNTR, Creation Records, 2000.

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24. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014).

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