Weekend reading / April 18, 2026
How music became the cathartic refuge for my political frustration.
A broken piano in the music room of the abandoned South-West high school.
(Johannes Schmitt-Tegge/Getty Images) I no longer drink, but a residual hangover clouds my memories of major events in recent history. The morning of the Unite the Right rally, I trudged down the stairs of a Catskills Airbnb rented for a bachelor party to learn that just hours before, a gang of white nationalists had stormed the University of Virginia campus, brandishing Tiki torches and chanting, “The Jews will not replace us.” My stomach wasn’t as queasy that morning as it was on Election Day, and my head wasn’t pounding as hard as it was after the inauguration, when I braved the crowded Washington Metro on my way to the Women’s March. Like the protagonists of 1984 And Stories from Berlinwhich I reread that winter with an earnestness I now find slightly embarrassing, my life soaked in gin, my senses dulled by the confusing chaos that approached.
By the time I returned to Brooklyn, where I had slept with the bride and groom, the haze turned to outrage and shame. I had wasted a weekend killing brain cells and walking in sandals to non-existent watering holes while an innocent woman was dead 300 miles away. There was no doubt in my mind that I was living in a totalitarian hellscape. When the president said there were “very fine people on both sides” that Tuesday, I knew he wasn’t talking about me.
For two years I had been living in Atlanta, where I was scheduled to return later in the week to prepare for another semester of teaching freshman English to computer science students trained in universal obsolescence engineering. I had left California and moved to the South in the twilight of the Obama administration, when the idea of a Trump presidency still retained a country’s fantasy. The Simpsons joke. As a reluctant Yankee, I had tried to blend into my surroundings without sacrificing often volatile opposition to the region’s dominant norms. It was far from impossible to find like-minded people to commiserate with, but the peaceful assemblies in which I gathered had no discernible result and did nothing to ease the precarity I felt as a knowledge worker on a fixed-term contract.
I retreated to points north and west at every conceivable opportunity, and when it came time to leave New York, growing fear sucked me into an Internet wormhole that resulted in an email offering my services to the local antifa branch, the address of which I probably found on Reddit. (While the group may not be the vast conspiracy the right assumes it is, there is a lot going on.) a real decentralized network of activists work to fight fascism.) What volunteering for the organization might entail, however, I had no idea, other than a vague idea of the tasks that might be assigned to a man of letters like me: writing pamphlets, giving speeches, leading freedom fighters to and from demonstrations. At 32, parading around on an underinflated air mattress in an overstimulated fugue, I was ready to put my body on the line.
Daylight softened my resolve, even as an unsigned message arrived in my inbox:
Hello Andrew,
Thank you for contacting us.
It would be best if we met sometime to discuss how people can get involved, whatever that may be. [sic] to do, our expectations regarding involvement, etc.
Let us know your available time and we can meet and chat.
Keep the faith ///
I immediately promised to sort out the details as soon as possible, even though I didn’t know I would actually do it. A more innocuous destiny awaited me when I arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson: playing piano in an indie rock band.
I’d met Virgil at a mutual friend’s house on a sweltering night in Georgia earlier that summer, at Michael Mann’s house. Heat projected on the living room wall. He was the kind of guy I had become familiar with over the previous fifteen years of recording and performing music: dirty and long-haired, animated and skinny. We weren’t really friends, but he contacted me after listening to the album I had freed myself, and soon after Charlottesville we began spending a lot of time together, our mutual disaffection bonding us.
Virgil isn’t his real name, although he’s been around so many people that I wouldn’t be surprised if he got a spot in the rotation. He worked as a night manager at a seedy hotel a few doors down from my apartment and shared a house with other underemployed hipsters a decade his junior. He enjoyed hanging out at Trader Joe’s, sipping free coffee samples, and chatting with strangers. He idolized Harry Nilsson, and the record he had just released wasn’t bad at all in terms of imitations. I was manic with anxiety and disappointment that grading papers, revising abstracts, protests, and tweets couldn’t dispel. Since childhood, music had been my refuge from the family and social dramas that had unwittingly prepared me for an era of political instability. Remembering the boy who had spent so much time in the principal’s office, I lost faith in the virtue of my fighting instinct. So I settled for a symbolic rebellion in a smaller arena where I could express my discontent and assert, for myself, if no one else, an illusion of control. “Don’t shoot the pianist,” goes the old joke. “He’s doing his best.”
We booked an opening act for a touring band whose debut had an 8.3 rating on Forkat the time when these notes had cachet. The day before the show, Virgil showed up at my house with a friend from Florida who had produced his album. Roland, he told me, was sober, but it only took a dozen or two beers between us for him to call his old dealers, and that wasn’t until 7 p.m. am that we stopped jamming in Virgil’s hallway. In the light of day, I understood why recovery was a wise decision for Roland; I was far from relieved to receive a call from my wife on my way home. “If you ever do that again, I’ll divorce you,” she said with chilling stoicism as I walked through the door.
Soon I was rehearsing several nights a week with the rest of the band: the lead guitarist, a divorced father gone gray; the bassist in 11th grade; and the drummer, a resident of an intergenerational punk house near the federal penitentiary who booked DIY shows in the basement. Other nights, Virgil would appear unannounced to raid my refrigerator and persuade me to spot him on the cover at Star Bar or at one of the downtown galleries, where I would hear disturbing rumors from those who had known him longer than I had. Despite growing suspicions, Virgil’s imperturbability was intoxicating: here was a truly apolitical man, seemingly unencumbered by conviction, fear, or awareness of current events—a Cosmo Kramer idiot with too-long nails. and an addiction to Instagram. In his own private South Bohemia, there had never been a Confederation and the 1990s dream of the 1970s endured, so it was easy to forget the indignities of our demoralizing reality in his presence. My wife, who was writing international news for cable television at the time, was unhappy with the complacency with which I had been seduced.
In the music as in the rigor of his disheveled appearance, Virgil demanded precision, and I was grateful to show off the chops I had perfected sitting every night with a six-pack atop the amount I had inherited from an acquaintance. Long hours at the keyboard had resulted in new compositions, but Virgil didn’t have much interest in my songs. The one I called”Atlanta“reflects my feelings well at the time:
I forgot the birthday
From the off-brand fascist state
I felt like shit so I ate Fentanyl
America has never been so beautiful
See, here we do things differently
We talk to Jesus all the time
Our cocks get hard for mom’s barbecue,
Go to church and get high
I was playing Randy Newman in Virgil’s Nilsson, the actuality of my own irony pointing in directions he was unwilling to go. And frankly, neither did I, beyond my clownish smile and the anti-authoritarian diatribes I launched at the students who mostly yawned in response. The superficial disbelief of my liberal colleagues, more concerned with securing tenure, tested my patience, and the news cycle forced my wife home from work. Doubting the wisdom of enlisting in a movement that even Democrats were beginning to associate with terrorism, even though I knew that wasn’t true, I never followed up on antifa.
My fall classes considered punk rock history as a site of radical politics and artistic experimentation, but I didn’t believe what I said half the time; in retrospect, this must have been clear to the hiring committees who sifted through the hundreds of applications I sent for teaching jobs across the country. Moonlighting in the indie rock scene restored an enthusiasm that I had lacked for too long. Atlanta’s scrappy underground, small but vibrant, gave me a sense of purpose and belonging, however childish, that academia couldn’t, and every time I brought up the idea of a monograph I’d never written, there was always something I’d rather do.
The ideas of the moment that preoccupied me – from those of Adam Curtis Hypernormalization and that of Angela Nagle Kill all the standards– contextualized my unease in the post-Watergate retreat from arts politics that abandoned the collectivist action of the New Left in favor of a nihilistic turn inward, which I recognized in my extracurricular activities as clearly as in the texts assigned to my program. Like the early punks who mocked the sentimental hypocrisy of the hippies’ utopian ideals, I too had put society aside in favor of myself, channeling my frustration into deceptively optimistic verses and refrains. Although I must have been guilty of identifying with my subject, I was comforted to see myself among a lineage of dreamers sublimating the horrors of reality on an alternative plane. Playing music allowed me to conjure up a material record of an experience more euphonious and infinitely less gloomy than the conditions in which it was produced. The conscience I was courting was undoubtedly false; I was living in a fantasy, working in a wish-fulfillment process that is, according to Freud, the professional domain of creative writers and children. It made no difference to me that anyone wasn’t paying much attention to what I was doing: the vibrations plugging my fingertips into my cochlea closed the circuit on a one-man feedback loop, taming dissonance more effectively than drug addiction or moving to Canada ever could.
In February, about six months into my time in the group, my wife and I drove to New Orleans, where a collective of drag queens were scheduled to lip sync to George Michael. remixes I had made for a group’s annual vapor wave themed Mardi Gras ball. At the eleventh hour, Virgil insisted on accompanying us, and my wife reluctantly agreed on the condition that he find his own accommodation and not rely on us to serve as his tour guides: we had our own people to see, and she had been assigned to cover the event for a website. Virgil slept in the front seat for the entirety of the seven-hour journey, shortly after insincerely volunteering to take the wheel. We parted ways outside his friend’s house downtown, but the next day, while I was fiddling with electronic equipment in the room, my phone started blowing up with texts and calls from Virgil asking where I was. I ignored him for as long as I could stand it, and he arrived early, eager for the kicks he expected from me.
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The night passed in a psychedelic blur: Win Butler DJed between sets, and the performance of my remixes moved me to the verge of tears. At the afterparty, my host showcased some rap skills that were new to me, and shortly before dawn we all returned to Alvar Street, Virgil behind us. We had been had, and now we were stuck. As our moving party gathered on the parade ground the next evening, there was Virgil: cigarettes, beers, sandwiches, and money from anyone he managed to ensnare into conversation. In his burlesque of the New Orleans spirit, I saw myself as the rube. I had had enough and I told him so; Soon my wife and I were yelling at him with enough volume for the bartender to throw him out. The next morning, livid as ever, I looked up the price of a Megabus back to Atlanta and Venmoed him the fare, skeptical that he had enough in his bank account to do it on his own.
I haven’t spoken to Virgil since, but from what I could gather online, nothing much has changed. In trying, in the years that followed, to unravel the act of creating the romantic myths of my youth, I came to understand that Virgil’s Dionysian influence on me was not all bad. His ostrich stance and Peter Pan lifestyle amounted to the very passivity that had drawn me to him, an unlikely antidote to the anomie I attributed to armchair Marxism. At his best, he approached negative capacity, embracing the forces of creativity against the voices of reason amplifying futility – a perspective that provided the perfect foil for my thinking about the role of the artist in society. I have not forgotten the catharsis that his lumpen hedonism unleashed in my information-induced paralysis, initiating a dialectical process of synthesis of art and politics that brought me, if not closer to enlightenment, a certain clarity and intermittent peace.
Meanwhile, the onslaught of international crises, domestic terror, and the countless microaggressions of daily life under fascism have not abated and undermined my efforts to lead a meaningful life, but the capacity for introspection, creation, and common ground that music has continually replenished as my habits gradually move closer to the expectations of a teacher, husband, and father eases the anxiety of the times catastrophic.
Art requires as much suffering as being, and I’m not naive enough to believe that music will get us through, no matter how many tragedies Bruce Springsteen deems worthy of a song. But the persistence of humans in humming a tune or plucking a string to affirm their community or their personality is a form of resistance that transcends the vicissitudes of tyranny and destruction. As long as we are alive, there will be harmony and discord; the importance of one does not completely silence the other. Maybe Virgil already knew something that I’m still figuring out: that to maintain the vision, energy, and motivation to make art, you have to find ways to drown out the noise. The machines at my disposal may not kill more fascists than Woody Guthrie’s, but nothing seems as sensible or as true to me when, as happens too often, the world goes to shit.
Andrew Marzoni Andrew Marzoni is a writer, professor and musician in New York.
