Back in March, I saw Maruja live at Bar le Ritz in Montréal. It was a powerful and energetic show, and it ended with a sort of speech from vocalist and guitarist Harry Wilkinson about peace, love, and music. The crowd raised their fists into the air in unison, and although writing it out like this makes it sound a bit cheesy, there was no denying their sincerity and conviction in the moment. In that dark club, it all felt real, self-evident, as though change was imminent. As if they had tapped into the undercurrent of anger and disenfranchisement that defines our current reality.
I remember leaving the show with the impression that "maybe art could save us," hardly a unique take, but one that I've been thinking about for quite some time, particularly with the advent of artificial intelligence and the renewed question of what art actually is. Is it a mirror of our reality, without any power to really change it? With capital now controlling much of its production, can anything truly subversive be made anymore? Does its ability to change 'hearts and minds' rely too much on media literacy? Or does it indeed have true emancipatory power in its ability to bring people together?
Pain to Power captures the energy of Maruja well; an impressive feat (as anyone who has seen them live will be aware). They, to me, represent a growing pendulum swing back towards sincerity in art. The irony-poisoned twee of the noughties has lost its allure. Deconstruction seems to have us eschewing the tongue-in-cheek, wink-and-nudge nihilism that characterised the last 30-plus years. And while my main gripe with the album is that some of the lyrics are a bit cheesy, a bit surface-level, I do think they make sense within the wider project of the album.
It's our differences that make us beautiful.
*Wild saxophone sounds*
The refrain of Saoirse is the biggest offender, a sort of milquetoast, squishy liberal sentiment of 'bridging the divide,' mixed with a brand of optimistic globalism that people of my generation grew up with. It's not something I disagree with by any means, but it's empty, reminiscent of hippie-era "peace and love." Bloodsport's refrain of "I'm an addict, addicted to my bad habits" is another questionable choice. These were probably groundbreaking when Rage Against the Machine did it 25 years ago, but they're cliché now.
Popular media and the broader arts seem to be noticeably pushing in this direction. James Gunn's recent Superman film is another example, unapologetically sincere. Perhaps it's because a generation of people who grew up hyperaware of the spectacle is now reaching adulthood. We have been performing for our entire lives. Everything is recorded, everything is tracked, and there is this pervasive, unspoken feeling that one wrong move, one misstep, could derail everything.1 Paired with the broader context that we grew up in—this endless stream of noise; worsening material conditions alongside constant gaslighting that things are 'better than ever'; and the bending and (in some cases) outright shattering of reality—it's little surprise that cultural output is reacting.
The keyword above is reacting. Culture is reactionary, dependent fully on the context in which it is created. If it rails against that context, we call it counter-culture, and before long, even that is subsumed into what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer call The Culture Industry.2 I'd argue, however, that cultures' material impact on the world is less decisive. Ideas, borne of material conditions, emanate from a collective consciousness, are spread through culture, and finally die. The belief that 'art can save us,' while noble, is unfounded and mistakes its role in the body politic. Kurt Vonnegut perhaps sums it up best:
During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turned out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.
Kurt Vonnegut
But there's nuance. The beating of the war drums does not win the battle, but perhaps the battle could not be won without the war drums. What Vonnegut missed is that they were never creating a weapon.
That's all to say, the message behind Pain to Power is not to be found in the lyrics, it's in the music. A frenzied, screaming bloodbath, opening up to cosmic jazz, like the ocean lapping at the shore. Distorted bass warns of impending destruction; earthbound waves of sound. Cycling, intensifying arpeggios hint at unfolding chaos. This is the 'point' of the album. The energy, the intensity, the catharsis, and yes—the sincerity. It's hard to put into words, but if you've been paying attention to the world lately, this is what it sounds like.
Footnotes
I want to leave a note here that, although this kind of argument ("you do one thing wrong…") often leads to railing against 'cancel culture' (which I would argue does not exist and is merely a conservative dogwhistle), I'm talking more about the idea of perception and the fear, unfounded or not, of being perceived. This ties into the spectacle, more than this more conservative idea of an 'outsized reaction.' ↩
Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (1947). Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. In Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm ↩