There will be no revolution

In September of 2011 I was at the official afterparty for the International Festival of Comics and Games in Łódź. It was the part of event during which all the official speeches were held and awards were handed out. And at the end, a musical act would play. That year the audience got a real treat - a joint performance by two esteemed artists. The first one was a well known local act called Cool Kids of Death, a somewhat controversial alternative rock outfit. The second was a famous Japanese video game music composer Akira Yamaoka, best known for the Silent Hill soundtrack. People who came to the show were probably expecting that the famous international guest would take the center stage and the local band would be the backup.

That didn't happen. The first half of the show was just CKOD playing their original songs. Public was lukewarm and mostly waiting for Akira to take the stage. That happened about half-way through the show - but public was suprised to learn that for this part, the ensemble is gonna keep playing local band's songs, just with addition of Yamaoka on guitar. The band already has two guitarists so quite frankly, an additional one didn't make much of a difference in the sound. Public groaned. Finally, the vocalist announced that it's time for songs from Silent Hill. And they played them, but for just 10 minutes - after 3 tracks, the show was over.

It was the first time I saw CKOD and I became a fan right away. I immediately connected with the sound and lyrics, the attitudes and the underlying message. They were my favorite band for a very long time and will probably always remain somewhere in my top 10. But as far as I know, a lot of people had the opposite reaction - they came there to see Akira and they hated the fact that he was a very small part of the show, and hated Cool Kids for "hogging the spotlight". The band gained one loyal fan, but put off the wide audience. Years later, I realize that this was the most CKOD outcome possible.

In fact, this was a frequent occurrence in their history. Their methods of promotion would often backfire by turning off some of their existing fans while not bringing any new ones, and every shift in sound from album to album seemed designed to scare away their contemporary audience... Or at least so argues writer Kazimierz Rajnerowicz, author of the band's biography, titled "There will be no revolution". I've first encountered his work when I was at the height at my fascination with the band and I was searching for any sort of analysis, discussion or context for their music. That's when I found an anonymous blog called "songs of ckod" which was a collection of fascinating essays about individual tracks that has become a large influence on how I think and talk about music in general. Reading through it I discovered I was on the right path in understanding just how complex and contradictory is the band's discography, but I clearly lacked the cultural context to really put together how all these references and borrowings formed a complete, coherent message. Many years later I read an article on a semi-well-known Polish website called "Dwutygodnik" that summed up the bands career, and that's where the author claimed ownership over the blog in the byline, giving me the opportunity to learn his name. It was a really interesting read that pulled a lot of facts and anecdotes from CKOD history to portray just how inadequate they were for the contemporary media landscape. Ahead of the time in their creations, while old-fashioned in their marketing, PR and distribution model. I was curious just how much more he had to say about this, to extend this short article into a full-length book.

What I didn't quite expect was that more than half of it would be dedicated to period of time before CKOD was even started, to the decades in which eventual band members would grow up and form their identities - 70s, 80s and 90s. This was a very tumultuous time - communism was waning and eventually gone in 1989, allowing Poland to finally join the western world. But just as important as "when", the "where" question would equally define the Cool Kids. Their hometown of Łódź is often compared to Detroit - a post-industrial city deeply suffering from the decline in business. With no hope and perspectives for its youth, some would say it's a breeding ground for artists who'd look for an escape from reality in their work. Their background would unconsciously seep into their creations, and not just the individual experiences with living in a dying city - the local community of artists would all inspire and affect one another. The book paints the picture of CKOD as one of the most eclectic art projects in Poland's modern history, defined by their love of western pop culture while under constant exposure to state-approved entertainment, influenced by local punk, techno and psychedelic avant-garde, trying to create their own take on britpop and simultaneously exploding with thoughts about contemporary political and sociological landscape. You could argue that in 00s they were on the cutting edge of modern media. And that creates an issue that perhaps isn't all that obvious - it means that no one in the general audience could quite follow what they're saying.

Kazimierz took the lens of a few Polish kids' upbringing to talk about the political transformation at large, especially how it affected artists and other kinds of creative people. Before '89, Poland existed in a bubble of sorts, with restricted access to culture created beyond the borders of the soviet block. And then practically overnight we got an unfiltered influx of movies, music, books and television, and Internet to come in just few years. Everyone was fascinated by the new genres and ideas, and above all, the free market. But no one was good at it yet. In Rajnerowicz's opinion, first 10-20 years of Polish commercialized mass media were pure kitsch, or more directly speaking, trash. All rules were off and people were filling air time with literally anything they could think of, while the ones who succeeded in the new reality were trying to aimlessly figure out how to carry themselves. And this world with no taste or class is where CKOD tried to position themselves as a counter-culture outfit. And as snobbish as it may sound, the amount of people who could understand what is it that they were a counter to wasn't very big. They were at a cross-section of bohemian intellectualism and working-class rebellion, and there were not a lot of people there to meet them. Cool Kids of Death were toying with their image in a way that feels way more attuned to current social media landscape than promoting yourself through radio, tv and newspapers in the yesteryear. They created this whole ideal of rebellion that had no substance to it, which was the point - it was about playing with the symbolism of defiance to shift the perspective on some issues and to get through to over-analyzing shy nerds like me who wouldn't accept a simple, sincere message, assuming there's some bad intentions hidden underneath it.

I'd like to emphasize that the first half of the book is extremely interesting. It made me realize that I really haven't seen anyone try to summarize and characterize Polish culture from this period in a similar way. There's documentaries about underground music from 70s and 80s and extensive writing about our modern culture, but everyone seems to just want to forget those last 10 years of the previous millenium. I'm sure those discussions and essays are somewhere to be found, but this was the first one for me and I really appreciated what Kazimierz managed to convey in those 150-or-so pages. And the author spends so much time painstakingly detailing the cultural background because it's vital to believing his thesis statement that CKOD was a great, tragic band, that could only be formed under those particulars circumstances, but had no chance in hell to have an actual success in these very same circumstances. A band like Myslovitz took inspiration from britpop to write beautiful songs in a fresh style. Cool Kids of Death used the same inspiration to create something provocative and challenging. And people really didn't get them. They couldn't understand why these so-called anti-establishment warriors are giving interviews in low-brow TV shows and publishing manifestos in the biggest newspaper in the country. The music was too clamorous and there were way too many layers of irony in the text that didn't sound all that different from sincere lyrics of regular punk bands, or hip hop artists who were conquering the hearts of the common folk at the time. Very few people knew all the things they were referencing, all the ideas that inspired them. Most people had to interpret band's creations on their own - and that was the starting point for CKOD to become one of the most misunderstood art projects in Polish history. Their history is a sad one and it doesn't have a happy ending. Reading through the book you can smell the failure as soon as the second album, but it will take 3 more until the eventual demise, and until then it just keeps tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling down...

As a huge fan of the band it's hard for me to say "everyone would find this book interesting", but I really want to. It's a fascinating journey showing how popular and alternative art progressed in the first 20 years of the Third Polish Republic, especially around Łódź, and how one of our most interesting ensembles ended up completely unremarkable, likely to be forgotten by history within its members' lifetime. It made me realize just how little we talk about a large and interesting chapter in the country's cultural history, about how our current media landscape grew out of it. Maybe you'll find it interesting as the history of "Polish Detroit", or a unique account of life towards the end of Polish People's Republic, or just as a biography of a bunch of really interesting guys. For me it was all these things and also one more chapter from Kazimierz's manual for understanding the music of my beloved band. No suprise it's one of my favorite books of all time.

The book is currently available in Polish only, but hey, maybe this post goes viral and we generate interest in creating an English translation, hm?