prosolar mechanics

The first Prosolar Mechanic in recorded history was some sucker caught fixing a billionaire's car in a fictitious desert on the first few pages of a Fantagraphics comic back in 1981. It was a time when punk was already dead but no one had bothered to let the corporate entertainment complex know. Back then, if you wanted to find authentic youth-driven angst culture, you had to work for it.

Two decades later, kids who'd aged out under Reagan and Bush had taken over the distribution of popular culture and sold the message to an alarming mass of unattended youth who had unwittingly let the cat out of the bag. With both parents at work and personal bank cards, they let on that they were out there, en masse, empowered to buy. Easily they were led to surrender their parents' dual-income cash stream to the new regime of corporate entertainment interests. What a coup.

Scroll back ten years from that point, and say it's 1991. An album such as Nirvana's legendary Nevermind has exploded. You could buy it at the god damned mall. Some of us contemporaries just didn't know how to think about music or anything else we loved after that. What did it mean that major record companies now peddled music we could relate to and that those records were generating a sick amount of revenue for an industry we had long mistrusted, that had long been out of touch with who we were?

We figured we weren't so fucking special after all. There were millions of us responding passionately to the abrasive sounds and desperately angry ideas embodied in the premier round of major label so called "alternative" releases.

Next, everybody under 30 in America was getting inked, pierced and wearing overpriced "vintage" style bowling shirts and cardigans, dying their hair all sorts of colors and wearing motorcycle boots in summer. Advertisements for soft drinks and Hondas featured people who looked just like us, and we bought it. The economy soared. It was just like getting beat at your own game. And we were.

For those of us who'd donned the spikes of adolescent alienation in the 80s, much of our lives we'd been overlooked. We had no idea where the future was leading us, but we were certain we didn't want to go. Not if the past was any kind of indicator.

Half of us watched our parents' marriages rip apart under the growing strain of rapidly inflating ideas about standards of living that now demanded two salaries in the home. We dealt with our friends, siblings, parents, and ourselves self-medicating our detachment with pills, coke, weed, booze, anything handy and better yet if it was trendy. We got diagnosed with mental illnesses so we could blame our biologies instead of our choices and fix things with chemistry instead of change.

Our baby boomer parents had failed to lead us meaningfully into our adulthood, and so we followed them blindly into theirs. With our material excesses and our collective neglect of the social, political, cultural, spiritual and geological environments we'd left the territory of the future a strangled mess.

So we hung onto angst. We hung on to rejection. We had lived on rejection for over a decade. We understood what it was to be alien and to struggle to create an identity in a culture without role models. We thought we had become culturally independent and complicated, finding who we were and what was important all on our own, through trial and error. We were hard to classify because for a while there, we really were not like our parents.

We were generation X, and no one knew how to reach us. We barely knew how to find each other unless we found each other in small record stores, basements, abandoned parking lots. But time went on and we grew up, got educated, indoctrinated, scored the high paying marketing jobs because we were quirky and young, climbed the corporate ladder, infiltrated the complex, took our anger, boxed it up, put it on television and sold it back to ourselves. We robbed our own generation of the only cause we had and laughed all the way to the BMW dealer.

Our alienation and displacement — our cultural signature — gone.

The next generation of Prosolar Mechanics erupted here, during the era of our cultural comfort. In an age where marrying young, having children and getting a steady job didn't fit the expectation anymore, making one's own way had little to do with going against the grain. It became a struggle to know your demons when everything in your world is lulling you to sleep. When anger at the way things are becomes a marketing ploy for duping you into doing the same old shit, more penetrating measures are necessary.

Prosolar Mechanics still believe music is one of the most effective means we have in this fight. It is the mainline to your emotional center, that part of you that makes you who you are. It confronts the worst and best of you yet makes no judgment. Music will allow you to make up your own mind.

Sometimes one must see a thing for what it is and we know today that good music can be found in basements, arenas, backpacks, ipods, and bedrooms. Good music will always defy the bounds of social and economic status. It knows its purpose and it finds its audience. In this sense it is unstoppable.

Mechanics know that while punk is long dead, individuality is still alive. Conformity and non-conformity are not what they once were. And neither are we.

We've much left to do. By our data, if we still haven't figured out time travel, mind reading, the boundaries of the known universe, whether there's life after death, the true definition of consciousness, alternative energy, sex, or how to communicate with animals, we've still got a lot to work on.

There is an entire future left to unstrangle.