Vispo: Shadow / The Nietzsche craze

RTomens, 2022

Remember when Nietzsche was hip? No? Well, it was a long time ago...the early-80s, when we were all trying to do what school teachers couldn't, namely, improve our minds!

I say 'we', but amongst the people I knew very few wanted to take on Nietzsche. I say 'we' as if it was a movement because a collective urge is more impressive than that of an individual, in this case. Otherwise, the collective urge is more frequently dangerous and exactly the kind of groupthink activism which Nietzsche would have railed against. 

I say 'we' as if to suggest a movement akin to major art movements populated by interesting people who fought the battle of ideas over beers and coffees. I'd like to say I was part of such a group, but the group I belonged to (as in formed part of with no purpose) simply sat around in the Aylesbury Civic Centre, jobless, but yes, actually discussing books and music.

Blame The Pop Group for the Nietzsche Craze. They named a single She Is Beyond Good and Evil after Nietzsche's book, Beyond Good And Evil. Perhaps mere titles could be influential, just as Rip Rig & Panic may well have lead a few people to Roland Kirk. Chicken or egg? Were we reading Nietzsche as The Pop Group made the single? Or afterwards? Both, I suppose. Either way, for a while, in retrospect, it looks like a time when some music-makers were attuned to and keen on promoting something other than just kinship with the broken hearted, or whatever. 

One thing leads to another. I'm reading At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell, which discusses Nietzsche, so this morning I pulled Thus Spoke Zarathustra off the shelf and flicked through in search of a useable phrase. It doesn't take long in a book by Nietzsche. It's used in the piece above.