Walking the line, tipping the throne
(The summary text is an homage to a very good piece about the band Kaj by Unwinnable, go read that)
On September 18th, 2020, Pendulum dropped their first new music video in the best part of a decade. The song, Nothing For Free, was hardly new. The video could not have existed as-is before 2020, despite its aesthetic which I suspect borrows heavily from Olafur Eliasson's 2003 The Weather Project.
The song and the visuals hit me like a truck. My introduction to Pendulum happened in 2010 via a classmate; their albums stayed in my regular rotation for the entirety of the hiatus. I was in Sweden in 2020, slowly losing my mind as the self-declared "most civilized country in the world" ignored science, allowed kids to get infected on purpose and sent elderly people straight to palliative care instead of giving them oxygen. A haunting dance anthem using such in-your-face imagery was just what I needed to feel seen.
One part that sticks with me five years on is how utterly done with everything Rob Swire looked. In an interview, he said: "My startledness kind of works in the video. It wasn’t intentional. They were saying, ‘Just go with the flow man, feel the vibe’. I said, ‘I have been at home for four fucking months during a pandemic, there is no vibe!’ It kind of worked out."
We're in year six. There's still no vibe.
Hold the line, don't forget
Taking arms is taking heads
Hold the line, don't forget
Taking arms is taking heads
Taking arms is taking heads
Taking arms is taking heads
Hold the line. Don't forget. I have no fucking clue what the other sentence is supposed to mean.
Hold the line. I step in the Stockholm metro, once more the only one with a mask on in goddamn October 2020. Don't forget. The public health agency claims that if we're worried, it's because we read foreign news.
Hold the line. I step in the Lille metro, once more the only one with a mask in September 2025. Don't forget. The public health agency claims that there's no wave despite horrific levels in the wasterwater stats we mercifully still have.
Hold the line. I talk to pals close and less close, gently pry memories from 2020 out of them. Don't forget. Near-always they remember something they'd forgotten. Trauma's funny like that.
Hold the line. Don't forget. Hold the line. Don't forget. Hold the line. Don't forget. Hold the line. Don't. Forget.
Look, I'm a 2D animation snob. The cartoon bits here aren't especially good. I don't expect the production team was thinking about doing much more than capturing the zeitgeist, going with the liberal consensus of mocking antivaxxers and pandemic denialists. Nonetheless, they nailed the core pillars.
We've got the immunity debt theory, doctors claiming infection will make you stronger when evidence keeps piling up that covid in particular damages the immune system.
We've got "back to normal" for the sake of petty needs, "mental health" treated as a counter against precautions rather than just one component of community care.
We've got the then-hope that the vaccine will get us out of this all by itself. In the US, courtesy of hoarding that cost so many lives across the globe, this false relief was allowed to exist for a few months. By the time I got my own shots during the summer of 2021, we already had data about breakthrough infections and knew there was no miraculous salvation coming.
Hold the line. Don't forget.
I do not, for a second, believe that Pendulum wrote an anti-authoritarian call to grassroots organizing, let alone on purpose. I suspect they cook up lyrics based on vibes above all else. But that's how art works, isn't it?
In most places, pandemic containment measures were implemented as tools of authority rather than care. Most people, notably leftists, are well-equipped to analyze this. Stringent laws, emergency rule-making, regimes of exception, policing, so much policing. Those of us still holding the line to this day are often accused of wanting a return to this, to be giving in to what I vaguely recall calling a totalitarian temptation back in 2020. Maybe some do. Not the queer Mad antifascists I organize with, though.
What most people fail to analyze is that the current situation is equally authoritarian. It is softer, easier to miss. It looks like freedom on the surface. It is "you do you" and individual responsibility, it is painting caring for others as a character flaw. It is pretending that the very idea of community is laughable. It is the path that Sweden chose as early as 2020.
There is another way that is neither neglect nor tyranny. We can center care for ourselves and others. We can demand that the State, while it exists, does its fucking job of protecting its residents, whether or not they are citizens. We can shore up against its too-numerous failures by working together, as anarchists and queers have been doing for longer than those labels have even been in use. In doing so, we can take active steps towards a better world.
It's a difficult line to walk. How do you convince people to care again, without deploying authoritarian methods? How do you avoid turning into an expert imparting knowledge on the ignorant flock when disinformation is being peddled by the State, media, doctors and public health experts alike? How do you gather up all the fluency that you've built through tears and screams of anguish and make it digestible without judgment?
We cannot advocate for community care against failed institutions without questioning power. We cannot win without ripping that power out of the hands that would rather throw us in a mass grave than relinquish even a modicum of wealth and control.
And so walking that line means, necessarily and inevitably, tipping the throne.
We've got a battle of the ages
Calling the cavalry through your phone
An army of the shameless
Walking the line, tipping the throneThere'll be nothing for you, nothing for me
Nothing to fear, nothing to see
You wanna take my life and fade away