You stand before a force cataclysmic, devastating, and resistant to all modes of being and reflection, challenging the very sovereignty of the Self…yet it is beautiful and inspiring, leaving only the imagination and the infinite possibility of alterity. It is the music of Exotic Animal Petting Zoo.
Exotic Animal Petting Zoo: Music of Alterity
That rock died yesterday, since '69 or'77, '80, or '94 – and rock should still wander toward the meaning of its death, recollecting the pieces, giving "birth" to the tepid hybrid genres of the late 20th/early 21st century, playing with exhausted remnants – or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying; that rock died one day, within history, or that it fed on its own agony, on the violent way, with pure, raw energy, it defied the carefully constructed illusions of permanence, freeing otherness from oppressive social taboos, which is its past, its concern, its death and source; that beyond the death, the dying nature, of rock, perhaps because of it, this music still has a future, entirely still to come – all of these are unanswerable questions. Unanswerable for a bloated genre, dragging itself forward, dressed in enumerable hyper-real fashions, inept to enact social change through threatening originality, rebellion, and angst that rejected imposed moral codes, creeds, and commandments. However, it is by these questions, static at the heart of this desert, the curse of these sands, the ever-widening wasteland, that the music of Exotic Animal Petting Zoo can make us tremble.
Philosophy debated the end of art and the end of history, and now Exotic Animal Petting Zoo debates, and then enacts the end of rock, the end of a genre, modernity's genre, expressed by a few guitars, vocals, drums, bass, etc. It is not the end as in the end of god, but a curve, a disappearance of foundations, stability, and form, an unknown birth. Before this curve of vertigo, all vision lies mundane, creatively barren, from a generation of artists paralyzed by the anxiety of influence, the experience of the Uncanny, leaving rock to become a real that is retouched and refurbished, a "hallucinatory resemblance" of itself. Within rock, there is an ideal corresponding to its every aspect, more real than real, boundaries of hyper-reality erased – music erased by stereophonic perfection. Is there any alternative to the paralysis of generic perfection and infinite repetition? Perhaps.
