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Normal History Vol. 249: The Art Of David Lester

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 29-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Mecca Normal has been the loud thing on poetry bills, the intense spoken-word thing on bills with much larger bands—and we’ve played many all-ages and underground shows with like-minded community activists. In 2000, we toured the West Coast with the then nine-piece Godspeed You Black Emperor!—actually, I opened those shows with my solo set before I was joined onstage by David for the Mecca Normal set. We’ve opened for Fugazi a handful of time, and at the height of grunge, Sonic Youth asked Mecca Normal to come from Vancouver to open their Seattle show. I also believe we have occasionally been coveted by those who seek to increase whatever cache or cred they’re working on by including us in their doings—and no doubt there will be those who view our inclusion in the 2014 Whitney Biennial as a sort of seal of approval gone awry or as an opportunity that we’d be stupid not to exploit. Stupid or otherwise driven to operate within parameters that no matter how I describe what it is we do and why, will not impart what it is I mean to the people who cannot see anything beyond how fame and money and success are tangled together—to be pursued (as in: the pursuit of happiness). But that isn’t what this is. The work involved in this exhibit (our work) is an attempt at direct amplification of a voice that was not heard loudly enough. The work included is very close to its actual purpose, and its purpose is, in part, the subject. To say what wasn’t heard. Our work is not there due to its quality or viability in the Art World. It is good work, but it falls happily in with political art that intends to create progressive social change.

Don’t get me wrong—when Mecca Normal is on tour and we play New York, we leave a day or two to go to museums, and the Whitney has, for many years, been at the top of our list. But the reason we go to New York is to present our work on our terms, to function in the crawlspace beneath the big house of capitalism and consumer greed.

“I Don’t Get It,” from Janis Zeppelin (Smarten UP! 2003) (download):