Of all the elemental horrors in the world, the horrifying knowledge that our lives have no intrinsic value is the worst. It is the purview of teenagers and among the many things that make the teens so interesting, this might be the biggest. And rock and roll is the sound of it. And Albert Camus is the Galileo of it.
While only two rock songs are directly informed by the absurdist existentialist, “Albert Camus” and “Killing An Arab”., his vision of the world informs every aspect of the rock and roll vision of life. AT the heart of what it means to rock is to rock as if there is no more tomorrow because there isn’t one, and at the heart of rock and roll rebellion is a rebellion in the face of nothingness. Without Camus, where is “if you’ve got nothing you’ve got nothing to lose?”
Dead in a stupid car accident at the age of 46, Camus, more than Sartre or de Beauvoir, was the post-positive nihilist par excellence. He got, and rock and roll latched on to, the supreme freedom of no tomorrow. Without God, without immortality, our actions are so meaningless as to be just about insane and rock and rolls emotional habitual Camusist conceptual is that sort of vision of a world without repercussions.
Between the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, very early in the rock and roll story, teens lost God and found sex, and everything else that will ever happen to rock and roll or pop, or youth culture, whatever, is based around those two aspects and a third (teens also became an affluent demo) and that is why teen have been very similar ever since. It wasn’t the Vietnam War that made them what they became, it was the death of God., and the birth of recreational sex (and I know, as a demo).
While sex is not the point of Camus, a lack of moral tension is. And this lack coupled with a distinct variant in the price factor of sin, meant a sea change that left the previous generation completely irrelevant.
Camus was so important because he explained in words what rock was doing in music. If Heidegger was the Third Reich’s philosopher of choice, Camus was rock music’s truth sayer. While Nietsche is the man for college kids, Nietsche wasn’t as clearly a youthful signifier, Nietsche substituted gods for god, Camus restructured the world so we weren’t the center of even are own world. Presley made it fun.
November 7th was Camus’s birthday. Rock on dude, wherever you’re not.