We have collectively stopped doing our best
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In July, I went to see the US electronic musician Marc Rebillet play at Vienna’s outdoor Arena venue.
Rebillet, who is half French and hails from Texas, has made a name for himself on YouTube with his videos of improvised funk and live jam sessions.
He has sculpted his classical music education into his very own musical and personal style, accumulating a devoted fan following around the world.
A pandemic discovery
I discovered Marc during the long lockdown evenings during the pandemic when we would while away the hours watching one Netflix series after the other and became experts in scrolling through our YouTube feeds searching for the next entertainment hit.
I was instantly impressed by Rebillet’s talent, his spontaneity, and the courage he has to create his own unique form of art, often performing in his signature dressing gown. The man brings just the right mix of talent and straight-up nuttiness to the table. He’s a true original and I am more than happy to support that by purchasing a concert ticket.
And so, clearly, are a lot of other fans in Vienna. Many of them are signalling their fealty to the Rebillet religion this evening by sporting their own dressing gowns – from workaday striped towelling right through to expensive-looking silky chinoise numbers.
The promise of a great evening
The rain which was forecast so far hasn’t materialised and it’s shaping up to be a grand evening. I’m currently in a tough phase with work and a good concert is exactly what I need to shake it all off and feel a bit more like myself again.
Things get off to an explosive start when Marc comes sprinting onto stage…in his underpants. Good grief – where can the performance possibly go from here?
To a great set, as it turns out. Rebillet improvised, jammed, experimented – successfully and less so, starting a piece before deciding it wasn’t going where he wanted and discarding it.
Usually, a concert ticket buys you the right to watch a well-polished and rehearsed stage performance. With Marc Rebillet, you get to watch a new dynamic unfolding and an unpredictable creative process in action. It’s thrilling because it’s flawed – and you never know where it might veer off next.
Concert buzz, killed
After about 90 minutes, things wind up another notch when Rebillet plays his popular YouTube hit “Wake Up”. The crowds goes wild – and so do we! One more song, he says. Oh that’s too bad I think, but I’m happy and I know I’m going to go home tonight full of positive energy.
Then he goes and does an encore which consists of him yelling “F*ck Donald Trump” again and again for 10 minutes over electronic beats.
My happy concert buzz vapourises in 10 seconds flat.
A good part of the crowd clearly loves it and continues to go crazy. But, looking around, I can see that a lot of them are looking as disappointed and as hacked off as I feel. I was done and left before the 2nd encore – no longer remotely interested in this show.
Multi-storey annoyance
I get annoyed quite often about various things. Basically because there is a lot of annoying stuff in the world. But also because I’m perimenopausal, meaning that my willingness to deal with any kind of BS in recent years has decreased in proportion to my oestrogen levels.
But it is unusual for me to experience multi-level annoyance. And yet this concert has achieved it.
Firstly, I go to concerts to enjoy the music and to get away from politics. As for the performer: why, after such a great show, take the risk of alienating a chunk of your audience by getting political? It’s reckless and very arrogant.
Secondly: this schtick is just so OLD. It might have caused a mild frisson of excitement back in 2016 when Trump first shocked the world by winning the presidential election. But that was 2016. It’s 2025 now. And these days, it’s just repetitive, tedious and witless.
Here was a young American with exorbitant levels of musical talent who can make up songs, rhymes and beats free-flowing and on the fly. And all you’ve got is “F*ck Donald Trump”?
By the by: it seems that this inability to move on from this wholly unproductive holding pattern of facile Trump insults stretches from Marc Rebillet right up to the top of the Democratic party. It’s frustrating to watch – and I don’t have any skin in this wretched game. It’s just painful to watch a bunch of people so persistently and successfully refusing to address the real reasons for their own ongoing malaise.
But back to Rebillet.
Part of a wider phenomenon
It wasn’t until a few days later when I was served a tiny Limoncello Spritz without the slightest trace of carbonation “spritz” in an upmarket Viennese bar and was charged EUR 7.50 for the pleasure, that I realised why the Rebillet encore had irritated me so profoundly.
It was the latest in a long line of social and cultural experiences where I’m left feeling disappointed and short-changed, asking: is that really the best you can do?
And I didn’t have to wait long for the next instalment. Witness, if you have the wherewithal, the late night talker Jon Stewart reacting to the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s own show (can be seen at the start of this Undercurrents clip below).
Imagine being 62 years old and thinking that the most meaningful thing you can do at this point in your career is to have a full public tantrum, screeching “Go f*ck yourself” again and again in front of an awkward-looking gospel choir because your buddy’s show got cancelled. A show which, by the way, was failing to fulfil its basic mission of being funny. And losing $40m per year. And was part of an entertainment format that’s generally dead in the water.
“Cringe” seems like far too generous a word to describe this performance. It was more like a tsunami of second-hand embarrassment, rolling out of the screen and inundating my living room.
How is it is that we, the viewing public, have to go to work every day and do actual useful stuff for our modest wages to pay our bills and keep the economy ticking over while folks like Jon Stewart get paid a fortune to be the fount of all inanity? Please someone – make it make sense!
The culture of complacency
There’s one thing that all of these incidents have in common, from the upper echelons of the US entertainment industry to the Marc Rebillet concert to my overpriced, carbonation-free “spritz” drink and the lukewarm coffees that I keep getting served in Viennese cafés for EUR 6 a pop. One thing that explains this consistent and omnipresent substandard.
There is a part of me which wants to go for the full histrionics and say that it is cultural exhaustion; yet another symptom of the terminal and irreversible collapse of the West. Like the Roman Empire, we have become decadent, spending time talking about fripperies and failing to pay proper attention even as the foundations of our very civilisation dissolve.
And, while the answer does have to do with the way Western culture has evolved over the past two decades, the more apposite – and less dramatic – word to describe what’s going awry is complacency.
We have slipped into a culture of complacency and its dead hand extends into more and more situations in my daily life.
How did excellence become so uncool?
When I’ve once again been fobbed off with crap service and been charged a premium price for it, I wonder how it is that striving for excellence and doing things properly became such an unattractive concept.
I think back to my beloved grandad and how he took so much care in doing everything from polishing his leather shoes to keeping a precise record of what medications he’d taken for his emphysema. I don’t get how, in the space of two generations, we seem to have lost this devotion to properness and traded it in for speed, convenience and cheap, careless thrills.
But I can think of several possible explanations.
Perhaps late-stage capitalism and challenging economic circumstances are forcing business owners to cut corners, cut costs and squeeze the last drops of profit out of their enterprises. The result: lower quality and underpaid employees who lack the time and the motivation to deliver any more than an average performance.
Or maybe it’s that a culture of service has been replaced by a culture of entitlement. If pay isn’t performance-linked, workers have no incentive to care or try harder to please the customer.
The pursuit of money and quick hits, clicks and likes in the attention economy may have superseded the value of and drive to produce one’s best work.
Or, it could be the weapons of mass distraction, aka Smartphones, that everyone now clings onto as though they are an extra bodily appendage. When I look around me in the city, I rue the day the bloody thing was invented. In fact, it has probably been the single most detrimental novelty when it comes to how our societies have developed. Everyone is stuck to those little screens – all the time. Even the simple act of walking along the pavement becomes a game of pedestrian slalom because some people can’t even bear to put their devices down when moving from A to B on foot and don’t look where they’re going.
That the service Smartphone-obsessed people provide is going to be sloppy and tardy is obvious. That device in their hand is like crack cocaine – they are so addicted that any jobs assigned will be done in the minimum amount of time and care so that they can get back to their personal entertainment. I have no idea why their bosses let them get away with it. Perhaps they are too busy looking at their own phones to care.
Back to the concert
As for Marc Rebillet, I think he has allowed his brain to get so broken by Trump that he reached for the quickest, cheapest way to let off steam, provoke a bit and get the crowd going. Hence: “F*ck Donald Trump! F*ck Donald Trump!”
Clearly, some are still happy to lap up this cheap thrill. But for me, it’s flogging a horse that’s been dead for so long that it’s become painful to watch the increasingly desperate effort.
I want things done properly again. I want my spritz drinks to be fizzy, my coffee served hot and songs of political resistance to be written well and thoughtfully.
P!nk managed to sing some semi-coherent lines of criticism back in the early 2000s with “Dear Mr. President”. But to find songs of resistance with real ambition and verve, you have to go all the way back to 1970, when Sixto Rodriguez wrote “The Establishment Blues (This Isn’t a Song, It’s an Outburst)”.
Just listen to those words. It’s poetry – word play at its best and absolutely timeless. Now that is the kind of effort I’d like to hear – and see – again.
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