Dear Jon Pareles,

I am writing to you not because you are the worst but because you are not the first, the second, the fifteenth or the 100th person to write the article Rock 'n' Revolution. You are the latest in an endless brigade of music critics who take a moment out of their U.S/U.K. centric rock listening and writing lives to champion the obscurity of the 1970s-(to present) Czech band Plastic People of the Universe not as musicians but as a fable about rock as salvation. To me, this is an offense not only the PPU but all Czech musicians trying to have transational modern music careers and to all artists struggling in oppressive regimes. I'm sorry to have to say this, but it is also terribly rockist in an extremely unexamined way. To you and all who may go forth - please stop treating the Plastic People like a parable of "rock and revolution." Try examing the myth instead of blowing any more hot air into it.

Have you thought about why you are writing the article this way? I have, because I have spent the last seven years of my life thinking about Czech popular music and constantly only asked by Americans "you mean the Plastic People of the Universe?" when I tell them of my research. Do you know why I am asked this question? Because although there are 4200 Czech bands on Myspace Music and thousands of contemporary talented working professional Czech musicians and a rich history of musicians making work in the CZ, the only group U.S. writers ever discuss is PPU. They're not the biggest selling, newest, weirdest, or any of the usual news hooks that one would apply to get a story together. What is the hook then? I'll give you a hint. Every single article mentions these words "revolution" "Andy Warhol" "Velvet Underground" "Frank Zappa" and do you know why? Because we love non-US bands that "mimick" our exalted heroes. Because there's something really, really life-affirming about the idea of disenfranchised obscure non-English speaking people listening to rock and roll music as a form of comfort during their political oppression – something that "we" as English-speaking rock critics want to believe is valorous, ideal, good, something that by virtue also will valorize why we write about music in the first place: Art can topple oppressive regimes! Obscure underground art find "real" audiences internationally, outside our oppressive economic system! The West does have some redeeming cultural impact to the world! There was a time when we could be idealistic! It was the 1960s! In short, every rockist cliche imaginable.

You write that PPU are now "living in the present tense" but were you at their concert last month? A year ago? Two years ago? No, I know you weren't, because I was (A music critic authenticity trip? No, just saying - there are opportunities to have hooked a piece like this about the PPU in the present, not on a myth-making past-looking nostalgic Stoppard play). NYC PPU audiences are always a mix of lively middle aged Czechs, curious Richie Unterberger reading psych nerds, and young couples who may or may not be Czech. Last time I ran into another rock critic and half of my ethnomusicology program were there – none of them were their because they like PPU's music, but because they were curious about the sociological importance of PPU. They always say things like "I like the idea better than the realization" or something pat like that. It kinda makes me furious. The music, dude?

The Plastics started as fans, and mimickers, of iconoclastic American bands including the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and the Fugs. Like other late-1960s rockers worldwide, they turned shows into happenings, collaborating with visual artists; the Plastics performed in wild makeup, wearing robes made of bedsheets.

Where I come from we called mimickers "cover bands" and yes, the PPU started off as a garage band. But then they went psych in a major theatrical and artistic way, and if you want to think about why, talk to me about Milan Knizak, talk to me about the Czech new wave. What was the moment that made PPU a band? Why did they stop "mimicking" and singing in English? It was political, but not in a way that you want to write about. Brabenec wanted them to be Czech - not American. Nationalism, not transnationalism, too sticky? There's also that whole "communism" thing, and I have to commend you. Among the many articles I've read on the subject, I've never really seen anyone dare argue that Communism was GOOD for the PPU so they couldn't be tainted by Western capitalist desire to be famous and pop. Even if these are Stoppard's words, you as critic have the final call to set them in a critical context:

"There was never the possibility of a desire for recognition being gratified,” he said. “So it was never on the table as something which might, as it were, change the way you play and the songs you choose.

-- Imagine a whole new way to be authentic: being thrown in jail, systematically robbed of your freedoms to create work, having constant paranoia for your own and your families lives. Beat THAT Colin Meloy. If only there were real reasons for today's pop musicians to be tortured, humiliated, impoverished, then they would have some real motivation to make art that mattered. Or mattered at least in a "real" way, that is to say, politically and not aesthetically. That paragraph was irony, forgive me. I'm angry.

Which brings me to my irate conclusion. I am an ethnomusicologist who studies music as culture, music in culture, the social world of music. I "got in" to the Czech Republic by this very seductive story of the PPU before I really ever thought about music in a serious way, when I was in undergrad. I wanted the world to know about how Czech musicians struggled during Communism, how important their stories were to history. After one semester of reading anthropology I was already cracking to this noble role of salvation. Then one day I was outside the Czech Center on the upper East Side waiting for a documentary about the band to start when Brabenec appeared, finishing his cigarette. "Jak se mate?" I said in bad Czech. He answered in English that he was fine. "What do you think of the film?" I asked. He said that he was glad it was made but that he was tired of the story manufactured about the PPU. "There's not enough music in the film," he said. The thought spiral from that conversation has changed my entire approach to how I think about my role as a writer of musical history.

A lot of rock critics I know would say "who cares what the artist thinks is their importance to history." I find to be an arrogant, intellectually irresponsible and unexamined valorization of the writer's subject position, something I thought died like, in the 1970s. I am not saying that historical agents can see the whole macro picture of their place within history, their influence in it or their being influenced by it, but I am saying that while these agents are alive it is our duty as historians of the present to ask them questions that expand our knowledge about their place in world events, not simply reaffirm the narratives produced 10, 20, 30 years prior by doing puff piece interviews with them so one can get rote quotes. In doing so you are reproducing the same bullshit stories of the past, letting the contradictions slip away, turning particularities into generic conventions. That makes for agentless history and bad writing, two things I am not interested in reading. Please use your power as a New York Times writer (or any type of writer who reads this) to question the narrative handed to you and to ask questions of these valorious subjects that might make history, and your story, a little more muddy and rich. The Plastic People of the Universe were not a political band, but history made them political – they have lived a life of complex contradictions and it your responsibility to find a way to tell that story more fully and better.

Na shledanou,
Daphne Carr