Motihari Brigade creates Rock-n-Roll Thoughtcrime for independent minds. Your cup of tea, perhaps?
Or perhaps you would prefer the comfortable illusions of corporate-state programmed culture. How do you tell the false prophet from the real? Because the false prophet tells you what you want to hear. We are always the heroes in the stories that we tell about ourselves.
Motihari Brigade is a defiant voice in the wilderness shouting “We are on our own, but we are not alone.” Have you found your band? Have some tea. No need to experience post-modern technological dystopia in isolation. Turn up the antidote a little louder and you will soon feel better.
The regularly scheduled tele-screen programming filters a daily dose of algorithmic groupthink to that is carefully designed to entertain, distract, placate, indoctrinate, enforce, ridicule, destroy, and then disappear.
Rock-n-Roll Thoughtcrime gives you permission to “Turn off and tune out the machine.”
But now a bit about what inspired our band. Motihari Brigade takes their name from Motihari, India, birthplace of George Orwell, the patron saint of independent human critical thinking asserting itself against the onslaught of the modern propaganda surveillance state.
“Brigade” and the associated three-pointed star symbology were inspired by the International Brigades that went to fight fascism in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War. This lost epoch of history involved volunteers who traveled from all corners of the globe to fight against the rising tide of fascism in Spain, and who were inspired to co-operatively defend human ideals of freedom and democracy. Such anti-fascism had not yet become as fashionable as it soon became in the 1940s.
At the time, International Brigade volunteers, who included many notable figures such as Orwell and Hemingway, were sneered at as undesirable radicals. Meanwhile, the industrialists of the day supplied the growing strength of the Axis powers in Europe. Later, as World War II erupted, International Brigade volunteers were briefly rehabilitated as “freedom fighters” before again being dispensed with as subversives during the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Such ongoing historical revisions likely inspired Orwell’s concepts of “newspeak” and “doublethink” as illustrated in his classic work of “fiction” 1984.
Orwell remains alarmingly relevant, and in turn continues to inspire us today – now in the form of Motihari Brigade’s Rock-N-Roll Thoughtcrime.
Like the “two minutes of hate” directed at the traitor Goldstein in Orwell’s 1984, the corporate permanent war machine always needs an official enemy to denounce. We still require an endless parade of new Hitlers and Stalins to justify“color revolutions” and regime change wars in the name of “humanitarian intervention.” And we always get to play Winston Churchill. Oceania has always been at war, along with its dutiful little brother “Airstrip One.”
And the system also needs a “resistance.” In the end, 1984 leaves interesting doubts as to whether Goldstein and his book were even real. Was the “resistance” a genuine clandestine movement, or a “fake news” contrivance used to identify subversive elements and better control the population. It strikes us that this literary ambiguity also explains a lot in our own present day. Beware the official “resistance.” They are like the revolutionary pigs on the Animal Farm who ultimately wore the farmer’s clothes. But that’s another story. Another good one.
Rock-n-Roll was born in cultural rebellion. And we love it. Rock-n-Roll Thoughtcrime now burrows deep underground, mostly absent from the approved daily tele-screen algorithmic feed, and nearly eclipsed from the world of artificially intelligent machines.
Motihari Brigade is a rock band based in hope. We remain hopeful that independent critical thinking will survive – passed around underground like a secret samizdat ghost. We remain inspired by hope in the possibility of a shared common humanity. We hope that Rock-n-Roll Thoughtcrime will conjure a fleeting impression of reality like a shadow faintly dancing in the firelight on the wall of the cave – an image that remains defiantly human in this post-modern technological age.
A world gone mad needs comedians to play the wise fools, and artists to reflect the suppressed realities. Culture is a contested terrain. We are still here. We are not robots, yet. Turn off, tune out, and drop in. Click outside the official narrative. Jam the frequency of the curated choices. Give the algorithm something unpredicted to think about. Find a lost moment to tell your own unique story. Seek out the rebel music of shared human desires.
You may be on your own. But you are not alone.
