I’ve learned more from this Little Red Book with the vinyl cover than any one volume since finding a second hand copy of The Golden Book of Knowledge (1928).

“...explanations , theories, and inventions.” (plus, Oxford commas).

Anti-academic, here are clarifying commentaries on Cold War Psycho-Geopolitics, High Gothic Vampirism. A disquisition on white supremacy, master races, eugenics, class hatred and race guilt.

The Beatles VS The Stones dialectic convincingly mimes the intellectual conflict of Soviet industrialism and Maoist Chinese agrarianism via Godard’s cinematic socialism. All good fun!

Svenonius explains the emergence of rock and roll; the shift from hayseed Christian work ethic at the end of the Second World War to the modern capitalist consumer ideology. Rather than defer one’s hard earned reward to the afterlife, musical gods would be the herald to the new desire for immediate gratification with sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Dylan’s electric betrayal became “another proxy struggle of market forces against latent communist egalitarianism.”

A chapter on Seinfeld and the regentrification of blighted urban neighborhoods resulting in, again, the abandonment of the lower middle classes, after the post-war promise of suburban Valhalla was itself abandoned. At least that’s what I thought it meant. I may be wrong. “Though it was promoted as a sitcom, Seinfeld was really a commercial designed to promote the city as the rightful home for the elite.” I dunno.

Also, Alan Greenspan is responsible for the death of rock ‘n’ roll. ( )

The good:

The best part of this book is the introduction, titled instructions. That's about the extent of enjoyment I had while laboring through this drivel.

The bad:

This is one of the worst books I've ever had the displeasure of reading in my life. I have to admit the titles of the chapters are very clever such as "Mordor Dearest" and "Scion-tology". It gives you a false sense of hope that this next chapter will be readable and the last chapter just a brief misstep, an anomaly in an otherwise well fleshed out book.

Alas, there is no respite from the literary torture this author deviously planned to get you to take a journey with him to this nonsense land.

We have all been in this uncomfortable situation before at a party or get together. The seemingly interesting person that starts out with a story or idea that catches your attention at first, but then goes off to rant-ville. Doesn't even matter what the topic is; music, nature, history, sports, politics, etc. It always head's to the same dead-end conversation killing, overbearing frothing at the mouth, schizophrenic political-ideological manure, “The man is keeping us down”. The kind of conversation that you begin frantically looking around for your cue to leave the area inhabited by this noxious pollutant as if your life depended on it. As soon you are free and out of hearing range from this person, you begin to relax and your stomach no longer feels upset. You make a mental note if you ever see this person again that you will never slow down enough for him to begin another discussion with them.

This is similar to what I felt like when I finally turned the last page of this book. Free at last to anything but read any more pages written by this author.

Did I mention I really enjoyed the introduction?
I would highly recommend him to solicit other authors to write their forwards. He nailed his own. ( )

Is it a manifesto? Is it a collection of essays? Who knows and does it matter? It’s a quirky assortment of thoughts that’s fun to read. I especially like the format, small red leatherette, reminiscent of Mai’s Little Red Book.

This modest book covers a lot of ground. With a slight, pocket-sized leatherette cover, it's not hard to see what sort of image punk-musician and fellow traveler Sevonius was going for. The Psychic Soviet is a collection of essays from various rock and culture publications that form a manifesto on capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and the rock-and-roll industry. In the introduction, he defines his little pink book as for "'street" use", and that, "None of this collection is to be confused with so-called academia. Instead, it is a kind of free verse, outside of science or respectability and at liberty to flaunt its diabolical exhumations on its user." (ix, second edition)

He certainly stands by that. The title essay posits that the world has been in a sort of psychic shock since the fall of the USSR and the absolute domination of capitalist overlords wielding the stained flag of the United States. From my albeit imperfect knowledge, there is some questionable history here, but it set the groundwork for a series of challenges to the status quo. The second essay, "Vampirism and Vampirology", takes a bit of a turn, breaking down Bram Stoker's Dracula (rightly so) as a white supremacist, eugenicist fable against blood mixing. Its a long way from rock music, but in hindsight prepares the reader for looking at popular culture as a tool of indoctrination. Things lighten up a little bit when he does a Marxist reading of the Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil against The Beatles Back in the USSR as a dialectic of "LennonMcCartney's industrial Sovietology vs. Mick and Kieth's agrarian Maoism, a direct reflection of the intra-Commie ideological conflict of the time." (66) Many of the other essays lean into how music, particularly rock-and-roll, but also movies and cultural production in general, are directly controlled by the U.S. government, taking usually minority art forms and warping them to create good, controllable consumers. Likewise, the "artist", going back to Michelangelo, had always been a brand, kept poor by the patrons so their output could be used to gatekeep the upper class.

I'm pretty sure the whole thing is satire. None the less I have a few issues with Sevenonius' arguments. He suggests that government insiders and plutocrats have absolute, monolithic control over popular culture, which they use to advance their agendas: a conspiratorial stance that assumes big systems are far to easy to manage. He also has very shallow views of things like American religiosity, which the way he writes it is on the way out, rather than a major force in American social and political life. And for all of his rightful bemoaning of the usurpation of Black art-forms by white producers, to my ears he fails to see much value in hip-hop beyond product placement. Often, his overarching statements are either obtuse or infuriating- for a while I was half convinced that he was trolling me.

As I finished his incantation-like closing chapters, though, it grew on me that, though he may not literal believe everything he is writing; it is closer to satire than farce. A literal reading of The Psychic Soviet may leave one thinking that all recorded music and culture is propaganda, and nothing made in the last century isn't soaked in blood. However, I think his goal is more provocative. Even if you disagree with his reading of history, these essays provoke critical thought on what is often the background noise of our lives in the West. I don't think the Feds are crafting music to make us more docile, but reading this book at this particular moment, during the accursed year of 2020, I feel that I am paying more attention. The Psychic Soviet may not have turned me into a chaos-magic revolutionary, but it did remind me to keep my eyes open. Try it out yourself, it is such a little pink book, after all.

What a fun book to read. The title and bright pink leather like cover grabs everyone's attention, and the sometimes zaney sentences keep one entertained throughout. It was hard to get through it because friends and family members kept swiping it to see what I was chuckling about. ( )