Proper Nouns between the concrete and light; photographed by Micah Wood.

Concepts of concocting utopias can often, even with the best of worldly intentions, be subject to the physical laws of fallibility just like anything else. Certainly in theory we all would love to live in a world that is devoid of constructs and start Tabula rasa with a blank slate or empty canvas to create that better world we want to live in. When a balance of egalitarian harmony is found, it can be mutually beneficial for all involved like an active and involved community or collective that works together in pursuit of a sustainable harmony that impacts society in ways that are both progressive and positive. On the other end of the continuum are the pratfalls of misguided groupthink, the power imbalances of cult-like environments, the senseless decision making made in late stage capitalism, to the cringe factor of ill advised celebrities banding together in the name of a facetious greater good to cover the done to death platitude pop of “Imagine” and other empty performative gestures of virtue signaling.

Raging against these machines and more is Proper Nouns’ Spencer Compton who earlier this year debuted their album Feel Free with us and today presents a first look at live performances of “Emma” and a cover of Kate Bush’s “Experiment IV”. With a much belated record release show slated for November 6 at Baltimore’s Current Space; Spencer presents the trio's candid, cool and endearing sound in a natural setting that feels at home with their raw, honest and real aesthetic. Performing two songs that questions the character of institutions that operate under the draconian orders of everything they claim to be against, Proper Nouns deliver cautionary pop tales that seeks a greater transparency, accountability in a world where human kindness and community empowerment has been co-opted as shallow liability covering PR lip service and a function of corporate doublespeak. Proper Nouns push toward a deeper investigation of the sus so-called self-proclaimed safe spaces that are anything but and the systems of capitalist oppression dressed up in pseudo-radical cosplay garb.

Proper Nouns begin their performance with the passionate “Emma”, featured on the album Feel Free. As revealed in Spencer’s expansive following long-form expressive free write, the song was inspired by the artist’s time working at the local Baltimore co-op Red Emma’s. A bookstore and café that champions a progressive ethos with an alleged flat organizational structure that, according to Compton, is instead a toxic, hierarchal and exploitive hegemony with a cult-like atmosphere. An ableist termination on account of Spencer experiencing seizures from the artist’s own longstanding medical conditions since youth inspired “Emma” that examines how alleged revolutionary groups can organize collectives under the guise of forward principles and build them under the shaky pretenses of backwards foundations. Compton pours out his heart with lamentations and heartbroken love sweet harmonies that ponders all the efforts and hard work contributed to a seemingly progressive group that was nothing more than just another problematic sect of society. “Emma” is in essence a breakup song, like a lionhearted struggling artist dismayed to find that the group to which they have given so much of themselves was in fact all along a fraud and a fake.

This motif of chanting down corrupt orgs carries forward with a solemn take on Kate Bush’s “Experiment IV” that blends elements of a dystopian sci-fi thriller with something that feels all too modern in its relevance. Military exercises, covert plans and institutional conspiracies loom large in a track where the artist takes on the role as a government/defense liaison that is making a certain type of sound with fatal intent. Like an update of Kafka’s terrifying In the Penal Colony, music becomes the weaponized tool for the will and whim of nefarious forces to fashion and manufacture implementations of harm for their own purposes and means of dominance. “Experiment IV” is adapted by Compton and company like a minimalist hymn with subdued, murmuring chords that creates a cautious tone that makes for an anxiety inducing nightmare. From the depths of imagination and fiction, Proper Nouns presents a portrait of a mistake in the making that is not far away from a world that prioritizes profits over people, policing and mass incarceration over education and the arts and limitless wars without boundaries over investing in the present and future for humanity at large.

Playing in the park with Proper Nouns; video still courtesy of the artists.

Proper Nouns’ own Spencer Compton provided some expansive thoughts on covering Kate Bush and the devastating inspiration behind the the song “Emma”:

This live video is pretty much a 4th single off Feel Free, plus a cover of my favorite Kate Bush song. I really wanted “Emma” to be a single during the album rollout earlier this year, but for a few reasons it didn’t make the cut. Namely, we thought it might garner too many naysayer vibes in the scheme of the pandemic and last year’s protests. Although that predicament is a nice non-metaphor for the song ever since I wrote it 5 years ago; there’s never a good time to denounce a faux-leftist institution that internally reifies precisely what its branding rails against: abusive hierarchies, exploitation and the barest definition of capitalism: capital accumulation.
That said, I guess now is as good a time as any to spill the rad-beans. “Emma” is about the time I did in a collective (now worker co-op) in Baltimore called Red Emma’s, which since its inception in ‘04 has operated more like a cult than a collective or a worker co-op. And I don’t say that in an exaggerated or pejorative sense — a cult is a group with one or a few leaders who manipulate their members through lofty ideological promises and ethical purity mind games into a state of unending selfless devotion, unfazed by self-sacrifice, in order to sustain the group. Red Emma’s is a group with only three original founding members remaining that has in its nearly 20 year lifespan cycled through countless mini-generations of good-intentioned leftists with the lofty prefigurative promise that boutique anti-capitalist projects such as itself are — once scaled and proliferated — how we can build a better world for capitalism to crumble around. All we have to do to help get there is keep a rad café and bookstore open for a righteous wage, which used to be $5/hr and now is $11/hr.
The majority of members who have left Red Emma’s did so because they couldn’t justify their measly rad-wage in exchange for the cultish sense of belonging and purpose (and low-key clout) that comes along with membership, Not least because cheap rent in cities like Baltimore roughly tripled since Y2K, making free-ish rad labor more tenuous, precarious and privileged). It didn’t help that there was and is a standing obligation for new members to get involved in unpaid backend work to prove their seriousness and commitment to the project. This insistence of low and unpaid labor is living proof of the lay-leftist-recruiting, inflation-blind trope you’re not part of the struggle unless you’re struggling.

A portrait of Proper Nouns’ Spencer Compton; courtesy of Micah Wood.

The other reason so many members left with a bad taste over the years is that they got in trouble for speaking what that saw and felt: there are two bosses of this collective/co-op and, call me crazy but, isn’t the whole idea here that a business can non-exploitatively self-organize without bosses? Also don’t collectives and co-ops not have bosses? It became such a redundant revelation in business meetings, and each time it came up, without fail, the bad seed co-owner who brought it up was targeted and left shortly thereafter.
You would think that when other recently-joined members see their kind be targeted, manipulated, and gaslit by soft powers that be as a means of control, they would take pause and their common sense empathy would redirect them against the default ideological current of the group. But, in a cult-like fashion, the radwave only gets taller and members more often are put in a survival mode of worrying less about the empathy they feel and more (on a subliminal level) about how their alignment could compromise their own standing with the bosses. Call this a regular modern workplace environment, call it clan mentality, whatever framing you like — it has nothing to do with empowering workers to self-organize, self manage and promote self-growth. Neither is it particularly horizontal, egalitarian, anti capitalist, non-exploitative, etc.
Unwrapping this walking contradiction would fit better in a book than this little write-up, so I’ll just summarize that a collective or worker co-op with longstanding power-brokers and an always-rotating cast of new leftist blood is — even zoomed out enough to not consider all the seriously bad feelings from at least dozens of former members — a form of capital accumulation and one that has inflated the value of Red Emma’s on the backs of its forgettable disillusioned former members to the explicit and exclusive benefit of its remaining original founding members, who will not be eventually cycled out like the rest. You might be wondering who the third non-boss original member is, and, to borrow a phrase that Spiv borrowed from Cicero, he’s the exception that proves the rule.
But before this does stretch into a book let me fast-track to my own involvement and what I’m trying to get at in “Emma”…
After the store moved in ’14 (it’s since moved again and I hear is about to move *again*) I learned that I couldn’t work at the bookstore I had just built because one of the bosses said so (cynically woke-qualified by the bookstore allegedly needing a more diverse staff). I brought this up in meetings, each time resulting in the survival instinct I described above, along with a diagnosis that I was harmfully paranoid. This targeting kept up and eventually led to what I can only describe as a magic trick: the boss who defacto-ran the restaurant side of Red Emma’s prepared, along with her friends, a list of fabricated grievances that at best read like a barista version of the permanent record of an Amazon employee who was reprimanded for being all too human and at worst read like the death-drive fantasy of a faux-horizontalist anarcho-liberal cult obsessed with sacrificing its allegedly lesser, impure, impious, toxic, not rad enough, bad seed members. It was almost as if this was a mechanism of a project designed to break individuals down. Disgruntled Red Emma’s members used to jokingly guess at the bar whether the bosses are assets of the CIA or of the FBI, but I’ll save elaborating on that noteworthy irony for the book I swear I’m not writing.

Spencer Compton and Proper Nouns live in the park; video still courtesy of the artists.

So, the grievance stipulated that I was suspended for 3 months and, as only happenstance could have caused, if I was allowed to return after this suspension there would be no shifts for me to work, since in my absence they’d need to hire a new co-owner barista. I put two and two together and realized what this ploy was (a way to fire me without firing me) and just like that the labor of love that occupied the bulk of my twenties disappeared.
Then, shortly after being kicked out of Red Emma’s, I noticed I was having seizures again. I had epilepsy as a teen from a medical scam neurosurgery, got a second intrusive neurosurgery after dopey years of pharmaceuticals not working, and, notwithstanding the impairments from both surgeries, didn’t have a seizure for about 13 years. But once I realized I was having them again (which was, uh, frightening), I realized that this was what all those inattentive moments at the cash register which the grievance vilified me for were. I somehow, in that cultish work environment thought that my distorted hearing and vision, memory loss and being spaced out were just symptoms of coffee and not paying enough attention. Then I thought, fuck, the one legitimate grievance item was caused (and my neurologist later verified this) precisely by the cultish, gaslighting, harassment-adjacent, soft power-exerting, manipulative targeting that I was experiencing in this prefigurative rad workplace for about a year. It didn’t then and doesn’t now sit super well knowing that all of my endless at-most-underpaid work at Red Emma’s accumulated cultural capital that was never for a minute partially mine and what I most materially gained from the whole experience is what I at a very substantial cost prevented just a year before Red Emma’s opened in ‘04: epilepsy for the rest of my life.
What I think is important here and what I’m riffing on in “Emma” is how this illustrates the neoliberal and capitalist impulses that bleed into collective and co-op models which claim to be horizontally organized, anti-capitalist, non-hierarchical, egalitarian, non-discriminatory, and so on. And more importantly, how greed as a human trait can be masked by the romantic idea that leftist alignment paradoxically both negates the possibility of greedy actors gaining and sustaining soft power, and mitigates them through some unspecified ethical osmosis if they do hoard power. Because how could a well-read anarchist with pitch-perfect activistspeak be a shitty person? How could an institution like Red Emma’s that hosts such rad events, is adored by so many leftists around the world and principally stands for so much be so toxic and so not remotely horizontal on the inside? How could a collective-gone-co-op be colonized by the same fluency, IQ, memory recall and oration skill Darwinisms (vis a vis ableist meritocracy) as a hierarchical business structure? It’s the notion that the left is resistant to capitalistic behavior which allows said behavior to be cloaked behind leftist rhetoric and signifiers. It’s also the deeper notion that sustains capitalism: the author always owns the thing they created as such, even if what they created is a horizontally organized business that uses consensus-based decision-making — and notwithstanding the skewed power dynamics that play out from that implicit extra-collective ownership. In my case, what the left would call exploitation and manipulation in virtually any other workplace environment was in fact me not washing dishes fast enough and not being a team player. Exploitation happens out in the world, exploitation is what Red Emma’s book titles and events critique, exploitation is what horizontal organizing and workplace democracy intend to stomp and exploitation doesn’t happen here.
To go back to naysaying — I’m not here nor in “Emma” naysaying collectives and worker co ops at large. I am saying that fake horizontality and its over-moralizing monoliths are the death of any viable leftism or proletariat that’s more interested in real, material, structure, mass change than coming insurrection cosplay a la unscalable boutique rad projects that cultivate and exert soft power with better optics than any story like mine could ever go up against.
I guess the bridge into the last chorus says it all much simpler:
Naysayers can drink at home while rad work is done.
Yeahsayers can toast to that with wars going on.
Safer still, meetings long, blinded eyes to all
problems with the heart of that institution.

***

Catch Proper Nouns' long awaited release show for Feel Free November 6 in Baltimore at Current Space with Chiffon, Manners Manners, DJ Shshunj (tickets available here) and November 13 at Hungry Harvest's Festival of Goodness at Culture House in Washington DC alongside Juan Waters and Frass Green.

Proper Nouns’ debut album Feel Free is available now via Phone Booth Records

PREMIERE | Proper Nouns, "Emma", "Experiment IV" live