RADICAL DISAFFECTION AND YOU
indie sleaze is reactionary—everything is fucked, hedonism, drugs and partying are the only hope; a wise boy once told me that cultural criticism is a hole, and i’m inclined to agree, however i think this hole is worth falling in to, as it’s impeding our ability to come together as a collective and push back against the repressive forces that aim to plunge the planet further into climate catastrophe and techno-feudalism. a true (useful) artist is someone who can metabolize the world around them and fuse their own thoughts with the culture at large to create work that at least somewhat speaks to progress and social cohesion; an army of the culture is indispensable to defeating the enemy.
my love affair with charli xcx started around 2015 when i heard boom clap for the first time in the end credits of the movie the fault in our stars (lol), i started hardcore stanning her around when vroom vroom came out - i immediately knew that she was the future, that this is where (pop) music was going - SOPHIE is a prophet, given the events that have unfolded since 2016, brat feels somewhat disingenuous because of it’s lack of engagement with culture as it relates to the critical political moment we find ourselves in, obviously i’m not saying she should be singing about forming a revolutionary vanguard or whatever but, i feel like we should be ‘bumpin that in the streets instead of railing lines of ket in the bathroom every weekend. during the pre-covid era, when i was deep in gay stan twitter, and the extent of my leftism was a dsa membership and occasionally skimming the marx-engels reader that i bought on amazon, this kind of music felt right to underscore the blind progressivism that was running itself in circles due to being shrouded in identity politics, and restrained by the guardrails of neoliberalism.
this is where red scare comes in, red scare began as an alternative[1] to the safe, friendly idea of leftism that dominated activist spaces around 2018-2019, they lauded over mark fisher and christopher lasch, talked about bernie sanders and universal healthcare, but they also called things gay and retarded - they were leftists, but they recognized that identity politics and pc culture was one of the things holding the left back from truly making progress.
the black lives matter movement, which gained a massive amount of traction over the summer of 2020, was an inflection point where we saw genuine violent insurrection in the name of change in this country, though, in hindsight, the culture was not ready for this - the neoliberal elite in an effort to curb the violent nature of the protests simulated solidarity[2] and change through marginal policy changes and virtue signaling. the majority of people who experienced this uprising through instagram infographics, and viral pictures of witty signs, saw this as a win, and order was restored.
revolution is not a dinner party, the rejection of destructive actions is ultimately what stopped the blm movement from evolving into a truly revolutionary movement. after this is when the shift in red scare’s tone began. they were critical of the movement for its lack of focus on class, as well as the use of destruction of property. they didn’t see the point, and the momentum was lost by the winter, so instead as a reaction to the left’s perceived “failure” they found it more advantageous to lean in to their radical dissociation via giving in to culture war politics and contrarianism. people on twitter joke about ‘thielbucks’ turning them into fascists but it’s unconfirmed that they took money from peter thiel, the gay german billionaire who (i think) whacked his ex-boyfriend[3], though they have outright denied it. he is still heavily implicated in promoting this rightward shift by bankrolling of various aspects of the larger lower east side art scene dubbed, dimes square[4], as well as his connection to curtis yarvin, who through his ~web 3~ startup urbit (stupid name) [5] has been sponsoring a handful of events for scene-ey fixtures such as noagency (which dasha is literally[6] signed to !). it should also help to note that curtis yarvin considers himself a neo-cameralist (what ?) and believes that the government should be replaced by a joint stock company (cool !) [7]. he’s also often associated with nick land - the father of accelerationism, which totally also bodes well for the morals of any thing he does ever. the philosophy of these two goobers has also largely informed the beliefs of current vice presidential nominee jd vance (stupid name + guy), in case you needed more proof that we have lost the culture war[8].
party and club culture rn is super weird. it’s like, i go to these fucking parties at old flings or something where everybody is bobbing awkwardly to the fucking fastest, loudest nelly furtado hyperpop remix ever[9], while there’s maybe like 4 people who are actually dancing. its like a crowd surrounding a mosh but instead of a mosh pit its like 4-5 anorexic cooper union fine arts majors that aren’t that phone poisoned - none of us are really that safe though, we all fry our neurons to a gross extent first thing in the morning by scrolling for an hour, and perceive ourselves through our instagram profiles; via the audiovisual terminal through which we facilitate social reproduction, and cultural consumption via algorithmically sorted reality timelines, we’ve become entropically dispersed across cyberspace on to a plane where socialization is based on corporate mediated signifiers and signifieds. we’re all kind of just assemblages of culture references and meme-lingo, bare-life reduced to make way for embodied consumerism. cultural and personal expression, which used to be something to be cultivated, is now reduced to picking from a prescribed set of aesthetic markers that are supposed to signify your prescribed traits and interests; nobody really knows how to talk to each other anymore, so many people have been partly or totally (depending on age, i find) socialized through like, tiktok comment sections, making them think that it’s okay to just talk at people instead of actually engaging in conversation, and or just communicate through memes or phrases that nobody would say outside of the context of the phone. i see some of this in myself - sometimes, if i feel awkward when im hanging out with someone or i cant think of a joke, 9 times out of 10 i’ll defer to my camera roll to look for a funny picture or something that i can show the other person to stimulate conversation. this is obviously an effect of outsourcing so much memory and cognition to the phone, such that trying to deprogram my reliance on it has been so fucking difficult, because it’s instrumental in carrying out basic social and life functions; i couldn’t get a dumb phone no matter how much i want to, the least i can hope for is getting an iphone se or something because i miss the home button so bad.
culture and art is instrumental in moving people’s opinion and guiding revolution, artists who really know their audience can get them to do anything(brat summer), right now one of the most important things musicians and artists can do is reflect our material conditions back at people in a way that doesn’t let everyone just resolve to hedonism and disassociation, or take on bourgeois ideals and morals. once again, i’m not saying that charli needs to be singing about marxist dialectical materialism(though it would probably be cool if she did), i’m just saying we should care a little bit more about our future and talk to each other more instead of getting caught up in the discourse of the hazy cybernetic dromosphere.
tl;dr
:
references
1 - https://www.patreon.com/posts/dont-trad-on-me-33206796
2 - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-and-off-the-avenue/the-embarrassment-of-democrats-wearing-kente-cloth-stoles
3 - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11926699/Peter-Thiels-model-boyfriend-died-WEEKS-NYE-showdown-billionaire-husband.html
4 - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/peter-thiel-anti-woke-film-festival-trevor-bazile
5 - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23373795/curtis-yarvin-neoreaction-redpill-moldbug
6 - https://www.noagency.nyc/#/dasha/
7 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin#Dark_Enlightenment
8 - https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas
9 - https://soundcloud.com/skyraft/nelly-furtado-parking-lotskyraft-reconstituted-ag-cook-edit-frm-tht-sxsw-boiler-room-set-remember