Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #21

This Week in Based and Cringe

BASED SAFETY
With much to catch up on, I just want to say that I (as the head of the Safety Propaganda division of the Counter-Agency of the Avant-Garde) felt quite certain not but a week ago that a tremendous moral fatigue had reached its apotheosis amongst the American citizenry. I believed, naively, that people were ready to move forward. Past this abysmal cultural era of narcs, cowards, and spineless conformists who do what they are told when they are told. And alas, I was wrong. My idealism, unbreakable as it may be, has done me in once more. SAD!

In what has truly been nothing short of an atrocious year for music, I can happily say that I am in love with Michigan noise maestro Aaron Dilloway’s new collaboration with Columbian vocalist and experimental musician Lucretia Dalt, titled simply Lucy and Aaron. It’s excellent. One of those truly haunting and hypnotic pieces of music that seem to fold in and out of time. Dilloway layers Dalt’s voice like another sound to be bent, contorted, liquidated, and spread about the tracks like an occult liquid. It’s great stuff. Dilloway is on the cover of this month’s The Wire (just skip every other article and go to his, the magazine’s reviews use the word “racism” in just about every album entry) where he discusses his finding the Butthole Surfers, getting involved with Michigan no wave band Couch, starting his label Hanson Records, forming and leaving Wolf Eyes, and his career more broadly. Dilloway is one of the last noise-adjacent musicians who seems to be truly generative in the way that he works; never is his music corny, stale, or stagnant. He often feels more connected to producers like The Caretaker than those that he shares bills with. He’s a sonic explorer, and a non-academic architect of noise. At The Quietus, Dilloway shares some of his favorite music: Caroliner, Pink Floyd, and Heldon are amongst his excellent choices.

Ian Leslie asserts the value and importance of the basic liberal value of disagreement. While that might not seem so explosively interesting, it is of immeasurable importance to remind humans why we communicate at this moment of vicious and socially enforced polarity, is it not? In an uncomfortably humorous turn of events, Nonsite demonstrates that it is not “da Rayciss wyPipo south” that is responsible for the bulk of racial disparities in police killings, but in fact that it is the blue dog ultra-liberal state of Massachusetts that disproportionately kills its own black citizens with the most shocking regularity. As a native Masshole myself, I can confirm that the commonwealth is as known for its clam chowdah as it is for its exceedingly raycisssss wypipo! Elsewhere, if the news coming out of the uprising in Cuba has been confusing — what with the imperialist media immediately blaming the uprising on the allegedly socialist system of Cuba, while other corners of leftist Twitter have defaulted to uncritically defending that same allegedly socialist system — Communia makes the case that the discontent behind the uprisings is real and the result of, not socialist failures, but the failures of a tightly controlled state capitalism.

In anticipation of the novelist’s new book, Dean Kissick dedicates his column to Tao Lin and absolutely nails the peculiar genius of the contradictory New York-based writer. Friend of SP and New York-based painter Justine Neuberger (who sold me a grip of awesome books at the beginning of the pandemic by the likes of Umberto Eco, Georges Perec and Maurice Blanchot, thanks Justine!) gets the critical treatment from Céline Mathieu, who finds in Neuberger’s paintings a space where desire and virtue play out. Are these paintings fables? Do they teach us lessons? Who knows? You decide! Dan Thrall sold his soul for heavy metal and gives Slayer’s titanic guitarist Kerry King the poetic treatment he deserves while outlining the spiritual contradictions between king and Slayer vocalist Tom Araya (with gal pal Gwen Orchid providing illustration!): “The committed, rock-solid Catholic of your grandparents’ generation is primarily a thing of the past,” writes Thrall. “What is left are a few die-hard soldiers—I envy you, by the way—and a whole lot of wishy-washy folks whose depth of religious feeling varies from one minute to the next.”

Cool podcast stuff. In possibly the greatest pod episode of the year, Quentin Tarantino joins Bret Easton Ellis to discuss his new book that novelizes Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Soon enough, you ungrateful losers will understand that that movie was an absolute masterpiece, Tarantino’s finest work since Pulp Fiction, and likely the last great work of quintessentially AMERICAN film art and you will feel shame for throwing such low IQ and gay critiques its way. I’m So Popular does a three hour dedication to the greatest art work of the 2010s: Twin Peaks: The Return. The best human being on the planet Nina Power goes on Justin Murphy’s show to continue her talks on Ivan Illich, this time bringing on LM Sarcasas to share his Illich wisdom.

Finally, I start the most important Twitter thread ever, where I finally unveil much of the secret knowledge that I’ve accrued as a counter-agent of the avant-garde. Do you have a hunch about one of your favorite artists being either a psyop or an actual intelligence operative? Ask away, and you’ll find out for good.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

What to do when you’re a low-level techno producer (seriously pal, you had to define “cacophonie” for us?) denied access to the audience that you so desire? Well, there are several strategies one could take. You could keep making music, and perfect your craft, hoping that you build that audience as your music gets better. That’s the hard choice. You could also recognize that a career in music is something denied to the vast majority of people, understand and gain self-acceptance in the the fact that failure in music isn’t a total failure of character, and live out your life happily as a regular person. The third? You can be a cancel culture loser and tear down others in service of amplifying yourself. Jean-Hughes Kabuiku chooses the third strategy with this “takedown post” of none other than Dom Fernow. Dom, he of Vatican Shadow, Prurient, and Hospital Productions, is in the unique position of being a long time noise icon (as Prurient) who eventually became a big money-making act in techno (as Vatican Shadow). Throughout his career, he’s also been a notable booster and maker of black metal, and has forged connections with many of the genre’s most provocative acts. Some of those acts, like Mikko Aspa and Akitsa, are either accused of being or proudly are right wing. But everyone already knew this. Nevertheless, “Techno Antonio Negri” pretends this is new information and that he is some kind of journalist for copy and pasting Wikipedia entries, blog posts, and Discogs archives into a Substack post. The degree to which experimental music leftists respond to this stuff like it’s a fucking bat signal is stunning. Within hours, everyone was on board with the Dom cancellation. Techno Antonio’s article is particularly harsh on journalists who “didn’t ask Dom the hard questions.” What the fuck were journalists supposed to do? “Hi Dom. Are you a Nazi?” “No.” “Are you sure?” “Yes.” Nevertheless, the most sickening response to the controversy comes from music critic Brandon Stosuy. Stosuy infamously interviewed Fernow for Pitchfork in 2006, and snapped a picture of Fernow and Aspa (Aspa was in town to perform power electronics as Grunt for that year’s No Fun Festival). Instead of treating this article with the contempt it deserves (something like “This is fake and I don’t care what corny edgelord shit that Dom likes”), Stosuy throws his friend Fernow under the bus, and claims that he did not know who Mikko Aspa was. It’s impossible to prove that he’s lying. But yeah, he’s lying.

A graffiti writer breaks into Hunter Biden’s gallery and scrawls phrases like “Daddy is a war criminal” on its walls. Low IQ Taylor Dafoe, of course, responds to the incident by calling the graffiti writer a “conspiracy theorist” for his his use of provable facts in his scatalogical writing. Over at neoliberal e-Flux, Ana Vujanović criticizes philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Paul B. Preciado (who I typically would be loathe to defend) for producing “a binary between ‘them’ (evil governments) and ‘us’ (good people)” for their criticisms of the lockdown measures. That’s right. A “left critical theorist” thinks it’s wrong to posit THE STATE as evil. You need any more evidence that left academia is in cahoots with imperial power? Well, then. You’re chopped in the fucking brain.

Ken Klippenstein pretends that his finding a document from 2010 and getting the word “socialist” removed from America’s dangerous groups list is evidence of his triumph, but really it’s meaningless. It is correct that these “socialists” are no danger to the state (they are its most loyal enforcers), but holy hell is Klippenstein cringe! The Riddler praises Bernie for the old crank’s alleged “master class” in handling reporters after surviving Maureen Dowd’s deep fake Bernie interview. You mean, Bernie the guy whose campaign tried to appease the liberal press for years only to watch them smear and destroy him with Ford line efficiency? Yeah, real master class. Moron. Speaking of the New York Times, the paper asks why the country is panicking about Critical Race Theory??? Hmm, I don’t know. Perhaps because the liberal order that you protect steam rolled it into public school curriculum without any institutional oversight or democratic process? Maybe just that. Proving that the “sensible liberals” of Quillette are often just as ridiculous, histrionic, and political economy dense as the leftoids they criticize, Ronald Radosh writes off Fred Hampton — the charismatic Marxist-Leninist black panther who was murdered at fucking 21 for his ability to galvanize and inspire people with appeals to universal dignity and class struggle — as a “demagogue.”

In an interview with Issac Chotiner, Robin DiAngelo spits out much retardation as the writer points out the many contradictions in her utterly baseless theory of racism. In her new book, for example, DiAngelo says that one of Da RayciSs things is “Not understanding why something on this list is problematic.” Chotiner then says: “This seems to imply that someone who disagrees with you, Robin DiAngelo, is racist.” DiAngelo face-plants trying to answer the question: “I’m really talking about people who haven’t done any of that work and still feel it’s completely legitimate for them to determine what is valid and what is not.” But Chotiner goes at length to explain that she is doing the exact thing she talks about, as a white progressive telling people what to think. It’s a funny read, but my counter-agent of the avant-garde sense is going off: I smell a PSYOP. It appears that DiAngelo is just too fucking ridiculous to defend. She’s an abject moron and her idiocy is plain as day. What I suspect is happening is that the libs will throw her to the wolves to save the underlying ideas of CRT in order to relegitimate and further inculcate those ideas into the minds of future generations. This is a machine of brutal efficiency. It smells its own contradictions and flaws, and knows how to wash that smell off. A mesmeric process of bureaucratic evil.

Where did the sensible people go? Where did the free thinkers go? It really does seem, like one day you’re here, and the next day you’re gone.

Illustration by Dana Dawud