Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #45

This week in based and cringe...

THOUGHTS

I’ll be 35 this weekend. Thirty fucking five. It’s the first birthday that has ever made me think and feel: “Wow, I’m getting a little old.” I think there’s never been a moment in my adult life where I didn’t feel like a young man. And I still do, I guess, feel young. I have all my hair. My body is strong and fit. I have boundless energy. Perhaps, in addition to my physical upkeep, this has something to do with my pampered upbringing. Wyndham Lewis once wrote that having doting parents who encourage a kind of childish helplessness in their children can “prolong youth and health beyond the usual term” in those children when they grow into adults. And my parents were so loving and attentive it often felt stifling. If Lewis’ belief is true, perhaps it’s little more than my emotional immaturity that has gifted me with such vigor well into my mid-’30s. Does that mean I should reprioritize away from my juvenile delinquency and towards adult maturity? Where does that leave Safety Propaganda?

I’ve long enjoyed the ability to trigger people. But is this still a valid use of my time? I have a lot going on. The Safety Propaganda Conceptual Manifesto is being reborn as a print book, Safety Propaganda: Conceptual Manifesto for Psychological Warfare, produced in collaboration by Safety Propaganda and Morbid Books. It should be out by the end of month and contains all you need to know to survive the ideological battles of late modernity. Furthermore, I am almost done with my third book. It is, a work of fiction. My version of the Great American Novel, if you will. It should be out sometime next year, and I will be previewing some material from it at Amphetamine Sulphate’s five year event on October 28 at Newton Gallery.

With all these vaunted, “high art” projects in the works, should I persist in lowering myself to the allegedly immature position of online shit stirrer? I don’t fucking know. I just like it. I like keeping up with what is going on, identifying the absurdity and retardation of it, and absorbing it into my aesthetic and my worldview alike. I suppose I could disconnect for a while, focus solely on the “mature” projects that usher one into a more serious adulthood. But, avant-garde cruelty keeps me young…

BASED SAFETY

Red Hot Chili Peppers release their second album of 2022, the retardedly named Return of the Dream Canteen (only marginally less retarded than April’s Unlimited Love); and like all of the best Chi Peps albums, it is loaded with as many of the band’s most brilliant anthems as it is absolute skippers. That’s always been the trade-off with the Peps. They aren’t great editors, likely due to the fact that they argue about which band members get to have their own written songs on the record. The best of those songs are, of course, almost always written by guitarist John Frusciante, my favorite musician of all time, who returned to the group for the second time in 2019 after 12 years of absence. Clearly, the band is rejuvenated by his god-like guitar work and virtuosic ear for melody and harmony. For the second time this year, Frusciante speaks with RHCP producer Rick Rubin. And in in this one, he gets more candid than he’s been in years about the notoriously bleak drug addiction that almost killed him in the mid-’90s, when he made his now iconic avant-garde 4-track solo albums Niandra la Des and Usually Just a T-Shirt and Smile from the Streets you Hold.

It’s hard to know what to make of the latest manufactured Kanye controversy. There was a time that I was so in awe of the man’s talent that I tirelessly defended him. But it’s been almost 10 years since the release of Yeezus and his music has gotten stale. I loved when he donned the MAGA hat, but listening to him repeat the mid-tier rightoid talking points of 2020 in 2022 is less interesting to me. However, this interview with Drinks Champs is, admittedly, entertaining as fuck. What self-respecting anti-semite admits publicly that Ice Cube “influenced them to be on an anti-semite vibe?” LMfuckingAO. NORE isn’t intelligent enough to manage the interview, and Kanye often comes off as Artaud reborn as a rapper whose gotten carried away with the 4chan boards. I think it is clear that Kanye is having a schizo break of sorts — the leaked news that he believed his kids were “doubles” is a sure symptom of schizophrenia — but that doesn’t mean he’s totally wrong and that also doesn’t mean he’s not entertaining.

In what has to be a crowning moment of cultural recognition of both our scene and its artistic forebears, Jack Mason of The Perfume Nationalist joins Bret Easton Ellis on the writer’s vaunted podcast. Listen to it. Something is happening here. On the subject of Bret, I found a Greil Marcus review of Less than Zero in which the greatest cultural critic of all time absolutely nails the early genius of one of postmodern America’s greatest literary artists: “At most this is a blind reference to what by Ellis’ time, the early ’80s, had become the Manson myth; that, or a mute gesture toward a meaning that will never be defined. Anything that weird ought to mean something.”

Couldn’t help but enjoy Michael Tracey eviscerate Ken Burns’ new documentary in which the celebrated libtard documentarian reaffirms the deep state’s party line that Ukraine is worth going to nuclear war over, using absurd comparisons to WWII and anti-war figures to Holocaust deniers to affirm his case. Give me a fucking break, Ken. “Opponents of US entry into World War II are characterized by Burns as nothing more than a grotesque assemblage of vulgar know-nothings, crazed racial bigots, and outright supporters of Hitler,” writes Tracey. Billy Corgan, perhaps the only icon of ‘90s alternative rock to proudly hold onto his dignity, has a new podcast and it’s worth listening to. The artist goes deep into his inspirations on the show from both his earlier iconic material as well as his upcoming three-act rock opera. Much to be excited about there. As much as I hate The Quietus and hate to give it a shred of positive attention, I can’t in good conscience tell you not to read this snippet of memoir by the greatest heavy metal lead singer of all time. Rob Halford: we salute you.

Two great artists with massive influence over today’s culture, writer Dennis Cooper and video artist Ryan Trecartin, have an interesting dialog here. Apparently, Ryan has created an amusement park. Whoa. One of the greatest omnicringe wiggers in history, pro skater Chad Muska, is the subject of a terrific documentary episode from the Epicly Later’d program (a holdover from the days in which VICE was fun and not a Soros plot) and it’s great.

For my recent shenanigans, Filthy Aremanian, Jack Mason and I gush over the brilliance of Andrew Dominik’s Blonde and wince over the BLM propaganda suffocating Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer series on System of Systems by Safety Propaganda. The dirty Armenian also hangs out again with me in New York, this time with one of my best friends the artist Bradford Kessler as well as our shared dear friend Harry Tafoya, art critic. For my October Compact Mag column, I eulogize the late Jean-Luc Godard.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

Clear your reading calendars, ladies and gentleman. Paul B. Preciado, the world’s most incomprehensible and utterly inane trans critical theorist, is back in the ever diminishing in stature pages of Artforum. If you can make any sense of this preposterously over-stylized text that manages to say absolutely nothing, it appears it has to do with the world fracturing in two and some people becoming libtards and other people becoming fascists and finding love in the middle of all that, or something. Imagine how good this writing would be if it was inexplicably peppered with copious uses of the “n word,” the connotation would be totally different and the direct meaning still utterly mystified. God, I love critical theory like this – theory that plays to all the most extreme and ridiculous tendencies of theory itself. It’s all so dumb, and Preciado makes that stupidity abundantly clear.

My least favorite writer of prestige to ever run a vanity campaign for president Eileen Myles has a new novel coming out and it gets excerpted here. Can’t make heads or tales of it, other than that she’s wearing New Balance sneakers which “are conservative but no one cares.” Well, that’s true I guess. More from the critical theory sphere: imagine how batshit insane you’d have to be to believe that eating maskless at a restaurant carries both risks AND lurid thrills equal to those of having unprotected sex with strangers? Academics are NOT OK!

Truly depressing and, if I’m being honest, rather terrifying to see the word “nuclear” repeated over and over in the media these days. Only more depressing now that the US is openly testing nuclear drills as a means of “intimidating” Putin. If you don’t think we need entirely new leadership when reading these headlines you are lost, forever. McKinsey plant and low-IQ psychological operative Anand Giridharadas confesses that the Democrats need to do better in appealing to the normies but can’t do so without positioning the opposing political side as, yup, you guessed it: Nazis. This is truly rich at the moment, when his side (libtards) are gearing us for nuclear conflict. Regardless of what you think about Alex Jones and what he said about Sandy Hook, the idea that anyone thinks it’s OK to be fined A BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS just for positing an opinion is absolutely insane. A NY Times columnist with the very real sounding name of “Zeynep Tufekci”, of course, thinks it’s great. And that we need to do more of it. Anyone else find it tedious that we are having political debates about fundamental rights that were supposedly settled by the forefathers when they wrote the fucking Constitution hundreds of years ago?

Feeling confident that Covid purgatory had finally come to a close? Let’s hope that’s the case. But don’t feel surprised when they start using the ambiguous scourge that is “Long Covid” to justify more encroachments into the comfort of your everyday life. Hrag Vartanian, the editor of a fucking art publication (granted, THE WORST art publication,) makes a mealy mouthed case for the destruction of a Van Gogh masterpiece in service of “climate change awareness.” Read that again, but simplified: the editor of an art magazine justifies the destruction of art. These people have absolutely no respect for history nor human achievement, and this is who we allow to act as arbiters of taste in our culture. Hrag: you’re an absolute rat.

Pitchfork has updated its “best albums of the 1990s” list and clearly re-manufactured their tastes for the culture they’re embedded in now: lots and lots more women and black women, in particular. OK, fine. Not like I expected this list to be anything worth paying attention to, but HOLY SHIT is this bad. Aside from keeping My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, a record we can all agree is beautiful and iconic, we now have Hole as more important than Nirvana? Aaliyah, who I like more or less, in the top fucking 20?Give me a break. Le Tigre, one of the worst groups ever, in the top 40? Pavement’s iconic debut pushed back to number 70? Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand not even in the top 100? It’s not that I expect Pitchfork to look at the underground or at extreme music or anything, but it’s supposed to be an independent music blog, no? I guess not, anymore. Well, at least Enter the 36 Chambers is right at the top of the list. It’s a perfect album. And Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope, my favorite top 40 album ever and basically unparalleled in its emotional depth for the genre that it’s in, is also in the top 10. Nevertheless, the feminist re-writing of artistic history is always going to be a little annoying, but also: who cares? I don’t need Pitchfork to affirm my knowledge that Royal Trux’s Cats and Dogs or Frusciante’s Niandra… or Macronympha’s Pennsylvania or Suffocation’s Breeding the Spawn or the Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream are among the best records ever. They just are. I know it. You, well, you should know it.

ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Amphetamine Sulphate "5-year” flyer
2. Art by Ryan Trecartin
3. John Frusciante and Flea
4. Vincent Van Gogh Sunflowers