Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #25

This Week in Based and Cringe

BASED SAFETY
I attended two live music events this weekend. On Friday, I took my better half and a couple friends to see Azealia Banks at Webster Hall in downtown Manhattan. The event was packed – at least 1000 people, assumedly mostly gay men (Azealia has become like the new Madonna for the Red Scare listening based gays crowd) but otherwise highly diverse. Azealia ripped; wearing high heels and looking admittedly hot as fuck, she tore through new songs with the performative and lyrical virtuosity of an artist at the apex of her career. The crowd had a blast, but not just because the performance was great, but because they were MASKLESS (venue required vaccine cards still, though). There was palpable freedom in the air. The other show I attended on Saturday was the second night of the three night Ende Tymes noise festival in Queens. Noise, now some 25 years beyond its glorious height, is in a rough spot culturally. The younger talent feels like such a weak simulacra of what came before and not one of the acts I saw came close to the seismic and explosive power of what Merzbow or Incapacitants are able to do. Beyond that, the festival required vaccines AND masks! How is it that this allegedly avant-garde subculture is more of a simp for rules and power than the mainstream? At one point during the show, I decided, “fuck it,” and removed the mask to watch Regression with Spykes (Nate Young and John Olson of Wolf Eyes), which I was enjoying, when an aggro looking dork in a baseball cap (and mask) came up to me and said “you dropped your mask.” I thought he was sincere at first, and thought mine may have dropped from my back denim pocket. When I realized he was stepping to me, I whispered in his ear: “Fuck you” (I have trained in boxing and a part of me lives for that shit). He then started saying some nonsense about safety, I told him to, “Suck my dick, libtard.” And he meekly shoved me. I let it go for not wanting to ruin the show for the performers, but was obviously rather angry. Experimental music is a horrendously depressing cultural space, filled with the exact kind of middle class, downwardly mobile losers that gravitate towards activism and knowledge work. There is no more vitality in these subcultural spheres; they attract the most abjectly conformist kind of people, those who live in desperate fear over “cancellation” (despite them all being poor and holding no chance of actually making their art into anything resembling a career, it makes absolutely no sense to be afraid to take risks when the stakes are so low). They just want access to this one little scene of alienated nerds that have somehow been deployed as enforcers of the rules of the state. The average noise musician has the politics of a 50-year-old shrill white woman, or Don Lemon (same difference?) My contempt for the middle classes has been exasperated. I like proles for their grit, and aristocrats (like Azealia) for their will to pleasure. If noise is going to have any sort of power or relevance going forward, it deeply needs to start bringing debate about the point of all this reactionary rules fetishism into its internal discourses. This is pathetic.

Speaking of aristocrats with will to pleasure, Kanye finally releases DONDA. It’s ridiculously long at an hour and fifty minutes, free of profanity, and features cameos by deep fakes like Jay-Z and the Weeknd. I adore Kanye, so I’m excited. I’ve been listening to the record while compiling this – it has some soaring beauty, but it does seem to lack the hyper-focus of his career highs on Yeezus and …Twisted Fantasy. Nevertheless, the record has been worth the wait solely for Kanye’s experimental record release parties, which have me concluding that Kanye has long transcended the role of rapper, and that the only other artist that he can evoke comparisons with is someone like Matthew Barney. The shows are massive budget, spectacle driven works of conceptual art. The most recent show in Chicago sees Kanye recreate his childhood home and bringing out canceled artists like Marilyn Manson and DaBaby for that extra provocative factor. It’s wonderful. Leos Carax, one of my favorite film artists ever, releases his first English language film, Annette (available to stream on Amazon Prime). It’s a musical soundtracked entirely by glam rock freaks Sparks and stars Adam Driver (who is riveting) and Marion Cotillard. The film has mystified people and earned some critical scorn, which is good. Anything professional critics hate you can count on being worthy of your time. I see Annette as a companion piece to the DONDA parties: both are high concept, high budget works of abstraction. Even when we don’t like this stuff, we have to appreciate its existence. Praise maximalism! We will be discussing the projects soon on System of Systems.

Elena Lang appears on Red Star Radio for some more Bratton bashing and explains why Bratton’s Covid proscriptions are tantamount to fascism. Writer Philippa Snow watches Cooking with Paris and finds nothing less than great performance art. Bret Ellis hosts fellow novelist and Gen-X prophet Douglas Coupland on his podcast. I think I missed this prior, but writer Audrey Szasz, whose Tears of a Komosol Girl is amongst my favorite works of literary art produced in 2021, appears on the surrealist Anechoic Chamber podcast. Dennis Cooper spotlights spiritualist and artist Paulina Peavy who used art solely as a tool for communing with one very specific alien life form.

Unherd gives the first fair outsider assessment of our political scene; Park MacDougald doesn’t write Aimee, Benedict Cryptofash and the others off as reactionary right wingers, but detects a disciplined Marxist, Laschian, and Bordigan critique of the political economic role of the left in reifying bourgeois supremacy. Marcie Smith Parenti rages against a vaccine-crazed medical establishment that refuses to listen to women who have had interruptions in their menstrual cycles after taking the jab. In typically terrific analysis, Communia posits the fall of Kabul as perhaps the final end of the American empire. From a different perspective, Marty McMarty more or less agrees with that sentiment; the Afghanistan pull-out is clear signal to the world that our military might be as broken and dysfunctional as our state elsewhere. DC Miller critiques the information war and propaganda operation of the ruling class.

On my front (and speaking of noise, which I have more contempt for by the second), I revive my noise-centered column to review new albums by Dave Phillips, Tom Smith and more at Mute Presence. The most based of all swaggots and artist Alex Bienstock stops by System of Systems to talk about his new book, published by SP and available now at the new SP e-commerce site.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

Filthy rodent human and psychopath Dr. Fauci goes on live television to say that vaccines mandates are “a good idea” for school children despite them being at a near fractional risk of actually contracting illness for the disease. Chapo Trap House paves the path for the dirtbag leftist “Based Biden” meme to take its place in the discourse; the idea is that somehow Biden being a functionally braindead skin suit and senile makes him, I guess, challenging to or resistant of the security state? Wow. Just…. Wow. The feminists of DSA’s Madison’s chapter do some really hard “organizizizinggg” to insure that Louis CK doesn’t perform stand-up. Surely, this grand effort (which hilariously failed) will lead to worker’s paradise on Earth. Good job, y’all!

Adolph Reed, Jr. succumbs entirely to the fascist hysteria specter and writes what is easily the most ridiculous essay of his entire career. WaPo chronicles how the billionaire George Floyd donations didn’t actually go to alleviating police violence (yeah no shit) but in most obvious fashion fails to mention the role of their boss Jeff Bezos within this phenomenon. Imperialist lackey and Madeline Albright appreciator Anna Kasparian is now oh-so-deeply concerned about the media and its cheerleading for war (hilarious). Ed McNally argues that Keir Starmer’s criticism of the Labour Party’s left is somehow signs of the left’s strengths even though we all saw them not but two years ago destroy Corbyn’s chances at earning real power and what the fuck planet do you people live on please stop doing this please just grow up! Finally, sicko Paul Krugman implores California to “protect what it’s built.” Here I will remind you that California has the worst levels of income inequality in the country and that San Francisco’s homeless problem has gotten so out of control that you can’t walk a block without finding 12 mentally ill men smoking crack and shooting junk in a tent. Krugman’s comment is incredibly telling: this IS what the ruling class wants. They want people to kill each other. They want the population to shrink. They want the problems to take care of themselves through poverty, drugs, and violence.

It’s been a bad year, real bad. But today at least, today it was a good day.

ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Kanye West, DaBaby and Marilyn Manson
2. Film still from Annette