Editor's note

The stakes of jazz to come and some of my intentions here for the year of the fire horse

The struggle to produce new people

During my junior year in high school, while studying for my AP European History exam at the hybrid Starbucks/Barnes & Noble then located in Westwood, just blocks from the French Bookstore where I worked at the time, I stole a copy of Mein Kampf, translation “My Struggle,” Hitler’s riveting manifesto as autobiography. I thought it a worthy and minor heist; how could I exchange the money I’d earned hawking copies of Le Monde and Paris Match to the tactful French diaspora of Los Angeles, for didacticisms from that demon seed. But I’d thumbed through the unlikely prison notebook at my wobbly cafe table, found the section on propaganda, and become transfixed.

Who could be more intentional in his possession of desired subjects and manipulation of their desires from within than a legendary sadist like Adolf? I wanted to understand the demented psychology that had helped produce the most scandalous events of the twentieth century, and upend the indoctrination that would allow me to pass my exam. Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of the crowd, he counseled, warning against the looping of anything too intellectual or blasé while pursuing that aim, warning that the crowd was unintelligent and driven by base emotions. I felt no guilt stealing from him, I was no thief, I was a seeker and without this open-secret manifesto I could be deceived just like the crowd for which he had so much contempt. I wouldn’t have stolen any other book, I adored books then as I do now, but this inverse bible deserved pilfering. Why was it on the shelf near the texts I needed to prepare for my test unless to assert and inspire criminality? I don’t remember being deeply impacted by his struggle diary besides as an emanation and reminder of the dormant potentialities within evil men, a talisman of their prevailing lore that remained nestled on my bookshelf through college like a hideous ream of caution tape; it was a cursed and sacred installation, a lesson in not looking away from what might offend you that I’ve yet to unlearn. Turns out, this man’s personality on the page was obsessive and boring; he drew unimpressive conclusions which anyone preoccupied with genocidal world domination might come to day one into that endeavor. Recently, investigating the cult of Edward Bernays, who invented the term “public relations” because Hitler had stained propaganda’s reputation, the indignant way I’d stuffed the that bulky black and red book into my Jansport and left the store and any eurocentric bias behind came flooding back with detached pride.

What if the new people are bad too

Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s American-raised nephew, repackaged propaganda as marketing and could sell the American public anything, from cigarettes to demure women, recast as “torches of freedom,” to coups, and disgraced presidents. After the wars he sold the culture of department stores and coerced the public into habitual yearning for cheap goods that had been produced in excess during the war effort. He was thwarted by the depression, absorbed by the CIA, and then his ideas and Freud’s went to Hollywood by way of Freud’s daughter Anna. A despairing Marilyn Monroe famously committed suicide while undergoing intense psychoanalysis. Another patient committed suicide at Freud’s home, also while undergoing psychoanalysis. This didn’t change the fact that PR, which Bernays had studied his uncle’s texts to master, was effective and desires could be manufactured, conjured, and manipulated using the subconscious drives Freud had defined. The casualties just proved that one of those subconscious drives is death. For those not motivated by world domination or power lust and weary by excessive self-examination, the death drive might override the sex drive or propensities to violence or fits of ecstasy. A whole propagandized society running out of new goods and services to consume might even succumb to the desire to ruin itself, sometimes called revolution, others collapse. Freud had accounted for this and wanted to ensure no one was maladjusted to love, lust, family life, or mortality. He described and chastised perverts in exhaustive detail. Some hallucinated heroes into those descriptions and acquired perversions as if they were a resource. A quotient of vice was encouraged in Bernays’ doctrine because it’s good for business, makes people easier to control, and makes it easier for the entertainment industry to hack into and direct the collective subconscious toward whatever the government might need accomplished at the time.

Good ‘Ol Boys

In the twenty-first century of our predictable patterns on earth, Bernays’ nephew Mark Randolph, is the co-founder of Netflix and programming through PR and propaganda is slick enough to disguise itself as mediocre original series after mediocre original series on the grandiose streaming service over-populated with gunk, distractions, and nostalgia, a modem digital circus of subconscious hysteria made into cinema and mind numbing “shows.” And music has become an accessory to the new modes of watching, scrolling and ceding agency to algorithms. What we used to pursue consciously we now allow to limply and implacably pursue us as TikTok “sounds,” circuits of “virality,” and mechanized suggestions from AppleMusic and Spotify. Compliant, music writing mostly accommodates PR cycles for albums and tours, rage bait cycles, and deaths or scandals. You can write about an artist who just died, just released an album, or just went to jail, finalized a public divorce, or revealed a bad opinion in passing. You cannot, it’s implied, write anachronistically, whimsically, or intently about music that’s not in the news today or this week or month—a film score from 1973, or a jazz archive sitting untended in a university library, a box of tapes you discover in your grandmother’s garage, the split-in-pieces gold record or 45 of your father’s kept in silver heart shaped box lined with crimson velour, all must be discarded as purely sentimental and irrelevant to current music culture. Even an album from six months ago is considered phantom, passé. Maybe on its tenth anniversary you can revisit it. Maybe it died on arrival but will be revived in a film or commercial to sell a lifestyle that makes you long to buy everything you need from pretty, softly-lit shops forever and there will be no more dying. The inventory is infinite and self-replicating. You can listen to music the way you listen to silence, inattentively, sloppily, like the score of the middlebrow movie you star in in your mind. Good times do create weak men and weak men do create hard times—for music and culture too.

The reigning technocracy is inverse propaganda for strong men, overmen, the Ubermensch strong enough to resist its advances. It leaves us vulnerable to new dictators because it is the new dictators’ primary implement, that intersection of corporate power, human creativity, and technology that conflates the two until they are sickly with co-dependency. What I’m saying is, if we aren’t careful we’ll produce another Hitler by passively adhering to these trends, someone who believes his disappointment with mass culture is so valid he’ll use it to program everyone to accept his authority. And because he controls the hidden hand of government in culture, the PR engine, he will succeed, the music will become PR for his ideology. Wagner into Ye into a trap remix of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. All the music will corroborate him or prove the inanity and complacency of the crowd, all the films will be funded by him and teach the crowd to worship their distractions and hard times. The products will sell convenience, ease sufficient to further placate the weaknesses everyone has agreed are creative and dignified. Your hard times will be mirrored back to you as gateways to the sympathy and well-funded humiliation ritual that most fame has become. I think we’re in a technocratic psyop that follows this formula and it’s urgent that we unwind the knotted coil and sing well again. I intend to be depatterend, maladjusted to the new habits of indiscriminate consumption of all media, but especially where music is concerned, especially black music’s ability to be exploited by their struggle for dominance. I want to silence the uncanny valley of synthetic voices or collapse it into my preferred frequency, a scalar wave to cure the chaos addiction.

I’m going into this next cycle, the end of the first quarter of this gloriously disgraced century, listening to music like a biohacker who wants her body back from the gladhanding mechanics. I reject the pollution of all this PR and automation, the yesman culture always attentive to the loudest and wrongest— jester, clown, plant, handler be gone from here, the department stores with no register that music streaming services have become, disappear, fail for being too big to fail, the desperate musings on podcasts whose primary aim is to keep a distracted listener company and a distracted, over and under-worked journalist relevant, become real conversations, no longer advertisements and heaps of jousting talking points. The album as a form is being eroded by inattention and too much attention to “sounds” and clout and ratings, and the more degraded music becomes as a whole, as an industry, the easier it will be to justify the impending influx of AI substitutes and clones for artists who have preemptively ceded creative control to machines, algorithms, and PR systems. This is a technological dictatorship so advanced it would make Adolf proud, it would alleviate his sense of futile struggle. Biohack against its rising tide with me, take my pill, clean the slate of bad infinity they’re constructing for a yet-to-be-imagined renaissance which can only occur improvised by the human heart in defiance of computer love but feigning complicity, become the propaganda to end the power of PR over your desire to hear decent music or to see anything through beyond trendiest phase.

People in Me

I fashion myself immune to the general program, chronically unimpressed and unimpressionable thanks to a combination of intense dance training and early childhood trauma overlapping, intermingling, my hyper-vigillance to scams and aberrations, misplaced counts of 8 and dizzying emotional blackmail is simply too well-honed, it’s become innate for better or worse. I’m hard to dazzle. It’s difficult to make an eagle cry. You won’t find me in a crowd cheering or disapproving as I’m told. Nor will I occupy predictable margins or indulge gratuitous disobedience. I’m most comfortable as a glitch. The radio in my mind tonight plays a mash-up of Qtip’s “Vivrant Thing,” which the DJ played at the New Years Eve party I attended last night, and Johnny Hartman’s version of “Feelings,” which is crackling through my speaker now like a revelation. Cries of conspiracy are all very empty and grandiose unless you’re willing to risk something in them, to be awkwardly and assertively vulnerable and open to new codes of conduct, and offer alternatives to what you’re disavowing. My antidote to new subtler settler colonial cultural fascism is revealed in Hartman’s spoken intro to his live version of the cronner’s standard— everybody’s in a hurry tonight, got nowhere to go. I have the patience to listen slowly and closely but lack the tolerance to wait until I’m asked to testify what I’ve heard. I’ll do it when I decide the time is right, and I’ll have listened to all sides like a spy until then and figured out how all the oligarchs are cousins. Why so much frenzy in no particular direction, and exhibitionism pretending to be liberation until then? The time is right. They’ve inverted your tastes and conditioned you to cherish what’s loathsome and cowardly and despise your chivalrous nature until then. And we’re nearing the year of the Fire Horse, and the etymology of chivalry traces it to the archaic French term for knight or horseman. We’re either swiftly approaching an apocalypse on horseback or riding out of it intact, we’re either forgetting our feelings or renewed by them, and in relation to music and culture harnessed for state propaganda, we’re either the suppliers or the ones stealing ourselves back.

The animal has too much momentum, tell it where to go. I intend to cover music and culture across genres with as much of a mandate as these crime families and their strays who have been covering their tracks for centuries as they ride you and raid you for parts. And if you see me on Netflix or prescribing you fairy tales about their struggles, mind your business, I’m studying.

Happy year of the fire horse, know and ride your overlords.

Coming up here, meditations on Adrian Piper and Mariah Carey

A reluctant review of the new ASAP Rocky

Streamed conversations with friends and musicians

Excerpts from new books I’m working on

A print magazine project

A belated lyric on KeiyaA’s album from last October

Biohacking lore and research as it relates to sound grammar

& more