Secular Blasphemy
Let people despise things, especially bad, formulaic musics hiding behind masks of decent intentions and hypebeasts. Some notes, some receipts, Nina Simone, Marcus Garvey.
Profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the beautiful …
Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. — Walter Benjamin
Aura farmers, thieves
Rereading “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is like relapsing into a hope addiction, irrational optimism; it is my eternal hopecore video, my ransom from all this inconclusive dopamine. Benjamin warns us how and why the aura will dissolve into simulacra and turn what is called art against itself and toward the pitch of fascist propaganda for micro-doses of escapism through the almost beautiful, the would-be beautiful if its entire agenda wasn’t to bypass the soul grinning like an idiot and begging to be revered and crowned supreme for this dodgy ritual of cowardice often called film, literature, or music in these last listless days. This is the secular blasphemy of the godless, an alacrity to take credit for disembodied concepts of artworks and then see if they can get by with labeling them great, if a critical mass of liars and fawners will join the entourage and submerge any voice of integrity, if the lie can be reproduced undeterred and become a career. If the career is more important than the caliber of work that comprises it, as long as the work remains semi-didactic and unassailable, if your thoughts have been surmounted by relentless stimuli, the failure of interval, the lack of desire for space between images and sensations, a cacophony addiction that is not even dadaism because it’s not deliberately reckless. It’s helplessly awry, abject, pathological scroll, decapitator of ritual. Only voluntary exiles from the aurafarm are marked safe from these side effects and that mark is a gash, a scar, barring them from commerce and functional speech in the new auraless territories. A stan is born, a terrible, dysfunctional standardized taste for mediocrity, upheld by zealots with severe cases of Stockholm Syndrome and no blank interval in which to come to and recover.
Aside, beside themselves
You can tell a writer is running out of ideas when he turns all of his tragic heroes into scapegoats for the dreamgirl, I thought, watching Euphoria spoilers in disgust. It’s adequate to sneak in thirty second sex scenes and death scenes screen-grabbed from the stream and uploaded to TikTok rather than submit to eight hours of what we now know is agit-prop for evil empire. I haven’t streamed a television series since the finale of Atlanta and I won’t relapse for this trash, though I need to see Maddy’s outfits, to see Alexa make it out alive for sentimental reasons. All our friends are dead— the end.
And you can tell all of a society’s artists are running out of the desire for innovation and new ideas when every film is a pulpy bloodbath pretending at mythic and epic stature, pawing at the pseudo-gothic like stray kittens type cinematic intervention, coquettish rage fetish of the horror epidemic in film, the beef contingency plan in rap, etcetera. I watch the films, some of them, and they’re often miserable half-lyrical revenge fantasies with plots that mimic scrolling through deleted scenes from Pam Grier’s life or 2013 Tumblr. It’s okay though, those were soothing dead scroll years, innocent when they faltered on the holy mountain of identity politics seeking redemption songs and a copy of Let us Now Praise Famous Men. At least that’s how I got through them. And we all looped Nina Simone’s furor, I cannot believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a song like that, until we could believe them, become those conditions, sing along. Yes, a kind of piracy, autophagy, against happy abstinence, against what light, goodbye to all that.
Retrenchment/ re-enchantment
I prefer when an attraction arrives like an ambush by the inevitable, a haunt that was lurking just beyond the margins of my life entering at the exact moment I’d stopped investigating its name and form. Many seek the opposite, the epiphanic spark in the last flickers of a slow burn that tells them a friend should be a lover, a melody should become a song, a song the theme for a book or film as if the minor chord has decided to ascend in status no matter what seduction tactics that requires, right when it seemed so stable and fixed in the low. Both paths to love or some impersonation of it rely on an absence of expectation upended by sudden fulfillment, and on the dread of that fulfillment being more burden than gift subsiding in the face of it, as if you have no choice but to accept that there is something new to enjoy, something you had banished to the invisible or impossible surfacing and it can either become a devouring monster or a source of enduring pleasure depending on how you respond. And in both sequences, you have to know the real thing when you see it; the recognition has to be mutual and loyal to itself, you have to know what you like and why you like it so you can detect whether you’re being adequately wooed or distracted into some pathetic infatuation propelled by your wish to be desired. Is it sabotage or revelation?
These same reflexes that introduce a potential new passion, muse, or love, are needed when you encounter new music or a new film or book; you need to know what you like and why so it’s useless to sell you an imitation masterpiece or try and appease you with a counterfeit. You need to be both unimpressed by false hype and entirely smitten with under-appreciated greatness. You cannot be desperate, bored, willing to pretend you like what you only tolerate for company or background noise, grit against the flatland flotsam of ambivalence, and you can’t be so lonely that you train yourself to find comfort in almost anything that mirrors that back to you and deem whatever that is simpatico, the high culture of your unmasked sorrow gate-kept by more exuberant lies. Stan culture arrives this way, in the zombie arms of lost souls looking for anything to embrace and borrow an identity from.
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The present envying the future
An uptick in the auraless hissy fits of those with stan psychosis paradoxically indicates that standom as a mode of relating to art, especially music, is in the kind of stuporous decline we often witness in petulant senile presidents who negotiate with ground invasions teased on social media like a new season of a failing show. That desperation for authority, and in the case of stans, for the threads of parasocial camaraderie that come with flexing it, turns them militant about the merits of whatever cause or star they’ve adopted for the moment. They’re having more frequent tantrums lately because the objects of their misplaced worship are becoming less and less glorious and redeemable, their mishaps are now easier to trace or spot in the moment, their controversies less interesting, their sustained escapes from accountability less likely than when the scroll didn’t double as total surveillance. Imagine risking your sanity for your misconception of popularity, defending artists who are stealing from their own likenesses to stay relevant, being estranged from your own pleasure to such an extent that you don’t know what you like and why you like it and contrive affinities to these branded entities to seem alive.
We are the first fascists. 2Without prince charming there’s nothing black beauty can do.3 Reclaim your sovereign regimes of love and beauty, your taste, from the habits of agreeability and frenzy that have turned your behavior as stiff as an eternally looping gif of a fictional it-girl mouthing sweet nothings to her captor until he offers her a recording contract and the American Dream. That would be embarrassing, you’d have to pretend to be elated to escape the tribunal at the end of making it big, where all the music begs to be the soundtrack of that 3 second gif economy, a commercial before it’s real. And if you don’t pretend to like that trade you could be drafted, shipped off to fight its battles, black Helen of Troy, the next scandal. If you can’t pretend to like it, audition for last angel of history with me
4.
Nina Simone at her baptism in LA circa 1988. Photo by Watts Prophets
Marcus Garvey circa 1937, who blamed the negro (black liberals) for undermining a semi-productive black fascist impulse in his iteration of black nationalism.
Lyric from Sun Ra’s version of “Sleeping Beauty”
Damn. What a brutal indictment of our current mass culture. You're not wrong.
I particularly like your long sentences. Brilliant writing again.