Where the Psyop Ends, Atonement

Notes on bad music and a good book

Some of the music is so bad it kills brain cells the way drugs do. So bad it’s good in the moment. This makes it catchy and addictive, just like narcotics. You find yourself trapped inside those songs and drained by them and reciting them and weaving their hooks into conversations, then emotionally attached to the lyrics because they remind you of being in public knowing what those around you know, like an involuntary choir or cult. After overdosing on the pop music repertoire you might steal your consciousness back and develop good or at least original taste, or forever cede it to bad sounds. Your life might start to mirror the lyrics you memorize, they raised you, trained you in their patterns. Most are in an abusive relationship with popular song and pop culture that way, enamored with sonic entities they unwittingly allowed in when their defenses were low and they were being programmed, aware they could do better, but terrified of breaking their bond with the familiar in pursuit of unknown upgrades, or too lazy to meet the challenge. I wish I was like you/easily amused, Kurt Cobain lamented from the edge of a cliff. That felt safe to repeat, a tender sneak diss for the ages even if his inability to oblige inane things, his mix of purity and punk nihilism, proved lethal. People aren’t embarrassed enough when they endorse terrible art for money or clout. Those who refuse such pandering take the blows for everyone.

Related, there’s a tacit shame around the consumption of gospel music in secular spaces, a hesitancy rooted in fear of seeming evangelical and not casual maybe, or fear of being fully seen, that never seems to surface around the early indefatigable adoption of the most profane or mindless popular hymns, or the willingness to inscribe any random radio hit placed in front of you onto to your worldview. We endorse what we consume passively and thoughtlessly, more effectively than we do what we deliberately consume because the subconscious runs the world. I also think the evil and philistine have an existential subconscious envy of honest souls and enjoy subjecting them to terrible scenes and terrible songs, to see if they can achieve lasting perversion of others, which would make them hate themselves a little less.

All that to say I would like to get What the hell, what they helly, etc. removed from all records of my testimony, even if it means I have to find God in new places. This can’t be the song of the summer, one that inspires us to act helplessly perplexed at anything going on around us, but the hook is so addictive, it’s they not like us for dummies. There is so much very bad music to choose from though, I’m sure more will surface before solstice. I think the music industry is officially dead. What’s left are the phantoms still willing to go through hazing and humiliation rituals for visibility, whether it be being body shamed into returning with a new face and body, the deadbeat baby daddy narrative, the fake beef narrative, the manic pixie dreamgirl’s revenge plot narrative, most of popular music’s deathbed albums have one of these as their muse or mule, all very easy targets for ten 3 minute tracks. The only original villain of this era in music, original as if his trauma based mind control is always glitching in and out, had his minions form a prayer circle around Diddy’s Hollywood star on the walk of shame this week, and sing his ode to the most famous villain of the 20th century there. This stunt didn’t make many headlines, it was just another day in the life of Ye. The next day he found God again and vowed to give up antisemitism. The crisis of black music is a crisis of performance art, of having reached the outer limits of what can be performed or made into spectacles by black artists, and needing to turn in, to rediscover intimacy in sound, speech and act. We don’t have the new archetypes in place in time to address the new thinking or lack thereof, and zombies are springing up in their stead to meet this recursive need. Perhaps it’s worse than that, and the archetypes are being decapitated one by one in these clear patterns so that a wave of AI generated music can flood the masses. The human sounds have grown so lackluster and redundant and wanna be shock-doctrinaire, we will welcome the sounds machines make when they’re replacing us.

Whenever the arts are in real crisis, we shouldn’t trust mediating forces; it’s only the conversations between musicians and artists, amongst ourselves, perhaps leaked to the public but not made for that public, that are honest. We need to have more of them, we need to use them to end minstrelized performance for good. Andre3000 shouldn’t just be talked about, he should be in conversation with the musicians who are angered or anchored in bitterness by his latest release, a gimmick piano album that got more reviews than very serious solo piano work released the same day. I’m attaching one of my favorite books on music, which features conversations between musicians, friends, collaborators, the ones who need one another more than they need executives and fans. It’s not a solution, but at least it’s not of the simulation, at least it places us rooms the radio cannot evaluate, rate, or enter.

Also I wrote something new on James Baldwin that I hope you’ll read. It discusses what happens to our symbols of virtue in the afterlife when we abdicate these conversations too early.