sadmanbarty

Well-known member
These are some jumping off points. Also, naturally, Yeats's theory of masks.

“No face…”

Choosing an archetypal UK drill track- one that does little to differentiate itself- is difficult insofar as tracks in that vein are so plentiful. But that’s the point. Drill is changing-same music (or, to borrow drill’s vernacular, chinging-same music). It occupies a distinct, almost uniform, sound world of muffled, funeral-march pianos, swampy bass, freckled drums and seraphic reverb. When played for any lengthy amount of time it becomes meditative and immersive. Repetition becomes mantra like. What can sound like apathy can also sound like surrender. For all the lyrical content surrounding physical death, its sonics impart a kind of ego death that chimes with drill’s aesthetic of anonymity. The collective gang identity trumps that of the individual. Faces are masked. Clothes are uniform. Voices are made devoid of any defining traits; mumbled with little variety of timbre or intonation.

Individual character is so stripped away that in rather dystopian fashion many artists adopt names that resemble codes more than they do nicknames as though they’ve tacitly internalized the disposability of their own lives in gang warfare. Monikers such as C2 and M24 are indistinguishable from gang tags like M20 and 150 when presented side-by-side in YouTube titles. The group O’Lanna take this to its logical extreme with each of its rapper’s simply adopting a number to add to the ‘surname’ O’Lanna; their track ‘Wheel It There’ is accredited to rappers 3 O’Lanna, 6 O’Lanna, 7 O’Lanna and 8 O’Lanna. These codified forms of identity have rather inconspicuous and bureaucratic origins. Groups 67 and 86 derive their names from Tulse Hill’s 020 867 telephone code. Moscow 17 and 12World likewise garnered their group names from their respective SE17 and W12 postcodes while Zone 2 arrived at theirs via Transport For London’s five pricing zones. Drill’s numerical preoccupation speaks to the genre’s reductive view of human life. Deaths, prison sentences and gang aggrandizement are often abstracted into mathematical sums as in Loski’s ‘Hazards’ where he mocks the death of four members of rival gang 150 by rapping “they say 150, but it’s 146 instead”. Ironically enough the code “IC3”, used by British law enforcement to denote black suspects, is routinely appropriated by drill artists. They assimilate and weaponise this depersonalizing taxonomy against their opponents. NPK’s ‘Talk is Cheap’ features the lyrics “black blade on an IC3, run down four other IC3’s” while Poky raps “stuck in the hood just trying to survive, pop four IC3’s in a ride” is his song ‘D Kamp’. B Side even go so far as to title a song ‘IC3’.

“Still cutting shapes in the rave…”

This blurring of boundaries between the individual- and collective- self simultaneously echoes the collectivism of the rave dream and is its moral antithesis. The divergent use of piano in rave and drill is telling. Though central to each genre, in rave the pianos were crisp, staccato bursts of utopian sunshine whereas in drill they’re viscous, nihilistic, murky and grey.

drill
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
But also, I think readers selves are somewhat obliterated by reading, or can be. Their selves, that is, as a subconsciously maintained (physiologically underpinned) fiction.

pantheism- the expansion of the self outwards achieving a kind of ego death.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's interesting to consider that the archetypal individualist rapper (boasting about his cars, mansions, etc.) might on some level be disguising their real complicated self in a character or set of cultural symbols and signifiers.
 

version

Well-known member

There's an essay on Messi which uses this as a framework.

Tradition and the Individual Superstar - http://www.runofplay.com/2011/02/09/tradition-and-the-individual-superstar/

Next Saturday. Cold. The cacophony of metal cleats. Lionel Messi is in a Blaugrana shirt, standing in the tunnel before the game and thinking. He might be thinking about his coach’s pre-game instructions. He might be thinking about the abuse that awaits him from opposing fans. And he might be thinking about how itchy his right shin guard is. But the one thing that Lionel Messi will not be thinking about is the only thing that is guaranteed to happen every single time he plays for Barcelona. Once he steps on the field, he will give up his self-contained existence and open himself up to immediate evaluation, unfair speculation, and comparison to his peers and his predecessors. Once he steps foot on the field, he will shed his individuality and assume the 112 years of his club’s existence, Total Football, tiki-taka—tradition. Once Lionel Messi steps on the field next Saturday, in the cold, amidst the clatter of cleats, he will become modern.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
It's interesting to consider that the archetypal individualist rapper (boasting about his cars, mansions, etc.) might on some level be disguising their real complicated self in a character or set of cultural symbols and signifiers.

ego death by way of self-aggrandisement
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
On a base level, I suppose this is coming from somebody particularly self-loathing, but the self is a bit of a nightmare, isn't it? I mean the individual set of strengths and weaknesses that desires and fails, or achieves and is left only desiring more.

If you haven't got anything to take your mind off the self you'll go nuts.

But then, if you're a narcissist like Trump... I bet he doesn't listen to music, or read books, or have any interests not entirely orbiting around himself. Because he loves himself. But how many people do?
 

version

Well-known member
In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), an engineer named Kurt Mondaugen enunciates a law of human existence: “Personal density…is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.” The narrator explains:

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now…. The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.
 

version

Well-known member
But then, if you're a narcissist like Trump... I bet he doesn't listen to music, or read books, or have any interests not entirely orbiting around himself. Because he loves himself. But how many people do?

I don't think I've ever seen him laugh, I can't even imagine him laughing.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It is interesting, his humourlessness. As you say, when he smirks, it's almost 'for the benefit of' the humans.

What that might say about him, about his sense of a self, a self without cracks.

It's why he's so comical a person, above all - that he can't see the joke.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
So dematerialisation is connected with orgasm/womb sort of language because you're re-physicalising the language about a supposedly abstract art?

The insight that there is no dematerialisation - material is all.

Wordsworth, preface to lyrical ballads, the physicality of language in its 'native' state... (Rural, naturally)

'Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation.'

Borges explained this with the example of 'the river of time' - a metaphor many of us use without ever spending time near a river.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
It is interesting, his humourlessness. As you say, when he smirks, it's almost 'for the benefit of' the humans.

What that might say about him, about his sense of a self, a self without cracks.

It's why he's so comical a person, above all - that he can't see the joke.

He is also quite possible the most thin-skinned person who has ever lived. A veritable snowflake-in-chief.

I think this is quite common to people with enormous egos - it's as if their ego is much larger in extent but actually no more massive than anyone else's, so that the bigger it gets, the thinner and more fragile it becomes, to the point where a mild joke that most people would be able to brush off is felt so acutely almost as to cause physical pain.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
apollo and dionysus don't fit with the two broad polarities we've established.

we've now got two axis. i think.
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
apollo and dionysus don't fit with the two broad polarities we've established.

we've now got two axis. i think.

Happy Hardcore sounds artificially feminine to me, a masculine idea of the feminine.


emotion dispensed so rapidly as to become information. they are signals, no longer feelings.

red is no longer rothko, but a flashing emergency light.

what we're talking about here is iconisation+dionysian
 
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