Culture As Advertising.

dan hancox wrote a little thing on the subject recently https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/qvyde5/your-city-is-not-a-brand

luka said:

I can see why you would bring this up, a song literally aa advert, but I don't think it's strictly relevant in that vybez is not a sock puppet of global capital. He remains a local artist operating within local norms with a local/diasporic audience.

I realise this is contentious and not a straightforward distinction to draw.

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Vybz still works in the sense of branding.

Since barty invoked the other main interest of mine, I've often talked about how regional rap deals in things like 'campaigning'. There's a big mythos of the 00s in rap where the local artist grinded in the streets with his mixtapes. He became a neighborhood celebrity, then a city-wide one, then slowly made his way out into the national circuit, etc. Unofficial street-teaming, legit going into the streets kissing babies. "Remember folks, purchasing my album is representing the community." Likewise when you're worried about making singles with Rihanna you are cut from that relationship no longer because you're thinking about radio and rotations and being airbombed onto people, not propelled up from where you once were.

Vybz was never fully allowed to become the star that say, Sean Paul was. There were numerous reasons for it, not limited to the debates over his homophobia, colorism (which I think may have legitimately been motivation for his bleaching), and the criminal ties that weighed him. So yes, Luke's right to notice there's a glass ceiling that prevents him being seen on the same level deliberately kept by the systems that isn't as in play with American rappers. But he's def. operating under the terms Barty's addressing.

luka said:

But if we accept, for the sake of argument, that western pop is centred around the song rather than the performers body, does it follow that Korean pop is vastly superior?

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Not a superiority but a different value. Pop music in the west is beholden to the idea that this is the artist's product, their work. K-Pop often entertains this too but more often than not everything they do has to be met by public response. A song can do fine on radio but it lives or dies by it's live reception, by it's music videos which in turn often depend on incredibly active choreography. Idols who cannot consistently perform as the artificial heart of their records. A well crafted song in the US can position even the most uncharming weirdoes to a single hit once or twice. In K-pop you can have the best song on earth, fine tuned but if the people see "you" at the heart of it and don't feel captivated by your efforts they reject you. So many groups linger on in 3 year limbos after 'scandal' desperately working to regain the appreciation of the public, to no avail.

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You think of the recent dialog where western pop stars have been openly calling out how much they hate the media (which in a show of how disconnected with the present day they are, they continuously refer to as 'the blogs') for having the nerve to criticize and critique what they do without being aware of the work they do on their material or what goes into their presentations which are essentially transmissions or documents. K-Pop and regional rap are beholden to a requirement of your physical presence and relationship as a performer through various mediated forms. It's a demand of you and your body to perform under conditions as they the public dictate, to follow rules and to fulfil expectations.

Also


This is perfect for Barti

hey wanted to say i felt bad barging in here w this dismissive/panicked tone, i really love this thread actually and was thinking i should do an effort post but i need to collate peoples points on this question and note em out. i will do it though on god

ok no fuck that it's ugly long i need to break this up into smaller posts sorry. multiple effort posts.

ON PLAYING THE GAME

"“Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. Advertising effaces any support and any depth, signifying a reabsorption of everything into the surface and plunges us into this stupified, hyperreal euphoria that we could not exchange for anything else.”
if this is so why do we continue trying to exchange it? this perception of dematerialisation and attempts to push back against it. why not fucking surrender? 'play the game' as luka says and touched upon. become 'semiotically literate'. choose to choose, choose to start, start the game.

sadmanbarty said:

my rap rituals thread was an attempt to move beyond the "we can't stick it to the man any more" narrative and find aesthetically redeeming qualities in it.

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i've really tried to do this in a self conscious attempt to break out of my own rockism for the past six years, through THE CHILLWAVE CONTINUUM, and a huge part of that has been hearing what u do in dematerialised/hypermaterialist rap. young thug and main attrakionz have both stuck w me the most but i completely understand why u feel migos to be futuristic, i just dipped out after 2014.

not pursuing vaporwave detournement strictly as a joke among friends but spending unhealthy amounts of time on youtube looking for tape rips (75% of the time advertisements) and archive.org looking for early net art (often not made with the purpose of being 'net art' but looking like such to someone who started on phpboards and came of age during asocial media) and strictly appropriating/drawing on what resonated with my body, that was always the test.
trying to give the early records the most charitable reading possible, assuming they could only resonate w me if the source material/inspiration also resonated with the artists. that it wasn't a Fuck You, some kind of clever comment on neoliberalism or whatever. but an attempt at a felt response to this surreal and frighteningly fast process, of which neoliberalism is definitely one part. that in japan neoliberalism means the Colorful Boom, convertible to yokohoma, but in the south it means 'the hour of the furnaces', and it really really fucking does.

but something in my mental health snapped in 2016 and i've just found it very difficult to approach making art this way or get excited ab new music, pop in general. i've just hit a wall. this isn't a problem w this outlook/approach but a personal problem, burnout. it's that i spent so much time trying to find what colors popped out to me in the metropole bloom and was ignoring the hour of the furnaces, chicago boys terrorism aspect, and how i perpetuate it, however indirectly, by engaging with the internet. moral turpitude. prurience.

luka said:

"Reading Ballard's introduction to 'The Doors of Experience' the other day and he talks about how the entertainment/media has 'engirdled' the earth, so that the only way to escape fiction is to pursue/plumb the inner depths"

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the only way out is down and right through. trying to escape to the outside by going up, backwards, sideways, only draws you further in.

sadmanbarty said:

the pioneering mumble rap tune.
gleefully post-human and superficial. chorus like a jingle

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young money is THE CHILLWAVE CONTINUUM. compare 'bedrock' and 'problem areas'.

[provisional conclusion: keep playing the game, just tap out when u need to?]

THE JESTER'S REMORSE

View attachment 956
look at the anxiety in his face, his close stance, his outspread hands.
the way he's framed by the portrait of lincoln, the decor of the white house.
and then: this spread of hot greasy shit.
placed side by side, it becomes indistinguishable, no functional difference between menu items, no effective difference between competing chains.

foreground: totalising logic of the [cellular? wh-] commodity;
center: the most on the nose philistine president, he's proud of what he is, he brooks no argument, he's an unsightly vital force;
surround: concentrated euro american political decorum. of which trump is the telos, he's at the end of the hall of presidents.

saw "this is the image that would tell a time traveler they fucked up" on Twit recently and wish i'd bothered remembering who said it. i think the reason this image has sometimes genuinely unsettled me (in a possibly occult but not yet in a 'cursed' way) is that he's an advertisement of himself, advertising himself, advertising himself... and so on. his insides are what it looks like between two mirrors. he is the full, naked body of capital. a religious mystery revealed in splendor. the gesture he's giving us is one of invite to his realm, 'play with me'. and he's the president of the united states; the office of president is an advertisement for itself.
https://boardinghousechicago.bandcamp.com/
https://midnightstarmedia.bandcamp.com/
https://manifestacionesoterica.bandcamp.com/

postscript:

luka said:

The universal is the face of the market. In some very strange way these people become the mouths and bodies of capital. I've talked about this a little bit before. How we are trolled by these young, beautiful rich faces, but the actual voice is impersonal. It doesn't belong to a human.

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i can't bring myself to engage with contemporary 'popular culture' because i hear this voice in all of it. and i feel like the entity behind this voice knows that i know it's there, there's mutual recognition. and it doesn't retrench, try to hide itself, double down. it mocks and it plays, it knows it's more powerful than i am so it doesn't assert itself. knows the immense difficulty of posing an effective challenge to it so it doesn't disguise itself. that's the unsettling thing. or maybe it's just Tankie Weed Schizophrenia.

catchphrase

you really bear on this vigilant citizen thing and it's endearing and fascinating bc you're doing it while also a bit disturbing bc i don't feel like i can afford to think that way.
more effortposts being produced

POP IDOLATRY/RADICAL ISLAM DOT COM: MEDIA IS THE WHOLE OF JIHAD, BUT IN MINIATURE

luka said:

The big critical battle that was fought by the members of my generation was rockist v poptimist with the poptimists winning a resounding victory. So the work now is obviously to replace the poptimist paradigm without falling back into the errors of rockism.

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poptimism feels overbearing at this point. rockism is defeated, it's a non issue, no one wants to be a rockist. but i shouldn't have to figure out why people really like billie eilish or whoever, or even admit they really do. i shouldn't have to accept this shit that doesn't appeal to me just to prove to nobody i have broad taste or, worse, can 'see something of aesthetic value in anything'. the narrative around and presentation of beyonce's s/t (even if i liked lots of the production on it). conde nast's pitchfork and everything ab pitchfork that made conde nast interested in the first place.

thirdform is just so lucid i'm stupefied to respond.
how can i know, for example, if being into the pistols in the 70s or new order in the 80s really did mean something, why would it mean something fundamentally different, really substantially be a marker of some kind of Subcultural Leftism, than it does now, than what being into migos means: that it resonates with your body?
really keen on describing 'right wing deconstruction'. the inability to draw lines of demarcation, to ground one's self in materiality, as politzer puts it to know the hurtling bus is real and not ideal without getting in its path... it's pathological. it's suffocating. and it somehow feels linked to what feels that way about poptimism.
ofc a partisan for third's position of hypermodernism/continuing modernism/realising we're still in modernity?, setting restrictions with intent in order to open aleatory possibilities.

EVEN THOUGH WE'RE MILES APART: SOME ASIDES/Q'S

thirdform said:

I mean this just sounds so performative in the 2010s doesn't it.

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one of the sidebar recs is a spotify Hip Hop + R'n'B Playlist.

sadmanbarty said:

as far as i can tell this thread is entirely about failed attempts at hyperreality. it's about how cringe-inducing it is when you see it unsuccessfully attempted.

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ruminating on this, coming to nothing conclusive besides Agreement. really wish i could go in on this point, what do i want the hyperreal to be, what is successful hyperreality? does this link back to THE CHIL-

luka said:

In the sense of the raw material, the stripmined subculture will no longer be necessary? necessary to whom/what? Capital?

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if this happens does it free the subculture to become a real counter-culture, or kill its raison d'etre, the contradictions that engender its developments?

luka said:

Miserabilism and the Mark Fisher problem

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do it. this is the diagnosis, isn't it?

sadmanbarty said:

I’ve tried my best to be the antidote to this

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you're a good man jack law

sadmanbarty said:

There’s a brilliant thread about how the 21st century has introduced a whole new paradigm of what the future is that is love for you to partake in

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jenny hval - spells. 'we will not be awake for long, you will not have to wait for long, we'll meet in the smallest great unknown'