audible seams in deliberate reaction to the Xanax Zone
- Thread starter treelethargy
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- 1970s turkish schmaltz audible screams benzo crew bin laden kitsch desirable music don't kill it carol night corroding everything inside of the bitter night of the city of the countryside radical apathy schmaltz jihad the art of fighting without fighting the narcissist the zone wallowing weed zone xanax zone zones without borders zones without people
Darkstar said Aidy's Girl is a Computer was essentially them trying to get the machine to sing.
That DFW bit from The Pale King seems appropriate here.
“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly...but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. The terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.”
I noticed a bunch of people echoing some of the sentiment in the catastrophe thread under a Reddit post about Hong Kong the other day. They were all saying they've always known something bad on a mass-scale would happen in their lifetime, that Hong Kong was a vision of the future, that they just have this feeling the world and their way of life will be drastically changed within the next twenty years.
There's a book by a bloke called Clifford Simak called City which had a section added to it about an ant city on Earth with a slight twist on the 'human boot' line from Nineteen Eighty-Four and it often comes to mind when I see how everyone seems to be fixated, consciously or unconsciously, on some approaching destructive force or doom.
It may just be death tbh. It's the one thing that hangs over everyone and we're more aware of it than ever due to the internet, scientific and medical advances and the ephemeral nature of contemporary culture. We're collectively sliding down a slate roof, grasping at tiles as they go whizzing past and smashing on the concrete below.
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
we've already had discussions about everything made after 2005's rubbish and barty's an idiot for liking new music.
we've already had conversations about how new rap music sounds like blink 182 and that barty's a complete idiot for thinking it's a very interesting, multi-faceted music.
now we're having a conversation from a different perspective; namely about how our current culture resembles some of the effects that xanax is associated with. it's a new conversation.
we've already had conversations about how new rap music sounds like blink 182 and that barty's a complete idiot for thinking it's a very interesting, multi-faceted music.
now we're having a conversation from a different perspective; namely about how our current culture resembles some of the effects that xanax is associated with. it's a new conversation.
lot of the white middle class feminist students when I was hanging out at uni/in club music adjacent scenes, although impeccably they would toot their anti-racist credentials by the dozen - chip away at the surface and you could see that the old suburban fear (which could cross into outright contempt) of the black man as an 'alpha predator' was still very much lurking underneath. It's one reason why I don't have much time for wokeness, not because it is stultifying or whatever - I wish it was far more stultifying and dictatorial but its not, it's just a variation on old liberal pseudo-tolerance!
Sure, I'm just trying to break the xanax zone with speed. make you feel more discomforted. kill your buzz, kill your enjoyment. murder God. In turkish the best cuss you can offer to anyone is babanin dusmanlarini sikirem. Meaning I'll fuck your dads enemies, they didn't do a good job, I'll do better.
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
very good this. the first black president and the fear of black ascendancy has created a cultural fetish for the sedated, emasculated black man.
Xanax is high kitsch. and kitsch is cultural fascism. thats my point Sadam.
luka
Well-known member
This may well be so. We were talking about convergence rather than resistance earlier today. But this shouldnt prevent us from talking about it and analysing it. Quite the opposite. Whether you choose to get seduced by it is of course another matter entirely. But please let us talk.
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
like any aesthetic it can be over done, there needs to be balance.
so with all this xanax rap you actually get these sedate instrumentals being paired with these incredibly dynamic raps. whack a mole rapping. the sound of neurons sparking.
Sure, I agree with otherlife and the point you made about adorno in minima moralia. That's the whole point of kitsch isn't it. presenting the old and the hackneyed as the post-modern. Truly futurist kitsch is not really possible, it also ends up being a kind of fetish of a distinctly glossy and airbrushed future, jam city.
For instance that classical curvs album, far from accompanying a critical discourse, just sounds like amateur grime. it's neither conformity nor resistance, it's just the circulation of a garbage commodity.
luka
Well-known member
Ok cool third I agree up to a point. I'm just saying don't get all agitated and start shouting at us. We're not bad people really. We just like to talk amongst ourselves and try to work stuff out as we go in an exploratory mode. We don't have the answers. We're looking for them. That's why we come here.
Maybe the truly subversive thing to say today is 'we are the future' for good for worse, but there is no 'futurity future' short of a mass breakdown in society. and that could go both ways. it's easy to prophesise doom and gloom but conservatives always do that. for me the 2010s were the decade of inertia. 2000s had all that 80s synthpop revival but the 80s gestures in a lot of 2010s music are just rote, a standardised musical device. They don't even really signify retrofuturism.
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m8 you said englishness needs to be abolished and I'm precisely trying to wage a merciless jihad against this tendancy in corpsey and others.
also you by the looks of it, however one of the most relevant twitter threads I created in the entire history of humanity.
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
again, i think that's a conversation we've already had. i've said that i think that the music of the last couple of years is the most potently innovative and futurist music since jungle and lots of people have told me that i'm dumb for thinking so.
so now we're having a conversation about how xanax.
so now we're having a conversation about how xanax.