Atrium- "Falling Forever"

Black Erasure

"That is, our past. Not only the refusal of white people to live with people of colour, but their conviction, running back through the history of the US, that any black space is not legitimate – that whatever black people own can and should be expropriated by whites, if they so desire it. During the second world war, this idea of white primacy sparked one of the worst race riots in American history, after white people insisted not only that Detroit’s federal housing built for war workers be segregated, but that all of it be turned over to white residents.

"The riot was no anomaly. During the first world war, in 1917, another white-on-black race riot all but annihilated the black community of East St Louis, Illinois. A few years later, armed white mobs (backed by local law officers) razed to the ground the all-black Florida towns of Ocoee and Rosewood, and the prosperous black Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Scores of black people were killed in these onslaughts. Greenwood was burned to the ground as airplanes dropped incendiaries on the neighbourhood. Some 10,000 African Americans were left homeless.

"These flourishing black communities were erased not only from physical existence, but also from living memory. Bodies were hidden, accounts censored and the survivors scattered or intimidated into silence. To this day, we don’t know exactly what happened, or how many people died.

"One of the most vibrant communities in black America vanished just across the street from where I lived almost all of my adult life. Until a few years ago, I had no idea it had ever been there"

-Kevin Baker, The real-life 'negro removals' behind HBO mini-series Show Me a Hero, The Guardian

No Haven- "Guttertronik"

Steve Hauschildt- "Sundialed"

NON-Compliant

"It's no wonder that African and Afrodiasporic artists are choosing to disseminate music in solidarity. In many cases, this creative decision is a strategy for dealing with the alienation that is so often a part of Afrodiasporic experience. As the London-based writer Kodwo Eshun puts it in his 2003 essay Further Considerations on Afrofuturism: “the condition of alienation, understood in its most general sense, is a psychosocial inevitability that all Afrodiasporic art uses to its own advantage by creating contexts that encourage a process of disalienation.” And yet in the continuing environment of white supremacy, this creativity is routinely either erased, appropriated, or confined to narrow and fetishized aesthetic areas. The music in this article—which is all linked by the multifarious connective tissues of underground culture (labels, releases, mixes, remixes, songs etc)—is not necessarily of the same belief or aesthetic, but can all be seen as resisting the supremacist paradigm in its many different ways and contexts. Often, it can be seen as exploring the way in which race intersects with gender, sexuality and/or queerness too.


In an email, a representative for NON Records explained to me that they are "a sovereign nation state divided into three united territories. NON citizens reside in villages, towns, and cities across the globe. Each citizen has distinct social as well as geopolitical agency with our nation's infrastructure." To date, those citizens are: Angel-Ho, based in Cape Town, South Africa; Nkisi, based in London; and Chino Amobi, based in Richmond, Virginia. Through their Facebook page, they also draw attention to tracks by other artists, such as American artist Jónó Mí Ló's dystopian panorama, “Daniel 9:25 - Dawn Of The New Ugly.” “In no uncertain terms, the Intent of NON is to run counter to current Western hyper-capitalist modes of representation and function, exorcising the language of domination through the United Resistance of policed and exotified colored bodies,” NON’s email continued. “At a time when national (market) state financial and political systems are tested as never before, NON shall remain committed to the militant realities and potentials of ‘The NON State.’ NON came into existence through the Pan-African desire for representation on our own terms.” As stated on their Soundcloud page, NON artists are "using sound as their primary media, to articulate the visible and invisible structures that create binaries in society, and in turn distribute power." They elaborated on that over email, using the terminology of 20th century French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari: "NON uses sound as a weapon to destabilize and deterritorialize our audience, and through this process of sonic reclamation and reterritorialization, we redirect the listeners' attention to our message." Put another way, in the words of American writer James Baldwin, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

- Adam Harper, The Voices Disrupting White Supremacy Through Sound, The Fader 

Harper remains nearly the only author actually doing the difficult work of music journalism (ie, excavating the deep terrain of soundcloud/bandcamp/undiscovered artists) out there.  Everyone else is just responding to promos, it seems.

Chino Amobi- "Non Shall Rise Above"

Beyond the End of the World

"For it is the end of the world that is in question here; and that could be exhilarating if apocalypse were the only way of imagining that world’s disappearance... Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism." 

- Fredric Jameson, 2003

“I thought IBM was born with the world/ The US flag would float forever/The cold opponent did pack away/The capital will have to follow/ It's not eternal, imperishable/Oh yes it will go/ It's not eternal, interminable/ The dinosaur law
Look at the symbols, they are alive/ They move evolve and then they die.” 

- Stereolab, "Wow and Flutter" 

And yet, here we are in 2015, and Sam Esmail has imagined the end of capitalism. Something no one thought possible in a popular medium, let alone a television program on a third rate basic cable channel like USA.    Okay, well there’s always Season 2 and maybe capitalism will make a triumphant return.  After all, the markets always bounce back even if they take less and less people with them each go-around, but something about the fSociety hack feels bigger, just as the naked exposure of self-serving bailouts did when the subprime housing market began to tank.

Even if there is potential danger in the storytelling to come, for now let’s just bask in the fact that Mr. Robot has become something special, something unique in the landscape of the popular imagination that could have Blade Runner-esque ripples.  It remained a zeitgeist show par excellence, but perhaps not because of some esoteric soothsayer intuition about the horoscope of the world.  Mr. Robot instead knew how to read the culture because it familiarized itself with its core- not the tired old Oedipal issues or dry intonations on male impotence, nor mere grief on consumer alienation or human empathy impeded by cartoonish powerlust and greed.  Mr. Robot focused its jaws attentively on the long con of accepted logic, so much so that it made status quo into a foreign culture.  It did so through a character who felt the regular pull of normal society, but never felt comfortable walking among it.  Elliot feels deeply the loneliness of living outside; counter to culture but counterculture less of a hip alternative to the gray flannel squares than a forbidding gambit of departure from any sense of community.  A heresy that spells excommunication from the state religion.  “I hate Facebook”, Elliot says at one point.   Elliot also winds up becoming so fractured by this dissent that it’s clear that he doesn’t even fully understand the folds, but he still maintains his disgust. His wide-eyed negativity is unwavering. Elliot doesn’t reject society, he wants to f society- fix it or fuck it up, the jury’s still out. 

Esmail has created a space in the popular culture where we are able to visualize not the apocalypse, the end of all civilization, but instead the end of that thing which uncivilizes us.  It was the next logical step after Marvel films banalized us to the notion of, as John Lydon and Afrika Bambaata cheer over the opening credits of Mr. Robot’s ace season finale, “world destruction”.  Apocalypse has now become fodder, backdrop for motion picture magic shows or TV melodrama.  In an attempt to depoliticize/delibidinize dystopia and apocalypse, the big and small screens have made large scale destruction an empty metaphor, backdrop to what happens while our most rotten mythologies linger on.  It trains us to expect the shock doctrine, the cold realism of 20 plus dead schoolchildren and no meaningful change, as shock dogma- a culture willing to let civilians be slaughtered on camera so long as the people most upset about this are not rude in their attempts to rectify this social injustice. 

In fact, you could call Mr. Robot the first truly “post-apocalyptic” work of popular art in that it’s the first narrative that forgoes the trend in apocalypticism to witness the end of capitalist civilization as not the end of the world but potentially the start of something new.  It’s clear in the season finale that the plates have shifted and then the transition will not be smooth, but it’s also not the end of everything

One can’t help but think of 2008 as Elliot watches actual world leaders on the screen scrambling to find a way to wrap their heads around the (fictional and highly unlikely but still delightful proposition of the) erasure of personal debt, debt being one of the key stakeholders in the delicate domino game of world economics.  There are so many finely stacked pieces holding the power structure together by threads that the loss of any given one- say, China’s gigantic bubble, the automobile industry, the ownership class’s investment in the perpetual lag of wealth generation by the bottom caste- and the bottom will inevitably fall through.   Esmail chooses hackers as one of the potential cracks in the police state built around this fragile edifice, but he’s also aware of how their righteousness is its own private tyranny, power bestowed upon itself like a CTO mad with power.

This is why Tyrell (speaking of Blade Runner) makes the perfect bedfellow to Elliot.  In look, demeanor, and even gaze, Tyrell Wellick is Patrick Bateman, representative of the completely sociopathic aspect of capital, the one that will sell you Bumfights, that will murder, that will peep on you while you’re sitting on the toilet.  His disappearance is sort of a McGuffin, but it’s posed as the central mystery of the season finale.  By going through with the hack, did Elliot delete him, make him and his altarboy devotion to personal individualized power completely unnecessary?  

One of the show’s shortsights is its portrayal of its elite, rich characters as callous and uncaring, each one way more Rand than Jobs, more RAND than TED.  In actuality, most executives may care deeply, but be powerless to do much.  They may do little, but insist that this small part is the best one can hope for in the public’s interest.  They may care less, but work tirelessly to project a persona of caring that they believe to be infectious.  Many think that the plebes themselves are plenty dignified, and have even convinced themselves that they’re doing good by them rather than perpetuating their struggles through the tiny ill-fitting life jackets they throw them- paid sick days, better-than-average healthcare, childcare discounts.  It wasn’t long ago that Netflix announced that they were heroically offering all their employees unlimited paid parental leave before it quickly leaked that this would only apply to their salaried (white collar) staff and they were proactively taking steps to ensure that their hourly employees wouldn’t qualify. 

Tyrell is like a parody of that popular Boss Tweed/Mr. Burns villain seen in far too many films and shows in that he’s comically bad at his ascent to power.    Every one of his schemes backfires because he buys into the self-determination ethos, that Stephen Covey/Sun Tzu axis.   When he does get to the gladhanding and networking dinners that actually do promote professional advancement, he’s impatient and skips past pleasantries to immediately announce his self-interest.  Tyrell is incapable of seeing the banality of evil and instead yearns for the excitement and titillation of those Wolf of Wall Street style narratives. 

The disappearance of Tyrell is the anarchist’s dilemma.   “Where is Tyrell” is really a question of “what happen to centralized power when one of its legs is kicked out”?  Where did it go, that evil that men struggle to do but must do?  That aching justification for a circle back to normalcy.  Remember, Tyrell was starting a family.  He had plans for the future.  He wanted to create something new too.  His displacement means that there is a void, a power gap.  How does that power get distributed in a way that it avoids re-arming those who’d wish to re-simulate recently dispossessed realities in new forms?  Elliot’s just a kid, just a tech, not even in his right mind.  He dreams of destruction, but it’s unclear if he has any thoughts towards reconstruction or if he just wants to enjoy the schadenfreude of the “beautiful carnage we’ve created”.

Unlike Tyrell, Elliot at least realizes that in a rigged system, you need to control perceptions of your intentions. Sometimes you even need to hide them from yourself.  On Andy Greenwald’s podcast at Grantland, Esmail emphasized that one of the things the first person narration is supposed to make the audience wonder is “Is Elliot really talking to us”?  Elliot’s imaginary friend that talks to in the voiceover is the divide between the fictional world where the end of capitalism really is happening and the other side of the screen where we pretend it’s not and scramble to restore order from the latest round of self-destructive, species-threatening limitations we impose on ourselves to minorly enhance the wealth of the super-privileged.    The show challenges its audience to actually think of it as more than breezy summer reading, a collection of cool references to Banksy (the graffiti outside the parking lot where Tyrell’s abandoned car lays), Clockwork Orange (the carnival-esque moog that plays as Elliot wanders into Evil Corp’s offices), and Under the Skin (the Mica Levin-like music that plays as Elliot and Tyrell’s wife Joanna have one of the strangest interactions ever caught on television).   Mr. Robot announces “Yes, I am a polemic” with no apologies and dares you to accept it.  Yet critics, chickenshit as they are, are actively trying to bury the message, perhaps out of fear that USA might pull the plug if it realizes it accidentally created a hit show whose core message is 95 Theses nailed against the door of every Chamber of Commerce across the country the station is named after. 

Mr. Robot makes no attempts to mask its hideous intentions either.  The season finale is peppered with allusions to the Titanic to highlight the inevitability of collapse.  Gideon mentions that keeping Allsafe afloat is akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, but then faces the music himself when he decides to fold the company.  Speaking of music, a character only known as Whiterose who seems to have some connection to both the Chinese government and the cyberterrorist group the Dark Army hosts an Evil Corp executive at a lavish party where he proclaims his love of harp music, which he claims Nero listened to as Rome burned.  The song playing though is actually “Nearer My God, to Thee”, a song infamously played by the orchestra as the Titanic sank.  A religious hymn about Jacob’s ladder, it actually has a larger history than just that though. 

The song has a tradition of being played at funerals for important figureheads.  Notably, in 1980 after the launch of CNN, the first 24-hour News Network, Ted Turner proclaimed to the Los Angeles Times that “‘Barring  satellite problems, we won’t be signing off until the world ends. And we will cover it live. That will be our last event.”   In that article, Turner flippantly suggested that as the world ended they’d fade with the national anthem, but in actuality CNN did produce a video that it hid in its vaults until this year, scheduled to only be played at the end of the year.  A stoic, kind of bland video of a marching band playing “Nearer, My God to Thee”. 

Mr. Robot is not just a show of its time, as exemplified in the many ways it foretold current events, but more importantly it’s a show that is characteristically out of another time.   This is now longer the bleak fatalism/capitalist realism of The Wire, where the only guarantee is suffering and heartbreak.  We’re living in a world where Pikkety’s update on Karl Marx was a bestseller and the leaders of the left parties in both the US and the UK identify as socialists.  Black Lives Matter is helping illustrate daily how state violence is the desperate refuge of a sick, ailing society. Edward Snowden is a folk hero, even as he sits extradited as a wanted criminal.  And Mr. Robot is the breakout hit of summer. The more Kim Davises created, the more they just appear as the creaky refuse of a dying or dead world, no more alive than the thing on Donald Trump’s head.  For years, neoliberalism fed us a narrative of the end of history, no future, but suddenly there was one- even if we didn’t know what it was or what it demanded of us.   The future is uncertain at Mr. Robot’s season finale, but it has created something new for the public imagination to dream.  It has created an open space, life beyond the end of the world.








Postscript: fitting that Trump would run around campaigning to "It's the End of the World (As We Know It)" since his entire campaign is based around prolonging the fear of the future.  Let's just hope enough of us aren't having it to let his cartoonish villainy reverse the small wins that have gotten us to this point.

Starfoxx- "Hi I'm 31"

not 31 anymore but I get the sentiment

Clouds- "Eeccuuaaddoorr"

The Remissive- "Loss for Words"

forthcoming Remissive Records

Jam City- "Dream '15"

Against Trophyism

Still from Night of the Hunter

"The big grown-up world is coming up behind my children—behind James Harrison’s kids and yours, too, if you have them. To sort them: those who will prosper, or falter; those whom the barbarism we have enshrined into our way of life will reward, and those it will devour; those who will strive with their whole selves to make their way in that grown-up world and then unknowingly choose to attend the same prayer meeting as Dylann Roof and be snatched out of it in violence and fear and confusion, whether they got trophies for participating in sports or not. Along the way it will beat them up and overwhelm them and punish or exploit what is best and bravest about them; it will make them feel small and lonely and bad about themselves, each and every one, because that is what the grown-up world does to all our little kids when they grow up into it. It is cruel and arbitrary and vicious; it will tempt them to be cruel and arbitrary and vicious, too, and even if they accept those terms—even if they break their own big hearts to make their way in it, even if their fearful, bought-in father holds them down and breaks their hearts for them—it may just betray them anyway. It does not care."

"...For now, for now, for as long as I can have it, the reason to do things—to play sports, to do work, to get out of bed in the morning—is because the privilege is a fucking miracle, because it might allow my children to be children now, now, today, before the least consideration of long-term goals and competition and getting ahead may intrude upon the impulse a little kid gets to put a balloon inside his shirt and make another little kid laugh. Before the world barges in with its repulsive notions of good enough and demands to know whether these two small people have earned their place in it. "

- Albert Burneko, Fuck Winning, Deadspin 

9/11 Fanfic

"But speculative stories aren’t just about the rearrangement of historical possibilities. Often, they draw their power from combining emotions and thoughts that we’d prefer not to combine. A story like “Beyond the Flags” unsettles, and even offends, because it identifies two common and incompatible thoughts: on the one hand, we are appalled by the horror and randomness of 9/11; on the other, we enjoy thinking of wealthy bankers as callow, narcissistic jerks. These two streams of thought are never supposed to cross. We all know that, factually and morally, Matt Taibbi’s famous description of Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone—“a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”—has nothing to do with the murder of thousands of innocent people on 9/11. We watch “Margin Call” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” with one part of the mind, and “World Trade Center” and “United 93” with another. All the same, even as the possibility of that connection is denied, it’s there, hovering in the mental atmosphere. Fiction, like a thunderstorm, precipitates it

"From that perspective, speculative histories are really about us—our desires, our ideas, our intuitions, however marginal, wrong, or unrealized they may be...when we say it’s “too soon,” what we really mean is that we’re not yet ready to confront these ideas and feelings in ourselves. We already have the thoughts—they’re in there. But we’d still prefer moral clarity. We’re not ready to play."

-Joshua Rothman, The Unsettling Arrival of Speculative 9/11 Fiction, New Yorker


9/11 always seems a constant struggle against the one acceptable narrative we're supposed to have of the day.








and then there's the other, weird speculative world of 9/11 premonitions, all the ways popular culture imagined the twin towers destroyed before they actually happened.  There's dozens, maybe even hundreds of these images in comics, cartoons, action films, advertisements, et al.

Caught in the Past

David Lynch, early on, before he became TV-ready to avert attention from the film, surprisingly candid on Eraserhead soon after it was released. Interesting reaction shots from people walking out of the theater, as well as anecdotes of a few moments/details that were cut from the film.

"If you're going into the Netherworld, you don't want to go in with Chuck Heston"

The Remissive- "Both Ways"

Kit Mor(e)ga(i)n- "Memory Management- Fun with Nord Modular 1"

Kaoss Edge- "Apparitions"/ "Looking Glass"

Yesterday, I discovered this amazing one-two punch of a single on Konfrontation Record posted to Soundcloud. Today, I see that they're a major influence on Oneohtrix Point Never's new album, whose lead single I posted a few days ago.  Angular and messy, proggy and junked out.  The other single, "Looking Glass" is all cartoon threats made to sound actually threatening, like sounds coming from deep in the matrix before the McAfee sirens start ringing

New World Destruction

So it turns out that Mr. Robot's premise was ontological, after all. The notion that capitalism has so fractured our sense of reality that those left to reconstruct a new ontology have no conception of what a model of base reality could even look like.  That we will be living with its memory, its parents who persist by our side, for some time to come, and the new world will not be born in the vernix of hope and joy, but in a mix of loss, trepidation, and reluctant relief.

"But what do we do tomorrow?", one of the characters asks.

It'll be interesting to see a show about hackers, who do have some degree of investment in technology- tech made possible by capitalism, speculate on how this next phase plays out.


An excellent use of this one over the opening credits too:

If Hannibal hadn't had such mind-blowingly incredible music too this year (its best ever-which is saying a deal), Mac Quayle would definitely get the nod for the knockout television score of the year.  

Oneohtrix Point Never- "I Bite Through It"

from the upcoming Garden of Delete

Rabit- "Pandemic"

Danny Passarella and Perc- "Fast Forward"

from new album Videodrome on Perc Trax