"For a man who lies like a rabid dog drools poison, Donald Trump has hit on the one topic on which he remains broadly convincing: his opinions about women. Namely, that he believes they should be beautiful, obedient, and definitely not president..."
"Secretary Clinton has been preparing for this job for several decades, has worked her way up through decades of public excoriation and relentless misogynist attack, of having to be more competent than every man around her. Trump has been preparing for, generously, two years, because he thinks that being a rich, powerful white man entitles him to anything he wants, including the presidency. This entitlement is the basis of his campaign. Clinton’s job in these debates is to remain competent, calm and collected for 90 minutes, to appeal both to the sceptical left and the centre-right, to balance firm policymaking with the levity and humour she’s never been permitted in half a century of political work, to look both perfect and competent in a culture that still has no script for a female in such a powerful position, to argue down a freewheeling bully who has captured the febrile heart of the nation, remembering all the while that a single mistake, a single cough or hair out of place could cost her, and the country, everything. Trump’s job was not to shit himself on stage. And that was it. That is how patriarchy works. But maybe not forever..."
"I want to see her win. I want to see her explode Trump's pride as one might pop a suppurating pustule on the face of American culture. This is no longer about whether Hillary is the hero America needs. She’s flawed, and she’s female, and that’s fine by me...
"Clinton is a hawk with her beak deep in the Washington machine and talons aimed for the eyes of her enemies and I want her to be president. I want her and all the terrifying young women standing behind her in power so I can fight them on a battleground that isn't already ankle-deep in crypto-fascist gore..."
"A general election is about nothing more or less than choosing your enemy. Any government leader must be considered an enemy to those who believe in radical change. Hillary Clinton is not yet that enemy but by damn. I hope she gets to be. Hillary Clinton is the sort of enemy I’ve been dreaming of over ten years of political work. She’s the kind of enemy you can respect. I look forward to fighting her on her commitment to climate protection, on workers' rights, on welfare, on foreign policy. Bring that shit on. That's the sort of fight I relish. I want to argue over how the state can best serve the interests of women and minorities, not whether it should. That's the sort of fight that makes me better. Four more years of fighting Donald Trump and his foaming acolytes would demean everyone involved."
Bernie Sanders was that bold experimental album that could have changed music forever until the record company got involved and tried prevent it from ever getting made, afraid it would either not move enough units to produce a profit or be such a roaring success that they'd have to re-train their boring, staid A&R men to suit a new business model. Maybe one day it'll be released posthumously or a few years down the road.Like The Velvet Underground & Nico, everyone who buys a copy will put out their own ground-shaking album.
Hillary Clinton is solid pop, fairly risk averse, you wish they'd stop making this stuff, but it's not her fault and you can tell she really loves exactly this type of careerist solo work. Also, she has a fairly solid discography that people shit all over (sometimes for good reasons), but really deserves a reassessment. There's some really terrible ballads and some horrible collaborations with the industry's biggest monsters (Dr. Luke and R.Kelly both on that same Iraq War track!), but it's fine. You wouldn't turn it off it was on at someone else's house, but you'd never actively put it on yourself.
Donald Trump is the rich actor who spent his entire career doing something else and now decided he wants to give music a try. He has no musical skill, nor talent, nor appreciation of the aesthetic nuances and subtleties of the artform, but who puts out an album he says is going to change everything and put music back to the way it's supposed to be. In actuality, it's just a shitty jumble of half-forgotten covers of problematic acts and half-plagiarism of bands whose time has come and gone. The lyrics are just narcissistic boasts and incendiary put-downs of other, more talented and creative musicians. Even given its retro-reactionary swing toward music's worst tendencies, it's even worse than a retread because it's hackneyed and amateur, but in a bombastic and overproduced way rather than being charming and DIY. His album rejects all the outside genre innovations of the past 30-40 years and it definitely has no soul or grit about it. Even Clear Channel and Live Nation are struggling to justify its existence. Also, dude is touring with Skrewdriver.
In addition, this is a world where we only put out 2 albums every four years and a woman has never had a #1 or even recorded an album.
[Break up the sentences above and add wacky GIFs that undermine the severity of the situation. Buzzfeed pay me $50. Share with 20 friends. Run again in 4 years if world not reduced to simmering rubble. ]
For some reason, I remember the above scene lasting a lot longer, like the entire glorious 7 minutes of "Groove Line", which might be the best fucking disco song of all time.
Although this is a pretty good contender for top ten
Could have been an Off the Wall b-side
Golden funky synth-bass
The little staccato Casiotone line in this is unfuckwithable
Emminently pretty minimalist ambience of digital synth music distilled to single strands, double helix arpeggios as prototype for the techno soundboard, encompassing Russian and Eastern europe folk, calliope, and circuit-board-building pioneers of mid 20th century academic electro.
Michelle and Barack's first date was to go see this movie
The most shocking/unlikely thing about the above clip- the partner cop saying "hey, that's enough" instead of "everything you are doing is entirely appropriate. He represents a threat".
Radio Raheem will never die, as long as Eric Garner's killers continue to go free, and the cheerleaders for his death continue to plague and harass Ramsey Orta, and his daughter is railroaded by ABC during their town hall, and a major presidential nominee runs an openly racist and fascistic campaign based on a Dirty Harry-esque "return to law and order".
Kashif's hotspot was during the early 80s when he took synths and made them sound "sophisticated". Schmeared at the Venn center of jazz-funk, quiet storm, pop, electro, and flat-out muzak, Kashif became a fossil. Only recently in the wreckage of vaporwave has his sound started to become reassessible. In fact, his debut LP in 1983 is quite good. The best track, below, almost sounds like it could be a collaboration between Visionist and Prins Thomas or something:
Dude could even make Kenny G sound dope. If you took the Saxophone off of G's G-Force Album, it might be some slept-on almost-ran halfway...ok, well it'd still be okay. In fact, much of Kashif's output is just okay, but listen to "The Mood" again. He coulda done some out there stuff if he just had some Arthur Russell style muse to break him outta pop.
late on this because of life things happening, but RIP Gene
WWWings’s music on the surface seems to tag itself to the nu-grime/experimental dancefloor scene associated with labels like Purple Tape Pedigree, HER, Crazylegs, and Gobstopper. Akin to those peers, WWWings ensnares the violence of power electronic into short staccato bursts and maneuvers the menacing dread of trap music into a neverending transition of varied contortions. To call it dehumanized is to exactly get to the point of it, but to call it inorganic would miss the raw, animalistic ways in which it grazes and attacks. Just as likeminded composers too artsy for the clubs like Arca, Amnesia Scanner, Chino Amobi, and Oneohtrix Point Never piecemeal a distantiated sense of culture from spectacle film trailers, video game segues, and obscure CD-ROM demos, WWWings at their best sounds like a sentient CPU struggling to be, ripping out orifices and snapping on limbs wherever it can.
Was thinking about Adam Harper's piece at 3hd Festival on Beethoven's Ode to Joy and its many uses, including as anthem to the EU and as a kind of metatext to Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, a strange sort of ceremonial changing of the robes to go along with Brexitism/Trumpism as frightful new world order:
The dystopian future that the world has been dreaming of for decades is on the horizon, is already here; the thunderstorm is very loud and very close. The question is: is it exciting? Or is it too close and dangerous? Another way to put this: is it for art and music to play with? Underground music has been sarcastically adopting the warped subjectivity of the dystopian, anti-human citizen for a while now, in lots of different ways. And it's nothing new: UK punk rock did this archetypically when its awful patriotism exploded into the summer of 1976. But the excitement of sarcasm is a consequence of the privilege of safety, the way that experiencing a thunderstorm indoors generates a thrill as long as you're safe from harm. But more and more people are in harm's way. Some — minorities of many kinds — have always been in harm's way, have never lived through anything but the storm.Is sarcastically reproducing the dystopian thrill of the storm just too close to — or ultimately just as good as — voting for it (by 'mistake' or otherwise)?
The name for this I and others have used a lot recently has sometimes been 'accelerationism.' British left-wing figurehead Owen Jones recently used the word on Facebook to describe people who would vote for Trump if they couldn't get Bernie, to make things better by knowingly making things worse. There probably aren't that many people of colour in the US who would do the same.
Who needs dehumanising machine music when you have Trump, when you have the rise of hatred the world over?
It doesn't seem quite as cool as it did a few years ago, does it? Although in the bigger picture my own particular breaking point is basically arbitrary, for me it was the week of the shooting in Orlando and the murder of British MP and Remain campaigner Jo Cox by a man who shouted 'Britain First' as he killed her. My increasingly distanced interest in dystopian art and dystopian clubbing turned into something like outright sickness. Other people got to that point long before me (or were always there), and other people have still to get to that point.And yet the future cannot be avoided. Musically or otherwise, we are being constantly dragged into it with kicks and screams.
I'm a bit disappointed in this stance, saying that dystopian, dehumanized music can't exist under the terms of the current environment. Harper hits hard at privilege as the source of virtual culture's fascination with empire, but it's exactly from a place a privilege that one can set the terms for this only now not being okay now that the pitchforks have united in ways that threaten neoliberal stability. The working class, black culture, queer culture, et al. have lived under the auspices of open oppression for some time and the rise of their jailers and persecutors comes as now surprise to them.
WWWings, cast across the pall of the Russian empire, living within the criminal state and choosing to make dystopian music that reflects it nonetheless is aware of the stakes. Ghe20gothik or NON also fit this model, fluctuating between the distinct alienations that accompany both black and queer bodies at a time when both are being fundamentally undermined by the highest levels of institutional authority.
It in fact cheapens Harper's own sharp and careful reporting on these disparate virtual scenes to dismiss them as mere sarcasm, cheap irony with nothing of substance behind it (for examples of where cold-shouldered irony truly dominated, throw a dart anywhere at 90s underground culture). Perhaps, he's digging here at vaporwave, his coinage with a inexplicably postponed expiration date, but it'd be hard to say that vaporwave "sarcastically reproduc(es) the dystopian thrill of the storm" as vaporwave is principally un-thrilling. But per dystopian club music, could Harper have possibly missed that this was largely the appeal of the music, that the storm had already arrived for many of these bodies long ago?
That's not to say that there isn't a creeping dread of the storm getting a whole lot stronger as we brave into a culture slowly acquiescing to the slick appeal of new media totalitarianism. I've always thought accelerationism was a shit sham, not worthy of the chin-scratching academic cryptography it all seemed to be encoded in, but its tied to dark, envelope-pushing music are thin at best.
I think what Harper describes here more than anything is feeling burnt out, which I can empathize with to a large degree. I'm not too big to admit that the world stage just depletes me sometimes. It becomes hard to cope with the degree to which reality seems to be fundamentally aligned against what appears to be the logical, just, and mutually beneficial progression of the future, that humanity seems so cavalier about steering itself towards mass extinction.
Maybe art that engages with this tendency has run its course because there's not much left to teach. The lessons now are simple when the fight seems centered against open hostility rather than polite neoliberal handwringing (much of which, btw, still going going on in the anti-Corbyn Labour wing and the Clinton caucus). Even if so, it's still valuable as an artifact since ours are short-order, obscure and rarely spotlighted, whereas the tentacles of actually-existing dystopia are potentially endless and brought to you with limited commercial interruptions.
I seriously hope Harper is not so burnt out though as to not approach the weird, wild realms that he wanders into because he's one of the only music journalists left out there doing real field work in the slums of Bandcamp and Soundcloud, where the real action is. For this, he is an indispensable treasure
