THINK! Column 2

ANON ANON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON

Yeah, no, I get it. Someone might poke fun at you. Someone might poke holes in yer not-so-tidy whities. Someone might not like you. (Or, worse yet, someone just might...)

i. LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AT THE GENOCIDE FACTORY

A fun thing every December is the big, panopticon-sanctioned recap of one's consumption habits (co-sponsored by Big P-roductivity). "Look!," it says, "I'm engaged in arts and partake in culture! AMYL & THE SNIFFERS lurked in the background of my each-and-every suicidal ideation, tilting the wheel imperceptibly just this side of zero degrees, while i yearned in private desperation for just one chance glance to toss me, end over end, one lane to the next, lest I pour one more Americano for some app-developing, balding Wicker Park fuck!" And then, with dull joy, we press play on Jan. 1 (1 Jan for those elsewheres) and the cycle continues anon.

But check it: Spotify fucking sucks. There is no debating this. Daniel Ek, like all CEOs, is an anti-art dullard, part and parcel to the ubiquitous and unyielding spread of the Tech Reich. The damage they've caused to mainstream music is likely irreparable and has been enumerated endlessly*. They've invested in war crimes and ran ICE recruitment ads. If the former transgressions were not enough, the latter should leave no wiggle room. And yet, the Big discourse (online, exclusively): self-assured -righteous & -informed (look no further than above!), all sides bleating back and forth, devolving inevitably into smarmy vagueposts underpinned by logical fallacies and loosey-goosey morals, marching ever onward, far past the last hard line, full-throated in our chants of "No ethical consumption under capitalism!" The rebuttal? Fuck off.

This phrase was never intended to mean "Do nothing." This phrase was never meant to assuage the guilt of ignoring each and every hard decision. Yes, those in power have corralled us all: Nestle poisons the water and the mothers and children who drink it, and Coke kills union organizers in South America, and Bob Iger cuts the ribbon at Disneyland Tel Aviv, but it's still your choice to buy a Night Sprite for half-price entry. No ethical consumption, but not all consumption is so hopelessly, vilely unethical.

Maybe, you're right. In fact, many of you are probably right: many of the online crusaders will abandon the current cause celebre for surer victories, like online campaigns to prevent Meta from soft-blocking activists, or begging Congressmen to limp-dickedly condemn an ongoing genocide, each surely one digital signature or two from fruition.

And yes, of course, we are confronted daily by seemingly impossible choices, exacerbated by intentionally esoteric branding and the infinite conglomeration of all things into one corporate eldritch mass, the increasingly brutality swept into banality by the 24hr news cycle. No one can have any way of knowing all things,** but many have ways of knowing some things, and those things should be acted upon. Not everything is a grey, unknowable mass.

ii. GREASE

In the caverns of my cranium, a truer meaning resonates: the walls are closing in, what will you do about it motherfucker?

iii. WELL?

I think my biggest issue with all of this is the tacit resignation to this idea that all things must be done under the auspices of some vaunted authority, that truly nothing may be accomplished without their existing infrastructure. Something as simple as a list of things you like must be collated and compiled by the same machine that put it all in front of you in the first place and this feels truly fucking insane to me.

For many, some form of primal atavism and/or monk-like asceticism are unlikely, yeah?, and in any case, this desire feels unhealthily nostalgia-brained, but it's not either/or here. The technology exists for us to connect with each other outside of the genocide factory. It's been nice to see these disparate freaks with niche interests utilize Neocities, and the proprietors of this here dirt rag have been some of the biggest champions of the Fediverse. The almighty Soulseek has never gone down, you can still interact with Old School Mike and his literal thousands of hardcore punk records, then connect an aux from your computer to a receiver and make a tape, or put all of that on your phone and forego streaming altogether.

If none of these things feel right to you, the world shakes with palpable anticipation for your solution. Better or worse is irrelevant, it simply must be done.

There's little left to say this month, my brain feels addled after all that ramblin'. My journey into the depths of Thee Canon was brief and shallow this last so long, but I did dig into one frumeach. SUBHUMANS - Demolition War 7" is the first indication that Pushead's tastes and mine will not entirely align. Some starter punk bands stand the test of time, but Dick & Co. really only have a handful of songs I enjoy ("People Are Scared", "No"), not one of which is found here.

Prank's #3, however, remains as potent today as ever. In the six-song MLP era, its almost inconceivable to think that a hardcore punk album could maintain its intensity (or that a reels-addled public could keep its focus) for longer than 20 minutes, but HIS HERO IS GONE - Fifteen Counts of Arson LP is a monstrosity that lingers beyond the length of the groove.

Flyin' down the Wire is ALBERT AYLER's Live In Greenwich Village. I highly recommend it, though not in one sitting, which makes total sense as it's a collection of two separate performances recorded at the tail end of the 60s. As experimental as the Wire's previous two entries, though no less unrelenting than HHIG, this is Jazz at it's absolute apex.

'Til next time, True Believers.

*If you've got yer output hosted on this wretched platform, congratulations! You've sold out and didn't even get fractions of a penny for your troubles. Mainstream bands such as MASSIVE ATTACK and XIU XIU have pulled their catalogs from the platform. You can still do it, too.

** All this said, no one is perfect. Deep in pandemic, naive as fuck, I flirted with the possibility that Midjourney Generative AI's four imperfect squares promised. I even found a random generation of a gang of skinheads and attached it to a flier for a show I was promoting, my name along with it. I truly didn't know where these images might be sourced from, but I paid attention to what was being said around me and have never used it since. Alas, one may only use "I'm An Idiot" as an excuse so many times.