David DePriest

Tag: 2025

  • Wishcasting Woke 2.0

    Wishcasting Woke 2.0

    In the midst of the revanchist moment that we’re experiencing right now, many on the left have begun thinking about what the future backlash to the backlash might hold. I think this could be fun to do, so today let’s think a bit about what a left-populist backlash to the current moment might look like.

    Anatomy of “woke”

    First, I want to talk a bit about “woke” as a term and descriptor. Most folks know that the term has roots in the Black American activist tradition, where folks were instructed to stay “woke,” or awake to/aware of, prejudices present in everyday society. It had been a part of Black vernacular since at least the 1940s, growing in prominence alongside the burgeoning civil rights movement. The term never really fell out of usage from that point — Black folks continued to use it amongst ourselves to indicate our understanding and awareness of the forces against which we were beset.

    Modern usage began raising in 2014 around the time of the Ferguson uprising. As racial justice activists took to the streets declaring that Black lives matter, they also warned fellow travelers on the road towards justice to “stay woke.” This usage crested in 2020 as the murder of George Floyd brought billions of folks into the fold. It was perhaps inevitable at this point that, as white people unaware of the history of “woke” as a term began coming into the movement, that the term’s meaning would shift. It stopped being simply an act that one performed — one no longer just “stayed woke” or “got woke.” Instead, it became something that someone could be. Placidity replaced action. “Woke” was transfigured into a moral position to occupy instead of a form of vigilance to be practiced.

    Then, once the Right got its hands on it, woke became synecdoche for the broader cultural Left and its ambitions. The very presence of Black people, of queer people, or of women in any space became “wokeness.”

    This linguistic shift is depressing. It demonstrates the ways in which the Right is adept at shaping and deforming culture, all while pretending that they are not doing it. For all the ink and noise about the Left’s cultural dominance and the ways in which it is indoctrinating kids and inculcating dangerous ideas into the body politic, the astroturfed backlash to “woke” as a term and as a representation of inclusive politics shows that it’s actually the conservatives who run the dominant culture.

    But anyone who’s read Chomsky or who observed America’s media landscape post-9/11 already knew that.

    I say all this to say that I am, grudgingly at least, adopting the Right’s definition of “woke” here. When I talk about “Woke 2.0,” I’m not simply talking about a heightened social awareness of oppression. I’m talking about a societal shift towards liberal-left cultural values, a liberal-left takeover of attendant cultural and political institutions, and of a broader shift in social mores.

    If Black Lives Matter and #MeToo and internet feminism were all evidence of a shift towards Woke, then what will the future shift look like? What should it look like?

    The audacity of “woke”

    First, I think we should set out the values in which Woke 2.0 will be rooted. If Woke 1.0 was rooted in part in a broader awareness of the plight of Black Americans and of working women, then I think the next iteration will be rooted in these struggles.

    1. The struggle for Palestinian statehood and an end to Israeli apartheid
    2. An embrace of democracy not just in politics but in the workplace
    3. Trans rights and immigrant rights
    4. Anti-monopoly and a rejection of Big Tech

    I think it’s pretty clear from the past three years that the issue of Palestinian rights has taken on new salience. Israel’s genocide in Gaza has created a new generation of anti-Zionists the world over, and recognition of the Palestinian state has reached new heights. As Y.L. Al-Sheikh notes in a new piece in The Nation, “the pro-Israel consensus has evaporated among the Democratic and liberal base. Not only that—being uncritical of Israel and its regime of control over Palestinians today is becoming an impediment to Democratic politicians.”

    Zohran Mamdani’s success in the 2025 New York City mayoral race and Kamala Harris’s shock loss in the 2024 presidential election illustrate the shift on this. Mamdani, long considered a long shot, was able to win decisively without ceding much, if any, ground on his anti-Zionism. This is in spite of the fact that Jewish New Yorkers make up a huge part of the electorate. Mamdani actually is winning among Jewish New Yorkers, despite his insistence that Israel should not exist as a Jewish apartheid state. Barring an epochal upset, Mamdani is on track to win in the general election by nearly 20 points, a margin that dwarfs incumbent Eric Adams’s 2021 win.

    Kamala Harris, on the other hand, took what was a fairly durable lead (the first polls of Harris v. Trump had Harris outperforming Biden and holding a slight lead, that lead grew as excitement built for her candidacy)and turned it into a small, but meaningful loss.

    Much of this can be attributed to her staying in lockstep with unpopular incumbent Joe Biden on Gaza, a position which lost her Muslim voters in key swing states and young voters who were already disillusioned with politics as usual.

    Second, the broader embrace of democracy as a governing principle is perhaps the most obvious of these new Woke tenets. The No Kings protests, some of the largest in American history, are all centered around the idea that representative democracy is a valuable thing that should be protected and expanded. While these protests haven’t yet turned into something like a general strike, there have been whispers of one on the air for some time. Unionization drives are ripping through the tech sector as the VC-backed embrace of AI threatens once-secure positions and freezes hiring. In the world of media, the billionaire class’s embrace of the Trump regime has led many to look to unionization for independence or job security, and it has been unions like the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) that have most forcefully and successfully used the legal system to push back against Trump and his gutting of the federal government.

    As the backlash to this revanchist moment grows, I fully expect that workplace democracy will be at the center of any movement or power-building that occurs. As it should be.

    Third, I think that the Right has overplayed its hand on trans rights and an attendant backlash is brewing. In 2014, the public opinion on trans rights was pretty favorable and improving – a UCLA study from 2014 shows that while public opinions towards trans people was less favorable than it was towards gay and lesbian people, it had still improved by 40% since 2005. The Obama administration, whose civil rights record is thin but laudable, took major steps to protect trans people under Title IX.

    The conservative reaction to this since 2016 has been an onslaught of vile, untrue garbage meant to portray trans people as uniquely dangerous or deviant. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) used the burgeoning feminist wave of the 2010s as a trojan horse to launder their bigotry, seeking to drape it in the language of protecting women. This, unfortunately, worked — public opinion on trans rights backslide and now even allegedly liberals like Keir Starmer’s Labour government are taking actions against trans people.

    This might seem like good politics now. Scapegoating trans people allows weak-willed politicians a way of pretending like they are reasonable, that they are not radical, or that they are not of-a-piece with the broader Left. Some in the center-left have decided that trans rights are just too divisive, too hard to win, and that the broader Left should put them to the side in favor of more winnable issues (like killing Palestinian kids or gutting the social safety net in the name of bipartisanship).

    This is, of course, a fool’s errand. Ceding even minimal ground to the Right on this issue has only opened the door to an even larger attack on queer people writ-large. Seeing no resistance to their war on trans people, the Right now seeks to repeal marriage equality, undo conversion therapy bans, and force millions of queer people into lives of misery, shame, or hiding.

    No one in their right mind wants this. Anyone of conscience can see that the Right’s efforts to essentially genocide queer people are just part of a larger project wherein they get rid of “undesirable” people. The Right’s mission isn’t just to erase trans people, it’s to erase Black and brown people, immigrants, and any woman who dares to seek a life beyond domesticity and servitude. The queer right’s struggle is inextricably linked to the immigrant struggle and to the racial justice struggle in that the driving force behind the oppression of all of them is an attempt by those in power to wipe the land clean of all people who aren’t straight, white, Christian, neurotypical, or committed to the same dying principles that animate modern conservatism.

    If the genocide in Gaza has opened the eyes of millions to the deeply cruel and unethical ways in which America and its vassal states conduct themselves internationally, then the Trump-era shakedowns and kidnappings of immigrants and dissidents similarly serves as a wake-up call to the cruelty and inscrutability of our immigration system and our rigid caste citizenship system. And by that same token, the genocide against trans people is a vivid demonstration of the cruelty with which the Right seeks to enforce social and ideological conformity.

    Lastly, the Big Tech backlash. One of the interesting hallmarks of the 2010s was the Left’s embrace of tech utopianism. Barack Obama handing billions of dollars to Elon Musk to privatize America’s space program; the Clinton campaign’s liberal usage of social media in lieu of traditional organizing and campaigning. There was a real sense that Silicon Valley had the best interests of the world in mind and that technology was the perfect solution to any problem. This, of course, changed in 2016 when Facebook and other social media sites privileged the Trump campaign and worked with them to promote Trump and harm Clinton. As the liberal establishment soured on Big Tech, so too did the public. Social media took up more and more of people’s lives, eroding trust in institutions and creating a slew of mental health issues for its users. The COVID-19 pandemic brought this into stark relief as millions were confined to their homes with nothing but the feed to keep them connected to others.

    The Big Tech backlash also comes as many aspects of culture have been eviscerated by tech’s growing influence. Musicians, already struggling to eek out a living, have seen their livelihoods destroyed as meager streaming revenues and AI slop have reduced their checks to nothing. It doesn’t help that Spotify, the dominant music streaming app, is now actively promoting the genocide of Palestinians and the mass deportation of immigrants and dissidents. For artists, the AI bubble has resulted in their work being stolen and their opportunities drying up; for blue collar workers the world over, the looming specter of automation has hung like a sword of Damocles for at least a generation.

    In almost every area of people’s lives that tech touches, the result has been harmful. The utopian promise of connection, of movement building, of creating new knowledge, has been killed by the profit motive. It is a tale as old as capitalism.

    There is, however, hope that the tide can be turned. This hope has largely manifested in the neo-Brandeisian anti-trust movement. Led by regulators like Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, the basic argument is simple and intuitive: tech companies have become too big, and their market dominance has allowed them to enshittify. They are able to ruin lives, decimate industry, and skirt regulation because they have made themselves central to people’s lives and to industry. The solution is to break them up, to encourage competition, and to heavily regulate their markets so that no one can ever again amass the kind of power that entities like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, or Oracle have.

    There’s a certain populist appeal to this, and it has already begun gaining traction amongst liberal-Left politicians and the broader public. Even Kamala Harris, not exactly known for her concrete or daring policy stances, made anti-monopoly enforcement a cornerstone of her 2024 economic agenda.

    I want to believe that these tenets/political ideas will animate the coming backlash to the backlash. In some ways, it already is — the anti-war/pro-Palestinian movement has created a new awareness of international law that almost certainly increased the political salience of Pete Hegseth’s double-tap war crimes. The drive towards democracy at all levels — a rebuke not just of Trump’s authoritarianism but of the dominance of billionaires and capitalists in public life — has been the glue that’s held the massive No Kings protests together. The ICE raids have made major immigration reform and the abolition of ICE into core pieces of any post-Trump legislative agenda for the left, and the anti-monopoly agenda is the one resilient part of Bidenomics. This was made particularly clear by the near-universal embrace of “affordability” in the most recent elections and by New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s embrace of former FTC Chair Lina Khan, who championed the most effective federal anti-trust enforcement in a century. The pieces are all beginning to add up, and the coming future is somewhat bright.

  • I’m sick of pretending like the law is real or good

    I’m sick of pretending like the law is real or good

    Hello there.

    It’s been a hot minute since I wrote anything here. That absence wasn’t exactly intentional, and in the time since I put out the masculinity post I’ve been batting around a ton of ideas for posts here, including blogs about my recent trips to Thailand and Grenada (my savings will never recover, but who gives a fuck), posts about the new yeule, Julia Wolf, and Lorde albums, and something about being gay and doing internet crime (I was really excited to call it “Pride and Piracy” or something).

    But none of those posts materialized for two primary reasons. First, I’ve started a new job as a direct services attorney, serving mostly poor people facing eviction or subsidy termination. I’m managing a pretty big (and growing) case load and many of my clients are facing not just their particular case but also other forms of precarity. Doing right by them has meant devoting less time to hobbies and side projects.

    The second reason is a bit more pointed: none of the above post ideas seem to speak to the moment that we’re living in. It feels really weird and out-of-touch to write some academic post about Grenada’s failed socialist revolution or how various pop stars handle femininity when the U.S. government is dumping money into a homegrown Gestapo with the express purpose of disappearing dissident brown people. How can I write lovingly about an imagined past of internet freedom when the last vestiges of that past are being torched by a right-wing revanchist court?

    A sunset in St. Georges, Grenada.

    At the risk of sounding like a parody of myself, the problem is that my hauntological preoccupation with communicating with the ghosts of the past has crashed against the reality that the present and future are horrible. No level of navelgazing or historical adventurism can beat back the simple fact that the revolutions all failed and the pregnant possibility of the past ended in miscarriage. The lessons we can actually glean from the past are fairly straightforward if we’re willing to listen to them — Grenada’s March 13 Revolution succeeded in mobilizing working class discontent and Black Power sentiment, but was quashed by global capital. A tale as old as time. The present in Grenada is one of malaise, where there’s little memory of or hope for upheaval. I don’t need to write a book to tell you that, at a moment of revolutionary possibility, capital stopped pretending to be human and started killing everyone.

    Here, in the U.S., we’re “celebrating” Independence Day, which is supposed to be a love letter to our revolutionary spirit, our divinely ordained destiny, and our freedom-loving lineage. However, not since the eve of the Civil War have these ideals felt so out of touch and anachronistic. A country that is sitting on its laurels as a corrupt kleptocrat seizes god-like powers cannot lay claim to a revolutionary heritage. A country that treats its poor like grist for the mill is not God-fearing or adherent to any religious principle. And a country building concentration camps and financing a secret police cannot call itself freedom-loving.

    The recent fascist turn by the United States is not exactly surprising — Trump and Co. told us they’d do this in Project 2025 — but one of the things that’s been especially demoralizing to me is seeing in such stark relief the limits and inutility of the law. When the administration blatantly violates the Constitution, the Court will simply kneecap the courts’ ability to enforce it. When the administration defies court orders and nakedly breaks the law, the courts will slow-walk sanctions in fear of actualizing a crisis that is already here. All of this amounts to a legal system that will do anything to accommodate this dictator and his apparatchiks, even when it denigrates their power and makes a mockery of their stations.

    Contrast this with the legal system that my clients encounter every day. If a poor person misses a court date (like the administration did earlier this year), they get a default judgment and their ability to litigate their case is severely curtailed. They’re basically screwed absent dramatic measures that are largely at the discretion of a judge (judges, of course, have little sympathy for poor people. All of it is reserved for multinational corporations and fascists, apparently). The letter of the law, with its deadlines, mandates, and edicts, is very real for poor people, for marginal people of all stripes.

    It is not real for the very folks who should be most constrained by it.

    This contrast is not new — leftists and liberals have been railing against a “two-tiered system of justice” for a hot minute now. But I think the thing that is most stark to me in this moment isn’t that the law applies differently to different strata of people. It’s the fact that the law does not apply at all to some people. Trump should have been disqualified from the 2024 election and jailed for his crimes. He wasn’t, he was rendered untouchable. Diddy’s crimes were an open secret in Hollywood for decades, he should have been sent to rot under the prison. He wasn’t, and very well could face very little if no jail time. Israel has illegally committed war crimes in Syria, Gaza, and Iran on camera, the evidence unquestionable. The country should have been ostracized by the international community, its leaders dragged in front of the International Criminal Court and held to account. They haven’t been. In fact the West has rallied to Israel’s defense, using police violence to stifle any valid criticism of them. Anything they can’t beat down with a baton is castigated as antisemitism.

    In short, it is clear that the law is failing at its core purpose. It is not curtailing antisocial or criminal behavior, it is not protecting institutions, it is not protecting the innate individual rights of people. The social contract has been breached.

    For someone who has — at least for now — committed his life to practicing law out of a (misguided) belief that the law had a useful if not totalizing role to play in protecting the rights of people, particularly discrete and insular minorities, this whole thing has been radicalizing and humbling for me. As a leftist who came up in a working class, single parent family touched by America’s toxic immigration system, I have known pretty much my entire life that the law is not exactly a force for liberation. The “centrist position is to be evil.” My mother, who briefly pursued law before retreating to academia, often remarked that the bar was the “nursery of Satan.” She was right about a lot of things, but even I didn’t quite know how right she was about this.

    There’s not really much more to say. Things are bad and getting worse. People who have long suffered are being told they must suffer more so that those who are thriving can breathe even easier. There is no easy fix, no sloganeering or special election that will reverse all of this. Hell, even if there was, the very folks tasked with opposing this mess are too busy firing on their own to take the fight to the enemy. There’s precious little to get excited about or hold onto in these moments, and I don’t know that I’m equipped to offer up anything. The best we can do is keep fighting, keep hoping. We have to do our best to protect one another. And we must do so knowing that the law is not a tool we have at our disposal.

  • Literally just gushing about music I like (Feb 2024 Edition)

    Literally just gushing about music I like (Feb 2024 Edition)

    One of the things I love to do, both on this blog and in real life, is think about stuff entirely too much. I love to draw connections, analyze things through different frameworks, and play with the substance and implications of things.

    This is cool and all (sorry to anyone in my life who’s been bored or upset by me being a way about things), but sometimes it’s good to just like things. So today, in lieu of a post I was planning about sad music, empathy, and social expectation, I’m just going to gush about some music I really like. This is going to be kinda like the “What I’m Reading” post that I intended to turn into a series but never did.

    venturing, Ghostholding

    In that first post, I wrote about venturing, the alt-rock side project of independent musician/rapper/producer Jane Remover. venturing, once thought to be abandoned, now serves as the place where Jane puts their emo/alt-rock experiments while they take the main project back to its roots in internet rap/digicore. “Sister” was a potent refinement of the themes that Jane played with on Census Designated, and Ghostholding as a whole plays with a lot of the same ideas and dynamics.

    Most of these songs are about unrequited love, sex, religion, and connection. Often, the narrator in these songs is someone trying desperately to save a relationship that’s already slipping away (“Play my guitar”), the victim of an untenable situationship (“Something has to change,” “No sleep”), or the one left after a relationship’s ended (“Guesthouse”). One of Jane’s strengths as an artist (at least since Census Designated) has been their ability to write lyrics that punch you in the gut, and those kinds of lyrics are all across this record. A selection of my favorites:

    • “I’ve been feeling some pain for fun now/Didn’t even wanna let it show/I’ve been hiding all the details/Just hated feeling alone.” (“Play my guitar”)
    • “Cleveland, I cry profusely in a hotel room/And it’s been paid for two, but it’s all mine.” (“Guesthouse”)
    • “If it’s anything, then love me / Even if it’s softly, my life is a wet dream / I’m screaming, got my hands above me / You make me feel so lucky, if only that meant something.” (“Something has to change”).

    These lines are cutting and emotionally resonant. The pain of allowing oneself to suffer in an unfulfilling relationship because of fear of being alone; the disappointment when one tries to spend time with a purported lover, only to be left with the evidence of one’s effort; the jealousy that manifests when one is passed up for someone else, even after twisting oneself into impossible knots.

    Enriched by the sonic palette of Midwest emo, shoegaze, and 90’s indie rock, these are fundamentally torch songs. More than any of Remover’s prior records, the songs are conventional in their structures (there’s no 7 minute drone track like “Contingency Song” here). Despite the subject matter, this is perhaps the most accessible release Jane Remover’s made. At least until Revengeseekerz.

    This record has been ruining me emotionally for the past few weeks (dropping this on Valentines Day was a diabolical move), and I expect it will continue to do so.

    Kelela, In the Blue Light

    Kelela is, in my opinion, a near-singular artist. While it may have been easy for listeners and critics to lump her in with other Black women alt-R&B singers in the 2010s — a fact not helped by the the shared sonic palette (often provided by producers like Arca) that occurred across their records — I always felt that Kelela’s art was more tied to the lineage of Black music than the others. She may have been at the vanguard, but it was clear from the start that she had a rich appreciation for history.

    This appreciation is on display on In the Blue Light, a record that is indebted to Black jazz artists like Betty Carter, as well as to those like Joni Mitchell who spent their career embracing and engaging with Black art (albeit in complicated and oft problematic ways). Kelela covers both Carter (“30 Years”) and Mitchell (“Furry Sings the Blues”) here, and both covers speak to this purpose of honoring Black music and reckoning with the ways that it can evolve and interact with the broader pop zeitgeist.

    The “Furry” cover is particularly striking for an artist like Kelela, who has made the uplift and recognition of Black artistry core to her artistic project. “Furry” is, at core, a song about appropriation — Mitchell, as a jazz and blues dilettante, decamps to Nashville to learn from the greats, is rebuffed for her culture vulturism, and then proceeds to write a hit song about it and not pay the Black artists she’s arguably ripping off. For Kelela to cover the song (excellently) is, in some ways, the ultimate act of reclamation — a song about a white artist knowingly pilfering from Black artists is rendered out by a Black artist leaning heavily into her own rich connection to the jazz and blues lineage.

    Kelela, perched in Blue Note, is doing what Mitchell could never, even flanked by Herbie Hancock and Chaka Khan: she’s making a legitimate claim to living in the heartland of jazz.

    Putting aside the politics of the record, it’s worth noting that her original music has never sounded better. Her lyrics are peppered with detail and saturated with complicated emotions.

    In the original Take Me Apart versions of these songs, Kelela’s ear for production elevated the drama of the songs, but maybe detracted from the richness of the lyrics themselves. The high-drama of Bok Bok’s production on “Blue Light” partly overshadowed the drama of the encounter described. Kelela’s indebtedness to underground dance music could lull listeners into thinking that the lyrics (as in a lot of electronic music) were secondary to the beats.

    In the Blue Light, however, demonstrates that Kelela’s strengths have always been her acrobatic voice and her pen game. Re-interpreting songs mostly from her debut album Take Me Apart with looser, organic arrangements, she demonstrates stunning vocal ability and a true insight into the emotional core of her music. Taking songs like “Better” and “Waitin’” and turning them into soft ballads, complete with harp and heavenly harmonies, allows the song’s subject matter to soar. In “Better,” the story of a couple breaking up, trying again, and resolving to be friends is rendered in heartrending detail over a spare, melancholy arrangement. “Waitin’” swaps the original’s Janet Jackson style bounce for a tentative keys-led arrangement that conveys the song’s heady mix of anticipation and anxiety.

    After Raven, I was pretty convinced that Kelela was unlike anyone in popular music right now. But this record cements her in my mind not just as an excellent albums artist, but as someone whose voice and ear are basically unmatched. The other folks in R&B right now just don’t do it like her.

    Baths, Gut

    Recently, Ian Macartney of The Skinny wrote about how the music of Baths, one of the various projects of Will Wiesenfeld, had helped him to navigate his queerness, particularly his queer melancholy. I was so happy to read this because it expressed something that I’d felt for a long time but couldn’t quite identify.

    Songs like “Human Bog” had spoken to me; the relationship described in “Incompatible” haunted me; the anguished carnality of “No Eyes” hit me almost too hard. These thorny emotions — of guilt at being insufficiently flamboyant, of shame in being overly sexual, of resenting someone in a relationship while dragging it spitefully into the future — are all things that I at one point or another have dealt with. Hearing these emotions done up in gorgeous synth-pop has been rewarding.

    The freshly-released Gut, more than any prior Baths release, mines material from this messy mix of queer feeling. “Sea of Men,” “The Sound of A Blooming Flower,” “Homosexuals” and others explicitly explore how Wiesenfeld has been affected by his Christian upbringing, how the weight of the dogma has stunted and scarred him. “Chaos” details his feelings of inadequacy as he lives in the apps, moving from hook-up to hook-up as his friends settle down.

    I’m a cis bi man who, more often than not, passes for straight. I’ve not had to deal too much with explicit anti-gay sentiment. What I have had to deal with is skepticism from other queer people that I’m not truly like them, skepticism from lovers that I’m insufficiently committed to them (or to anyone), and that I’m not enough of anything to be worth loving. And as a lapsed Catholic, I regularly struggle with the propriety of my life and choices. In “The Sound of A Blooming Flower,” Wiesenfeld questions whether he can be loved because of the trauma of his upbringing, whether he’s beyond repair, whether he can withstand the beauty of connection. The song swells as he calls out to God, looking for answers. The album ends. There is no answer, we’re left knocking at the door of the Son of God, knowing full-well that he won’t answer.

  • It is no good bearing false witness

    It is no good bearing false witness

    I finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message recently, and one thing that stuck out to me more than anything was the profound sense of obligation that he feels towards readers, his political allies, and the ancestors. His writing is less about him having great, illuminating truths to share and more about serving as a conduit through which other currents can flow. This self-effacing role for the writer — the one left once those who really drive history have done their work — is interesting to me as someone who thinks of writing not just as a a political, social act but an artistic one.

    Coates seems to imagine the role of the writer, the artist, as someone who discovers truth and remakes myth. Someone who “walks the land” in search of answers to tough questions and shares them with a world eager to hear them and willing to change in response. The writer is a combatant at the front lines of an epochal war over meaning in the world, their role is to not only defeat harmful established myths, but to establish new ones. This is a beautiful, albeit idealistic, way to cast the artist’s role. Put this way, the role of reporter or griot or poet or rapper or songwriter is deeply important sociopolitically — clarity on what the moment means comes not through elections or movements or violence, but through the pen.

    But what happens when this fundamental relationship between artist and audience breaks down? Can an artist truly move people if the people they’re trying to reach aren’t listening?

    This question has been swirling in my mind a lot in relation to Ethel Cain’s new album/EP/project Perverts. At first billed as her sophomore album and then recursively cast as an EP, a side project, or whatever else, the record is at turns horrifying and beautiful. It’s a record not just about Cain’s stable of trusted hurts — God and religion, shame, punishment — but also about the ways in which our relationship with the world shapes us. It very well may be the best record of the year.

    A lot of ink has been spilled about Cain’s frustration with the reductive way that critics, fans treat her art. Cain wrote on her Tumblr that she was frustrated that fans seem to treat her work more as a joke or a product than as something that’s worth considering intellectually and emotionally. There’s no discourse about her work, she contends, just memes.

    Perverts has been mostly considered as a response to this concern. It is almost hilariously antagonistic to modern pop sensibility — the first couple of tracks are minimalist drones meant more to evoke dread or anxiety than sublimity, the few traditional singer-songwriter songs (“Punish,” “Vacillator,” “Amber Waves”) undercut themselves with titanic length and uncomfortable subject matter.

    But I think this reading of Perverts is too reductive. Like Coates, I think Cain sees the role of the artist as a combatant who seeks to upset the audience’s pre-established narratives about the world. It seems to me that the aim of Perverts, more than some adolescent antagonism, is to force listeners to confront the ideas that they hold about the world and themselves.

    The characters populating Perverts, rendered minimally, are exactly what’s described on the tin, and their neuroses fill the album with an odd eroticism. This isn’t shock jock horrorcore, these are lovely rendered portraits meant to demonstrate the strange and haunting similarities between the listener and the ostensibly “bad” people populating these tracks.

    Coates writes that “[a]ll our conversations of technique, of rhythm and metaphor, ultimately come down to this–to the stories we tell, to the need to haunt, which is to say to make people feel all that is now at stake.” He does this by writing explicitly political tracts that speak directly to history — the essays of The Message challenge the right-wing effort to censor anti-racist books, the near-century long ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and how his trip to Senegal reshaped his thinking on Blackness. Cain similarly does this by excavating the darkest corners of her heart, using composite characters and allegory to force discussions about our proclivities. One cannot listen to Perverts, a record filled with divine condemnation, sexual repression, and body horror, and not be haunted.

    This process, Coates notes, is difficult not only because it involves confronting the world, but also confronting oneself. It involves reckoning with the narratives that one has internalized and interrogating them. Coates does this constantly throughout The Message — he challenges his internalized anti-Blackness in Senegal, his cosmopolitanism when he decamps to South Carolina, and his tacit acceptance of Zionist lies when he visits Occupied Palestine. In each essay, he revels in his own initial ignorance, he’s almost gleeful in revealing how wrong he was.

    Cain, by contrast, seems to delight in playing the opposite role. She renders deeply unsympathetic characters in sympathetic hues, forcing the listener to sit with how much of themselves is reflected back in these portraits. Take a song like “Onanist,” which sketches out the character rejecting religious dogma in order to pursue sexual pleasure. There’s a lot here: there’s the seductive pull, the attendant shame, the climax. It’s pretty heavy. Through it’s nearly 7 minute runtime, we’re made to sit with that weight. Like Coates, Cain seems to revel in the confrontation between what we’re made to believe and what is.

    “Housofpsychoticwomn” sketches out the one-sided love that a woman has with an abusive partner (heavily implied to be God Himself). This track is wild in a lot of ways — it’s 14 minutes long of mantric repetition — but this central perversion of the traditional relationship between God and believer is so interesting. God in this song breadcrumbs our protagonist, promising again and again magnificent, fantastic love and never delivering. There’s hints of Genesis and Eden here, as well, which complicates the whole thing even further: a woman pleading with a God that’s rejected her for love. The core subversion here is a powerful idea: God as manipulator, as abusive partner. It challenges the listener to play with received ideas about the beneficence of the divine, and the overt sexuality of the dynamic calls into question the line between the sacred and the profane. All of this is couched in the language of perversion and obsession — nothing here is as it should be, nothing here is pure.

    I don’t want to draw too much blood from this stone: Coates’ book, like his previous masterwork Between the World and Me, is soulful and resonant in ways that Perverts isn’t and arguably doesn’t try to be. While both seek to dislodge socially constructed narratives and challenge their audiences, they do so for different reasons and in largely different ways. But it struck me in engaging with them both the strange affinities between them, and I felt the need to tease them out here. At core, both of them view the artist as a provocateur, someone who has a duty to challenge the audience and society at large. This duty is what the artist owes their audience, and we as an audience have a duty to engage.

  • The New End of History

    The New End of History

    One of the things that’s struck me the hardest about the new year is that nothing has seemed to change. Perhaps it’s my being naive, but there’s a part of me that still believes that the passage of time means something. I wanted to believe that the dawn of 2025 would ignite something in us, that we’d lurch forward clear-eyed and ready to do something.

    That has not been the case.

    The incoming Trump administration has not been met by a 2017-style Resistance, but by a series of prostrations, each more debasing than the last. The so-called opposition has crowed its acquiescence the loudest, with everyone from Ro Khanna to Bernie Sanders to Tom Suozzi kissing the ring.

    On the tech front, the A.I. bubble, like the crypto/NFT bubble before it, continues to grow unabated. Nevermind that A.I. has not demonstrated profitability, it has not demonstrated a valid use-case beyond bullshit content generation (already termed “slop” by actual humans and avoided like the plague). Nevermind that the resources required for it make it an environmental catastrophe. Companies continue to throw it into everything, regardless of whether anyone wants or needs it.

    On the artistic front, we continue to see heartless franchise films and soulless reboots dominate the cultural landscape at the same time as TV shows and movies that evince soul and artistry are met with crickets, crumbs, and cancellation. 2024 was the year that shows like “Our Flag Means Death” and “Scavengers Reign” were cancelled, while various permutations of the same Disney remakes and Marvel movies got billion-dollar budgets. Inventive games that received sterling reviews are apparently not enough to keep game developers on payroll. Various studios cut their best-and-brightest loose, all while executives talk up the promise of A.I. as if it can do anything to make a game good.

    It’s only been a week, and it’s enough to make you want to holler and throw up your hands.

    I recount all of this not because it is some new nadir but because it is the same old song. This has been the state of things for at least the past 10 years. The relentless march towards mediocrity, the failure to learn anything, the continued death of the future. Mark Fisher wrote extensively about this on his blog and in his published works.

    He wrote about the “slow cancellation of the future,” a phenomenon in which 21st-century culture is marked by “stasis” and “anachronism” wherein the psychological perception of progress is disrupted, and replaced by a “crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.” A cursory look at 20th century politics and culture reveals a wealth of future-facing expectations: flying cars, luxury communism, pan-Africanism, space exploration, scientific development, and more. However silly, there was genuine belief that there was something beyond the horizon of the present. There was discourse and deliberation about who would rule the future, but there was a collective belief that there was a future.

    Now, of course, there were limits to a lot of these visions. As writers like N.K. Jemisin have noted, many of these visions for what the future would be did not include Black and brown people, queer people, the disabled, etc. But for every vision of the world tainted by the bigotry of the present, there was something like Drexciya or the Arkestra or Combahee: radical, bold visions of a future not just populated with marginal people, but driven by us.

    These kinds of visions are few and far between, and largely “relian[t][…]on styles that were established long ago.” The futuristic sounds emergent in 2010s R&B have been trashed for 80s/90s revivalism and a revanchist eye towards cheap Motown imitation. The techno-utopia has become a feudalist nightmare, with the walled gardens of Meta, Apple, and Google growing taller by the day. The New Deal-era vision of social democracy that grew larger and more inclusive with each successive Democratic candidacy was first killed by Jimmy Carter, but even he can be held up as progressive in comparison to the trenchant conservatism of the Harris 2024 effort.

    This colonization and defanging of the new is part of the broader death of the future, and contributes to what Fisher, borrowing from Derrida, terms “hauntology.” Hauntology is a term meant to describe what happens when the colonization of the vanguard is successful. The victorious present, perpetually indebted to the past and devoid of new ideas, is disrupted — in fits and starts — by the echoes of the futures it has killed.

    We see this in the 90s and Y2K revivalism that’s occurring right now. People longing for something that’s new, something that evinces a future in which they can belong, are mining past sonics, aesthetics for guidance. The future that could have been had the promise of the 90s and 2000s not been killed in its crib haunts the present in the form of the garage and drum n’ bass revival, Y2K indebted fashion, the rejection of social media and of modern technology. It’s worth noting that some of this looking-back has been very harmful: instead of embracing the radical queerness and openness that defined the millennium, there’s instead been a turn towards traditional gender roles, antiquated ideas about sex and gender, and an embrace of strongman/authoritarian posturing. But even this is not new — in the same way that, post Civil Rights movement and Vietnam, the flower children cut their hair, went corporate, and turned out for Nixon, so too did the children of the 2020 uprising backslide into the comfort of Twitter gender wars and Trump.

    In some sense, this blog (both as a project and this particular post) are hauntological. The retreat into discrete internets, of blog rings and personal pages, is the ghost of the early internet lurching forward to haunt the present. Fisher’s writing, indebted heavily to Derrida and other post-modernists, haunts this post and a good chunk of my others. Alternate timelines and possible futures live on in us, even as the Real scares and confounds.

    But it’s not enough for us to dig up dead futures and wear them like thrifted jackets. Our imperative is the invention of a new future. We can, of course, look to the radical promise of the Black Panthers, to the writings of California socialists like Angela Y. Davis or Ruth Wilson Gilmore, to the cultural criticisms of Mark Fisher. But we cannot be so moored to them that we do not strike out and seek to break free of the cyclical death march of neoliberalism.

    Not to sound too Nietzschean, but it is incumbent upon us to create new ways of being, to make art that isn’t slave to the sounds and strictures of the past, to dream of new ways of governing, of living. We must discard the things that don’t serve us. It has been clear for almost a half-century that the systems of the present — of unlimited capital accumulation, of culture wars, of cis heteropatriarchy, of techno-feudalism and surveillance capitalism — do not serve us. They are killing what brings us joy, they are killing our future. But worse than that, they are killing us at a soul level.

    I can only hope that 2025 becomes the year that, instead of us, these necrotic value systems die.

  • What I’m Reading – Week of 12/2/2024

    What I’m Reading – Week of 12/2/2024

    I want to talk a bit about what I’ve been into lately. I try to engage with a diverse diet of media and so, as a way of fostering discussion and to keep myself accountable, I’m going to try and maintain a weekly series where I briefly share and talk about what I’m into.

    Feel free to reach out and share what you’re listening to, reading, watching this week.

    Listening: “Sister,” venturing

    This week was Spotify Wrapped/Apple Music Replay week, and my top artist was Jane Remover. venturing is her alt-rock side project/ARG/band. They’re gearing up to release an album in February and single “Sister” has been running my life ever since it dropped.

    I’ve loved Jane’s music for a minute now, and I’ve been fortunate to see her in concert twice (once as an opener for brakence and then on the Designated Dreams Tour, where I actually got to meet her!). Her music as venturing exists in the space between Frailty, which leaned towards emo and alt-rock but with a healthy bit of electronic flourish, and Census Designated, a more conventional shoegaze/noise rock album. The project has mostly existed in ephemera — SoundCloud posts since deleted, then reuploaded by others, user-made compilation albums of snippets — but it seems like now that Jane is again pivoting to new sounds for the main project, venturing is a good place for her rock songs. An honest-to-god venturing LP is slated for official release in February.

    “Sister,” both lyrically and sonically, feels like it could have been on Census Designated. The song details the singer’s alienation and anhedonia. She’s afraid, she feels like she’s already dead, and getting fucked up and going to the club are no solace.

    There are lyrical echoes to artists like Rickie Lee Jones and Joni Mitchell that I really love, even if unintentional, and I appreciate the emotion in Jane’s vocal performance. She’s grown markedly as a vocalist since Teen Week, and it shows here.

    Reading: “Detransition, Baby” and “Imagined Communities”

    This week, I finished one book and started another, and they couldn’t be more different. “Detransition, Baby,” the 87th best book of the 21st Century per the New York Times, is a poignant story of three people — a cis woman named Katrina, an out trans woman named Reese, and Ames, a man who detransitioned after facing violence and hardship as a woman — who become linked after Katrina falls pregnant with Ames’ child. Torrey Peters does a really great job of giving every character, especially Reese, a unique voice and viewpoint. The broader discussion of womanhood, motherhood, and identity is really well-done, and I appreciate that, at various points, Peters explicitly points out that the characters’ subject positions (these are upper-middle class white or white-passing people living in a cute, progressive enclave of New York City) are pretty limited to their experiences. The experiences of Black women, especially Black trans women, varies greatly from the experience of someone like Reese, who for all her hardship is still able to fall in with the rich wine moms and housewives.

    Despite being perhaps the most high-profile fiction book about trans people out at the moment (and certainly the only one getting feted in the New York Times), the book doesn’t seek to be the definitive treatise on tranness or motherhood or womanhood. I exists entirely on its own terms.

    After finishing “Detransition, Baby,” I picked up Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities.” This one is a bit of a long time coming for me: way back in 2017 a friend of mine recommended the book and I tried, and failed, to finish it. The prose is readable enough for a work of political science and the points are well-argued and salient. But I just couldn’t get through it.

    In light of the current fascist moment that we’re facing, I feel compelled to give it another shot. Understanding nationalism as a system produced by cultural and historical conditions will be important in understanding our politics going forward. I’ll probably write a blog post about this book and some of the ideas in it in the future.

    Watching: Video Essays about the Internet Sucking

    As I noted in the inaugural post for this blog, the internet has become claustrophobic. The walled garden social networks are cesspools, search engines are poisoned with AI slop, and everything from streaming services to job posting websites are designed to steal one’s data and exploit it for profit. Cory Doctorow’s written about the “enshittification” of the internet, but one of the issues with a novel (and kind of juvenile) term like this is that it makes this issue seem like it’s new when it is just the latest in a long line of utopian projects corrupted by capitalism.

    That’s why I appreciate these video essays by chriswaves (“The Internet Is Dying and That’s A Good Thing“) and Jessie Gender (“The Internet Was Stolen From Us“).

    “The Internet Is Dying…” makes a pretty compelling argument that the capitalist exploitation of AI has the potential to expel human control from the internet, creating a stagnant, entropic hellscape where humans only exist to passively consume and make money for the billionaires who run everything. If the internet is driven by humans producing signs that take on and shape meaning, then this expulsion would functionally strip any real semiotic value from the internet. The signs produced by the corporations and bots would lose any tether to reality.

    In “The Internet Was Stolen From Us,” Jessie Gender traces the radical history of the internet, linking the internet with the radical potential for expression and community evinced by hacker collectives, TV show fandom, and queer message boards. There was a time when the internet promised to melt away the boundaries between folks and offer an opportunity to shape one’s identity in whatever way one wanted. This promise fell away as technofeudalism took hold and everything became monetized, commodified, or radicalized. The internet, instead of a break from the horrors of the world, became a twisted mirror of it.

    Both chriswaves and Jessie Gender lament the loss of the internet’s radical, utopian past and both call for us to use creativity as a means of connection. Art is one of the best tools we have to connect and build with other people, the inherent emotive quality of good art makes it especially potent. Despite it’s best efforts, AI and corporations will never truly get this. Anything produced to satisfy a four-corners algorithm or made with advertisers sensibility in mind has a hard cap on what it can do emotionally.

    Both of these videos get at what will probably be a theme on this blog — the slow, horrible death of the internet and how the ghosts of the internet’s dead utopian moment haunt the present in weird and unsettling ways. Again, we’ll probably come back to this idea in a blog post (woo, hauntology!).

    Thanks for reading. Again, let me know what you’re engaging with or if you’ve seen/read/watched any of this stuff.