PC Music's Surreal Nightmarez

Less love more sex no calls just text new boy no ex more sleep less stress

Long before anyone knew about PC Music, the virtual contracts had already been signed, corporate sponsors partnered, and zillions of fans adorned in mimicry. Where did all this begin then? Duh, the internet. Where else could a group of artists transform themselves into pop stars by dint of declaration? 

Just so it's out there, I am a supporter of PC Music (though I admit that allegiance is sometimes riddled with embarrassingly existential angst).  Its impossible to say how much-needed their fresh and ingenious attitude toward pop music is. And their music, by the way, is endlessly impressive and labyrinthine and represents a pioneering feat for the electronic DJ. More importantly though, I like PC Music because they provoke more questions than they answer, not the least of which being the throbbing what does it mean?!?! upon first introduction.

So who/what/why is PC Music? Hard to say. We know they are an online record label based in London whose contributors include head honcho A.G. Cook, adorable petri-pop-star Hannah Diamond, foul-mouthed millennial GFOTY, the elusive DJ Sophie, the musicologist and “regular-guy” Danny L Harle, the energy drink cover girl from space QT, and a whole bunch of other personas who contribute electronic music. If I was asked to describe their identity as a whole I guess I would say something like: “hyper-pop consumerism via art-school nihilism with a touch of Dada-Minaj a Toi” but then I guess I would also sound like an asshole wouldn't I?

OK, if nothing else, PC Music is brilliant in meticulously maintaining the their surprisingly subtle image. 

And that’s the capital T Truth.

I’m thinking in particular of Hannah Diamond’s hat, or those GFOTY interviews.

I do, however, admit to feeling deeply unsettled if I give them too much time or attention. 

Cuz the thing is, their identity is such an unbelievable well-performed act that the only way it could be accomplished is if the players themselves embodied the characteristics their personas represent. Is authenticity just a bad joke? And who's laughing? And where does this leave "art"?

???????

………

!!!!!!!!!!!

What I am saying is: Any romantics left in the world (please stand up) will surely chew their knuckles in despair trying to understand why “Pink & Blue” is giving them the goose pimples.

……….

I don't know if I’m alone in this but watching GFOTY interviews is really scary!!! I mean holy shit WTF!!!! 

……….

Alright, the Truth is PC Music begs for reactionary commentary. It is vodka-drunk on paradoxes. They maintain an identity which is both unattainable yet unavoidable. The more you search for a meaning, the more you end up feeling like a schmuck. 

What we’re left with is the realization that this is not merely a reflection of the absurdities of corporate culture but an actual immersion into them, where any distinction between image and reality is erased. Someone like James Ferraro toes the line in this genre, but the difference lies in authorship: he gives interviews and we know its him. Just like his music and twitter presence reflects the sensations of walking into a Best Buy from a gated community in Florida or coming across a glowing ATM at night, we know why he makes his art: to reflect the surreal feeling of living a contemporary life. Plus, Ferraro’s output still belongs to the art-space culture of museums and installations. PC Music on the other hand sings from the void. They obsess over the world of consumerism until it obliterates everything else. This is way fucking post-irony. They would probably align themselves with someone like Nicki Minaj long before Ferraro’s Lo-Fi High Concept work. Yet, at the level of intentionality, there’s no question that they come from (and still remain) in Ferraro’s world of cutting-edge philosophizin' arties. Its like they’ve taken the paranoid warnings of the Situationists— that the age of “the autonomous movement of the non-living” is upon us— and worn it as an accessory, proclaiming: everything that is true is false, everything that is false is true…  nothing is real, there are only mirrors. The artist is the product. There is only one true path of the universe and it is being bushwhacked by the zeitgeist. Observation and response is our only choice. Our God is a cursory trend. No values, no politics, no allegiance except to the nihilistic world of the cultural garde…

Upload Creativity into the coin slot, into the digital chip, into the Zone… 

If this all sounds like a robotic response system, its no mistake: the very Idea is in the absence of authorship. 

Then things get even more confusing. 

A few nights ago I was cruising the web and came across a photo spread taken at a PC Music premiere-thing where their “multimedia reality network” Pop Cube was revealed. It was terrifying. To be there in person would have been like living in a Bret Easton Ellis novel. And yet of course, for the few moments I was looking at the pictures, I did want to be there, more than anything. 

I saw with comic horror that the gang had somehow actually gotten Red Bull to sponsor the entire event, which was complete with limos, red carpet photo ops, and mock-paparazzi asking members their opinions about the latest PC Music releases. I now had faces to the once-mysterious A.G. Cook, who apparently is tall and thin with big glasses and mop-ish hair. He sported a Red Bull RallyCross shirt. GFOTY wore a bikini and thong with $100 in bills taped to it and QT sang her famous song inside a giant translucent Red Bull can. She even had the QT energy drink for sale this time. The price: $20 a pop. 

I learned later that SOPHIE’s “Lemonade” was picked up by McDonalds for a commercial. There’s no doubt all his friends at the sterile Red Bull Studios congratulated him profusely for the feat: Cook shakes his hand, promising him its just the beginning; Kane West turns up his track “good price” with those words pumping throughout the studio; GFOTY starts twerking; QT puts her conference call on hold; the film crew hands out Red Bull to everyone.

So PC Music is out of the closet, so to speak. We now have faces to the once-veiled wizards. Cook and Sophie give an interview to Rolling Stone from a Williamsburg bar (ha-ha!). Their goal: to take pop music (and culture) as far as its vanities will allow. Shallow conversation about deep conversation. Deep conversation about shallow conversation. One and the same. 

Hell / Party

A world according to PC Music (and don't be naive here, they do have Global Plans) would be all skittles, candy hearts and virtual reality games. I hate skittles and never play video games.

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That night, nervous and uneasy, with PC Music on shuffle, I fell into a strange dream…. 

Here is what happened:

I am on an assignment with three English professors who live deep in the Missouri Ozarks. They are debriefing me from the back of a jeep (only I am in back; all three professors are in front, like a comic trio) meandering through forests and small towns. We come to a small village resembling a colonial recreation, except darker and completely abandoned. The three professors look back at me and tell me this village is problematic…that they haven’t quite figured it out yet…. that they haven’t been able to stop these people. Why would you want to stop these people? I ask. “Its a cult,” one says, “they’re called 918. They attract members, kill them and feed the corpses to their animals.” I look around the grim village but fail to see any trace of animal activity. 

The general mood of the Ozarks is the blues. 

Next thing I know, I’m walking out of a campsite latrine to find an old schoolmate of mine walking in. We exchange greetings. I’m elated and showing it; he’s elated and feigning it. As we walk, Jack eventually discloses to me that he’s part of the 918 cult. The way he talks about it is the way you’d suspect someone from a cult would talk. “It has made me discover who I am really am. I owe everything to 918, everything,” he says, “and because you’re not a part of it, you would never understand.” Its behavior that is completely pattern within the context of the cult, but approaches lunacy to the rest of the world, and this is of course is where we get problems. 

The feeling I remember during this conversation was of a giant void laid out between us. It was uneasy to say the least: I’m paranoid and twitching, and deep down I know everything in the world will soon get sucked up into the void, that rift, caused by the presence of this cult. The wind howls. 

Next thing I know, Jack has taken me to a party inside a huge Victorian mansion in the woods, with dark walls and big windows, chandeliers and drapes swinging in the wind. There is an excess of stair cases, but no light or electricity. 

What happens at the party: I learn that the 918 cult has a reputation of attracting wealthy membership, which is how they maintain the cost of their extravagance. From eavesdropping, I gather than many members of 918 are the same Hollywood stars you can see walk red carpets to accept awards for t.v. and movies. The only celebrity yet to publicly acknowledge his involvement, however, is Harmony Korine (and you could say he is reveling in the role) who is at the party, drunk, and boasting about the many appropriate bridges 918 burns. His eyes are pure white. There are others at the party and I’m looking at them all wondering if they know. 

Later, I’m with Jack again and everything goes to shit. I’m gripping an old book in a dark room with a huge window facing the moon. Jack has his back to me facing the wall, explaining in a calm voice all 918 has done for him, literally listing the merits of the cult one by one. I’m thinking about those three English professors. I clutch the book. Then Jack admits that 918 needs me dead. He says they have to kill me, and that I wouldn’t understand. Suddenly, the window breaks into a million pieces and everything stops. 

Next thing I know: I’m alive, walking in the woods. Somehow, I have escaped death. I spot a road on the top of the hill and aim for it. I decide to track down a car and report the cult to the authorities once and for all. But the thing about cults: once you’ve sniffed the poison, you see its trail everywhere. Suddenly I know I can’t trust anyone. My own schoolmate wants me dead. Think: What do I know about 918? That they are rich and powerful. Even Hollywood is in their pocket. Those three English professors? Why do you think they brought me down here in the first place?? Fuck! So stupid. I feel the world closing in around me but I keep walking, avoiding the roads, sticking to the shadows, eating sleeping where I can. Walking, walking. The void is everywhere. The stars look real.  

Converse Chuck II, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

In his magnum opus Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Fredric Jameson frequently laments the abject position of both the Marxist theorist and the revolutionary artist in Postmodern/Neoliberal/Globalized/Post-Fordist culture. Unlike his German progenitors (Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin, etc..) who upheld Modernist aesthetic practices as the only antidote to or way out of the all-encompassing superstructural adaptations of the culture industry, Jameson describes a period in which previously revolutionary/avant-garde gestures and styles have become assimilated into institutional practices and have thus been evacuated of any potential political valance. These styles, in turn, now constitute an aura-less archive which contemporary artists cite as debased pastiche; in other words, as Jameson famously states, "Modernist styles" (the idiosyncratic brushstroke that indexes a transcendent subject) have now become "postmodernist codes" (the decontextualized ironic deployment of previously oppositional strategies).

Since this pronouncement (which, it should be remembered, came during the rise of finance capitalism and the emergence of China as a new capitalist power), Jameson's positions, especially his critique of pastiche as a-historical and a-political, have come under fire from a myriad of critics. But however potent these critiques remain (particularly Linda Hutcheon's in The Politics of Postmodernism), Jameson's original thesis continues to inform many of the most significant voices of post-Marxism Left who have attempted to theorize the relationship between contemporary economic/social transformations and their aesthetic expressions.

Two accounts I have found particularly stimulating are Jeffrey Nealon's Post-Postmodernism (2012) and Mark Fisher's Capitalism Realism (2009). Like Jameson, Nealon and Fisher are of course interested in the same topics of assimilation, the cultures of finance capitalism, and the ideological apparatuses that foreclose even the unconscious disavowal of capitalism. What I find most interesting in their accounts, however, is their convergence on topic with which I know y'all are constantly engaged: Classic Rock.

To summarize, according to Nealon, classic rock has undergone a process of assimilation that is comparable to Modern art in Jameson's analysis, but which, according to him, evinces a much more intense, accelerated cultural transformation. Not only has Classic Rock's oppositional potential been totally neutralized, but it has now also come to stand for a right-wing/neoliberal position that would have been antithetical to its role in its original context. To quote Nealon:

"On this line of reasoning, the prescription for classic rock’s cultural longevity is then relatively easy to reconstruct: drain the leftist political stances and the druggy danger out of rock music, and conveniently forget or downplay rock’s roots in African American culture, and there you have it—not exactly the “durable Republican majority” that Karl Rove had openly dreamed about, but something parallel" (55).

"In other words, classic rock at this juncture functions in popular culture as little more than an endless incitement to become who you want to be, being your own person, not following everyone else, and all the other stuff that cultural subversives like Miss America contestants and former sports stars talk about in their Sunday prayer breakfast speeches" (55).

"Drained" of its original political context among student demonstrations, the New Left, experimental lifestyles, drug use, and sexual "freedom," classic rock has now become an expression of the fundamental tenets of finance capitalism and global consumer culture: total, deterritorialized freedom to invest and consume. The biggest irony that I notice about this transformation is that while a protest song in the 60s might have claimed its target as the oppressive social policies that facilitated America's aggressive neoliberal interventions abroad (in southeast Asia or Latin America for example), those very same songs are now being used to promote the policies that they used to condemn (think about Trump's use of "Keep on Rockin' in the Free World").

While I'm yet to finish Capitalist Realism, Fisher's argument seems intimately related to Nealon's. Like Nealon, Fisher wants to suggest that the cultural logic of late capitalism of the late 90s and 00s has not only confirmed Jameson's original thesis, but has indeed surpassed his observations. For this claim, Fisher also cites Rock music:

"What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream. No-one embodied (and struggled with) this deadlock more than Kurt Cobain and Nirvana..." (9)

While Nealon argued that Classic Rock evinced the cultural process of  assimilation-with-inversion, here Fisher claims that the culture industry now has been able to formulate and sell oppositional tactics before they even go through the process of political transformation.

But what does this all have to do with footwear? Cruising twitter last week, an ad popped up heralding the new "Chuck II" sneaker from Converse. The ad, which suggests a radical reformulation of the enduring basketball sneaker appears as the following:

Of course, it's no novel observation (more of a cliche by now actually) that Converse Chuck Taylors have long been intimately associated not with athletics, but musicians, particularly those positioning themselves against the perceived utilitarian normativity proffered by American culture at large. From Frank Zappa, to Kurt Cobain, to the Ramones, to Jim O'Rourke, the ironic (usually black) shoe has been adopted and re-contextualized, and for a long time remained a instantly-recognized sign which suggested a certain durable cultural mythology of the rock n roller. 

What is interesting about the shoe's latest iteration in the "Chuck II," however, is its apparent refutation of this whole previous mythology. While the original Chuck Taylor, its obstinate minimalism, suggested a monetary, physiological, and stylistic equivalence (solidarity?) between those who wore it, the new shoe suggest specialization, comfort, athleticism, and health, namely, many of the qualities that its previous customers would have repudiated. In light of my initial discussion of Jameson, Nealon, and Fisher, I want to claim that the newest iteration of the Chuck Taylor is a product of precisely the new attitude towards Rock mentioned by these critics. 

This conclusion seems to suggest itself from a number of angles. First, in relation to Jameson's initial logic, its clear that rather than embodying a particular aura of originality, the new Chucks offer only a virtual, mediated experience to its original historical referent. While when buying the "original" Chucks there was still a faint feeling that you were "in the shoes" of Dee Dee Ramone, that hope has now been vanquished as a "foam-padded collar," "non-slip gusseted tongue," "perforated micro suede liner," and "Nike Lunarlon sockliner" have invade and displaced the ethos of originality.

Secondly, and more importantly, this new sneaker shows a shocking avowal for the health culture that has been dominant for the past 20 years, which, as Foucault might suggest, is itself an expression of the need for the corporate state to produce disciplined, docile, and productive bodies. While the original Chucks were often cherished as literal canvases that recorded one's experiences (Miller Lite spills, cigarette ash, discarded roach bits), this sleek new thang seems to be instead suggest a gym membership and a bottle of coconut water; while the shoe used to be associated with a particular transgressive regime of substances, the Chuck II is instead suggestive of the modern clinical and pharmaceutical market, with its weight loss pills, dietary supplements, protein shakes, skin toners, hand lotions, and body sprays, all of which exist to tame and control natural bodily processes.

In closing, the question quickly arises to what alternatives are available, or whether or not thinking oppositionally is still even an option. Taking le Chuck as an example, we might ask with equal parts innocence and facetiousness, what becomes the radical footwear of choice? Doc Martens? They've been absorbed by the sororities! Chacos? Christian hippies! The suggestion that lingers in the background, although I cringe at its presence, is the norm core or accelerationist strategy of just wearing those brands (Nike being the prime example) that are most complicit with capitalism and taking some sort of ironic performative attitude towards them. The problem with this, however is the epistemological deadlock that it suggsets: are you wearing Jordans ironically or do you adopt an attitude of irony just to make wearing Jordans and participating in global capitalism palatable. Alternatively, even going barefoot, in its apparent disavowal of these trends, is itself informed by a green logic of the return to a prelapsarian symbiosis with nature. Duct tape shoes maybe? Idk, I guess we're fucked...

soda pop 101 presents You Don't Know Jack

We made it past the copyright censors!
soda pop 101 presents their first video (and first blunder) You Don't Know Jack
 Enjoy.




You Don't Know Jack from William Linhares on Vimeo.