Ideology: Are you opting out or buying in?

Let's go ahead and reduce it to a false binary, in order to understand exactly what we're talking about here. Which is worse? To play the game and lose. Or to not play the game and lose. There is no good option. We knows the rules of the game. You choices you make about how you live/love/work need to be rooted in fear. Fear of not making enough money, of not having health care, of one day (never today, delayed gratification is rooted in this game) being able to buy a house. There's a reason this blog has SC.R.E.A.M. (Scarcity Rules Everything Around Me) as it's motto.

But what's the alternative, people ask. What else are you supposed to do? The fear of being poor is so great, a fear indoctrinated into us from birth by parents, authority figures, the entire fucking culture from top to bottom. Who is worthy v. who is not--worthy of love, respect, admiration. Which one do you want to be? Well if you want to be worthy, if you want those rewards, hell if all you want to do is survive, you need to shut your mouth and play the game. That means you measure every relationship on whether or not it can get you closer to your goal (which is the same goal as everyone else's money and/or fame and/or power). This is true of people in the culture industry, academia, country clubs, whatever. The people who can get you where you want to go have value. The people who can't are worthless, or a waste of your (limited, exhausted) emotional resources.

That's one path. The other path would mean trying not to care about any of that, and just doing what brought you joy, or freedom. It would mean learning, or creating, or working in spaces & situations that--even if they couldn't bring you 100% enjoyment all the time--could at least minimize the anxiety and dread and SC.R.E.A.M.ing in your head. You could at least find peace of mind in knowing that you weren't perpetuating a cruel and exploitative way of living. You could, to be trite, treat others the way you yourself want others to treat you.

For all its kindergarten simplicity, it's still a radical concept.

You can opt out, or you can buy in. But be careful. They both lead, more often than not, to disappointment. But they are two different types of torture. Opting out means getting your heart broken over and over again. Buying in means sentencing yourself to a life of perpetual hell.

Because the way you live your life ends up creating the lens through which you see others. In the same way that if you are liar, you'll assume that nobody can be trusted, if you are a person who sees other people as a rung upon a ladder, then you'll assume other people are as shallow and machiavellian as you are. I have to do this, you will think, because everyone else is doing this. And to not do live like this would be putting yourself at a disadvantage. And in a competitive world, you need every advantage you can get.

There is no victory. Not a final victory. Any success, by these standards, can only be temporary and fleeting. There are no triumphs, only respites.

The thing is, there's no guarantee that playing the game, that leading a ruthlessly aspirational life, inevitably leads to success. This is not a meritocracy. Not even fucking close. And the amount of money you're born into has way, way, way more to do with whether or not you will "succeed" or "fail" in this life (we're going to start putting those words in quotes, because they have been debased beyond all meaning).Do you really think hard work gets you anywhere in this country? Intelligence? Ability?

And networking is just another form of work. It's right there in the word. The idea that, in order to get ahead you need to make contacts and cultivate relationships (puke) is just  bougie, middle-class version of the "if you work hard, you'll get ahead" American dream horseshit that even the people selling it don't believe in. The US equivalent of snake oil. Work hard because I get to keep 90% of the wealth you generate would be a more honest and more accurate philosophy.

What does it mean to opt out of all that? What is the alternative? It means recognizing that dignity and self-respect also matter.  It means trying to live first and foremost as a human being sharing the planet with other humans, as opposed to seeing one's self as a commodity, or a fucking brand. It means resisting. It means being conscious of all the ways in which dominant ideologies--of neoliberalism, of capitalism, of nationalism, etc.--poison our existence. It means seeing how we suffer in our striving. It doesn't mean no one should strive, or aspire, or dream. It doesn't mean one resigns one's self to suffering. It means being aware of exactly what choices we're making, being aware of them as choices, and then choosing what we are willing, and are not willing, to do--to ourselves and to others--in the pursuit of our goals.

Opting out isn't easy. But then neither is buying in. Opting out means being aware. No rationalizations, no straw man arguments, no easy justifications. It means understanding exactly what you're doing, and accepting that your actions have consequences. It means valuing love over money, kindness over success, and revolution over perpetuating a system that is murderous & cruel.

The Number Fortys: Barry Gibb - "Shine Shine"

In The Number Fortys, we review whatever song was sitting at #40 on the Billboard charts. We began in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music, and will continue until we get bored. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either). Also, if you want to read the Number in the title as meaning "more numb," I think that's totally understandable at this point.

This installment, we present to you a song so bad you may never want to listen to music again.

I would rather listen to Shine a Light, or Shine Like it Does, or Shine On You Crazy Diamond, or Shiny Shiny by Haysi Fantayzee, The Sun Is Surely Gonna Shine, or whatever that Blossom theme song was called. I'd even listen to Collective Soul's Shine, which is only half the title that Barry's song is.

Anything but Shine Shine, from Barry Gibb's 1984 album, Now Voyager, which I'm assuming was named after a 50's movie called Now, Voyager. Barry got rid of the comma, the first of many, many lapses of judgement. Hell, even Barry thinks the album sucked.

It's something I always wanted to do, but I never quite felt confident enough to do it. The man who really made me think seriously about it was Irving Azoff, who convinced me that there was possibly a market out there for me. As unhappy about it as we were at the time, we now appreciate why it didn't do well. We worked nine months on that album. That's crazy. I think you lose energy by doing that. The message has to be that we really can't take so long making albums. 

That's one message, a kind message, a kinder message than this song deserves. Barry Gibb had done, by this point in his life, plenty of music-related things that could be considered, by some, to be good. This is not one of them.

Fun fact: I think there's some celebrity cameos going on in that video, but the only person I can definitively identify is Jameson Parker, one of the Simon brothers on hit 80's TV show Simon & Simon. It's theme song, taken as a TV theme song rather than an actual piece of music deserves a 7.

Anyway, see if you can find some more celebrities. Mr. Gibb's song is a 0.

 THE NUMBER ONE

This is probably the biggest between a #40 and a #1 that we've had so far, quality-wise. We wrote a couple weeks back about what an absolute bucket of scum Prince was as a  human, but this song is quite simply one of the most exciting pieces of music ever recorded. You have to admire the way it does everything. Spoken introduction, jet-engine guitar riff, a beat that kicks, sex, melody, a heart-stopping guitar solo, even a little bump & grind at the end. Short of the studio exploding, it's impossible to imagine Prince, or anyone, getting more excitement into a pop song. Some songs reach #1 because they're sweet, or because of their hype, or because everything else around it is so incredibly shitty. Prince reached #1 here, as he did with When Doves Cry, because he had created something so artistically and commercially perfect that I can't imagine how it could have not gone to #1.

Score: 10.

Ratka Against The Machine

When I here something like this, something that makes me sit up and go fuck yeah, I figure everyone must be talking about it. After all, most of the stuff everyone is talking about makes me sit back and go huh. The good folks (they could be bad folks, actually, I don't know them) over at Treble wrote about this new record by a Brazilian band called Ratka (link). You're a smart person. You can listen for yourself.

The review's great (the phrase "psychedelic witches" was all it took to send me scrambling to their Bandcamp). I'm not sure I get the Factory/4AD comparisons though. To me, it sounds like early Animal Collective in hell (a show I would definitely see; I'd even pay an extra $20 to do some of the torturing), everything distorted and processed through delay pedals being abused within an inch of their existence. Or maybe Laurel Halo on a Pharmakon trip? Anyway, it's white-knuckle, blasted, and beautiful.

But a quick Google search brings back next to nothing on this Brazilian band. The album is available on Iron Lung records, who obviously haven't thrown the proper amount of $$$ at the proper PR firm (this is, in our opinion, a plus). Here's a link to their site. Buy this album. Hell, go buy the label's entire fucking catalog, you RMD-collecting trust-fund son-of-a-hedge-fund-manager.

This record feels like an appropriate response to being alive in 2019. And you want to talk to me about fucking Weyes Blood, a Sarah McLachlan without the sense of melody? Get the fuck out of here. Go sell that shit somewhere else.

The Number Fortys: Sheena Easton - "Strut"

In The Number Fortys, we review whatever song was sitting at #40 on the Billboard charts. We began in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music, and will continue until we get bored. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either). Also, if you want to read the Number in the title as meaning "more numb," I think that's totally understandable at this point.

If I had been involved in making this song, the first thing I would have done is fire every one of those fucking horn players.

Strut is a song about a woman who doesn't like being sexually objectified by her partner. Sheena Easton, apparently not the deepest thinker about these kinds of things, decided to make a video for the song where she does exactly that. I guess if the words "strut" or "pout" appear in the lyrics, then Sheena, being a true literal-minded showbiz pro, is going to strut and pout when she sings those words, even in a song mocking a man who wants his partner to strut and pout. One shudders to imagine what might have happened if Sheena had ever sung a song about leaping off a bridge, or sticking her hand into a mason jar filled with ants.

For all her pro-ness though, Sheena makes a common singing mistake on the chorus. She starts out singing high when the song will require her to go higher than her voice is comfortable with. So by the time she gets to the watch me baby while I walk out the door her voice has become a barely intelligible screech. Though, to be fair, Sheena had a tendency to go into this range a lot (go check out the ascending key changes at the end of 9 to 5 (Morning Train), or Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair)--Sheena also had a thing for parentheses [so do I]. Actually, don't go check those out. They're pretty terrible. As for Strut, it has some good things going on in it (memorable hooks, feminist lyrics), but it has oh so many very bad things going on as well (rooty toot horns and slap bass, memorable hooks that maybe you don't want to remember).

Score: 3.

THE NUMBER ONE

This song is, on an objective level, smooth garbage, but I love it anyway. I'm a romantic sucker at heart, and a song where the singer insists that he's not missing the person who is obviously, desperately, missing, is a concept that totally works for me. A song about trying to convince yourself that you aren't missing the person you're missing is, for the Top 40, a poignant conceit. The conflicting internal monologue makes it a builder, as the narrator gradually realizes--hell, by the final chorus ad-libs (I. Ain't. Missing. You.) Waite and me are both virtually in tears.

Score: 7.

This Is How We Live Now #2 - Neoliberalism As a Form of Social Control

When George Monbiot makes contact, he doesn't miss. His Op-Ed in The Guardian yesterday is worth a read. Here's the link. And here's the money paragraphs, but the whole ting is worth a read.

New extremes in the surveillance and control of workers are not, of course, confined to the public sector. Amazon has patented a wristband that can track workers’ movements and detect the slightest deviation from protocol. Technologies are used to monitor peoples’ keystrokes, language, moods and tone of voice. Some companies have begun to experiment with the micro-chipping of their staff. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han points out, neoliberal work practices, epitomised by the gig economy, that reclassifies workers as independent contractors, internalise exploitation. “Everyone is a self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise.”

The freedom we were promised turns out to be freedom for capital, gained at the expense of human liberty. The system neoliberalism has created is a bureaucracy that tends towards absolutism, produced in the public services by managers mimicking corporate executives, imposing inappropriate and self-defeating efficiency measures, and in the private sector by subjection to faceless technologies that can brook no argument or complaint.

Saves me the time of saying it myself. Thanks, George. As someone who does part-time work transcribing meeting notes of financial advisors--I could be fired simply for telling you that btw--the "my stats" page on my online employee profile has enough stats to make a pro sports analyst blush. I do have the freedom to make my own hours. Walk in, log on, and start earning $$. Based on my proficiency, I can earn anywhere between $8.25 and $11.00. Usually I'm around $9.50. I only work 16-20 hrs a week, and the extra physical/mental effort it would take for me to crack $10 is more than I'm willing to do. I like that freedom. It allows me to juggle my pro writing life (there's a signed contract, w/an advance, that says I will deliver a manuscript on Nov. 1st) with my family life. The other half of my legally binding romantic partnership had a PhD. dissertation due in six weeks, and together we are raising a five year old son. I'm saying the job fits with my lifestyle right now in a way that most other jobs would not. But I have no illusions. About anything.

The Number Fortys: Elton John - "Who Wear These Shoes"

In The Number Fortys, we review whatever song was sitting at #40 on the Billboard charts. We began in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music, and will continue until we get bored. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either). Also, if you want to read the Number in the title as meaning "more numb," I think that's totally understandable at this point.

No question mark in the title, but man do I have a lot of questions. Why is there thunder at the beginning of the song? Was anyone fooled by that toupee? Given that Elton can't dance, why not get a ringer to wear the hat and shades? Did anyone notice that the last two minutes of the song are basically an extended meandering chorus? Who thought it was an idea to take the common colloquialism of walking in someone else's shoes and apply it to a break-up and try to make a whole song out of it?

I actually know the answer to the last question--long time Elton lyricist Bernie Taupin, a man with so little poetry in his soul, and so many aspirations to poetry in his writing, that Taupin is the kind of ridiculous that I can't help finding a little endearing. Who Wears These Shoes, however, contains no poetry, no aspirations. It's an extended metaphor stretched so thin, that by the end of the song I'm strongly considering whether the song is actually just about shoes. That Elton, the narrator, whoever, left their shoes behind when they moved out, and they're genuinely curious how the shoes are doing now that this same shoe-sized person is living there. They don't want the shoes back, necessarily, they just hope they're comfortable.

After a late 70s/early 80s commercial/creative lull, the by-product of exhaustion and cocaine addiction, Elton John was having a bit of a comeback around this time. The past year-plus had seen hits like I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues (it's an 8), I'm Still Standing (it was true, Elton doesn't lay down once during the video; the song's a 6); and Sad Songs (Say So Much). The last one is a 4. And if you've detected a pattern of diminishing returns, you are absolutely right. Elton would have hits through the rest of the 80s--we may or may not encounter them as we travel through the decade--but they are all uniformly horrible.

Who Wears These Shoes thinks it sounds Motown-influenced, and I suppose for the first 30 seconds or so it does an extremely 80s-fied impersonation of You Can't Hurry Love. Then the song starts, and the rhythm guitar gets subsumed by the doobie-doo lead. Goodbye Motown, hello 80's schlock. A melody, catchy or otherwise, refuses to make itself known. The song keeps going anyway. A bridge appears, no more memorable than anything. The song feels like it will go on forever. Eventually it stops, having played out all its (tired, uninspired) ideas long before it ended.

Apparently, this song went all the way to #16. I have no memory of it ever existing. This song has no reason for existing, and yeah, I get that in a cosmological sense none of us have any reason for existing, but I think of the effort that went into writing and recording this, all the people who worked on the video, and it just makes me sad. Everyone involved in this song would have been better off spending that time mediating, or jerking off into a sock.

Score: 1.

THE NUMBER ONE



Tina's third week at number one, which means we've already written about it twice. It's cool that, not only did this song reach #1, it stayed there for a while. It wasn't a fluke hit. It didn't struggle. For nearly a month, this beautiful song of wisdom and pain was the most popular song in the country.

Score: 10.

This Is How We Live Now: #1 - Dumpster Diving In Silicon Valley

Here's a link to the NY Times article. It's worth using one of your five free articles a month, or whatever it is on it, though the first three paragraphs give you the basic gist.

SAN FRANCISCO — Three blocks from Mark Zuckerberg’s $10 million Tudor home in San Francisco, Jake Orta lives in a small, single-window studio apartment filled with trash.
There’s a child’s pink bicycle helmet that Mr. Orta dug out from the garbage bin across the street from Mr. Zuckerberg’s house. And a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, a coffee machine — all in working condition — and a pile of clothes that he carried home in a Whole Foods paper bag retrieved from Mr. Zuckerberg’s bin.
A military veteran who fell into homelessness and now lives in government subsidized housing, Mr. Orta is a full-time trash picker, part of an underground economy in San Francisco of people who work the sidewalks in front of multimillion-dollar homes, rummaging for things they can sell.

And then later....

Mr. Orta says his goal is to earn around $30 to $40 a day from his discoveries, a survival income of around $300 a week.

This is definitely the best of all possible worlds, life under capitalism. You'd be a naive fool to suggest otherwise.