DIY as USP:
Community as marketing speech

The 21th century sounds all too familiar. No challenge or discordance. A sonic landscape littered with rockstar dreams dressed in rebellious language. Unorthodox thinking, stopped after their first utterance. They form empty gestures on the stage of the spectacle. Because action is pointless for these degraded simulations. “Protest” music is a vapid mode. Or are you too intelligent to resist full incorporation?

Commodified Dissent as an Act of Resistance

We are haunted by older gestures of rebellion, repeated endlessly, hopelessly. But still repackaged, offered as new. Because in a world where rebellion is deemed impossible, the dream or image of rebellion is a particularly appealing one to sell or to participate in. It’s all in the affects – rage, frustration, resentment: giving a voice to disappointment. Restricted demands in antagonisms, noise-free, cleaned up, controlled.

Give the coppers a pepsi for peace...

Growing big to tell your message, means growing big is your message

That shade of lipstick trace. Joy, pleasure, preaching against any kind of negativity is embedded in middleclass’ impotence, these positive obligations speak of no truth. I do not dream of a gentle revolution. What happened to the theory of the leisure class? Freedom and pleasure will be reclaimed and quickly reincorporated in the neo-capitalist apparatus. A raising of fists is bound to become the next feel-good junk – the miserable service of dissent.

Written in the core of capitalist reality: “dream big”, this romantic hallucination corrupted the possibility for an alternative. We are supposed to dream big to tell our message, even if our message is to not become big. Building up the paradox which defeats our own speech. Undoing the faintest inkling of potency right from the start.

Aesthetics of the radical under the bright, neon lights of neo-liberalism. Selfiestick, watch where you aim.

I admit, paranoia seems more appealing to me, as a political ideology. These dark shadows and spectres could become liberated. Nothing is fixed and there are no guarantees. Anxiety, depression, as mere representations of reality, waiting to be destroyed.

The shape of punk to come, new noises 

There is an archival of noise from which a lot of contemporary artists draw their inspirations. But what kind of statement is offered when these noises are choked in their own pastiche? Institutional(ized) noise is still a form of aesthetic poverty.

Psycho, priceless, good in a crisis

Has hope for a revivified politics died in a scorched earth, in despair over paying rent and utilities? Have we gotten fooled yet again? Is there a way out? The end of the future is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

It’s on us to resist the growth strategy, dream and construct new ways, painful, dirty, covered in mud. That’s going to be pretty ugly. 

I want to thank Hidden Agenda for their initiative highlighting underground culture and offering me a space to promote Pretty Ugly. Instead of writing a promotional piece I opted for a short essay to use my voice in a different way.
I want to thank all the volunteers who have helped me out over the last couple of years. It's encouraging to know people will put in so much time, energy and love to create spaces outside of the scope of the neo-liberal hellscape. 

(I) Don't take this for granted. <3