Oh look, a new mix (of all things) by me (of all people). Do you like music from the late 70s through the early 80s? Then LISTEN TO THIS MIX, it has an hour of that sort of thing!
Featuring Split Enz, Eurythmics, The Nails, Talking Heads, Scientists, The Replacements, Sad Lovers & Giants, Iggy Pop, Public Image Limited, Simple Minds, Skids, Rheingold, and The Stranglers.
A bit of bare arse, dodgy Italian exploitation cinema, Jack Kerouac with a kitty, some typically tasteful fumetti art, and the usual whole lot more besides.
The Grateful Dead are increasingly living up to the latter half of their name, with the passing of Bob Weir. It must be said that he did pretty well out of that group considering he got kicked out of it briefly early on, though since the rest of the band played under a different name for those gigs without him that meant he still played every show the Grateful Dead ever did…
Someone on Bluesky linked to a really interesting article, came out in April last year but I didn’t see it until late December:
The new right is a great purveyor of images. Our new Secretary of Defense revels in taking off his shirt and displaying his tattooed, muscular chest. Andrew Tate is much the same, but poses with a cigar and a raw steak while he lectures millions of young men about the right way to treat a woman. Meanwhile AI or OnlyFans or Instagram delivers you an endless stream of dewy girls with flowing hair and glossy lips just barely parted at the camera.
The internet offers a psychedelic dreamscape of gender, perfected. Men with bulging pecs and gleaming biceps. Tradwives bursting out of their cottagecore dresses, slowly whipping batter and cream. You know the aesthetic I’m talking about. You see it on the news every day—or on YouTube, or Tiktok, or wherever visual content is sold. We are all drowning in it.
I call it reactionary camp. Fox News Face, the pancake makeup and bleach-blond hair that every female Fox News anchor is required to adopt. GearBod, the puffed-up look men get on too much synthetic testosterone, veins writhing beneath their skin like grey worms.
It’s not enough to just be a man or a woman. You have to crank the dial up till it breaks. Every stereotype must be magnified to the utmost technologically possible. And I do mean technologically. I’m just saying what everyone knows. “Hard work and good eating” will only get you so far. And you’ll watch guys who took the “hard work and good eating and mail-order meds” option rocket past you.
It goes on in that sort of vein about how this sort of “reactionary camp” (great term for it) requires taking masculinity and femininity to a sort of excessive extreme, and I meant to post about this about a week ago, but I’m so glad I didn’t cos I think we just got the greatest example of it—assuming that it’s serious—in the form of the photo at the top.
Now, “Man Cereal” is an actual thing, in that there’s a website and an Instagram for it; the extent to which it may or may not be some sort of joke is something I don’t know, but the website indicates that they are serious but also self-aware and there’s quite some degree of irony involved… the question then becomes: how seriously do The Manly Men of the right take this “man product”? Do they get the apparent joke? And how much of a joke is it, really? The person who posted the picture also posted this grab from the website…
…and, well, those are some pink balls. I don’t know what to make of it all, though I can’t say I don’t find the whole thing greatly amusing…
I’d only just bought Blackstar that afternoon. Didn’t even have time to listen to it before the news broke (indeed, my first hearing of the album would be on Double J that evening when they played the whole thing). Dave’s timing was impeccable. In memoriam ten years later, duke.
From the Graun’s Trump news highlights; apparently this is what he said in an interview with the NYT. Mushroom Cock HAS no morality, of course, and increasingly neither does his regime; as we’ve seen in the last couple of days, being an American citizen and white person will not protect you from ICE. We need to start regarding the US not only as a bad thing but an active enemy to the rest of the world; if no morality constrains how it deal with its enemies, no morality similarly constrains it from dealing with its friends the same way.
This selection of images contains a bit of nudity, plus Bowie and Iggy in Red Square, a timely bit of political commentary… and… cannibalism and… zombie molestation?
Happy slightly belated 50th anniversary to Punk magazine, which apparently first burst onto the world on January 2nd 1976. The term “punk” had been circulating for a few years but mostly in relation to 60s garage rock; I gather Punk was a big player in drawing attention to a certain contemporary scene in New York (and other US cities and, lest we forget, Australia) that had been percolating around that time and the term “punk” being used to describe that new music. Plus it wound up originating thousands of print followers of its own. I wonder if messrs Holmstrom and McNeil ever thought that music would become a kind of “classic rock” in the way that certain strains of 60s and earlier 70s rock became thus enshrined during the 80s, though…
You must be logged in to post a comment.