Let me tell you
prejudice hurts especially when its associated with the music
you love and the city you were raised in.It is for this reason
UR is in this war with the programmers – those kidz were
by the sight of 20 heavily muscled brothers who yes some were
gang members some x-members and now musicians,they were in-
timidated because the programmers taught them that all Brothers
that didnt have on silver shoes and didnt smile or laugh at
bullshit jokes and small talk were probably criminals ask
Mumia,Rodney King or Malice Green who effects programming
has on people.I am a very serious brother nothing that I do
or have done with UR is funny or entertaining,I am not a clown
and I will never tap dance on cue – I have never been pimped
and neither has my company,the moves and strategies that I
use are for one thing and one thing only – and that is to guar
tee that the programmers agendas and stereo-types do not
proceed into the next century!! Because it is these same
agendas and prejudices that nearly extreminated my mothers
peoples(blackfoot indians) and forcibly inslaved my fathers
Peoples for 400 years – so believe me when I tell you UR
some DEADLY serious shit!!!! there is very little for me
to smile and be happy about with the condition my people,
my city,my EARTH – MOTHER EARTH is in.All I can hope is that
music from our label can without words or explanations
knock down all the barriers (racial,economic,religous,etc)
that the programmers have cleverly set before us in order
to keep us from understanding that catergories and definitions
separate and with separation comes exploitation and profit!
I hope you can feel what I am saying – as I stated
earlier I am not very good on the net and I tried to xplain
as efficiently as possible what me and my label stand for
so that there would be no misinterpetations or
people putting words in my mouth.I am 33 years old and fully
capable of speaking for myself but I choose to use music
because men have been talking for years but always with
FORKTONGUE music is true and ultimately much more efficient
than all writtien language to this date – tribal people
have known this for thousands of years.WE are all tribal
people but some of us have strayed away from the talk of
the drum and they talk with words and languages that mean
nothing!

THE DRUM IS ALWAYS BETTER

-Mad Mike, 1995, Somewhere in Detroit

This essay was originally in Terraforma Journal #2 (Feb. 2022)

Around 3AM on September 18, 1989, James Stinson woke up in a cold sweat, stood up, and said, “Drexciya.” Later, he said “it felt like a tidal wave rushing across my brain.” From 1989 for the next 13 years until his unfortunate transition in 2002, James Stinson and his musical partner Gerald Donald established a world-building sonic fiction all whirling around this “other place;” a non-organic lifeform realizing itself with each passing day now finding itself spoken about in academic papers, twitter threads, various art mediums, and Discogs comments sections.

Drexciya, a world given life through matrix runout etchings on vinyl records, track titles, and the occasional liner note, speaks of an underwater metropolis founded by the offspring of kidnapped African women, thrown overboard and drowned. Stinson and Donald connect the horror of the middle passage, their home of Detroit, Michigan, to a frame of thought being produced concurrently with their output known as Afrofuturism, and first decide to dive into the seas before heading up to the stars. They create a counter-history that approaches, critiques, and produces language for people stripped of their humanity for the sake of technology and its economic drivers. Born and raised in Detroit, the connection between the automation and obsolescence of a populace for Stinson and Donald was not happenstance. Being raised in the wake of the mass-scale white flight of Detroit, most Black people in the city were under-resourced, unheard, and entirely othered from the concept of the “American dream,” This extreme kind of social class is known as the Subaltern: to be so underneath the society above that you have no voice to speak with. Through the foundation of Black suffering and its linguistic byproducts like electro and techno, Drexciya acts as a pristine looking glass to examine the idea of the subaltern. In other words, if the Subaltern can’t speak, can they make enough noise to be heard? And what of that deep noise? What are we hearing from beneath the depths?

Are Drexciyans water-breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Have they been spared by God to teach us or terrorize us? Did they migrate from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi River basin and on to the Great Lakes of Michigan? Do they walk among us? Are they more advanced than us and why do they make their strange music? What is their quest? These are many of the questions that you don’t know and never will.

-The Unknown Writer, The Quest, 2001

The sort of double consciousness Drexciya worked within is emblematic of the underneath; for an entire people to be in shadow, underwater. How do we even conceive this idea as a people? These subnautical themes, presented through hi-tech means, such as the synthesizer and drum machine, harkens back to a (sub)textual effect of unspoken otherness.

“Subaltern,” Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s term, expands the paradigm of the triptych superstructure we’ve come to understand capitalism: the bourgeoisie, proletariat, and lumpenproletariat, but adds an underclass beneath all three. The subaltern acknowledges an “underpeople” so forgotten, so on the fringes of society that it’s practically impossible for them to represent themselves—sentenced to only be re-presented for various uses for the other class. As modernism came to Africans in the 1600’s during the slave trade, these people were left without a voice and stripped of any power as immoral white businessmen chose to continue towards their soon-to-arrive economic jubilee. In the field, these humans were forced into synonymization with technology; a more efficient and economical means to expand the southern American industry. Within this hell, they continued to code their voice through musical reverence to their past, call and response tunes to pass the sweltering days.

Through these field tunes, Black musics grew more branches over the years with Gospel, Blues, Jazz, R&B, Rap, and House. It was at the then-newly midwestern sprouts of Techno where Stinson and Donald decided to configure their own sonic space to tune into the forgotten voice, and place it in a fully-realized otherworld. Writer Sylvia Wynter proposed in her 1992 paper, “Rethinking Aesthetics”, that rhythm is a recoding of time. Through albums like Harnessing the Storm and the Seven Storms Series, Drexciya used the marker of the hurricane as a metronome for such a recoding. The Seven Storm Series was James Stinson’s last forecast for Drexciya; to produce seven albums in one year, each one helmed by a different moniker on a different label. These seven records were said to make up a violent storm containing a wide latitude of melodies, rhythms, and concepts. Albums in this sui- generis tropical pattern include the sultry “Lifestyles from the Laptop Café” underwritten by a Stinson handle known as The Other People’s Place; while the much more intense LAB RAT XL’s “Mice or Cyborg” suggests a harsher methodology with techno and his ideas of R.E.S.T (Research, Experimentation, Science, and Technology). Stinson’s interest in water and rhythm produced an application where the use of both can breathe life into a space, fictional or otherwise. This type of thought is reminiscent of a 1996 VirtualFutures conference interview at the University of Warwick where Philosopher Manuel de Landa speaks on how hurricanes are a non-organic form of life:

It lasts long enough for us to give it a name. It assembles itself. It’s not living in the sense that it doesn’t breathe. But to ask it to breathe would be to impose an organic constraint on it. The thing doesn’t have to breathe, it doesn’t have to have a pulse. Even then, certain winds do breathe, say the monsoon, the wind that is most prevalent on the southern coast of Asia. It is a perfectly rhythmic creature: it blows in one direction for six months of the year, blows in the other direction for another six months, and every sea-faring people in Asia that made a living from the sea had to live with the rhythm of the monsoon. The monsoon gave those cultures their rhythm…It even has the beat that we tend to associate with our hearts.

It appears de Landa and Stinson had similar thoughts on how water can be understood as a rhythmic strategy towards a clearer perspective of the many worlds around us. As a submerged state, Drexciya asks us to find the liminality in life and our surroundings culturally, geographically, and geologically. Culturally, by applying a counterhistory of the fates of African people taken from their homes and placing them not as technological agents but back into humans in the eyes of many. Geographically, by granting us the underwater perspective to examine the culture of Blackness as it migrates across the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico, through the mouth of the Mississippi up into the northern American continent to then produce a global double consciousness. And geologically by contextualizing water as a force of Black nature, allowing for growth and erosion to be observed simultaneously and without judgment. Water meant a lot to Stinson, in many of his interviews he allows for water to be a primacy in his practice as it is nothing but a material force; nothing to hint at water finding itself in a binary, or even a spectrum for that matter—a discontinuous force. Forces purely can. Forces can simultaneously express both beauty and horror —softness and abject brutality. As one wades through the waters of Drexciya’s discography, one feels this opacity of force.

At its core, techno conventions can be described with the use of synthesizers, keyboards, samplers, and drum machines, and sequences are working around a generally repetitive 4/4 beat. Many techno artists use these tools to find their own voice in the rhythms and Drexciya was no different. They found liquidity within or completely away from this quantization. Outside of often deviating from the convention 4/4 beat or 4-bar structures (making much of their music more difficult to mix with than other techno), the particular use of their synthesizers substantiates their ideas outside of words and weave them into the infrastructure of the song itself at an almost molecular level. Writer Mick Harvey examined this subtextual motif through their use of an obscure feature in 1980s Japanese synthesizers known as oscillator cross modulation (OCM). OCM is the capability for analog synths to have two voltage-controlled oscillators within one body, allowing for multiple harmonics and timbers to be filters through whichever waveforms are being decided. This technique allows for ever-shifting tonalities to happen in place of a solitary wave, something many electronic producers have been using since its introduction with Sequential Circuits’ analog synthesizer Prophet 5 in 1978, but it often came across more so as noise than anything melodic. Drexciya used this technique in the ‘90s in such a unique way that it resulted in melodic phrases carrying beneath it deeply complex neotectonic harmonic bubbling and accents, raising the tension that much more. Said tension could also be inverted to something soothing if need be.

“It’s the difference in degree. Sometimes you might be going through some rough rapids, or there’s a strong undertow or whatnot. Or, better yet, maybe it’s just still,

very calm, a very gentle flow. So, when you’re making music it all depends entirely on which water you’re in.”

-James Stinson, 1999

The obscurity of water also lends itself to both concepts and what you hear on the records. Applying a liquid Blackness into techno through both practice and message aligns with what Dr. Katherine McKittrick speaks to the codes interlaid with Black music in general: “Narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline Blackness.”

Drexciya contributes to this space of nonlinear liquidity but practices this methodology alongside a form that is almost obsessive in its rote musicality. Doing so arrives the listener to a hyperstitioned soundscape of what it must sound like to divide by zero. And with Stinson and Donald’s deep interest in the sciences, it wouldn’t be a far reach to believe they were trying to find the musical equation that would allow them to figure exactly that out. The subaltern may not speak, but underneath all that capitalist detritus lies a water-laden world connecting the ocean depths, the dance floor, the outer reaches of space by means of some Rolands, Yamahas, and an infinite interior collective knowledge wave jumping throughout the African diaspora bound to erupt any second now.

Urban Tribe, the pseudonym of Sherard Ingram, a Detroit Techno artist—released his first EP in 1996, Eastward, producing all tracks by himself. Two years later, Urban Tribe released his first full-length but decided to scale out to a global level from the viewpoint of his own kinship with Detroit. With 1998’s The Collapse of Modern Culture, Urban Tribe became a one hour-long downtempo soothsayer alongside his contemporaries Carl Craig, Moodymann, and Anthony “Shake” Shakir.

Through its textures, rhythms, samples, and track titles, Collapse illustrates the feeling of standing at the precipice of a bottomless pit before slipping in. Lo-fi sample artifacts of the then nascent 24-hour news cycle and eerie public access recordings surrounding a call to action to “breed cattle, not humans,” paint a bleak picture of the moment. Track titles like “Decades of Silicon,” “Cultural Nimrod,” and “At Peace With Concrete” make me wonder if this modern culture they spoke of centered more around compression than collapse. Indeed, what Urban Tribe pondered and feared is even more present 23 years later.

This techno-anthropological sound-study may critique the world Ingram and co. saw around them, but through working together, and texturally on the last track “Peacemakers,” they use the prior 13 detritus-as-songs as context for a better tomorrow. Urban Tribe starting as an unidentified persona to shroud Ingram, only to build a collective coat of arms for Detroit’s finest to address the now ever-present shadow of surveillance, misinformation, and technologically-induced hysteria across people, is triumph of collective intelligence and creativity. Through working together, they honed the trouble that faced and the world writ large, exposed these plights, and manifested a viewpoint of a better world before closing what was to be the only Urban Tribe record to include all four members present here.

Urban Tribe did not arrive at this fool-on-the-hill perspective alone. For decades, Detroit and the wider African diaspora worldwide have been approaching their various ends of the world. In Detroit, it was in the late ’60s. Gil Scott-Heron documented the fear of this metropolitan denouement in the song “We Almost Lost Detroit,” speaking of Detroit-Edison’s 1966 Enrico Fermi-1 partial nuclear meltdown caused by a floating shrapnel (now believed to be a beer can) blocking liquid sodium from cooling the reactor. Thankfully, it was rectified but this meltdown feeling was socially transmuted only one year later with the 1967 Detroit rebellion between black residents and the Detroit Police Department. This consecutive release of structural toxicity upon a primarily black population must have been at the forefront of Urban Tribe minds as they looked at the decay of their own world. Even looking further past 1998, The Collapse of Modern Culture feels even more pertinent in this generation where each year feeling worse than the last finally came into culmination in 2020. The never-ending dissemination of disinformation, paranoia, and excess consumerism was already spoken to with track titles such as “Transaction,” “Daytime T.V,” and “Social Theorist.”

But from the ashes comes the grassroots phoenix; Ingram and his collective that formed Urban Tribe understood at a core level that history was coming to an end with environmental crises, 24/7 news networks, right-wing grifters, and neoliberal incrementalism swallowing up a chronological view of progress. Due to the hierarchy of western capitalism and its recent collapse due in part to the pandemic, history has ended… or at least how we understand history has. After sitting with this record, I’ve come to feel that the only way off this merry-go-round is to restructure how we conceptualize history and detach that understanding from synonymizing it with progress—technological or otherwise. Looking back, returning to works such as Collapse, and listening to our elders/ancestors to find a deeper understanding behind the tools and message left for us could be our way out. Techno in particular, through its own musical language of sequencing and subtractive synthesis, suggests and incentivizes horizontality. The technology used in techno is not considered worthwhile because it is purely new but because there is a well-defined appreciation for what the object can do regardless of its novelty. Maybe we almost lost Detroit and we lost even more last year, but the end of history as we know it doesn’t mean we can’t build something better on the other side of time.

            On June 27, 2020 something inspiring happened that gave hope in a time where there is little. On a 7th generation console from 2006 on 5-year-old multiplayer server, every nuclear warhead was dismantled for PlayStation 3 in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. This was done without any given objective from the developer nor was any infrastructure put in place to do so. Subreddits were made and alliances were built, R/Philanthropy and R/MetalGearPatriots, respectively. Nuke watchers were ever present hoping to reach a virtual world free of nuclear weaponry. After the impossible was achieved they were treated with a previously known but never authentically unlocked 8 minutes cutscene around the fight against nuclear proliferation and to leave the world as we found it for our children. Although the PS3 reached nuclear peace, the other servers seem to be in a perpetual nuclear age with PC servers carrying 1193 and the PS4 showing an astonishing 2479 nuclear warheads. With both subreddits having over 5000 posts and countless discord replies, why go through all of this effort in creating sides, narratives, friends, enemy, and rallying cries? What do you do in the aftermath of a completed myth?

            Jack, the protagonist from the second game in the series, Metal Gear Solid 2, said it best, “It’s like being a nightmare you can’t wake up from”. The decay of the world seemingly reaching terminal velocity all happening behind our screens is a particular dystopia I don’t think we saw for ourselves; at least so soon. In this techno-psychedelia where certain truths only makes sense depending on what timeline you find yourself on. Mass social labor movements as you click through your stories, race wars centering around a white womans bantu knots on another, and the full transition of a site we used to find our old middle school sweethearts now a swamp of fascist leetspeak. Life can begin to feel like just another day in a war without end where to imagine a world worth fighting follows the law of diminishing returns like driving a car off the lot. The one space we first enjoyed with the bright optimistic potential of a digital utopia was co-opted as the largest vehicle of manipulation through ad-sensed misinformation. The shattered black mirror only presented another empty room to us all.

            Hideo Kojima, an artist seemingly obsessed with this technological anxiety behind and in front of us has been wandering in these Bladerunner backrooms since 1988. Games he made prior to Metal Gear Solid like Snatcher (1988) and Policenauts (1994) spoke of fears surrounding state sanctioned violence spreading past our atmosphere, but it was with Metal Gear Solid for the Playstation in 1998 that elevated his text surrounding the slow, granted stripping of agency in a world that takes the reign of our future and places it in a government funded hard-drive mount. A game about the choices of a hard-nosed veteran, Solid Snake, assigned what was to be his final mission of taking back an Alaskan nuclear warhead testing facility from a group of terrorists, Metal Gear Solid predominately carries theme centered around genetics, political/military corruption, nuclear proliferation and disarmament, cybernetic prosthetics, gene therapy and genetic engineering, child soldiers, and post-traumatic stress disorder but carries a torch in fighting to take back agency in our own lives. That our futures are not dictated by our genes but in our choices. Such comments examined at length in a video game was unheard of at the time in 1998 where the other top games at the time being Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Banjo Kazooie. Now we have Kojima’s offspring in the ways of Bioshock (2007), Spec Ops: The Line (2012), and just about any game that speaks of player agency in their own postmodern metafictional ludonarrative dissonant ways.

            A series about genes shifted to a series about memes in the follow-up to Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Without falling into the endless hypertextural rabbit hole around what the game is and what it’s about, 2001’s MGS2 is a game about the inherent failings of a sequel but it’s also siren cry around the perils of the Information Age we now face today. How the rapid flow of information rids us of any context to understand the world around us, it speaks of echo chambers on forums that carry their own truths while never being able to see other truths in other subcommunities. All this information is “junk data” but who could or should be the curators of the ideas worth passing on? They can’t all come with us and given to future generations. In 2001 (!) MGS2 believes that choice was never in our hands in the first place but in artificial intelligence. That AI term has been moved into the present day under the guise of The Algorithm. Deciding what will be show to us on our feeds. The canary in the coal mine was already dead in 2001 and we’re only coming to terms with the smell in 2020. For almost a two-decade old text, they really nailed it on the head. Honestly, I’ll let the colonel, the who’ve you follow all your order from through all games in the series, say it better than me. (Spoiler warning as this is easily THE cutscene of the entire game; if you do wish to play it then you maybe shouldn’t be reading any of this anyway?)

           first documentation of a video game blackpill?

MGS2 moves its theme from the prison of the body to prison of the mind but still believes in a fight towards living with your own agency in life. That the stories we tell ourselves, and not the ones we’re told, are ones worth fighting for. That words don’t mean so much. We should look past the words to find our own meaning in a world filled with symbols only given meaning by those before us. In all its truth telling, this game still believes in a story; it still thinks the empty room that we awaken in after the nightmare is salvageable.

            14 years later, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain shows us what it’s like to live in that empty room where all we face is our own ineptitude. MGS5is the terminal conclusion of a dream denied. A game about blind revenge and the lies we tell each other to keep that fire alive at all costs, it tells us what a nation-state does when it run out of enemies to supplant their jingoism into. When the memes we tell ourselves run their course. When the flow of information is so fast that history can’t keep us. When poor intentioned American sentiment of solidarity turns into paranoia and imperialism overseas becomes at-home authoritarianism. The two games really document to the pre and post 9/11 American objective quite clearly in my eyes: as MGS2 came out weeks after 9/11 (and had many parts of the game taken out due to taking place around New York), it heeded warning over information, unmediated spread of memetics, and hypertextual discombobulation. MGS5 looks at the carcass of a culture that once stood for something, albeit violence against others, and the endless spiral that can be strewn in every direction, including your own, when your enemy is a just another phantom.

            Culture used to be a very small thing. Whole countercultures distilled into street names, bricks thrown, and seats taken on buses. Now we don’t know how to cope with how much history happens to us every day. The names, the protests, and tragedies coming at such a rate where it’s impossible to reconcile and place within a greater context. So how do we cope? We don’t! They wash over us as we create our own slower, smaller fiction that makes more sense than reality ever could, not unlike what the colonel spoke to in games prior. MGS5 is an ode to the third act of America, where we are no longer the scrappy nation fighting from tyranny nor are we the king of the hill for the rest of the world to look up in jealousy, we’re the snake eating its own tail since we’ve run out of food to eat. How can we create meaning in the abyss?

            The players on the PlayStation 3 version of Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain created their own meaning in the abyss by creating a problem worth believing in. On R/Philanthropy (now r/metalgearantinuclear) and r/ThePatriots vicious sentiment travelled between cross posts, many would take shifts in the middle of the night to see if nuke we’re being made under the shroud of darkness. Private discord had watchdogs figuring out next steps towards how to avoid hackers and moles infiltrated into their own voice channels. The names are based off of in game organizations: The Patriots Philanthropy being Snake and his partner’s anti metal gear NGO and the Patriots, the metal gear’s equivalent of the deep state. Started in earnest back in March, reddit user u/thehunghorse created a discord server to round up anyone will to get the war count to zero for the first time ever. In an interview with arstechnica, thehunghorse admitted to the beginning issues ,”At first, nothing got done because we simply didn’t have the numbers. But slowly, our numbers grew to 60, 70… It was heartwarming to have everyone come together for this goal. Me and a few other members actually bought a PS3 copy [of Metal Gear Solid V] just to help out”. Planned coordination brought the number of warheads in the thousands in June to just 100 by July and to zero by the end of the month. After they reached the number they had been fighting for all of lockdown, Japan’s Metal Gear twitter account responded quickly but in the way they had hoped. “A nuclear abolition event has occurred in PS3 version of MGSV:TPP from July 28, Japan time, but we are currently investigating this matter.” Was posted the very next day and have yet to confirm Philanthropy’s efforts. Some people feel as if getting confirmation of nuclear abolition day will unlocked some new content in a game that is widely considered to be unfinished, but this is all hearsay and will most likely result to nothing. A discord server can dream, I suppose.

            This journey shows that when your dreams are denied you construct your own approval. And even through all this inane hardship they were still rewarded with Kojima hiding a 8 min cutscene in the game only seen once by hackers fooling servers into thinking the nuke count reached zero over two years ago. Echoing the same sentiments as MGS1 we have a role in not bettering the world but leaving it be for our children to allow them to make their own choices. MGS5 continues to show its prescience even half a decade over in other ways too. A large story beat surrounding MGS5 is the spread of a vocal cord parasite that grows only when certain languages are spoken from the host. In this case, it’s the English language, the world’s lingua franca, to liberate society from the social consciousness of how our brains are shaped by the English language. The coincidence of how predominately English speaking countries refuse to come to grips with our own reality’s global virus where the more we talk the faster this virus spreads is not lost on me through replays of this Sisyphean game about forming an enemy in an empty, endless war. These phantoms also have their own analogs in modern times. In MGS5 its “Cipher” and “Zero”, but in real life its Qanon, the Deep State, and Antifa. We must create our own myths to fight, even if nothing is really there. 

            The reason this series is in the medium of video game in the first place is due to Kojima’s ideas on player agency and how the form of video games can supplant textural narrative, elucidating the passivity of storytelling other media showcase. The character will not progress in the story unless you do, unlike a movie where the story will unfold the same way every time with or without you present. Form and Metal Gear Solid go hand in hand. These games not only speak of agency, but  alsomaterially confront what it means to control an avatar that being controlled by higher power both in game and in real life. In MGS1, the only way to beat a particular boss battle was to switch controller ports from player 1 to player 2 so he could no longer “read your thoughts.” You were expressly told in game by a character that you could only find the phone number for another character by reading the back of the game disc case. These fourth wall breaks were impressive at time but MGS2 took it a step further. Multiple times through the last act you are ordered to turn the game off. That Jack will face continuous hardship as long as we play. That we enjoy all the killing. By holding the controller, we aren’t just a part of the conflict, that we are the source of it. MGS5 provided a more subtle examination with the nuclear proliferation multiplayer component. The only way to stop this is if both side stop playing. Why are the servers still up for a lesser version of a five-year-old game on a console no one plays anymore? Why we’re subreddits and discord servers created for dismantling virtual nukes? Why does this make me happy that people fought for something? Do we enjoy all the killing, the posting, thee tweeting, the in-fighting? Maybe because even if we never arrive at an absolute reality, the joy of believing in something was worth it.

            On June 27, 2020 they’re were 0 nukes, touting a small victory in a subset of an already tiny microcommunity. By August 2, 2020, 40 nukes were back on those PS3 servers,106 at the time of me writing this. In 2021, the START treaty initially made in 1963 will expire, leaving us with nothing towards supervision against facing the second nuclear age. Nuclear proliferation as it happens on servers can now happen in real life with the US and Russia’s arsenal now left unchecked. As Putin states that he happy to extend the treaty without any precondition, the US stalls on signing the extension. The mirrors of conflict face each other in an empty room- battling for a decaying world stripped of its resources and wonder. Do we continue to stare in a never-ending brinkmanship? Do we break these mirrors, or do we walk out the room and build a better one? Whatever we do, we must something. Lest we face just another day in a war without end. 

#1

To read the accompanying essay

To purchase the accompanying shirt

This will be a general rambling in a way to produce something that merely isn’t falling into the void of “no one is bored, everything is boring” loop of social media. It carries such a numbing effect in a plethora of ways that within the absence of never being bored, we’ve “decided” to substitute that with anxiety for a future with no horizon. All of this is in tandem with the writings of Mark Fisher and his ideas of the slow cancellation of the future. Although he predominately used music and its surrounding culture as his example of how cyber-capitalism has squeezed the idea of a singular moment to align with cultural production, I think the present moment of George Floyd’s murder and its subsequent result on our timeline can be another mark on this idea of a watching any semblance of a future merely become an dated aesthetic, like 80’s day for spirit week. The “future” in so many way is behind us. We’ve been delegated to a hamster wheel of the same hot takes, death videos, responses, appeals to humanity towards a system explicitly designed to strip any idea of exactly that, calling congress people who could care less about us, urges to call police station to fire their own fellow blue bloods. I’m exhausted, enraged, and numbed out simultaneously. 

I honestly got up and decided to type this after watching the same James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Malcolm X instagram excerpts that almost begin to feel like a sociopolitical Punxsutawney Phil that communicates a summer of Black Death two weeks early ahead of time. This combined with how there’s truly nothing new or at least cogent ahead of us is most seen in these clips. Imagine those in 1968 purely referencing those that came before them 50 years ago for a moment that is intimately happening to them. I believe in ancestors like the rest of us but when I look around to a movement, or a moment or a group that we can singularly define us I find myself at a standstill, at a loss. Who will our children look to as a guidepost when their world is burning (and it will be burning, make no mistake)? This is not to place blame or the onus on us singularly as the compression, horizontalization, and blurring of any actual time markers (this becoming even more clear in the lockdown) produces such a structure where we as a people have no means to rise up. There is no culture to place in context of this pain so the only thing that makes sense to people to revert to a time of coherence. We have no choice !

How do you speak about the credit sequence of a movie? The era we find ourselves is the empty wake of when things actually happened and carried weight. America has begun to treat black people like marvel movie characters. Completely flat, static characters we either emulate or plea to exterminate. “Black girl magic” and “black boy joy” place us on pedestals where we have been yaas’d and king’d into unhumanity. Racial politics in America is so warped where those who outright call for our executioners because they don’t want to leash their pets are granted a light, euphemistic nickname. We historically police our own blackness in so many ways that we strip our own people from finding some sense of happiness in this hellscape through revoking black cards for one reason or another (this is a whole conversation that I am only willing to have over drinks). White people that have no black friends are obsessed with a people they know nothing about. Kids in the suburbs fantasizing about living in Staten Island with the Wu Tang Clan. This isn’t our fault but due to the structure of capitalism, we end up commodifying ourselves into a flattened object. One to be passed around and spread across the world through memetic virality. Nothing new of course, but we’ve reached critical mass where instead of the new hot Jazz tune, our views of our own deaths are now hitting billboard-like numbers. 

The compression of blackness on the world’s stage will almost always lead to the result we’ve see before. This is something we too are complicit in but only because we’ve been stripped of the agency to do otherwise. Late capitalism has rendered us without the toolset to produce anything accelerated as we cannot formulate our own awareness in our bouts of constant collective trauma. We have nothing but the past as there’s nothing in front of us. America in so many ways is on the locked groove of time that keeps looping. Unfortunately that needle keeps eroding this record with each revolution; each cycle eating into the material we’re tuning into. Interested when we’ll finally break the record and put something new on. Please ACT in the ways that institute REAL CHANGE in your surroundings, as small as that can look like. It’s only way we can break this incessant loop and listen to something truly new.