"Irony used to feel like a defense against getting played," writes the novelist Hari Kunzru, "a way for a writer to ward off received ideas and lazy thinking." Broadly speaking, irony is the rhetorical strategy of saying one thing yet meaning another, usually the opposite. It also might be the most abused trope of our time. It's beyond substance over style. It's the absurd over the authentic. "It also made us feel nihilistic and defeated," Kunzru continues. "More recently we've seen how it can be a screen for reactionary politics." In the preface to his 1999 book, For Common Things, Jedidiah Purdy frames the overbearing irony of our era as a defense mechanism: "It is a fear of betrayal, disappointment, and humiliation, and a suspicion that believing, hoping, or caring too much will open us up to these." It's an escape route, an exit strategy, a way off the hook in any situation, it's become the dominant mode of pop culture, and we're all tired of it.

In his book, The Comedian as Confidence Man, Will Kaufman explains the feeling, coining what he calls irony fatigue, the exhaustion of ironic distance as the promise of play collides with the pursuit of truth. He discusses the comedian Bill Hicks having to edit lines from his twelfth, unaired appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. Hicks maintained his "Warrior for Truth" persona, claiming all the while that they were "just jokes." He didn’t intend to offend because he was just kidding. Having it both ways is perhaps impossible for a figure under public and media scrutiny, but what about your classmates, colleagues, and friends? What about the coffee shop denizen? Are they for real, or are they joking? Why is everyone so veiled in irony? Princeton Professor Christy Wampole writes,

Ironic living is a first-world problem. For the relatively well educated and financially secure, irony functions as a kind of credit card you never have to pay back. In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime. He doesn't own anything he possesses.

More stretch, less tense.
More field, less fence.
More bliss, less worry.
More thank you, less sorry.

More nice, less mean.
More page, less screen.
More reading, less clicking.
More healing, less picking.

More writing, less typing.
More liking, less hyping.
More honey, less hive.
More pedal, less drive. 

More wind, less window.
More in action, less in-tow.
More yess, less maybes.
More orgasms, less babies.

Charles Mudede is a senior editor at The Stranger, “Seattle’s Only Newspaper,” and he recently started doing a video series called Mudede’s Book Nook.

He writes, 

Because a big part of the only life I’ll ever have  is devoted to books, the best thing I can offer during this holiday season is a recommendation of five books you can read by a fake fire (like the one in my cottage) or gift those who happen to be close to your life or who you want to be close to your life. 

In the third installment of the series, Charles recommends Boogie Down Predictions, which, as you know, is a collection of essays edited by me and published by Strange Attractor Press. See the video here (You really want to watch this):

Today is the Last Bandcamp Friday of 2022, during which Bandcamp waives its fees and all of the money spent goes to the artists. So, spend recklessly.

Read on!

Zeal and Ardor Zeal and Ardor (MVKA): Mixing black metal with Black gospel, Zeal and Ardor is a dirge of a different kind. There’s a darkness here other metal bands attempt but never achieve. Band leader Manuel Gagneux once said Z&A is an answer to the question, “What if American slaves had embraced Satan instead of Jesus?” Wonder no more. This is their best yet.

I was in the tenth grade when Run-DMC's "Walk This Way" came out. I remember hearing it and feeling like something truly unique was happening. Raw, raucous, and rocking. It brought together fans of both traditional rock n’ roll and rebellious hip-hop.

Recently, I pitched the song to a book series specifically about individual songs, but they didn't agree on the impact or the import of it. Well, while I was factchecking my memory, I found out there's already a whole book about it! There's no doubt it was a special moment in music, a new node in a burgeoning network of sound.

-- Notebook cover I made from the sleeve of Run-DMC's Raising Hell (1986).

This week is all about paper and printed products: namely notebooks, zines (old and new), and books, of course.

Read on!

What's in my NOW?

Well, I just signed on to write The Grand Allusion for Palgrave Macmillan as a part of their Pivot series! So, I thought I'd repost my early thoughts on the idea.

Here's my mock cover. Like a lot of allusions, I did it for yuks:

And here's the tentative Table of Contents:

For the last couple of weeks I've been busy with writing and editing The Medium Picture (forthcoming from Zer0 Books) as is usual these days, but also made a public appearance, released a new excerpt, celebrated an anniversary, and kicked off a new project (more on the latter later). All the details follow.

Read on!

When we try to draw a line at the limits of our comfort with technology, we make a statement about what we think is too much technology. My favorite example is the bicycle. As much as I love computers and stereos, the analog interface of the bicycle is the perfect amount of technology to me. The difference in realms of these contrivances-- analog/digital, muscular/mental--may have more to do with our comfort than we think.

"Mind didn't actually emerge from matter, but from constraints on matter."
– Charles Mudede, August 2012

"I like simple instruments," Brian Eno told Deirdre O'Donaghue of KCRW in 1985. "I always have. I've always used very simple synthesizers actually, and I prefer them because I don't particularly care to be faced with limitless possibilities. I prefer a slightly more constrained situation."

In a 1999 article for WIRED called "Revenge of the Intuitive," Eno expands the idea, pointing out that a proliferation of options on a new device reduces the intimacy one can have with it. He's writing specifically about recording technology, but the concept applies far more broadly. You can't get facile with a tool if its use keeps changing. You can't have a relationship with something if it keeps becoming something else.

The inevitable upgrade annoys us before it delights us and then becomes commonplace and indispensable. Advances in technology are disruptive. They are beginnings. They are bifurcations. They are the initial conditions from which our media is born. Feared and disparaged at first, all of our technological contrivances are eventually welcomed in. They change our minds. They change our relationship with our world and with each other. The era in which we are born helps determine our comfort with new technologies. Not unlike learning new words, every new advance is a new addition to our media lexicon. Our media vocabulary includes those technologies with which we feel facile or familiar.

I call the line we draw at the edge of our comfort zone with new technologies the advent horizon. It’s a line we draw as individuals as well as a society at large. In his book Human as Media, Andrey Miroshnichenko describes it in terms of eras, writing, "If an era is shorter than a generation, the balance between the speed of technological innovation and the speed of cultural adaptation breaks down." We feel a sense of loss when we cross one of these lines.

At the DMA conference in 2011 in Boston, I described it as follows:

Celebrity, fame, and influence are inherently asymmetrical. They all require a one-to-many style of distribution akin to the wide-range broadcasting model of legacy media. As that media infrastructure has given way to smaller and smaller platforms serving smaller and smaller audiences, the ideas of celebrity, fame, and influence have been reconfigured and need to be redefined.

"It’s all become marketing and we want to win because we’re lonely and empty and scared and we’re led to believe winning will change all that. But there is no winning." — Charlie Kaufman, BAFTA, 2011 [1]

The dictum, "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," for which several sources have claimed credit, is widely attributed to Andy Warhol. [2] Regardless of who first said it, those 15 minutes of the future are the popular origins of the long tail of fame. Though the phrase has been around since the late 1960s, its proposed future is here.

In his 1991 essay, "Pop Stars? Nein Danke!" Scottish recording artist Momus updates Warhol’s supposed phrase to say that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 people, writing about the computer, "We now have a democratic technology, a technology which can help us all to produce and consume the new, 'unpopular' pop musics, each perfectly customized to our elective cults." [3] In Small Pieces Loosely Joined, David Weinberger’s 2002 book, he notes about bloggers, content creators, comment posters, and podcasters: “They are famous. They are celebrities. But only within a circle of a few hundred people.” He goes on to say that in the ever-splintering future, they will be famous to ever-fewer people, and—echoing Momus—that in the future provided by the internet, everyone will be famous for 15 people. [4] Democratizing the medium means a dwindling of the fame that medium can support.

Boogie Down Predictions is out today!

After a global pandemic, all the supply-chain delays, and a printing backlog, Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism is available! You can get yours directly from Strange Attractor, the MIT Press, or the source of your choice (yes, including that one)! It's also in fine bookstores everywhere today. It is well worth the wait, but the wait is over!

Below is a bit about how it came together, a look at the cover, the blurbs, the table of contents, and an early review from The Wire magazine.

Read on!

A few weeks ago, I looked up a song on YouTube, got busy with something else, and inadvertently let the algorithm run. When I started paying attention again, a new Interpol song was playing. Realizing both that I hadn't listened to them since their debut and that the new song reminded me of the Afghan Whigs, I decided to play catch-up on both of their respective discographies.

After I listened to various records from both bands over the next few days, I found myself returning to that first Interpol more than any of the others. Soon, it was the only one I was listening to -- and I haven't stopped.

Turn on the Bright Lights (Matador Records) came out exactly twenty years before my recent kick began. Plagued by comparisons to Joy Division, Interpol's debut is rich with many other veiled and not-so-veiled influences. The shoe-gazing tendencies of Ride and My Bloody Valentine, a jaunty bounce more akin to Echo and the Bunnymen or the Doors than to their contemporaries the Strokes, and a post-punk gloom Ian Curtis could only dream of are all inherent in the early Interpol. Recorded as it was in November of 2001, 9/11 also hangs heavy over the record.

I've been wanting to share another piece from my latest interview anthology Follow for Now, Vol. 2 for a while now. When I was trying to figure out which one, I kept coming back to my 2014 interview with Clay Tarver.

Clay's a guitarist, a writer, a director, and as you'll see below, he's been doing really cool stuff for a few decades now.

In addition, this one features cameos by Greg Dulli and Donal Logue.

Read on!

When I was growing up, my family moved every two years. We did stints all around the South, in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama again... My dad is an air traffic controller and to move up in that career, you have to move on. Apparently, out of consideration for me and my kid sister, we made all of these moves during the summers between school years, except one. In the fall of 1984, we moved from Level Plains, Alabama to Richmond Hill, Georgia a few weeks after the school year started. That one was to be the defining relocation of my early life.

The factors involved in this move’s impact on me are several. I was in the throes of adolescence. It’s a time of trying on identities and seeking out tribes. I'd tried various sports, played Dungeons & Dragons for a couple of years, but by eighth grade I had discovered the activities and music that still define me today: BMX, skateboarding, punk rock, heavy metal, and hip-hop. I wasn't a fully formed personality yet, but I had a few, new ideas. That move would help solidify my self like nothing before it.

At Richmond Hill High School, they had a leveled system within the grades. Group A was remedial, group B was regular, and group C was advanced. Ideally, one would take all of their classes within their group. I was an eighth-grade C, but some of the 8C classes were full. So, I had a few 8C classes, a two 9B classes, and 8B P.E. Yeah, it was confusing.

 "...Our technology has produced the vision of microscopic giants and intergalactic midgets, freezing time out of the picture, contracting space to a spasm." – Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects

"How did you get here?" asks Peter Morville on the first page of his book Ambient Findability (O’Reilly, 2005). It’s not a metaphysical question, but a practical and direct one. Ambience indirectly calls attention to the here we’re in and the now we're experiencing. It is all around us at all times, yet only visible when we stop to notice. In Tim Morton’s The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010), he explains it this way:

Take the music of David Byrne and Laurie Anderson. Early postmodern theory likes to think of them as nihilists or relativists, bricoleurs in the bush of ghosts. Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” features a repeated sample of her voice and a sinister series of recorded messages. This voice typifies postmodern art materials: forms of incomprehensible, unspeakable existence. Some might call it inert, sheer existence--art as ooze. It’s a medium in which meaning and unmeaning coexist. This oozy medium has something physical about it, which I call ambience.

"I know you all think you live in all the times at once, everything recorded for you, it’s all there to play back. Digital. That’s all that is, though: playback. You still don’t remember what it felt like." – Shinya Yamazaki in William Gibson's All Tomorrow’s Parties

While Jordon Peele's Nope (2022) is many things--a modern take on the classic monster movie, a study of spectacle, a comment on our relationship with nature, a reminder of the erasure of the Black presence in cinema--it's also a critique of our media-saturated society. My interest in media drew me in to that aspect of the film over any of the others. If you've seen the trailer, you know that the main characters are Hollywood horse wranglers, descendants of Alistair E. Haywood, the black jockey in Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 series of photographs of a horse running, one of the first motion pictures ever recorded. The technological mediation of experience is less of a theme of the movie and more of a condition of the environment it's set in.

[Please note: If you haven't seen Nope, but plan to, there are spoilers galore below.]

As you know, my new book, Escape Philosophy: Journey's Beyond the Human Body, is available as an open-access .pdf or a lovely paperback from punctum books! You should snag a copy, if you haven't already.

Here's a playlist I put together featuring all of the songs and artists discussed in the book, including Godflesh, Deafheaven, Wolves in the Throne Room, Celtic Frost, and Jawbox, among others.

Play it loud while you read this edited excerpt from the book.

A small band of rapping misfits convened in a wasteland commune, weed-bent on making music for their masses and a self-sustainable community for themselves. Sadboy, Keem, Mijo, RyBundy, Huckleberry, Phong Winna, Benz Rowm (RIP), and Champloo Sloppy set up camp in the desert near Crestone, Colorado. Having gone to high school with most of these guys, Marnie Ellen Hertzler followed with her camera.

Ostensibly making a documentary, Hertzler manages to capture a mix of both pre-apocalyptic dread and post-apocalyptic glee. The result is a delirious detour through the chaos and contradictions of coming of age in a future that’s already ending. The cast of characters listed above and the setting—as desolate and demanding as Tatooine or Arrakis—make Crestone a mesmerizing study of people out of place, a whole subculture uprooted and relocated on the edge of the end of everything.

Hertzler is currently in production on her second feature called Eternity One about a disappearing island community.

In spite of projects chronically getting pushed back, I've managed to get some of them out into the world: a book here, a zine there, a poem, new shirts and stickers...

What follows is a round-up of my friends' and my current projects, forthright and forthcoming.

But first...

Here's a quick clip of me talking to Eiliyas of Mixtape Menage about the impact of Public Enemy's "Rebel Without a Pause," which I first heard on the Plywood Hoods' OG BMX videotape "Dorkin' in York."