I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence. They want to be told about this publicly…Goodwill longs to be recognized and cultivated. For it to develop and have an impact it must hear that the world does not ridicule it…people want to hear that decency and courage make sense, that something must be risked in the struggle against dirty tricks. They want to know that they are not alone, forgotten, written off.
When [Daniel] Lopatin [who records as Oneohtrix Point Never] was still living in Boston, and working at a textbook-publishing company, he started making what he called “eccojams”—essentially, chopped-and-screwed remixes of treacly ballads, paired with videos that featured strange repeating imagery. The publishing gig was stultifying. “I was nothing,” he said when I asked what the job entailed. “I was a piece of furniture. I could just feel the life draining out of me.” Lopatin began uploading the videos to YouTube, and in 2010 he put out a hundred copies of “Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1” on cassette. “B4,” the most beloved of the eccojams, features a mesmeric sample of “The Lady in Red,” an awful song recorded by Chris de Burgh in 1986. On its own, de Burgh’s voice has a weird, cadaverous quality; when Lopatin loops an isolated bit from the chorus (“There’s nobody here!”) nineteen times in a little more than two minutes, it becomes a kind of surreal Mayday call, lonesome and eternal. The video features a reiterative graphic—a pulsing stretch of rainbow-colored highway—from Laser Grand Prix, an eighties arcade game. Watching it made me think of ancient Gregorian chants, and the droning, pentatonic laments of northern Greece, and certain Indian ragas, and, eventually, any sort of music that makes your vision blur, or gets the mind soft enough to see God.
Both the song and the video were assembled entirely from found material. Yet the release of “Eccojams” was also a Big Bang: it was the dawn of vaporwave, a genre of electronic music obsessed with aestheticizing relics of the recent past. Attempting to define vaporwave is sort of humiliating: like most Web-based phenomena, it deploys an idiosyncratic grammar that remains mostly inscrutable to anyone who has recently gone outside. The visuals tend to involve 3-D graphics, screen savers, dolphins, dead malls, VHS tapes, corporate training videos, bad graphic design, and Greco-Roman statues. The primary instruments are synthesizers and YouTube. There’s a kind of aching pathos to some of it. If you’ve ever wandered around a flea market and felt a peculiar pang after coming across, say, an inkjet printer from 2008, an old cable box, or an unopened Sony MiniDisc player, you know what I mean: the accelerated obsolescence of commercial technology can feel like a kind of memento mori. Nothing is relevant forever.
Lopatin is credited as one of vaporwave’s earliest practitioners; he is probably its inventor. The genre had an oddball moment in the sun in 2012, when Rihanna performed her hit “Diamonds” on “Saturday Night Live” before a projection of vaporwave-ish graphics: a weird neon peace sign, a ceramic bust, a checkerboard, a spinning globe, fractals, palm trees. The fact that “Diamonds”—a pop ballad—is not a vaporwave song, in any sense, doesn’t matter. Boundaries, systems, context: these are also relics of the past.
–Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker, October 2, 2023
Everything except language knows the meaning of existence. Trees, planets, rivers, time know nothing else. They express it moment by moment as the universe.
Even this fool of a body lives it in part, and would have full dignity within it but for the ignorant freedom of my talking mind.
When I was making What Is Democracy? I interviewed some young Republicans. I don’t normally talk to twenty-two-year-old Trump supporters, and I assumed that they were going to give me the conservative spiel that democracy is free markets and everyone having a chance to duke it out in the marketplace and trickle-down economics and blah, blah, blah. Instead they told me they don’t like democracy, because democracy is about the majority wanting to improve their situation, and they, the young Republicans, are part of a minority of affluent white people. They literally mocked democracy on camera; that scared me.
They see capitalism as more valuable than democracy, because capitalism benefits them. And if the masses are empowered, they’re going to want to take rich white people down a peg. These young Republicans recognize that their status is dependent on others being impoverished. They recognize that if we had a popular vote in this country, and not the Electoral College, Republicans would not win the presidency. They recognize that controlling a majority of seats on the Supreme Court is essential to imposing their agenda. It’s not going to happen through mobilizing voters, because the policies they support are genuinely not popular.
What’s increasingly clear is that the far Right is abandoning democracy. It sees democracy as the enemy. It is a politics of aristocracy, a politics of hierarchy. I have gone on deep dives into far-Right subcultures online, and what they hate about democracy is the idea of equality at the center of it.
–filmmaker Astra Taylor, interviewed by Finn Cohen in The Sun
another eye opens 