Part 5 - Too Dark Park
Part 5 - Skinny Puppy - Too Dark Park
Well, this week has been a pile of something best not described in detail. We'll get to that, but first we can talk about this article that popped up on my feed today. It's target content marketing obviously, given what i've been writing, but actually i have no argue. I haven't heard a couple of those albums, but there's no reason to complain about Revolver's list if you want a broad survey of what's in peoples' minds when they think of Industrial. Every one of those bands encapsulates something essential about the genre, even if i personally haven't toured every single room in the dilapidated mansion.
So, i think we should end this not at all thorough or academic survey of Industrial by listening to Skinny Puppy's Too Dark Park, if only because i keep seeing monsters and losing my mind.
I am intensely, extremely, terribly uncomfortable talking about the death of Trevor Strnad. Not because suicide is taboo or frightening for me, but because of the mental shock most everyone else goes through when pointing out that the overarching commonality of all forms of self-destructive behavior is an escape from obligation. Obligation is an extremely problematic psychological phenomenon; it's binary manifestations are truly unpredictable, and one can just as easily rebel against subjectively positive obligations as delight in the high level of psychological control that subversion of obligation brings.
Spasmolytic is a fun song about quitting smoking (we'll just ignore the heroin addiction concurrently blossoming at the time it was written). That, my friends, is irony. But more important, the album as a whole is a depiction of living a predetermined existence in a world of total helplessness. One is obligated to live, and i don't mind telling you that is a terrifying mental state to be in, not least because everyone capable of reading this post is actually living it right now. Call it "getting back to normal," or "coming out of the pandemic," or anything else you want to call it: for many people it is absolute agony. Many of us don't enjoy the overarching nationalist way of commerce at all. I'm certainly as vocal a critic as you might find anywhere. I don't want to keep driving to work then driving back home every day for the rest of my life out of the sheer obligation to earn the money that fuels "America." But, there aren't really many people eager to financially support my staying home and creating music and words and ideas, so there's not any tangible alternative, is there?
Very important note, the preceding paragraph is absolutely not a passive-aggressive guilt trip kind of statement like it might read. Rather, it is as clear an example of the lack of alternatives we actually have as i can construct. There is no actual alternative to the prevailing Right-Wing hegemony of WASP America, one can only accept or reject it to varying degrees. 1990s Vancouver sounds no different according to Too Dark Park. What the pandemic taught us is that we haven't actually made any progress in terms of the political machinery the vast majority of people vocally oppose. Again, that's not a Democrat/Republican distinction at all, it's a distinction between dependence and independence. White, middle-class, Bourgeois values are completely and utterly dependent on the psychological machinery that exploits the labor of a capably independent, self-supporting population. To be blunt, what i'm saying is that the current politically defined social class of Entrepreneurs (synonymous with Investors) is intellectually and functionally useless. The Elon Musk who devotes his energy and intelligence to the design and fabrication of rockets and the technological advancement of the science of propulsion is perfectly lovely in the grander scheme of things, but the Elon Musk who sold Paypal to Ebay and recently bid to buy Twitter is as useless as a broken television. Sure, you could harvest some useful/valuable components if needed, but the scrap heap of unusable waste is still getting larger regardless. The EU has for the most part recognized that mutual trade itself is a much more productive and beneficial mode of existence than war. The US, however, is still inexhaustibly dedicated to the internal conflict surrounding hegemony itself. The structure of a now imaginary trillionaire ruling over an economic empire is vastly more important to many people than any particular benefit it might bring to people as a whole. We see it in the targeted advertising to "the one's who get it done," to borrow Grainger's hollow marketing slogan. I hear a hundred ads a day directed toward the "plucky CFO," the "online funnel-master," the freaking-out petit-bourgeois business owner who desperately needs Indeed to filter out 3 qualified candidates to wash silverware and change the tablecloths.
Humor aside, what we're really looking at isn't a question of how to make it in an Economic universe, rather what are we actually trading for? What we do for money must ideally pay for everything else we cannot do while using that time and energy to earn money, and i think we can all understand that the exchange rate of "a hard day's work" is merely a fraction of 1% of an equivalent "day off."
A business, any business, is fully dependent on its employees and customers, not the other way around. We see this relationship manifest in the tendency toward monopolization, i.e. the personified desire to invert the structure itself; to make reality as dependent upon the brand as the brand is dependent upon reality. Yet all signs seem to point to this phenomenon itself as essentially destructive rather than constructive. The harder we work to live, the less we wish to live at all, and the taller the mountain of garbage grows.
Not a cheerful way to end this week of exploring my personal favorite genre of music, but who could argue it a cheerful genre of music?
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