AGAINST APPLAUSE: CULTIVATING AN AESTHETIC OF CONTEMPT

"Ever had the feeling you've been cheated?"—Johnny Rotten

by Andy Nowicki

I have written about the internecine war between white youth of the 80s: “punk” vs. “metal.” That earlier article, this subject functioned as an as introduction to Duran Duran’s 2011 “neo-retro” album All You Need Is Now, summarized the differences thusly:

If you were a youth in the ‘80s—as some of us may be old enough to remember—you simply weren’t allowed to like both Metal and Punk at the same time. The sort of kids who were into Metal (who had the rest of us outnumbered, it always seemed) tended to be less thoughtful or reflective, and more swaggering and macho, while we “Punk” kids liked to style themselves as intellectual and artsy.
Naturally, the Metal kids tended to be the ones to ruthlessly administer the inevitable doses of adolescent mockery, ostracism and ass-kickings, while we Punks and New Wavers were usually the ones who got mocked and ostracized, and who got our asses kicked. Of course, some of the crazier and more fearless Punks might were able to channel their inner-Johnny Rotten and fight back occasionally, but as a general rule we were on the receiving end of the abuse.

And yet, one could argue that we Punks and wavers were the ones whose adopted values were most reflective of the philosophical fruits of Western, that is, “White” civilization. While we admittedly flirted with grandiose effeteness much of the time (hence the mockery and the ass-kickings), we were more prone to agree with seminal Western thinker Socrates in his famous assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living. The Metalheads, on the other hand, merely liked to drink, party, and screw, and thought it was plainly “gay” ever to question their debauched lifestyle choices. The Punks and Wavers (with the exception of the “straight-edge” ones, like myself and most of my friends) took their share of mind-altering substances, and most certainly had sex if they ever got the chance, but all the while were asking themselves, with gloomy, hyper-literate wordsmith Morrissey, “What difference does it make?”

Of course, we Wavers could be tiresome and pretentious, and we often were. But we were also very often quite sincere in our expressions of angst and anguish. The existential terror of adolescence, after all, is that one suddenly finds oneself neither fish nor fowl but a rather pitiful mixed breed, one which sprouts useless scales when it tries to fly, and is afflicted with ridiculous burdensome wings when it only wants to swim.

The aesthetic and philosophical differences between the 80s incarnations of metal and punk, however, are in fact representative of far more than what I enumerated in that article. They can be summarized as the difference between two very distinct attitudes towards art, and two radically divergent sets of values. It is not simply the distinction between the intellectual and the yahoo, or between the geek and the jock, as I characterized things in my 2011 piece. Rather, at its heart, it comes down to one’s perspective regarding the prospect of applause, i.e., approval.

GLORY AND GORE: THE BRIGHT SIDE OF "TORTURE PORN"

                                                               

A nasty, hostile scene from Eli Roth's Hostel

                                                               
                                                                      by Andy Nowicki

Moral permissiveness is one symptom of a society in conspicuous decline. However, insofar as moral permissiveness feeds into artistic permissiveness, a wholly negative trend becomes at least potentially positive. "Extreme" art — that is to say, art that is dark, disturbing, and, to use a much overused word, "edgy" — often provokes reflection among its consumers, whether or not the artist intended any such thing. That is especially true of movies, which remain powerful and culturally ubiquitous in their influence.

I hardly need point out that reflectiveness and permissive behavior seldom go hand in hand; the former is, in fact, the determined enemy of the latter, and vice versa. Thus, in an age of decadence, movies that are "extreme" in content and theme have a double-edged function. On the one hand, they tend to feed the increasingly perverse appetite of a jaded and debauched general public. But that problem is sometimes misleadingly magnified by shortsighted right-wing scolds (conservative film critic Michael Medved being the most egregious example), who appear to think that the production of any movie containing profanity, nudity, or violence amounts to another act of naked aggression by liberal Hollywood against decent American values.

EVIL WOMAN

                                                                

He would die for you.

When I composed my previous two analyses of the import of pop-song lyrics as expressions of Zeitgeist angst and/or establishment agitprop, my wife—who can be brutally frank when she wants to be—expressed a dubious attitude, not about my arguments, either with regard to REO Speedwagon’srepressed cuckold rage or Billy Joel’s gratingcondescension towards self-immolation-prone teens, but about my overall lack of topical relevance in devoting attention to either Speedwagon or Joel . Who, after all, knows about these songs in 2013, much less listens to them?

Mrs. Nowicki was right, as she often is. And since Alternative Right’s readership skews young, I suppose I need to prove my mettle as one hip to the current pop culture scene, lest I come across as some sort of out-of- touch forty-two year old. Unfortunately, I possess little knowledge of, nor interest in, black metal (a genre which, I’m told, apparently does not number Jimi Hendrix among its practitioners, despite appearances to the contrary), and I’m well aware that faking one’s awareness in the youth scene makes one overall appear even more buffoonish than owning one’s ignorance.

"RESPECTFULLY I SAY TO THEE"

Liz Phair ups the ante: you're not just a firework, you're a SUPERNOVA!

by Andy Nowicki

Many common themes in popular music have been duly cataloged and commented upon in recent years, with publications like Cracked.com assuming a prominent role in scrutinizing the meaning behind clusters and conglomerations of frequent song lyric leitmotifs.

Yet to my knowledge, no one has reflected upon a particular classification of pop song, nor pondered the significance thereof. I speak, of course, of what could be called the “Wow, You’re Awesome in the Sack!” anthem, a species of pop song which seems expressly the province of female singers, wherein the object of amorous admiration is exclusively men.

FIRST, THEY CAME FOR THE HOLOCAUST DENIERS..

FIRST, THEY CAME FOR THE HOLOCAUST DENIERS...

With a sly, knowing wink to Martin Niemoller. What follows is a contemporary reworking of his famous dictum about life in Nazi Germany, as it might be spoken by a typical weasel-faced, mainstream American conservative establishment-lapdog, as a sort of soliloquy/confession uttered in an unguarded moment.

Don't worry about the encroaching totalitarian dystopia... it's football season, baby!

by Andy Nowicki

First, they came for the Holocaust deniers.

I didn’t have a problem with this at all. After all, as a mainstream American conservative, I pledge fealty to the state of Israel and obediently fetishize Jewish historical suffering as uniquely horrific. To compare the Jewish Holocaust to any other instance of mass murder is offensive to me, because (as I have been told, and as I quite unthinkingly repeat, good little goyboy that I am) to do so inexcusably trivializes the Shoah, making it seem like just another case of man’s inhumanity to man, which it certainly wasn’t, because… well, because that’s what I’ve been told! By whom, you ask? Well, by sources that are surely knowledgeable, sources that one doesn’t question if one knows what is good for one—and I, for one, surely do!

DISDAIN FOR FAT PLEBS: THE "PATRICK BATEMAN" RIGHT

"Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?"

by Andy Nowicki

Patrick Bateman is a now legendary anti-hero, first depicted in Bret Easton Ellis’s excruciatingly hilarious and bleakly horrifying 1990 novel American Psycho, and brought to the screen a decade later in a career-making performance by Christian Bale. Unlike Bale’s more famous later cinematic incarnation, Bateman is no “dark knight,” but rather a deeply vain, vapid, and vacuous man with a killer smile, who also happens to be a serial killer.

MANLY FLACCIDITY

                                                          by Andy Nowicki

My previous articles at Alternative Right and Counter-Currents, analyzing and and critiquing the manosphere and its attendent pick-up-artist "game" ethos, provoked a wide variety of responses. Commenters chimed in with much to say about what I had to say, and their feedback ranged from the highly complimentary to the laceratingly scathing and epithet-intensive.

DREAM GIRL

by Andy Nowicki

With her new song “Team,” the big-haired, wide-eyed, preternaturally self-possessed 17-year old Kiwi phenom self-named Lorde (birth name Ella Yelich-O'Connor) picks up where she left off with her hypnotic 2013 hit “Royals.” Thematically, the song treads similar territory to its anthemic predecessor: it is at once celebratory and wistful, ferociously sassy and soaked with aching regret.

Abundant hooks aside, what makes “Team” most aurally compelling is the manner with which it both embodies and transcends the youthful enthusiasm of one “wise beyond her years,” expressing simultaneous pleasure and dissatisfaction with what she feels – perhaps perceptively, perhaps rashly – to be her lot in life.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BUZZ: POP "RACISM"

                                       

                                     by Andy Nowicki

Over the past couple of years, a fascinating musical mini-trend has emerged. Last year, “Somebody That I Used to Know”—a memorable duet from Australian singer Gotye and his New Zealand-born vocal accompanist Kimbra– became a surprise hit in America. A somewhat odd, eerily haunting, emotionally-pitched, at times tonally dissonant, yet still supremely catchy little ballad with the sweep and grandeur of an epic poem, the charm of “Somebody” was in part its utter absence of irony. Somehow we all felt Gotye’s pain when he mournfully shrieked, “You didn’t have cut me off!” to his lost love. Jaded and cynical as we are, this tune managed to elude our post-modern impulse to smirk and make mocking, deadpan quips in response to intimate revelations of pain and loss; instead, we were drawn into the heart of the song’s maelstrom of turmoil by its honest and forthright presentation of the heartache and bitterness of a breakup.

BRUTALIZING THE BETA: TAL BACHMAN'S "SHE'S SO HIGH"

by Andy Nowicki

It has often been remarked that the real losers of the sexual revolution are the so-called “beta males.” After all, prior to the time when the marital covenant became so thoroughly denigrated and devalued as it is now, “betas” actually wielded a kind of clout. 

Back when young women were still encouraged by the culture to marry decent men, instead of being pushed to pursue Eat Pray Love-esque escapades with sexy strangers, the better to “find themselves” and so earn their ticket of supposed feminine “authenticity,” it actually paid for guys to be good, solid providers with sweet natures and decent temperaments. 

THE BIG SHAVE

There will be blood.

by Andy Nowicki

Note: this essay is in part inspired by the singularly powerful and disturbing 1967 Martin Scorsese student short, The Big Shave. posted below.

When a man shaves his face, he engages an activity that is dully prosaic, yet at the same time fraught with endless possible permutations of pain and agony.

The blade of the razor that he uses can in fact be likened to the double-edged sword of shopworn metaphor, as it truly cuts both ways: meant to remove those grubby, unwelcome whiskers and to restore a fresh, smooth surface to the face, that same “sword” can also sink beneath the skin and draw blood.

MAMMARY MANIA

It's October again, and once again they're making American football players wear pink for "breast cancer awareness" which means it's also time to run this article again:

                                                              by Andy Nowicki

I have often pondered how it impacted the average Gen-Xer to hit puberty at the very moment when the AIDS epidemic became a ubiquitous media sensation.

I do know how this ironic sequential syncronicity affected me personally, though I am in no sense a paradigmatic “X-Man.” In my adolescent mind, as a teenager in the '80s, sex and certain death came to be inextricably intertwined in ways they had never before been associated in human history. To have sexual intercourse was to make oneself vulnerable to a dread plague that viciously ate away at your insides until you perished in horrific pain. You didn’t get better, and there was no cure.

FIFTY SHADES OF MISANDRY

                                                                         

                                                            by Andy Nowicki

As an author, I faithfully go wherever my flighty and unpredictable Muse leads me. This dedication to my ever-evolving, often elusive source of inspiration has led me down a winding and torturous path, lined with copious clusters of thorns, nettles, and poison ivy. It has most certainly not, thus far, brought me widespread recognition, fortune, fame, or glory. Yet I trust my Muse just the same, because really, when it comes to creative stimulation, who or what else do I have? Without her, I’m nothing.

I will not spill too much ink here investigating the identity, orientation, or overall reliability of the Muse, nor even exploring the question of whether she dwells within, capriciously stirring my consciousness when she feels the inexplicable urge (but always on her own terms) or if in fact she is a separate entity entirely, one who hovers above me, flitting about and occasionally whispering mischievous notions in my ear before withdrawing with a girlish giggle, darting away to a cleverly chosen hiding spot and teasingly mocking my efforts to find her again. Suffice to say that she moves in mysterious, and at times infuriating, ways. In the last couple of years, however, the Muse has proven to be a faithful helpmeet; she has sung to me freely, and I have translated her music into numerous works, some that I have managed to publish and others that have yet to find a suitable suitor.

STRAIGHT TALK ON BULLIES

by Andy Nowicki

I have written before about the outrageously hypocritical antics of the anti-bully brigade, whose self-appointed members constantly puff out their chests and pound their proverbial podiums ad infinitum these days, constantly getting in our faces, and all but stealing our lunch money and throwing us into trash cans and slamming us into lockers as they hector and bluster and demand all the while that we need to STOP BULLYING!!!!

Of course, to a large extent, those who denounce “bullying” the loudest don’t really care about bullying qua bullying. For them, the War on Bullies is but a proxy battle, through which they intend to vilify anyone opposed to gay marriage and any type of concerted gay-normalization effort. When such folk speak spitefully of “bullies,” what they mean are “(white) Christian conservatives,” who in their prejudiced perception just can’t be anything but bullies, since they’re so closed-minded and bigoted… (and so very gauchely white, too...)

IN DEFENSE OF SQUARES: A REPLY TO JACK DONOVAN

                                                                                 

Lost the girl, won the Force.

                                                    

                                                                       by Andy Nowicki

I haven't yet read Jack Donovan's new book The Way of Men, though I plan to do so. However, having read Jack's intriguing reply to Jef Costello, I find myself compelled to raise an issue related to the contemporary masculinist movement, of which I know Jack to be an enthusiastic advocate.

The point I wish to make is one that, surprisingly enough, I haven't seen anyone in the so-called "manosphere" address adequately, unless I have missed it.

JESSIE'S GIRL: THE ANGST OF AN ALPHA

She's just not that into you, Rick!

by Andy Nowicki

In 1981, Australia-born soap opera star Rick Springfield first burst to the top of the American pop charts with Jessie's Girl, a tune that combined irresistible hooks with raw, emotional ferocity and unexpected pathos.

Given the singer's chiseled good looks and teenybopper fan base, Springfield's songwriting talents tended to go unnoticed; even today, the song is often regarded as a kind of 80s "guilty pleasure," devoid of substance and only fit to be appreciated with a dollop of ironical post-modern smarm. Yet Jessie's Girl has endured through the decades for much the same reason that it first became a hit; in addition to being a catchy-as-hell power pop anthem, it also effectively catches the angst of the alpha male hellaciously hoisted by his own petard, in a manner that elicits both amusement and pity from the listener.

RECONSIDERING SUICIDE

                                                                   

This mook says not to kill yourself.

                                                         by Andy Nowicki

Reflecting on Dominique Venner’s recent suicide has caused me to consider the entire subject of self-slaughter anew. There are many different angles from which one might analyze and comment upon the matter of dying by one’s own hand—and I have weighed many of them before—but one which has gone largely unremarked is the concept of suicide as a pop-cultural phenomenon. At the risk of sounding insufferably po-mo, what is needed is a “meta”-analysis of the practice of quietus-making and bodkin-baring.