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.