Toward the fall of last year, I went to a Berkeley house party. While searching for a place to stand and look preoccupied with my cellular device, I came upon a shocking scene of distilled white people.
They were singing along to Kanye West's ego-opus "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy," grunt for grunt. Their heads were tilted back in drunken splendor. The genuine feelings of comradery--the forming of a cohesive unison... giddy bodies writhing to the rhythm...
There was no resentment. There was no self-consciousness. There was no lambasting and leveraging of opinion. Surely this was a hell.
The internet was supposed to prevent this type of filth from happening. The physical space could be a place where we are warriors to the granular search terms we enter into Google. We should not be fixating on aspects of similarity when there is an infinite amount of detail that can cause our disagreement!
I closed my eyes and whimpered a soft prayer to my Future Self, so that I would one day pardon the behavior of the weakling self I was--a self who knew not what to do other than give in and mumble along.
Why didn't I pretend that I would have preferred "Power" to be in a different key?
Why had I not pretended that I thought sampling was immoral and that anyone who perceives someone elses copyrighted material is going to hell?
As I revisit my past self to mend the trauma I have within, I will show you what to do in foreign value systems and how to become the conqueror of worlds. Reader, it is time to rise up from our sofas and pontificate.
On November 24, 2008, Kanye West released 808s and Heartbreak. What many assumed to be an autotuned field recording of a baby monitor at night turned out to be Kanye's declaration that he was not to be held back by anything--even musical taste.
This type of boldness is what I lacked in that space. I needed to be free of their oppressive coalescence. I needed to appeal to my inward powers.
Kanye declared this album a 'pop' album, and rather then take the time to transition his voice to work within a pop format, he simply autotuned the shit out of everything. This ingenious time saving strategy is likened to someone who decides to run a marathon and simply takes a cab to the finish line.
The album confused society, just like our opinions, at times, should seek to confuse our 'contemporaries.' And just as Kanye autotuned his voice, we must autotune our logic by using vague jargon no one wants but everyone is willing to pretend to understand.
With this wisdom as our focus, let me show you how to go about returning a room to its full chaotic beauty:
- Show tremendous, immediate disdain in reference to specialized terms even you don't understand.
"Jesus Fucking Christ the sampling rate on these speakers is awful. Where did you buy these things? North Korea?"
2. Immediately claim something else is better (as revealed in my previous post) but for extreme situations of mass taste upheaval, the technique becomes more drastic:
- claim the thing no one remembers exists or no else likes is better
- justify your argument using specialized terms you don't understand
I would then dim the lights as I ask the final question because it was rhetorical. And maybe there is no dimmer in the room. I would simply punch the lighting source in a display of my tremendous passion.
As I would close my eyes to take my deep breath, I would put my arm around the attractive person in my vicinity and whisper, "I can explain to you more what I was talking about later."
Hear me now, past self--you did what was necessary to survive. You did not know the strategies I know now and you are forgiven and you are loved.
Let the healing begin.
If you click on this and listen to it, I should be getting a fraction of the fraction of the cent that Kanye is getting: Kanye West – 808s & Heartbreak
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