I. Smells Like Teen Spirit

I was wrong about Nirvana. As a young punk it was not cool to like them, or so I thought. Compared to Terveet kädet, Integrity, Shitlickers and Minor Threat, they sounded lame. Every kid had a Nirvana t-shirt.

I found the riff kinda boring playing it on my cheap Stratocaster knockoff. It just repeated the same power chords over and over - F, G#, Bb, C# - dynamically changing between quiet verse and loud chorus - Cobain taking a page from The Pixies songbook, very much like Soundgarden and every other lame band did back then, copying the genuine innovations The Pixies had made to the punk form.

Regardless of all my teenage besserwisserism and unearned wordly wisdom, I did not understand modalism back then, and could not hear how the songs melody lifts the chords creating a tension and sort of superimposing a harmonic narrative to the otherwise simple and fairly tepid four-chord vamp.

The chord roots are I–III–IV–VI in F minor, but Cobain’s vocal melody - an amazing singer he was - lifts the chords into ninths and other variations, which together with the dynamic shifts and the quite genius chorus riff - the broken rhythm always anticipating the beat - creates a composition that is modal, ambiguous and always shifting, never really settling. Similar to the girl’s deodorant the song is named after lingering in your room after she has gone. However, the simple structure of the song creates a formalistic unison that gives the listener a way to withstand the chaos, the storm of noise, the almost unbearable chaos of the modernity. The honking horns and sirens of the urban chaos of Vareses Ameriques, the futurist war manifesto, the modal always raising tidal wave of sound of the Bolero, choral jazz of the Bebop, Ginsberg’s Howl and the Burroughs´ Naked Lunch, onomatopoeic wave rides of broken man Kerouac’s Big Sur, modal sophistication of the cool hard bop of Miles and Trane… Modernity was a sea that washed over the humanity with its transistors, urbanism, wars, police truncheons, political unstability, riots, its armies, its mad writers and broken machines. The centre was forever shifting but the form in which we gave to it - verse-chorus or 12-step blues - made the storm possible to withhold. Even postmodernism was just order disguised as chaos.

Maybe Nirvana was the last echo of the pop modernism before the towers fell. The new millennium is not a storm, it is viral - a plague. HIV crisis already started the 21st century to the gay population in the late 70’s. You can do what the Italian renaissance aristocracy did and hide in a castle telling each other stories, but if you are out there in the ditch… You cannot wait out the virus. You just rot and die.

II. News at 11

You can sing almost anything on top of power chords, as long as you don’t jar against the root or the fifth too much, or too long. It makes the harmony somewhat ambiguous and very free, like what Miles did with Bitches Brew. But The Stooges, Pixies, Fugazi and Nirvana made a kind of a caveman version of the sophistication of the modal jazz. Miles’ fusion offered his musicians a sonic voodoo landscape to paint the sky any colour they wanted, but he was not free same way Ornette Coleman was, or the way Trane later became. Even in his most experimental you had to always return to the form, to the chord structure, and the chorus.

Cobain and the punks worked out their traumas into a kind of sonic immediacy, much in the same way say Wu or Mobb Deep did (and Kendrick Lamar still does) did in hip hop, just using different tones. You can hear MLK and the civil rights movement in the Coltrane solos same as you can hear the LGBT liberation in the rhythmic force of the Disco, Hip Hop and House. How do you resist facism? By dancing. Your landlord might throw you out or your asshole boss might lay you off since the markets do not like gay anymore, but in the pumping bodies of your own community you can find safety and structure. Capitalism is chaos, facism is chaos, the anarchic dancing body of the Planet Rock brings order to the society that has lost its meaning and direction.

However I must apologise, since I am reminiscing. And even worse, I am feeling nostalgic towards something I never experienced, since I wasn’t even born yet. I am the twelve-year-old in the youtube comments of a Jimi Hendrix cut gutted that I was born after all the good music had already been made. Now I’m fifteen arguing on a punk forum whether Nirvana is punk or not, listening my elder siblings vinyls. Now I am 25 doing my own version of the hippie drop out by burying myself into the online chatrooms making noise tapes to trade with other incel losers. We don’t dance. We flick Grindr looking for the next hit that evaporates as soon as we get a sense of it. I am alone.

Even a sample of Donny Hathaway’s Little Getto Boy becomes void of meaning in the viral loops and psycho-chemical plateaus of the post-towers aerospace. Cat System Corp’s News at 11 or Oneothtrix Point Never’s nostalgic soundscapes recreate the pain and loss from the fragments of the past, but as much as I enjoy them, I am always left without any antidote to the sickness.

Nothing shifts in the forever repeating Weather Channel audio clips nor in the self-help video tapes (or whatever they are Point Never samples) of the vapowave, it just lingers. Nothing is resolved. This is a sonic equivalent of waiting for your demise. We are just scrolling the ever worsening news waiting for the virus to take us, the predator drones to find us, the missile to finally hit, the government rambo’s to kick in our door because of some arbitrary legal status forced upon us by the increasingly authoritarian government.

No fuck this, this cannot be the art of the 21st century. You failed. We all did.

III. old Man yells at a Soundcloud rapper

20th Century was the era of TV, the moon rocket, the newspaper, the cold war and the city. Harlem, Detroit, Village or Castro was where it’s at, or where it was. 21st Century is the era of the social media, algorithm, hallucination, online forums, games, viruses and the network. City centre or the getto is dead. It is just expensive coffee shops and vintage shops now people staring their little Claude mirrors trying to desperately haruspex their own destruction. The virus enters. We sit at home, playing games the voice chat muted, alone, algorithm feeding us new escapist fantasies that mix in with the political propaganda and misinformation creating a hallucination of a society, or multitude of societies, all fake and all seemingly teetering above the forever ending darkness. There is no centre. Nothing is true and everything is possible. Same fucking tik tok ding ding clang clang looping endlessly, your face only lightened in the darkness by your phone screen turned way too bright the machine you hold like a sacred crystal or like that cancerous hobbit caressed his dumb fucking ring. Oh shit I guess I’m old now.

I don’t know what the kids are listening. Nor do I care. The pop music still hangs on tight to the last drags of modernism, the loop and the melodic modalism. You were like a wrecking ball becomes a new jazz standard. But that is not interesting. The neural transformer architecture can create infinite amount of Real 90’s New York Hip Hop that bots in the comments celebrate as… Or are people this fucking stupid? How do I know wether anybody online is an actual person anymore? It used to be important to be real, stay real. Milkface? Milkbone? What was his name? Hustle, since you have to, but stay true to yourself. Don’t steal from your own.

None of that matters anymore. And it can’t. Everything is fake.

Except there are communities creating techno on Strudel and sharing their compositions in code just from the pure joy of making. Microcommunities sharing their versions of digital era folk created in their home studios. At some point everybody bought a cheap Behringer synth and called themselves a DJ. Then they invented exactly the same dumb EDM melody from the 90s on top of almost identical house beats. Thank you, you just made electronic music suck.

But the cool kids played chords over sampled drum beats singing about loss and drug addiction and shared it between themselves. It is difficult to give an example, since most of the bedroom demos in themselves were not that good, but they created this community that in itself was an artwork and a musical masterpiece - not in harmonic innovation, but in shared social ecstasy. Not these lame ‘social practices’ of the losers suckered to do an MFA (I should know, I’m one of them) who pay some hot art school kids in Balenciaga T-shirts to dance dorkily in Tate Modern. The real thing. People making music together over the fibre cable and 4G creating a digital communion.

The 21st century logic is algorithmic, its rhythm stochastic. It does not represent; it calculates. That is exactly the tragedy. We live in a system we cannot perceive. We don’t sink into fragmentation because we love chaos, but because we cannot see the structure we inhabit. The TV broadcast arriving to your home was a mystery to most people, but we could still perceive its logic. But the black box of the algorithm, the LLM and the global fibre network is far too complicated to understand except by the selected few, those black head priests of our new techno gods. Plot to the first quarter of the 21st century sounds like a grim dark novel of Warhammer 40 000.

Perhaps the artists should be ones learning Python and C making poetry with code and jamming with SuperCollider, Strudel and other various programming languages for music. The silicon valley dorks want to stop coding, maybe we should take over and return the programming to its roots in hacker culture, to the joy of creation, to the ethos of invention. I do not know what the new form could be, but the micro-melodic fragments rehashing epistemology of of the modern sound I do not believe in. Besides. You gonna do it better than Burial?

Then again, modernism has not disappeared. SD Laika creates form out of chaos of the noise experiments, Merzbow and the more potent players of the Noise scene brought ethereal beauty out of screaming mixer feedback loops,while Mika Vainio wrote music of the undercurrents, ambient that insists you listen, the very Opposite of ASMR lofi hiphop muzak that exists solely to make you work harder.

On the other hand Helly Herndon’s Proto finds new tonal landscapes using her own AI - I don’t now what she exactly means by that, but I assume she has trained GPT model with her own data set of vocal samples, but I would love to know the details - and Ryoji Ikedas sonic mathematics create strangely emotional sonic narratives from the structure of the cartesian grid. Perhaps modernity just needs a Z-dimension, complex numbers to create a new axis of infinity.

IV. Incel Superman

Disclaimer: I have not watched the Castration Anthology in full. In matter of fact, I haven’t even finished the first part. But I think we can (and should) discuss it’s formal achievements in relation to lost centre and fall of the empire.

If you don’t know what I am talking about, here it is. You can go watch it right now. Should take you only about 9-10h for the first two parts.

It feels unlike anything else. It does remind one of the Situationist theatre of the absurd and the early 2000s web comedy videos captured with a potato of a camera. The ugliness is palpable, but the writing is amazing. Did she just collect weird and disturbing stories of people on 4chan and turn them into a 15h youtube vanity project - To Boldly Flee was an inspiration I was told? - that however has a true cinematic language and ethos? What is the meaning of this? Everybody - incels, transwomen, gay people, terf’s, conservative, liberal - just suck? I don’t know and I will not pretend to understand something I haven’t even seen yet.

It’s far from code art, but it feels algorithmic - fragmented, multiple, both obscene and precise. Is there a middle, the end, or a beginning? Is this like a joke that can exist solely on punchline, but one that lasts for 15 hours? Watching it is positively painful. The video feels like the toxic 2010’s chatrooms turned flesh, some algorithmic monster of digital babboons with a complete lack of empathy or remorse. A film Harmony Korine would make if he still had talent left.

Perhaps your only opition is not to succumb into some melancholic introspection of a 2020 pop princess flicking about ninth chords while the world burns around you, telling yourself you did your part by resisting ICE on Twitter. X. Or whatever. Perhaps we do not have to become just brainless morons slurping at whatever trite - whether generated by an AI or not - the entertainment corporations stream straight into our neocortex, but rather create our own forms. Take your old gaming PC and run a 3B GPT with your own data. Take your virtual memories of your youth spend in Minecraft and turn it into a concept album or a film. Resist the shiny surface and the subwoofer kick drum. The real cyberpunk smells like 2015 Axe deodorant, cheap energy drink and Korean noodles, your own Matrix created with the community and family of your own choosing.

I think what Louise Weard has shown us is that in order to preserve our humanity in the age of Omnissiah we must become not cynical and jaded, but more humanist, more modernist, and more radical in our rejection of the techno slavery the global elite is pushing down on us now more than ever before.

Empire is falling. Let us become the mutants, the morlocks, the X-Men resisting the sentinels with our weirdness and our ugliness, our mistakes and our imperfections - the very things that make us human.