Pop Music is a Satanic Mind-Virus! Part 4: What to Do?
Scott Weisswald1,495 words
So, there are blacks with beats, heebs with chutzpah, and Swedes with serenity. What is a white dissident to do in an environment in which the talents of his people are so easily turned into springboards for cultural developments that annoy at best and brainwash at worst?
Well, we can turn towards subculture for some clues. Anyone who has attended a show for music on the. . . noisier side of the spectrum knows that there are extremists of all stripes heavily represented among the crowds. The Left tends to enjoy more straight-up noise and nu-industrial groups, whereas the Right can be found in numbers at neofolk events, old-school industrial shows, and black metal concerts. There is an inescapable appeal to the contrarian-minded — or at least aware — person that can be had in music that is inherently exclusionary at its most basic forms. The average person cannot be convinced to enjoy music that hurts their ears or breaks all of the rules that they are accustomed to. Subcultures can create their own ingroups of people based on shibboleths and common understanding, whether it is an explicit ingroup of those who enjoy that kind of music or ingroups formed based upon mutual overlapping interests. Generally speaking, someone that is interested in the same kind of extreme music as you is highly likely to have other inclinations that align with your own.
The latter example is likely the most important one, as it affords valuable insight into the realm of optics and viability. Shared apolitical interests among a group of people with similar values afford a useful veil of plausible deniability and sustained cultural relevance because it gives them a place to meet and face forward to the public without concern for retaliation. Of course, once people catch wind that Nazis like a certain thing, efforts will be made to cancel it — but this strategy doesn’t have the same sticking power in the eyes of the general public. The best example I can think of is the eternal Death in June, a group that has spawned so much hilarious hair-tearing from the Left over their fanbase and public statements, yet remains socially acceptable to be a fan of. Why is that?
For one, it is important to remember that Death in June still remains a relatively obscure group. Really, all of neofolk is safe from the tendrils of culture distortion or heavy scrutiny because it remains a niche interest, albeit one with enough numbers for its fans to back each other up. Attacking a subculture that hasn’t bothered anyone is a tough sell to normies; in their eyes, the people who turn up at these concerts are a little odd at best and a little occult at worst. There is also useful plausible deniability at work within these contexts. Nobody — in their right mind, at least — shows up to these events to proclaim the new ethnostate. Rather, one can attend safe in the knowledge that you’ll meet some like-minded individuals in attendance, and still have a credible claim to knowing nothing about any of that.
Consider this not a consignment to the fringe, however. The goal of the Dissident Right is for our ideas to become hegemonic, but hegemony is not often reached through the channels of pop culture. Just the opposite, in fact. It was on the fringe that industrial music developed, one of the world’s most influential musical forms; it was on the fringe that 4chan developed the lexicon for today’s Internet; it was inside smokey secret meetings of the Thule Society that the framework of National Socialism was first developed. The intelligent people of the world seek no approval.
The same people who are repulsed by the mind-numbing and soul-crushing mendacity of the modern world and its mass-produced “culture” are the ones who have the brainpower to talk about big ideas and set them into motion. Revolutionary thinking does not exist in a vacuum of philosophy; it goes hand-in-hand with an unshakeable feeling of being out of place and time. To be driven underground in circumstances like this is not an act of cowardice, or even submission — it is both the smart and right thing to do.
The sounds that drone on ad nauseum from the radio were not made for us, nor are they a useful breeding ground for our ideas. We have no need to attempt to salvage them because we know how easily they can be subverted and we do not wish to court those who find them exciting. What, then, is to be our musical tradition, if we are ever to have one? Much ink has been spilled over this question, with answers that I quite frankly find tepid and uninteresting. Classical music is not for everyone in these circles. I have been known to cause controversy by calling opera decadent and bourgeoise. Mr. Bond is funny for like, five minutes. What do we have, then?
We can look to the past for our old folk melodies, which have retained their charm and numinousness, though they are somewhat dated. Beyond their own artistic merit, these old songs had a quality to them that is not easily replicated in any music intended for a large audience. European folk songs were sung from one person to another, and were handed down over time through an oral tradition that was inherently limited to one group. The second one considers whether or not their artistic endeavors will have appeal to anyone but themselves and their own close circle, they open the door to creating art that loses its soul.
We talk often of the need for the Right to begin making its own art. Many people on our side already make great music to share within our circles. But much of this is hosted on hostile platforms, and as we’ve seen recently, our endeavors on there can be wiped clean at the drop of a hat. I propose a somewhat radical answer to the question of what music on the Right ought to look like. I say that we keep it to ourselves. We share it with each other, face to face, and we hold our own events and concerts, the contents of which we can keep a little secret from the outside world. It was in this way that the primitive, yet striking music of our forefathers was passed around, and such a strategy clearly does not preclude our mark on history from being recorded.
The New Right’s goal of injecting our ideas into the mainstream can very easily be mistaken for a desire to become mainstream ourselves. That is not necessary at this stage in the culture war. We understand that groups of people have a desire to belong to an us that opposes a them. We don’t make an effort to convince the them to join us; instead, we simply wait for other people to start knocking on the door and asking to join. An attempt to distill the messages of the Right into mainstream mediums risks creating something that doesn’t quite get the point across, whether it’s mired in edgy humor or coated in brain-melting pop cliches. Those you put together for your guys in your city? Well, that’s something of your own; the exact opposite of what the people in charge want for you and us.
Changing the world doesn’t always require the approval of the masses. Frankly, the approval of the masses seems to be the mark of death upon any cultural movement. If some of the greatest upheavals in human history were initially sketched out in private before being thrown upon the masses once they’re perfected, then we ought to do the same.
There is a lot to chew on when one considers the history, methods, and consequences of mass communications. Pop music is but one facet of the whole thing. Don’t let this discourage you from enjoying what little of it is pleasant to our ears, but by all means, consider the significance of such an act. This world is a cruel one, and we are all in a fight that will require a healthy dose of unorthodoxy and esoteric sensibilities. Sometimes, we may even feel like we’re losing our minds in a death struggle against some of the evilest forces in the universe.
To that, I suggest you buy an instrument and write a song about it. Relish in the shadows, for we’ll soon have our day in the light.
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6 comments
Neofolk strikes me as dreary, repetitive and generally afflicted with substandard production and vocals. Actual folk music, for example the dark Child Ballads, might be more rewarding.
But why bother with any of this when we already have our own glorious musical heritage stretching from Palestrina to Richard Strauss? Ignore the hipsterish lionisation of anti-music such as that of Stockhausen, Cage or Varèse and dive into the three Bs: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.
Their work stands head and shoulders above all popular and modernist dross and once you develop your ear you will disdain the efforts of lesser minds and lower cultures.
You beat me to this comment. I discovered classical music when I was very young, thanks to my parents, and because I developed an ear for it early on, I get easily bored with music that is not sufficiently complex. I want to hear unpredictable chord modulations, counterpoint, multiple movements, expansive structures, etc. If we compare music to architecture, a Beethoven symphony is like the Parthenon and a pop song like the local prefab strip mall.
Like you, I too generally abhor the modernist tendencies. Though I cherish true innovation and sophistication in music, innovation for the sake of innovation, and complexity for the sake of complexity, are a waste of time. I think, besides the fact that we live in an age of overall decay, it gets down to the issue of composers being overly concerned with trying to be original. I compose symphonies and concertos myself, and in my writing I try to combine the best of the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and even Modern eras — though my emphasis is decidedly upon the first three, and with regards to the latter, I generally do not move beyond dissonance within an overall tonal structure.
What do you guys think about Gordon Lightfoot?
One of my favorite songs
https://youtu.be/K7NMvpZ3PM0
I like Gordon Lightfoot very much. He sang so many well-crafted songs, with beautiful melodies and intelligent lyrics. “Early Morning Rain,” “Rainy Day People,” “Summer Side of Life” and “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” are among my favorites. Can you imagine the average “pop star” singing something like the latter? Or any of these, really?
Love Gordon Lightfoot! Sundown is one of my favorites too, but there’s nary a boring song of his greatest hits collection. I like how he does these historical ballads like the Edmund Fitzgerald and the Northwest railroad. You don’t hear much of him anymore on the radio, but when I was young he got significant air time
It used to be the case that music (and culture more generally) was *local.* grunge sounded like Seattle; punk sounded like New York; bluegrass still sounds like Appalachia; original metal sounded like the North of England. A genre is born when a local musical aesthetic gets mass-ized. It is turned into something nonlocal and therefore more subject to subversion.
Ages ago I concluded that the solution to nearly all the problems we face is relocalization. The local is the very thing our enemy most wishes to destroy, by its nature it is impenetrable to him. I think the more we can encourage our people to relocalize production of everything, including culture, the greater chance we have of getting more of our people through this population bottleneck.
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