I like that it's ham fisted. A lot of punk is ham fisted and blunt. Part of IDLES appeal is that we can just have brash angry music about progressive beliefs without having to make it artsy and dressed up in metaphors and self doubt and fully painted pictures that illuminate the humanity on all sides. That's fine, but it's not in short supply. Sometimes we just feel disgust and want an outlet for that for 3 minutes, not something that tempers my mood to lead me to understanding.
Back in 2006 - 2013 I definitely enjoyed his narcissism as an ultimately harmless source of entertainment and a way to hype yourself and get a boost of energy.
These days I fucking hate this guy.
Anyone that complains about Bernie not being "a member of the democratic party" is revealing they think about this the way we think about sports teams, not fighting for values and ideas. It's not "Team Blue" it's "Team Universal Healthcare," "Team Livable Wage," "Team End of War on Drugs."
On #2: I remember Obama vs. Clinton being absolutely relentless. Clinton started to feel the heat and decided to press the Reverend Wright issue. That type of low blow would've been unforgivable, except one of them eventually won and incorporated the other. In the intervening years both sides eventually came together. But the mocking of Hillary-or-bust voters and the bewilderment about riding hard for watered down centrist policies was alive back then and there's no reason it should've been off-limits in 2016.
A less delusional person would've said "I've learned my lesson, I'm going to think long and hard about my projects and maybe stick to what I'm good at or go slow & steady."
These guys, learning nothing, went "WE CAN STILL BE LEGENDS LET'S BUILD A CITY IN 12 MONTHS"
I feel like this was bound to happen sometime in the music festival boom. Someone with no qualifications or experience except a grandiose vision of luxury and leisure tricks a bunch of people to go to a remote festival that doesn't even exist. But at least they got the aesthetic and marketing down! That's the fun stuff.
Like the TLOP cover, it's imitatable. People will be making their own memes in this style soon enough, and I think that has some kind of value. It becomes its own distinct style and language -- no one's making parodies of the TPAB cover, but you see people redo the TLOP cover allt he time.
The lesson that people take *is* that the US immigration system is vastly complicated -- and that's the problem. It's completely unaccessible and the proper channels don't match up with the realities of the modern industry. It's easy to say, "Just get a P-1 visa" and people will think that means you fill out a 10 page form and wait a month. It's harder to explain that you need $460 plus an immigration lawyer fee if you want to be sure you're doing it right, enough press clippings to convince an examiner that doesn't read Stereogum that your band is notable, all of your show dates at indie venues planned out with signed deal memos, and ways to prove vague notions of prestige like commercial "success" and "starring" roles in "distinguished" "productions." No wonder people try to skirt that nightmare by rolling the dice with customs at the border.
Now imagine you're not an indie band, you're just someone that was brought to the US as a kid and there's not even a "proper channel" available to you. The immigration system is a nightmare and this sudden uptick in cancelled SXSW performers should distribute that news.
I don't even think of it as a "don't feed the trolls" thing, if he's doing something illegal I'm sure the attention from NYDN and TMZ have it covered. I just find it perplexing that the alternative media is going along with it too. Anything Shkreli does = news has become such an automatic standard that we're turning him into a regular music institution. How far are we from a big music blog interviewing him for his opinions on today's music like he's a music crit figure? He's sitting on a hard drive of unreleased music, and whenever he feels like his Twitch numbers are low he's going to play a minute of it, and we're all cool posting The Latest From Martin Shkreli?
Like, people get annoyed when Father John Misty makes a funny instagram post and it's on every blog for a week. At least FJM makes something! At least he's a creator! At least Azealia Banks had an album!
If we really hate this guy, why do we have to dedicate a whole front page post to him every time he makes a squeak? At what point do we realize he's playing snippets for the attention and every time his face is plastered on the front of every major music news site, he's a little bit closer to getting his own E! series?
>It's a joke about how the left were so concerned with treating everyone like special little snowflakes that they lost enough of their core supporters to lose the election
How is this the most obvious conclusion instead of the dozens of other reasons that were just as easily weaknesses? What makes Hillary Clinton the SJW candidate more than Bernie Sanders, a guy who willingly gave spotlight and mic time to Black Lives Matter? It's like people are so worked up about what college kids are up to today that they want to make it the scapegoat and snuff it out entirely. Nevermind the Clinton trust issues, her huge unfavorability ratings, voter suppression, we're going to pin this squarely on too much hippie shit!
In my metaphor liberalism isn't the ship, it's anti-racism/anti-sexism. The idea being, gender fluidity is all well and fun when you're winning but once you get some push back from the center and center-right it's time to tolerate less.
Even that op-ed pays the faintest concern for class with barely a mention. It is 99% griping about how the author chafes at observing all this identity politics around him he didn't have to be aware of before.
A class-based critique of identity politics would look more like this http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/what-ny-times-op-ed-writer-mark-lilla-gets-wrong-about-identity-liberalism which, in too many words not all of which i'd say myself, at least acknowledges that all sides play identity politics and pins identity anxiety as a symptom of capitalism's degradation of common good, rather than writing it off altogether.
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