chris††† social justice whatever

[Self-Released; 2017]

Rating: 4/5

Styles: “the worst album ever”
Others: 4chan, Reddit, Beat Detectives,

“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”
– Samuel Beckett

“Everything in the world exists in order to end up on the Web.”
– Kenneth Goldsmith

Half meme, half dream, social justice whatever ascends through the dark pipes of chatrooms straight into the light. This light is familiar, because it’s emitting from our desktops, where, with radiant nodes and clusters through which ideas churn, the internet, like the caul of a fetus, forms an eddy, a wide spindrift of downloadable content unstill, ever turning, beckoning us to sift and sow our souls all about this apparatus. And what do we do? We never log off. We stay at our desks forever. We scroll for the rest of our lives, commencing a comment-war with trolls for which there is no end, the tinges of racism and homophobia in its offing.

The Frog cries, and the Frog twerks. Chat rooms, snuff films, deep-web assassins, whistleblowers, pop music, torture chambers, child porno, Alex Jones. This is where we end up when we’re alive, but think we’re already dead. (Because we probably are.)

social justice whatever begins there, with a barrage of paratactic surges, lost cities of culture juxtaposed next to each other without any logical connectors. It doesn’t work in a linear or plot-driven way, but rather with a strong, vomitlike, and whirly centrifugal pull, yanking that which appears discrepant: the memes, the videos, the cartoon dialogues, the commercials, the vaporwave, the hullabaloo.

The album acts as a repository for internet culture and as a portent of how the internet distracts us from mobilizing, stunned online in our minds, frozen from the outside world, yet there, never not unable to be political, but just simply and overwhelmingly inactive about it. Because, for many, the internet comes before the world around us, as real as the reality behind reality & interchangeable like-life.

This is a personal history of how chris††† spent his time on the internet and how he digested how it seeps into our lives. It seduces, always on the radiant edge of knowability. It’s open, diffuse, multiple, complex, de-centered, filled with silence, filled with noise, incorporating difference and the Other and the undefinable, the subversive, the transgressive. It doesn’t want to be aesthetically pleasing. It is, as chris††† writes, “the worst album ever.”

Sample after sample, the album forms a kind of sign-system, in which several cultural phenomena arrive all wonky & comic, stripped of their power, derailed with their pastiche, separated from their time, fueled by their disjunction of their traditional utilitarian role, merely existing as another hubcap of junk in the heap to be picked out and spruced up and thought about once again — in these new weirdo digs — surrounded by other curious undead snippets.

Did an evil surgery occur while we were sleeping, offline?
Yes. Now watch it:

Eureka!

Some releases are so incredible we just can’t help but exclaim EUREKA! While many of our picks here defy categorization and explore the constructed boundaries between ‘music’ and ‘noise,’ others complement, continue, or rupture traditions that provide new forms and ways of listening. Not all of our favorites will be listed here, but we think each EUREKA! album is worthy of careful consideration. This section is a work-in-progress, so expect its definition to be in perpetual flux.

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