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[Trigger Warning: the content of this blog post discusses negative feelings that are associated to suicide, substance abuse, domestic violence, and other human actions in our social life that are considered taboo, deviant, or perverse. The author cautions anyone who exhibits these tendencies or has related traumas to be careful if engaging the blog post. Please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at (800) 273 – 8255 if you are feeling suicidal thoughts.] Cries from Desolate Worlds: Dystopia and the Negation of Redemption – A Review Conceptual map of this heretical-thinking-in-process-with-Dystopia:
“The toilet is clogged in this world of shit.” I don’t remember the time I first encountered Dystopia. I probably came across their album design for Human = Garbage in my late teens searching for music on YouTube. I cannot express in words the feelings Dystopia generated in my youth. Such abhorrence for capitalism, industry, and environmental degradation in music, especially Punk music, was unknown to me. It was Dystopia that led me to other musical genres of the same thread, what is called “crust punk” or “grindcore” or “noise.” Dystopia changed me in ways I can’t fully describe, but here I want to—to re-encounter a band whose misanthropic nihilism inflects itself in me at times in my occasional futile yearning for optimism. In this writing I review their music, lyrics, and aesthetics to conceptualize useful frames of thinking, feeling, and disaffecting from naïve assurances that we can “save” the Earth. It is to learn from an incendiary and experimental sludge metal band whose bleak outlook of the world phenomenologically shows how a negation of redemption is full of potentiality, if not a lyrical space to re-generate theories of emancipation as imperative in the now. For most of Dystopia’s time as a band (from 1991 to 2008) their primary record label would be Life is Abuse/Misanthropic Records. They emerged from Oakland, California and consisted of many members who walked in and out, the consistent members being Dino Sommese, Matt Parrillo, and Todd Kiessling. Dystopia would play with various bands of similar sounds at shows and would collaborate on 7-inch and 12-inch vinyl/CD splits with Skaven, Grief, Suffering Luna, and Embittered. In their DIY aesthetic, Dystopia would self-release some music, many demos or live compilations being released on cassette. Their time making music and playing music is hardly recorded, documented, or has an archive—some of their live appearances are uploaded to internet sites such as YouTube, or old Punk blogs. If the reader has gotten this far to read what I have to say about an obscure band outside of popular music, then I implore you to give them a try, to listen to the noise, their heavy, slow, guttural sounds. I ask that you play some of their tunes. Now that we got that out of the way, let us think for a moment on the name “dystopia.” Opposite to “utopia” is “dystopia” and it comes to signify a kind of post-apocalyptic or desolate condition that endures physical, mental, and spiritual suffering or violence. Perhaps used here as metaphor or a what I want to call an apocalyptic realism, “dystopia” as noun and name designates an imaginary of futile real conditions that accelerate and intensify—and it’s with this name that Dystopia calls us into their own apocalyptic realism to see the dominant world in motion: a death-world. In this way, we are now situating Dystopia and the abstractions via concepts to show in what ways that Dystopia incarnates its image of the world, and for me it’s the modern Western civilization that they are speaking to. Let’s start with Human = Garbage, their debut 12-inch record album, with an original five-track EP listing, released in 1994. Human = Garbage forges Dystopia’s first lyrical pessimism of the world made by “humans.” It’s here in this album that they articulate what I coin from their lyrical capacities a misanthropic nihilism. Misanthropy is defined as the general hatred of “humanity” as category, identity, and verb. It is contempt for the species we call Homo sapiens. Misanthropy carries with it a loaded formulation between “hatred” and “anthropos” that signals in its usage the negative feelings or attitude towards “Man” or the actual species themselves. Its negativity is marked by an ambiguous yet clear idea that the Homo sapiens present a problem in the world due to their “nature” or “behavior.” I am not personally one to think this way, but it is a philosophical position that entrenches Dystopia’s general attitude: the general hatred of humanity due to their human activities. Yet, their misanthropy is a unique one as it couples with nihilism. I cannot due justice here on the definitional character of misanthropy, nor of nihilism. So please bear with me my brief sketches. Nihilism is defined as the philosophical perspective that rejects any essence or fundamental character of “human” existence, or of the existence of Homo sapiens. Nihilism generates the viewpoint that “life” as a category is meaningless, that any epistemology is impossible, and that values that human cultures hold is without base. Nihilism is the zero-degree philosophy that un-thinks itself and produces a nothingness. It’s this formulation between misanthropy and nihilism that articulates the misanthropic nihilism of Dystopia: life rendered meaningless is in debt to human activity—thus, it is human cultures that produce the conditions of negating life as meaningful. For me, misanthropic nihilism is a perspective or conviction that is engendered by the human condition itself in a capitalist world bent on death, violence, and suffering for the relative positives of profit, development, and pleasure for the few. It is a response from those from below to the ruins of modern Western civilization. Dystopia surges the feelings of this philosophy, as the turn of the twenty-first century endures climate catastrophe at a scale unimaginable yet is very much real. Human = Garbage begins with the song “Stress Builds Character” with the voice of Dino expressing a suicidal string of utterances that speak directly to Capital’s workings and the “human” feeling such despair. “The things I see go unnoticed by some, fill my eyes with horror.” As the song progresses beyond the monologue of Dino’s desperate voice for salvation, asking God for help, and receiving no love, the next screaming voice of Dino asserts: “Life’s been swell, now I want to die / My body it hurts me, sigh after sigh / I call it torture, you call it life / A slave to money and everything I despise / Like everyone is general / Fuck, eat, sleep, destroy…” Dystopia’s misanthropic nihilism starts to become clear, as is now the negation of redemption that I hinted to earlier above at the start. Dystopia’s interpretation of “Fuck, eat, sleep, destroy” shows us how they view human activity, as a continuous consumption that results in auto- and collective-destruction. “Stress Builds Character” speaks to the human condition entangled in the web of Capital, the body unable to seek relief from its overbearing power and violence, seeping into the psyche a violent feeling of auto-destruction. “All these pressures on my life.” The end of “Stress Builds Character” then turns to other songs that show the negation of redemption. “Hands That Mold” invokes an explicit poetics that speaks directly to other related themes such as environmental catastrophe and the death-world that is accelerating on Earth. It’s in this song that we start to see their technological pessimism and the related anti-humanism (coded as humanicide) that expresses how the Homo sapiens should not have evolved, as technology has enhanced life-killing capacities. “Build and build and build some more / Industry fucks nature like some kind of whore / quest for invention, intelligence gone too far / synthetic environment, we’re doomed from the start.” As we see here, the advances of Capital coupled with human invention are what is problematic for Dystopia. The rest of the songs on the album address suicide, homicide, substance abuse, sadism/masochism, and the doom realities of our current civilization. At the heart of the album lies the refusal for and of “God’s” help, lost to a feeling that the isolation, estrangement, and alienation of the human condition is self-imposed and engenders a violence for meaning wrecked by a collective ensemble of behaviors that has led us to our predicament of planetary collapse. As we shall see in the other albums, Dystopia’s poetics orient us to how humans are coping with “life” (structures of death) through addiction (substance abuse) as we encounter the realities of a planetary future as an imminent miserable catastrophe—as it has always been a possibility if not already a reality for poor, Black, Indigenous, migrant, and refugee populations around the world. For us considering this diagnosis, how do we construct viable imperatives to build another world of life, joy, and meaningfulness? Let us ponder the question. I turn to now Dystopia’s second 12-inch record The Aftermath. This four-track LP is a devastating critique of Capital that re-inserts their prescient views from a misanthropic nihilism. The album starts with the scathing sounds of “Population Birth Control” that edges a rhetorical flourish of existential anguish by describing the desolation of our system. “Father’s Gun” illustrates the desperation of a “dead son” who commits suicide. “Self-Defeating Prophecy” portrays the life of an individual faced with mental health issues, someone trying to articulate their pain. The last song, “Sleep,” is another first-person narrative of “longing my own desire” and the looming death of one’s life. Together, this album portrays the first-person existential suffering that the first album demonstrates too. Here we feel another poetics seeped in the themes we’ve encountered, with a feeling of total despair. The Aftermath was a minor, piercing lyrical flourish to predict what was to come. “Searching for my soul / Through the chasms of my mind.” Dystopia’s last and final album is a self-titled record that was released in 2008. Dystopia is an original seven-track LP that speaks against the grain of the digital age or the internet. A masterpiece of their genre, Dystopia is the accumulation and culmination of a mature perspective that entrenches their more analytical expressions. With the first song “Now and Forever” the band does an unsuspected experiment by delivering a sample of Eckhart Tolle’s diagnosis of ideology. With an eerie beginning, Dystopia opens a slow and noisy album—invoking paranoia. “Take a long look at the past to unlock a greater future / Sift through the wreckage of failures / In the hope to make things better / Like more efficient ways to kill in the name of human progress / How to crawl and crush the will / So that no one dares to question.” “Now and Forever” makes the listener feel a deep sorrow, how many human cultures tend to recapitulate the violence rendered through civilizational terrors. Exploring the horrors of the internet, “Control All-Delete” exacerbates their technological pessimism. Other songs ring themes of substance abuse, slow death, mental health, and the illusions of “God’s” grace—again we see how the negation of redemption presents itself. What is new is the critique of U.S. imperialism and the Bush Administration—a terror held in these lines: “Rape and conquest feed your kids.” The threshold of Dystopia’ lyrical diagnosis of our human and other-than-human condition is rooted in their misanthropic nihilism, yet the stark conceptual map that they enable are not without us thinking about or taking action. Their images are not fiction—their apocalyptic realism is in the real as actuality, not potentiality of modern Western civilization. Why is Dystopia then useful for Xican@ heretical thinking? For one, they demonstrate the alienated world we encounter through unimaginable violence that we might take for granted, as we are consumed by an image that makes us think otherwise. For me, I take from Dystopia’s poetics a general and specific formulation of an anti-civilizational critique through feelings, affect, expressive depression, and destroying hope as generative concept. As we have seen, their conception of the human falls closer to how theorists such as Michel Foucault, Sylvia Wynter, or posthuman thinkers like Rosi Braidotti speculate as the human being overrepresented by Western Man. Thus, their anti-humanism suggests an otherwise engagement of humanicide as the ontological suicide of humanism. They disenchant the “Human” as a category in their negation of redemption—in doing so, other forms of Homo sapient life must take place—and in my estimation it will take place in the liberation of the animal, a shadow in the poetics of Dystopia unexplored here. As we edge the end of this writing, we must differentiate between Dystopia’s misanthropic nihilism and other forms of related philosophical views, to assert how Dystopia is not eco-fascist. I want to make this clear because while crust punk, grindcore, powerviolence, and other related genres between Punk and Metal create lyrics with the same imagery, band members themselves are not committed to nor practice the crimes against humanity nor the Earth that they themselves critique. Unlike eco-fascists, Dystopia does not assert in practice that humans as Homo sapiens should be exterminated by other human forces organized to do so. Rather, Dystopia creates a poetics of anti-humanism because of modern Western civilization that functions more as metaphysical critique than it does the imperative to build eco-fascist structures to kill discriminately certain groups of Homo sapiens. To think otherwise here is to distort the poetics and lyrical value of Dystopia. I want to make clear what I am not doing here in this writing. What I am not doing is saying we must fully be in conviction with Dystopia’s power to illustrate a misanthropic nihilism. This will not get us free. Rather, I only hope that we might encounter Dystopia to help us think, if not try to build other forms of being/becoming that does not reproduce the horrors they spell out. As with Xican@ heretical thought, it is an encounter with futility, with horror, and with the terrifying world that makes us, breaks us, and scatters us that we must become another force of production that brings it full stop. Dystopia must inspire us to action, not generate us into numbing fatalisms. For us in La Xicanada, we must encounter an apocalyptic realism to ensure what we struggle for are not the same systems that dominate us—and we know it in our hearts that this is not what we desire, however nameless our desires might be. “This has been built for you and me / Maniacal annihilation machine / Using fear to keep you in control / ‘Everyone else is the terrorist’ / That’s what you’ve been sold / And do you buy it? / Yes, you fucking do!” My desire to write this review was to think with bands that have inspired me—so expect more from other optimistic groups too. I hope I was able to do the same (to inspire the reader), and if not, perhaps I failed. Let us imagine with a power that overwhelms Capital, perhaps that is the way, or maybe it’s not. What we can’t do is expect life to revert to “normal” as if it ever was, part of a teleology classical Marxists thought would occur with progress or what the Frankfurt School could not think: actual and generative liberation. For the reader who sees no apocalyptic realism in sight, unconvinced by my musings: “Click here for serenity.” Heresy sometimes takes the form of disrupting optimism. Don’t lose hope, my reader. A politics of emancipation must invite perspectives that sometimes don’t see the light—darkness, and gloom, sharpens our wisdom. Don’t fall into the abyss of horror. As Angela Davis said long ago: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” I hope that this brief sketch of Dystopia prompts you to listen. From the putrid beaches of poisoned lands, With offshore formations drilling for oil, The Central Coast of California. White Mountain Rabbit
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