Wow.
That was my reaction — after laughing out loud — on seeing this video:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the culture-war, I shall fear no opinion that resounds with absolute certainty…
Look, I’ve spent my whole life listening to music that’s stuffed to the gills with all manner of devil imagery, but there’s something surreal and unnerving about the sheer spectacle — and audacity — of Kim Petras and Sam Smith’s performance at the 2023 Grammy awards ceremony.
It’s almost as if it were a kind of shot across the bow in the culture war, almost daring people to take the bait, people who are already convinced that mainstream American culture — particularly the entertainment industries — are a haven for Satanic forces seeking to manipulate and control us and use their platforms as a kind of hypnotizing medium.
I have no comment on that specifically — other than: the Smith-Petras devil routine was either an act of complete tone-deafness or an act of laser-focused provocation with a middle finger extended towards a good half of the U.S. population. Sure, t-shirts depicting way more overtly Satan-friendly imagery were sold at Hot Topic stores in malls across the U.S.A. as far back as thirty years ago, but the Grammy organizers had to know that a huge swathe of the audience was, rightly or wrongly, going to feel provoked by all this devil stuff being given such a visible platform.
And the “brought to you by Pfizer” adds the perfect cherry on the cake to the absurdity of it all.
As usual, it seems to me that the people freaking out about this performance and the people shrugging it off as harmless fun both have it wrong. But what the hell do I know — more and more, people who speak with certainty appear to me to be the most lost. I mean, how the hell is it possible to find a sense of certainty from within a blizzard of distortions, propaganda, and media fragmentation that all adds up to so much noise it’s like having to drive in white-out conditions.
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We’re living in a funhouse, where seemingly every sliver of communication that reaches our eyes and ears is hurled from a specific angle, representing a specific agenda. We are the collateral damage in scorched-earth campaign of narrative warfare that has a way of self-amplifying — and, whether intentional or not, last night’s theatrical display was a grenade thrown into the fray.
Regardless of the intention, the result will be the same: the shrapnel of opinions flying in every direction such that yet another blow is struck against collective coherence.
To speak with any kind of conviction about the symbological and narrative-shaping mechanisms on display last night strikes me as a surrender of sorts. I mean, I just don’t see how on earth anyone could walk away from that performance and feel anything other than confusion.
Symbols, by definition, convey hidden meaning that registers at sub-conscious levels, even when those symbols are invoked flippantly. Whatever the hell the point of all that pointy-headed, red-themed song and dance was — if there even was a point in the first place — it’s guaranteed to cause ripples of apprehension and defensiveness amongst an already-traumatized populace that’s become accustomed to living on-edge in a perpetual state of hyper-vigilance, to see one another as a threat to each other’s way of life.
And it’s not like it’s very well hidden that these events have become sales pitches for a set of values. It was so blatant there may as well have been a ticker across the bottom of the screen that read WE ARE TRYING TO INFLUENCE YOU...
Again, I’ve listened to — and continue to listen to — tons of stuff that makes the Smith-Petras’ number pale in comparison. I think music can serve a purpose when it truly scares people and threatens the foundations of our social assumptions. And even if it doesn’t serve a purpose, art is going to do that anyway. Artists are going to scare us — that’s part of their job, like it or not.
Still, I can’t help but feel there was something reckless and incendiary about the way last night’s broadcast was choreographed, like it was either meant to touch a nerve, or the organizers (mis)calculated that touching nerves wouldn’t come with grave consequences.
Not that the outrage isn’t amusing too! But there was something chilling in listening to MSNBC host Joy Reid present the Grammy ceremony as a victory for diversity, proudly chirping that “the culture wars are over — and the Left won!”
I wonder how many generals and top-level officers felt confidence like Reid’s as the U.S. began to hunker down in Vietnam, cocky and secure in all our might and weapons and righteousness, the fearsome ability of our nation’s war machine to vanquish enemies that our most senior military minds saw as inferior.
Of course, they were wrong, and the error of their hubris is still being felt generations later. (Not that we’ve learned anything from it.)
In war, alas, sometimes one side discovers all too late that it hasn’t properly assessed the terrain, that the “other side” is fighting in a style that can leave even the most powerful of armies vulnerable. That the other side is fighting in ways that aren’t visible to large, ungainly, overconfident armies accustomed to different rules of engagement.
Joy Reid, like so many of her talking-head peers, oozes with a smugness that verges on parody — only it’s hard not to get the impression that it’s a malicious parody, and that the joke’s actually on us. I don’t understand how anyone — regardless of their views — could watch her hiss and preen without feeling mocked.
She addresses her audience as if her network bosses have assured her that the audience is too brainless, too desperate to know any better. It’s as if her bosses had issued an edict, “Speak as if God is on your side — so that every word that comes out of your mouth rings with an almost Biblical authority. Speak in a way that leaves zero room for doubt. Speak in absolute terms as if you and your followers are the only ones who know Truth.”
Gee, what could go wrong when we start to gravitate to people who speak like that, huh?
Yea, though I walk through the valley…