War

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2019-11-01

Label: H.V.R.F. CENTRAL COMMAND

In 1909, Edward Bradford Titchener invented empathy while working with American Psychological Association in collaboration with the CIA to develop enhanced interrogation on a mass scale. Today we live in not a simulation but a spectacle. Democracy is reality's spectacle. That doesn’t make sense, which is why it's so abject. Entertainment media is exemplary of the spectacle/reality duality of our neoliberal/capitalist dilemma because it’s the peak of humanity’s paradoxical desire to signify our independent & free subjectivity through the latent data within objects & economies that subsequently enslave us. We as consumers of any type of good perform the surplus & non-paid labor of researching, choosing and displaying our purchased choices. The less utility value an object has, the more surplus value it requires the consumer to generate. High fashion, fine art, entertainment media are peak surplus-dependency.

As time and production data progresses & accelerates, we see the "prosumer" diffuse to the average consumer and then below the poverty line to non-consumers, who are then integrated back into the surplus value cycle. While the spectacle/reality duality was clearly delineated before, “Gucci sells a spectacle to the rich and slave labor in China & Africa make the spectacle a reality," we now see an accelerating crashing between the two sides, the spectacular attempting to brand itself as “ethical” while reality continues to tear down & mitigate the wall between what is real & spectacular. In the 00’s, Gucci survived off the surplus value of privilege. In the 10’s, there's more value to be found in “gloing up & getting rich" than “growing up & being wealthy," the latter being civilization’s core drive for countless centuries.

Non-music and extremely left-field experimental art on a meta-conceptual level toys with exploiting the line between capital/utopia. The hand-maiden of reality's spectacle tries making it big in whatever is mainstream, but off the beaten path one finds a long course leading the dismantling of reality’s spectacle through spectacle itself. Everyone has to learn the proper tools of the trade to do everything "right,” or else learn the history of doing it “wrong” as to ensure not to retread what's already been achieved along the course of dismantling, because there's no value in that. Capital has far more reach in appropriating non-capital and integrating it back into capital, but artists working one step ahead of these expectations serve as an example to others, and in that process exploit capital, thereby turning the system on its head- creating value from wisdom & knowledge rather than slavery & exploitation.