#353

Oh shit! From a Monday to a Tuesday, Factually Pointless updates. Been a while! Someone must be excited about

FACTUALLY MUSICAL GODDAM FUCKIN TWENNY TWENNY FREEEEEEEE

today we get going immediately. Strap the fuck in.

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Debating over whether this post should shoulder the issue of morality as it relates to the consumption of music, which is of course the conversation as it relates to not only art but every sphere of human activity for some fucking reason. 

But like do we realize yet how truly catastrophically fucked up morality is yet? Can't we see, even though the examples play out daily on our little screens? Music is a great example, filled with examples and counterexamples.

Jesus, I guess we're doing this. 

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Some people disagree off the bat that every person has a right to life. I hold the view that all do, as well as everything that exists has a right to exist as close to the expiration of its natural durability as humanly (myself being human, ecce homo indeed, all that) possible. Naturally, we kill and destroy just to survive, just to draw the next breath. That's strike one for this kind of broadly understood "killing is wrong" morality that everyone pretends to agree with but ignores, which is fine because we have to kill to live. And over and over, as history and its functions destroy billions and the empires that spawned them. 

Anyway some people would think that it is correct and natural that a certain percentage of human beings are born bad and wrong and irredeemable, and that because we are good, we can have wars against one kind of bad person and imprison and enslave another kind of bad person and keep a third and fourth and fifth or however many bad people in society but lower down where they belong, and then better people to manage things, and the really good people who deserve it on top.

Sound good? Guess I hope it does, cause that's every stupid childish fucking agricultural society that's ever existed. They were almost all bad, and they have all collapsed eventually because they were stupid like this about morality. They built their shit with it, and it grew up big, but they built it with stuff that goes moldy and degrades and they built on shifting sands and the whole fucking thing was doomed from the start. Get me? 

Alternately, it may be that there is no good and evil, and we are all the same, and we have no right to try to harm each other or fuck up the world. Because knowing that we are imperfect and natural, we have the opportunity to be careful in the real sense; conscientous in our ignorance and power and the tension between life and destruction. And we keep making societies and people lead amazing lives despite everything within them and around them and benath them because life is life and life goes on and even saying a society was bad is fucking nonsense because it was just set dressing and variable conditions for the human condition, which is glorious and perfect in its horrible imperfection. A process, a cycle, a remixing, a recomposition of elements, themes, structures, repetitions, crescendoing and decrescendoing and fading into silence to start up again.

Yes, music is like that too, that is my point, thank you, yes. Do not pat me on the cheek or back, thank you.

People, maybe, are complicated kinds of songs, playing out a symphony for some unimaginable mind.

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So we decide to stop listening to music because it turns out a person is bad, or we defend our music to the death because a person is good, no matter what.

Look, I'm gonna do the hard, fast, gross, and maybe kind of mean version of this, because I've just realized that despite having been up since four and fed cats twice and washed the dishes and played pkmnViolet version for a couple hours, sure, I have not had breakfast.

Do whatever the fuck you want. The whole thing is corrupt and irredeemable. The process of recording music is evil in and of itself for the resources it consumes and the cultural production and monetization of art is tied into everything from sexual slavery to state propaganda. There is no way to be good in this life. You cannot be good. I am not good. The president and the pope are both not good. Jesus was not good. Your mom and dad are not good--this one might not be so much of a shocker--but the big reveal is that they couldn't have been good even if they were a million billion times better than they were, because existing is a crime if morality is real. You don't have to defend or attack anyone, and it's no one's business what you fucking like, really.

Also, the extent to which the whole song and dance is gossip and how massively quantitatively and qualitatively persuasive yet patently false evidence can be easilty generated should make everyone profoundly suspicious of everything they see. Maybe the only real thing in this life is the actual music coming out of the actual speakers at the end of the malignant process and criminal act that is the generation of those sounds and the materials that produced them, that send them over a network over which fentanyl is sold and populations, subpopulations, and economies are destabalized and attacked, on which child pornography is distributed and where predators of every imaginable description trouble the waters every single second of every single day.

Maybe it's kind of stupid to wonder if it makes you a worse person, listening to Kanye West or David Bowie or Prince or Beatles or whatever. Reading a play by Artaud. These fuckin dudes. Anyway a lot of people are ready to say you are bad for looking at homosexual erotica and for being homosexual--does that track, or are there some problems with what we think, as a society, makes people good or bad? Maybe the problem is with those two categories in the first place?

Not saying it shouldn't fuck with you. Not saying anything shouldn't bother or outrage or trigger or arouse disgust in you that is righteous and correct, and I'm not saying anything agaist anyone protecting themselves from harm however they can, must, and need to. I say Do It. Boundaries and distances and hard passes and getting rid of shit completely are tools and they exist for a reason, there to be used. What I am saying is, gotta kill to eat, gotta eat to live, and everyone has a right to life. I'm saying, not a single one of us knows enough about anyone else's life or how the world works to truly understand anything even about our own lives, our own pasts, our own selves even and maybe especially deep down. I'm saying, there's no way for me to be better than anyone even if they've done terrible things I haven't, or don't believe I have, or don't believe I would, even if they're so outrageously opposed to what is tolerable and excusable to me personally that I cannot countenance them or let them go unopposed. That doesn't make them bad, or me good. 

There is no good and evil. The world is much more difficult than that fun storytime shit.

A better question maybe, in a direction more hopeful--and hope is, after all, life itself, fight me--would relate to the possibility and veracity of redemption, of growth, of values transforming and the transformation leading to cascading transformations. A better question has more to do with protecting and healing and communicating openly than with punishing and silencing and building walls. But I'm too hungry to go that way right now. Another time. 

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Missed Kaki King's 2020 album but now I have listened to it last Friday and finished it this morning and to me it is the best thing in that particular discography. I loved every moment of every song, which makes this my favorite of her albums. A steady builder of her powers and the craft itself, is Kaki King, with some powerful friends sitting in on the record that really push it radically beyond previous albums.

That's today's Music Opinion, brought to you by Factually Musical 2023. 

Peace out, I'm delirious (sick drop crashes over the audience, people go buck wild, dance mix continues)

--JL