Vapor, Substance, and All Points in Between: The Musical Phantasmagoria of Phteven Universe

Phteven Universe, for the uninitiated, is the musical project of Pilleater, one of the more individual and idiosyncratic racial thinkers to have carved out a niche for himself online. An original, challenging, confounding, and often obnoxious figure, Pilleater in his now substantial body of Alt-Leftish critical and creative work explores a wild frontier at the margin of the Alt-Right without ever really being of it, putting in occasional co-host appearances on Robert Stark’s Stark Truth podcast, writing books, and doing everything from comedic impressions of Alt-Right figures to music reviews on his frightening YouTube channel.

Pilleater

Musically, the oeuvre of Phteven Universe is not entirely separable from its creator’s perverted boutique ideology of “Asian Aryanism”. Even the name, referencing as it does a grotesque viral canine meme and a Japanese-influenced Cartoon Network TV series, is expressive of Pilleater’s interest in internet subcultures and Asiatic hybridism, conveying as well the sense of whimsy that characterizes much of Pilleater’s output.

The first, self-titled Phteven Universe album advertises itself as a vaporwave release – and there is certainly some memorable vaporwave on here – but to pigeonhole Phteven Universe as a vaporwave artist, while this perhaps is useful as a marketing niche, is to do a disservice to the eclecticism of the tracks. This one opens with effervescent waves of peace, melancholy, and inspiration wafting in with wetness and the sounds of birds – only then to plunge the listener into a morbid cityscape with soundbites expressing contempt for the soulless corporate mentality.

Then comes a sassy succession of late-80s-sounding Terminator-X-style hip-hop sounds and quaint computer noises. Keeping the scenery in flux, the album evokes a windswept expanse of blue desert followed by a slick retrofuturistic club beat, after which the listener is treated to a truly inspiring vapor track sampling the Commodores’ “Easy” over determined pulses of synth ascending into triumph. The vocal is spaced out – way out – so that the listener can believe it and feel it when told, “I wanna be high – so high.” This moment alone was so glorious that I actually felt a bit bad about having paid so little to own this awesome tape.

The second side of Phteven Universe is another eclectic nostalgia trip, launching from a disorienting opening into a sample of the once-ubiquitous “You’ve Got Mail” announcement and leading into an earnest, ballad-style piano number, followed by the inarticulate moan of a man ripped painfully out of a comfortable but no longer accessible past, both sad and soothing. Then the album gets crazy again and shifts into some oriental synth cutesiness followed in succession by slick, ritzy, high-rise vanilla elevator funk, a track with aggressive percussive elements resolving into a pastel chill session, and then “Fuck Off Melissa”, a nasty track evocative of a futuristic mutant sex club and reminiscent of Cabaret Voltaire of the era of The Crackdown.

The second release, おさかなといっしょ – which, if Google Translate can be trusted, comes out as “With Fish and Lettuce” – consists of a first side inspired by primitive video game soundtracks and a second side that recreates what I have to imagine a night out at the gay disco must have sounded like in the early nineties. It had me thinking of C+C Music Factory, but Pilleater is very particular and autistic about his club music obsessions and probably has something else altogether in mind. The creepier and more interesting first side, which apart from nostalgia bears no immediately apparent relationship to the second, gives the haunted impression of bad AM radio reception and a lonely, neglected vintage Nintendo game that seems to ask with a touch of menace, “Hey, kid … why don’t you play me anymore?”

Illicit, the third Phteven Universe release, opens with some busy, hectic, alien-sounding material somewhat reminiscent of Prodigy or Ministry’s classic “Stigmata”, warning the listener, “There is no future.” This is followed by more distorted video game sounds in keeping with the material on おさかなといっしょ, but this time mining a more baroque melodic vein. From here Illicit turns dark again, with chaotic, repetitive cacophony evocative of a malevolent universe. As eclectic as Phteven Universe, however, Illicit never settles into a single style for very long and progresses through guitar discordance, African chanting, more homoerotic club music after the fashion of おさかなといっしょ’s second side, some funky programming and S&M percussion, industrial sounds, high-NRG dance, and a disjointed jumble of childhood memories, blips and beeps, gothic electronica, KMFDM-style angst, and – most hilariously – a sample of Jamie Stewart’s Stark Truth appearance in which the Xiu Xiu artist hissily unleashes on the Alt-Right.

Side B continues with the eclecticism, getting underway with some pleasant hypnotica before launching into machine-gun-like percussion followed by more throbbing homo nightclub shenanigans. Next some breezy synth washes over an unobtrusive beat – one of the few soothing moments in Phteven Universe’s oeuvre – but the respite is brief, as the horizon darkens and gloomier tones return, followed by hip-hop and trance-like obsessions. It must be noted, too, that some of the ambient explorations and the disquieting ruminations on Illicit’s second side would seem to belie Pilleater’s cultivation of a clownish persona, so that the album is far from a mere hodgepodge of carnival weirdness. This is an album that at times expects and receives a listener’s serious attention. The creepy voice comes back again before Pilleater apostrophizes a “dream girl”, and ends on a bit of a Wendy Carlos note, with some classical synthesis.

Getting off to a fun start with some Moonman and dis rap samples and some soulful, moaning retard scat, Asian Girlfriend further develops the styles established on the previous Phteven Universe releases, with more naughty club thumping, baroque video-gamey electronica, discordant lo-fi dystopian cuteness, atmospheric electro-percussion worthy of old-school New Order, and more dark and whimsically primitive gaming, some of it sounding almost sentimental – or it would, at least, without the mutated robotic muttering over it. As with the previous albums’ smatterings of vocal passages, Pilleater seems not to be too concerned with whether or not the words are heard – except when it comes to needing help with his algebra homework; that bit gets the proper enunciation it deserves. The highlight of Asian Girlfriend, however, is easily the nasty dance number “Consent”. If you don’t like this one, it’s probably just because Pilleater can do, as he puts it, so many things – “and you’re just jealous!” The artwork alone would make Asian Girlfriend worth owning.

Phteven Universe, again, is much more than a vaporwave fad-follower; but Pilleater’s commentary on the sociopolitical significance of vaporwave is key to understanding what he is attempting with his music and new Apocalypse Culture. “At its core, the vaporwave genre nostalgically admires the past: VHS tapes, electronic synthesizers, retro-futuristic cars, vector grids, vintage arcade games, bad consumer products, Japanese culture, etc.,” he writes in his essay “Fashwave Sectarianism vs. Vaporwave Hegemony”. At the same time, he concludes, vaporwave is “the music of the future.”

If vaporwave is inherently reactionary, nostalgic, and retro-futurist, it is already Right-wing. The whole thing is Right-wing. Not just the fashwave secession. What I would like to see is a critical discourse that accompanies and interprets the vaporwave genre as an essentially anti-liberal art form sprung from a sincere longing for the future we were promised but denied, without cutting itself on edgy National Socialist and Evola memes. Sure, people will try to trot out Capitalism and Schizophrenia, but it’s up to us to call out such errors in thinking. It is up to us to construct a dominant anti-liberal paradigm to eventually turn vaporwave discourse, and the music itself, against the globalist nihilism and transhumanist philosophy of Eccojams and Floral Shoppe.

Fashwave is dead! Long live fashwave!

Do Pilleater’s Phteven Universe project and Apocalypse Culture revivalism lend themselves to the construction of this anti-liberal paradigm? As Varg might suggest … let’s find out!

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies – the DEFINITIVE Alt-Right statement on Hollywood!

 

 

White Girl ***1/2

Just when you thought the movie industry had hit rock bottom, along lumbers White Girl with its Jewish jackhammer to get at the rock beneath the rock. Following on the heels of American Honey (2016), White Girl exemplifies a long tradition of cinema that seeks to shock the sensibilities with its exposure of the wild rites of the rising generation – a genre that stretches from the earliest juvenile delinquent pictures up through the likes of Over the Edge (1979), River’s Edge (1986), Kids (1995), Bully (2001), Spring Breakers (2012), and Heaven Knows What (2014).

White Girl is yet another foray into the demimonde of ugly people in ugly clothes engaging in ugly, loveless dances and lewd acts to ugly, afro-degenerated soundtracks – with the difference that this entry makes its anti-white agenda totally explicit. Purporting to tell the true-life experiences of some lowlife named Elizabeth Wood, the story follows an Oklahoma City slut (Morgan Saylor) after she moves to New York – ostensibly in order to “study” – but instead uses her parents’ money to buy drugs and get into trouble.

Gazing longingly out the window of her apartment at a group of loitering mongrels, White Girl announces, “I’m gonna go get some” and so sets out on an odyssey of debauchery that will occupy the next eighty minutes or so. White Girl falls hard for hat-backwards barrio banger Blue (Brian Marc), who tenderly screws her against a wall. After Blue gets arrested, he trusts her to get his supply of dope back into the hands of his ruthless supplier; but, being the stupid White Girl that she is, she instead hopes to raise money for his legal defense by trying to move the powdered product herself – with inevitably catastrophic results.

Not worth watching more than once, White Girl is a nihilistic film that thrives on shocks and not much else.

3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that writer-director Elizabeth Wood should be institutionalized for her own protection and that White Girl is:

3. Media-skeptical. At the very least, White Girl presents a sobering picture of the species of undesirables who seek employment in the media. The idiot protagonist, the sort of lout produced by a lifetime’s ingestion of mainstream media poison, has gone off to New York to study writing and the “liberal arts”. White Girl’s sleazy magazine editor boss (Jewish actor Justin Bartha, playing a character with the distinctly goyische moniker Kelly), meanwhile, hopes to inflate the value of some worthless artwork he bought by spotlighting the artist (“Rambo”) with a special profile.

2. Pro-drug. The script halfheartedly makes a distinction between marijuana and harder drugs – “We just smoke weed every day, all day,” explains one of the mutts – but all drugs are inextricably linked with sex in the film. The title character falls in love at first sight with a street pusher, and plying women with cocaine or alcohol comes across as an expeditious means to satisfaction. Kelly gains instant access to White Girl’s orifices when he lays out some lines of cocaine and essentially rapes her with little resistance and no consequences. The movie appears to want to dissimulate about its intentions and provides a couple of scenes of morning-after horror and vomit for plausible deniability; but the association of sex with drugs is undeniable in the face of such moments as a young woman snorting a line of cocaine from a man’s penis.

1. Anti-white. Whatever claim White Girl might have to being a cautionary tale is forfeited by the flippant choice of celebratory ape music about pimping white flesh to play during the closing credits. A Jewish triumphalist proclamation of victory in the face of ubiquitous European degeneracy, White Girl is nothing if not an expression of ethnosadism. Zio-prostitute Chris Noth of Sex and the City infamy puts a gentile face on the sleazy lawyer archetype in his role of George, the unscrupulous attorney White Girl hires to represent Blue. In one telling moment, a drop of wine trickles like blood from the corner of George’s mouth – a projection to the effect that whites, not Jews, are the vampires that prey on America. “It’s a really fucked up system,” this character explains. “You could have a white kid stab someone to death and he’ll get less time than a black kid caught with a miniscule amount of drugs. This is the way it is.” One of the movie’s objectives is to get across the propaganda meme of “white privilege”, with White Girl seen to escape unharmed, suffering no repercussions after precipitating what is likely the end of Blue’s career. He goes to prison while she, unperturbed, is accepted back into the fold of the “college” life. White Girl, unsurprisingly, was produced by a rats’ nest of ethnics including Ariel Schulman, Orlee-Rose Strauss, and Gabriel Nussbaum – all of whom, one can only imagine, are deeply concerned about the plight of white girls worldwide. Another producer, Christine Vachon, made The New York Observer’s list of “The New Power Gays” – homosexuals being Jews in spirit and politics.

https://twitter.com/orleerose/status/314131279178244096

https://twitter.com/icareviews/status/876509064074756096

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

America’s Monsters of Rock: Metal and Dehumanization Rituals of the War in Iraq

Obama poses with Drowning Pool.

As technology has advanced the delivery of music from live performance to radio, tape, disc, and mp3, pop product has played an increasingly personal part for the typical soldier fighting America’s imperial wars. “Music has become a significant source of combat inspiration for American soldiers in Iraq,” argues composer Jonathan Pieslak, who cites interviews with military personnel in an essay he published in 2010, before the U.S. announced an ostensible end to that country’s occupation. “The relationship between music and soldier life seems more intimate in this war since new technology allows music to be a part of soldiers’ lives on and off the battlefield in unprecedented ways.”¹

Unsurprisingly, the metal genre – with a tradition of war-themed lyrics dating from tracks like Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” and Iron Maiden’s “Aces High” – has proven to be a favorite among troops preparing themselves psychologically for the task of committing officially sanctioned mass murder. Pieslak points out that in the documentary Soundtrack to War, “multiple soldiers make the analogy that ‘war itself is heavy metal,’ and, in fact, the original version of Gittoes’ documentary was titled, War Is Heavy Metal.”² Pieslak offers further gleanings from his series of interviews:

Almost all of the metal songs selected by soldiers as an inspiration for combat involve themes of chaos. A favorite album among soldiers is Slayer’s Reign in Blood (1986), which is often credited as being the seminal album of the death metal subgenre. Another popular band is Metallica; their song “One”, about a WWI soldier who survives a land mine explosion in which he loses his limbs, sight, hearing, and speech, was played frequently by [interviewee] Grisham during the initial invasion of Iraq. Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” is another popular song with its repeated refrain, “Let the bodies hit the floor.” In this case, however, the meaning of the lyrics has taken a different form from the original intent. Drowning Pool claim that the refrain refers to the audience “hitting the floor” of the “mosh pit” at a concert, not bodies falling to the ground from acts of violence. When these themes of chaos are combined with the notions of power inscribed in the metal sound, they provide a highly influential tool for soldiers as they prepare for combat.³

“While the power element of metal is manifest in a variety of ways within the music,” Pieslak explains, “it operates, not as a dominating force over the fan, but as an empowering agent.”⁴ “Music is a means of establishing the identity of the group,” he adds, “and supports the feeling of togetherness through a ritualized musical experience”⁵ – which is intriguing in view of the fact that more than one of the soldiers interviewed used “predator” as an adjective to describe their comrades’ musical preference⁶.

Interviewees describe rituals in which soldiers would gather prior to combat to listen to metal or rap together and chant or shout out the lines of a song as a group. “The tendency of soldiers to come together around music, and to sing or yell the lyrics together,” Pieslak suggests, “seems to have precedence in aspects of BCT [i.e., basic combat training].”⁷ Training regimes which require the men to collectively sing a set of responses to the prompts of a drill instructor develop camaraderie in the unit but also condition in them a repertoire of programmed behaviors and teach obedience to a superior’s will.

An abdication of the self and of humanity is acknowledged by more than one of the soldiers who spoke to Pieslak:

Grisham highlights the music’s power to […] make them capable of “inhuman” acts. In these instances, the music could be said to have a transformative power that removes the humanity element from human identity. Other soldiers said that metal and rap music had similar effects, to varying degrees, on their experiences as an inspiration for combat. Saunders believes that “War is people having to step outside of themselves. It is you having to become what I consider to be a monster.”⁸

It is also a possibility that metal, owing to the abrasive sonic palette reflected in the genre’s moniker, has contributed to a readiness on the part of men to find aesthetically pleasing elements in the bombastic cacophony of combat itself. A machine gunner, Specialist Colby Buzzell, told Pieslak that “the explosions and the machine guns, and the shooting that’s going on, that’s the music. It’s kind of like listening to Slayer, like that sort of shit. Listening to a two-forty fire off rounds, or a TOW [i.e., tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided] missile hit something, that’s music to your ears, kind of.”⁹ It comes to constitute, if readers will forgive the reference, a veritable “Symphony of Destruction”. Megadeth, however, it is worthwhile to remember, warned that “Just like the Pied Piper / led rats through the streets / We dance like marionettes” while “Acting like a robot” whose “metal brain corrodes”. Indeed, Drowning Pool’s album Sinner, from which the Iraq occupation forces’ favorite “Bodies” was lifted, was released by a record label called “Wind-Up” – referring, one assumes, to mechanical toys.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Endnotes

1. Pieslak, Jonathan. “Music as an Inspiration for Combat among American Soldiers in Iraq”, in George Kassimeris and John Buckley, Eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Warfare. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010, p. 386.
2. Ibid., p. 390.
3. Ibid., p. 395.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 392.
6. Ibid., pp. 389-390.
7. Ibid., p. 393.
8. Ibid., p. 396.
9. Ibid., p. 394.

Straight Outta Compton ****1/2

In the opening moment of Straight Outta Compton, the street thug who would one day win fame as Eazy-E is seen retrieving a pistol hidden in a speaker in the trunk of his car. The image perfectly captures the unapologetic essence of Niggaz wit Attitudes, the hip-hop supergroup E would form with Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, DJ Yella, and MC Ren, and which famously made music that packed a nasty and influentially lethal punch. N.W.A. were the founding fathers of gangsta rap, and Straight Outta Compton traces their sordid story from inauspicious ghetto beginnings through celebrity, infighting, dissolution, and Eazy-E’s untimely demise from AIDS. Raw and angry but intelligent lyricist Ice Cube is portrayed in the film by his son, O’Shea Jackson, Jr., while the surprisingly mild-mannered Dr. Dre is played by Corey Hawkins. Jason Mitchell is believably street as the devious Eazy-E, and R. Marcos Taylor is positively savage as brutal Death Row Records kingpin Suge Knight. It is Paul Giamatti, however, who steals the show as the group’s super-sleazy Jewish promoter, Jerry Heller.

4.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Straight Outta Compton is:

7. Pro-gay. Two women kiss during a threesome.

6. Sexist! “Life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money.” Jiggly booties abound.

5. Anti-white. Eazy-E is afraid to tour the South, where rednecks are “waitin’ to lynch niggers”. He therefore insists on taking a machine gun with him on the tour bus. To its dishonor, Straight Outta Compton perpetuates the myth of the unprovoked police attack on Rodney King, thereby pouring more synthetic fuel onto the ongoing black radical agitation of the Obama years.

4. Pro-gun. In one crowd-pleasing scene, the N.W.A. boys grab their gats to scare away a disgruntled cuckold.

3. Pro-drug. The “chronic” reignites Dr. Dre’s genius after a bout of doldrums and rapper’s block. The War on Drugs, furthermore, is a hypocritical and oppressive failure.

2. Libertarian/anti-police. “Fuck tha police!” Racist white cops hassle Ice Cube and call him a “nigger”. “I’m the only gangster around here,” one of them tells him. Others, including one black cop, have the rudeness to slap hamburgers out of the rappers’ hands for no reason. “Fuck the law enforcement community,” Ice Cube challenges those who would censor the group’s message. “We got freedom of speech, man.” Striking a relativistic note, the film opens with a sound montage containing a snippet of Oliver North, reminding the audience of the American deep state’s role in the importation of the cocaine that would come to define the thug life glorified by gangsta rap.

1. Anti-Semitic! Straight Outta Compton does not flinch from the truth that Jews played a decisive role in taking gangsta rap out of the ghetto and thrusting it into white people’s living rooms. Heller appears as a stereotypically seedy and greedy Jewish wheeler-dealer and propagator of cultural degeneracy. In Straight Outta Compton’s funniest scene, Heller throws a fit when he hears Ice Cube’s post-breakup diss track “No Vaseline”, containing the line, “You let a Jew break up my crew.” “I’m callin’ my friends at the JDL!” Heller snarls, referring to the violent Jewish Defense League.

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

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Blood Red Presidents ****

Filmed in 2010 as The Two Plates and re-released at Redboxes this week under the stronger and more attention-grabbing title Blood Red Presidents, this ghetto epic from writer-director Jonathan Straiton is well worth checking out. Nasty, raw, and uncompromising, Blood Red Presidents dispenses with the Hollywood kid gloves in the depiction of blacks and emphasizes instead the grittily real. So firm is this film’s commitment to presenting the truth, no matter how unflattering to the society it depicts, that much of it feels almost as if actual camera phone footage straight out of the ‘hood had been edited together and uploaded onto YouTube as a movie, with most of the actors mumbling and slurring their lines instead of hamming it up and projecting; but there is much audiovisual style displayed here along with the handheld and seemingly primitive, with several memorably composed frames and such tactics as split screen employed more than once and used especially effectively in a doom-laden money-counting montage and musical interlude. Hip-hop is very much a part of this film’s personality and does much to enhance its power.

The violent story has two small-time hustlers, Deshaun (Assault) and Buck (Ambush), making a play for the big-time money as counterfeiters after they steal two plates that once belonged to a Peruvian drug lord. Unfortunately for them, their scheme attracts the attention of Secret Service agent Caddell (John Patton), who, along with Richmond cops Beck (Chris Morrison) and Burnett (Wes Reid), is determined to bring Deshaun and Buck’s successful run to an end. Before the tragic but blackly humorous story has run its seedy course, many will die, families will suffer, and friends will turn against each other. Blood Red Presidents, then, lives up to its title as yet another cautionary tale about how money, the titular “presidents”, is supposedly “the root to all evil.” Buck and Deshaun are no pitiable victims of any white Man’s “system”, however; these are crude, coldblooded brutes, self-described “niggers killin’ niggers” who deserve everything they get and more.

4 out of 5 stars. Recommended.

[WARNING: SPOILERS]

Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Blood Red Presidents is:

6. Christian. “Yeah, I’m sure, man. Is Jesus black?” Director Jonathan Straiton thanks God in the credits for His “guidance”.

5. Pro-family. Straiton dedicates the film to his father. Executive producer John M. Clark, meanwhile, thanks “Gene my adopted son who I appreciate very much for helping my retarded son.”

4. Sexist and slut-ambivalent. A rap that plays over the opening credits warns of crooked lawyers and “bitches with game”. “Get the fuck off the bed,” Deshaun tells his “shorty” in one early scene. “You need to take that shit to the clinic,” one young wastrel says to her. Leaning in the pro-slut direction, however, the executive producer gives a “special thanks” to “the designer of crotchless panties and peach flavored douche.”

3. Drug-ambivalent. In the opening scene, an old-fashioned white father, no doubt intended to be laughable, is shocked that his son would use marijuana. Thugs smoke joints and blunts and drink alcohol throughout the film, but “seein’ ya mama on that glass pipe is a painful sight.” In the end credits, executive producer John M. Clark thanks “the French wheat growers for doing their part to distill Grey Goose Vodka without which I couldn’t get through a day,” while producer Mean Gene thanks Bud Light “for always being there for me in time of need.” The director, Jonathan Straiton, says, “To anyone I forgot I apologize but it’s late and I’m drunk.”

2. Police-ambivalent/anti-state. Blood Red Presidents presents a sympathetic portrait of rookie cop Burnett and his chief. “You know how the media is,” Burnett complains to his chief after being accused of police brutality. “I mean, where were they last week when I was changing that old lady’s tire?” Surprisingly, Burnett is the only character in the film who shows any remorse after committing a murder, and he even risks blowing a major investigation to try to save a criminal informant’s life. His colleague Beck is another matter. In a situation similar to that in The Place Beyond the Pines, this officer attempts to cover up for Burnett after his mistaken killing of an unarmed suspect. Meaningfully, the victim, an aspiring rapper, is found to have been holding a microphone rather than a gun. (Symbolically, this might be read as suggesting that the police state feels less threatened by black crime than by socially conscious black men’s freedom of expression.) One of the extras in the police station has clearly been cast to capture the worthless, doughnut-scarfing blob archetype.

1. Diversity-skeptical/anti-wigger. A close-up of Virginia’s state flag, with its motto, “Sic semper tyrannis”, calls to mind Lincoln’s assassination and never-completed Reconstruction. “Freedom ain’t free,” one rap number suggests, and racial resentments going back to the days of slavery inform the typical thug mindset, with the ghosts of slaves, heard from the trees, encouraging young black men to “Squeeze that tech, nigga.” White police, consequently, are vulnerable both to violence and defamation in the media. In one scene, a black man punches a white stranger on sight. Buck and Deshaun’s wigger associates, “silly-ass white boy” Chuck (Ashby Brooks) and his brother, “ol’ crazy-ass white boy” Mike (Rob Rozier), turn out to be untrustworthy. Authorities, meanwhile, are frustrated by criminals’ use of unintelligible Ebonics.