Cultural Critique of "Dissect" Music Podcast

Here is Dissect's mission statement:

https://dissectpodcast.com/about/

In a world creating and accessing more content than ever before, we’ve quickly become a scrolling culture, hurriedly swiping through this infinite swath of content that seems to replenish without end.
Dissect was created to counter this cultural shift.
Dissect picks one album per season and analyzes one song per episode measure by measure, word by word.

It's a noble endeavor, and Pimp a Butterfly is an excellent album to start with! But in a general sense, here is my critique:

It's funny how connoisseur culture favors this kind of stuff. i might be critical here: their message is to reverse the scroll-through culture that our hyperconsumerism has led to, but their remedy (feeding you the exhaustive list of facts about the song in order to truly capture it) suffers from an arguably similar cultural sickness. In the end we don't put on the headphones and close our eyes through an album anymore, we either scroll through feeds or reductively dissect the facts about a song in order to conquer it (see: success of rapgenius). Let's be cautious in how we frame our solution.

That being said, I'm definitely going to play the shit out of this because I'm a complete product of connoisseur culture. 

The Reversed Role of Modern Working Art: Pulling Us Out of the Void

pre WW2, the goal of working art was to unconceal the earth from underneath us, and present it as such

for example painting obscene pictures of naked old people, because no one likes thinking about that, its hidden from our daily life, we push it away

its a concealed earth that we walk on and are oblivious too and rely on its concealment in order to maintain comfort

and this is heideggers definition of working art, and it makes sense

and i think in his era, the important thing to do (a la deconstruction) was pull people out of the romantic and into the void that they were repressing

romantic/classical, depending on whether you were religious or technical etc

but in any case the "earth" in this case was the uncomfortable void that everyone was ignoring

and people more or less do the same thing today, but what if its the opposite?

we've confronted the absurd formally ever since camus/sartre, and have been DEFAULT in the void

so working art is now about pulling us out of the absurd and back into the romantic

reminding us that feelings are still real, and things DO matter, even though we dont want to admit it

this meditation was inspired by this track:

https://open.spotify.com/track/0Eqm7hD828cATBLUx2fJox?si=fbFjH0ggQ-mm0tgPyaRKew

Great Nihilist Responses to the Question of Suicide

The question is "Why should I remain alive?"


Great Nihilist Responses (from Camus meme stash):

• Because your death is meaningless too. Might as well drink a cup of coffee.

• "Man is mortal. That may be; but let us die resisting; and if our lot is complete annihilation, let us not behave in such a way that it seems justice!"

• "What's your hurry?"

• There’s no reason to remain alive. But there’s also no reason not to. It makes literally zero difference. Life is futile, but deciding to end your life because of its futility assumes there is some kind of value (although negative value) attached to that futility.

• Intuitively you should kill yourself. And that’s why you shouldn’t. Because it’s absurd not to!

• And finally my (lamer) response:

life's meaning comes IN the rebellion against suicide in the face of futility and meaninglessness. its almost more meaningful that way, if you think about it. choosing to rebel against suicide in the face of transcendent meaning is almost boring. our story is the cool one.

Opioid Epidemic Cultural Breakdown

i just read such a beautiful interview on NPR about opioids

the guy FUCKING laid it out

in an era where machines are threatening the dignity of the "working man"

he loses an aspect of meaning, but also religion is gone now too, so he can't fill the void with that either

oxycontin actually serves as an instant replacement for oxytocin, which is the neurotrans. released when you get social acknowledgement like sex, being rewarded for work, or partaking in communal spirituality

furthermore, technological age of screens encourages us to get "lost in our own worlds" at the screen rather than going out and interacting

so staying home in ur own world using oxycontin is a natural consequence of undignified labor + expired religions + screens

a couple of other things, 1. you can trace this correlation starting from the AIDS movement where patient autonomy was encouraged, aka fight for your treatment as a patient regardless of what doctor says, to now. This patient autonomy is part of why patients are so adamantly demanding these drugs.

2. this is hitting men much harder than women. part of this is because men have been traditionally getting their prestige and meaning from manual work, which is now gone, and also that being a man is sort of irrelevant in this social progressive period where the woman is being redefined in a fruitful way.

so all of this together just leads to people demanding drugs to ease pain, but then sinking into this world of meaninglessness and loneliness that can only be nurtured by oxycontin.

tldr: opoid epidemic is less of a physical/economic issue and much more of a spiritual, psychological, and existential issue.

you can also see this in the surge in weed and meditation in culture

people are desperately trying to fill this void

you can't just view humans as economic agents, they will lose meaning and destroy themselves

you need a system which views them as complex, psychological, emotional etc beings

we need a new religion etc

it was such a good interview, best one ive heard in a while, here is the original article:

https://medium.com/new-york-magazine/the-poison-we-pick-261d062e6938

7 mins

Sartrean Solution to Consumerism: Consume Nothingness

General Summary: We can’t help but have an impulse to consume in our modern society, so the solution is not to avoid consuming, but to consume nothingness (i.e. your relaxing breath). this parallels sartre who sort of said, we can’t help but asking “what is consciousness” in our ego-based society, so the solution is not to avoid talking about it, but to just call it “a pool of nothingness in the brain” that sucks everything in.
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We are trapped in layers of consumerism. In one sense, we can resist temptations--eating, smoking, masturbation, etc to rebel against consumerism. But we still lose here, as the entire Western society we are situated in is framed in terms of consumerism, so you will constantly find yourself in jail. Every directive and norm is telling you to consume, and you have to pass constantly. This is not solving the problem, but rather imprisoning yourself to it.

Sartre found himself in the same situation in the 20th century--we were still trapped in Descarte's formulation of the cogito--unable to formulate our relationship to the world without conceiving of our "selves," our discrete "consciousness," which necessarily separates us from the world. Even if you say things like "my consciousness is connected deeply with the world" or "we are all one!" you still lose in the same way as consumerism above, because the cogito, whether formulated as "consciousness," heideggarian dasein, kantian transcendental subject, etc, is still the individualist separatist framework within which you are operating.

So Sartre devised an ingenious solution--let us not rebel against the framework we irresistably operate in, but rather invert it with nothingess. He defined consciousness as "a pool of nothingness in the brain," a sort of vacuum that is always sucking in everything. In this formulation, you submit to the cogito, but also transcend it, as now consciousness is always OF something, and if it is not filling itself with SOMETHING in the world, then it is--literally--nothing.

I stumbled upon a solution to consumerism that I found strikingly similar to this. If I meditate immediately for 10 minutes upon waking up in the morning, focusing on my breath and watching the dreams go around in my surface-dreaming mind, without falling asleep, my breath becomes an exceptionally calming force throughout the rest of the day, almost like a drug. It is as if doing breathing exercises in the morning while my brain is still on drugs forges a connection between breathing and hallucinating that MILDLY maintains itself throughout the rest of the day. Here, any time I felt a consumptive impulse, I would simply breath, and it would have this neurally calming effect, similar to that of a drug. And in this case, I could consume, consume, consume all I wanted, eating nothingness all day, but oddly escaping the paradigm of consumerism from within it.

Do not rebel against your framework--invert it with nothingness.

"Man would rather consume nothingness than not consume at all"

Analysis of Scorsese Movie Silence

Silence is a powerful 2017 film by Martin Scorcese, that pierces deeply into some interesting theological questions. Below is a discussion analyzing some of these points, between a friend and me.




Friend:

Finished it


Wow


Me:

He kept the cross.



Friend:
Yeah


Did his wife.slide it into his hand?


It was such a good movie


Its like Padres came to Japan to "save" the Japanese but the only way to save them was to give up their ego, which is the route to Buddhist salvation


And all the inherent conceptual conflicts between Christianity and Buddhism


Damn



Me:
Yes, but also more importantly than their ego, their spirit, their entire world view


It’s asking much more than taking your life, in a sense



Friend:

Yeah


True




Me:
Because they wanted to die for their beliefs, they did NOT want to live to see their beliefs die




Friend:
Such a beautiful film


Wow


Well put




Me:
But you realize at the end that he did the ultimate sacrifice


He gave up all external signs of his belief, stepped on jesus, to forever go down in history as a heretic. But he kept the cross. He kept his belief in the end


He was the first Protestant, in a sense




Friend:
Ah that's a good point




Me:
External rituals are irrelevant, as long as you stay true to your personal relationship with god


That’s why he heard jesus’ voice at that crucial moment, saying step on me, it’s okay




Friend:
Yeah! And in the end, when Jesus said I was suffering beside you in the silence




Me:
Ugh yes, fuckkkkk


In a sense he did the hardest thing


He could have disbanded his beliefs like Ferreira, or died for his beliefs


But he decided to externally disband them while internally holding on


The ultimate enslavement 2017


I’ll have to hand 2017 over to him tbh


He won that shit




Friend:
Yeah seriously

And yeah I’m assuming he had his wife give it to him

How was that movie not way more popular



Me:
Probably too deep for most


Same with birdman




Friend:
Oh hold up


What if he didn't




Me:
They both had that layered quality, like 6 different layers


Of meaning




Friend:
What if she just gave that to him


Which maybe makes it more beautiful


Like he would never jeopardize her in any way


And he never outwardly showed his faith


But she saw it in him still



Me:

Yeah, good point. They leave it up to the viewer, to add more layers of meaning


Same with birdman. Remember the ending?


There were like 4 ways you could interpret it, and each made it a completely different movie




Friend:
Yeah!!!




Me:
I was always curious whether he kept “silently” blessing kijichiros confessions, even after


Cuz they showed one instance of him doing it silently




Friend:
I think he did




Me:
But at the same time they said the one emperor dude was watching him super closely to the end of his life and saw now Christianity


No*


And he kind of used Japan’s metaphysics against them, the same way they did against him


They were so preoccupied with external signs, so he gave that to him


But he still kind of won, while letting hem win too




Friend:
Yeah!!! You're right!!




Me:
Cuz all they wanted was to write down in history that he showed no external signs and therefore was not Christian


But he totally challenged that


Ahhhhh so many layers!!!




Friend:
Yeah!!!




Me:
The brilliance was, when I first saw it I was like man they broke him, Japanese ego death wins,


But when they show the cross at the very end


It just totally fucks WVERYTHING up


And starts adding all the layers




Friend:
Yeah and I think he thought he wasn't a Christian anymore too



Me:
Still maintaining the top layer, but adding so many more



Friend:
Bc he denounced




Me:
Also cool symbolism: if you watch closely, kijihiro and the other Japanese Christians only partially step on jesus’ face toward the end


Because they are still preoccupied with the externality




Friend:
But him dying with the cross hidden in his hand really showed that he still was, even if he didn't think he was bc of how he externally lived




Me:
But our boy puts his WHOLE foot on there, he don’t give a shit!!!




Friend:
True!




Me:
And that line at the end too: he failed in the eyes of god, or I guess, that’s between him and god.....


Then it shows the cross


AHHHHHHHH. The best.





Friend:
it's such the best one




Me:
Silence moonlight and birdman


Top 3 easily




Friend:
Yeah!


Without a doubt


Man


That was such a powerful movie


Even how is was shot


Most of the movie is silence or the sounds of nature


But when it's not silent, you almost don't want it to be


Bc the dialogue uncovers or fortells pain


And if it's not dialogue, the silence is broken by suffering


The pit or the cross on the shoreline are the worst ways to die I think


Japanese are fucked up




Me:
Yes!


The surface layer is that the Christians are doing it for their glory, the price is the suffering of others


Which is true


But a lot of the other layers Kind of subvert the Japanese

funny story idea: death

Amir Mazaheripour:

u know what would be a nice read

a guy is about to die

and he’s terrified, because he doesn’t want to vanish into nothingness, it all starts dawning on him towards the end

that everything he ever knew, loved, hoped, is all just about to be…stopped

forever

then he dies, all scared

and he BECOMES the one “mind at large”

there is only one

then he starts laughing and goes “oH YEAH, HAHAHAHA. holy shit, i forgot i was this, and i was just doing an experiment with locality”

“okay, let me dive back in, and this time, NOT get freaked out about death”

but the same thing keeps happening

he keeps diving into local neural systems

and then getting really freaked out about nothingness

and then dying and remembering that this was all an experiment, and laughing