mainstream sellout

i hear this word everywhere now: authenticity. it seems like everyone wants it, but very few people have it. there's an irony in the way its stridently pursued as an aesthetic on social media, or paraded in the current iteration of 80's hair metal in the corporate-tiktokification of misfit music. you could not make the cover art of mgk's album "mainstream sellout" a better example of this: a man with a net worth of tens of millions of dollars being pelted with pink tomatoes (to show his "self-awareness") while misusing the anarchism symbol. "it's designed to make you hate him, which is the point!" his defenders would say. here's a song about being labeled as a poser, one about an "emo girl", and one about sid and nancy. a copy of a copy of a copy of the original idea, three generations of copycats later, all that's left of an underground movement birthed in a seedy bar in lower manhattan are the mid-life crisis cash grabs from the husband of a billionaire family: all looks and no ethos.

as i've gotten older, i've become increasingly disgusted with political kayfabe in the arts. the world is literally embroiled in interlocking global crises -- climate change, imperialism, colonialism at the hands of megacoporations, wars, and the failure of the status quo to provide a minimum, humanitarian standard of living to billions of people. if UFOs are really visiting us, i think the aliens would be stupefied at how we ignore looming catastrophes and societal suffering, while we simultaneously parade the symbols of revolution and hope as a source of ironic entertainment onto our phones for our daily commutes. in calling himself an anarchist and adopting a pathetic hot-topic aesthetic, mgk serves the cultural forces of authoritarianism and oppression by taking the teeth out of countercultural power. it makes me think mark fisher was right, maybe there really isn't any way out now, and the system has eaten away all the spaces that could possibly critique it.

when punk -- or anything -- becomes ONLY an aesthetic choice, we cut off its potential to actually do something. obviously, this isn't a new phenomenon -- this happened at the very beginning, when a few prescient industry executives decided to put together the sex pistols. but by muddying the self-absorbed, profit-driven pursuits with the original radicalism of three chords and an electric guitar, the average person is lulled into a sense that true rebellion in the arts is impossible: rebellion itself is just part of the machine driving us to armaggeddon. that's dangerous, because all the kids who grow up with a vision of changing the world through what they love give up before we ever hear them, and we need those voices more than ever.

thankfully, i don't think the punk ethos will die. making music and distributing it to the entire world is easier than ever, and despite brazen attempts from silicone valley wannabes who want to exploit and commodify the creative spirits of colored, neurodivergent, queer, and underclass misfits, we will always be louder, stronger, and smarter than them. the culture vultures have always circled above, but the world is changing again, and the playbook to facilitate their bicentennial rude awakening is being updated. i hope this generation takes all of their money, and i hope we make a lot of friends along the way. as for me personally? i'd like to be a mainstream dropout: buy my mom a house, burn a million dollars live on twitch, and spend the rest of my cash on getting high in the woods every day, staring at clouds, and talking to trees. that would be a very nice life indeed.