On your Marx

A couple of related pieces from Kieran Press-Reynolds:

1/ A sharply observed portrait for GQ of the trio behind the popular left-wing podcast TrueAnon. The show started out with deep descents into the foulness pit of Epstein-Maxwell, but quickly diversified, becoming "an oracle of our hysterical times," K writes. "In an online slopscape dominated by far-right furor and mercenary clipfarming, TrueAnon offers something unusual: carefully researched takes, delivered with humor and genuine empathy." 

I was tickled to learn from the piece that one TrueAnon, Liz Franczak, used to read Blissblog and K-Punk back in the day.

At the unmentionable place, the winning witty comment: "The podcasters have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it"

2/ For his Pitchfork column Rabbit Holed, K delves through the dankness of Marxist brainrot - ultra-left teenage meme-makers battling the "alt-right slop all over TikTok", with a particular focus on the mythos of  "Red Shambhala, the idea of a communist utopia from Tibetan Buddhist lore."

"mapping the brainrot continuum"

Hasten to read - while the paywall is relaxed for 24 hours - this fascinating conversation between Kieran Press-Reynolds and Shawn Reynaldo (no relation) for the latter's substack First Floor. Kieran talks about being a Gen Z writer about music + memes + internet subcultures - or as Reynaldo puts it, "mapping the brainrot continuum". 

There's also some glimpses into Press-Reynolds family life. 

E.g. 

"I think I always wanted to be a writer. When I was six, I made my own newspaper. But I also had that teenage rebellion thing where I thought that what my parents did was the lamest thing ever. I’d come home from school and my dad would be playing weird ambient alien sounds, and I’d think, 'I just want to go play Minecraft. Turn this off.' Then my mom would come home and she was exhausted every day from work. Both of my parents were like, 'This is the worst job. Do not follow in our footsteps'."

I must say I don't remember ever saying it was "the worst job", being a critic - after all, it's got a lot of upsides. 

But we did kind of hope he would choose a path that didn't lead to precarity. 

And we really didn't expect him to go down that same path. As a teenager he showed no interest at all. I always thought Kieran would do something involving video. Or invent an app.

But he's joined us in the incredible shrinking field. 

The Corecore Encore

Here's Kieran Press-Reynolds with another report on the "chaotic contentscape" that is the internet and social media in 2023. He wrote the first piece on corecore back in November. Now that the meme-montaging videoclip genre has blown up and become a site of discourse fever (with journalistic pieces galore and K finding himself interviewed on the subject several times), he returns to replant that flag with  an extensive update for No Bells, examining corecore's recent political turn and other urgent developments within this splintering and contested vortext of nano-genres.  You will learn about wilbertcore and even  something rejoicing in the name corecorecore.

Corecore, you know the score - well you will after reading Kieran's piece. 

Cor!

Kidding around

Here's Our Kid with a piece for No Bells on corecore. "We're not kidding" the headline offers in a  proleptic parenthesis. Certainly, it does sound like a hoax, or a piss-take: one of those parodying-the-very-idea-of-genre entities that flicker up ephemerally on the internet. But apparently it is real, whatever that means in the increasingly derailed consensus hallucination that is life today:  a "deep internet video genre full of 'meme-poems' with cute cats and fried music choices... a meme equivalent of the many microgenres spawning across SoundCloud." And Kieran convincingly takes it seriously, along the way dropping some neat phrases like "an abyss of vibes."

More grounded in material realities - sweaty bodies rubbing against sweaty bodies,  reclaimed trashy urban spaces and shivery rooftops at dawn - here is Kieran's account of his favorite live shows and DJ experiences of 2022. Fifteen peaks picked out of three times as many expeditions across the nightlifescape of Manhattan and Brooklyn.  Sweet to read about Our Kid having so much fun in the clubs and micro-raves of the city that never sleeps. Glad to know that some of the time he is out there having adventures rather than inside chasing onscreen phantasms. 

Down with the Drain

In a new piece for No Bells, Kieran Press-Reynolds take a deep dive into the meme-mythos of Drain Gang and the collective's most prominent member Bladee.  Readers of this blog may well be unfamiliar with either but Kieran makes an intricately supported and vivid case for DG + B as the most influential and pervasive entity in the last decade's ever-more-chaotic genrescape of online sounds - a common denominator through-line cutting across an entropic field of endlessly splintering, recombining, and border-blurring micro-genres and nano-scenes. And it's more than just warped weirdo sounds, emo lyrics, and ultra-processed vocals - as K writes, "Drain culture" = "an abyss of in-jokes, slang, visuals, and fashion". The piece is a kind of archaeology of knowledge connecting the evanescent drifts of online fan energy and excitement. As K, writes "the way chatter is scattered across myriad forums, platforms, and private chats, and the inescapable fact that so many pivotal videos and memes and myth-building conversations get deleted or lost in the digital void—makes it almost impossible to fully delineate how a cultish fanbase forms online....  Underground internet musicians accrue fame and myth through the steady buildup of Instagram stories and lives, loosies, TikTok edits, micro-viral fan tweets that gain 1,000 or so likes and become an inside joke.. This kind of mercurial legend-construction can result in knowledge gaps when an artist rises up....  it has also bred more ghosts—artists who grow successful but whose musical past is dotted with elisions, breaks, erasures, mysteries. Luckily, by traveling back in time through ancient Reddit posts and panoramically viewing today’s music landscape, it’s possible to glimpse how this unit has grown." 

"21st Century Humor" aka "Interdimensional Memes"

 “What was once cringe has now become cool again."

Early 2000s nostalgia already... .Internetculture genreologist Kieran Press-Reynolds at Insider on the retro-absurdist meme collages currently infesting TikTok.

"Technologically impressive, hyper-digital spectacles that viewers admire purely because they are so unintelligible… Creators speed up, distort, saturate, stretch, or mutate these pieces of media to maximize the ludicrousness…"

Also contains a potted history of early stages of meme-faddery during the 21st Century so far, including Youtube poops and MLG montage parody.