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."

The Final Countdown

Bandying the word "apocalypse" feels a little off after the local events of last week, but here is Kieran-Press Reynolds on The TikTokalypse - a Pitchfork piece on the drastic effects of TikTok's potential banning in the USA on the memey end of music culture. 

And here's another K P-R report, this time for GQ, on hopecore - "the last gasp of a less-toxic internet?".

This kind of thing brings the homilyphobe out in me. 

I'd probably get on better with the spin-off subtrend Kieran further identifies - "hopeless-core", which sounds like the spirit of slacker reanimated...  Processed World as digital samizdat, spores of unproductivity and demotivation circulating.  

"jumping iz not a crime"

Kieran Press-Reynolds with a guest piece at Shawn Reynaldo's First Floor, while the main man takes a vacation.  It's a report on "the holy hell of cursed jumpstyle" - a zoomer-oriented TikTok-propelled twist to the gabber continuum.  

"vyrval’s ballistic banger is the biggest tune in a growing wave of psychotic jumpstyle music that seems made to express existential fears: technology has gone too far, we’ve broken the world beyond repair, autocratic autobots will soon seize control...  In the comments of the clips that accompany these songs, people write what’s basically apocalyptic science-fiction, imagining grim future scenarios: “Me watching an AI generated video of me doing the most atrocious War crime ever.” The visual aesthetic mirrors the freakiness: unsettling cyber graphics are superimposed on neon landscapes, with distorted limbs and objects."

"At its most baleful, these songs obliterate any and all melody, leaving listeners with no chance for reprieve from their unrelenting assault. Dj Svevsx’s “jumpstyle (1)” has over 8 million plays and it’s just a 42-second spasm of feculent kicks." 

Looks bit like the Moving Shadow logo, that silhouette. 

Weathered legend returns to youth currency 

What K calls "peak slumpstyle" - the slowed + reverb remix 

Lithuian "nu-jumpstyle Jesus" Yabujin 

And his alter-ego

"What makes this internet-addled aesthetic so addictive is the way it taps into the younger generation’s collectively fried childhoods. It’s a shitposty Tower of Babble that crosses countries and languages."

Talking of shitpostmodernism, Kieran is quoted in this Kyle Chayka article in The New Yorker on corecore and "The Dada Era of Internet Memes"

Check out also K P-R's piece at No Bells on the Bushwick nightclub Rash, which was attacked by an arsonist in what may well be a hate-crime a few years ago, but has now been rebuilt and relaunched. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The uglier aspects of this scene reminded me a bit of this spoof  and spoof pt 2 I concocted back in 2007 (inspired by guesswho)

Old post on hardstyle, a related genre that has some militaristic undercurrents... well, overcurrents really

Jumpstyle in simpler, happier, more innocent days. 

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!

"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.

A busy week for  Kieran Press-Reynolds. 

He makes his Pitchfork debut with a review of NYC rap crew Surf Gang's latest album SGV1, described as "a mansion of sweet beats and vocal textures... husky whispers, slow-motion chirrups, reverb-laden echoes that flutter into nothingness" and with ensemble rapping that "feels like you’re watching the SoundCloud rap Avengers unite or some crossover episode between two hit TV shows". 

He also makes his Bandcamp debut with a profile of the netlabel dismiss yourself - the "nexus of hex" plus other freaky online microgenres, whose catalogue offers a trove of "glitchy burps", "alien jeers", "videogame ambient," "meme-havoc" and assorted bitcrushed beauty. 

And he's further been busy working at Insider, where he's done some fun pieces like this profile of  Vanessa Clark a.k.a. @glitchgirlmaster, the creator of TikTok's dance-craze of the summer. 

champion son

Kieran Press-Reynolds, a.k.a the other genre taxonomist living under this roof, has won the award for Best Work of Music Journalism: Text-English at the Reeperbahn Festival, for his piece on "How Tik Tok Is Taking the Tunes Out of Pop."  Kieran saw off competition from the illustrious likes of Laura Snapes, Roxanne Gay, Ed Gillett, and my friends Tariq Goddard and Carl Neville. Check out the list of winners here and K's  acceptance speech video here!