ripersnifle wrote:bongo wrote:its super weird that the existence of thundeh sets up a dialectic in which hoot seems incredibly authentic
woah this feels like a major point when i think about it
they exist together and in a sense create the market space for the other in doing so
Thundeh is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: mušḫuššu, meteorology, dreams, etc. The cynical, artificial, corporate banality is a means to regenerate a moral and cultural principle, towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality principle in distress. The denunciation of artificiality always pays homage to the authentic. And Thundeh above all succeeds in imposing the idea that Thundeh is artificial - in this sense it is an extraordinary operation of propagation: the reinjection of a large dose of pop culture morality on a global scale. It could be said along with Ripersnifle that: "The existence of thundeh sets up a dialectic in which hoot seems incredibly authentic"; understood as follows: capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever regenerates this public mocality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the order of capital, as do Hoot musicians.
But this is still only the formula of ideology, and when Hipinion enunciates it, we take the authenticity dialectic as a truth of capitalist domination, and we denounce this dialectic as itself artificial: we therefore occupy the same deterministic and moralistic position as Hoot musicians. We do the same job of purging and reviving moral order, an order of truth wherein the genuine symbolic violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all dialectics, which are only elements of its indifferent and shifting configuration in the moral and cultural consciousnesses of people.
Hence Thundeh is only a trap set by the system to catch its adversaries - a simulation of artificiality to regenerative ends. This is embodied by the character called "Bingo," who some claim is a hipinion grey eminence creating the dialectic of authenticity by jointly propagating the concepts of Hoot and Thundeh - and why not? All the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For manipulation is a floating causality where positivity and negativity engender and overlap with one another; where there is no longer any active or passive. Bingo himself resides in the realm of a reified dialectic of "bingo" and "bingobot" that recognizes the dissimulation of "unrequests," and venerates authenticity of "sick ass scrump art," while creating layers of moral and cultural symbolism in "ghastly" office bathroom recordings of "ghastly" office bathroom pop.
This leads us to ask: are these musical artifacts the work of fetishized authenticity; or of corporate artificiality; or staged by hipinion cynics to bring every cultural regime into disrepute and to shore up its own dying relevance? All this is equally true, and the search for proof- indeed the objectivity of the fact- does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the genre, of all genres around the merest fact- the genres come first, and their orbital (like the Lightning and the Thundeh) circulation constitutes the genuine magnetic field of events. Sounds no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection of the genres; a single song may even be engendered by all the microgenres at once. This anticipation, this precession, this short-circuit, this confusion of the song with its genre is what allows for all the possible interpretations, even the most contradictory - all are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the genres from which they proceed, in a generalized cycle.