Three observations:
1. safe & stable
In her 2018 novel Crudo, British author Olivia Laing asks how one should live if Donald Trump could tweet the world into nuclear war at any moment with a wrong tweet. And although this question sounds strangely old in itself, the feeling of constant insecurity has not changed. Just a push notification – a new virus variant – and it could all be over. Lockdown, showdown. This is what the present feels like.
And the mistake lies in feeling. Because it’s unlikely that next Tuesday we’ll be the next dinosaurs. It is more likely that the constant proximity to unclassified news and the subsequent tweeting of uncertainty among others triggers fears. “I’m stable,” raps Teven 2021 in “Stabil”. “We are stable,” Capital Bra rapped back in 2016. And yet “stable” doesn’t seem old, but safe like the adjective of these days. At the same time, stability is sought in ever more uncertain sources. Horoscope podcasts are trending on Spotify. And disinformation on the socials. The pandemic is just a staging of an elite holding everything together in the background? How stable that would be.
2. down the rabbit hole
Meanwhile, “Matrix Ressurections” is showing in cinemas. Another installment in the film series that was the gateway drug for many into postmodern philosophy in the early 2000s. Because it says in the best Baudrillardian sense: Yes, we live in a simulation. In leading roles: a blue and a red pill. The blue pill makes the simulation feel real. You have to swallow the red one if you want to shake your previous perception.
Gender is a social construct, was the red pill that directors Lana and Lilly Wachowski wanted to administer via the “Matrix”. It didn’t work. The red and blue pills have nevertheless become popular culture. They live a multifaceted life of their own. Sometimes they’re memes, then they pop up as the eponymous misogynistic dating forum, or they become lyrical content, such as in The Weeknd’s “Privilege” or Bloc Party’s “She’s Hearing Voices”.
Sometimes, however, they become quite bitter. Trump, for example, administered his own red pills to his supporters. For example: the old media are fake news. And now red and blue pills are reinterpreting Jefferson Airplane’s Alice in Wonderland song “White Rabbit”! It’s running in the trailer for “Matrix Resurrections”. “One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small,” Grace Slick sings while Matrix hero Neo pours his blue pills down the sink. And the lateral thinkers get red hearts in their eyes. Yes, the corona-is-a-conspiracy pill made them bigger, they think. Finally, I’m not a “little man” anymore. I woke up and yet I don’t woke. I am stable. The push notifications from the old fake media can no longer scare me.
3. Bitches need media skills
All of this is, of course, “Deathless His Great Grandfather”. A sentence that the YouTuber Rezo coined in April last year in one of his videos in relation to AfD voting. Since then, “Todeslost his great-grandfather” has been a comment that you can find under every lateral thinker post. So as a comment from the other side. “Todeslost his great-grandfather” is just waiting to finally become a song text.
You can use Olaf for posters, the text is: Bitches need boosters pic.twitter.com/befSJVcVOq
— Margarete Stokowski (@marga_owski) November 25, 2021
Maybe Shirin David could take care of him? The former YouTuber has – like Tocotronic once – the most beautiful song lines to slogans magic. Her BITCHES NEEDS RAP, for example, became “Bitches need boosters” thanks to a Margarete Stokowski tweet. The fact that Booster starts with a “b”, like “blue pill”, is certainly a coincidence. Or? OR? OMG.
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 02/2022.