I want to thank everybody who down-voted my "Karens & The Man" post for reminding me why I left the U.S. Most people don't understand that music is an industry, an actual trade that requires compensation, and not a hobby for idlers and wastoids. Look around and tell me you haven't gotten the culture you have paid for. I've been saying for a little while now: Anyone who thought Metallica was whining during the Napster fiasco has done much to destroy Western civilization. Whether they like it, believe it, intended it, or not.
The "Karens & The Man" promotion is a joke. A joke, but also a promotional scheme, made in the humorless vacuum of what remains of American society. People who downvoted it, clearly have never had to make a living doing something the entire society actually believes it's entitled to for free. You don't have to find it funny, but don't think for a minute your lack of support is important; indeed, it's endemic to the entire English-speaking world. People who have been forced by the culture-wide spirit of entitlement to subsist on tip jars to the point of being forced to live in cars & vans for 15 years... can't possibly care. Had better not care. Personally, I'm so accustomed to the self-righteous aloofness that overestimates the importance or power of its own fickle opinion which dominates the English-speaking world that I've come to call English "the language of contention and constant explanations."
Obviously it aggravates me, but that isn't the point of this post. The point of this post is to inform you, as to an arrogant, self-important wall, that you are nothing new. You are as common as the screeching middle-class halfwits in black-bloc who think they're acting in the name of justice by destroying the culture that allows them to "protest," who aren't aware that if they were actually oppressed (which they will be)(they too will get the culture they are paying for), they wouldn't be allowed to walk out the door without government approval. You're as common as Karens, as people whose minds are dominated by manufactured racism, people who don't have enough self-respect to look in the mirror and ask the difficult questions: Am I Wrong? Am I Self-Righteous? Am I a Literal Tool Allowing Itself To Be Used For Its Own Destruction? Is My Sexual Orientation Actually Anybody Else's Business? Is It An Idol? Does My Lack of Self-Awareness Pose As Strength When Really It's An Embarrassingly-Obvious Example Of Weakness That I Will Be Ashamed Of For All Eternity If I Don't Repent Today? Etc.
Your approval and/or lack thereof is the same thing. The comment-section culture is one of the last bastions of "independent voices" the anti-Christian world will ever see. You used to have a choice of artists, now you have twerking Illuminati shills selling Satan shoes to children and a culture-wide, monolithically-uninteresting question which isn't hard to find in any comment section anywhere, and for which the answer is actually painfully obvious: Where Has All The Good Music Gone?
It left. Or died. We took the hint and walked away. Or died. We have been forced into various states of hiding, including working dead-end jobs in the service industry for life. You wanted the minuscule sense of power your comment sections and thumb icons provided you, instead of something different. Something difficult, offensive, strange, and yes even "cringey." If people who used the word "cringey" in a haughty sense realized how embarrassing their thoughts are, and how stupid they actually look to people who have left the plantation (one way or another), they would move into a car for 15 years until they learned that lesson the hard way. The lesson of keeping your mouth shut. The lesson of self-awareness. The unimportance of the opinions of a bunch of people who have been trained to revere the providers of bandwidth, while reviling the bands that have been forced into consignment situations on the thrift-shore shelves these huge, monolithic companies provide.
In fact I have just experienced this on a personal level, looking through the Word files for the Dancing on the Ceiling book for something to post for, yes, once again, promotional reasons. Most of the book is obsolete to me. I have outgrown most of it. The parts I haven't outgrown, do indeed make me cringe, just a little. Toward myself. As it should be when looking back at certain aspects of yourself from 15 or 20 years ago.
Your high-and-mighty opinion of your own opinion will not last. I'm telling you. If it does, move into the gardening section of the world. You are a houseplant.
But I have gone off on a tangent. The entire English-speaking world has made itself into a giant tangent. It has no idea that the only newly-famous household names are mostly YouTube pundits. It has no idea how small it has become. It can like a thousand videos by Brandon Tatum or Candace Owens, et al. (both of whom I like), and who sell merch with God and America phrases all over them, then wonder out of the other side of its mouth why the only music you see is hardcore agenda-ridden swill from Illuminati shills who've sold their souls for the ONLY way they can make it in a world where everybody actually believes they are entitled to the product for free.
You take it for granted that I'm dependent on you. Do you think people like me are going to thank you for the dollar in the tip jar.... forever? You talk about independence, but your actions prove you are its enemy. It isn't all of you, I know. But if this describes you, and I know it describes many people today, hear it now:
You're next.
If you have found an independent artist's attempt to get noticed in a sea of entitled swill "cringey," you will remain forever dependent on whoever it is that will always be above you.
If you don't see how you've taken for granted the dependence your artists have been forced to have on you, and how this dependence has translated itself into the death of free society:
You will never be free. You have failed the invisible test. It came unannounced, but you didn't ask the difficult questions, and took your position for granted.
You have ignored the death of the Musician in the Coal Mine, and will reap the benefits of this ignorance. It isn't wise to prod the dead bird, and ask it if it thinks it's better than everybody else. It is wise to observe the corpse, and learn to tread lightly, if it isn't too late.
Which it is. Probably.
You got the culture you paid for. If you don't like my attempt to rise above the waves of entitled vomit that have consumed the English-speaking world and think I should continue to be grateful for the ways your spirit of entitlement has eviscerated my capacity to make a living, you are my enemy. I don't respect the way you think.
Indeed, you have squandered my respect. I used to have it, probably, at one time. But I lost it, and certainly I'm not the only one. You took my respect for granted. YOU TAKE IT FOR GRANTED THAT I AM DEPENDENT ON YOU.
You have squandered my respect. A difficult concept for entitled people to understand, but there are ways of thinking outside of those that you have never bothered to question. You are being used, like the Karens and Antifa types, to destroy the culture that you think you're trying to preserve.
If you have a serious mind, which I know some of you do, and don't worship at the altar of your own manufactured neuroses, which I know some of you don't, you'll consider it. I'm not here for you either, but
I appreciate you very much.
Thanks for listening.
An afterthought: The Codependence of Community (DIY Or Die)
