No One is Proud of America Right Now
musings on THE ROT EMPIRE + a soundtrack to match
Hello my fellow citizens,
It’s Mo aka DJ Gay Panic, and this(!) is The Deviant Dispatch. I’m blogging from my corner of the NYC “underground” to bring you subcultural musings, scene updates, and queer shit. There will be typos.
I’ve been too busy this past month to devote time to this newsletter. The DJ gigs overflowed and I simply had to fill in my free time with some revelry to stave off the doom. Of course, Pride this year had a bit of a doomed vibe. Chrissy of the fab substack Transtrender noted how the trad celebrations felt a little stale. We all sense that the time to pick up our bricks and riot comes near.
As dawn blooms on this cursed holiday known as 4th of July, a riot has never seemed more likely.
When I was a teenager Michelle Obama got in trouble for saying "For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country, because it feels like hope is making a comeback … not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.” Her husband’s presidential campaign was going well, and she was surprised that her black husband was being received so warmly. Nothing makes you prouder than someone or something bucking your cynical expectations. Still, the right complained that she wasn’t a patriot and therefore her husband was unfit to run.
At the time I remember being bewildered at people’s outrage. I was considerably more naive in the year 2008, but even I remember clocking few reasons to be proud of my country in particular. Why would we be proud of a country who started a war with Iraq under false pretenses? Who’s current president, George Bush, was a political nepo baby and himbo? With such obvious still racism coursing through it’s veins? America’s problems are so obvious that the idea of being patriotic seemed complicated at best.
Americans are not proud or even satisfied with their country. While the Obamas in many ways failed to bring about the deep change Americans were hungry for, the desire remains. Tragically, swaths of people put their hope in a former reality tv host who promised to violently changed many aspects of American life.
I felt a renewed sense of hope + pride, not in my country but my city, when we successfully nominated Zohran Mamdani as the democratic candidate for mayor. The night of the results someone screamed “Zohran won!” at me from across the street. When I arrived at Bossa Nova the bar was filled with volunteers in Zohran merch giddily dancing to techno.
But hopeful moments about positive change are fleeting as fuck. The general vibe is fried, with every day there’s a sign that America is sliding further into the hot mess at it’s core. Our country was never about the freedom of the common citizen, but about a bunch of slave-owning aristocratic white males who didn’t want to pay their taxes. The latest billionaire bullshit was congress passing the "big beautiful bullshit bill” yesterday, a move the promises to strip people of their Medicaid and even cause rural hospitals to close.
This America is so twisted and grim that it needs a soundtrack for deviants like me who are gonna keep dancing + making noise til the wheels fall off. Which leads me to the below playlist I’ve titled THE ROT EMPIRE. It’s a hedonistic, dystopic, chaotic, at times as horribly superficial as it’s citizens. It’s what America sounds like right now, as empire gasping for air as it decays.
You can take a listen for yourself, but scroll on for my in-depth mixtape notes. Honorable mention to this audio, which is required viewing today.
The songs on the playlist fall into several categories
Hyperpop bangers
Hyperpop is a genre that takes superficiality + artifice to it’s extreme edge, much like the USA. It’s the musical embodiment of the surged-up blonde woman: garishly superficial, enjoyable in a camp sense. Instead of the naturalism implied by the phrase ‘red-blood american woman’ this mindset imposes rigid standards that leaves followers “into a kind of uncanny valley between human being and ghoul” P.E. Moskowitz describes in this substack piece. Hyperpop music occupies a similar uncanny valley between human and machine.
The rise of facism is always linked to people vapidly pursuing money and power. Take a look at Cabaret’s Sally Bowles, who glibly pursued stardom in the backdrop of nazi-ism taking hold in Germany. Listening to a song about “money, power, bleach-blonde hair” over a grating beat feels appropriate for the Alex Cooper-dominated pop culture moment right now. You look at the news, and everything is indeed gnarly. The money is all dirty.
If you look out in Bushwick rn, the hemline index is getting debunked everyday, so I had to throw in a song about mini skirts that includes a breakdown as threatening as the times. One of the singers is a horse with a helium voice? Sounds like the chaotic absurdity these unhinged times demand.
The anxiety of modern surveillance that 2hollis talks about in “Tell Me” was to poignant not to include. We all just wanna go escape this society, but like Britney we’ve got people attempting to keep our “inappropriate” thoughts and ideals contained. Shame on me to need release, amirite?
80s electro
There’s also a bunch of 80s electro. The Reagan years were a cultural backlash to the progressivism of the 60s and 70s in the pursuit of money + square family values. Minimal techno and electro to me invoke the grimness of that time. The emphasis on futuristic aesthetics in the synthetic dance music is similar to the way we are racing towards an AI-dominated economy. The primitive-sounding bleeps and bloops of reflect how the current consumer-facing AI technology flops at making a image of a person with the correct amount of fingers.
On “Body Politics” the speaker’s assertion that “I get to choose what I do with my body” is interrupted and spliced by the production, mirroring the push between people’s bodily autonomy and the right’s quest for control. Bouffant Bouffant’s remix of “Tommorow’s Carry” by the punk band Special Interest merges a dystopian monologue with an sonic sci-fi backdrop. Life has never felt more like a dystopian YA novel. May the odds be ever in your favor.
Discordant Noise
Before veering into blown-out breakbeats, The Machine Girl remix of different Special Interest song on the playlist starts with this chant :
Who gets offered the American dream?
To O.D. on fent in a fascist regimе
Who can't afford shit
'Cause the price is fucking gougеd
Don't even have a house
The landlord kicked us out
One for the money and two for the show
Society of spectacle
The theory fucking blows
This song, alongside others like “BURN THE WITCH” + “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself,” rhetorically face the violence with words that pull no punches. Some might get depressed hearing our world described so grimly, but it’s comforting to feel seen in your frustrations.
It’s always tracked to me that these violent times deserve violent sounding music. The Jane Remover remix on this playlist matches the country’s chaos with a musical cacophony: whip your hair till it falls out, damage your brain. The idea that everything seems nice, but if you look you’ll get confronted with gunshots + shrill alarms feels incredibly American to me, so I had to drop in the Switch Remix of Lily Allen’s “LDN”.
This Matmos track gives the song “The Stars and Stripes Forever” a wonky sheen that the absurd failures of the American empire demands. It’s the version of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” for a country where people struggle to get healthcare, own a home, get out of debt, find work, but do get greeted by military forces if they try and protest.
That’s it for me rn, but I’ll be back early next week with an event forecast including a Boiler Room protest, a unhinged puppet show, + a no wave concert.
Til then, I hope you find a way to enjoy a hot dog today.
XOXO Mo