Ancestors

Written by Passenger on 2025-01-13 at 21:15

I now have over a thousand followers. I've spent a little while purging my follower list of inactive accounts, so I think whomever remains is active. A thousand is too many. You all have terrible taste in whom you chose to follow. I am very disappointed.

Seriously, I'm flattered that you all consider me worth listening to, but also somewhat terrified.

What follows is a (light-hearted) attempt to prune my follower list so that only the strong remain.

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Written by Passenger on 2025-01-13 at 21:16

Firstly, blue is objectively the worst favourite colour. I'm sorry but it just straight-up sucks. If you thought your favourite colour was blue then please reconsider.

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Written by Passenger on 2025-01-13 at 21:18

Please don't attempt to rehabilitate nu-metal. It doesn't need a critical reappraisal or a modern reexamination. I still own most of the original albums from when I was a kid, and even them sitting in a box in my cellar is too much presence.

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Written by Chris Ford :tw: on 2025-01-13 at 21:35

@passenger How do you feel about it being redeployed as a flavour e.g. Rina Sawayama's 'XS'?

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Written by Passenger on 2025-01-13 at 21:46

@cford

I have complex feelings about this. I really like what Sawayama is doing, but I feel that she doesn't quite succeed: she's using nu-metal as a signifier of crass, flat commercialism, which isn't wrong exactly but it misunderstands the historical context that nu-metal came out of. Nu-metal is like Dada or Situationism or Superflat: it loses a lot of its meaning if it's detached from its moment in history.

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Written by Chris Ford :tw: on 2025-01-13 at 22:07

@passenger Good point. I still cling to the idea that using nu-metal in an inauthentic way itself works as a metaphor for crass commercialism, though that's a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free.

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Toot

Written by Passenger on 2025-01-13 at 22:51

@cford

Again you're not wrong but there are many, many genres of music which can be used as a signifier for vulgar consumerism. What does this one specific moment in music history communicate beyond that?

(Genuine hot take: XS is a brilliant piece of anticapitalist art because it answers that question by saying "this is not just commercialism posturing as rebellion, but it's your dad's commercialism posturing as rebellion against your grandparents." The specific generational meaning of nu-metal has a specific significance within that song that it might not have elsewhere.)

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Descendants

Written by Chris Ford :tw: on 2025-01-14 at 12:15

@passenger This is one case where art works viscerally and immediately for me so I try to retrofit intellectual rigour that isn't there, perhaps. 🙂

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