cyberpunk
ass taste better in the summertime
Earlier today I was on the toilet,
phone in hand, Mikaya Behailu’s Shemametew ballads playing low, her voice doing that thing where it sounds like it is mourning something beautiful on your behalf, whether you asked it to or not. And somewhere between one ballad and the next, a thought sat down beside me in that small tiled room and refused to leave: what would it feel like to write a blog post that feels like ELUCID’s Revelator?
The title, if you know, you know. It is lifted from ELUCID’s verse on “Bitter Cassava”, off Shrines by Armand Hammer. (i also want to write a post that feels like Shrines. maybe after this one. if i am not exhausted)
If you have not heard Revelator, here is the weather report: it is an album that whispers. Dense verses over dusty jazz loops, a man walking through the city at dusk with his hood up, rapping about surveillance cameras, dead mothers, God, rent, and time, all in the same breath, all at the same volume, which is low. It is sad the way evenings are sad. Naturally. Structurally. Like the sadness was load-bearing.
That is the register I want this post in. So:
We keep saying the cyberpunk dystopia is coming.
We should stop. It is not coming. It came, it saw, it updated its terms of service while you were asleep.
The cameras were supposed to be the warning sign. Every cyberpunk film opened with them, the great watching eye of the state, and we were told to fear the day they went up. They went up years ago and nobody rioted, because they did not arrive as cameras. They arrived as convenience. As doorbells. As traffic management. As the phone in your pocket that you carry voluntarily, charge lovingly, and would panic about losing, the most intimate surveillance device ever built, the one that knows where you slept, what you wanted at 1 AM, and which message you typed and deleted and typed again.
The panopticon has a for-you page. Big Brother is not watching you; he is recommending you things, and the recommendations are good, and that is so much worse than the films promised.
Cash is becoming a suspicious activity. Your face is becoming a password. Your attention is strip-mined daily by machines that were designed, explicitly, in rooms, by people, to be irresistible, and the word for resisting them successfully is “wellness”, and wellness is a subscription.
(the dystopia did not arrive with neon and a title card. it arrived with a software update, and we clicked accept.)
And here is where Revelator comes in, and why it is the only honest soundtrack for this exact moment.
Because the album does not scream about any of this. There is a track literally called “CCTV” and it does not rage; it notices. “The World Is Dog” does not show despair it reports. “Bad Streaming” takes the entire broken economy of music, the art form turned content farm, and just looks at it, steadily, the way you look at rain. The whole record is a man saying: I see the machine, I live inside the machine, I am made of the same materials as the machine, and I am still here, walking, rapping quietly, lighting one small candle of attention.
That is what melancholy actually is, at its best. Not despair. Clarity. Seeing the thing fully, without flinching, and deciding that seeing it is itself a form of staying alive.
Despair wants you to look away. Melancholy holds your head gently and says: look. Then go home. Then eat. Then continue.
Which brings me back to the title, because the title is the counter-argument, the whole counter-argument, hidden inside one absurd bar.
“Ass taste better in the summertime” is crass and funny and bodily and alive, and that is exactly the point. The machine can map your face, score your credit, predict your next purchase, simulate your voice. It cannot taste anything. It will never know what anything tastes like. The summer comes anyway, cameras or no cameras, terms of service or no terms of service, and in the cracks of the surveillance city the old unoptimizable life keeps growing like grass through concrete: the ballad on the toilet speakers, the mango from the street vendor, the body, the appetite.
The dystopia is already here.
So is the summer. So are you.
Revelator’s last lesson
Continue.
I honestly have no idea if any of that made sense, but even does, nothing ever does, but I just had the itch to write this out and just meh, let it float somewhere out here on the net, was this true to the album? idk, was the analogies correct?, maybe or maybe not idk…. its just an itch to write like all the other posts here, and plus there is no light out here so I do need to do something I guess, at this point I am just ranting but probably, I think I owe it to ELUCID to write a well researched post next time but connecting shrines to revelator feels illegal but honestly I have connected much more unrelated things here … lmfao I am just ranting at this point. But we do need an elucid album in the orion DLC for cyberpunk, that shit would slap hard…fr fr