Hi

Jana’s Notes:

1. Gorillaz - The God of Lying ft. IDLES 

“Are you happy with your housing? Are you climbing up the walls?

Are you deafened by the headlines or does your head not hear at all?

Are you pacified by passion? Are you armed to the teeth?

Are you bubbling at the surface of what's cooking underneath?

Are you dying for an answer for what they call good grief?” 

//

“Do you love your blessed father?

Anoint by fear of death?

Do you feel the lies creep on by? As soft as baby's breath

Do you beg that truth will set you free?

Are you shackled by the keys?

Well, if I was you, I'd stay strapped in

Cause all you got is me” 

I recommend this with Bertram’s Negative Money on one of the tables. Both of these are rather new. Gorillaz drip-fed their new album “The Mountain” over the past few months, starting with “The Happy Dictator (feat. Sparks).” 

2. Flobots - There’s A War Going On For Your Mind

A bit older. Flobots released their album “Fight with Tools” in 2007, calling for awareness on media control and propaganda in the screen and advertisement age. Somewhat to my dismay, current psychological studies on repeated subjection to traumatic stimuli in media focus on increased violence in the viewer: 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4393354/#S18 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4522002/ 

–save for Albert Bandura in his book, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-43532-000. 

This is all to say that I believe the more pressing issue at hand is viewer apathy. That’s not to ignore the fact that (per the hierarchy of needs…) our current material conditions (piss economy, etc.) force us to prioritize our own survival (in other words, just clock in and lock in!), but this is how the wheel keeps turning… 

3. Nero’s Day at Disneyland - In Aisles

Sampled from Die Dreigroschenoper () by Bertold Brecht. Spoken in German, backwards: 

“Soldiers dwell

On the cannons, 

From the Cape to Cutch Behar

When it rained some day

And they encountered-” 
//

“It’s the right of a man on this earth,

Since he doesn’t live long, to be happy,

To enjoy all the pleasures of this world,

To get bread to eat, and not a stone.” 

From the mid-2000s. Something of a precursor to modern hyperpop, which makes me think of subculture’s role in resistance and revolution. I’ve a few friends who make hyperpop music–I’ll let their shows speak for themselves: https://www.instagram.com/p/DUqYB3Ojikv/ 

If the link doesn’t work, the title is “BRING THE HEAT: Fundraiser for Immigrants Affected by ICE.” What am I trying to say here? Go dance, go club, go move. This is revolutionary. 

Anyhow, Lauren Bousfield’s alias “Nero’s Day at Disneyland” says a lot by itself. Emperor Nero’s still historically infamous for his overconsumption for entertainment purposes at the cost of the lower class’s wellbeing, and I will refrain from commenting on Disney. In her words, though, her harsh music “poetically illustrate[s] ... hopelessness in the age of late capitalism,” but that her goal is “to make people who feel powerless feel powerful.” 

4. BAD BUNNY - DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (Short Film)

I could speak forever on gentrification and cultural appropriation. Those are American, for sure. The loss, though, the memory, that’s American, too. I was talking to my friends about how our parents’ accents don’t sound like modern accents from our home countries. Like immigration holds your tongue in time. I learned Spanish from my Puerto Rican father figure and can’t speak Spanish because my actual parents thought it’d give me a better shot. Yeah, that’s American. The people from the nations extracted from and subjugated come here thinking they’re in a safe haven. Then we’re not safe. But look, at least we get to exchange hands and languages like this. Thaaaat’s American. One time, when my brother was trying to convince me to move to Jersey City, I asked, “what’s in Jersey City?” He said, “your people [Filipino-Americans].” I said, “Yeah, who’s my people?” Answer’s “everyone”. I’d like to think that sentiment’s American. Could be American. 

5. Bad Bunny’s Superbowl Halftime Show

I remember there was some noise about how the people are placated by fireworks while the world burns. Fair point. I also remember my friend, a second generation immigrant from Peru suddenly feeling ushered to decolonize her mind and dig into her family history after watching this. That does much, much more than one would think. 

6. Marathon | Reveal Cinematic Short

Concept short film for an extraction shooter video game in the works by Bungie. Ironically, the game might never make it. The market’s too saturated and Bungie’s coffers are running thin. The short features Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and sees players gaining conscience in synthetic silk bodies. I include this to touch on the Western imagination: on capital dystopias and what a fallen capital empire would look like. From the rubble of an ecologically spent planet, thoroughly extracted, players must acquire items of the highest value, die, and do it again, and again. 

7. Warframe | We All Lift Together

Similar idea, older game. Warframe’s release of the “Fortuna” colony sees non-playable characters who have sold body-parts laboring to clear their debt. Not far from reality. Towards the end, ambient audio bleeds into the recording: “With a conscience clear and unburdened, give, give.” 

8. Les Miserables - Do You Hear the People Sing? 

I include this specifically to question when and why the revolution is televised. Hugo’s novel is much older, but the film popularized it and the stageplay in 2012, deep in an era of progressive US optimism. I also wanted to include clips from the League of Legends TV Series, Arcane (2020), animated by French animation studio Fortiche (who’s done work for Gorillaz, and heavily leans into resistant subculture aesthetics). It features a literal “undercity” of the “City of Progress,” and season 1 opens with siblings walking away from their mother’s death during a protest that went violent. Class tension rises, but the show dodges class war and revolution and has their two radicals join the “overcity” in a fight against a more blatantly imperial third party. 

In a mere 8 years, what’s changed, such that companies (Riot, in this case) don’t want to take anything but a centrist position…? Rather, what specifically allowed films like Les Mis and the following to televise (sensationalize?) revolution such that it was not actually threatening? 

9. The Hunger Games

See above. 

10. Across The Spider Verse but it's only Spider Punk / Hobie Brown 

Follow up question to the above: is there a way to televise the revolution quietly? This character ironizes himself, obfuscates his intentions, and, well, gets 4 minutes of screentime. Although seemingly unclear about whether his resistance is merely aesthetic, he wrests control from the “autocrat” by democratizing the watches which the Spider-people rely on to (essentially) live. 

See Defeating Dictators: Fighting Tyranny in Africa and Around the World by George B. N. Ayittey–unfortunately we don’t have it on hand. Credits to @schnee on YouTube for his great analysis on this character where he cites this book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ90GIuawAo&t=1267s at 21:00 

“To enable national political change, a revolutionary movement needs control of components of civil life: the levers of civil power.” 

11. Hayley Williams | True Believer

“They put up chainlink fences underneath the biggest bridges

They pose in Christmas cards with guns as big as all the children

They say that Jesus is the way but then they gave him a white face

So they don’t have to pray to someone they deem lesser than them

//

The South will not rise again

Til it’s paid for every sin 

Strange fruit, hard bargain

Till the roots, Southern Gotham” 

Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday protests lynching. Hard bargain: https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=141263 

12. Dear Alice

…As you might see from the top comment, unfortunately, this amazing solarpunk animation which imagines an ecologically sustainable future is a Chobani advertisement. Can we wrest our imagination from the machine? Regardless, solarpunk itself, I believe, is a great avenue for imagining what is to be built from the rotting cadaver of colonization (invoking Fanon here). 

13. Stokely Carmichael Kwame Ture 1971 NEWARK, NEW JERSEY

I’ll withhold my thoughts. Just mind that the global conflicts he mentions are at the forefront of our headlines now.