On Kings

I know for a lot of you the prospect of talking politics right now is like chowing down on a big steaming bowl of maggots and razor blades. I get it: We don’t all ski the double diamond run of grief. But for me to ignore it right now would be like sporting a baseball-sized swelling in the center of my forehead and being all, Oh, what? That? I hadn’t even noticed.

I am, unfortunately for you, a student of history, if an inconsistent and undisciplined one, and I’ve got a few observations to load onto the daily corpse wagon. But, in the appreciation that one may soon find one’s choices rather proscribed, should one of our worse-case futures manifest, I would like to offer you an alternative. A bowl of warm, savory broth, let’s say, though—prepare for foreshadowing—this soup will be full of Vegemite.

If you’d like to skip past the hostility, violence, and fiendish mayhem, click here.

Caligula in the House

In the event that you just fell off a tomato truck, I’ll be slightly less indirect than usual and just out and tell you that I found the election results pretty upsetting. But I didn’t find them terribly unexpected.

The postmortem has been the usual fragmentation grenade of opinions—Harris ran a crummy campaign; Democrats can’t get their message out; Democrats need to reach out to nativist bigots and delusional voters; Democrats need to embrace Marxist fascist socialist humanism whatever the fuck; people are hateful; people are ignorant; people really believe that Trump can reduce the price of eggs, perhaps with voodoo; perhaps Trump will actually just buy eggs for them from the vast horde of gold¹ underneath Mar-a-Lago where he lies coiled up like a flabby dragon in an ill-fitting suit and shoe lifts; and of course no election would be complete without a swirling suspicion that Trump, who projects as he breathes, cheated. And so forth. Some of this is true—Democrats do struggle with messaging; they don’t need to compromise their principles; some people are hateful and some are ignorant. Some of it is not—Harris ran as good a campaign as one could expect given its abbreviated time frame; however much he has corrupted the system, Trump did not cheat outright.

The thing is, all this stuff is all like a wave of prey fish presaging the shark. If I may be allowed to put a chip on the political roulette table, I would say that the reason Harris lost has less to do with her campaign² than in political and economic trends stretching back to days when Ronald Reagan introduced us to the perverse notion that the best way to improve our economy was to make life much, much easier and more lucrative for rich people. In various costumes and sitting atop various justifications, so-called trickle-down economics has amounted to political orthodoxy for forty years now, eating away at the finances of everyone outside the investment class until we no longer need a economico-philosophical scythe to cull the Laffer Curve; we’re seeing the effects in real time.

Ben Stein knew it was doodoo but had to suckle at the GOP teat because how many times could he play himself in John Hughes movies?

The extreme wealth concentration these policies produced is particularly pernicious because it fuels so many other problems: it distorts our politics, it poisons our journalism, it destroys our environment, and worst of all it feeds upon itself—the more money is concentrated in the hands of a small few, the more the few can bribe politicians—desperate for cash in our intensely and abnormally capital-centric electoral system—to further tip policy in their favor, leading inexorably to yet more wealth concentration.

Progressives have warned about this for decades, mostly in newspaper and magazine articles where such warnings go to die whilst mainstream Democrats apply the tiny bandaids they occasionally manage squeak past the GOP—those tiny round ones that are sufficient for covering a pimple and not much else. Or when something of real worth does get done, it usually gets gleefully demolished by subsequent GOP administrations of often dubious authority (Bush’s minoritarian victory in 2000 and Trump’s in 2016) before the systemic effects are apparent to the low-information voters that typically decide our elections. The best, said Yeats with the clarity of a seer a hundred years back, lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

As the rich have gotten richer, everyone else has effectively gotten poorer. The minimum wage dropped in value by a third between the start of Reagan’s presidency and 1995. After a brief bump under Clinton, it’s been completely flat since 2000. Wages generally haven’t done much better, dropping similarly under Reagan’s policies and struggling to gain traction after Clinton, all while productivity has climbed steadily. Wealth apologists like to point out that the pie has grown, but won’t acknowledge that a tissue-thin slice of a big pie is really just a plate of up yours.

So if you’re a wage earner and you’re struggling, this is why. It’s a direct result of not only calculated GOP economic policies but their scorched-earth political tactics, which make governance under Democratic rule nearly impossible. You can see all of this in the numbers as clear as day. If you look at em. Which, let’s be honest, most people don’t.

Forty years of this, all too predictably, has created a serious crisis, and, awash in propaganda, living in a media environment in which the truth is increasingly fuzzy and lies can be generated automatically or with the help of our friends in Russian pay, who can even see the long sweep anymore? We are instead fed a pat story about how migrants are taking our jobs and well, it seems that it’s at least as effective as a chart showing the productivity gap. As the saying goes, if you’re explaining you’re losing.

And so nobody explains.

I don’t have an answer to this problem, which is why this piece is never going to appear in Newsweek. Well, that and a cornucopia of other reasons.³ Mainly what I want to get at today, before I shut up about politics for a while, is twofold: First, to recognize how unremarkable our situation is. People have been talking about these issues almost as long as I’ve been alive, and warning that if they continued there’d be hell to pay. Well here we are, and the bill stands before us, orange and flatulent. Second, to say—and I know you don’t really need me to tell you this—that we are squarely behind the eight-ball now. We’ve lived in a crisis-rich environment for a long while, and there are many—climate change, the international rise of authoritarianism, the potential reemergence of nuclear proliferation—which we can ill afford to shelve while we deal with the colossal stupidity of nominating Butthead for Attorney General. It’s a terrible thing to witness the crumbling fortunes of a country that seemed eternal when I was a boy watching Bicentennial fireworks. But worse, it’s happening at literally the worst possible moment.

It’s the feedback loops that are the scariest part of all of this. For instance, climate effects and wars engender refugees, and refugees grow into migrant crises, and migrate crises spawn autocracies, which in turn devalue attempts to alleviate the warring and climate effects. This is true everywhere, not just the U.S., and again we could have seen it coming had we merely looked. We could have been spending the last 20 years creating real solutions to the problem of mass migrations, instead of just using it to as a club to bash political opponents. But we didn’t, and the crises—migration and the rest—are now metastasizing. If the election of Trump tells us anything, it’s that when you drive fast and recklessly along a cliff edge, sooner or later you’ll drive right the fuck off.

If there’s a bright spot anywhere in this vast field of shit and landmines, it is that we have an unexpected ally: the Rapist in Chief himself. Consolidating, building, and running an authoritarian regime requires more than accordion hands and word vomit. Indeed, the really dangerous authoritarian figures generally possess qualities Trump, who is barely more than a walking appetite—for money and Big Macs and the butt-licking idolatry of his legion of sycophants—lacks. It will be interesting to see, for example, what actually happens in two years when that weird double-headed efficiency committee—which is being presented to us as a cabinet level department but which lacks both budget and constitutional authority of any description—issues its report. Will Elon and Vivek even make it to the deadline without incurring the wrath of their turgid sovereign? Will the end product make any sense at all? Who will turn it into legislation? Will it be passed?⁴ The GOP House spent the past four years trying and failing to impeach Joe Biden, and did virtually nothing else. I’m not even sure they named any post offices. They’re going to have to put on their big boy pants for this stuff, and it remains to be seen whether they even have big boy pants.

There’s two poles of opinion about what might happen over the next four years. One is that Trump and his flying monkeys will swiftly move to capture the military and silence critical media and fire all the civil servants and arrest their political opponents and blah blah blah until eventually we’re all living in the United States of Trump. The other extreme is that MAGA will feud with establishment Republicans and with themselves, that Trump’s appointees will focus mainly on stealing everything they can from federal coffers until they draw too much limelight from the black hole about whom they orbit and get fired, only to reappear on Fox and Friends or launch a miserable podcast or land in jail.

I lean toward the latter pole: Trumpworld is completely incoherent, led by a lazy and egotistical bag of shit with no thought beyond gobbling up everything in sight and serving his own petty grievances, filled with self-serving freaks, ninnies, nitwits and nincompoops, and lacking even a shred of any clear, cohesive ideology. It seems likely that the lion’s share of its efforts will be quickly blunted or crippled through incompetence and infighting or the inspiration of a tidal wave of lawsuits. This will be the era of the lawyer, hear my words. And the truth is, they’ll be fine with that; MAGA has the memory of a goldfish and no patience for details. Remember how Mexico was going to pay for that stupid wall?

That’s not to say there won’t be damage. It seems all too likely that the military will wind up deployed on U.S. soil to quell protests and whatnot—this will likely be an expression of petulance more than a self-coup, but it will still be a shattering blow to the republic. Internationally, the rest of the world is already seeking to work around the U.S., and our soon-to-be-erstwhile allies are forming alliances without us. As our influence declines so will our fortunes.

But damaged is not dead, and the absolute best case scenario is not at all impossible: a new generation of progressives rises to the occasion in four years with a set of concrete answers and a story more compelling than the horseshit one about trans surgeries eating up your tax dollars.

Kings Among Men and Lizards

Ok well enough of that. Depending when you read this I will either be preparing for, enjoying, or basking in the memory of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s first appearance at the Fox Theater Tuesday night. If you know nothing about King Gizzard, boy do I have a story for you.

A friend of mine brought them up at a party about five years ago, telling me in a strangely confidential tone like he was recommending an addictive drug—which he was—that I needed to go home and queue up Flying Microtonal Banana as soon as possible. I did, and I was not disappointed. The Australian six-piece (then a seven-piece) soared immediately to the top of my listening queue.

I try to describe this band to people but I always feel like I’m cornering them with a master’s thesis. I carry around a complicated instruction manual for enjoying King Gizzard, but it’s all in my head, so it requires me to monopolize the conversation for a good ten minutes or until I feel like my interlocutor has grepped all my essential points or is no longer breathing. This ought to work better in writing, for the same reason that owning a shop manual for your car is a better solution than having a fat guy named Earl wearing a stained wife-beater and chugging a Miller Lite burping up arbitrary suggestions from the curb while you’re crawling around looking for the oil drain plug.

So the first thing to know about King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard is this: it’s six different bands. I mean, it’s not physically 36 guys, but they make (at least) six different kinds of records. Be aware of this when you give ‘em a listen. If you don’t like one album, keep going. They’re all different, and there are plenty of ‘em. As of this writing, the band has made 26 studio albums, 39 live albums, four compilation albums, one remix album, three extended plays, 59 singles, and 60 music videos. In 12 years.

If you hear any noise, It's just me and the boys…

Absurd profligacy is a key piece of the King Gizzard brand (they made five albums in 2017 alone), but it’s by no means the whole story. Each of these albums (I’m speaking from this point about the studio albums) is a serious achievement, not just a bunch of tracks that failed to make the cut for the last record. Each of the six members—comprising bass, drums (originally the band had two drummers but one quit to run their label), keyboard (plus occasional harmonica), and three guitars (often doing double duty as additional keyboardists, plus a bit of flute just to keep you on your toes)—is an accomplished musician, and the songs are jammed to the gills with inventive, unexpected riffs and melodies, across an absurd range of genres. Like I said, this is six bands in one: a straight ahead rock band, a microtonal (more about this in a moment) rock band, a sort of poppy folk group, a jazz band, an electronica outfit, and a thrash metal band. They are at least that faceted. Others might find cause to divvy them up further, but the point is their creativity is not only mindbogglingly productive, it’s wildly varied.

It’s not just in the production of albums that they prove fantastically driven—they also tour relentlessly, selling out enormous venues—worldwide—sometimes several nights in a row. I honestly don’t know when they write and record these albums because they seem to be playing nearly every night somewhere.

But like the old Ginsu knife ads, that’s not all.

They also self-promote. They make their own videos, by themselves. They design their own t-shirts and other gear, which they send out, you guessed it, themselves. They are fundamentally a DiY outfit, and despite having no label support and virtually no radio play, really just through sheer will and word of mouth⁵ and constant performing, they’ve grown large enough to be able to put together a North American tour, beginning next year, which will feature a 28-piece orchestra. A fucking⁶ orchestra! Who are these people?

I’ve honestly never witnessed a phenomenon quite like it. A friend and bandmate of mine compared them to the Grateful Dead, which maybe is getting there. But though you can find their traits elsewhere, there’s nobody else, now or in the past, that does it with quite the drive and profusion of ideas and downright weirdness and success that King Gizzard has mustered. If you told me they’d sold their souls to the Devil, I’d give you a hearing.

Now, the first album I generally recommend to putative listeners is the aforementioned Flying Microtonal Banana, which I feel is the purest expression of their fundamental style—that part of their style that transcends genre. The music is driving and machine-like, with angular ostinati and long, sinewy melodies that would not be out of place in some eastern folk music. And also, of course, microtonal, which is both a sigil of how strange they can get and also how incredibly cool.

If you don’t know what microtonal music is, go to a piano and play all eight white notes starting from middle-C (ask someone if you don’t know where it is). That’s a C-major scale. Now play 12 notes starting from middle-C, including the black keys. That’s a chromatic scale. Now imagine that there are notes in between those keys. If you had them, you could play a microtonal scale.

Microtonal scales will sound, to the western ear, either foreign or out of tune, or both. I find that King Gizzard’s use of these scales—the use of which entailed buying an entire separate set of custom instruments for virtually the entire band⁷—lends the music a sharp, exotic flavor⁸ that is totally unheard of in rock music. Years ago I knew a guy named David Fiuczynski who played a microtonal guitar, which he used to lend a Vietnamese and Laotian veneer to his brand of electric jazz. It was cool but Dave isn’t playing three night stands at Red Rocks every four months. His music was highly intellectual and perhaps lacked popular appeal in our fundamentally dumbshit world. King Gizzard’s music is highly intellectual, but you don’t have to think about it that way if you just want to rock out, because it does that too.

This will be the second time I’ve seen King Gizzard—I was lucky enough to catch them at Atlanta’s Shaky Knees festival a few years back. They took the stage like a 747 on fire, and the intensity just increased from there. They were worth the price of admission all by themselves. I missed them several times afterwards—I swore and be damned I’d catch ‘em in that crazy cave venue in middle Tennessee last year, but you gotta be Johnny on the Spot to get tickets. I failed again with the Fox show until a friend of mine emerged with a half dozen tickets and a layaway offer, which frankly is the only way I could have afforded it. Their meteoric growth has been accompanied by downright silly levels of pricing, which is unfortunate, but what can you say? If people were knocking the doors down to see me playing Beatles songs badly on my daughter’s parlor guitar, I’d probably take my act out of the living room and charge y’all $150 a pop to hear me butcher “Julia.” Sorry but a man’s got to get filthy rich somehow.

Well so anyway, give ‘em a listen. I hope you like ‘em but remember, if you don’t, try a different album.

1. And national security documents.

2. Biden’s failure to stick to his initial resolve to serve only one term was a serious unforced error, but of course it wasn’t Harris’.

3. Like, I haven’t tried.

4. With exceedingly narrow margins in both houses, the GOP cannot afford to lose votes, and I suspect that there are plenty of California and New York Republicans who are not going to go along along with attempts to prize coin out of their constituents’ hands, or any other of the more batshit proposals coming from the MAGA mob.

5. Assisted by an army of fans, for whom the band provides limitless access to their music through what they term their bootleg program, encouraging people to remix and rerelease their tracks to their heart’s content. Want to start a record label? No problem: you can release your own compilation of King Gizzard tracks right now, no questions asked; they ask only to be credited.

6. Fkn orchestra, as they put it on the show posters.

7. Except drums, of course, and keyboards, which can be reprogrammed for the purpose.

8. In this context I think of it in more textural terms as crunchy.