From Caruso to Bebe Rexha

As published on SubStack, 8/2/22:

[Toronto, 3/20/17]

Mentioning a darkening Germany recently, I thought of two bands, Rammstein and HGich.T, both hilariously dark, just like Büchner, Kleist, Kafka and Kippenberger, etc. There is that awesome strain in their culture.

Thinking about doomsday music led me to several acts that are downright satanic, however, but unlike the German combos, they are heavily promoted by the music industry, as dominated by Jews. 

We’ve had roughly a century of recorded music, but it began, innocently enough, with Edison recording himself reciting “Mary Has a Little Lamb” in 1878. Two years later, he enlisted two musicians to perform Arthur Sullivan’s “The Lost Chord.” How poetic a name for such an immortal event!

Widely deemed a genius while still kicking, Sullivan has evaporated into nothing. Still, he should be remembered for this statement to Edison, “For myself, I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening's experiment—astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever.”

This wonderful power has certainly subjected us to a bottomless cesspool of not just hideous but also satanic music, so we have a number like Bebe Rexha’s “Sacrifice,” a word that used to mean taming or even negating yourself for those you love, your nation, an ideal or God. Here it means “human sacrifice,” though you wouldn’t know it from the first verse, “I'ma need those eyes focusing on me / Middle of the night, I'm the only star you see / I'ma need those hands running over me' / Cause I ain't the type to let you go easy, so”

Sounds almost like a love song, though in the video, a shackled and bleeding man resembling Jesus is bitten by Rexha with retractable fangs. Christ also bled copiously, see? Four women of different races then drink blood ecstatically, with one gushing it from her mouth. The end is a party scene with blood raining from sprinklers. Six years earlier, torture has already been sexed up and glamorized in Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money.” Neither singer had much to do with her mise en scène, needless to say. They, too, were props.

Now, let's us consider Todrick Hall’s “It’s Rainin’ Fellas.” Though it’s wrong to objectify human beings, it’s fine when done by a sassy queer:

It’s raining dicks and ass ass

It’s a fire (work) and it ain’t even July

Muscles falling from the sky

If you wanna find a guy

The video is a cornucopia of masculine buttocks, quite naked.

Consider this joke: What do you call that fleshy part around the vagina? A woman!

Oh my God, that’s so sexist! You must be a Nazi!

Sorry, dude, let me try again: What do you call that region around a penis? A man!

Wow, you’re a genius!

Black men, too, are free to reduce women to asses, often huge and twerking, so check out, for example, “Taste” from the half Vietnamese Tyga. In the video, all those nearly faceless and near naked women are just one fleshy background. About all they do is twerk or open their mouths to receive sprayed whipped cream. It’s not quite kosher yet to show them swallowing semen. Having tried many half-night stands, hardcore porn and mainstream culture will soon be wedded, but in an open marriage, of course.

In music videos, black men own mansions, drive the fanciest cars and get barnloads of pussies. In real life, many live in desolate ghettos or on sidewalks, can barely afford bus or subway fares and, all too often, end up in jail from mugging, raping or murdering somebody. Locked up, they rape men or get cornholed.

It’s this obscene gap between American bullshit and reality that Rammstein explores and mocks. In its “Amerika,” you have Maasai, Zulus, Innuits, Vietnamese, Thais and Chinese, etc., all mesmerized by watching Americans on the moon, most tellingly, though these superhero Yanks are merely Rammstein singing, in spacesuits but without helmets, for they’re still on earth, just like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and company. Watch the press conference of the oddly subdued Apollo 11 crew if you still believe in that fairy tale. It’s all bullshit, Rammstein drives home.

In its “Mein Land,” Ramstein goes to California to indulge in its myth of sun, sand, sea and pussy galore, though there are more homeless people pissing, shitting, going mad or even dying on its sidewalks than just about anywhere on earth. Before you balk at this assessment, walk for half an hour, don’t just drive, through San Francisco’s Tenderloin or Los Angeles’ Skid Row. At the end of “Mein Land,” the video turns dark and hellish, with fire, violent dancing and faces becoming demonic.

Though the lyrics to its “Angst” is about a black man, Der schwarze Mann, as bogeyman, the video clearly indicates it’s about the USA, so we have cookie-cutter men with lawnmowers in identical plots, then hideous-faced cheerleaders offering them gold ingot-like bricks so they can build walls around themselves, then they get guns and become so paranoid, they shoot at their TVs.

In its “Dicke Titten” [“Huge Titts”], Rammstein suggests, not all that convincingly, that there may be an antidote to this emasculated alienation. A nearly blind old German sings of his desire for a wife with huge tits, looks not important. Halfway, there's a cross-dressing man putting on makeup and padding his chest, but that's the only hint of contemporary Germany. Everything else is wholesomely retro. All the women aren’t just proud of their titties, but strong, they’re in control, with one laughingly flashing a priest at the end. There is much humor in this, and irony, too, which suggests even their authors consider this scenario far-fetched.

Writing this, I’m constantly looking at the clock, for Nancy Pelosi will soon land in Taipei. Will another war break out tonight? Someone must blink.

I’ll close, then, with a nod towards  HGich.T's "Dave Meier." Most hilariously, it features an old, wrinkly dude in a blonde wig who thinks he’s Dave Mustaine, lead singer for Megadeth. Half humoring him is a young dirty blonde, Steffi, though no way can she force herself to kiss grandpa. She ends up masturbating his fretboard.

That’s Uncle Sam, a disgusting has-been full of laughable illusions.