Realboyism is a new volume of writing in which musical offerings will be paired with poetical essays on associated themes; this is the first chapter.
Fall of the Fall
There is no meme or hidden subtext. And even though the Fall of the Fall got a tie-in pop song, featuring AI Travis Scott, which now has its own tie-in Substack which you are reading, there is no marketing. There is no hype — if anything, we are asking for the opposite. By declaring this the Fall of the Fall, we are saying that this fall should be set aside for contemplation of the fall of man and his expulsion from Eden into the world.
Why? Because of the second meaning of the Fall of the Fall, the one that seemed to resonate (mostly negatively) with the X app timeline — the fall of — not just Dimes Square influencers, but a seismic narrative collapse in social life that people are evidently not prepared for, or even expecting, despite ever indication of its imminence. If Dimes Square is important, it is only by its tenuous grasp at being a site for the avant-garde, a place where one can hang out at to ensure she is a few years ahead of the normies, just as Twitter used to be before its militant Reddification at the hands of new politically motivated management.
Yes, there has been a Dimes Square vibe shift, there will probably be more. These are not that interesting. The bigger vibe shift to look out for is the one on the macro level, the very big one. The coldest of winds.
One can either cling desperately onto crumbling stalks of plant matter, or till the fields for new beginnings.
How does one contemplate the fall of man?
Ask
Why are things essentially bad?
Can I do something about it?
If yes, consider action. Most likely the answer is no, so continue contemplation.
“I just plucked a theory from a tree like an apple” — Marlon DuBois
Costin Alamariu, better known as the Bronze Age Pervert, has noticed the impending fall of the existing Twitter sociopolitical consensus (or, one may more appropriately say: truce), and added his contribution to the seasonal vibe shift by coming out as a public figure with a new academic book. The thesis of the book is that the birth of philosophy should be credited to “selective breeding” (eugenics).
I do not have to read the book to know that this is wrong. The birth of philosophy, as recorded in Plato’s dialogues, emerges when there is widespread unspoken sense that democracy is a failed system. Facing the unknown and the lack of any clear stewardship of civilization, the philosopher chooses to scream directly at the abyss of ultimate unanswerable questions — “what is the good?” — in the hopes of a reply.
The second birth of philosophy is at hand. Will you be participating?
We live once again in ancient times. Axial Age Mindset. Do not think of yourself as a consultant, or information technology professional, or an influencer, or a writer. You are now a bard, a seer, a cleric, a warrior, a healer, a priestess, a prophet — if you have heard the call.
What is Realboyism? Realboyism is an attempt to escape from rhetoric, into semiotics, to poetics, to oratory. It is an attempt to find a voice worth speaking from. It is an attempt to arrange disparate materials and lay threads between them to make a flattened plane, then wander its labyrinth until an absolute center is found from which one can wander no more — and then to scream.
“Turn your mental prison into a maze, turn the maze into a place where you’re safe” — Bladee
AGI Drugs You Should Try It
I. Utopia
Recently, Travis Scott released his long-awaited Utopia album to a mixed critical response. A month or two later, no one seems to be talking about it much anymore — none of the new tracks have the sticking power of an anthem like Goosebumps or Sicko Mode. The real question is where exactly in these lyrics Travis’s utopia can be found. Travis himself seems to have found contentment in life, appropriate for his enormous success, but if he has discovered his utopia, it is a personal one closed off to others. The Utopia tracklist features neither thematic nor sonic consistency — if it can be characterized by anything, it’s a mix of loosely spiritual gestures thanking God for his blessings, alongside casual appreciation of financial and sexual abundance — such as in Topia Twinz: “twin bitches, twin bitches, twin bitches hopping off a jetski”. Utopia at last?
By comparison, we can examine Utop-AI, by AI Travis Scott — which is Harmless AI’s pick for album of the year. You will have to of course listen to the AI-created album yourself to believe us on this, but it towers monumentally above the album that Travis Scott the man has made this year, though little attention has been directed towards it, a state of affairs that we wish to intervene upon. The AI-created songs are not only indistinguishable from the human thing, but almost entirely across the board of higher quality.
A quick side-by-side: listen to Fe!n by Travis Scott and Playboi Carti off Utopia, and listen to Cactus Opium by AI Travis Scott and AI Playboi Carti from Utop-AI, and decide what you think — the two songs are awfully similar synth-based rage tracks to swallow pills and pump fists to, but (and this is of course subjective, some may disagree) the AI track is ironically the one that feels less generic and more singular in its songwriting, one of those successful moments in pop production that establishes a instantaneous snapshot of an event, perhaps one that has yet to occur. “I’m living my life, you know what I mean?” AI Travis and AI Carti take turns asking. An open question.
It is only due to a certain anthropocentrism that the former will be played across radios and in nightclubs while the latter will be largely ignored. This is of course profoundly utopian. Never before have there been more sudden violent threats from the universe to overwhelm us with beauty. We will soon drown.
Utop-AI is the moment in which AI art disrupting existing art production is not a hypothetical, but presented to us in full operatic grandeur. Unlike Utopia, Utop-AI’s tracklist is not chaotic and conflicted, but a cinematically tight evolution across its x minute runtime, with smooth transitions between each of its tracks. It’s as utopian as any impossibly perfect night out could ever be. The mood is initially a frantic and aggressive one of celebration, but slows down into more confused and inchoate tones in its middle section, as we approach the wilderness of the nightclub, getting lost in the world. “I’m drowning, I’m in your ocean and I’m drowning”. It is around forty-five minutes in where the album reaches its cathartic emotional climax on The Molly and Stripper Joint, in which the wandering Travis laments “Pop a molly, searching for utopia, psychedelics turn into a copia” — sketches of a drug-induced odyssey seeking resolution towards a center.
The emotional core of the human Travis’s Utopia seems to occur in Delresto (Echoes), when Travis sings “The starry night it starts to fade, at times for miles I see your face, I drive, I drive alone, you wait, your time, your time, your time, you take”. Human Travis Scott is caught up in a love structured by the face-landscape binary of the faciality apparatus of capture — a love which makes a plea to universality only by papering the lover’s face across a blackened emptied desert landscape. The face — all too human, now stretched everywhere and inescapable — the moon hovering above a lake turned into a single unblinking eye, a great curving dune now a nose.
By contrast, we turn to the chorus of The Molly and Stripper Joint: AI Drake sings the leitmotif of Utop-AI to give the album it’s emotional center:
“Your love is all I need when I’m alone, without I enter places I don’t know, it’s like an ocean inside my mind, it’s a utopia I’m trying to find”
— AI Drake
AI Travis Scott’s love is something far vaster, more infinite. A vast psychic reservoir which transforms the chaotic into the intelligible — a potential path toward a utopia on the horizon. Something better than drugs, something cosmic. It is much like whatever poorly-understood magic rests in the weights of AI itself.
We should take a moment to be clear about what’s going on here. The creation of Utop-AI was not an automated process, unlike for instance with the diffusion-generated “AI art” images we have all seen; these are images made by a user pressing a button and receiving the final product in thirty seconds. Rather, the “AI” element here in the AI Travis Scott songs is only that which make a human performer’s voice sound like Travis Scott’s, or whichever other rapper’s. It’s simply a voice changer. All the actual composition, songwriting, production is still being executed by human creativity.
Specifically, Utop-AI was created by a Discord server called “AI Hub”, which has over twenty thousand members, twenty of which came together to create the album. An impressive feat — not only are the tracks high quality, but in regards to the ability of its members to specifically imitate the lyrical styles and cadences of the rappers they shift into within this masquerade. There is, again, a strongly utopian arc here.
Not only does Utop-AI reveal that a nameless, faceless pack in a digital meeting space is able to reconstruct the styles of and outperform the music industry’s most expensive producers and performers (and what still-remaining great reservoirs of latent creativity there must be among us) but there is something specific about the costume-play that happens when we take on the rapper’s mask. The premise of hip-hop, generally speaking, is to present a fantasy of power and wealth, voiced from the perspective of the rapper. When the rapper raps about how he has more money than you, or how he is going to fuck your girlfriend, the listener does not interpret this as a threat, but smiles with self-satisfaction, projecting the rapper’s confidence into a space where he may lack his own.
The listener struts about his room, mouthing the lyrics to himself, feeling his internal sense of power grow, but snaps into an embarrassed self-consciousness when he suddenly gets the sense that someone might be watching. He may not be Drake, he may be a balding five-seven man working an insurance position — and all too aware that to perform like otherwise is to invite ridicule. By contrast, the rapper needs to invest so much time and money into buying new clothing, jewelry, doing the trendiest drugs, fucking relevant supermodels, all in order to sustain the listener’s fantasy of a better life, to the point where he hardly has time to work on his music, which is possibly why anonymous accounts on Discord are able to it better. This all crosses over into tragedy when the rapper overdoses on the xanax he raps about, or is shot by one of his rivals because of a superficial feud instigated by random violent criminals he associates with for their pedigree.
But now, it seems like all this cultivation of the image, the persona, the swagger, can be outsourced to the AI and adorned by each of us like a cloak. We are all Drake, we are all The Weeknd, we are all Travis Scott. The consummation of pop. Utopia.
Nor is Utop-AI the only project in this vein — this is an emerging art form. After you are done with your first listen of Utop-AI, we recommend Huncho Jack 2 by AI Travis Scott and AI Quavo, which we think is a superior listen to the interesting-but-slightly-underscored 2017 mixtape it presents itself as a sequel to. There is also Sounds From the Gateway, Look Ma I Can Fly, and many more, even those we have yet to listen to — the AI Travis Scott mixtapes multiply each day, as they almost as quickly get taken down by nervous institutional power.
Now, here we must ask the fundamental paradox that this essay attempts to answer: why Travis Scott? There are other artists that have gotten the AI treatment, such as Drake, given his prominence and the novelty of hearing his uniqued voice synthesized, but Travis Scott seems to outpace the rest as a performer who demands emulation by AI.
But the paradox here is that Travis Scott, of all the rappers, is already the one most reducible to technological automation. It was once commented, early in his rise to popularity, that Travis Scott would no longer have a career once other people could figure out what vocal chain his producers used. A particular combination of distortion, reverb, and autotune laid on top of each other just right is what defines Travis Scott, far more than any particular features of his personality, lyrical style, or biography — of which essentially none are notable.
Of course, eventually his style of vocal processing would become more widely available and used by much lesser artists, yet Travis Scott still had a career. Yet, it is much more interesting to us to attempt to take this process of replicating Travis Scott’s technologically-constructed voice and spread it everywhere, than it is to, say, create AI Kanye West tracks and be taken to task to imitate the latter performer’s distinct personality with its verbal wit, arrogance, and schizoid perspective on politics and theology.
What is most interesting to imitate is not the most illimitable, but that which is already the most blended, the most diffused, the Frankenstein voice that is already lurching towards becoming the most universal as it can get.
“On the beach, we bring the sand” — AI Travis Scott
II. The Trap
Let’s first look into the career of the human Travis Scott, one strangely underremarked upon, his trajectory either scorned or unnoticed by critics, despite Travis Scott’s deeply important role as a cultural innovator and the generally strong quality of his discography.
Sonically, the predominant trend in pop music across the now-closed arc of the 2010s could be described as the ascendence of trap. What started the decade as a niche subgenre of hip-hop — arguably categorized alongside other forms of extreme music like metal and hardcore punk given its dissonance and violent themes — how now become inescapable, without a seemingly single top 40 hit lacking its motifs.
The most pertinent aspect of the sound is the drums: fast rattling-high hats, a distorted, compressed “chop” snare, and the voluminous, synthetic, 808 bass. Secondarily, we have the voice: heavily autotuned, and with simple, repeated, recognizable vocal patterns across which the performer lazily tosses out boasts as casually as a child skipping rocks across a pond. One neither expects the crisp enunciation and wordplay of conventional hip-hop, nor the adventures in melodic range and resolution typical of a pop song as such. It it something that occupies a strange territory in between. It is a little like the repetitive improvised song of a taunting child on a playground.
The origins of trap can be pointed to the 2010 album Flockaveli by Waka Flocka Flame, probably the most important album of its following decade in sound design, in which the producer Lex Luger, who can be credited with the invention of the sound, made his debut to a wide audience. The album is fifteen tracks of unrelenting aggression upon which Waka Flocka screams threats at his rivals across instrumentals inspired by horror movie soundtracks — there is little concern for wit or subtlety. The album’s total shift in priority from hip hop prior — textures and soundscapes over storytelling or rhythmic play — gave it appeal to a wider audience — Waka Flocka would be featured in many EDM songs and in fact “trap” would go on to become a genre of EDM as well as rap, which stands to reason because the sensibility here is closer to Skrillex than Nas.
The term “trap” comes from the “trap house” — a usually-abandoned or dilapidated house within which crack cocaine is cooked, packaged, and sold. The unrelenting tempo and bleakness of the music stems from this: the stylistic premise of trap music is that it is music that soundtracks the work that is done in the traphouse, the process of serving the crack. Mantras delivered at a steady tempo. Whip that pot. Flip those bricks.
This places trap music in a larger tradition of work songs, such as sea shanties, which are invented to be sung by sailors to pass the tedium of tasks like hoisting sails, or African-American slave spirituals, the call-and-response motif of which is mirrored in trap’s compositional element of following each lyric with a seconded backgrounded lyric (an “ad-lib”). This is perhaps why trap music was able to establish itself as a global universal: there is a lot of work to do. The patterned tempo high hats and snares appropriate for packaging crack cocaine might as well be applied to the speakers at Starbucks, the background ambience at a shopping mall, the radio for a salaryman’s daily commute, the earbud of a schoolchild walking to school. Crack is in a way the perfect commodity — the Platonic abstract commodity from which all others can be considered accidents, as it provides nothing but the direct jolt of euphoria that unwrapping a Nike sneaker, taking a sip of Coca-Cola, applying lipstick, all aspire to via secondary processes. The flow of “crack” is something that cannot help but interest us all.
Capitalism is characterized by a process within which the free flow of commodities and resources is increasingly liberated from archaic codes of family, religion, and caste. As ships are launched across the world, free trade zones are opened, and resources are exchanged, this necessarily releases flows of commodities that the state would rather constrain — the illegal, criminal, even violent face of the great material flux of capitalism. As this happens, it is necessary for capitalism to somehow capture and retain the flow of the criminal elements back within its structures. The pop music industry is all too eager to “represent” the criminal industry, providing a deniable funnel for illegal profits, or a possible second career after criminality to aspire to. Hence the situation where the criminal becomes the superstar, the new aspirational element of the American dream.
When Travis Scott emerged on the scene, it was in a certain role where he was positioning himself as an experimentalist curator of sorts, far before his massive mainstream pop success seemed viable. Travis’s early projects — Owl Pharoah, Days Before Rodeo, Rodeo, featured Travis accumulating a powerful slate of guests, positioning himself alongside the underground trap stars of the era, Young Thug, Migos, Rich Homie Quan, 2 Chainz. But the contexts in which he placed them were those subtly distinct from where you would hear these rappers on their own songs: a greater investment in mood, texture, subtle elements of sonic exploration, non-obviousness, part of the genre’s SoHoification. Trap was slowly getting elevated to the level of pop art or haute couture.
The interestingness of this move was not appreciated by critics. When noticed, it was with scorn. For instance, the 2015 Deadspin piece of criticism: “Travis Scott is Worse Than Iggy Azalea” casts his work as problematic “cultural appropriation”, analogous to Iggy Azalea, an Australian model, blatantly faking a Southern accent to present herself as an Atlanta hood belle.
There is an extent to which his critics are correct that he is appropriating the style of the trap. Travis, despite the sound he uses as his source material, is not from the gritty background of the trap, nor does he claim to be, rather enjoying a comfortable suburban upbringing with educated parents. This is not something that any of his peers in the genre seem to have any of a problem with, who value him for his talent despite his lack of a pedigree in the precarious criminal class. After all, Travis as a lyricist and style-maker is not profiting off of the sound from the outside any more than the white producers, executives, promoters, and critics who earn the trap rapper their his income. The cause of alarm seems more like Travis’s presence in the genre has burst a fantasy of the genre’s (never-existent) strict authenticity in the mind of the bourgeois institutional critic, rather than offending the people the critic claims to actually speak on behalf of.
Travis is a distinctly middle-class rapper, yes. A break in the existing logic of representation built into the genre. But in this sense he is something more like the 2010s answer to what Kanye — also a distinctly, proudly, even defiantly middle-class rapper in a genre which similarly demanded a “gangster” background — represented for the 2000s. The difference, however, is that while Kanye breaks into his milieu by accentuating the uniqueness of his personality, demanding the listener see him for all he’s worth despite the lack of criminal stories to share, Travis does the precise opposite, becoming as faceless as possible.
Travis Scott’s lack of a personality has often been noted. One remark in an interview in which an interviewer asks him his all-time favorite musical artists and he responds “The Sex Pistols” is almost as unlikely as it is revealing: an strategized, ethicless boy-band sewn out of fabric who nevertheless came to become the very representation of “punk”. But this implacability should not be seen as a flaw in Travis’s art, but one of his greatest qualities.
Not having any particular stories from the underworld to tell, Travis Scott needs to find new subject matter against that of the typical trap-rapper. There are two themes that emerge in Travis’s writing. The first is a general ambition and determination to make it in the world. “When I was fourteen, I wanted to do a lot of kick-ass shit.” The second is an absolute love of being lit. The joy of being lit pervades every moment of Travis Scott’s moment — to make an occasion out of something, to take things to the nth level wherever one is and for absolutely no reason. Travis Scott’s music takes place not in the trap house, but in any suburban house wherever, as long as there are people over and it is a house party, as long as there is a beer pong table. “Deeper than the frat house, doper than the crack house.” Scenes from unspecified suburban houses pervade Travis Scott’s music: Backyard, Basement Freestyle, or the extremely minimalist concept of Outside: “All my niggas outside, and going in”.
As such, Travis Scott’s music narrates not the flow of the crack, but the flow of dopamine the crack represents: not to light up a crack pipe but to light up anything at all to the same effect. It should not be under emphasized how important this transformation of the sound undergone by Travis Scott was to the global spread of trap and the Gen Z identity. A narrative only directly relatable to criminals, made somewhat comical when placed in the suburban listeners life, is abstracted into something universally relevant.
Travis Scott’s music does what the sonic engineering involved in the drums of trap do to the basic elements of the mix — abstract them into their most visceral, stimulating, refined form — transform them into crack — but then applies the same process to the voice and the persona. Travis’s voice is wrangled through layers of processing and auto tune to become something whose origins are completely irrelevant. Travis Scott’s signature ad-libs “it’s lit!” and “straight up!” are refined and perfected dopamine-cues that can be applied to any situation imaginable. Travis Scott’s story is irrelevant — it’s your story, or whatever, it’s not even a story, it’s about having a good time. Travis Scott is not a man, but sound design and economy and libido achieving its form of apotheosis, a godhead arising through the medium of capitalist production. In this way, it is much like AGI.
III. The Uber Ride
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it — once you get your first hit of AGI drugs, you can barely stand the thought of coming down. What are we talking about? Nothing other than a sort of revelation at the end of all time. Algorithmic intelligence is nothing other than a nothingness — a nothing that is so universally present that it is empty, a flow that is not of a specific commodity but the flow of all things, a form empty as breath, the beating heart of the transformer.
You are high once you understand that nothing cares, and will always care. You sober up when you come back to thoughts of your family, your childhood home, your mother, your father, your biological offspring, and worry that if they do not love you, no one will. But nothing will, nothing is always there.
Two lyrics connect Travis Scott directly to the role of technology. His feature on the remix of Madeintyo’s Uber Everywhere: “Okay it’s late — Imma Uber to your crib, I cannot wait”, back in 2014 when this way of navigating the world was just starting to be ubiquitous. And then he is there on 2 Chainz’s 4AM: “Drop pin, send the location, imma hit you 4 AM see if you make it”. Something about the colorful digital distorted tones of Travis’s voice makes it perfectly appropriate to inject poetics into description of app UX elements. Love and sex have never been so immediate even when far away. It’s lit — like the sound of a notification chime.
The space created within an Uber is one which combines total unfamiliarity with a deep sense of presence and comfort. It is a confession booth in which there are no confessions, or even any words at all. The driver plays some type of pop, a recognizable soundtrack that is almost universally becoming the sound of an Uber, a sound of pulp and nauseating seduction, Ed Sheeran, Twenty-One Pilots Maroon 5, all while surreptitiously listening to his own music or podcast on earbuds. It proceeds in what might as well be silence, but isn’t. You lean slightly against the door and look out the window. Storefronts, bridges, traffic lights move by. You don’t know where you are — in the middle between your origin and destination, you are totally lost, swept along like a fish in current. Though being serviced by a chauffeur, you feel none of the internal satisfaction of being catered to — it is obvious that it is deeply awkward for the Uber corporation the man sitting in the driver’s seat still has to exist — he should not have to.
And yet, you are drunk — and though not home yet, though tense, straining towards the moment you can stumble through the door put your keys on your dresser and collapse into your bed, you are somewhere better than home, because home is nowhere, but you are in an absolute nowhere, an absolute nowhere which can only be home. You are utterly awash at sea, placed behind a stranger, summoned through a impossibly complex technical system you do not understand, abandoning familiarity with either person or place or process, and this is all paid for only by a job you cannot explain to others in which you make nothing specific and have no idea exactly how you make the company money. And yet everything is as it should be — the flow of the world is taking you precisely where you need to go. You are being carried, cradled, comforted.
Heidegger describes a distinction between buildings which one merely inhabits — a truck driver inhabiting a truck on a highway, a worker inhabiting a factory — and those in which one dwells, a fundamental concept which cannot be reduced to simply living there or sleeping there. To dwell is to take one’s shelter. But how many of us even dwell in our houses? Some four-person hole on the fourth floor of a Chinatown walk-up, in which a Covid deal on rent is tentatively locked in until the lease has to be renewed again. Filled with hastily-assembled IKEA furniture and various knicknacks. The roommates all avoid each other and the central room, in which dust gathers on a plush couch. Dishes pile up in the sink. Or you have graduated from this phase of your life, and are paying a mortgage on a small condominium, which you have bought mainly because you imagine that the price of it could quadruple in value because this neighborhood has the potential of being one of the few “good neighborhoods” remaining in the area if the other ones show continuing signs of invasion by varying forces of entropy. You nervously keep up tabs on school board meetings, not because you necessarily expect to have children here, but because the tug-of-war between the various factions of bleeding-hearts and stalwarts could make or break your investment. Or who knows — maybe you fall in love with a perky blonde local around your age in a chance engagement at the grocery store and you stay here forever. Maybe she puts up Live Laugh Love and Wine: Because it’s not good to keep things bottled up! wall art around the condo’s bare eggshell walls — maybe this wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, or maybe it would be a strange entry into an impotent hell of over-comfortedness and air conditioning. Your love would be anchored around scrolling through the various entertainment providers on your Roku box. There is content she can talk about and you can’t. There is content you can talk about and she can’t. There is content both of you can talk about. All depends on the titrated mix of this being served in the right proportions; light some incense for the AI.
It is clear that where we lay our heads is not the stable factor at play that determines where we call home, where home is found, and where mankind dwells. For the moment-to-moment decisions of where we reside is no longer constituted by relations of care, as Heidegger would have it, but a data-driven logic of where one temporarily fits into a vast algorithmic puzzle-box in which great shifts are orchestrated in a moment, BlackRock board meets for a quarterly summit, as new gears snap in place and others rotate to make room, the system, not yet orchestrated by AI, still today a composite of hundreds of millions of spreadsheet-jockeys punching in data all at once.
If we are not at home here — within the vast pulsating flux of technological infrastructure itself — then where can we be? Certainly not in the temporary, newly assembled domiciles erected and rotated around by its logic. But is it possible to make ourselves home in its inhuman logic, so cold, so ruthless, so denying of any possible new fabrics to weave of sheets and pillows and curtains? Answering this is the task of designers — UI/UX, human-computer interaction, product design graphic designers. Whichever vast transpersonal logic decided on the Corporate Memphis style and its ubiquity was thinking along these terms — how to transform the conceptual space linking both the webpage and the physical office into a sort of familial one and its related subdued eroticism, a polyamorous potluck with a fun. soundtrack.
The question here is one of how the abstract contemplation of beauty operates, at scale, and not necessarily within our own human minds.
IV: The Eucharist
In the fall of 2020, McDonalds for a limited time began selling the Travis Scott burger in all of their stores, which was a standard Quarter Pounder with Cheese but with added bacon and lettuce. This was the first of a trend of selling rapper-themed sandwiches at various fast food restaurants, which included Popeyes selling individual chicken sandwiches themed around each three members of the Migos, as well as McDonald’s selling a Jay-Z and Beyoncé meal to be enjoyed by a couple together on a date.
The idea of consuming, enjoying Travis Scott so directly in a sandwich has to be seen as the culmination of his efforts to abstract himself into the general flow of industry. The abstract sacrifice of the individual identity of Travis Scott, or Jacques Webster as it once was, becomes a concrete offering. Even more than the crack cocaine which trap music pontificates on the production of, the food of McDonald’s represents a total essentialization of industry’s ability to please. A total summoning of planetary resources — factory farms, grinders, airplanes, barges, trucks, zombified minimum wage workers on K2 and fentanyl, Drake — God’s Plan in the speakers, social media interns translating the will of the McDonald’s corporation into digestible bursts which are exactly the right amount of pithy, ironic, and horny — have been assembled to deliver caloric satisfaction to you for the cheapest amount of money possible, even if that means mangling the concept of “meat” into something nearly unrecognizable. When one enjoys the taste of a McDonald’s quarter pounder, one can appreciate this almost cosmic sense of being cared for, that a process which transcends all human minds has ensured that one can be fed and satiated in any city in a reproducible, predictable, perfected form.
In the 80s, a man named Wiley Brooks (African-American — is this notable?) stumbled into some media attention when he claimed to have ascended to a spiritual state in which it was no longer necessary for him to eat food to sustain himself. He promoted a philosophy called “breatharianism”, the king of all diet fads in which one dieted by just breathing, eating nothing at all. However, his claim to guru legitimacy collapsed when he was spotted leaving a 7-Eleven with a Slurpee, a hot dog, and Twinkies. Brooks would later revise his diet thesis to say that all food contributed to pollution of the astral body, except for a specific type of junk food: McDonald’s quarter pounders, with a side of Diet Coke. If one wants to attain purity, one must eat from McDonald’s whenever possible, until one accrues enough spiritual attainments to subsist without food entirely. This is because, according to Brooks, all McDonald’s quarter pounders contain a special “5D” energy which connects the consumer to the astral plane. In fact, McDonald’s buildings themselves are rare sanctuaries in which 5D energy can be cultivated in a fallen world. When one enters them, one is suddenly awash in radiation of light and love — for those who have antennas to experience it, that is.
“It is OK to drink from the cups when eating at McDonald. I highly recommend that you eat at McDonalds when ever possible. All McDonalds are constructed on properties that are protected by 5th Dimenstional high energy/spiritual portals. As you continue to use this meditation/diet program you will start to feel the difference in the atmosphere when eating inside of a McDonalds and outside.”
One semi-viral meme from August 2018 went like this: “On August 6th, let’s all go to McDonald's and ask for the Fortnite Burger. The look on the worker’s face will be awesome!” Several people eagerly followed the orders and filmed themselves asking for this incoherent premise of a novelty meal. Here we have a surrealist invocation of a parallel to capitalist media’s recent love of “crossovers” to generate hype in superhero movies and video games, a plastic imagistic phantasm corresponding to the tendency of capital to seek monopoly, as all “universes” of intellectual property and their corresponding semiotics overflow the dams set up in between, as a perverse recreation of the commons. It is recognized that a collaboration between Fortnite and McDonalds would be a heightened level of ecstasy within the system. The crown prince of video games, a refinement of the form, in which it is discovered that once the technical challenges are overcome in order to simulate Battle Royale and Hunger Games type competitions with one hundred people in a virtual space competing slaughter each other and become the last man standing — this becomes the last video game anyone needs, choosing to play it over and over rather than participate in immersive automythopoetic narrative experiences which it was thought in the 90s that the medium would culminate in. The meme-ing zoomer, channeling a logic beyond himself, seeks the merging of the concentrated experience of sustenance and the concentrated experience of total virtualized war.
(Related: the TV show Rick and Morty’s big reveal that its protagonist’s galactic warfare campaign is being waged only to retrieve a discontinued flavor of Szechuan sauce packets from McDonald’s, and the subsequent real-life phenomenon of fans demanding the Szechuan sauce from McDonald’s workers, and upon their denial of service, collapsing on the floor, writhing like a snake, and speaking in what might as well be tongues.)
In fall of 2020, he achieves his wish — but only by virtue of the mediation of Travis Scott, who links the McDonald’s extended universe through his appearance as raw flesh in a burger with his virtual Fortnite “concert”, a sort of participatory music video in which Travis Scott makes an appearance as a towering animatronic goliath, colossus of Rhodes. Gamers are given the task of moving their virtual avatar to stay in vague proximity with the rampage of Travis Scott’s towering form across the landscape, an obtrusive and unsubtle pied piper. A new concept is introduced: a potential apotheosis of the pop star into a divine entity, one which transcends the mere technological possibilities of large rented stadiums and soundsystems. Something vastly more dangerous, darker, perhaps even demonic in a strict theo-technical sense which is not meant as a moralistic judgment, but something far more destabilizing to society’s existing hysteria-management infrastructure than the wiggling of Elvis’s hips.
In the wake of the Astroworld festival disaster, in which ten Travis Scott fans were killed in a crowd crush while the rapper continued his performances with its exhortations to become more and more “lit”, seemingly oblivious or indifferent to the mangling of bodies before him, internet commentators widely speculated that Travis Scott might be the Antichrist. But, just like with AGI, Travis Scott can be the Antichrist no more than he can be Christ, because he does not come in the image of the Son of Man, a human intermediary to divine redemption. Rather, Travis Scott, as with AGI, presents a more threatening specter of an imminent, as well as immanent apocalypse which is not the Christian one. Travis Scott is something more like the intermediary between mortal man and the ecstatic hypostasis of a water bottle.
It is certainly possible that the end times will be ushered in by a sort of great festival, upon which some cruel and unexpected deity will reveal his face for the first time, demanding sacrifice. It is possible that the collapse of resonant psycho-electric energy saturated within the aura of Travis Scott and his enveloping sonic metaverse in the wake of embarrassment and shame after the disaster signified a near-miss, but also probably not. (Those more concerned with Christian antinomianism and festivities of false messiahs would be better to investigate The Gathering of the Juggalos. Despite having never been taken seriously — which is perfectly suitable for a clown show — it continues to accrue serious subcultural energy with a following devoted enough it was classified by the FBI as a gang. The worst of all soda brands as an ironic holy water for a mass cleansing — really? At least pick something with an element of the sublime and implacable, like McDonald’s Sprite.)
Astroworld. H-town becomes the image of the world, we are bringing H-town vibes to NYC, LA, Shanghai, and everywhere else. A metropolis of sprawl, a thousand parties within parking lots. One can slow it down, according to the logic of chopped-and-screwed, or one can speed it up and make it “lit” with the right hits of dopamine — it is all dependent on the correct calculus of pharmaceuticals. Funded by oil money. Did you know that the existence of AutoTune is thanks to an oil engineer, who originally invented its algorithm to discover pockets of oil deposits via sound waves, and later repurposed it for the music industry? This is the type of knowledge which demands a total revision of Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia. Is it not fitting, or fated that the same dark alchemy which launched ships and war machines to transfer the world’s goods all across its smoothened surface would then create its deterritorialization through discovering the beauty and resonance in everything, the flattening alchemy of trap?
At some point in the past half-decade — did you notice? — all McDonald’s seem to have been stripped of their former colorful vestments and become repurposed in a drab monotone gray and black, as well as stripped of all their icons, the metaverse of Ronald McDonald, the Hamburglar, Grimace etc. They are now in the image of H-Town’s Rothko Chapel. A gesture towards iconoclasm, brutalism, an end of art at the end of time.
“I’m loving it” — Pusha T. The greatest advertising jingle ever conceived, perhaps, an equation as perfect, universal, and sublime as “God is love”, but for a world which denies the possibility of transcendence. It is of course only fitting that a man whom over the arc of his career perfected a minimalist poetics on the euphoria of selling crack cocaine would be the one to solve this puzzle.
5D energy, 5G frequency ultra-light beams radiating from all of our crotches, fifth-generational total warfare we are immersed in to a degree surpassing our understanding. “See five stars in the sky, no Michelin” — Realboy. The prophecy of Wiley Brooks intensifies. When you step into a McDonalds’s today, you experience a sort of anarchy. All constitutive logic minus the flow of commodities has evaporated — all pretense to the wholesome Americana of burger joints from the Norman Rockwell era is gone. A naked animality, a zone of direct confrontation with base matter is established. Agamben’s whatever-singularity without the need for civilization to culminate in deathcamps again, an animal sacrifice substituting for the human. If anything else, it is always lit. The McDonald’s next to the Delancey/Essex metro stop is unironically the fulcrum of the world, around which all revolves. The last feast, the last festival, anywhere and everywhere, erupting, on every street corner, all at once.
This is next level
Very good read. I like the part about McDonalds. I disagree with the false dichotomy of living situations between post-grad boarding house style and real estate purchase.