‧₊✧ Is Bladee Supposed to be Funny?✧˚₊‧
A few years ago now when I first reviewed energy drinks for a digital magazine I thought I was being really super duper original and clever for doing so. Not long after, I found other people had done a similar sort of thing; not through taking a distinctly Baudrillardian perspective on such things, of course, but by way of taking the vocabulary of wine tasting and applying it to things like Monster Energy, which was funny to me not least of all because it was making a mockery of a bourgeois sophistication whose lexicon was otherwise alien to the majority of us.
Whilst I initially thought I’d be disappointed at those vloggers getting there before I did — pursuing energy drink tasting in more unique and visually compelling ways — I actually found myself more than happy to see other aestheticians land on the cultural significance of energy drinks, taking a sardonic approach to their deconstruction.
Likewise, one thing I wanted to do in showcasing my hyperfixation with Bladee’s music was to pinpoint how a serious and post-ironic engagement with this kind of music was in no way a unique or brand new thing. Hence why Fader’s embedded interview with producer, Yung Gud, in the article, ‘Yung Lean’s Second Chance’, is an excellent example of some great music journalism in practice whilst simultaneously highlighting the tendency for mainstream music journalism to focuses on the (often traumatic) historical record of artists rather than the interpersonal effectiveness of their music.
As a side note to this, it is perhaps worth asking if the democratisation of media literacy has resulted in readers and listeners who are no longer interested in deepening the analysis whatsoever, hoping only to garner from such journalism a sense of an artist’s history, since everyone is today a poststructuralist capable of their own method of deconstruction in which we are no longer concerned with the disappearance of a grand narrative but rather the dismantling of a grand analysis to go along with it. This is perhaps the final and very deliberate consequence of neoliberal atomisation.
Similarly, it may be the case that social media has taught us that we don’t need experts when we can all be experts in everything all of the time. We only have to take the most preliminary glance at the pseudo-political situations of the world to see that real expertise long ago disappeared altogether. No doubt this phenomenon of disappearance — just as the rainforest and the bees are waving goodbye — would cause extreme fear if only there was only someone left to look up from their screen to see it. No — it is far better to remain in the astral ambedo of elsewhere. Better to remain in our phones and bluetooth headphones and hyperfixated.
As such, it is perhaps better to accelerate my hyperfixation over the Americentrism of that Fader article where you can expect to find Bladee treated as secondary to an artist like Yung Lean, where the historicism of Bladee’s come up is so often made as something by way of predictable association, which is depressing when Bladee, Ecco2K and Thaiboy Digital all sound radically different from one another, let alone sounding radically different from an associated collective like Yung Lean’s Sad Boys.
Over the years I’ve found it more difficult than ever to find a genuinely interesting interpretation of Drain Gang’s collective sound in a landscape where most people think an alternative take is listening to a ten minute video of Anthony Fantano. The fact that Fantano is unable to appreciate Bladee’s nuanced use of autotune, for example, is perhaps further evidence of a limited Americentrism when it comes to music criticism in general.
It’s perhaps easy enough to dismiss this charge against Fantano as jealousy, since he has, according to wikipedia, a following of 2.88 million; but when people push these kind of figures as evidence for an opinion of significance I’m always reminded of that Immortal Technique lyric, ‘If you go platinum, it's got nothing to do with luck, it just means that a million people are stupid as fuck.’
Whilst Between the Bard’s ‘Why Red Light by Bladee was my favourite album of 2018’ is not an interpretation of the Drain Gang collective in its entirety, it is an approximately three-thousand word essay on Bladee’s 2018 album, Red Light, whose tracks I’ve also written about. I once saw a meme that said loitering was frowned upon because it involves standing around without spending money and as such loitering — like love — might become a most radical gesture, antithetical to the productivity of capitalism. Here’s what Sad Boy Aesthetics had to say about Obedient, featuring Ecco2K, in which the visualiser’s true-to-life portrayal of loitering about town only facilitates a sense of its radicality:
‘I’ve noted since 1986 (when Blue Velvet was released) that a good 65 percent of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures-grotesque,’ [David Foster] Wallace writes, ‘enfeebled, flamboyantly unappealing, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances ... a class of public-place humans I’ve privately classed, via Lynch, as “insistently fucked up.”’
One thing I’ve come to notice about the progenitors of sad boy aesthetics is their proximity to these public-places, their occupation of these ‘non-places’ – to use the term coined by Marc Augé. In many ways, this aesthetic is born from these peculiar spaces of late capitalism.
Within ‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’, Fisher recalls the British television series ‘Sapphire and Steel’ — ‘One aim of Sapphire and Steel was to transpose ghost stories out of the Victorian context and into contemporary places, the still inhabited or the recently abandoned. In the final assignment, Sapphire and Steel arrive at a small service station. Corporate logos – Access, 7 Up, Castrol GTX, LV – are pasted on the windows and the walls of the garage and the adjoining café. This ‘hallway place’ is a prototype version of what the anthropologist Marc Augé will call in a 1995 book of the same title, ‘non-places’ – the generic zones of transit (retail parks, airports) which will come to increasingly dominate the spaces of late capitalism.’
‘Who you worship when you’re all alone?’ Yung Lean sings on ‘Acid at 7/11’, ‘Acid at 7/11 (In the rain, in the rain) / I’m so gone.’ The lyrics and title referring to ‘your go-to convenience store for food, snacks, hot and cold beverages, gas and so much more.’ There is something unnervingly terrifying about convenience stores where ‘the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.’ [David Foster Wallace.]
It is a profoundly hallucinogenic realisation, coming to understand the human cohabitation of non-places as inferring dream reality. I have walked around a shopping mall, for example, and felt ‘“insistently fucked up.”’ ‘Link at the gas stop...’ Bladee raps on the track, ‘Obedient’, featuring ECCO2K. For a prescient example of ‘non-places’ and their use within the aesthetic, refer to the music video for ‘Obedient’ where the mise en scène is exclusively one of car parks, a convenience store, and what appears to be an Amazon warehouse juxtaposed with the waves and strobing of an ocean by night.’
Whilst reading that last paragraph it is worth bearing in mind that Red Light was the project Anthony Fantano famously rated one-out-of-ten stars, making this album — in some paradoxical way — really quite fascinating from a critical perspective; especially when we consider the militancy of those Bladee’s fans (like me) who are more than happy to defend Red Light from Fantano’s scathing, ‘the only commendable thing about Red Light is that it’d be almost impossible to parody with a worse sounding version.’
Subsequently, in the light of Fantano’s review, Between the Bard’s blogpost becomes a passionate defence of the album and the overall artistic approach where the otherwise unnamed author of the piece contrasts Bladee’s more melancholic, haunting sound with Yung Lean’s (more aggressive?) music, arguing that Bladee’s use of autotune is an expressive tool rather than a flaw.
Interestingly enough, the author also cites Mark Fisher's thoughts on autotune, viewing Bladee’s use of autotune as an adequate reflection of the emotional and existential state of contemporary life. Taken from the aforementioned essay, (which I recommend reading) here’s what Mark Fisher had to say about autotune:
‘Auto-tune is in many ways the sonic equivalent of digital airbrushing, and the (over)use of the two technologies (alongside the increasing prevalence of cosmetic surgery) result in a look and feel that is hyperbolically enhanced rather than conspicuously artificial. If anything is the signature of 21st century consumer culture, it is this feeling of a digitally upgraded normality – a perverse yet ultra-banal normality, from which all flaws have been erased. […] On 808s and Heartbreak, we hear the sobs in the heart of the 21st century pleasuredome. Kanye’s lachrymose android schtick reaches its maudlin depths on the astonishing ‘Pinocchio Story’. This is the kind of auto-tuned lament you might expect neo-Pinocchio and android-Oedipus David from Spielberg’s AI (2001) to sign; a little like Britney Spears’s ‘Piece of Me,’ you can either hear this as the moment when a commodity achieves self-consciousness, or when a human realizes he or she has become a commodity. It’s the soured sound at the end of the rainbow, an electro as desolated as Suicide’s infernal synth-opera ‘Frankie Teardrop’.' (Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Zero Books, 2014, p174.)
Clearly,’Why Red Light by Bladee was my favourite album of 2018’ invokes Fisher’s cultural theorising to defend Blades’s heavy use of autotune whilst also highlighting the lyrical content which not only lacks the misogyny and sexual content often found in mainstream rap but actually combines dark, introspective themes with a quirky, sometimes humorous approach.
Nevertheless, whilst I would agree with the author of the piece that Bladee’s music is a unique expression of late capitalist angst — without a doubt characterised by a pervasive sense of melancholia — I would actually disagree that it is working within the remits of a pure irony, since it is my contention that the Sad Boy Aesthetic is one of post-irony par excellence, hence why Anthony Fantano can listen to an album like Red Light and detect no discernible trace of irony whilst so many other listeners can.
In fact, I would argue that it is the result of an aesthetic embedded so firmly into post-irony that makes Bladee so culturally polarising since it is, in addition, an aesthetic emblematic of a hypercultural inability to tell the difference between the real and the unreal in an ars poetica that proclaims, ‘Five thousand points do I look like a liar? / Energy field / The blue steel / I'm unreal, I'm unreal, I'm unreal.’
In other words, Bladee’s style is part of the broader Sad Boy Aesthetic which often blends genuine emotion with a detached, sometimes ironic presentation, making it difficult to discern where sincerity ends and irony begins. As such, Bladee’s music is an intriguing blend of melancholy, irony, and post-ironic aesthetics that can be both serious and humorous, often depending on the listener's interpretation. It is precisely this ambiguity that is central to the appeal of Bladee in a hyperculture that attempts to render everything perfectly transparent to reason.
For some listeners then, Bladee's music may come across as funny — sure — particularly when viewed through the lens of post-irony. His use of autotune, abstract lyrics, and unconventional production can seem deliberately exaggerated or even absurd, evoking a sense of humour that resonates with those who appreciate the nuances of internet culture and contemporary post-ironic sensibilities. For a more recent lyrical example of that, look no further than the WODRAINER track on Cold Visions, where Bladee proclaims, ‘I bought a thousand Smurfs on Ebay, / I was on shrooms needless to say.’
However, this humour is not necessarily the main point but rather a byproduct of the complex aesthetic layering of the music where, from looking at the online discourse, (YouTube comments sections lol) we can observe how fans and serious critics alike find depth in Bladee’s work, interpreting his music as a sincere reflection of the anxieties and deliriousness of a contentiously positioned (Hyper)eschatological Condition. To say, his music’s ethereal, detached quality can be seen as a genuine expression of a generation grappling with the overwhelming presence of digital technology and the blurring of the lines between reality and simulation.
So, is Bladee supposed to be funny? The answer is both yes and no, (but mostly yes) since his music operates on multiple levels, where humour, melancholy, irony, and sincerity coexist, often indistinguishably; but perhaps that sense of hypercultural indistinguishability is the real message here? After all, there was once a time when we could reach a consensus on things like beauty; now we’re not so sure anymore. In the end, whether we find Bladee funny or profound (why can’t he be both?) largely depends on the perspective from which listeners approach his work, with this sense of duality becoming a significant aspect of what makes his music resonate in a culture already so predisposed towards aesthetic polarisation.
‘Sad Boy Aesthetics shares with its reader the casual nihilism of a party that never wants to be over, even though it really should have ended a long time ago. Nausea and vertigo become new forms of ecstasy. The glossy surfaces of this world are alive with distorting scratches and reflections. There is in Mazey’s exploration of this hedonistic despair an equally desperate desire for it not to stop.’ – Ken Hollings