As racist, woman-hating fantasy writer Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale) likes to remind people, he was kind of a big deal in the industrial dance music scene back in the day, with three Billboard Club Hits to his name.
Well, sort of. Beale — he wasn’t known as Vox back then — was briefly a member of a largely forgotten industrial dance group called Psykosonik in the early nineties.
Now, I was listening to a lot of industrial dance music back in those days, and was particularly enamored of the label (Wax Trax!) that Psykosonik was on. Yet somehow I never noticed them.
Listening to their first album today — the one that Beale was involved in — I can see why. Musically, they’re a peppy, if highly derivative, mix of industrial and rave, at times sounding a bit like the Shamen or Pop Will Eat Itself or even, unbelievably, EMF.
The trouble comes when the group’s vocalist opens his mouth to sing or, even worse, to rap some of the most cringeworthy lyrics I’ve encountered since I listened to this. The bassy “rapping” in their song “Acid Hammer” is on a par with the rapping in Aqua’s “Barbie Girl,” except that Aqua was in on the joke, and Psykosonik clearly wasn’t.
And that’s where Mr. Beale comes in, because a lot of these very very serious, very very terrible lyrics are his. Psykosonik seems to have been built largely around two guys — Paul Sebastien (vocals, lyrics, music) and Daniel Lenz (music). Beale, a member for only two years, is credited by Wikipedia as being responsible for “composition, lyrics.”
So let’s take a look at some of them, shall we? The lyrics below, which I found on Lyrics Wikia, are excerpted from songs he’s credited with co-writing; click on the titles to see more.
Fractals fusing, brain abusing
Drink your smart drug, find illusion
Ride the air on an angel’s dare
Mandlebrots fly everywhere
Illusion the solution
You will find your absolution
Within silicon, in silicon, in me
Mondo rave, magnetic wave
Cyberbaby, my love slave
Computational attractivity
New world networked connectivity
Down to the ground, down to the ground
Social entropy is reigning today
Burn it down, burn it down, burn it down, down to the ground
A generation’s coming your way
Feel your heart explode with lust
Vacationers, this one’s a must
If you choose to take this drug
You will feel your libido erupt ….If you choose to lick my brain
Use your tongue to taste the same
Feel the acid reign
Servitude is in the mind, a death in life
Don’t be confused by the terms of Left and Right
Statism is statism, by any name the same
Apathy is suicide and we will bear the blame …Huge berserk rebel warthog error
Zeroboys unleash domestic terror
Jack it in and burn the data
Violence a religion they can relate to
Now, it’s not completely clear from the scanty info I’ve found if Beale wrote all of these lyrics by himself — Wikipedia also lists Sebastien as being responsible for lyrics — but quite a few of them have the stink of Beale about them. I mean, “social entropy,” “statism is statism?”
Oh, and that bizarre bit about the “huge berserk rebel warthog?” That may be Beale’s only bit of cleverness. After puzzling over it a bit, and listening to that part of the song over and over to make sure that was really what was being said, I put the phrase into Google and discovered that it’s an anagram for George Herbert Walker Bush.
If you want to listen to any of these songs — and really, they’re not bad, if you can manage to ignore the awful lyrics — you can find the whole album here.
And here’s the video for their single “Welcome to My Mind,” which features Mr. Beale’s rotating head.
I don’t think these guys can imagine not wanting their white male privilege.
I’m white, straight, and cis.
I don’t want my privilege. I’m not afraid of equality. I do not want to support an oppressive system just because that system benefits me. I do not want status I do not deserve. If people only like, love or respect me because I’m white, straight, cis and married to the person I’m fucking, their esteem is meaningless. Those relationships, personal and professional, are empty and bleak. It isn’t something to celebrate. You should not want to live in Omelas.
Why don’t these men feel the same?
I think it’s fear. They cannot compete in a world where they aren’t super special for doing nothing at all. There is a world full of brilliant brown people and they do not want to compete with them. So many women’s minds and bodies are stifled and restrained. These bigots need that. They need other people held back so that they can attain some small measure of success. They know that. That’s what all the posturing and chest thumping is about. Women scare the shit out of them.
I don’t, but their immediate response to Nequam being “fuck off back to Reddit?” That smells of 4chan to me.
Yeah, I heard about David Tennant doing it on his first JAM appearance, but I was certain that I’d heard Sue Perkins do it before him, and felt like she deserved some credit for that, even though it wasn’t her first attempt. As much as I adore DT, I felt a little sad that so many people were lauding him for that, and not SP, and I suspected it might be a gender thing.
I love them both so much… Have they been on any programmes at the same time? I’m going to google that…
I was up for believing that NPS wasn’t a troll until that second post.
The first could’be been someone having an exceptionally bad day/week/year and venting spleen.
The second too throughly abused the MRA idea of feminist talking points to pass muster.
@M.
No worries. Now that I read my post again, I understand that it didn’t really have much in the way of genuine insults. I fail at them.
Note to self: It should have read: ” I cannot understand how even ludicrously arseheaded poopieheads with no life to speak of could have so much time on their hands as to actually, genuinely go through the trouble of learning the language, phrases and various points of feminist discourse purely for the fuckwitted waste of time that is impersonating a feminist on the internet, and even being spectacularly clueless enough to actually think that anyone with their head still attached to their shoulders would fall for that. That would be, like, grandiously stupid. Thank all the gods and goddessess that there exist no such people in the world, because I would feel so sorry for them that I would probably start weeping and laughing at the same time.”
The troll is gone, maybe we can move on now? Eh.
I may have unintentionally trolled a feminist blog a while back actually. It was under a blog post where the author was complaining that UK laws that ban gender-based abortion was oppressive to women. I pointed out that the reason those laws were in place was because there was an increase in certain members of certain minority groups repeatedly aborting girl fetuses. And that even though I’m as pro choice as they come, it’s not right to choose to abort because of something as superficial as gender.
Her response was…sigh…honest to God it was like the MRA caricature of a screeching harpy feminist. That’s when I just lost patience and started to just muck around for a couple more posts before disappearing. I’m sorry but I just can’t get on board with the idea that if you can’t abort based on gender your reproductive rights are being stamped on.
Ah, I love the smell of burning troll in the morning.
Has N.P.S. ever posted here before? Asking just because it’s worth noting that:
A: NPS posted on a thread that actually has very little of the sort of content that supposedly ‘triggered’ NPS (unless NPS is triggered by techno music, which certainly gives NPS’ post a different spin, y’know?);
B: NPS posted in the flounce, “I feel kind of sick having bought into this shit for as long as I have,” and “Thank you for the few genuine laughs this place provided before I became nauseous with guilt and shame.” This is intriguing, as it suggests that NPS has been around here awhile, but I don’t recall ever seeing any other comments–but if the reaction is as strong as NPS’ first post in this thread suggests, it would’ve come out a helluva lot sooner than this post, yes?
It’s almost like NPS is actually a lying fuckhead who also lacks the wit to lie effectively or consistently. My personal bet is a Vox Day fan.
The fuck did I just read? I swear I’ve seen N.P.S. around here in a non trolling capacity. So I’m confused. Most of the time all I hear is about mean we are to everyone for stepping out of line. Now we’re suddenly Stepford wives and not all men central? If zie is an MRA, that’s quite a long con.
Personally, I’m happy that David wades through this crap so we don’t have to. Not because women are fragile and need a white knight, but because it is easier for someone who isn’t the target to read through that crap.
Also, the fact that he gets less harassment and vitriol from the manosphere than feminist women do is something he often addresses. I’m not seeing him asking for pity because they call him fat.
Oh and Tennant repeated the word “something” during his minute, even though he didn’t get interrupted. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02jmd8z
Sorry, I’ll try to bring it back to relevancy to the OP with some Angelspit if anyone’s interested.
Better than Beale’s lyrical output, anyway, IMO.
That was a pretty unconvincing performance by NPS. Lots of red troll flags, including the unironic use of “cockblocking” and the attempt to reverse the standard “shut up, you’re just a girl, what do you know” argument and use it as some kind of weird feminist gotcha against David. It’s pretty clear zie hasn’t read the blog and is incapable of understanding why mockery and sunlight are the best (and perhaps the only) available tools for combating seething, entitled misogyny.
Plus, how do you arrive at “this blog is so triggering!! I hate you all!” from an innocuous thread about industrial dance music? That was the nonnest of sequiturs.
sunnysombrera: Eh… actually, given the situation, there’s still plenty of oppression going on there. The problem is that banning sex-selective abortions simply puts the women in a bind. They can’t abort (or, more commonly, can’t admit why they want to abort), but they also are going to suffer consequences for the first/only child in the family being another girl, because the communities they’re coming from are so misogynistic that it’s seen as undermining the family.
It’s utterly horrible that women are being put in the position of feeling they have to abort pregnancies with girl fetuses, but it’s not really a solution to tell them ‘no’ without offering better alternatives. All it really does is make everyone really good at lying (when what we’d be better off doing is tracking the reasons for abortions demographically, to see where we need to change societal issues).
That said, it sounds like your blogger was not very able to form a coherent point on the subject.
Yeah, I’m confused as well as to why, of all the posts to choose from, it’s the one mocking crappy industrial dance lyrics that broke the camel’s back.
Oh, I love Sue Perkins as well! I’m just sad I seem to have missed that performance.
Sunny,
There are problems with laws like that though. Firstly, I don’t know about the UK, but I do know that in the US, there is zero evidence that droves of immigrant women are having sex selective abortions. You can’t eve tell the sex until 20 weeks or so. The vast majority of abortion takes place before that. It’s really just a thinly veiled excuse to restrict abortion access. Give us one more hoop to jump through.
Also, how do you enforce the law? Should doctors be required to quiz a woman on the reason for an abortion? Is it up to their discretion to say? It’s just seems to me like an excuse to legally discriminate against women of color and immigrant women. Particularly South Asian/Indian women. Because, let’s face it. White women aren’t going to be suspected of this.
Another issue is, what’s the punishment? If a prosecutor decides an abortion or even a miscarriage was a sex selective abortion. Does she go to jail? In the US, it’s not uncommon for women, almost always low income WOC to be prosecuted for a miscarriage or stillbirth that prosecutors have twisted into something criminal. I’m really not cool with a law that will give ammo to the courts to stick more POC in jail.
Plus, there’s a bodily autonomy issue. Women shouldn’t have abortion rights because their motives for an abortion or something people approve of. Nobody should be forced to host an organism for against her will.
QFT. I might have worn out the skip track button on my CD player because of this band.
I’m pretty sure they’re in the Black Box. (Also in that set: The Young Gods, plenty of Al’s stuff, and … Divine’s version of The name game).
They also did the soundtrack to X-Calibur 2099, one of the worst SNES games ever.
Or at least, one of the worst SNES games that I got suckered into spending money on.
“There’s literally no reason for straight white guys to hate or even mildly dislike these kinds of folks.”
There’s literally no reason for straight white men to hate or mildly dislike a fascist who wants marital rape to be legal and pushes the idea that most of the Earth are biologically inferior to the point that black people aren’;t homo sapiens? Fuck you too, buddy.
Thanks for your points on the sex selective abortion ban. I forgot that even if it’s not that common, the women in the middle of misogynistic cultures will still get crap if they can’t abort a girl. The ban won’t make the attitudes go away.
Semi-off topic: today I was delighted to discover that a venture aimed at recovering “the lost voices of women who have been ignored in standard narratives of the history of modern philosophy” is called Project Vox.
http://projectvox.library.duke.edu/pg/
Neat link @mcgingersnap 😀
Wow, I certainly missed a troll whilst I was sleeping, didn’t I?
For what it’s worth, David is an excellent business of ferrets in a David suit who dutifully puts on his waders every morning to go to the cesspool so we don’t have to.
(P.S. There’s a warning at the top of the blog under David’s head that this blog isn’t a safe place. It could stand to be a teeny bit more prominent, but it’s there. David does go out of his way to tag things that are especially triggering though, like stories about rape and whatnot.)
David has every right to think that he’s not a rape machine who can’t control his peen like these asshats he blogs about says. David has every right to think he’s not a terrible person and that women are out to get him. He’s got every right to think that he’s not doing mental gymnastics to somehow blame women for every ill in his life.
It’s fantastic that David understands he’s got (as far as I’m aware) cishet white male privilege, and he understands how that affects other people, so he uses his powers for the good of those who don’t share in his lot in life.
I don’t know where you got the idea that every man is horrible and must agree with shitty MRAs and PUAs, but we don’t subscribe to that particular newsletter here. Either lay off the radfem blogs, or shove off back to 4Chan.
And yeah, he would get listened to by other men because he’s a man, that’s why we need male allies. Because sometimes, men have it in their heads that we’re making it all up or exaggerating things, but when they hear the same things we say said by a man, suddenly we’re not so “hysterical” anymore.
If that’s what it takes to get some attention from men who may not have taken a woman seriously, and to get them to re-evaluate their thought processes and get into feminism, then so be it.
TL;DR: David is an awesome person for doing what he does, and you got no call to come in here and shoot your mouth off because you’re trying to exclude him from allyship based on his gender. Shove off and don’t come back until he actually does something terrible (which, judging from his track record, won’t be anytime soon).
@maistrechat:
I’m guessing that was a Marvel tie-in, from the sound of it.
Sue Perkins is far and away the best one at Just a Minute 🙂 I don’t know the numbers offhand (but I bet that someone’s compiled them!) but I’m pretty sure she would have the most uninterrupted minutes of anyone…
I also want to say to NPS, even though you’re gone and were never real anyway, that the reason I’m against the MRA movement as a man is that everything that they do increases the gulf of distrust between men and women.
They also did the soundtrack to X-Calibur 2099, one of the worst SNES games ever.
The Japanese soundtrack is a lot better.
I tried to listen to Psykosonic and needed to wash it out with lots of Glazunov and Atlas Lab.
I like the part about N.P.S.’s post about this blog being all up in their face. There must be some sort of curse that keeps them glued to the seat, facing the monitor, eyes wide open with WHtM permanently on the screen. Honestly, any person that complains about any blog being “up in their face” is really using the most stupid argument ever. You can choose not to read this blog just as I choose to not go to 4Chan, Reddit or Stormfront. That’s what David is for, and we appreciate him for it.
You’re welcome, proxieme. 🙂