From the album ‘Simple Headphone Mind’ (1997)
I’d imagine by now you’ll have either watched Tiger King or heard about it.
It offers grotesque human and animal exploitation, murder plots, deceit, sabotage, confidence tricksters, mullets, vicious professional jealousy that’s obsessively creepy and pathological, an uncomfortable amount of amputees, suspicious suicides and disappearances, more mullets, political condoms, guns, three way gay marriages, more guns, hideous Garth Brooks pastiches, a harem of female helpers that double as slavish concubines, blowing up inflatable dolls with legal explosives, lucrative black market exotic animal breeding and cub petting, and the equally profitable scheme of running an animal welfare refuge thanks to a huge social media following and free labour.
But instead of revulsion at all the lunacy and shamelessness we’re presented with there’s fascination, even if it’s of the sarcastic or morbid kind. Tiger King is a cultural phenomenon.
We can allow ourselves some semantic leeway with Tiger King as we recognise the cognitive dissonance of the documentarians wedging themselves in this surreal cycle of exploitation by profiting from Joe Exotic’s quixotic behaviour and the salacious rumours surrounding Carole Baskin’s ascent. You’re also, and this is where I give the producers some credit, placed into a white trash sub-culture straight from America’s rancid underbelly, fuelled by poverty and destitution. This is very rarely documented willingly, primarily as it’s a source of tremendous embarrassment for educated Americans and a huge dent to America’s persistent show of self-denial as ‘the best country in the world’.
Without said latitude the popularity of the show doesn’t add up. Reality docs are a tired genre. The prevailing consensus in the mainstream ‘woke’ culture is that keeping exotic or wild animals in menageries is cruel, or at best somewhat sub-optimal. And anyway, what animals are we to consider ‘wild’ or ‘exotic’. What is domesticated? Is it being bred in captivity? What is humane? What conditions the animal is kept? Is it just simply a series of superficial arbitrary measures, that how much we care is based on the size, beauty, dangerousness or scarcity of the animal in the wild? It’s all rather vague, as are, suitably, the laws which govern animal ownership in the US. But what seems like a pivotal moral and legal discussion is dispensed, suitably, given how disposable the animals are, for Joe Exotic’s and Carole Baskin’s tawdry feud.
Tiger King’s popularity is due, I suspect, to the most obvious explanation – thanks to the unforeseen consequences of social media we live in a time where conservatism and group identity prevail, not only over freedom of speech, but freedom of thought. This barrage of far right and left shaming means most of us only truly feel liberated to indulge in extreme behaviours vicariously. By watching Tiger King at home, in privacy, nobody can judge you for laughing (or wincing) when a snippet of Joe Exotic’s gloriously abominable music videos arrives, or for admitting there are worse alternatives for the keepers and animals. Better the employees have jobs at a zoo than sit in a trailer park drinking vodka and smoking crystal meth all day, and the animals be kept in captivity than get poached, cut up and or sold in a Chinese wet market.
Coronavirus, and its ongoing surge, originated in such an environment. It’s hard not to be enticed by the thought of Covid-19 offering a firm karmic rebuttal on nature’s behalf for our blasé treatment of animals and the environment for what amounts to greed, especially when the main protagonists in Tiger King offer a particularly egregious example of it. Even if we’ve developed the cognitive capability to breed other species into domestication or for commercial agriculture, that we think this should be extended to caging large apex predators in confined spaces is nothing more than pure arrogance.
Speaking of naïveté a contrast between two events in Tiger King offers us conclusive proof that certain animals cannot be truly tamed to react proportionally, and that using Karma, chance or fate in its stead is one of human consciousness’s most destructive forms of absolution. At one point we see a keeper nearly get her hand ripped off by a Tiger just for putting her hand into the cage. Later, we see one attempting to put a Christmas hat on a Tiger, who, unsurprisingly, wasn’t cooperative. Instead of it reacting somewhat benignly, you would’ve loved to see it remove that person’s face.
There’s an overwhelming number of bad actors on show here; Jeff Lowe is a creep, Doc ‘Blowhard’ Antle is a depressingly crappy Harvey Weinstein knockoff, and Joe Exotic is smearing himself with his own faeces whilst wearing a Marilyn Monroe paper mask with the eyes cut out crazy. Yet amongst all the nutters, deadbeats and conmen it is Baskin who deserves additional scorn, because she, a dismally infantile cat lady, and her servile husband, piously and disingenuously parade themselves as the homogenised and ethical face of big cat confinement.
Ultimately Tiger King’s main narrative string lacks clout because I really couldn’t care less if Carole Baskin offed her second husband, or if Joe Exotic tried to have her killed. Well, perhaps I’m not completely apathetic about the latter. I’m just sorry that Joe Exotic didn’t manage it, and that now he’s safely incarcerated where Tigers can’t maul him.
Most of all I’m relieved that I’m not one of these horrible wankers, or near them. Yet I’m left wondering whether Tiger King’s dystopian foreboding might’ve caused me permanent psychological damage. Now I stay awake at night wondering if Big Black Bubba, wearing a leopard print crop top which terminates perfectly at the top of his pot belly, is making Joe Exotic his bitch by decimating his ringpiece and if Joe likes this arrangement. Or if a hundred years from now, with the world completely ravaged by our ongoing indifference to disease and pollution, the world will be ran by psychopaths like Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin. They’ll fight for devotees by breeding increasingly grotesque iterations of feral mutant humanoids, who, thanks to generations of bad dental hygiene, mullets, and abortive tattoo choices have achieved an evolutionary split from the media consumers who now cannot leave their homes for fear of being mauled by one of them. Let’s be glad that all of us won’t be around to witness the documentary about that.
From the album ‘Revolutionary Suicide’ (2013)
From the EP ‘Love’s Got Me’ (1990)
As with Discogs and Boomkat, Bandcamp looms as a potential worm hole for aficionados. Now, if you know what you’re after, you can escape quickly, and financially intact, but if you’re browsing you can easily get sucked in.
Not that this is a ‘problem’. Quite the opposite, nearly all of us will have extra time to do this thanks to working from home, or self-isolating to combat the spread of Coronavirus. There are worse ways to kill some time – well, unless you want to purposely infect a cunty neighbour who hasn’t returned that Parmesan microplane you lent them – especially as Bandcamp supports a lot of independent musicians, bands and labels, who, as so many do, need all the support they can get right now.
(I know we’re supposed to be vigilant and earnest about Coronavirus and its threat, but I did manage to amuse myself by reading the headline to this story as ‘A man has appeared in court charged with fake tits which claimed to treat Covid-19’. Hey, sometimes a little levity in uncertain times is necessary. Also necessary, that the scummy dickhead in question who made the fake kits gets what’s coming to him.)
Bandcamp’s catalogue is vast but it still retains a niche feel. Its skin and layout is favourably reminiscent of Myspace, which is now synonymous with the early internet’s look and feel (remember the days before ‘do you accept our cookies?’, ‘Please register with us’ and using your data consent bars incessantly popping up?) and as one of the first significant sites with which burgeoning musicians could self-promote. Bandcamp is a business, and while it does take a cut of the proceeds, fifteen percent to be exact, you struggle to begrudge it this when compared to Spotify or fucking Apple music (*spits*), mostly due to its ease of use for both uploaders and buyers and having no adverts. Everything is linked by label and by genre, encouraging you to wander. Information and context are often sparse, and the (relatively) large media buttons are given prime of place at the top left of the page. Sure, there may be a soft-sell blurb from the producer, label or artist placed further down the page, and there’s a comments section from those who have tried it, but why would you read these instead of trying the music? Bandcamp succeeds in placing you vis-à-vis with the music and poses the important questions; is this interesting, do I like this?
Oddly, Bandcamp’s indiscriminateness reminds me of the Coronavirus. It’s a leveller. However, the simplicity of Bandcamp’s interface is a welcome inverse to the infuriatingly confusing coverage the pandemic has received in the media. The information matrix, that’s a euphemism for the internet kids – and it’s now the place where nearly all news is sourced, has become such a landfill that it’s never been harder to parse what information is genuine, vetted and given to you for your benefit.
Normally you’d trust the government guidelines, but their confused message at the start obliterated trust and makes people less likely to follow the medical advice tethered to it, no matter how viable or reliable it is. When Boris Johnson first announced his headline figure of two hundred-thousand deaths by the virus, that was based upon influenza data, a different affliction. Then came Dominic Cummings’ quickly aborted herd immunity ‘take it on the chin’ strategy (I’d pay good money to see Cummings’ head bounced off a kerb before someone in a JCB digger reversed over him), which everyone sensible recoiled at. Was this dogmatic, strategic Darwinist right-wing wet dream challenged as outrageous bollocks? No, and in the darkest of ironies they were absolved by the ground shifting too quickly. Now, in lockdown, we’re reduced to medical experts being wheeled out daily to offer speculative predictions. What good does this do other than fill news cycles?
In the absence of facts or even consensus, or, get this, actual news, you know, reporting of events, we get opinion. News as opinion is always editorialised, which makes it propaganda. Case in point – see the Daily Mail whipping up its readership with xenophobia, with the utterly ludicrous assertion that Michel Barnier infected Boris Johnson with the virus as revenge for Brexit.
While that might be the bottom of the barrel, the rest barely rise above it, we’ve had copious interviews and ‘what it could mean’ takes – answer: nobody knows, using the pandemic as a conduit for political point scoring (it’s the absolute worst), non-medical experts discussing the issue and asking inane questions of other non-experts. Such a circle-jerk of incessant news filler is the terrain where conspiracy theories, bad faith anti-vaccine nutjobs and mis-information thrive, and it spills over to social media, in the pub, at home or in your workplace. Worst of all, it helps breed the kind of ignorant contempt that sees people act without concern of spreading the virus to others.
It’s alarming, but no less surprising, that someone as lacklustre as Johnson, in a position with direct access to the best experts, initially struggled to identify and act on the correct information. While it would be facetious to blame the media directly in that case, the government’s dithering is indicative of how robust the current media’s propaganda model is and its ability to sow doubt. In Johnson’s case you wonder if a potential backlash from the ignorant talking heads who set the public tone encouraged him, and that nasty fuck Dominic Cummings, to prioritise optics, business, the market, way of life, instead of following the lead of other countries, like South Korea and Japan, and adopting the correct strategic approach. It’s fitting that the current government’s early handling of the situation; complacency, dysfunction, ineptitude, sycophantism, also prevail throughout much of the mainstream media. Its main job is to hold people and institutions accountable, and now it does everything it can not to, including, crucially, itself.
We are to blame here too, we don’t hold them to account. We’ll distract ourselves with anything to avoid holding ourselves to account. See the slew of self-serving arseholes going out and getting pished one last time when pubs were forced to shut, or doing a Kirstie Allsopp and contravening the current lockdown cause ‘not travelling to our second house is a bit inconvenient, yeah’.
Thankfully, not everybody is an epic cunt like Kelvin MacKenzie who’s made a career out of lying and saying anything to remain relevant, or the worst kind of self-interested shameless grasping cunt; Mike ‘I need to go on a zero calories per hour diet’ Ashley or Tim fucking Martin – here’s a naming and shaming spreadsheet for employee testimonies for treatment and conditions during the outbreak. There are sane, altruistic people in the public eye. They’re the folk who aren’t blagging, claiming to have expert knowledge. Take Gary Neville allowing NHS staff to use his hotel’s premises and just being a voice of reason generally, and Jürgen Klopp rightly refusing to give his opinion on the virus when some lazy arsehole journo looking for easy copy pressed him on the issue. Klopp had the requisite self-awareness to know he didn’t know enough about the subject and therefore it was irresponsible for him to give anybody advice. If only everyone else heeded it…
…anyway, down a different wormhole there, so, where was I?
Oh yeah, Bandcamp. The following is stuff I’ve found, or been directed towards, over the last few years that can act as jumping off points. Who knows where they’ll take you? That’s the fun of it.
There’s loads of Japanese Vaporwave on Bandcamp. Who knew? My initial exposure to Vaporwave was not favourable. It’s crap, as crap as a McDonald’s breakfast, and its construct is too – knocked off soul and R’n’B samples slowed down to half speed, often with the vocals distorted into sluggishness, and occasionally augmented by ambient collages.
Clearly an ignorant stereotyping. 2814 would be perfect as the sombre part of the score for one of the Yakuza games or one of Takeshi Kitano’s stylised hard boiled crime movies. The other one’s music to get down to, it’s twenty plus minutes long (take it as a challenge fellas) and is essentially two different mixes of the same track. It, and the person(s) responsible retains some mystery. There’s bugger all info provided, and the artist and album title haven’t been translated from the Kanji (I daren’t attempt this through Google Translate for fear of looking like a bigger fanny than usual).
However, the latter of the above shares a label with a bunch of other Japanese Vaporwave and this wee gem:
If I hadn’t noticed this was a Japanese/Chilean combo I’d think it was released by Star Slinger. The beats and abbreviated hooks are almost as delightfully garish as the cover art. The second wields eighties funk baselines with serious aplomb.
I discovered some KevinTheCreep stuff on an NTS mix, then Vector Graphics as they share the same label. If you’re so inclined you can buy the entire Sic Records discography for about £70 (subject to exchange rates). This presents a quandary, buy the whole lot based upon one or two you’ve tried, and get a discount, or buy them separately cause you like them. Who listens to seventy odd albums from one source? Who buys seventy all at once? Thanks to Coronavirus perhaps this will be our only chance.
Some other Kevin The Creep picks from the catalogue – Sic Oasis offers the kind of laid back yacht grooves found in eighties commercials or video game title sequences, while Marble Eternity’s beats owe much to new jack swing and nineties west coast rap’s jazz sampling, as does another Sic Records offering – International Jazz Playaz by the Jazz Playaz Quartet (why of course!)
And yes, I’m finishing with 1991’s bleak and austere soundscapes, with a dash of Vaporwave, again highlighting the genre’s sonic versatility. It sounds imposing, vast, even threatening at times. The title ‘No more dreams’ is topical. Are you dreaming of what once was? Being able to go anywhere at any time, for a meal, to the football, nightclubbing, following the herd down to Greece – on holiday, heaving up a rancid kebab, to the cinema, for normality to return? You know, the shit we take for granted? So fams, let’s not take Bandcamp, and what it can do for the music industry and your sanity, for granted either.
Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard 
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