elaboration station
lets transform the news into something more interesting
Dwelling for a moment on the release of The Dare’s The Sex EP, a four-song LCD Soundsystem-esque dance-punk debut, noteworthy for grappling with unfulfilled & inchoate desires of a certain audience which feels underserved by the current discursive ecosystem. One of those desires is for public expressions of straight men’s sexuality, outside of rap music; another is that the past was more fun than the present. Maybe it’s also about how irl hedonism is better than the perpetual anxiety of social media. And finally, most importantly, it’s current music for doing cocaine. I think whatever its faults, it is touching on something in the zeitgeist.
As someone ethically compromised by his proximity to the music industry, I’m not going to "write a review” of this project. I think ‘indie sleaze’ is funny and it “works,” to the extent that it does, because its a conflation of about 18 different mid-00s cultural things, filtered nostalgia for a past young millennials were too young to enjoy, combining The Rapture and electroclash and CobraSnake and early 00s NYC hipsteurdom with like, trends from 2011 Urban Outfitters. What we’re talking about is a gestalt, and ‘indie sleaze’ is a proper gestalt-word in that it mashes together a bunch of unrelated shit, obliterating boundaries and scenes and styles in favor of vague flavors of the era. In naïveté there is wisdom, or whatever. More on why I like this in future posts.
The audience desire for greater hedonism and less pious underground musical culture makes sense to me, I think, although it’s interesting how aspects of this particular brew don’t really ‘work’ today. My recollection of early 00s music culture was that there was at the very least an implied leftist political edge, handed down from underground gen-x cultural nodes of the 1980s and ‘90s, which allowed 'indie' or 'alt' cultures to feel a bit more inclusive, and less directly associated with fascism. After all, the Proud Boys had yet to become Vice's most popular branding spin-off. But this big tent was rooted in part through shared transgression of conservative norms, an angle which largely aged poorly, as a tentpole.
There’s a Pandora’s Box aspect to how culture has shifted, and many of the efforts to resolve the tensions brought about by, for example, social media, the uprisings and protests of 2014 and 2020, or #MeToo, or the arrival of fentanyl-laced cocaine, seem unable to engage with the new paradigm, a contemporary reality, easing instead into reactionary nostalgia. I think this is what most people find frustrating about a four-song “‘Disco infiltrator’ type beat” EP, even if they mainly articulate that as very stridently-embraced ethical principles that have nothing to do with music — irritation with folks they follow online, who in pressing nostalgic buttons lead inevitably to a Bill Maher-brained conversation about cancel culture.
I’m bored reading and thinking about the conversation — everything feels a bit scripted. If we’re talking problematic underground cultural heroes doing a cocaine pastiche of early 00s trash culture, Ayesha Erotica strikes me to this day as the most creatively inspired, even if her peak was now half a decade ago. Strong songwriting, high-energy production, surprisingly fluent cross-genre inspiration, her music had the feeling of a Paris Hilton-era hanger-on throwing up in a bejeweled trucker hat on Scott Storch’s yacht. The “Poison” drums on “Literal Legend,” a simple, seemingly ‘obvious’ trick, is so effective for how obvious it is — few songs are as saturated culturally as “Poison” — but those are the ones which rattle around your brain through a next-day “rad hangover.” I used to get this effect with Green Velvet’s “Shake and Pop” and Kid Cudi’s “Day N Nite” Crookers remix, but the dissonance between my own experience and hers makes it all the more real.
Songs like “Sixteen,” a partner to CupcakKe’s classic “Pedophile” of the same rough time period, bluntly address a relevant and contemporary reality. In doing so, they speak to the world as it is, not as one wishes it would be, or imagines it was. It doesn’t mean one can’t imagine a different reality, or have an impact within this one; if anything, I feel an empowering sense of agency in the Ayesha Erotica project, the way it utilizes the past to illuminate a sense of self in an overwhelming present, full of life, for good and ill.