16 February 2009: "The Day the Bloghouse Died"

This post is about appropriation. Carles is concerned about the way insurgent progressive movements, often identified in terms of the music that serves as their ideological manqué, often find themselves under symbolic assault by corporations, which seek to leverage the incipient power of spontaneous formations to more intransigently calcify the status quo. Of course, the music itself, as product, is never a means to self-realization. Carles's sly questions at the end call our attention to that: "Does the music still belong 2 the fans after it is in a commercial? Or is it less authentic since it was used to ’sell something’ besides records/mp3s?"

But the experience of appropriation is often inchoate for those subject to its invasive recontextualizations, as Carles effectively captures here: "Just feel kinda like my whole world is falling apart. I knew that eventually the whole world would realize that I listened to the best + most fun music in the world, but now that I don’t even listen 2 it any more and they are trying to utilize the aesthetic, I am just feeling a lot of emotions." Appropriation deprives insurgent movements of the very language with which they can express their political formations, leaving them only with ineffable and impotent "emotions" that can no longer be transformed into social praxis. The unbounded collective possibilities inherent to a social formation committed "just wanting 2 dance" devolve into despondent stasis.

More challenging is Carles's intimation that the seeds of spontaneous social formations are in fact planted by corporations themselves, which suggests that all youth movements are in fact always already appropriated. "I remember I used to be really into SoMe’s design aesthetic. I thought it was unique to the Ed Banger crew. I really felt like it was organic, and it BELONGED TO US. but I was wrong." This paradoxically means that no one can "sell out" even if they wanted to.

In the end, u just have to realize that everything is a brand. And every brand wants to be significant, so u can’t hold that against ppl. Brands can’t last 4ever–so u must do whatever u can 2 maximize ur value before you metaphorically ‘die’ a.k.a. become ‘irrelevant.’

Thsus it is that Carles proposes the radical, perhaps fatal, strategy of accepting brand praxeology as a way to channel the psychic energy from the thantopic drive cathected in such cultural forms as dance music and cola.