THE KANYE RAMBLE

A year ago Kanye West was seen to be this newcomer, Paul McCartney's, mentor - he'll be a-okay if he hangs with with Kanye it seemed.
All the kids were saying so and what a mensch Kanye was to be giving an old unknown codger a break.
Who was this Sir Paul, that quiet old git who'd fucked around with some garage band back in the day?
Does anyone know what became of those guys?
They're not around any longer and someone told me the remaining members might be making a drum and bass album soon. Who knows?
They've sunk into obscurity so who really gives a fuck! Not the evolving swarm mindset of the contemporary teen, that's for sure. And why should they?
Well there are a host of good reasons but more on that later perhaps...
If they'd stuck with Kanye, the garage band, they might have made something of themselves.
Unarguably, they would have had to wait for 56 years anyway seeing as God's gift to hip-hop was only born in 1977 and only started actively putting himself about in 1996 whereas the unnamed garage band signed some obscure record contract in 1960. A record what? Yeah, exactly.
We exist in the days of entitlement now.
Why should anyone have to pay for some muso's songs? I mean you just go online and download them right...they're not artists - artists paint and sculpt and shit - these are just guys with guitars and microphones and drums. They're okay but we need to hear their shit before we pay to go and see them, right...
We'll get the folks to pay for a concert ticket but fuck paying for the download - anyhow, I know a guy who knows a guy...
Luckily though, Paul was spotted by Kanye in 2015 so maybe the old scouse git has a future in music after all...
Let's hope he can make it on the road in the concert scene seeing that nobody pays for albums these days. Albums? Who listens to an album? We just want that song. Fourteen songs by the same guys one after the other - are you on fucking drugs or something?
You are?
Can I have some?
Make mine a double.
Whatever happened to six degrees of separation? Hang on - that shit won't work with these kids - they need to know who the fuck Kevin Bacon is from the get-go.
Oh, and what six degrees of separation means too.
No, kids, it's not the angle of the gap between Nicki Minaj's butt-cheeks when she's squatting on stage in leopard print - what's much more important than that of course, is finding out if her butt-cheeks are filled with god-given adipocytes or some synthesised alternative that augments the twerking motion just that iota more than her nearest rival who is......who is her nearest rival?
Let me see - oh yeah....who gives a fuck!

I didn't start out to write about this - it was going to be about values and hypocrisy and things I've unavoidably been seeing lately where news coverage is reduced to obsession with some celebrity's ass and whether it's fake or real...like that.
This may, of course, just be the result of some cognitive bias, Baader Meinhof phenomenon or some such paradigm where my new awareness (sic) taunts me into seeing this bullshit manifesting around me like I've been trapped in some teenage mutant value system dreamworld.

Whether you believe in conspiracy or not - forget conspiracy theory - I'm talking about just conspiracy - it doesn't matter whether you believe in it or not - just look around you. The media is owned privately - globally - the news is sponsored by the corporations with the stock. Similarly, politicians, as Robin Williams so sagely suggested, should be walking around like Formula 1 racing drivers with their corporate sponsors' logos emblazoned all over their uniforms, in this case, a designer suit that costs more than their average voter's monthly pay check. They'd be invisible behind the corporate identities, which is probably just as well - who'd want to see someone else's hand going up Hillary's ass to move the arms legs and mouth around?
Not me.
Let's be honest - we all get enough of that at home.
And it doesn't matter which way you slice or dice it, there hasn't been a legitimate defensive war since the advent of World War II - they've all been strategic orchestrations designed to foment destabilisation in certain regions, promote agendas of global uncertainty, boost oil sales and prices, cleanse the planet of a few more undesirable elements who don't make the WASP cut and create revenue for a multitude of industries owned by the same guys who own the politicians and the media. There is no conspiracy there - just reality - the one Orwell and Huxley predicted way back in the 1940's and 50's.
It's not coming to a cinema near you soon (although dystopian futures are the order of Hollywood it seems) they're already here and it's just that you haven't noticed it because your friends might not be trending it on twitter or Facebook or whatever other portal one has into the current reality.

Yet paradoxically along with this myopic tunnel vision, they have managed to reach out and instil uncertainty and fear among the emerging youth - even identifying an enemy upon whom this fear can be focused. All you have to do is listen to random public radio interviews on the streets of Sydney to know that teenagers aren't just aware of the sweeping threat of Islamic fundamentalism, they're downright afraid of it without necessarily thinking to the end of the page. Yet when I speak to my own range of selective "youngsters" they're hep to the bullshit and aren't buying it.
Could it be that the news stations are editing in only the juicy fear-filled interviewees?
To what end? Tell me it isn't so...
In the UK just ask any freethinking citizen if they believe the BBC stands for unbiased journalism and I'll show you a magic trick that has you disappear up your own arse.
I've heard the hoary old Nazi chestnut being dragged out for comparison to the current threat to world peace (ha - ha - yes, I did just write that - how can you threaten something that doesn't exist?) but here's the twisted irony - it wasn't the religious (supposed) zealots (in this case, the Jews) who threatened the peace and stability of the region and the world, it was the regime in charge that identified a religious faction and convinced the rest of the country that these infidels were a threat to the Third Reich, the Fatherland and - Gott in Himmel - the world itself!
Isn't there something eerily familiar about that scenario right now?

Don't get me wrong - I'm no fan of the Zionist extremism that has driven despots and powermongers home and abroad to have created the abomination that is Israel/Palestine right now - but it wasn't being Jewish that made that happen. In the same way it isn't being Muslim that makes you a maniacal suicidal fundamentalist with a desire for jihad and world domination. That thinking certainly exists but it doesn't define Islam in the same way the KKK doesn't define Christianity although just like ISIL (I refuse to call the cunts, ISIS as that is my cat's name, after the Egyptian goddess not some godforsaken bunch of puppets created by the US and manipulated by their foreign handlers), this extremist ideology has been promoted through our mainstream media as the driving force behind Islam and the boogeyman under your bed in Paris, Sydney or New York is no longer brandishing a hammer and sickle - he's now got an explosive vest on and he wants your city - no hang on, he wants a bunch of virgins in the great hereafter - or does he?
It's a pretty frail and desperate proposition no matter which way you dice it. And it doesn't hang together too well under any real scrutiny.

And it's the distractees, the hoards of consumers, the proles on parade with their free downloads and their rampant obliviousness who, through their voracious appetites for whatever cheese the media sees fit to serve, give it legs, fuel its power...

Maybe Kanye can fix it.
If he can give a nobody like Paul McCartney a career path, maybe he can fix just about anything.
They're always talking about Kim Kardashian's ass - well maybe he can do something worthwhile for a change.

Goo-goo-ga-joob!

DON'T GO

I lay no claim to any form of psychoanalytical expertise but I think it's fair to say (to paraphrase someone, whose name escapes me right now) that once upon a time we listened to politicians and laughed at comedians whereas nowadays  it certainly seems to be the reverse case. 

The polemical wit and observational comedy of people such as George Carlin and Robin Williams for example, was without equal and really cut to the point. Sadly, both of those fine gentlemen are no longer with us in the flesh but in another sense, their bodies remain - their bodies of work - as cuttingly apposite now as ever before, if not more so. 

It strikes me starkly however that with this insight and the revelatory absurdity that comes from observing life from a comedic perspective, the material that's delivered for our amusement is profoundly tragic. The pathos just oozes from every pore.  

The lore and spectre of the sad clown syndrome was never more startlingly apparent than with comedic giants such as Robin Williams and in a bygone era, Tony Hancock, a pioneer of British comedy. Or was it? It only became startlingly apparent posthumously and there wasn't a shred of humour in that revelation. 

I experienced the same sense of intense pathos while watching and listening to Steve Hughes last night down at the Adelaide Fringe. There was this astonishingly funny and quite brilliant observational comedian performing before us yet unlike Robin Williams, whose depressive plight slipped quietly past us - to our eternal shame and chagrin, Hughes was stating quite bluntly (and I believe, genuinely) that if there was some place where he could go to transition from this world, he'd do it in a heartbeat. He'd had enough. His show was dubbed appropriately Nervous Breakthrough and it parodies, in part, his recent nervous breakdown and the stark horror of that experience. It is so much more than that though and the layers, if we were to peel them back, reveal, I think, a much darker and desperate world. 

He talks openly about not having had the balls to commit suicide but he certainly explored that possibility. Hughes, to me, is wise and wonderful and paradoxically connected with higher aspects of life where he posits our only hope of any form of long term survival as a species comes in the guise of a consciousness evolution yet we are so distracted by banal inanity that we are, many of us, sinking inexorably into a state of irreversible unconscious existence. 

One of his quips - stop obsessing with the evil of the past and watching Hitler doccos when there's full colour evil happening before our eyes that we skirt over or simply feel helpless to resolve. 

There's no overpopulation and there's plenty of "stuff" to go round, he quips. To believe in a state of global overpopulation and a shortage of stuff is, in essence to deny that whatever transpired to place us here in the universe was a very badly worked out plan indeed. And whether one is religious or atheistic, there's something fatally flawed in that mode of thinking. And if we accede to this ideology, it inevitably leads to fascism and someone or some group of people deciding who gets to live and who gets to die. 

"When you ask someone if they think the world is overpopulated and they say yes, ask them why they think this?"

"They stare blankly at you and mutter - someone told me..." 

"So if people need to be removed - if there are too many of us - kill yourself. Do your bit."

"No, not me, they protest - them - them over there. Yeah, it's never you, is it. It's always someone else causing the problem. And that's the real problem." 

Much of the show was in similar vein. It was biting and excruciatingly funny yet I was deeply saddened that this insightful, talented man admitted he no longer wished to be part of this tribe - us. He'd had enough. He saw no hope for us in our present state - a conclusion obviously augmented by his own personal burnout and resultant breakdown. 

What the fuck does one do in a situation like this? 

Laugh it off?  

Why? 

Because he was joking, right. He is after all a comedian - a successful one. 

So were Tony Hancock and Robin Williams....

They too had had enough. The chronicling of life's bitter ironic absurdities for the amusement of others was no longer enough for them. And we were too busy laughing at their antics to sense the tragedy lurking beneath. 

If Steve Hughes elects to bow out too and my wife intimated that as horrible as that prospect was, she got the distinct impression he just might, then try as I may, no matter how he might have "joked" about it, I just don't find that funny. 

The mixture of amusement and tragedy roiling within me as we filed out of that theatre last night, was profound to say the least. 

Where to from here?