Amerika

Someone asked on The Other Site if it was consumerist to amass music, video, and texts. My disappointing answer was that it depended on the goal of this collecting.

This question presents a great illustration of categorical versus transcendental imperatives.

That is, are the records, books, and video being collected in a consumerist way or a transcendental way?

The transcendental aims at infinity, eternity, and the perpetual good; the consumerist aims at short-term gratification.

So if you’re stacking up a bunch of Dua Lipa and Pantera rare vinyls, that strikes me as consumerist… individualism in product form.

If you’re archiving and enjoying the best of black metal and Bruckner, that does not feel very consumerist to me.

I am certain there are equivalents in books as well; the best of books are worth having. Some movies strike me as essentials, like Apocalypse Now, Zodiac, and Birth of a Nation. Is it consumerist to have excellence around us?

Maybe we should extrapolate further. Movies, books, and music are basically conversations; a writer, musician, or director conveying what they have learned through pain. Is it consumerist to have quality conversations? What about to have vapid conversations?

The consumerist is the reflection of our individualism: it is what we want right now to make our egos feel comfortable, our thinking convenient, and easy answers to predominate over complex, gritty, difficult, and most of all, inscrutable nature.

Commercialist music on the other hand is not quality but quantity, or rather, the opposition to quality through contrarianism, which always degenerates to the same basic message: eat, f**k, drink, steal. You know, the peasant, trailer, ghetto, and third-world things.

True commercialized music — the Black album, Sonic Youth, Pantera, Cradle of Filth, Deerhoof, Cannibal Corpse, Draupveil, Lja, Deafhaven — is designed to avoid challenging you to upgrade your inner state to perceive more of reality. All of it is navel-gazing hedonistic individualism.

If you are simply owning quality music, nothing can stop the process of growing beyond who you are. It is anti-individualist, anti-commercialist, and most of all, pro-realistic as a process.

If you are buying the latest trendy metal, even the most “underground” of the funderground, that’s basically buying Chinese junk on eBay and topping it with a visit to McDonald’s. Most of the stuff in our short reviews is pure commercialism.

Tags: commercialism, consumerism, transcendentalism