The Woke Universe is about inverting reality—turning truth, morality, ethics, and aesthetics on their heads, and destroying every categorical imperative bequeathed to us by the ancients. The goal? To make The World safe for Ugly, Evil, Idle and Aberrant ~Ilana Grammys 2023: The end of art, techno-porn caterwauling, and indecent exposure masquerading as music; an erogenous-zone centered extravaganza ~Ilana Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Debussy, César Franck, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky (Russian), Elgar, Fauré and more—they embody The Best of The West, not the Woke pornographers and perverts, the Covid goons; rap, reparations, and the critical race bile ~Ilana Symbolically, the decaying Empire unveiled some of its most putrefying, pornographic cultural products in the week in which Burt Bacharach, composer of sublime pop-music, departed to the heavens. The beastly bacchanalia unfolded at the 2023 Grammys and the Super Bowel (sic) halftime hump-along, showcasing zero skill, 0 imagination, 0 talent and 0 beauty. Those vaguely familiar with my prose recognize that I’m being charitable. Unfortunately, conservative commentators minimize the impetus and significance of this cultural foot-and-mouth, superciliously giggling over, and misdiagnosing, it. The postmodern shift in the culture is positively tidal. But with their good-natured, bemused, crushingly stupid reactions to the most meaningful of events and situations, conservatives normalize, even aid and abet the decay. In this instance, the 2023 Grammys—techno-porn caterwauling, and indecent exposure masquerading as music. The staple response I refer to are the reliably diffuse and vapid “insights” offered up by The Tucker Carlson Show’s giggly guest, Chadwick Moore. Why is this perennial conservative confusion so important to correct? For one, because thought mediates action. And fuzzy, foolish thoughts about important matters give rise to fuzzy, foolish actions about important matters. Chadwick Moore protested the Pfizer sponsored (alleged), Grammy performance of one Sam Smith on the grounds of “satanic panic”; that it was “devil-themed.” Moore’s other redundant banality was to “reveal” that Smith is a grotesquely ugly transsexual man whose aim is to grab world attention. You don’t say! As if my lying eyes told me otherwise! THE ONLY SUBSTANTIVE CONSERVATIVE CASE to make over the Grammys is that it signifies the complete loss of immutable artistic standards. For while artistic taste is subjective and personal; artistic standards are everywhere and always objective. Nobody looking at, and listening to, the 2023 Grammys should dare talk about beauty—of melody or movement—harmony (as in consonance and counterpoint), chord progression, and a facility with musical instruments, for these were nowhere apparent. Better melodic progression is to be found in “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” and “Three Blind Mice.” Nobody watching these erogenous-zone centered extravaganzas, for which the celebrity Idiocracy clapped like clapped-out whores, should dare conclude anything but this: The Grammys were about the end of art—about the loss of all meritocratic, objective standards in art. THE TRUE MEANING OF THE WEST is not to be found in the staged acts of ugly exhibitionists and filthy pornographers who bedeck our cultural and sporting events, the likes of loud, lousy Lizzo, a mountain of meritless flesh, and the Sam Smith Sicko--demented degenerates who are all engaged in publicly tolerated indecent exposure and tuneless yelping, that not even the Auto-tune magic software, the “holy grail of recording” technology, can correct. THE MEANING OF THE WEST is not in this ghastly culture, in which our kids, liberal and conservative, are allowed to wallow, or in our ugly, grubby, tit-for-tat politics. IT’S NOT in the Woke, postmodern perverts degrading the language, literature, music, art and sciences. IT’S NOWHERE IN THE COVID CARTEL and its army of goons, medical and bureaucratic, devoid of intelligence and bereft of proficiency in anything but the use of force. The aforementioned are imposters, interlopers; frauds, freaks and fetishists. Beethoven is The West. It’s men like Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Debussy, César Franck, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky (a Russian homosexual, whose manly music could never be queered), Elgar, Fauré and more—they embody The West. They and the many young performers furthering their work, the work of the Lord, are examples of the best of the West. “Ode to Joy,” inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s eponymous poem, is but the soundbite in Symphony No. 9. Sublime as it is, “Ode to Joy” is the popular tune in a more magnificent whole. One should not seek out exclusively the Ode of the Finale—the fourth movement—without assimilating the typically ballsy build-up by Beethoven throughout the preceding Allegro (first movement), scherzo (second movement) and Adagio (third). MUSIC IS MAN. These men, to be precise. Like nobody today, Beethoven instantiates this truth in all his Symphonies. Listen to No. 5 here, conducted by the great Herbert von Karajan, and tell me this is not the original headbangers ball. To share with you, I have a fine performance of “Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 ‘Choral’ (1824).” It is that of The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Barenboim’s intensity during the performance and the perfection he wrung so effortlessly from these young, eager musicians—beautiful in face and form, hailing from far-flung countries across the Middle East and North Africa—led me to suspect this setting was more than just a celebrity conductor, one of the greatest, for sure, parachuted in for a night. Indeed, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a product of the vision of Maestro Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, a Palestinian intellectual. The impetus of their collaboration, I imagine, was to foster peace and transmit immutable beauty through music. Done. To speak colloquially, not theologically, neither Allah nor Elohim has ever inspired the transcendence of a Beethoven or a Bach. Christianity begat the glory and genius of Bach and Beethoven. They are The West, not the Woke perverts trying to drown Western glory with no more than pelvic and genital thrusts parading as music. A sad, but inspirational, anecdote: Beethoven had composed the sublime work, the Ninth, utterly deaf. Via Britannica:
AND that’s The West, too. Alas, it has become anathema in Neurotic Nation USA to be stoic and heroic like Beethoven. I shall close with guidance neither fuzzy nor diffuse: Honor Western civilization, not Kanye West: Do it up, parents. This piece was previously published at IlanaMercer.com on February 26th, 2023.
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AuthorIlana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa”(2011) & “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Facebook, Gab & YouTube Archives
March 2024
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