I. Bitch I Died And Didn’t Go To Heaven
“6 shots dead — I’ve Been on Pills All Day M I A” – Yeat, Rëal six, 2 Alivë (2022)
“The fundmental structure of reality is the one programmed by the program-maker. This has existential consequences: the maker can freeze waves, that is, he can transform action into scene and actor into idol. He transforms the “hero” into a god. And he can equally make particles move, and transform scenes into events, idols into actors. He transforms God into a hero. The concrete experience of the ludic manipulability of the fundamental structures puts an end to every ontology. The question “what is real, and what is fiction?” loses its meaning. We have lost the sense of reality, we live absurdly.” – Flusser, Post-History (1983)
“Koons’s stated goal was to be as culturally powerful as the Beatles, who themselves had outraged people with their claim to be more powerful than Jesus, which was itself updated by West’s proclamation “I am a god.” Of course none of these ambitions could be fulfilled, because none of these powerful and sui generis people would ever escape their assigned box: the Beatles remained a pop-music phenomenon, Koons would forever be an artist whose name was only vaguely recognized by most, Kanye would stay Kanye, and God was God.” – Seth Price, Fuck Seth Price (2015)
“The saturation point has come so strongly that one just longs for new images and new ways by which reality can be created. After all, man wants invention, he doesn’t want to go on and on and on just reproducing the past… You want something new. Not an illustrative realism but a realism that comes about through a real invention of a new way to lock reality into something completely arbitrary.” – Francis Bacon
“When I walk out of fucking Delilah in L.A. and TMZ will be standing out there with cameras and not even take a picture of me, I get sick. I get in my fucking Lambo truck right in front of them. All my jewelry on and they don’t even take one picture. But God willing this album will change that because if they’re taking pics it must mean my album went number one and I’m getting more money. – NAV, Pitchfork Interview. 2019
“The truth is told through the language of cap.” – Buum, Twitter (2019, Pub. 2021)
“Music is the beginning and end of the universe.” – Hazrat Inayat Khan. The Mysticism of Sound and Music
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” –John 1:1
“Heard there's a fountain of youth — told em to fill it with wock” – Yeat, Still Countin, 2 Alivë, 2022
I need an army of angels to cover me while I pull this sword out of the stone ... I need everyone’s prayers ... I promise we will be free and own our masters but we must be faithful to God this time — I think I lost my damn mind, I gotta find one! and This Chain so heavy imma Die — when Gucci Mane was talking about getting lost in the sauce he meant you can only spend so long working on the recipe, at a certain point you just gotta take one last taste and say: Let Me Cook
Somehow it's simultaneously Sebaldian and Flusserian the way Yeat's repetitively crashed his whip – you’d know about the crashes if you dug thru the fan archives on Youtube or tuned into an IG live where he’s streaming and driving, and his fans are commenting “put down the phone twizz, you’re not a good driver”. And the thing about the ‘who’s Yeat?’ question for an artist who only just broke the billboard 200 charts is that it’s answered simply: he’s making the best popular sound art of anybody working right now.
Yeat dies and comes back to life constantly. He quits percs and quits quitting percs and takes molly until he can’t feel the molly. He raps about clothing brands, sex, money, and drugs – in the simplest sense, he’s a rockstar. After flooding the industry with back-to-back-to-back projects last year that had a perfect understanding of 2021 memetics, media, and virality, he dropped 2 Alivë in February, his much awaited major label debut, which held down the #1 Album spot on apple music for a couple days. Yeat’s faced criticism for his music being superficial, but there’s something to remember: ppl will see a kiddie pool and say it's shallow instead of looking at what's in the reflection💧☀️🌎✨ Yeat is America, so many sides of it filtered and amassed into an assemblage of a half-romanian, partially-mexican 22 year old who spent his formative years in the suburbs of Portland, OR, a city known for having an extremely small hip-hop culture due to gentrification and an incredibly white population. So how did a white boy get the sauce like this?
Last year, thinker/musician/virtuoso Buum dropped an opus of a text, “On NAV and His Consequences”, in which he dissected the reason Toronto musician NAV, a rapper of South Asian descent (though he didn’t show his face for the early rise of his career) was elevating the emo music form to high art. NAV popped beans and drank lean so Yeat could hit the X with the boot up: “NAV’s art is not about what he is saying, but about what he is not saying… he draws our attention away from his physical presence on the mic and towards his spiritual absence” – it isn’t empty derivative music, but pure emptiness of the American Spirit:
As Buum points out, Yeat’s fans are more enlightened then anyone who feels the need to engage in criticism – it’s all a vibe – but just like NAV became the first brown boy to get it poppin’, Yeat is en route to become the first white boy to get it poppin’. “Get it poppin.” translates directly to “race being elided while their music is considered”. Just as there were brown rappers like Heems and Big Baby Gandhi before NAV, there are white rappers like Mac Miller and Jack Harlow before Yeat – the difference is in their focal influences. NAV 3%’d the flows of Rushxy Bandz, an Ohio rapper now serving a lengthy complicated sentence, mixing them with the synth-soaked beats he was producing, while Yeat’s major influences are Young Thug and Future – which point to the way the internet has wholly warped the musical and cultural experiences of youth, not only in America, but globally as cultural export.
After getting out of a bad record deal, Yeat independently released the album Alivë early in 2021 – the record showed the first signs of the linguistic world-building he’d soon master. “Twizzy” – an invented word rooted in ‘twin’ – emerged, as did the emphasis on “Tonka” – slang for a large luxury vehicle – as a motif. Yet there were still lingering references to the larger rap sphere: a “number nine” ad-lib after referring basketball player Rajon Rondo, in turn referencing incarcerated Chicago drill rapper RONDONUMBANINE, and a name drop of ‘Marsupial Superstars’ – one of the biggest songs by Thug-influenced Atlanta rapper SahBabii. Nor had Yeat’s religious themes fully developed on Alivë, though they came into full fruition on his next album 4L, released only months later.
4L stripped away any outside references and saw Yeat enter full cosmopoesis mode. He was building a world, a religion, a language, a lexicon to be immersed in. These themes only advanced into his following project, another 20 track album released months later titled Up 2 Më. Tracks like Money Twërk off 4L were referenced on the new project, with lines like “First my money twerk, now it’s lifting weights” appearing on the project. Another case: on the track ‘Gët Busy’, Yeat raps “off this perky got me stupid I’m a snail”, then circles back to that concept a handful of songs later, rapping “this perky got me snail, you can call me Gary” on Trëndy Way. The umlauts also became a signature part of Yeat’s linguistic code in 2021. On the SeptembersRich (best described as Yeat’s sidekick in rap who is signed to Yeat’s TwizzyRich label) track “5 2 Uh 60”, Yeat yells: “They said I'm new wave from my sound to my lettering”. So while Yeat is “just rapping”on rage beats about drugs, sex, money, he’s building a mythology, which he extends into his artistic performance across Instagram and Twitter.
In the novel Fuck Seth Price, the unnamed female narrator lists off four of the main motivations of Artists: Freedom, Craft, Money, and Scene, before listing fifth: one which combines all the above interests yet feels “the desperate, barely acknowledged need to forestall death”. The thing about rap as a form is that it engages all four of those motivations if one chooses to pursue superstardom – there is no 'sell out’ stigma, but rather the goal is to make as much money as possible, by maintaining your Freedom as an artist, working tirelessly at your craft, examining all the different ways to make money (look at all the rappers shilling NFT projects right now), and the scene being an integral part of sending signifiers through the culture, whether on social media or in the club. Yeat is the fifth, forestalling death, there’s nothing else for him to do in this life but to go up, make money, make music, and have as much as the world in the palm of his hand as possible.
Say we remove the letter “S” – it removes pluralities and multiplicities from our language. Yeats becomes Yeat infinitely and finitely and just as Yeats imbibed the spirituality of William Blake to get his flow, Yeat imbibed the spirituality of Future and the language-play of Young Thug, and is continuing to push how we communicate away from written language, into pure sounds with distinct meanings he attaches to them. They taught Yeats to millions of Irish children for generations, yet already millions of children around the world listen to Yeat – it isn’t writing and it isn’t literature – it’s the sonic intelligences that reflect the Western unconscious and its drives.
II. A Vast Image Out Of Spiritus Mundi
“Yeat is a weaver” – Conor [in DM’s], 2022
“Some day music will be the means of expressing universal religion. Time is wanted for this, but there will come a day when music and its philosophy will become the religion of humanity.” – Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Sound and Music
“Pull off in a Tonka, yeah, this a big body, big body, big body — Pull off in a Tonka, yeah, this a big body, big body, big body, big body, big body” – Yeat, Doublë, 2 Alivë, 2022
“But maybe Neolithic peoples had believed this only because stone and wood occupied the outer rim of their technology, standing for tools, building material, sculpture, weapons. These people naturally located spirits in the most advanced techne around. If this was true, though, where were the spirits to be found now?” – Fuck Seth Price, 2015
It starts with Soundcloud – an accelerator for sounds, scenes, and cultures to mix across the globe. Break it in half to get “cloud” and we’re already into a representation of Heaven, yet rather than physical, the digital represents a Beyond that cannot be conceptualized, yet exists, with new reverberations being generated and translated into our lives from there. When Kanye says “Culture is the most powerful force in humanity under God”, it is because Culture dictates sounds and sounds the very vibrations that fill our lives. Hazrat Inayat Khan said “The music of the universe is the background of the little picture which we call music…. Music is behind the working of the whole universe.” so Kanye, on his God-ordained quest to save humanity feels the compulsion to direct Culture in such a way to generate certain sounds in alignment with the Universe he wants. Perhaps the most powerful direction of music culture in the 21st century was that of Lil B, who knows the BasedGod and is sometimes the BasedGod, and directed Based energy to form massive communities that were heavily influential in developing the sounds of popular rap (and in turn popular music) of the 2010s, infusing it with a religiosity and spirituality of its own specific flavor.
The thing about Soundcloud is how vast it is – every mixture and combination of musical styles imaginable is being experimented and played with, coalescing into micro-scenes in far corners of the platform. Yeat came up in Slayworld, a loose group of vocalists and producers evolving the nascent PluggNB genre – he quickly absorbed styles from many of his contemporaries: Summrs, Izaya Tiji, Kankan, yet what set him apart from the rest was his ability to pick styles from far-ranging sounds and bring them into his wheelhouse.
Take the song Money Twërk off of 4L: the beat is has a drum pattern and instrument cadence that mirrors that of DMV rap, yet the beat Yeat’s using is soaked with VST’s, having a synthy edge compared to the pianos of the regional rap style, and Yeat’s vocals have autotune, extremely uncommon for the regional style as well. Yeat effectively Virgil 3%’s the sound of the region, just as Yung Lean 3% the sound and style of Metro Zu, a Florida based collective, on his way to the relative/niche stardom that the cultural meta of that era would allow for. Or take the lyrics to his song ‘Talk 2 God’, also off 4L, where he refers to himself as ‘the beanman’, a nickname Virginia rapper Nolanberollin has been using across many projects and songs.
It isn’t the first time Nolan’s work has been appropriated – the webcam video for his deleted-but-reuploaded song ‘Half a Bean’ was probably an inspiration for Clairo’s pretty girl (dig deep enough through her soundcloud likes and you’ll find PHARMACIST next to Bladee’s Botox Lips and SahBabii’s Titanaboa. The flow of ideas from innovators into appropriation is an inevitable part of the way the internet functions.
Yeat understands cultural metas – his sound is hyper-contemporary and futuristic to those who listen only to the past – yet his decision to bring the ‘Turban’ (often a designer scarf or shawl wrapped around his and others heads) into his style code went back to a past generation, a pre-Obama window when it was still acceptable to do so, most often seen through the stylings of Harlem’s Dipset. Just as Yeat references blowing up like Bin Laden in his music, Cam’ron would freestyle about being a ‘young Mohammed Atta’ and this Taliban influenced even trickled into the blog of Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, attending Columbia just a handful of blocks away during the same time as peak Dipset, where he turned the look into ‘Scottish Taliban’, posting pics of his fit on his pre-social media era blog “Internet Vibes”.
When Yeat put on the Turban everything changed – he lost face, he became a new version of himself, he died and came back in a new form, and his lettering and language experimentation accelerated, posting stories on his Instagram full of language that only his fanbase would get, but his fanbase would also grow through archive pages documenting words and moments like ‘luh honeybun’, ‘luh kranky’, ‘I feel lyke dëmon at smooktober dinnër party’, and many more.
Yeat had to put on the Turban because he had to lose face – artists like Bladee and NAV paid attention to not reveal or obscure their faces early in their come up, whereas Yeat had to redirect the attention from his face, obscuring himself in a mythos that he continues to build and get lost within.
III. They Be Tryna Like Hieroglyphic Words Or Something
“The displaced poems will serve to supply the big electric power network which is at the service of the already well-known reality.” – Eduardo Williams, The Sound of the Stars Dazes Me (2012)
“We now have instruments that allow us to register speech without using letters, for instance through tapes or records. And we use instruments, for example computers, which permit us to think without the use of letters. These instruments may be programmed by new types of codes that express ideas without having to pass through letters. Perhaps only specialists will have to learn letters in the future, as today only specialists learn Egyptian hieroglyphs or Incan knots. People have been saying for some time that we may be beginning to take leave of literature and to anticipate an illiterature culture. What will culture look like? – Vilem Flusser, On Communication, 1987
“The history of musical notation is that of an increasingly rigorous mathematicization, highlighting the generalized standardization of signs in the system of representation. The score is to music what linear perspective is to painting, [...] a regulative placeholder that reacts upon its referent by subjecting it to a codified symbolic logic.” – Michel Thevoz, Le Miroir infidel, 1996
“I want to stick my dick in that 🍑 [peach emoji] – I left that bitch on read for weeks, replied with a 🏖️ [beach emoji]” – Yeat, Liftëd, Alivë (2021)
One of the aspects of Yeat’s music that sets him apart is how post-lingual it reaches. Each song has layers and layers of vocals stacked up one another, almost all of which just feature Yeat singing sounds in various registers and tones as opposed to words, autotune-ing it, and layering make it part of the composition. It’s reminiscent of Young Thug’s 12 second long skrrrrrrttttt ad-lib on the song Check yet expands and abstracts this technique to new levels. Peep the pinned comment on a Kankan IG post: Stop Using Language. This is the trend, Yeat is just one side of the spectrum, while Islurwhenitalk’s detournement of plugg and jerk and whispered, barely decipherable vocals represents another.
In an IG live with SeptembersRich, Yeat superfan TwistyP1, who went viral for rapping along to the song Dub (“I’m spinning on these percs like I’m a laundromat”), made a point about how our technologies are trying to “hieroglyphic words”. It’s the trend of emojis and gifs and symbols that are more common to communicate with now – it’s why Chief Keef made “Emojis” in 2013. Everything is transforming with the technical image, and in the West, it’s completely destabilizing our cultural forms, from Cinema to Literature to Television, to Music in the Streaming Era.
IV. Hold Up, Speak 2 Heaven!
Call me, yeah, you need to call me (Call on me)
Yeah, call me, yeah, you need to call me (Call on me)
Yeah, call me, yeah, you need to call me (Call on me)
Yeah, call me, yeah, you need to call me (Call on me)
Way too stuck up to be a slut, I need you to call me
I'm too rich, yeah, to give a fuck, so I need you to call me
I ain't reading all these texts, baby, you need to call me
I ain't never thought I'd fall in love, and your love surrounding me (Yeah)
Any time I think about fucking, I feel you around me (Yeah)
Every time I see your texts, them words arousing me (Yeah)
We both crazy, baby, I know that you want all of me (Let's go)
I gotta take a break from Percs, baby, so you can have all of me– Yeat, Call Më, 2 Alivë, 2022
“Drugs, as the result of the tension between man and his culture, mirror the specific culture that they provide an escape from. Opiates from the Far East mirror the religious experience of those cultures: they seek to provide a negative “enlightenment”. Flusser, Post-History
“Yeah, bitch told me she love God, I'm high with the gods Bitch, you talked to God (Hello?), oh my God Like somebody asks me questions off the opiates, I nod” – Yeat, Talk 2 God, 4L, 2021
“God asked the angels to play their music and, as the angels played, the soul was moved to ecstasy. Through that ecstasy – in order to make this music more clear to itself – it entered this body.” – Hazrat Inayat Khan. The Mysticism of Sound and Music
“Hallucination, of whatever sort, is not the sole prerogative of madness. Each of us can experience it more or less lucidly. Hallucination does not refer only to the voice of the Virgin who whispers a message to the saint or the voice that orders the madman to kill. It is entirely of a piece with the production of listening, the modification of the sensible object.” Francois J. Bonnet. The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago. (2016)
“Spoken language will invade the scene day and night from speakers, TV screens, and computer terminals. In this it probably will not be very different from what it was before the invention of letters. This will not matter, however, for language, although omnipresent will no longer be at the centre of culture, but will form a sort of noisy background. New dimensions of thought will develop, profoundly changing not only ideas but also action. Poetic thought and mathematics will merge in a way that we are as yet fully unable to appreciate, although we can already observe the first results in the merger in synthetic imagery and music.” – Vilem Flusser, On Communication, 1987
“i need my Drugs i need my Love” – Yeat, Poppin, 2 Alivë, 2022
In the post-historical time of the technical image, we’re bound into cycles of eternal return, watching the same things repeat with slight iterations. In this case, it’s the relationship between Yeat and his girl Symone Ryley, a very public part of his image. She’s built like a Los Angeles Soundcloud Rap archetype, with a huge ass and big rack, but what’s interesting is what the public love affair calls back to: the relationship between Lil Uzi Vert and his long-time-now-ex Brittany Byrd – notable was how the souring of the relationship lead to Uzi making his biggest hit “XO Tour Llif3”. There’s a trajectory that comes with stardom that includes unlimited drugs and unlimited women, and as long as you keep making hits, you get to continue having them, and the music wraps and morphs itself around this, with Uzi’s body of work twisting from aspirational songs about fashion and flexing and money to dealing with the pains of fame and the psychosis of superstardom. Yeat, slated to go on his first tour soon, will have his own Tour Life, and the autofictional nature of the work in relation the trajectory brings questions about the future of the Wifey.
Yet for the time being, Yeat’s made a couple of love songs, which take inspiration in tone from his biggest influence Young Thug. Yet it is clear, Yeat could've made Harambe or Digits, or a number of the songs of Barter 6, but he couldn't have made You Said or Feel It or Daddy’s Birthday or Relationship, at least right now, until his grasp of Eros changes. Beautiful Thugger Girls stands as a landmark album that has yet to have an album with a similar sonic palette do anything close to what Thug did with it.
Go double cup Wock, and then mix with a Perc, I might go mix with an X, I might go leave the Earth, I'ma boot up with God, he said I put in work, Yeah I’m with the Palm Angels literally — the drugs and Yeat’s relationship with them have evolved throughout the short time span of Alivë to 2 Alivë – note even a year in length. Yeat’s gone from mixing ecstasy with Percocet every day to having such a high tolerance to X that it doesn’t even work. He’s on pills all day, he has to be, the drugs fuel the music fuel the drugs, it’s a feedback loop that Future worked to perfection and lead him to make Codeine Crazy. Everything is freestyled, there’s no writing, it’s just expelling words and sounds from the body. It follows the lineage of jazz musicians, except now it’s a double cup and a pill instead of a needle, yet Yeat’s still high in another world most of the time, describing it as essential to his recording process. In a country caught in the throes of its opioid, Yeat becomes the premiere user, of only clean prescription pills and syrups. It’s Pharmakon meets technology – he gets to live it.
V. Videograms of a Revolution
“In the same way in which it has been said that after Auschwitz it is impossible to write and think as before, after Timisoara it will no longer be possible to watch television in the same way”. – Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics
“This message from the past does not simply arrive at the present, but arrives to divide the present, dislocating the current... Along with a certain debt to the past and the dead, this videogram’s heterogeneous temporal structure invokes a democracy of the future, a democracy to come that disturbs what we think we know to be the present.” – Benjamin Young, On Media and Democratic Politics: Videograms of a Revolution
“I can't change what I said, what I did (Uh, uh) // I feel like I'm runnin' circles round this bitch // And when I wake up, opps be callin' my phone just like one of my bitches // One eye open when I sleep alone, can't trust nobody, that's it // ho that’s it” – Yeat, Kant Changë, Up 2 Më, 2021
“Absolving the real event and substituting a double, a ghost event, an artificial prosthesis, like the artificial corpses of Timisoara, testifies to an acute awareness of the image function, of the blackmail function, of the speculation, of the deterrence function of information” – Jean Baudrillard
“Better, it might be said that the basic element is the beauty of what is said and heard, that intelligence flows from the audio element to the visual.” – Bazin on Marker, 1958
When the Ceaușescu regime fell in Yeat’s motherland of Romania, it was the first event of its kind – a national uprising and transition in power, captured and broadcasted on television screens across the world. From it emerged a film, Videograms of a Revolution, a collaborative effort between German filmmaker Harun Farocki and Romanian documentarian Andrei Ujica, composed of found footage selected from over 125 hours of tape. It was a film meant to show how the image, and how history had changed, something that would soon be reconciled with again during the Yugoslav Wars of the 90s and the conflicts in the Middle East that began and have yet to end from the same era.
Yeat is like political upheaval. In Post-History, Czech-born theorist Vilem Flusser says: “It is not that history has stopped “developing”. On the contrary: it turns faster than before, because it is being sucked into the apparatus. Events precipitate themselves towards the apparatus with accelerated speed, because they are being sucked and partially provoked by the apparatus. All of history, politics, art, science and technique are thus motivated by the apparatus, in order to be transcoded into their opposite: into a televised program.” Everything becomes televisual – a somewhat antiquated term in our streaming era – but like politics or war, every single thing that Yeat does with his social media accounts is tracked and recorded into superfluous archives. A tweet that goes up and is deleted in minutes will get hundreds, even thousands, of retweets – an Instagram live will get thousands of screen recordings. Yeat can create thousands of images with the touch of a button, replicating his digital presence over and over and over. If Yeat has a destiny it’s to return to Romania, make images there, livestreaming and posting, bringing American superstardom to a country that first saw the political impacts of television. It’s to flex drugs, money, and girls in front of Ceaușescu’s Palace of Parliament, a monstrous extravagance that an unknown number laborers died to construct, all in the name of Flexing.
VI. Parallel I-IV
“Digital media is radically elastic as it can move across multiple, changing platforms, scaled to fit (or not fit), be read, accessed, broken down, and embedded in ways that previous cultural forms cannot.” – Laura Cornell and Ed Halter
“Computer animations are currently becoming a general model, surpassing film. In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind.” – Harun Farocki
“Told 'em it's all facts and you know it
We don't be lying in our raps but you don't know what that mean though
Said I would quit them Percs but I done relapsed, a thousand million times
I don't be trying at all, make a hit every time, 'bout a thousand million times
I just be high on the drugs and I lie to my bitch, just 'bout a thousand million times” – Yeat, Factz, Up 2 Më, 2021
Towards the end of his life, Farocki began to turn his attention towards the digital, producing a number of films including the series Parallel I-IV, short documentary essays that explore the worlds of video games, no Lana Del Rey. The first explored the evolution in graphics, the 2nd and 3rd focused on the boundaries of games, and the final iteration discussing the role of heroes in games. Moshpxt, a videographer who’s directed many iconic videos in the Soundcloud sphere, known for his Rotoscoping of visuals into immersive, animated backgrounds and worlds, says he’s playing games on his IG story – he’s playing the cultural apparatus, just as Yeat is, and every other person attempting to change Culture.
VII. Lying 4 Fun
“In reality, in order to reflect our experience more accurately, it would be necessary instead to assemble a whole, out of pieces of more or less the same size, placed concentrically on the same surface. Constellation, not sequencing carries truth.” – Olga Tocarzcuk. Flights
“Giving substance to the ineffable was an occult act... The magic effected by all good artists was the act of making something from nothing, a something from nothing that was powerful enough to change lives and thinking. It was all the more powerful for its boundless, ceaseless fragility: as you regarded the work and felt its power, it might suddenly flicker and revert to nothing, and then, just as you were marveling at this trick—because you marveled at it—the work might swell with power and meaning, assuming the shape of something important. You needed to suspend disbelief and place your faith in art and yourself, in order to allow yourself to be taken in and lifted up. At its best, art was a faith without religion, a gnosis without spirituality, a system without need of names.” – Fuck Seth Price
“Music is more important than ever right now and we ought to be damn thankful for anything that makes us move and forget what’s happening around us.” – Lil B, Takin’ Over by Imposing the Positive (2009)
“i don’t want to label something as contemporary as social media– as an increasingly passed (or maybe just classic lol) art form.. why try to contextualize a new experience from an old lens?” – megsuperstarprincess
“I’ve also been very affected by a great number of Yeats’s poems. Perhaps one thing I admire so much about Yeats is the way he made himself.” – Francis Bacon
“Some day music will be the means of expressing universal religion. Time is wanted for this, but there will come a day when music and its philosophy will become the religion of humanity.” – Hazrat Inayat Khan. The Mysticism of Sound and Music
“The only thing I have to decide is when to stop it, where to stop it, how to stop it. The sentences line up on their own power, they’re crazy about living: there’s a problem fo stopping, don’t turn it on since it all goes by itself.” – Réda Bensmaia. The Year of Passages. (1995)
“Yeah, I can tell, I don't know you, but I feel you // Every time I take a Perc, it feel familiar // Every time I took a step back, I got closer // Every time I was on the edge, I jumped over” – Yeat, Lying 4 Fun, Up 2 Më, 2021
Kanye said “this Reality has been forced upon us — it is a choice… we can make our own Reality” — hold up, triple seven — park that bitch back like i'm double heaven… everything i do be going viral // my fans just like a cult, they read my Bible — got a lot of percs, got a lot depending on me — i just left the Earth and they told me it landed on me and u not that guy cuz i’m Him. the craziest thing about abolishing time is that you just have to do it. Yeat’s done more for decolonization by creating shmunktöber and then turning it into smöoktober than anyone trying to fight the billionaires on the board of a museum to carry a certain type of painting – he’s changed reality for himself and others, all while pursuing the New. Some people, like Jordan Wolfson and FWB x Lil Miquela Vro Trevor McFedries don’t really get it:
Are these bleak times, or is it just bleak to have a lack of cultural understanding? If it’s the latter, it begs the question why they’re being interviewed for a cultural magazine, but even the magazine lacks an ability to function within the flows of culture now. In the early 2010s, institutions like Dazed, Pitchfork, The Fader, Complex, and Rolling Stone all had genuine impacts on culture, putting on artists and giving them exposure to young audiences looking for new things — now they exist as zombies, there to prop up a name, their writers barely getting paid, and the youth simply looking at TikToks and Youtube content made by their fellow young peers.
Clearly, they don’t understand the compression of time – because you can just repeat a 30-second snippet over and over again, just as you can a 5-minute long song, because they have the Moments you want. Yeat’s most viral song Gët Busy has a micro-hook perfect for TikTok: “This song was already turnt but here’s a bell” followed by a thunderous ring of a church bell. On the other side, the closing song of Up 2 Më, titled Lying 4 Fun is a tour de force, over 5 minutes long, as he opens up about addiction, drug use, and all the pressure in his life. The final 4 lines ring out: “Yeah, I can tell, I don't know you, but I feel you // Every time I take a Perc, it feel familiar // Every time I took a step back, I got closer // Every time I was on the edge, I jumped over” with the jump over the edge echoing Eternal Return.
And Yeat is New in every sense – the combination of new flows that have emerged in regional scenes in the last 5 years, with beats that use VSTs that are constantly being created by teenage sound designers and engineers in Europe looking for an in to the American music machine. This is the new way to lock reality into something completely arbitrary into sound, a networked sound that is its own intelligence – Yeat is just the one capable of containing it all within him. He’s programming and composing reality for as long as he has the reigns on culture, before something Newer rises up and takes his place, but until then he’ll be geeking and booting up with God for as long as he can.
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I just sent to this Yeat I think he gonna read it 😋