The following is an installment in AltRight's ongoing series “So This Is How It Ends” (STIHIE), which chronicles instances of decadence and degeneration so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization.

"Booty Wave," sung by the fictional artist "K'ronica," is a satirical take on contemporary pop music, a genre which, The Onion reports--channelling STIHIE, no doubt!--likely signals the downfall of civilization.  

The following is an actual, non-parodic product of America's popular music industry--"Stupid Hoe," sung by Trinidadian immigrant Nicki Minaj.  

We seem to have passed some kind of Rubicon, when "Booty Wave" has more redeemable qualities--and is far closer to something one might call "music"--than the creations it is meant to lampoon.       

Four years after the event, singer and former Smiths frontman, Steven Morrissey, has decided to sue the New Musical Express (NME) magazine for libel in connection with an article where he was criticised ‘for allegedly telling a reporter Britain had lost its identity due to high levels of immigration’.

According to The Guardian,

Lawyers for the former Smiths frontman told the high court on Monday that the singer “continues to suffer” reputational damage from a controversial interview he gave to NME magazine four years ago in which he complained about an “immigration explosion” leading to a loss of British identity.

In a written submission, Morrissey said his comments received “a barrage of press” at the time, and added: “Question marks over my being a racist have never since receded”.

This is the latest instalment of a

bitter standoff that spans almost two decades – in 1992 NME accused him of “flirting with disaster” and racist imagery after he wrapped a union flag around himself while on stage in Finsbury Park, north London . . . .

In the opposite corner, however, Catrin Evans, acting for the magazine, takes the view that:

“[t]he fact that [Morrissey] has spent the three years since March 2008 recording albums, touring, promoting his new work and presumably doing well enough commercially to be able now to contemplate funding this libel claim, shows that his reputation has been unaffected. His fans apparently still love him,” Evans told the court. She pointed out that the offending interview had never been published online and continues to exist “only in Morrissey fans’ bedrooms”.

In 2007 Morrissey was quoted by the NME as saying

Although I don’t have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears. So the price is enormous.

If you travel to Germany, it’s still absolutely Germany. If you travel to Sweden, it still has a Swedish identity.

But travel to England and you have no idea where you are

Following which, in a follow-up interview, he

is alleged to have added that he did not think his comments were inflammatory, but were “a statement of fact”.

It says something about the Left, and indeed about the politics of the mainstream music industry, that even Morrissey’s perfectly reasonable and accurate observations were deemed, according to Tim Jonze, the journalist who interviewed Morrissey, ‘offensive’, and according to the NME, racist. These people are so far to the Left that they will only be seen when instruments able to detect the cosmic gravitational wave background are invented. (The predicted redshift is in excess of z > 10²⁵.)

Be that as it may, one cannot help but wonder why, if Morrissey believes that successive governments’ policy on immigration has had a negative impact in Britain, he cares about the opinions of those who supported that policy.

I certainly don’t. Do you?

On the other hand, it is difficult to ascertain Morrissey’s real attitudes an intentions, given that in 2004 he was a founding signatory of the violent terrorist group United Against Fascism, and that the year following his ‘offensive’ remarks he donated £75,000 (some $150,000 at the time) to a campaign sponsored by the aforementioned group, Love Music Hate Racism.

As to his politics, Morrissey is known to have criticised conservative politicians and to have been rooting for Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry in the U.S. presidential elections of 2004.

Thus this seems the case of a Leftist suing other Leftists for using Leftist reputational weapons because of his criticism of Leftist policies.

Put another way, this seems a case of Leftists seeking to redistribute wealth among themselves and contribute a big chunk to fattening their lawyers.

I hope the legal process proves detailed and comprehensive, and that they spare no funds, and leave no stone unturned, unearthing every document, taking as many years as are needed, in their search for the truth.

In his amusingly-titled article “Smells Like Dead Junkie,” Jim Goad, an iconoclastic icon if ever there was one, takes rhetorical dead aim at Kurt Cobain, the famously fame-hating rock star, heroin addict, and supposed voice of Generation X, who took literal dead aim at himself back on April 5, 1994, when the self-directed Shot Heard ’Round the Grunge World tore a massive hole through the Nirvana frontman’s peroxide-fringed head, knocking the life out of this lead screamer’s poetically plaintive blue eyes and caking the ceiling of the celebrated anti-celebrity’s Seattle mansion with his gorgeously tortured brains.

Much as I appreciate Goad’s scathing and inimitably witty invective in assailing the grisly and insufferable rock-journo-fueled Cobain personality cult, however, I find his overall assessment of the left-handed guitarist with the naively left-wing views a bit off the mark. Cobain’s über-politically correct “cultural Marxism,” as expressed in certain sections in his journal where he attacks White heterosexual males and promotes riot-grrl feminism and homosexuality ought not, I believe, unduly inform our understanding of his personality or music.

Cobain himself saw with clarity that he barely knew what he was talking about when he indulged in such rants, and in fact was aware that it amounted to little more than blowing off steam against people who annoyed him—namely, jerky jocks and mean, macho metalheads. He never took himself seriously enough to view himself as anything other than a lightweight on political or social matters.

One journal entry is quite telling on this score: “I like to have strong opinions with nothing to back them up with besides my primal sincerity,” Cobain wrote. “I like sincerity. I lack sincerity,” he added, demonstrating characteristically cutting self-awareness in undermining the very thing that would even lend him credibility in his own eyes. Cobain wasn’t a poseur when it came to self-loathing; one gets the sense, in fact, that this aspect of his personality was very real, indeed, primal.

Self-hatred is a brutally recurrent motif in the lyrics of Nirvana’s songs; it is, in fact, the thematic centerpiece of the now-legendary Nevermind album, whose release 20 years ago suddenly and shockingly changed the sound, look, and feel of hard-rock music, transforming it from a bombastic, flamboyant celebration of hedonist excess (think Poison, Motley Crue, White Lion, Whitesnake and other popular “Hair Metal” bands of the '80s and early '90s) into something darkly satirical, snarlingly bilious and emotionally raw.

The following is an installment in AltRight's ongoing series “So This Is How It Ends” (STIHIE), which chronicles instances of decadence so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization.

Rebecca Black should be commended for pushing gurl pop to its inevitable conclusion. No longer will suburban tweens be confused by their favorite star’s poetic lyrics. Indeed, “Friday” makes “Oops I Did It Again” read like the Pound Cantos.  And taking its lead from the “Bed Intruder Song,” “Friday” is auto-tuned in its entirety. Now, budding gurlstars won’t have to worry about actually singing in key or in tune to produce a video with tens of millions of hits.

Rolling Stone suggest “Friday” will leave only devastation in its wake: 

[T]hus Black and Ark Music Factory have made a video that forces its audience to reckon with a particular formula for pop music. It's not as if any of this was ever actually cool, but suddenly it seems as if any legit pop singer goes anywhere near the vibe of "Friday," it will just seem like a joke.

The music of STIHIT was produced by the Los Angeles-based Ark Music Factory. Reading between the lines of its “About” page, one understands that its business model is to get the artist’s parents to finance the music videos in hopes that their daughter might “make it” in an industry known for chewing up and spitting out young coeds. One can imagine the Ark salespitch, "Your daughter is clearly exceptionally talented, and we don't want that to go to waste." 

Ark can even provide you with a Big Black Gansta, who will rap about and cavort around your daughter.

Thought Catalog notes that at one time, “music industry bottom feeders had to seek out the child prodigies and pre-teen crooners they sought to exploit.” Now, the gurls come to them.

And who knows who will be the next Ark gurl to go viral. I’ve got dibs on “CJ Fam.” By the looks of her, she has enough obnoxious badgering power to make herself a star.

I’ve been a U2 fan since the 1980s. But one thing that has continually bothered me over the years, as I am sure it has a considerable number of my fellow fans, is Bono’s extracurricular urge to be seen as some sort of Messiah figure, especially as his moral compass is about as accurate as a sundial in a coalmine.

Over the years, this has not only led him to pen some naïve and cringeworthy lyrics, but, in the latest case, has seen him flirt with the genocidal ideology of Marxist ANC extremists, who, egged on by the anti-White racism implicit in the international Marxist movement, believe in butchering all Whites in South Africa.

During a recent interview Bono suggested that ANC chants like “Kill the Boer” and “Bring Me My Machine Gun” had a legitimate place in South African culture, demonstrating gross naïvety or something worse.

Unlike many rock songs that invoke violent and bloodthirsty imagery merely for effect, “Kill the Boer” is taken very seriously by those who sing and hear it, being a clear call to butcher innocent civilians, and has been repeatedly acted on. It has played a leading role in a smouldering culture of genocide against White farmers and their families, which has seen well over 3,500 of them butchered and often savagely mutilated since the start of what can best be called the Neo-Racist South African State.

The Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt, who lived from 1908 to 1981, was plagued by bad luck in the final half of his life. Tveitt was ostracized in the decades after the Second World War for the Pagan, Pan-Germanic, and racialist (but never National Socialist) views he had defended in writing and expressed in his music during those years, and in 1970 his cabin in Hardanger burned to the ground, destroying 4/5 of the almost 300 original scores it contained. Among many other things, three of Tveitt's six piano concertos perished in the flames.

Tveitt's oeuvre—what's left of it—is multifarious, replete with hundreds of art songs and folk song arrangements as well as large, ambitious masterworks, such as the ballet Baldurs draumar (Balder's Dreams) and the magisterial Sonata Etere. Although Tveitt's music is not atonal, most of it is not based on the major and minor keys, but on the modal scales familiar from the folk music traditions of many countries, including Norway. Several Norwegian composers, most famously Edvard Grieg, had incorporated elements of their country's folk music into compositions in the 19^th century. But Tveitt, who grew up in the Norwegian heartland and made extensive studies of its music, found Grieg's folklorism affected and superficial. He was probably the first Norwegian composer to assimilate fully the principles that governed the traditional music of his country, and to adhere to those principles in his own works even when they clashed with those of the classical tradition. Tveitt's music has cosmopolitan influences as well: his piano writing combines the ethereal textures of Ravel and Debussy with the sonorous virtuosity of Rachmaninov and Liszt; his orchestration often echoes the Stravinsky of Petrushka, The Firebird, and The Rite of Spring.

Tveitt was born in Bergen, Norway's second largest city and one of Northern Europe's most important ports. His roots ran to nearby Hardanger, a rural region centered around the eponymous Hardangerfjord; the name Tveit (one T) comes from the family's ancestral home there. Tveitt, the son of a nationalistic high school teacher, grew up among books and pianos, and heard the music of the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle during visits to Hardanger. Although not a child prodigy, he was musically precocious, composing chamber pieces and founding an orchestra in his late teens. At around the same time he became interested in pre-Christian Norse culture, changing his birth name, Nils, to a Norse and angular Geirr and adding an additional T to the end his surname.

According to biographer Reidar Storaas, it was not given that Tveitt should decide on a career as a composer; he could just as well have gone the way of a linguist (Tveitt wrote in an archaic, Norse-inflected Norwegian for which he had devised his own vocabulary and grammar), a writer, or a concert pianist. But he did eventually decide on composition, and went to study at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1928. His teachers there considered him brilliant, but were often frustrated by his fixation on the modal scales of traditional Norwegian music: for although Tveitt was a Germanophile, he had little use for the German music of his time, be it Brahms or Schoenberg. Like his fellow composers Béla Bartók and Ralph Vaughan Williams he wanted to forge a music unique to his country, and believed that he could only do this once it had been rid of some of its Teutonic influence.

After finishing his studies at the Conservatory, Tveitt lived in Paris and then Vienna for a few years before returning to Norway. Among the pieces he wrote and premiered during his time abroad were his First Piano Concerto, which some sources list as his first opus, and the Two-Voice Studies, which are technical exercises based on the modes of Norwegian folk music. The First Piano Concerto inverts the traditional concerto pattern of two fast movements with a slow movement in the middle, bookending a lively, Lydian-mode folk dance with two introspective slow movements ushered in by the solo piano.

During the 1920s, Tveitt began to compose a series of large-scale works with Neo-Heathenistic themes. This culminated with 1934's Balder's Dreams, a monumental ballet loosely based on the poetic Edda and featuring parts for a speaking narrator, multiple solo singers, and a set of nine specially built steel drums tuned to the pentatonic scale. The third movement of 1958's Sun God Symphony, a condensed version of Balder's Dreams, is entitled Dansen i pileregnet (Arrow-Dance). The movement is a balletic illustration of an extract from the Poetic Edda. In it, the goddess Frigg has made everything in nature promise to do no harm to her son Balder, the most beloved of the gods. Shortly afterward the Æsir are amusing themselves at a feast by bombarding Balder with axes, stones, and arrows (hence the title of the movement), knowing that he will not be harmed thanks to Frigg's deal-making. But Loki, a trickster, has learned that there is one thing from which Frigg has extracted no promise—the mistletoe, which seemed too inconsequential to be of any danger—and convinces one of the gods to plunge a mistletoe branch into Balder's chest, killing him instantly. Balder's death is universally mourned, but it is only Odin who realizes its full significance—for Odin alone knows that the event is a portent of Rangarok, the end of all things. Tveitt illustrates the  “arrow-dance” with a light texture of interweaving ostinatos, gradually building up to Balder's death and a dissonant, brass-driven climax.

The interwar years saw Tveitt's cultural and religious opinions take on a political character. Many Norwegian intellectuals and artists of the time held revolutionary conservative, Völkisch, Pan-Germanic, and Neo-Heathenistic views, with the publication Ragnarok forming a loose nexus for their movement. In the mid-1930s, Tveitt, by then one of the most famous young composers in the country, started writing for Ragnarok and quickly became a part of the inner circle of intellectuals that kept the magazine running. The Ragnarok circle, influenced by philosopher Hans S. Jacobsen, completely rejected Judeo-Christianity in favor of the polytheism of pre-Christian Scandinavia and derived from this a Pan-German political philosophy that emphasized the unity and racial purity of the Germanic peoples. That was no problem for Tveitt, whose Neo-Heathenism had always gone hand in hand with a dislike of Christianity, an animus that may resulted from his Pietist mother's overbearing and strict style of parenting. This extract from a 1934 letter gives some indication of how extreme his opinions were at the time:

I fear that the Fimbulwinter has set in at last! People have little interest in old Norwegian, jazz and Grieg-style mediocrities predominate, the Jews are raping our women, and young people are brought up by the “Labor” Party's whore handbooks and “sexual education.

The Ragnarok circle was ambivalent about Hitler, Mussolini, and fascism in general. While many in it sympathized with some of the goals those movements pursued, few considered themselves members of them. Norway's main fascist party, Nasjonal Samling, and its leader Vidkun Quisling never held much appeal for them: Quisling, a bourgeois Protestant, was more occupied with anti-Communism than race, and one historian writes that the party as a whole consequently held views that were nationalist and conservative, not radical and Pan-Germanic. Things did not improve when, after Germany's invasion of Norway in 1940, Quisling was sidelined by Reichskommisar Josef Terboven, who in the eyes of the Ragnarok circle, treated Norway more like a colonial protectorate than a stronghold of the Germanic empire. Tveitt, who moved from Oslo to Hardanger shortly after the occupation, allied himself with the Norwegian resistance movement, hiding resistance fighters from the authorities and sabotaging Terboven's schemes through his position as a cultural consultant to the government. One photograph taken after the liberation of Norway shows him in the uniform of a local guide for Britain's Hardanger command. There is no evidence, however, that Tveitt's anti-Nazism led to or was caused by a turnabout in his religious, political, or cultural opinions—nor, indeed, that he was a great supporter of the Third Reich even before the war and the occupation.

This did not deter many in the postwar era from painting Tveitt as a “collaborationist.” In Norway as elsewhere in Europe, leftists in politics and modernists in art saw de-nazification as an opportunity to do away with ideological opponents. Tveitt, a right-wing Germanophile who wrote tonal, folk-inflected music, was targeted by both groups. Frozen out of the Norwegian establishment he toured Europe as a concert pianist, playing recitals before thousands and reportedly throwing his audience into a “paroxysm of ecstasy” on at least one occasion. Things gradually improved for him in the following decades: Parliament granted him an artist's salary in 1958, orchestras began to play his music again, and he continued to compose prolifically. A notable postwar work is the 29^th Piano Sonata (“Sonata Etere”) from 1951. Under its conventional three movements, the sonata hides a form that abandons Classical development in favor of a cyclical structure tied together by a recurring motto theme. The theme appears explicitly at the beginning of the first and third movements, and permeates the rest of the sonata in various ways.

Tveitt suffered another blow in 1970, when most of his works were lost in the fire. In the years before his death in 1980, he had developed a drinking problem and found it increasingly difficult to compose. Still, Tveitt's last major composition, the 1974 cantata Telemarkin, is every bit as good as his early works; it even includes a solo part for Hardanger fiddle. Tveitt's late compositions also include another notable work for that instrument, namely the Second Concerto for Hardanger Fiddle and Orchestra. Like the 29^th Piano Sonata, the concerto is a three-movement structure with a slow set of theme and variations in the middle; and like it, the Second Hardanger Fiddle Concerto is a cyclical work. In the middle of the third movement a wistful theme, first introduced in the second, reappears fully harmonized for the first time, bringing the apparent climax of the whole concerto to a poignant pause.

In recent years, a spate of CD releases and concert performances have given Tveitt's music a Renaissance in Norway and abroad. It has not been without controversy. Anti-racist and left-wing groups continue to paint Tveitt as an unapologetic Nazi sympathizer, and they have garnered the support of some historians. (A newspaper article from 2003 about a recently published book on Tveitt's involvement with Neo-Heathenism declares that Tveitt thought that Vidkun Quisling was "not enough of a racialist," which sounds damning until you realize that Quisling was not a racialist at all.) But although the postwar Norwegian establishment's treatment of him is an instructive example of the way in which “anti-fascism” has become an ideological battering ram, Geirr Tveitt was far more than a pitiful victim of overzealous de-nazifiers. He was a genius, and his works constitute an important but neglected contribution to the aesthetics of the revolutionary Right.

I have found commentators on the Right to be deeply polarised concerning modern popular music. There are those who think only Classical music is real, and anything made after the 1890s equals noise, from Arnold Schönberg onward. Then there are those who say that, actually, even today we can find positive developments in modern popular music, even if they are not to everyone’s taste.

In earlier writing about music, I have concentrated on Black Metal, whose cultural roots I traced back to the Völkisch movement of the nineteenth century—although, of course, one could, if determined, keep excavating deeper into time without limit. The album under review today, however, does not belong to the Black Metal genre, but would be classed as Neo-Classical, with a few hints of Martial Industrial (the two genres overlap, and are contiguous, and in key ways ideologically congenial, with the more Völkisch forms of Black Metal; and indeed disaffected Black Metal fans have been known to “graduate” to the more refined Martial Industrial, Neo-Classical, Neo-Folk, Dark Ambient nexus of genres, which are not always sympathetic to the miscreants on the other side of the divide).

Heroica is as apt a title for this album as one can imagine, as it swirls with neo-Romantic beauty and heroic pathos, somewhat reminiscent of Beethoven. Their music is synth based, and has the epic quality of an epic film soundtrack, but the approach to composition, the melodic development, and the dark atmosphere, is pure nineteenth-century Classical, with apocalyptic rhythms and some diversions into Electro Pop on tracks two and eight, complete in the latter case with male narration and angelic female vocals. Despite the obvious heroic feel, however, this is not as martial as H.E.R.R.’s The Winter of Constantinople, let alone Kreuzweg Ost’s masterful Edelrost. Neither does Heroica have as modern a feel as the latter two albums, the former being almost entirely instrumental.

Winglord is designed to fill the listener’s mind with images of “Europe’s slumbering grace and splendour”; and it is, according to the press release, “about the longing for a more heroic spirit—and a worthier way of life . . .” These are certainly welcome sentiments in present day Western society, and may herald an eventual turning of the tide when one considers that this is not one isolated case, but part of a thriving network of modern popular music genres, comprising hundreds of artists, predicated on the comprehensive rejection of the values of 1789. The power of music is not to be underestimated, for it can, under the right conditions, rouse feelings of a violence and of an intensity that transcend all rationality, that can defeat any logic, argument, or economic imperative. Few other forms of human expression have such power.

Visit Winglord’s website and listen to a few samples (here is one). And if you find that you would like to hear more in this vein, support the work of this talented musician, and buy his music: do not steal it and do not make it available for thieves to steal; buy it, offer to pay double even, and play a part in pulling modern popular music in a positive direction.

One of the less helpful features of the radical Right is its propensity to spend a great deal of time and effort analysing and complaining abou is wrong with modern culture, and a lot less time actually producing an alternative to this culture. For the most part, the nearest it ever gets to producing said alternative is generating endless suggestions of what needs to be done, without actually doing any of it. Worse still, most of the suggestions are not even actionable in the short to medium term because they involve the creation of vast operations, necessitating large and sustained investment, abundant personnel, established networks, and extensive infrastructure - all this within a community that struggles to raise even measly sums of a few tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes I wonder if the people making these suggestions are serious about achieving change and do not just seek emotional relief.

Perhaps the tendency to make impractical suggestions stems from the tendency among elitists to think on a macro scale, a trait which I believe results from an inborn desire for order. This would explain the abundance of conspiracy theory buffs within the radical Right: what is a conspiracy theory if not a narrative, an ordered exposition, that efficiently explains a mass of otherwise confusing data and events?

In a satirical blog  about pop culture, I recently presented two sets of photographs: one of ageing mainstream musicians, whom I described as the past, and another of young underground musicians, whom I described as the future. Using a standard tabloid technique, I mischievously chose unflattering images for the first set of musicians, and proceeded to dismiss the latter as a freak show as well as a negative cultural influence. Unfortunately, some interpreted this (rather superficially) as simply a derogation of Elton John, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Bono, and Bob Geldof's looks and musical talent, ignoring the fact that the title of the blog referred explicitly to culture, and the blog itself made no mention of music.

My original aim had been to do a series, where I juxtaposed representatives of the egalitarian against representatives of the inegalitarian camp, taken from the fields of philosophy, politics, journalism, art, literature, psychology, anthropology, and more, always accompanied by a few satirical comments at the enemy's expense. There is no doubt that there was an element of playground malice in this exercise. Yet, the latter had a serious purpose: the enemy routinely engages in self-serving, derogatory, and cartoonish misrepresentations of the intellectuals, artists, and scientists whom they do not like, whom they would like to keep beyond the pale, and whom they would like the apolitical and the miseducated to avoid and dismiss in advance. The message I wanted to convey was that we know how to do it too, and are quite prepared to give them a taste of their own medicine (in fact, in December last year I wrote an article  for The Occidental Observer where I did some post-imperial deconstructing, in response to the White-bashing discourse that permeates the field of postcolonial studies). I think this is important because one of the reasons European descended peoples have come to find themselves in retreat, on the losing side of every significant battle in the cultural war for the better part of a century now, is that the Left has not been met with an effective response - in fact, even so-called "conservatives", who were supposed to have been on the side of European man, have proven - at best - craven, weak, flaccid, myopic, selfishly motivated, and far too willing to compromise, pull back, surrender, and apologise in order to avoid trouble.