H/T Rod Dreher
This is an excellent read.
TAC:
“The black and red, blood injected, upside-down pentagram sporting Satan shoes by Lil Nas X as well as his serpent-alien sex, Satan lap-dancing Montero video could only be released a week before Easter. This is business as usual. It has almost become part of Christian celebrations to expect a slew of these smears in the mainstream media before important Christian holidays. There is something boring and tedious about the whole affair, a nicely organised propaganda supply chain with just-in-time delivery.
Nonetheless, beyond my first reaction of dismissal, I found there is something people might want to understand in this Satanic imagery. It is not arbitrary at all, but like any system of meaning, it rather has a strange coherence. This coherence can give us a few clues as to why this imagery would be used to attract the type of attention someone like Lil Nas X desperately needs in order to stay relevant in a post-Christian, blasé, porn-infused, hungover culture. ...
The Montero video is a disturbing sight to behold. In a world inhabited only by versions of himself, Lil Nas X sings about his sexual encounters and obsession with a man who has the same name as him (Montero). “Call Me By Your Name” is the unofficial title of the song. The video is about one thing: Pride.
This self love is represented as an exploration of the strangeness and idiosyncrasies of oneself, self seduction, self-victimizing, self-abasement, self-gratification and ultimately self-crowning. In speaking to his self-named lover, Montero tells us that “I’m not fazed, only here to sin/If Eve ain’t in your garden, you know that you can”.
Pride as self-love appears ultimately as a sterile revolution against the natural patterns of the world, a desire for the world to be in our own image, and a desire to free ourselves from the usual constraints of natural patterns and cycles of being. He tells his self-named lover he wants to “Shoot a child in your mouth’”. This is of course the ultimate image of sterility, solipsistic dreaming, and imagination which is taken up in fantastical places but does not produce body, community, or cohesion, but only revolution, fragmentation, and loneliness. Montero tells us: “I want to **** the ones I envy, I envy“. We have entered the pattern of revolution, of attempting to come in and up from behind. …
Ending up in a caricature of Hell with a thorn covered door (nice touch. BTW), Montero lap dances Satan into simulated sodomy, to then himself come up behind the Evil One to break his neck and steal his horns and crown, replacing the Devil in a final revolution, the supremacy of the self. …
In a traditional world, the monsters, the demons, the gargoyles and especially the Satan or opponent, are on the outside or underground. They are below us. It is best to not even pronounce their names. But now, in the context of Liberty and Equality driving social forms, the figure of Satan begins to appear as a dark prophet of the modern world, a noble Promethean who tragically stood against authority and declared himself equal to that which was above him. …
Besides the strange movement from Baphomet to Montero, a good example to help people understand what is happening is that according to the Malleus Maleficarum, the purpose of witches was to prevent normal reproductive relations between men and women out of resentment. They accomplished this by seducing men away from their wives, by using disincarnated female demonic phantasms or “Succubae” so that men lose their seed, by making it so women have children from “Incubi” demonic males, through other men besides their husbands, by killing and harming children, aborting babies, and ultimately by removing the male member all together. …”
I don’t have much to add.
It is more of the same old modernism that has been around well over a century now. As a work of art, I also thought it was a rather boring and unoriginal contribution to the exhausted genre. It is hard to see how our culture can continue to progress and get more degenerate than this.
“We’re thrilled with the way this case has been resolved,” said DAVID BERNSTEIN, a lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP representing MSCHF. He added: “These shoes were never about making money.” The whole point was for the artistic message the collective hoped to convey which was “dramatically amplified” by the lawsuit.”….
MSCHF partners Gabe Whaley and creative VP BENJAMIN ROSEN
Even pagans in the past made lovely art and architecture. Taj Majal, greek temples, celtic jewelry, oriental people’s made many lovely artistic things. Native americans made some incredible stuff. All modernity could create was this foul fools sewage.