Art courtesy of Machine Girl’s Bandcamp
My Apologia
This blog, music review thing, notebook, etc. was born partially from me growing tired of the stupid shit that people say online. There is no substance, no conversation to be had. Just shitty one-liners to accrue internet clout. This blog, to which I clearly owe much of my intellectual development to scholars and blogs such as Mark Fisher’s k-punk, is an attempt to force me to think things through, to engage with things critically, and I hope, to be a better writer.
Also whoever at Pitchfork wrote that review of MG Ultra please do something more useful with your life. Generating AI slop is better than whatever that review was.
Machine Girl’s 2024 album MG Ultra tells un-narratives with schizophrenic storytellers - Vignettes of the drug-induced mania (Sick!!!), the thought that everyone hates you (Psychic Attack), and nihiic views of human indulgence (Hot Lizard) invade the ener. Like previous MG work, it captures and reduces a feeling of jouissance into aural creations that attack your sense of self. This is an album about the loss of self, about ego death, about paranoia, about suffering, about drug abuse and the confusion of fiction and fact.
oh god oh fuck we’re gonna do death of the author
Jouissance, The Death Drive, and The Insatiable Lust for Violence in All of Us
The hectic and bass-driven sound on the track “Grindhouse” seems intentionally designed to get eners ready to violently fuck, and that is even before you listen to the lyrics.
Fuck a safe word
Give it to me extra rough
The very song evokes imagery of an old Grindhouse or exploitation films, ergo the name. The narrator assuming the role of a submissive in a hardcore BDSM relationship begins to become ever more depraved, beginning to beg for pain as their only source of pleasure. In the last verse:
Till you puke up blood
That’s the stuff we love
We can’t get enough
Watch me lick it up
Like a good little sub
In the grindhouse
Here the narrator has gone truly beyond the pleasure principle. It is no coincidence that in this psychoanalytic vignettes, that in going beyond the pleasure principle, we have engaged with flows and breaks in those flows (See Capitalisme et Schizoprenie). This is the story of a person who embodies the anti-Oedipus. This is not behavior that is easily explained by simple pleasure principle or oral fixation. This is a mind who is so engrossed Let us look to Tamsin E. Lorraine’s 2003 work on Schizoanalysis.
On the body without organs, desire is the only subject. It passes from one body to another, producing partial objects, creating breaks and flows, ‘following connections and appropriations that each time destroy the factitious unity of a possessive or proprietary ego’ (AO, 72).
Desire, clearly, is the only subject in this sequence of events that Machine Girl brings us. Desire has taken over this person’s mind completely, they are unable or unwilling to put a stop to such pleasure, even in the event of grievous bodily injury. The person qua person is a completely detached entity, a pure object, that only receives instruction and action upon itself. The interaction between the dominator and the dominator have become competing and co-operative desiring-machines. They have no personhood, no sense of ego or superego, only an id that has made one of its’ sparse appearances to the surface of a human psyche.
The person has been destroyed, and only desire remains.
The Unbearable Pain of Overwhelming Hatred
Schizodipshit, the penultimate track on the album, is an anthem of the bipolar. Between manic exaltations threatening violence, extolling the frivolity of humanity, and narcissistic outbursts, there are 4 lines where the vocals are pitched heavily down:
I’m so full of shit … I’m ready to kill … Don’t be afraid … No one fools me
Have you ever felt the overwhelming urge to kill someone?
Have you ever wanted to destroy as much as possible on your way to hell?
Have you ever wanted to be a terrorist?
Are you bored? Do you feel like you need to let loose? Are you dissatisfied?
Do you want those who control you to fall victim to the torture they put you through?
Do you feel these feelings so much they cause you pain?
Do your feelings cause you pain?
Do you want to die in pain?
Do you want to live in pain?
Then, as MG so eloquently states:
Open your mind
Don’t be afraid
…
Killer fanatic
…
First person shooter
…
All the chaos and confusion
…
Now I’m locked and loaded
But caught off guard
We see here that MG has become self-critical, they are caught off-guard by their actions. Their mind has cracked from their schizophrenic neuroses. They have a moment of reflection, a becoming-whole again. As MG states:
My head splits open
And now the thoughts are gone
The word “Schizophrenia” literally means “splitting of the mind.” In moments, one could be viewed an asymptomatic schizophrenic, and in the next, one could be “fall[ing] into a hole.” There is no exact moment of splitting, it is a gradual change between these two states that are driven by the pleasure drive and the death drive. When one becomes so entwined with the pleasure drive that the only way to feel pleasure is through pain, or when one thirsts for annihilation in such a way that this virulent nihilism subsumes them, the outcome is anti-social behaviors.
Tell me, if someone tortured you, put your life through hell, split your mind in twain, and made you fear for your sanity, your life, and family, wouldn’t you be glad to see them put down like sickly cattle on a farm? Does that make you insane? Does that drive you mad?
This war is a psycho
Where madness is priceless
Living in the Sludge Between Phenomena and Noumena
A common motif throughout MG’s discography is seeking to understand if capital-T Truth exists. Does a world exist beyond our perception? If we return to the common refrain from …Because I’m Young Arrogant and Hate Everything You Stand For, we see a phrase that embodies a common theme in MG’s music - “I exist in the sludge between fiction and fact.” In doing so, MG defines themselves as existing not really in the Real but also not really as a character. Here, we take a lesson from Baudrillard. MG exist in the hyperreal. Machine Girl is a signifier, a simulacra of the nihilism that pervades our culture.
MG generates a model of virulent nihilism, without origin or reality. They are characters that attempt (and in my opinion, succeed), at representing the condition of so-called “misfits” and showcase deepest desires, their depraved wants, their thirst for annihilation. MG represents a way to escape and to feel that annihilation, that lust, that bloodthirstiness. But at a safe distance.
We exist in between the real and the hyperreal. We create fictions for ourselves because the world is too much to bear. We consume these fictions like Machine Girl because if we didn’t we would fall into a hole, kill others, and then ourselves.