k-punk

A few people have written asking me when Capitalist Realism will be coming out: it will be published at the end of November, at the same time as the Michael Jackson book. But it won’t be available in many bookshops when it’s published (bookshops aren’t exactly lithe and agile beasts, to say the least). It will be available online, of course (I’ll link to the Amazon page as soon as it’s up).
On the Michael Jackson book: a testament to how good the book will be is the fact that, after editing the essays, far from being jaded by MJ, I’m far more interested in him than I was beforehand. It’s incredible how much strange and fascinating material was floating around, hidden in the songs – concealed partly because of Jackson’s mangling of diction. Ian’s and Reid’s writing about “Thriller”, to cite just only one example, has permanently transformed my experience of listening to the song… previously I’d heard it only as enjoyable enough kiddy fun(k), but Reid and Ian show that it is a kind of Lovecraftian-Zizekian incantation: Jackson thought that the horror references were an idle jape but “Thriller” ended up being a horribly accurate description of his subsumption into the “terror on the screen”, his consumption by the “jaws of the alien”, the Capital-Thing, from which there really was no escape….
demons closing in on every side… they’re out to get you…
You feel the cold hand and wonder if you’ll ever see the sun (As Ken Hollings reminds us in his excellent essay, Jackson once told a friend: “I can’t go out in the sun. My face would fall off.”)