Emperor, no clothes, you can sort out the rest.

A con­tro­ver­sy? It seems almost a shame that AIDS Wolf would get such a cur­so­ry dis­missal con­sid­er­ing the rich, con­tentious dis­cus­sion that brought Jes­si­ca Hop­per and Drew Daniel into the mix. Maybe the sig­nif­i­cance of invok­ing AIDS as a half-baked noise con­cept was­n’t worth the atten­tion; con­sid­er that teach­ing ABC’s has­n’t made Amer­i­ca more lit­er­ate (via NPR).

Would they be less offen­sive with­out a pub­li­cist (tree, for­est, no one around)? To what extent does a band’s flippancy/absurdity/whathaveyou reflect the gen­er­al malaise/ignorance/handwringing char­i­ta­ble spirit/willful hatred of affect­ed populations?

To some extent, AIDS gets treat­ed today as though it were an ’80’s arti­fact — a cul­tur­al prob­lem and locus of shame and pity rather than a sci­en­tif­ic and med­ical one. This demon­strates the over­whelm­ing rhetor­i­cal suc­cess of the Rea­gan con­tin­u­um — a focus on fam­i­ly, per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty and the impor­tance of the indi­vid­ual over every­thing else. In many respects Rea­gan’s entered his twen­ty-sixth year in office, but this just isn’t semi­otics. It’s big phar­ma and insur­ance lick­ing their chops, com­mod­i­fy­ing ill­ness, bul­ly­ing the FDA, and cel­e­brat­ing dereg­u­la­tion in a grotesque orgy of suf­fer­ing. (Dan­te’s Divine Com­e­dy has been on my mind a lot late­ly. So has Boc­cac­cio, but that’s almost all the time.)

Where to begin? Sure­ly not with these jok­ers. They’re Cana­di­an! They have sin­gle-pay­er! That’s not very Dick­en­sian noise, right?

(Keep in mind that Greil Mar­cus point­ed out in Lip­stick Traces that Richard Huelsen­beck once told an audi­ence at Cabaret Voltaire that there was­n’t enough suf­fer­ing, and Ger­man WWI vets, dis­fig­ured by the fight­ing and mus­tard gas, were in atten­dance. Kin­da makes John­ny Rot­ten and Mal­colm McLaren seem a lit­tle pre-school by comparison.)

AIDS Wolf — “Vam­pire King”