Welcome to Dada Strain, 18th of January

Monthly Update and Self-Perspective: Dada Strain on Twitter and IG + purpose of new editorial commandments

First off, I want to thank you for subscribing to Dada Strain, and, potentially, for reading. (You could have signed up for any music content in the world, but you’re here with me, and I appreciate it.)  

This is the second of the monthly communiques updating subscribers on what is going with Dada Strain beyond the newsletter—which aspires, after all, to be a continuously developing project. It’s also my periodic attempt to simultaneously explain and understand what Dada Strain is by speaking it into being; because while I am pretty clear about what its values are (multi-disciplinary but grounded in music, ancient to the future, rhythm and improvisation, in community), exactly how to turn these ideas into a clear and cohesive explanation of the work you encounter here, remains beyond me. But it’s a straightforward purpose that I still hope to capture.

Let’s begin with two related logistical announcements:  Dada Strain has launched a Twitter for more immediate communications; for broader promotion of pieces subscribers receive in their/your in-boxes; for music, media and article shares; and, generally, for the kind of banter you’ve come to expect and love on that useful-hellscape platform. (Seriously, I continue to love Twitter, especially now that the Orange menace and a large swath of his idiocracy army has been banned; though admittedly, it's because I focus on the platform’s occasional oasis rather than the vastness of its desert.) Dada Strain has also launched an Instagram to serve as a visual component of its mission. The primary focus will be on the interdisciplinary music/visual-art crossover, spotlighting the artistic and/or thematic connections between this work and community organization—though as with everything else Dada Strain, I’m also contemplating its other potentials. (No star-fucking/humble-brag selfies, or crass attempts at influencer-ing.) There are plans for other Dada Strain social-media outposts, but only as their functionalities align with whatever TF it is I am trying to put out into the world. (Though I can assure you that there will never be a Facebook page.) Stay tuned, please subscribe/follow and tell a friend who may be interested—word of mouth is my only current marketing.

Central to Dada Strain’s existence is the idea that it explicitly fulfills a real-world need—besides my own desire to stay up late, putting words to paper (…and, soon enough, helping other people’s written voices reach the world). The current moment doesn’t need more reviewing and reacting, burdening already overwhelmed content consumers with additional decontextualized “taste” or “opinion.” It requires proactive building, the structures of feeling (and even more so, a network of such structures), which if not offering something different, at least create a space where that something different can take shape.

What do I mean by that? Earlier this week I wrote a long piece outlining numerous failings of ethics and responsibilities in how current music-journalism writers and editors at both mainstream and subcultural outlets, approach their work. It’s easy to understand why some would regard details and examples I pointed out not as mis-steps but as the natural progress of doing business, or dismissing my plaints as subjective reactions to reasoned choices, or how projecting outsider values onto insular communities is in itself a colonizing practice.

But the “business” of critical observation in an era where cultural media has been deeply corporatized, and where taste has been subsumed by synergies (or potential synergies) of capital, is already admitting to biases which have little to do with creative or social aspects of the art in question. The critique of subjective criticism is always a straw-man at the ready, but carries even less weight when the art being critiqued is not picked through a set of clear editorial parameters but through another subjective lens. And the argument of independent values in silo’d, self-policing micro-communities (which may actually be rather large and rather adverse to self-policing) is taking a pretty f*cking heavy beating post-“the 6th.” So...

These music sections are strongly defined by both their submissions and omissions. They obstruct emergent independent cultures in favor of a market-preordained popular direction; continuing to work under rules of value engagement that are outdated and libertarian, latently presenting society’s toxicity under the headlines of “change.” When the critical work is not actively dictating a familiar narrative, it is passively choosing not to present a counter-narrative, usually for the sake of simplicity or in the name of the audience. And, in the most ridiculous Ourorborosian instances, they cheerlead cutting edges which soon enough reveal themselves as predatorial and hyper-capitalist, incapable of surviving critical scrutiny. The roots of these cutting edges are almost always a combination of corporate push, social technology buzz, and contemporary representations of society’s once-and-future-dominant points of view—and little that’s happened in 2020 seems to have affected it. 

By contrast, “2020 vision” is central to Dada Strain’s entire proposition, requiring the recognition of a new Year Zero whose lessons are clear and instantly applicable. There’s a need for dismantling prefabricated linear versions of history falsely believed to have been settled, and the contents of the related, previously assembled archives—maybe even rethinking the whole notion of the all-proving archive—in favor of something more fractal and liminal yet factually sturdier. Not running away from stories that seem muddled by numerous moving parts, engaging a variety of characters, storytellers and creative directions, encouraging their oddity. (This is what the extra space of the Internet was supposed to have enabled.) Despite the year of health code-imposed social distancing, or maybe because of it, instituting a healthy distrust of self-made individualism, in favor of communal creative efforts—or of creative efforts that invoke communal needs and parts—also feels an important step. As does a healthy distrust of ideas that start at the universal/Internet level rather than locally—side-eyeing anything where the terms “disrupt” or “genre” play an influential role. Most crucially, we must not insist on separating the roles of storyteller from that of story instigator, the journalists from the activists from the creators.

The purpose is not simply to reject the precedents that govern the rituals and practices of storytelling. The moment requires something more supple and sensitive, a reconsideration rather than wholesale refusal, a new set of rules to inspire more spaces for new chronicles—ones whose governance is not defined by social media’s terms of service. This strain must be manufactured outside of the lab of Likes and Followers. Which is an ironic way to end a note in which I am also asking you to follow me on IG.

Previous ‘Welcome To Dada Strain’ thought-balloons: December 15th, 2020

(Dada Strain logo by @Interstatial. Art by Aya Rodriguez-Izumi)