Metanarratives of the Rich and Famous: Good Charlotte and the Spectacle of Violence

If you were a teenager in the early aughts, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” was a breath of fresh air. Surrounded by boy bands and divas, Good Charlotte was an alternative to the doldrums of celebrity culture and a rallying cry against the superficial and materialistic. For some, it might have even been your first brush with class consciousness, introducing a new generation to criticism of an out-of-touch aristocracy.

Here, I want to look at Good Charlotte, their influence on American pop culture, Benji and Joel Madden’s class interests, and their career arc. What’s most interesting to me is how this music appeared to offer a revolutionary alternative cultural movement during the 2000s while, at the same time, relying on those artistic movements to spread a capitalist message.

The first idea I would like to tackle is celebrity culture and its relationship to the spectacle, as theorized by French theorist Guy Debord in his seminal text The Society of the Spectacle from 1967. This was a seminal text to the Situationist International, which influenced leftist movements in the 1970s, including the anarcho-punk movement that spawned The Sex Pistols. In his theory, class and class consciousness are more detached from politics because of images' widespread production and proliferation.

Media stars are spectacular representations of living human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles. Stardom is a diversification in the semblance of life — the object of an identification with mere appearance which is intended to compensate for the crumbling of directly experienced diversification of productive activity. Celebrities figure various styles of life and various views of society which anyone is supposedly free to embrace and pursue in a global manner. Themselves incarnations of the inaccessible results of social labor, they mimic by-products of labor and project these above labor so that they appear as its goal.

Debord correctly pointed to the global manner that a celebrity project resides. Celebrities are more than local products; they are international projects of capitalist exploitation. In themselves, they become ecosystems of production, as an entire industry of force is built upon the spectacle of their labor. In this case, the “spectacle of their labor” is facilitated through the media that Good Charlotte wrote about — Rolling Stone magazine and MTV. Through the production of images, celebrity is manufactured and reproduced.

Ironically, the primary way “Lifestyles” was promoted was through the spectacle they criticized. In this case, through the music video. The video was a throwback to Anti-Art and Dada movements pioneered in the early 1900s but was heavily used by the punk movement in the 1970s. However, there’s a difference with this video. This has the new glossy production, which hauntologically glitches to reproduce the anarcho-punk aesthetic that had since been lost: newspaper clippings flash, money is cut and burned on screen, and several Anarchist “As” flash as agitprop.

This play on lost anarcho-punk futures extended to the video's general aesthetic and fashion choices. First, Joel and Benji Madden are dressed in formal tuxedos, then in prison jumpsuits, and, finally, in signature Hot Topic-approved punk tee shirts. This three-fold change tells a story: First, the band indulges in its anarchic and decadent life of crime, then as the fallen and misunderstood anti-heroes, and last, as the authentic everyman.

At the end of the video, the band is declared innocent. ‘Declare your independence’ and ‘right is right’ flash across the screen. The band is emancipated, and they are seen back in their tuxedos talking to the press outside the courthouse. This emancipation is the ultimate payoff of not giving in to the rich and famous, and the band revels in the attention of the press. The overall message is to be as authentic as yourself, and you will be set free.

But what is the band emancipated from? This is a question that we will return to time and again. Within the logic of the video, the band’s authenticity justified the band’s violent actions, and conversely, it’s their authenticity that set them free. In a reductive way, the band remained true to themselves and punk music, and their working-class authenticity triumphed over the falseness of the rich. This, broadly, was the message of the anarcho-punk movement of the 70s and why it appeared as a leftist message in 2002.

In this video, reality warps. The relationship between the bourgeois and proletariat is blurred, and the rich and poor are reduced to caricatures and representations. There’s no difference between aristocracy and celebrity. Consequentially, as Debord points out, anyone can become a celebrity. This is different than, say, in feudal times when birthright and social status were essential aspects of identity. However, the equation of aristocracy and celebrity also implies that anyone can become an aristocrat.

This is a brilliant yet insidious aspect of late capitalism: the democratization of class status (everyone can become an aristocrat regardless of birth) implies a breakdown of class relations and a lost class consciousness. The song does not say there is a material difference between the rich and poor but presupposes the universe cannot imagine a difference between rich and poor. Therefore, the song can only operate at the level of the spectacle. It can only exist in a world of surreal fantasy. It can only narrate a world of pure desire.

Reinforcing the play on celebrity-as-aristocracy, N’Sync singer Chris Kirkpatrick and Minutemen bassist Mike Watt are featured in the video. These two are fitting representations of the two types of people that Good Charlotte want to appeal to — the fans of pop music and boy band fame and the California punk rock purity. The court scene is wholly detached from reality, but that is the point. When the world is a spectacle, people are presented as an image, a caricature, an outline, and nothing more.

Musically, the song borrows heavily from Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life,” which adds to the ‘authentic’ punk feeling. Lyrically, the world of spectacle is ever-present. From the first line: “Always see it on T.V.,” the world of producing images as commodities is inescapable. The T.V. supersedes time and space — it is not in the present nor the past; it is ‘always.’ Similarly, they “read it in the magazine.” The obsession with images, mediated by text or video, suggests that Good Charlotte is trapped within the spectacle.

The chorus is most pronounced: “If money is such a problem / Well, they got mansions, think we should rob them.” This presents a violent spectacle — the image of violence without violence. According to Debord, this comes from a political alienation caused by class conflict and commodification. This alienation results in a false life, a non-life, an artificial separation of the self from the self. Alienation, as Marx shows, is instrumental to the maintenance of capitalist exploitation, and the spectacle is instrumental in caring for the resulting violence.

That brings us to the question: what is produced by the spectacle, by images? Debord answers that the production of images only makes more images. He says that “the spectacle is capitalism accumulated to the point where it becomes an image.” The ‘image’ here is the video itself, but also the image of anarchy as mediated through corporate interests. This way, Good Charolette “sold out” for corporations and could get away with suggesting an anarchist insurrection. This spectacular violence worked within those corporate interests and was commodified as the production of the Real.

And this is where we come to one possible limitation of an analysis of the spectacle. The society of the spectacle has celebrities because they are part of a global fabric of bourgeois image-production, but where does the Real end and spectacle begin? Now, becoming a celebrity is both more and less attainable with the advent of the internet, but the same divides exist as they have since the beginning of industrial capitalism. In other words, does Good Charlotte represent a shift away from the spectacle of working-class solidarity, and towards global and totalitarian neoliberalism? For insight into that, we need to look at the way that satire and ironic distance works as a way to promote and permit reactionary politics to enter into leftist politics.

What is really disturbing … is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarian force of laughter, of ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of this… in contemporary societies, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are, so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Perhaps the greatest danger for totalitarianism is people who take its ideology literally…

In “Lifestyles,” the ironic distance is permissive of a type of corporate totalitarianism. The laughter is directed at the superficial privileges of being a celebrity — having mansions, owning cars, and getting away with murder. It doesn’t direct its anger at the exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie or the lack of ownership of the means of production by the working class. Instead, it treats both classes as consumers in a marketplace, and anger is not the result of class conflict but envy. Envious of ownership, envious of status, envious of privilege.

This kind of envy-generated irony permits a corporate ideology to flourish under such scrutiny within the world of the spectacle. In other words, as long as there is envy rather than class conflict, corporations can maintain control over the means of production. The bourgeoisie owns corporations and the means of production that create the spectacle. Shareholders, owners, and corporate boards oversee this production process, and here, there’s an embrace of irony and distance as a means to profit. That ideology is superficially identified as anarchism and punk music but represents the exact opposite, what I have called Corporate Anarchism.

As shown in my article on Avril Lavigne, corporate interests align with the superficial anti-capitalist symbolism after 9/11. These anarchic desires for freedom from patriarchy, media apparatuses, and celebrity status were not met with an alternative formulation of the human spirit and a drive toward new economic structures. Still, instead, it reinforced patriarchal structures, shored up profit for media apparatuses, and profited off working and middle-class desires to be admitted into the world of celebrity culture.

“Lifestyles” doesn’t present a world without the rich or the famous. On the contrary, it argues that the wrong people have become rich and famous and that the aspiring white working and middle classes are robbed of fame. Ultimately, Good Charlotte was beholden to Capitalist Realism, where challenges to capitalism were reduced to new, productive forces. Just as “there is no alternative” was a powerful but empty slogan for The End of History, songs like “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” (and “The Anthem”) were empty truths for the post-9/11 world. Good Charlotte encapsulates the frustrated psyche of middle-class white male suburbia far more than bands like Blink-182 or Green Day because they offer the spectacle of violence without engagement with the reality of violence.

Embedded within the lyrics is a deep reactionary turn that moralizes celebrities as a symptom of racial integration and unfair distribution of power to the undeserving underclass. While the video portrays celebrities as WASPy aristocrats, the lyrics only refer to black celebrities. In the bridge, Madden references O.J. Simpson, Simpson’s black lawyer, Johnny Cochran, and D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, who, despite being caught smoking crack in 1990, was re-elected as the Mayor in 1994 after six months in jail. The argument is not that celebrity itself is terrible, it is that an underclass of undeserving wealthy black people should not be celebrities.

This gets us back to the concept of envy. The insidious part of this song is that the satire and ironic distance masks the envy of the white working-class protagonist. Throughout the music, the envy is reflected in the speaker’s rhetorical gesture towards the celebrity: “I’d like to see them spend a week / Living life out on the street / I don’t think they would survive.” It is as though to say, “these (black) people don’t know what it’s like to live,” and that “their life is not living.” The underlying envy is projected outward and reflected by the protagonist, who thinks they are more authentic to themselves and, therefore, more deserving of celebrity and fame.

The reactionary element to this analysis of “Lifestyles” is that envy bespeaks a larger Christian metanarrative delineating who deserves salvation through celebrity. The integration of black individuals into positions of power was framed as a symptom of a world that has turned away from God. The metanarrative of Christian salvation and emancipation is deep within Corporate Anarchism. In the years since 2002, Good Charlottes’ career has also taken a turn towards Christianity. To get to that point, it is crucial to understand why that is, where it was that this metanarrative injected into their music to make sense of their contradictions.

ii. i just wanna meta

Following “Lifestyles,” Good Charlotte faced the appearance of contradiction: their success had made them one of the celebrities they envied and mocked. I say appearance because “Lifestyles” wasn’t a song about class-conscious egalitarianism but rather individualistic vigilantism. And in that sense, they got what they wanted and remained consistent. However, within the realm of the spectacle, they appeared as hypocrites. After gaining their fortune and status, Joel Madden began secretly dating then-16-year-old teen idol Hilary Duff. This was the subject of tabloid speculation until Duff’s mother confirmed the relationship in Seventeen magazine. The couple eventually filed a restraining order against a stalker who broke into their Hollywood mansion. These conditions would set up their next album, Chronicles of Life and Death.

Chronicles of Life and Death (2004) was their melodramatic follow-up to their successful The Young and Hopeless. As the name implies, the album offers stories of their personal lives, which are “as fictional as they may seem.” Contrary to their previous efforts, this album drew upon autobiography more than mockery. In Debord’s terms, where they once commented on the spectacle, they found their own lives had become a spectacle. This move towards sincerity instead of irony was not successful. The album was derided by critics and couldn’t match the success of its predecessor. However, this failure was precipitated by a rediscovery of their Christian metanarrative.

What makes up this Christian metanarrative? Instead of commenting on the celebrity culture, they place themselves within a larger story of emancipation. Their most successful song off the album, “I Just Want to Live” is a perfect example of this motif. The song responds directly to events in their life (“I need an alarm system in my house / So I know when people are creeping about”) and leads the listener through a world of paranoia and confusion. This time, they’re not out to get the celebrities. This time, the whole world is out to get them. The roles are reversed, and it’s as equally as traumatic.

There’s no better way to track this than to notice how the band treats Rolling Stone magazine. In “Lifestyles,” the magazine was a forum for celebrities to bitch and moan and put on display their superficial desires and grievances. In “I Just Want to Live,” the magazine takes on an existential quality. It’s now the arbiter of the band’s authenticity:

Talking on the phone got an interview
With the Rolling Stone they’re saying
“Now you’re rich and now you’re famous fake ass girls all know your name
And Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous your first hit aren’t you ashamed”
Of the life, of the life, of the life we’re living

Here, Madden is making a meta-commentary on the band, mediating the band's image to respond to criticism — that the band is not authentic, that it’s hypocritical, that it lacks something Real — and that ultimately Madden should be shamed for it. Much like his actions constituted an indulgence in desire as an existential reality, his response is one to cry out for life: “I just want to live.” The “state of living” has been under attack, but by what? Media attention, spectacle, fandom: by their fame.

This retreat into meta-commentary was commonplace in the years after 9/11. It was a way for social systems to deal with trauma, to deal with worldwide terror, and to deal with times of war. These wars, however, aren’t present for Good Charlotte. Their war is with the spectacle, media misrepresentation, the spoils of fame, the loss of innocence, and punk rock optimism. This disconnect between larger social traumas and individual conflict plays out in the music video as a fantasy, as a reimagining of themselves as a new band, a fantasy band, “The Food Group.”

Good Charlotte, therefore, must separate itself from itself to maintain authenticity. They must become “The Food Group” to show how they’re still true to themselves — by becoming someone else. If this sounds like a contradiction, it’s because it is. “The Food Group” is another attempt at satire with a cheeky name but an insidious undertone. It is as if to say two things: “If you can’t make it as yourself, become someone else” and “If you can’t defeat those that consume, become that which is consumed.” While this contradiction is a function of capitalism, the alienation from identity is necessary for the band to remain consistent in the spectacle.

This move towards the meta-commentary and a precarious identity are features of a postmodern era. While this term has a charged and often disputed meaning, I want to turn to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979). In this text, Lyotard posits that the postmodern is defined by an “incredulity toward metanarratives.” He shows how modernism’s reliance on the scientific method promotes local narratives and obscures larger trends. This is mostly due to based on metrics and scientific legitimacy. This technocratic belief de-legitimizes the need for metanarrative:

In contemporary society and culture — postindustrial society, postmodern culture — the question of the legitimation of knowledge is formulated in different terms. The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation.

How should we read “I Just Wanna Live?” Is it this de-legitimized knowledge that brings about an existential terror? That seems true when it comes to the treatment of the media — as both the legitimizer of their own fame but, in legitimizing their fame, the media then can arbitrate the band’s existence. This form of extrajudicial arbitration forms the psyche of Madden’s distress: he grows paranoid, he retreats inside himself, he grows defensive: he wants to live. The existential terror is, on one hand, de-legitimate — there is no real threat to the band’s existence, livelihood, or class interest interests, and, on the other hand, the most legitimate fear — fame has forced precarity and surveillance into their lives and threatened their individual security.

This points to two hallmarks of the postmodern condition: living in precarity and living under constant surveillance. Repeatedly, Lyotard points to the way that technology and the scientific method are promoted as universality and as a means to profit. Under these conditions, narratives are told to tell half-truths in service to the larger truth: the authority of capitalism, the authority of power, and the democratic terror inflicted on all classes. This truth — removed of its metanarrative legitimization — has reduced “living” to performance and scientific speculation:

The production of proof, which is in principle only part of an argumentation process designed to win agreement from the addressees of scientific messages thus falls under the control of another language game, in which the goal is no longer truth, but performativity — that is, the best possible input/output narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goal: in the discourse of today’s financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power.

Truth, according to Lyotard, is reduced to its performative legitimation. This has made it so that an individual can not live authentically. Like Madden’s desire to “wanna live,” living is a performance, a performance for the cameras, a performance for Rolling Stone, and a performance for the band’s fans. This absence of authenticity is the result of postmodern conditioning that necessarily negates the metanarrative. When our subjective experiences are localized, the metanarrative becomes obscured, lost, and forgotten.

Does Madden have an antidote to this precarity, surveillance, and alienation? Yes. Faith, Christian morality, and radical individualism. It doesn’t take much to figure this out if you’ve listened to any Good Charlotte song other than the hits. Evidence of their underlying Christian message can be found on The Chronicles of Life and Death in the song “We Believe” where a utopian vision of faith and believing in truth overcomes the pain and suffering of the world. An accompanying video hones in on these themes as the band appears as preachers for an emo audience. Later, you can find it on their 2019 album Rx Generation, Madden returns to this theme with the song “Prayer” where communication with God overcomes the pain and suffering of addiction.

“We Believe” and “Prayer” offers salvation as the only antidote to the symptoms of the postmodern condition. This metanarrative is one of emancipation: we are only free — and freedom is attached to authenticity, both to the world, to yourself, but, here now we can see, to God. This may, at first seem contradictory, as this type of metanarrative is the type that the postmodern condition necessarily evades and delegitimizes, but this is a misreading of the conditional nature of Lyotard’s formulation of the postmodern. It is as if Madden is saying that this punk authenticity is lost, and the only way to return to it is through a belief in God.

Here we have the negation of negation: (1) punk and anarchism as delegitimation of power to create a new world; (2) the postmodern condition as a delegitimation of knowledge to create a new world; (3) punk and anarchism as an emancipatory metanarrative to create a new world. With this formulation, the new counter-culture becomes the old dogmas — conserving the patriarchy, preserving capitalism, and segregating genders become the new anti-authority. Most of all, the Christian value system and the signifiers that upheld the metanarratives of forgiveness and redemption, maligned by most punk movements, become the new punk; the Anti-Anti-Punk.

Notice with the negation we move from power-structure — to knowledge — to emancipation. This is the great and terrifying realization of the French post-structuralist school, particularly Foucault, who — taking cues from Nietzsche — observed that knowledge and morality were genealogically passed down from generation to generation and were inherited from various institutions — schools, hospitals, etc. With the absence of God, or, at least, the distilling of religious values systems reinforced by law, the state apparatuses turned to new technologies to keep populations under surveillance. This led to the creation of the surveillance state, and the new truth — the new metanarrative — a scientifically monitored negation of the future, a negation of the emancipatory and speculative metanarratives.

However, this resistance to metanarrative reveals the utilitarian nature of discourses to accumulate capital. That is, without the possibility of revolution and freedom, the fluidity of capital territorialized narratives to promote a larger metanarrative of preservation. Preservation of tradition. Preservation of individualism at the expense of the collective. Preservation of inequalities that plague capitalist nation-states. This territorialization of emancipatory metanarratives promises not the freedom for the many (who are sinful), but the preservation of the freedoms for the few (who are faithful).

For Good Charlotte, this metanarrative of Christian salvation would expand throughout their career and would become fixtures of the Madden brothers’ career. Their lives, their music, and their philanthropic endeavors would all be filtered through the spectacle held up by global capitalism. Their Corporate Anarchism, once it reached a sustainable level of concentrated wealth, turned into a Christian metanarrative, and whose interests once again aligned with global capitalism under the guise of globetrotting humanism. In the next section, we’ll look at the ways that the Madden brothers have mixed their public and personal life, and what kind of world they’ve imagined now that their music has lost pop relevance.

iii. polite punks and global clichés

“You know, it’s funny,” says Joel [Madden], eating a slice of thin-crust pepperoni. “You’re probably the first person who hasn’t focused on why we are or are not punk this whole interview. It’s very cliché for rock & roll journalists to go, ‘Well, you’re not punk.’ We don’t care if we are, we don’t care if we aren’t.”

In the 2003 Rolling Stone article “The Polite Punks,” the band is found returning to their former high school in Waldorf, Maryland at the height of their popularity. The article is interesting because it specifically doesn’t try to litigate or gate-keep whether or not Good Charlotte is punk, or whether they’re poseurs, and focuses on the Madden brother’s upbringing with their abusive father, their affinity for their devoutly Christian mother, and how their poor and working-class roots affected their music.

Between depictions of the brothers as “polite punks,” the Maddens are portrayed as sober businessmen with tattoos and demons. Benji, the guitarist, is described as a recovering drug addict who “sometimes sounds like a guidance counselor preaching to wayward teenagers,” and Joel, the singer, is described as a chatty, sensitive, and impulsive frontman. The two say that they are trying to do the opposite of “piss and moan inside the Rolling Stones.” This goal is mostly accomplished, but there are slips in the facade, and it’s almost as if these are the glimpses into their authentic selves.

The most striking example is how the band depicts themselves as being democratic and rooting for the little man. Early in the article, disparaging remarks are made about a band at Warped Tour and one of the members gives a lecture on why the band should be humble when it comes to new bands, and respect what they’re doing. However, the humbleness has a limit, and by the end of the article, Joel is shown as performing an indulgence and, immediately, Benji offers a penance:

Joel heads for a watch shop, where he does something rare for a member of Good Charlotte: He spends money on himself, buying a $500 Fendi watch. As if ashamed by Joel’s sudden splurge, Benji makes a peace offering to the God of Good Manners, buying a $100 watch for his mom.

Fast forward to 2021, and the brothers have married into Hollywood stardom. Joel married Nicole Ritchie, who got her fame from The Simple Life — which institutionalized the influencer as a fixture of the late-capitalist spectacle — and Benji married Cameron Diaz. They are both judges in “The Voice Australia,” and have a residence in both Australia and Los Angeles where they split their time. In 2015, the brothers started their own record company, MDDN, which manages and produces a mixture of young and old alternative artists. Joel is worth $25 million and Benji is worth $20 million.

Once married, the Madden brothers attached themselves to all that stardom could afford. Like many celebrities, entrepreneurial success was followed by the deep rot of global capitalism. Their marriages have led to globetrotting, pet causes, and initiatives that have been marketed as humanitarianism projects. In 2007, Joel and Ritchie became UNICEF Goodwill ambassadors and started their own joint fund: The Richie Madden Children’s Foundation, which has raised money for playgrounds, and provided grants for educational and literacy programs for impoverished children overseas.

Additionally, Joel contributed vocals to “We Are the World 25 for Haiti” in 2010 after the devastating earthquake which killed thousands. These initiatives and global project are what Mark Fisher identified in Capitalist Realism (2008) as a late-capitalist alternative to an ethical world: a world without hunger, a world without ecological disaster, a world without AIDs, a world without addiction, etc., but still, deeply embedded in this ideology is a world where capitalism remains:

It is necessary to act straight away, we were told; politics has to be suspended in the name of ethical immediacy. Bono’s Product Red brand wanted to dispense even with the philanthropic intermediary. ‘Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands’, Bono proclaimed. ‘Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce’. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism — on the contrary, Product Red’s ‘punk rock’ or ‘hip hop’ character consisted in its ‘realistic’ acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.

Fisher’s analysis of Bono’s Product Red can be applied to Maddens’ philanthropic endeavors. The point of their initiatives is not to end the struggles that they purport to care about but to redistribute enough wealth to maintain capitalism, and, therefore, maintain the inequalities endemic to capitalism. There is no alternative to the model of inequality and extraction, so the only antidote to global suffering is global humanism.

It’s not like these initiatives in-and-of-themselves are negative, it is that the goals are larger within the matrix of capitalist extraction, and profit models cover for the continuation of the extraction. It is as if to say “Capitalism will solve the problems that capitalism caused,” and that politics itself is impotent to change the structural inequalities on its own without posing a danger to the benefactors of the extraction.

Through this lens, Good Charlotte’s last album. Generation Rx (2018), is another example of the Madden brothers’ neverending activism. The album presents the problem of addiction, mental health, and “Actual Pain,” as symptoms of a world that has fallen. “Self-Help” and “Prayers” offer their antidote to these problems: belief in a higher power. In this, they showcase emancipation from conditions of the modern world. This activism does not offer an alternative to the economic suffering wrought on a global scale, only faith in a global capitalistic solution to individual problems.

Corporate Anarchism is built on the maintenance of inequalities of capitalism while presenting the spectacle of violence. The rhetorical anti-capitalism does not offer a solution to the inequalities, nor does it really offer an alternative to the celebrity culture that is rooted in capitalistic inequalities. Instead, it offers an outlet for grievances that are presented as a symptom of some human fallibility. It sets up a metanarrative of forgiveness, repentance, of recovery.

This cultural phenomenon isn’t just a way to present capitalistic music in an anti-capitalist way or a way to pacify discontent with an alt-capitalism. It is one of the many ways corporations deterritorialized activist politics and rebranded it as the only primary function of resource extraction. Corporate Anarchism paved the way for Woke Capitalism, and now, it’s exactly in those cultural divides that signify politics where corporations mine information, activist activity, and points of conflict as prime profit extraction points.

While the conditions of postmodernism turn away from metanarratives of emancipation and speculative futurism, conflict within capitalist societies will continue to rise, and the revolutionary need for an alternative — a Real alternative to capitalism will emerge as the various capitalist classes fight over their profit margins and investment shares as they’re shipped overseas. Only then can we emancipate celebrities from their problems. Only then can we harness the power of the proletariat against the rich and famous. Only then.