The Rise Of Pop Culture's Woke Satanism, How Not To Take Their Bait, And The Joys of Being Old and Old Fashioned

We Who Warned About Satanism In Pop Culture Can Now Rest Our Case

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”

― Albert Camus,

The Stranger

I spent many hours yesterday, in preparation to begin writing about the perpetual horror again, watching video clips from the Grammys, as well as videos from some of the main artists, such as Ben Smith and Beyonce. I didn’t want to state the obvious: “They’re openly Satanic.”

I want to avoid writing in ways that could demoralize or even crush our spirits, without adding anything of substance to what everybody sentient is already observing.

Watching said videos induced deep anxiety, yet I persisted, until I passed out around 2 am, still wondering what my observations really were.

I was an editor and writer at SPIN between 1987 and 1997, and although I was in charge of the part of the magazine we called “non-music” and was effectively banned, or at least discouraged, from writing about music, (since this was considered a kind of privilege one had to be ordained for,) I still had to “deal with” the Grammys each year.

I mostly suffered in silence for how I felt watching it—back then. I would watch a little of it and then anxiety would overtake me.

The rise of the hyper-sexualized porn-ish female singer was well underway. I was surrounded by the well entrenched belief that edgy pop culture was good, and objections were “far-right” “Christian fundamentalist” and de-facto bad. This was years before I understood that basically, I am a stodgy, square, “fundamentalist” Christian at heart, but my day job was at a rock and roll magazine, where my main duties were to interview scientists who did not accept that “HIV” was the “cause of AIDS.” It’s all pretty unlikely, but that’s where I found myself.

I always felt dull, un-hip, and faintly ashamed.

Having grown up in a socialist country, (Sweden) rock and roll was important, but I expected it to serve as a medium of resistance to un-freedom; In America, it was something else. It was imposed from the top down, not, as we had it, from the street, from our self-declared fiefdom of an occupied old shoe factory converted to a rock club, which we ran ourselves, as teenagers. Our “establishment” were Social Democrats, in velour shirts, and Trotsky glasses, who wanted us to love the State and obey it. Incredibly, we sent them packing, informed them we ran the place, and would never adhere to their cultural impositions, such as banning our anarchist book club, or whatever. We somehow made our own albums (vinyl albums, with barely audible punk music) and my first boyfriend managed to build his own electric guitar in the wood shop. We were, in that town, proles—working class kids from broken families, with just enough money to make our hair orange or blue, and mess up our clothes, bought on government bi-annual stipends. We had joy, we had fun.

When crossing through the central square, we had to run for our lives past the bikers, who would happily beat, at least the boys, if they caught one.

Years after we all dispersed to large cities, New York, Paris, London—the place burned to the ground in a mysterious fire, and eventually became (literally) a parking lot. And now none of those people will talk to me except the bass player in my first band, because they have all become, inexplicably, obedient globalists, and I’m rumored to have become “right wing.”

In America, I arrived as a cultural zero, a rock culture ignoramus, at a major rock magazine, where I kept my head down and ran into all kinds of trouble. I missed my friends.

I was increasingly unsure what we were even doing, or what a pop culture magazine was, never mind how I wound up there.

The “values” were diffuse, but I remember wondering why, in America, rock people seemed so middle and upper middle class, and so left.

My whole context was gone. Where I grew up, we opposed socialism and the Social Democrats—the technocratic Swedish welfare state. In America, rock was performative, lucrative, and alien.

SPIN was supposed to be the punch in the eye to Rolling Stone. Madonna was on the first cover. I took shelter in being torn apart by AIDS activists for objecting to Big Scary Virus theory #1. I craved, but never got, acceptance—the kind I had back home.

Editorial meetings: I tried to understand American counter-culture and its idols.

I internalized most of my observations, knowing they were “wrong.” But today I see that I was not so wrong after all.

Since I was trained during those years to always think about pop culture and music, (even though I was rarely permitted to actually write about it,) I find myself still doing this.

And wondering how you all would react to me writing about something so trivial.

Recently, I pondered, for example, Miley Cyrus and her new song and video: “Flowers.” I watched it a few times and discovered on the one had that she is much more “talented” than I realized- a great singer, dancer, and choreographer, yet there was that unmistakeable presence of death over the whole thing.

It made me sad. But I liked the Yves Saint Laurent golden gown.

The line that floated up into my mind when I intended to write about Miley Cyrus, and wondered how you all would take that, was this:

“What has become of the love song?”

Here’s the video:

Within the love song genre, there is the thwarted love song tradition, in which the singer expresses hurt, rejection and possibly fake pride. Who-needs-you? Type of thing.

By 2023, Miley Cyrus has turned the Love Song inside out, while signaling expertly for the Beast System some of its new obsessions, chiefly self-worship, (and even self-marriage.) All chugging nicely along in the pre-ordained direction of automaton-ism, individualism, separation-ism, and narcissism.

The song is number one all over the world, but it’s a sad song!

The lyrics:

”We were good, we were gold
Kinda dream that can't be sold
We were right 'til we weren't
Built a home and watched it burn

“Mm, I didn't wanna leave you
I didn't wanna lie
Started to cry but then remembered I

“I can buy myself flowers
Write my name in the sand
Talk to myself for hours
Say things you don't understand
I can take myself dancing
And I can hold my own hand
Yeah, I can love me better than you can

“Can love me better
I can love me better, baby
Can love me better
I can love me better, baby

“Paint my nails, cherry red
Match the roses that you left
No remorse, no regret
I forgive every word you said

“Ooh, I did not wanna leave you, baby
I didn't wanna fight
Started to cry but then remembered I

“I can buy myself flowers
Write my name in the sand
Talk to myself for hours, yeah
Say things you don't understand
I can take myself dancing, yeah
I can hold my own hand
Yeah, I can love me better than you can.”

Let’s go, shamelessly, to Aristotle’s Poetics for a minute; My education was in Classics, so maybe this is why I’m like a stubborn mule who refuses to cross the bridge to modernity.

“Rules for the construction of a tragedy: Tragic pleasure, or catharsis experienced by fear and pity should be produced in the spectator. The characters must be four things: good, appropriate, realistic, and consistent. Discovery must occur within the plot. Narratives, stories, structures and poetics overlap. It is important for the poet to visualize all of the scenes when creating the plot. The poet should incorporate complication and dénouement within the story, as well as combine all of the elements of tragedy. The poet must express thought through the characters' words and actions, while paying close attention to diction and how a character's spoken words express a specific idea. Aristotle believed that all of these different elements had to be present in order for the poetry to be well-done.”

—Wikipedia

Call me crazy but what bothered me about Miley’s hit song, said to be about her former husband, was that it did not make sense. It was disordered. I kept thinking about it, and how it seemed to reflect the values of the “beast” even as it seems to be her song. And to complicate matters further, it’s a great pop song, whatever that even means anymore. Robert Crumb has said that to his ear, all popular music “sounds like death.” (He only listens to music recorded in the 1920s and maybe 1930s. ) I need to ask him what he means by this, that it all sounds like “death” to him.

So back to the lyrics of “Flowers:”

They were “good” and “gold” until they “weren’t.” They built a home and “watched” it burn. (Their actual house burned down.) The protagonist didn’t want to “leave,” and also didn’t want to “lie.” She “started to cry,” until she apparently stopped, when she remembered—what? That she can buy herself flowers. Write her name in the sand—and so forth. She can discover herself as the object (sender and receiver) of the love she did not get from her husband.

In fact, she can dance straight off the map of the entire (post-Greek) western tradition of love and romance. It’s not that it’s narcissistic—pop music has to be—it’s that it’s emotionally a-tonal. Or maybe I mean incoherent.

Miley is very close with Dolly Parton, who also serves the Beast System, but for contrast, listen to two of her most famous songs, and you’ll see the missing thing I’m talking about.

I’ve said it before, and maybe people find it sappy, but the first music I ever heard around age 4 was Jacques Brel, and I marvel more each time I listen to it. How was it possible that he wrote these lyrics, in a world that was already dispatching of the love song? Because he was Belgian?

Well, I submit it again, as antidote to contemporary popular music, and the Grammys, which we will address momentarily:

Miley’s song is an international smash hit, and I notice that her fans are all cheering her supposed emancipation from having loved her husband, and they are particularly excited that in the second part of the song, she invoked The Joker, through her dance moves. This is all part of the new agenda; YAY Divorce!

Women marrying themselves has even become a “thing.” End stage feminism, I guess. I only know that it is designed only to raise sadness in the soul. Or is this only a sign of one’s age?

Now over to the Satanic Grammys, and Sam Smith. I don’t know if I can add anything original, but the values I detect (in the video below) are:

1. Condoms, as liberating object and talisman, signaling both sexual hedonism, homage to HIV cult, and de-population, and Woke.

2. Handsome ostensibly heterosexual, married man secretly getting sexual satisfaction in orgiastic underworlds, desertion of children and wife, lying, deception, mockery of wife’s obliviousness, but (haha!) it turns out the wife is really a man.

Soak the whole thing is blood red, and dancing demons, and call it a day.

Here’s the video for “Unholy:”

This tweet, with the Grammy performance of “Unholy” has a thread that reveals how it was planned to shock and outrage American Christians, and also reveals Madonna’s deeply disturbing history of stealing children from Malawi and performing psycho-social experiments on them to transform them into transsexual sex props for her Instagram page. Madonna also, don’t forget, got Michael Jackson to drink alcohol, seduced him against his will, made him attend S&M clubs, and tried to get him to say curse words, which he was known to be adamantly against. “Madonna is not a nice person,” Jackson said. He called her, in fact, an “evil witch.” I don’t know what to think about the accusations about Jackson. But as usual, we refuse, as a culture, to address that which drives all of this, namely childhood trauma.

Hypersexuality is a symptom of unresolved trauma. Billie Eilish, to her credit, tried to confess that porn had “wrecked” her mind. Nobody was interested. We’re all supposed to go along with all this—the pornification of pop music, as a healthy expression of the no-longer-repressed individual.

NΛTLY DΞNISΞ @itsnatlydenise

I want you to understand, that the outrage they want you to feel is completely manufactured with intent. 𝘛𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘳 𝘕𝘰𝘢𝘩: "No, mom, it wasn’t the actual devil ... Yeah, you did 𝙬𝙖𝙧𝙣 𝙢𝙚 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙃𝙤𝙡𝙡𝙮𝙬𝙤𝙤𝙙" 10-4. Open mocking confirmed.

So, since it is so clearly designed to provoke shock and outrage among us clueless, bigoted “conservative Christians,” I refuse to play along. I’m observing, but I’m not reacting.

About 15 years ago, I discovered that the HIV/AIDS cult was embedded with occultism, and that their use of symbolism, the red ribbon, and the color red itself, were critical, and would later be folded into the Next Level pop culture Satanism of Covid, and the post-Covid epoch which we are in now. The narcissistic demand of the HIV/AIDS cult was that their own sexual “expressions” must continue without hindrance, while at the same time, they dictated sexual “safety” standards to people who would never acquire the actual disease syndrome. The suburban heterosexuals they loved to chide and bait. I always said: “It’s not a disease. It’s an occult-ic religion.” It was a gateway to Satanism. And behind it: Big Pharma. The Grammys were “brought to you by Pfizer.”

These people all want the same things: Unlimited sexual indulgence, with adults, children and (if they so choose) animals, surrounded by perpetual adoration for everything they do, as transgression that is actually conformity, while people of other beliefs (Christians, Jews, Muslims, for example) are trashed as “haters.”

So here we are. We have landed at the epicenter. It was never about any disease, any public health “measure;” It was never about “love” or recycling, or saving the “planet” or accepting trans sexuality. It was always about the finale, on full display at The Grammys, which is mandated Satanism, as “feminism,” gay rights, trans rights, and above all, progressive-left supremacy. The final gotcha is this: If you see Satanism in our flagrantly Satanic pageants, you’re a hater, a clay-footed Christian, and one of the culture’s dejected and rejected.

But something interesting is also happening. People who are not, like some of us, actual anti-Satanists, who are in fact liberal and hip, are also tiring of this oppressive sludge—this brave new world of hideousness, in which everything is permitted so long as it is ugly, mocking, illuminist, and scary. Wink wink. People were genuinely frightened to see “Madonna” appear with that rubbery evil face, with that whip, as usual, scoldingly telling America how brave she and her fellow billionaire sexual transgressives are.

What was it she said: “You are seen, you are heard, and above all, you are appreciated.”

Wonderful.

What about the rest of us?

Are we never to draw a “proud” breath, because we don’t get it why Satan worship, self-decoration, fame, and sex-obsession makes for an American contemporary hero, especially if you have decided your true gender is not the one you were born with?

They say Christians demand everybody worship our God, but these people really demand worship of all of their chosen idols. Heaven help you if you don’t bow down to Sam Smith, or Beyonce, or Billie Eilish, or if you secretly wonder what is wrong with Harry Styles. Looking dazzlingly androgynous in glittery girl’s clothes does not make you heroic.

You’re not the new JFK, or MLK—except in this weird bubble where the costume makes the “hero.” You’re not Raoul Wallenberg.

A hero is not worshipped. A hero is severely punished.

Here’s a meditation I wrote last year while in Spain, on gender, and clothing.

Lastly, I chose two videos, after watching many, that were excellent expressions of all that needs to be said about the depressing 2023 Grammy Awards.

Steve Truly did a good job, assessing the absurd marriage of Woke and Neo-Satanism:

I also really like Raymond Arroyo’s cultural commentary. He manages to be mocking yet genuinely funny and original:

And with that, let’s move on, and to those of us who were early “Satanic Panic” types, who’ve been “saying this for years,” and been met with incredulity from liberal friends who doubted these people could really be into “devil worship,” the time for vindication has arrived.

And we were vindicated by them.

They have come full circle: “Yes. We are practicing Satanists. We dare you to object. That too, is part of our trap, since entrapment, to quote poet Ed Dorn, is our sole activity.”