Bari Weiss Is A Big Fat Idiot And Other Observations
Given all the controversy, novelty, and attention its attracted in the press, it's no surprise there have been a number of documentaries about that phenomenon loosely known as "SoundCloud Rap," from the Terrence Malick-produced Lil Peep memoriam Everybody's Everything; to Yung Lean: In My Head, a portrait and biopic of the misunderstood Swedish artist; to Crestone, an experimental, Animal Collective-scored docufiction portrait of struggling, would-be SoundCloud rappers who live on a commune in the desert and make music that no one hears. Though "SoundCloud rap" or online-centered rap is often generalized and homogenized in how it’s written and talked about, the disparity and differences between these documentaries illustrate the vastness of both rap music and the Internet. On one side, you have warnings about the perils of viral fame, as a kid in Sweden stumbles upon some accidental hits riffing on a culture he only vaguely understands, sky-rockets to success beyond his dreams, and then comes crashing down because of how celebrity and the intensity of the industry affected his mental health. Crestone, on the other hand, is like the anti-viral, polar opposite of In My Head and Everybody’s Everything. If a SoundCloud rapper records a song in the desert and releases it into the digital ether and no one hears it, does it make a sound? The movie finds a kind of bittersweet poetry in the artistic practice of these fake-deep, face-tatted weed farmers toiling away at the end of the world, hoping to maybe attract some kind of attention online, but who ultimately keep doing what they're doing because they don't know how to do anything else — these guys are what Sadboys or Drain Gang might be if nobody had ever latched on, though they sound a little bit more like Awful Records. While other rap documentaries are about how you keep making art despite the pressures of success; Crestone is about how you keep making art when there's no pressure and no one is paying attention.
Of course, there’s another documentary angle often taken to rap music, given its frequent intersection with real-life intrigue: true crime. First, we had article after essay after thinkpiece about the artist formerly known as Tekashi 6ix9ine, then a Complex podcast series some reason, then an unlicensed and unauthorized Hulu documentary that had to refer to him as “69,” and now a Giancarlo Esposito-narrated Showtime series. I don’t think I’ll be subjecting myself to the Showtime original, but a few months ago I watched the Hulu offering, directed by Vikram Gandhi. Unsurprisingly for the artist behind a Netflix-produced Obama biopic, it’s an autopilot, over-narrated streaming house style documentary by a director who unnecessarily feels the need to make himself a character in the story, with a lot of very asinine observations about social media, viral culture, and "Clout.” It occasionally bumps into more interesting topics beyond Danny Hernandez himself, like the popularity of SoundCloud rap in the former Soviet Bloc and the NYPD’s surveillance of rappers. There's a very surreal scene where the doc goes to Berlin to talk to the awkward techno bro co-founder of SoundCloud, sitting in this office surrounded by pillows with comments from the site on them like "slayyy kween slayy" and "smokepurpp goes off" while attempting to explain this now massive culture his musical delivery platform accidentally spawned.
Maybe the most interesting moment in 69 is when it points out that, despite being labeled a SoundCloud rapper, 6ix9ine was never actually on SoundCloud until he was already big; he's YouTube Rap, the musical equivalent of the algorithm creating far-right extremists by quickly leading you to the most extreme content. His popularity was driven by an intense, loud, and colorful image that stood-out in your autoplay queue and recommendations sidebar, and these docs take that algorithm-tailored appeal to the documentary level, clickbait squared. The media is grossly enthralled by this edgelord rapper and how he "trolls" and uses "clickbait" techniques, the very same kind that get you to click on asinine articles and half-watch shitty documentaries, but they just end up falling prey to the troll by giving more focus to a kid who first got attention walking around in shirts that said “HIV/AIDS.”* 69 ends with the director literally asking "Did I get trolled and just give him the attention he wanted?" and I think the question to that is certifiably yes, but of course, I got trolled by writing about this too.
It’s a difficult proposition, I think, because what do you do when trolls become popular and successful, and end up shifting culture beyond just their commitment to the bit? How do you analyze a troll without being trolled, without giving them exactly what they want? How do you use your platform to critically analyze someone who is thirsty for literally any and all platforms? How do you have productive critical discourse about someone whose sole intention and motivation is to hog the discourse? These questions have been in my head a lot lately, but especially after reading a hot take du jour churned out by someone who is, in effect, the 6ix9ine of the thinkpiece industrial complex. Before I saw the byline, I noticed the publication, and that little beehive logo: why in the world was Media Twitter talking about an op-ed from Deseret News, the fucking church-owned Mormon paper? For those not in the know—i.e., those without much firsthand knowledge of Mormon cosmology and/or those who have not seen Neil LaBute’s covertly ex-Mormon film maudit The Wicker Man—the titular “Deseret” is not only the state symbol of Utah, but an essential image within Mormonism. In The Book of Mormon, a science-fictional epic about multiple warring races, the word means “beehive” in the language of the Jaredite peoples, and it was the original name proposed by Brigham Young for the state of Utah. More than almost any other religion, especially in its deeply American essence, Mormonism emphasizes the qualities that we associate with the beehive and their insect residents: self-sufficiency, hard work, industriousness, not a collective in the communist sense in which people are uplifted through community, but a collective in the capitalist sense in which all identity is subsumed into the group in order to make production more efficient.
“Deseret” as a word and a concept appears throughout the Mormon diaspora: the Deseret alphabet, a short-lived written language developed by Brigham Young in the religion’s more utopian days; Deseret Books, the church’s foremost bookstore and media outlet chain; Deseret Industries, the church’s answer to Goodwill (the store where Napoleon Dynamite buys the dance instructional videotape that changes his life in Napoleon Dynamite); Deseret First Credit Union, the church-owned credit union; and, more recently, the Deseret Nation or “#DezNat” community, the latest manifestation of a right-wing extremist tradition that stems from former Secretary of Agriculture, Church president, and John Birch Society member Ezra Taft Benson (he who speculated that Eisenhower himself might be a Communist asset), to survivalist special-forces freak and alleged “Real Life Rambo” Bo Gritz, to Elizabeth Smart kidnapper and self-styled prophet (who, in fact, spent a season with his wife at Gritz’s Almost Heaven survivalist compound) Brian David Mitchell AKA Immanuel. Gathering under the “Kingdom of Heaven” banner, the #DezNat community is an explicit reaction to increasingly vocal progressive and leftist pockets of church membership. These white nationalists look less to Joseph Smith, a queerer, stranger, and more complicated figure, and more to the Chad-like Brigham Young—it was Young who made the church even more patriarchal in its polygamy, more aggressive and oppressive, and even welcoming and accepting of slave ownership. The bowie knife is their Tiki torch, a symbol not just of frontier existence but a direct reference to the disavowed concept of “blood atonement,” a controversial and scandalous tenent of early Mormonism that permitted the punishment of eternal sin by shedding the sinner’s blood on the ground. At certain points throughout Mormon history, blood atonement oaths have been a part of celestial ceremonies, requesting you keep silent about things considered too “sacred” to discuss in public at risk of having your throat slit. All that’s to say, I was at first mildly amused, and then increasingly angry, at the fact that the day’s main character of a thinkpiece was from none other than Bari Weiss, the would-be Cassandra of Cancel Culture. Bari, as always, is up to her old tricks, crying about “self-censorship” from the bed she made herself, but there’s a particular hypocrisy to complaining about how you feel “silenced” by PC culture in the paper of a church that literally violently threatened members to keep silent.
The blood oath thing was long gone by the time I came of age as a Mormon teen in Central Texas, but the censorship and silencing was still going strong as ever—both top-down and all-around in terms of pressure from Church authorities and the members of my community, but also from myself. Let people believe what they want to believe, but I don’t think we really stop and think about how much of a fucking trip it is that we convince our children there’s a big guy on a cloud literally always watching you; beyond Santa Claus, he doesn’t just see what you do, he knows every desire of your heart and every unclean thought that fires through your brain. For me, organized religion was panopticons all the way down, and it’s something that I’m still undoing: in high school I still got quiet and looked over my shoulder when I swore in conversation, and I felt distinct pangs of guilt the first times I sipped coffee and alcohol, but even now, I struggle to express my true self and transgress gender or sexual norms, I’ve never developed much of a taste for pornography because of how militantly its alleged sinfulness was drilled into me, and I constantly worry that as I get older, my mind will erode and regress to the conservative operating system installed in my brain at birth. I’ll probably never explore anything besides monogamy because of how complicated I feel about my ancestor’s past polygamy (as much as I have in some ways learned to theoretically respect their attempt at radically transforming a sickly industrial society), and also because of all the kids who constantly asked me how many wives I had. Even just supporting fucking Obama as a precious, NPR-listening adolescent got me ridiculed, ostracized, and side-eyed from my Brothers with their hair gel and Van Heusen dress shirts and my Sisters with their J. Crew modest-is-hottest outfits.
Bari, ever the nationalist, proclaims that “We live in the freest society in the history of the world. There is no gulag here, as there was in the Soviet Union. There is no formal social credit system, as there is today in China. And yet the words that we associate with closed societies — dissidents, double thinkers, blacklists — are exactly the ones that come to mind when I read the notes above.” Beyond my own personal history, take the women of Bravo’s Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, sifting through the trauma they’ve endured living in a repressive culture, from Whitney’s excommunication from the church after an affair to the ostracizing Heather experiences from family and community alike after her divorce. There are Mormon dissidents, like the growing number of self-identified Mormon feminists and even socialists who risk expulsion and placement on the very “blacklists” Bari believes leftists keep. At the very best, letting go of the so-called “iron rod” and straying from “straight and narrow” path puts you in a lower caste not just within the church on Earth today but in eternity in the future, limiting your access to essential rituals and covenants that church members believe are necessary to entire the highest echelons of heavenly exaltation and eternal pleasure. At worst, breaking with the Gospel and its rigid dogmas and commandments can lead you to lose your entire network of family and friends, the culture that has seeped into every element of your life, the worldview that’s held your mental health and sense of reality together. Once that’s taken from you because you don’t live up to the impossible expectations of religious doctrine, your mind can fracture and the world can spin apart. There’s an extreme case in Netflix’s recent Murder Among the Mormons, about the case of high-profile Mormon forger turned murderer Mark Hofmann, whose crisis of faith led him to feel he had been duped and deceived his entire life, which drove him to want to dupe and deceive others by incepting similar doubts into the minds of other Mormons and calling the LDS Church’s authority into question. Though the specific documents Hofmann used to challenge the Church turned out to be false, the incident still reflects extremely poor on church leadership: its prophets and apostles are revealed, as plain as day and blindingly white as the light that hit Joe Smith on that dewey New York morning, to be experts in the kind of censorship and silencing Bari decries in a Mormon-owned paper, willing to pay any price to bury and seal away any documents that might damage the church’s constantly questioned reputation, like brass plates being buried away in a hillside thousands of years ago.
It’s only beginning to come out of the darkness, but there are other secrets the church has suppressed too: the astonishing, potentially over 100-billion dollar endowment it has crowdsourced from tithing and mandatory donations and kept quiet from members, as well as the slowly-emerging epidemic of abuse that raged like unchecked wildfire in the Boy Scouts of America, an organization deeply wound up with Mormon culture. More incidents and stories are coming to light every day, and the case count stands to overwhelm the Catholic Church’s similarly horrifying plague of pedophilia. Don’t believe the Trad-Caths who follow the word of the Vatican as much as they listen to TrueAnon; oh, the irony of being sickly fascinated with Epstein’s secret world while readily converting as an adult to an organized religion that’s been complicit in so much abuse, imperial violence, and oppression throughout the history of the world. Though the Catholics were second only to Baptists in terms of making fun of me as a kid for magic underwear and supposedly having multiple Moms, the LDS and Roman Catholic churches are similarly efficient, top-down machines for inflicting abuse on an unfathomable scale and then shushing it up. I can’t imagine the untold horror stories locked up in the Mormon mountain bunkers stuffed with genealogical information that Paul Virilio wrote about in War and Cinema: “The Mormons have decided to carry out a census of eighteen billion persons, both dead and alive, with the aim of baptizing them all. To this end they travel across Europe and the world, going from town to village and putting the smallest civil register on microfilm that is then stored in a 200-metre-deep atomic shelter in the Rocky Mountains, a necropolis where film takes the place of bodies for all eternity.”
Weiss believes that “in the past, societal taboos were generally reached through a cultural consensus. Today’s taboos, on the other hand, are often fringe ideas pushed by a zealous cabal trying to redefine what is acceptable and what should be shunned. It is a group that has control of nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life: media, to be sure, but also higher education, museums, publishing houses, marketing and advertising outfits, Hollywood, K-12 education, technology companies and, increasingly, corporate human resource departments.” Bari never really discusses what exactly this “zealous cabal” is, but I’m pretty sure that if she weren’t Jewish, this would read like some kind of dog whistle about a global Jewish conspiracy. Who is this “group”? Queers? Socialists? Though Mormonism is far from a small, backwards congregation, I think it still falls under the “zealous cabal” designation: a relatively small elite circle of powerful white men with almost infinite money, a multimedia broadcast empire that spans cable channels and digital content, an army of pimple-faced foot soldiers in button-downs, deep control of the Utah state legislature, as well as numerous pieces of real estate worldwide and various other business assets. If the Mormon church wants to erase history, it only needs to pull out its Mary Poppins-ass wallet and spend hard-earned tithe money on making sure no scholar can ever see the offending document again. Bari claims to speak for “liberty,” but in this instance especially, it’s an undeniably illiberal institution endorsing the check; she’s become an anti-PC PR person who has perfected the art of slinging muddy projections onto someone else so they don’t look at your own dirty clothes.
Like 6ix9ine, Bari's undoing won't be the provocative edges she loves to sharpen so much; it will be the self-destructive impulse that drives her to publicly identify as a devil's advocate that is her ruination, as she slinks from the new york times to the lowly, almost exclusively Mormon-read Deseret News just like 6ix went from major labels back to the independent leagues. 6ix may still be the subject of slickly-produced content meant to autoplay when your show hits the closing credits, but the door on his days of superstardom seems to have closed. Bari, similarly, has made herself a martyr and voluntarily gave up the cushiest, most high-profile gig she could probably ever have, resigned to the circuit that is her spiritual heritage as a thinker: the op-ed assembly line perfected by self-styled provocateurs like Thomas Sowell, circulated and syndicated in the company town rags of Middle America but ignored by most everyone. Blue Check dreams become Tucker Carlson guest appearance realities. 6ix will go back to being Big In Slovakia, and Bari will fashion flyover country into her ivory tower, a moneyed public pseudo-intellectual who deigns to stoop down to Real America, Nomadland-style, like billionaire’s daughter and Disney employee Chloe Zhao romanticizing Amazon workers without asking too much about the conditions. It won’t be long before Bari decamps, like cancel culture children of the corn Kanye West and Jeffree Star before her, to a compound in Wyoming**, her Folklore Sessions an epic, unhinged Exegesis of reactionary thought, a literary Predator handshake meme between TERF rhetoric and Zionist ideology. Like the culturally blood-sucking Swag Blacula West inviting satanic spawn Playboi Carti to clock into demon time at his ranch for an IMAX-sized screening of Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu, Bari will invite Liz Breunig out for a weekend of hitting the slopes and slipper slope debate, courting the trad-cath scion like an ever-looping GIF of Birdman gleefully rubbing his hands together. What Eastern Europe is to disgraced meme rappers, Wyoming is to alleged-geniuses-cum-failed-presidential-candidates, and this very platform Substack has become to cancelled (cis) (white) (male) cultural pundits, the floundering regional papers of America will be to a parasite like Bari Weiss.
*I do have to wonder if Danny Hernandez’s perpetual need to play the aesthetic and ethical devil’s advocate might have something to do with what’s happened to his neighborhood over his lifetime—it’s hard not to imagine why Danny, a native of the gentrification-ravaged Bushwick (a neighborhood I live in, because of gentrification), might get off on offending the allegedly clean, liberal sensibilities of the white progressive transplants who’ve come to call Brooklyn zip codes their home, despite still having an out-of-state ID and snitch-posting surveillance footage of people stealing their ASOS packages. But that’s probably for someone else to pontificate on.
**The whole narrative around Wyoming and Kanye as he’s rebranded himself as a “Gospel Artist” has been particularly fascinating for me because Wyoming is a place for me that, like so much of the west, is deeply enmeshed in mormon culture and my own mormon heritage specifically. my mom’s side of the family is the mormon side, all the way back to the Joseph Smith days, and a lot of them are from Star Valley, Wyoming, a rural area where many people raise horses—in fact, a number of my extended family members and distant cousins and shit where extras at the end of Ron Howard’s forgotten immigrant epic Far and Away, where all these people are racing on horses doing a land seize trying to claim parcels for their families, which is probably something my actual ancestors participated in generations ago, now recreated by marquee movie stars. Kanye went to Wyoming to find God, and it’s always surprised me that he didn’t end up hieing all the way to Kolob.