Before and during the first Trump presidency, scholars, experts and commentators were all eager to share their opinions on the most unlikely of candidates. Now Trump has retuned to the White House we are going to take an occasional look back at our conversations that questioned his credibility.
David Shields’ Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention is organized into six chapters and sixty subsections and gets increasingly harrowing in its focus, moving from childhood to sex to media to virtue-signaling to chaos theory to “apocalypse always.” The book’s central thesis is that we have met the enemy and he is us. As daunting as that may sound, Shields’ cleverly deconstructs the idiot-savant-autocrat now in his second term at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue by focusing with laser-like intensity on Trump’s fan-fiction base, and the emotional needs/moral failures of the city, country, and world that created him. The best-selling author argues that Trump loathes himself. No human being on the planet is less capable of joy or even fulfillment. This is the key connection between himself and his voters. Shields offers up a much-needed discussion on why sixty-three million Americans voted for Trump. A huge number of things we love are big, sick jokes (from WWE to horror movies to the NFL), he says, adding, the method to Trump’s madness is that in a shame culture, he’s shameless, this gives him enormous appeal and leverage to people who are resentful. The key to iconic celebrities is that they embody the culture’s contradictions, e.g., Jesus, Elvis, Madonna. Trump is a “winner” who acts like a “loser.” He’s a millionaire “schlub.” This allows him to play both ends against the middle. This is mad brilliance or lack of both. Is Trump is karmic payback for an America lost to simulacra for at least twenty years?
Seattle, the more-often-than-not-grey city that gave rise to a musical phenomenon from the late ’80s to early ’90s that musicologists continue to debate over. The debate is most often over who was first to wear the mantle of Grunge and what song will be remembered decades from now. But, there is usually no debate over the importance of the first record label to discover and promote the new genre of music. Sub Pop began as the dream of an avid music fan, then morphed into a fanzine/bog/cassette label to finally a rag-tag record label signing unlikely acts such as Tad, Green River, Soundgarden, Mudhoney and of course, Nirvana. The story from there merges into a world of myths and legends. Frequent Life Elsewhere guest and long-time music journalist, Gillian Gaar has set about trying to sort out the Sub Pop history in her latest book, World Domination – The Sub Pop Records Story. Gillian joins Norman B to recall the early days of Grunge and the record label that grew out of the damp, cloudy climate of Seattle.
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