Beautiful Freaks 2010-2020

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS
September 16, 2016
08
Nots says NO! to everything. We say YES! to Nots.
‘Entertain Me’ is a force of nature. It doesn’t care about you, or me, or any of
the other two-thousand people on the beach. It’s a scene from Max Max: a massive
truck relentlessly moving through the nuclear desert, with Meredith Lones
playing a flamethrower bass guitar and Alexandra Eastburn driving a motorcycle
the size of an organ, exhaust pipes fuming, circling and zigzagging, steering
through the chaos – or maybe they are the chaos?
But Nots are not the Empire, they are the unstoppable Imperator Furiosa. Even
better than Tom Hardy. Way harder. Like the tyrant’s ‘wives’, they’re tired of
being forced to be entertained, and more than tired of being forced to entertain.
If you watch television while listening to Nots, its cathode ray tube electron
gun will spontaneously combust.
Cosmetics are what politicians use to hide their nastiness. It’s ‘face-value’, but
the face is lying, the mouth is lying, the eyes are lying, and the television makeup
is making it up. But hotter than the stage lights, Nots’ eyes stare you right
in the face… and melt it.
Nots carries a sledgehammer with them and wherever they go they smash mirrors,
leaving only blank reflections. Until the vanity of cosmetics is no more.
Nots hasn’t been tested on animals and side-effects may include cold
hands, dizziness and slight paranoia.
Nots is a negative force. ‘Inherently Low’. They respond to the news with vexation
and sarcasm. There are no answers, only problems: Donald Trump growing like
a grotesque hot air balloon, Assad’s and Saudi bombs turning Syria and Yemen
into a wasted landscape. Better let Natalie Hoffman scream. This is not a helpless
scream. It’s a critical scream. Political movements are borne out of being critical,
peering through the cosmetic. Nots is saying “This is not okay”.
Sometimes Nots has a determined shape, albeit asymmetrical and five-dimensional
and incomprehensible. Most of the time Nots is going somewhere, even if it’s
only the synth urging the others to hurry up, or the bass marching on its own,
not caring about the organ which is then lagging behind and then catching up,
running circles around the peloton. And sometimes Nots loses every trace of a
definite form, becoming a pulsating globule with spiky bits, an abhorrent object
you don’t dare look at. That’s when your family asks you to please turn it off.
Nots recently joined the Non-Aligned Movement.
All post-punk contains traces of the Cold War. The synth in ‘Cold Line’ engenders
that nuclear angst. However, not nuclear proliferation but global warming is
the defining issue of the 21st century. The scariest thing is that we’re not scared
to death. Nots are here to frighten us.
Nots themselves wouldn’t be scared - but maybe deep down they are.