It goes without saying that we need more original voices, more iconoclastic visionaries sharing their work in the new year. So much of our American culture anymore is just rehashed joke templates and pious entreaties for self-care and performative socialism, a bunch of sad sappy suckers slinging the same half-dozen gags into an unhappy void. To me, that’s the unspoken tragedy of “2020,” if you’re bent on shaking your fist at the idea of year-as-scapegoat: It’s an unsettling vacuum of humor and individuality on a sprawling scale.
I guess my point is that, with social media conducting broad swaths of our society’s shiftless identity, it takes a bold sense of intent to simply be yourself. And with the zoonotic diseases, climatic uncertainties and rising nationalist tides roiling around the world right now, that’s the best thing you can be: yourself. Not a celebrity, not an image, not a god, not an echo of another, not a memory: just you.
Anyway, RIP MF DOOM.
Sandy 