44. Girlpool - “It Gets More Blue”

This right here is a little dose of understated beauty. It reminds me of pre-apocolyptic love within a world that is unrelentingly and deterministically drifting towards a certain destruction. The planet is dying, the seas (which are littered in trash and full of plastic) are rising and everything that remains is either getting polluted, catching on fire, or becoming overcrowded. We can no longer bury our waste and sins within the bursting belly of the earth. Nature can no longer evolve or adapt quickly enough, and so even the animals we don’t already willingly slaughter begin to die, acting as a catalyst to an already certain chain reaction of destruction. New wars begin everyday, perpetual and undeclared, hammering countries into oblivion right alongside any sense of empathy, decency, or interest within the populations back at home. The absurd is made commonplace and complacency usurps compassion. Extremism and Immigration (both by choice and by refugees) are on the rise, as ideologies and human beings emerge from places ravaged by an elite that places more value on borders and capital than empathy, dignity, and human life. Inequality is higher than it has ever been. The majority live in perpetual decline, hopelessly clutching what fading glimmers of status they still possess, which of course gives rise to a resurgence of racism, colorism, and classism (basically any -ism). Meanwhile, those who own the riches, and are overwhelmingly responsible for the destruction of the earth, live lavishly, buying up luxury and ease within a market of their own making, but even that market is spiraling ever more out of control. Corporations now control governments, and spend their days advertising and manipulating, concerned with nothing but figuring out to bleed the masses further dry. Voting is an illusion, more pointless than it has ever been (if it even manages to still exist), and despite all the financial chaos, perhaps unsurprisingly, violence is now the currency with highest degree of inflation. Everything is shit, and yet within that shit – that gaping maw of nothingness, desolation, and oblivion, something as trivial as love still manages to exist. It’s resilient, as much a part of us as our destruction, unable to be dissuaded or suppressed by the absence of a foreseeable future. We are slaves to both, and so we carry on, pulled by something we all too eagerly relegate to beyond our control.

This is a true story by the way. Every sense of modern love is tainted by this in some way, haunted by the specter of chaos and oblivion, and yet we hide from it and avoid acknowledging its presence, hoping that in doing so we will somehow keep it from actualizing itself – because pretending is easier than acceptance and decisive action. We live in pre-apocolytpic times. The wheels of positivism, capitalism, and consumerism turn and we remain caught within their clutches, staring in horror, soaking up what we can, too powerless and impotent to even begin to do anything about it (unless of course we embrace mass radical collective action).