HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH

BACKKLASH™ Worldwide returning guest and Christmas Secretary Hagalaz joins Poolhouse for an incendiary blast of motherfucking TRVKE. Hagalaz returns to talk about the cult she recently started, her new occasional podcast series Hyacinth House, and to lead Poolhouse through a tarot reading on the theme of redemption before the two descend into a sprawling discussion of Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 cult masterpiece Possession. Using the film as a lens, Hagalaz and Poolhouse unpack the contemporary gender war: the increasingly distorted relationship between men and women, the tension between traditionalist expectations and progressive feminism, motherhood and paternal responsibility, surveillance, identity, domestic obligation, and the suffocating gap between who we are and the roles we are expected to perform. From there, the conversation turns to the Lindsay Clancy case and the way competing ideological camps consume real human catastrophe as evidence for pre-existing narratives about women, men, motherhood, mental illness, family, and social decline. What happens when concern for children becomes another weapon in an endless culture war? And what happens when the people supposedly defending human beings become more invested in winning the argument than understanding them? Finally, Possession opens onto something larger and considerably darker: an era in which technological life itself increasingly feels supernatural. Algorithms feed anxiety back to us, political and gender archetypes replace actual people, private fears become mass-media spectacles, and reality arrives already processed through an invisible machinery of signs, incentives, surveillance, and polarization. REPODEMPTION: Poolhouse and Hagalaz on possession, redemption, gender war, mass informatics, and the monster growing behind the algorithm. Hagalaz is on X. Poolhouse is online. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com

Fan favorite Detty returns to HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH, and whenever she and Poolhouse get together, the conversation tends to unlock something strange. THE INFORMATION WON’T SAVE YOU is a free-ranging journey through the hidden architecture of modern life: media manipulation, memetic contagion, scapegoating, collective thought forms, spiritual exhaustion, and the increasingly perceptible sense that something ancient and sacred still hums beneath the surface of the world. Detty and Poolhouse zoom out to ask not simply what is happening, but how we should think about what is happening, and how to navigate an information environment designed to lure us into endless rabbit holes. Eventually, plumbing the depths of the rabbit for more information stops being a worthwhile pursuit. The real quest becomes how to keep your reason, intuition, curiosity, and sanity intact while moving through the labyrinth of the 21st century. Follow Detty on X - [link] DJ POOLHOUSE IS ONLINE. Detty’s viral post comparing media market PR impresario Mitchell Jackson to the proprietor or Arkham Asylum: a relevant Poolhouseism: The classic Backklash about 1950s comics culture, featuring TheNaniState: Check out the Spotify playlist for the entire collection of Backklash Dettysodes: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com

On this episode of HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH, Poolhouse descends beneath the material machinery of marketing to investigate its stranger, more esoteric twin: influence itself. Taking Charli XCX’s prophecy of “anti-marketing” as a point of departure, Poolhouse traces pop culture’s mutation from please love me, to please notice me, to the new commercial imperative: I don’t care if you like me. Just don’t stop talking about me. Enter Lizzo, Lola Young, Audrey Hobert, Charli XCX, Slayyyter, Tiga and more – all avatars through which Poolhouse decodes moderns notions of manufactured authenticity, invisible PR, algorithmic friction and the strange new economy in which polarity may be worth more than popularity, backlash becomes distribution, and being called cringe might be the ultimate prestige strategy. A material and octolectical analysis of how ideas move, celebrities are manufactured, and culture changes before anyone quite realizes it has changed. Mimesis is not material. Influence is intangible. Cringe is the new prestige. The university set has everything more figured out than Ms. xcx…. right right Poolhouse on anti-marketing, pt.1 Poolhouse on anti-marketing, pt. 2 DJ POOLHOUSE IS ONLINE. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com

On this episode of HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH, Poolhouse dives into the strange and relatively uncharted realm of pop authorship, an already nebulous concept made even more slippery in an age when persona, performance, identity, and technology are becoming impossible to separate, let alone authenticate. From Audrey Hobert’s clownish, hyper-aware pop persona, and the uncanny specter of one Ms. Sue Heck looming over the project, to Tyga’s critically detonated and AI-assisted $TARFACE, Poolhouse asks what we actually mean when we call an artist “authentic.” Does authorship reside in the hand that makes the thing, the mind that conceives it, the voice that performs it, or the persona that holds the entire construction together? Are pop auteurs even real, or are they carefully manufactured illusions designed to obscure the collaborative, technological, and highly industrial nature of mass-produced pop product? Along the way: cringe as creative strategy, authenticity as artistic currency, AI panic, pop-star identity, machine production, inherited archetypes, Pitchfork’s resting bitch stance, and the increasingly unstable line between artist, producer, persona, and avatar. Pop music performance has always relied on artifice – but does this dilute the artist’s agency, or extend it? Poolhouse delivers a soaring meditation on the pop auteur with the type of episode you will ONLY find on BACKKLASH. Episode Mixtape: Peech Boys NYC - Stay With Me (Tom Moulton Twelve Inch Extended Mix) DJ POOLHOUSE - Track ID (unreleased) DJ POOLHOUSE - Ramon Novarro’s Revenge Dub (unreleased) DJ POOLHOUSE - Put It All On Ice Tyga - Rack City (DJ POOLHOUSE All Screw No Chop Remix) BRUISEFI.IST – The Box (unreleased) DJ POOLHOUSE IS ONLINE. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com

Hi! this one is just a quick update from backklash studios east….I promise I will get a proper microphone for the next one. We don’t have to live like this! Thanks again for your lovely support of my ice reggae musical projects, ARCTIC SUNSPLASH and HYPERBOREAN DUB EXCURSIONS. It means a lot when you take the time to listen. I’ve so thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating these albums, that there is an audience for them at all is such a joy and a blessing! Thank you, backklashistas. And remember, inside of you, there are two Poolside Dub Versions… P.S. … Stick around to the end of the episode (as if you would ever not do this!) for a special treat – my “Acid Cotton Candy Hurricane Mix” of BELSHAZZAR. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com