1982's Trans is an incredible artifact. It's mostly anti-fascist, but it's got some obviously fascist elements, so it fits here, and its story is just wild.

If "Neil Young's synth album" isn't enough for you, consider a few things:
- It is almost entirely sung through a vocoder.
- It is almost completely indecipherable. This was on purpose. Young's son was born with severe cerebral palsy and the fog of synth and vocoder was meant to represent his son's efforts to communicate.
- Scattered amidst such deeply inaccessible electronic tracks as "Computer Age," "Computer Cowboy," and "We R in Control," are some light, organic country-blues songs that sound like they were lifted from another album. In fact, they were! That album, per Young, was "a tropical thing all about sailing, ancient civilizations, islands and water."
- This was the first album Young recorded for his new label, Geffen. It was such a colossal fuck you, as well as a commercial and critical bomb, that the label sued him for deliberately sabotaging himself by releasing "uncharacteristic" material.

This album is fascist in all the obvious ways. Computers dominate the landscape lyrically and musically, to the point that Young himself is a computer. The album art shows a computerized graph-paper hologram man hitchhiking toward a dystopian metropolitan future in some kind of DeLorean, while a shaggy guy heads to the woods in some old hearse. 

But in deeper, more important ways, it's anti-fascist. Young's son was crying out to be heard, a lone, small voice in a world that had no time for him. That effort was worth something. Young himself mimicked it, and when his strained falsetto occasionally breaks through the vocoder, it is actually stirring. And yes, hologram man is off to town on the cover. But where is the shaggy guy going? Off to foment revolution, probably. There's hope on Trans.

This demented January 2016 performance by USA Freedom Kids was an immediate legend of fascist music. The fascist nature of this performance is total, from concept (let's get some little girls to extol Dear Leader) to presentation (American flag costumes!) to setting (some batshit rally in Pensacola) to lyrics ("Enemies of freedom / Face the music / Come on boys, take 'em down!") to music (blippy and hellish) to the mere existence of this band (Florida Svengali devises scheme for his daughter to perform and gain him $$). It should be obvious that this video occupies rare air even among its fascist brethren.

The best (worst?) part of this whole thing is that the object of their jingoistic praise is now the not-unfascist President of the United States. Perfect. I only regret that I have but one post to give USA Freedom Kids.

David Bowie's death in January triggered many deserved tributes. He was the greatest rock star ever.

But during the 1990s (technically 1987 to 2003), he released an amazingly long and unbroken string of terrible fascist albums. It would take a perverse revisionist* -- and there were plenty in the weeks after his death -- to deny how far he fell during these years.

The Cliff's Notes Bowie is this: He came on the scene in the late 1960s as a psychedelic folkie, then hit his creative stride in the early 1970s as the glam Ziggy Stardust. He soon turned to "plastic soul," the Thin White Duke persona, and mountains of cocaine. Clean by 1977, he headed to Berlin to release a trio of artsy, acclaimed albums. Then he wanted to get popular again and released a big, ominous, arena-rock album (Scary Monsters... and Super Freaks) and two popular dance-rock albums (Let's Dance and Tonight). After these commercial successes, Bowie was at a crossroads. He chose fascism.

• Never Let Me Down, 1987. If Tonight was Bowie doubling down on 1980s dance production, to diminishing returns, Never Let Me Down was him tossing his entire reputation on the table and going bust. He sold his soul for a shot at fame -- he admitted being in a "mire" and "unsure of what he was supposed to be doing" for this one -- and ended up with a banal and facile album. It's plainly fascist to sacrifice artistic integrity for sales, with bonus points for the zombie-like manner in which he acquiesced to anonymous production Svengalis.
• Tin Machine (with Tin Machine), 1989. Bereft of confidence after Never Let Me Down, Bowie turned to hacky Berklee axeman Reeves Gabrels, who would muddle up Bowie's sound with industrial garbage for the next decade. As Rolling Stone put it, Gabrels "ruined everything left to ruin in Bowie's music." Stripped of his panache and autonomy, Bowie became a faceless band member in a truly shitty band. Surrender to the machine, citizen.
• Tin Machine II (with Tin Machine), 1991. Why? Because Reeves Gabrels said so.
• Black Tie, White Noise, 1993. An apologetic-looking Bowie, blessedly sans Tin Machine, poses for an extreme close-up on the cover of this would-be comeback. Unfortunately, dressing up has never been a good music strategy. Pop is about satisfying needs and wants; the more desperate the artist, the better. A guy in a black tie, rich and happy, doesn't have any needs or wants, so what is he bleating on about? More gold or opera tickets? It's a fascist insult to have everything and still demand more.
• 1.Outside, 1995. On its face, this seems like it might be a commendably weird album, from the name (Bowie thought more were coming), to the hellish cover, to song titles like "Segue-Baby Grace (A Horrid Cassette)." Alas, 1.Outside is actually Bowie trying to cravenly rebottle the weirdness that had generated commercial and critical success for him in the past. He even propped up Brian Eno, producer of his masterful Berlin trilogy. An embarrassingly overt attempt to re-establish his position in the pop firmament, which, of course, was what had landed him here in the first place.
• Earthling, 1997. A full-on appropriation of industrial house music. Remember The Prodigy and Nine Inch Nails? Bowie fully embraced that faddish, horrible sound as his production standard. Reeves Gabrels was behind the boards, of course. Appropriation is a fascist classic.
• 'hours...', 1999. Musically, the least fascist of Bowie's 1990s albums because he's not trying so hard. Wish I could say the same about the gauzy album cover and title typography, which are overconceived messes in lockstep with the worst trends of the "millennium" era. A pointless, middle-aged record that Bowie released because there was a lot of money in music in 1999. Paycheck pop.
• Heathen, 2002. A carefully curated selection of his most fascist touches of the decade, all in one album. Black tie? Check. Industrial garbage? Check. Overt weirdness in an attempt at acclaim? Check. All bad news here.
• Reality, 2003. A spiritual sequel to Black Tie, White Noise, from the accessible sound to the mediocre songs to the clear designs on a commercial comeback to -- amazingly -- another black tie. The guy just couldn't help himself! Maybe, at this stage in his life, he was simply a fascist, and had to be true to that.

After so many embarrassments, it was time for Bowie to finally give up, which he did. But in a happy coda, 10 years later, he released two pretty good albums, 2013's The Next Day and 2016's Blackstar. His output from 1969 to 1983 had already ensured his legacy, but these two showed he was at least capable of humor, drama, and striving -- antidotes to fascism all -- and willing to share his gifts in his waning years.

*One revisionist, Jason Hartley, came up with the Advanced Genius Theory to address work exactly like Bowie's 1990s output. Per Hartley's theory, since Bowie is an acknowledged genius, it's natural that the genius present in his work would eventually exceed his audience's ability to appreciate it. The "problem," then, lies with us, not Bowie.

In this grim and bizarre image, Cube is styled as a top-hatted (!), cassocked ruler of a dystopian hellscape. A tank rumbles through the smoky ruins of a city, presumably commissioned by Cube to polish off the survivors. Cube, meanwhile, is insulated from the madness in some kind of iron structure that nonetheless boasts the ornate trim befitting a ruler of some kind. Cube holds a staff, crucial for the works he'll conduct as leader of this post-apocalyptic world, and with his right hand offers some sort of Illuminati salute. To top everything off, this CD cover is "3D," in the late-1990s sense of "tilt this CD back and forth, and you will perceive motion." In 1998, this packaging was neither modern nor particularly impressive, but it was expensive and maximalist. You wouldn't be crazy to consider this to be "peak CD cover."

Ironically, Cube's persona on the album is the opposite of this totalitarian figure. The same bleak, fascistic atmosphere prevails, but Cube's role is that of a quasi-revolutionary on the run, working shadowy angles to defeat his enemies. With the dubiously valuable assistance of his sidekick Mr. Short Khop, Cube talks surreptitiously on cell phones, gets crippled by an assassin's bullet, and eventually slinks around the United States attempting to avoid extradition. Sure, he enjoys good moments smoking marijuana in the Hotel Niko sauna and owning "a mansion and a yacht," but he is not the solemn power figure of the cover. Maybe the cover is meant to represent Cube's successful fate following the events of the album. If so, it's a poignant reminder that deposing fascism often leads to nothing but more of it.

As if all that wasn't fascist enough, he had to smother his name all over the 1992 charts with two separate albums of bloat. Let some other people have a chance, Boss!

The gold standard. The system crushes the individual.

Mindless repetition of shapes, icons, and slogans. From the claustrophobia-inducing center -- where "JAZZ," in pink, the stand-in for humanity, is evidently trying to escape -- one encounters choking circles, one after another. If you are somehow able to escape the inner rings, you soon confront another, different set of rings. There is no end, no escape, as the rings gradually become infinitesimally close together.

The album's title is cruelly ironic. Jazz is the freest, most organic 20th-century musical form. Its language is abstract and improvisational; its images are colorful. With its computer-generated black and white circles, this is the furthest thing from jazz.