California Uber Alles

This is insane and grim, somehow meaningful - and strangely resonant.

Here are two pretty young sisters who sing songs:



Like me, you probably think they're the Olsen twins - they're not. Their names are Lamb and Lynx Gaede, they have a band called Prussian Blue named after the racial purity of their origins and they are massive stars at Neo-Nazi rallies around the USA.

... the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.

"We're proud of being white, we want to keep being white," said Lynx. "We want our people to stay white … we don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race."

[...]

Songs like "Sacrifice" — a tribute to Nazi Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy Fuhrer — clearly show the effect of the girls' upbringing. The lyrics praise Hess as a "man of peace who wouldn't give up."

You can read all about them here.

Like I said, I have a strange mixture of emotions reading this. The first is one that I've spoken of before - a sort of a baseline response these days - about how bizarre and off-centre the world has irrevocably become so that it can produce pretty little Neo-Nazi anti-boppers.

They emerge from an environment where pop cultural staples - disposable music sung by young role models promoting an image of healthy, clean entertainment - have been distorted, stretched like a reflection in a fairground mirror till they assume bizarre proportions. We're in the world of the comic book or science fiction which - like all futurist fiction - is primarily and deeply concerned with the present.

So, sure, the world of of the Gaede sisters is that of Ballard, Cronenberg and Gibson. A world in which cultural facets have been prised loose, squeezed and beaten thin like escalope to the most transparent - and most intrinsic - of meanings. But if you look at the story with a kind of unforgiving clarity and focus you could also say that it's not so strange at all. Not really. And any aberration from our culture is slight and not without relevance.

Our culture of celebrity is founded absolutely on a fetishisation of physical beauty and excellence (the two are identical, where they are not - as with the lionisation of someone disabled or physically impaired - it serves only as a reinforcemen). It's a cult of look and effect: relentlessly sculpted muscle and athletic superiority showcased by the famous few and emulated in hangar-sized gyms and fitness rooms by the many. It's a world in which those who are supreme - Kate Moss for example - are given to believe that they are beyond others: Nietszchian supermen and women in which the notion of moral superiority has been elided with physical and cultural lionisation.

It's a world tightly hinged to Leni Riesenthal's Utopia of Aryan Venuses and Adonises in Olympiad and Triumph of the Will - the first and greatest of Nike ads - which have since been so carefully co-opted to commercials. These were films where the beautiful - and intellectually and emotionally inexpressive - supermen are deified as what they are, how they perform.

That, it is clearly telegraphed, is what is required to rule. A cult of genetically ordained excellence. And in order for one to rule, there must be others who serve .

The other element that has relevance is the idea of the elite cadre - the special leadership - who stage and guide the tableaux of excellence for the masses and for the ceaseless promotion of its own inevitable victory.

Well now - and while this is just a somewhat relentless seeing through of things it is no joke - you ain't that far from the celebrity era tableaux of X-Factor or Pop Idol my friend.

Physical specimens who are selected to look and appear utterly correct, possessing a certain base of talent, to be refined by members of an elite who promise through their own esoteric arts - echoes again of Himmler's obsession with a mystical genesis for the Aryan dream - to school them in superiority.

Indeed, with its early sequences (again echoes of Nazism) of masses crowding into audition halls, begging, threatening and cajoling the judges to elevate them into a celebrity elite - X Factor is a not-so-subtle message that many are unworthy, only the few will rise and they will only do so if they deliver themselves entirely to the power of this Praetorian elite...

You my find this extrapolation a bit far-fetched or ridiculous - but it comes from one single seed and perhaps the road that takes us from Girls Aloud to Prussian Blue is neither as rocky nor as winding as we'd like to believe.