The comedy podcast "Comedy Bang Bang" has a recurring character in Martin Sheffield Lickley, a new wave musician with a tragic life who airs his pain through his music, a meditative process, raw and authentic and often cryptic and metaphorical. He is best known for his signature retro synthpop aesthetic, as heard in his songs "Ship of Love", "Love City", and "Love Gym", reprinted in part below:
I'm working out at the Love Gym
The Love Gym charges a membership
Where the muscle you train is your heart
Instead of punching bags, they have kissing bags
And the personal trainer is your wife
But instead of cash, you pay with a hug...
It carries on like this. They all do.
Martin Sheffield Lickley is not trying to make these marketable corny songs. He says himself "I'm done with this Top 40 horseshit" shortly before presenting Love Gym. This is just how he expresses himself. It's natural to him. Within he and his ilk was something to exploit and wring chart-toppers and money and more money out of, and they were rewarded for it, and they were molded to fit.
Pop Will Eat Itself's "Def Con One" from 1989, containing geeky comic book reference after geeky comic book reference, was lauded as countercultural. Now it's just the norm. In 2025 they released an album, Delete Everything, that sounds exactly like their 1994 album Dos Dedos Mis Amigos. They're still the sarcastic cool boys they always were, making clever name-drops left and right, even 30 years later. An interminable spirit.
xkcd #78, released in 2006, is a paranoid surrealist rendition of a Garfield Sunday comic, the caption pleading Jim Davis to "throw off your commercial shackles. Challenge us. Go out in a blaze of Dadaist glory. There is still time." Fast forward 20 years, and while it would be silly to say xkcd has reached the level of immortality of Garfield, calling it countercultural, much less Dadaist, would sound ridiculous. (Not that Dada was some unparalleled faucet of artistic purity.) xkcd is the comic about cool science facts. It's the web series about hilarious macabre science hypotheticals. It's a pool of geeky references.
We found ourselves recently grumbling about Undertale and how merchandisable it was (and, implicitly, how our enjoyment of OFF had become forever tainted by all the Fangamer merchandise it was receiving).
Alain: kill & devour sans undertale
Pablo: That's what you do in Undertale though.
Pablo: [Undertale] might legitimately be better than the gruh-gruh industrial bullshit OFF shares so much in common with. Maybe this is preventing 1 more kid from getting into Cabaret Voltaire.
Pablo: Maybe VGM has a spark of life where all we have is our white DMX boys we don't care about anymore and Joesph Babblehorns And The Society Deconstruction Act.
Pablo: Maybe we've been plain suckered.
Alain: who's to say the white DMX boys / Joseph Babblehorns And The Society Deconstruction Act / Homestuck Undertale and his VGM friends aren't the same people
Alain: tmbg did some public stunt in like 2000 where they were like "if bush is elected we will kill ourselves live on stage" and at the same exact time they were making No! and Mink Car
Alain: tmbg in general, these no wave new york guys who got bored and made cartoon music on their yamaha or whatever and became quirky indierock darlings
Alain: hell the aesthetic and legacy of [Edmund McMillen's The Binding of Isaac] should make this pretty clear
Pablo: Then "kill & devour sans undertale" is just speaking a different dialect of the agreed-upon language.
Alain: yeah huh.
Pablo: It's just perpetuating the cycle. The edgy subversive boys grow tired of the mainstream norm before them and wail on their guitars and play on their synfosizers and then 50 years later they put out an AI-generated nostalgia retrospective music video.
Pablo: They do a thing, we consume it, we get tired of it and consider them fake, we do the exact same thing but updated and legit, then we either get bored or burn out (like 99.99% of people do) or get astronomically lucky and become the new disappointing fake thing to be surpassed.
Look who's been literally molded to fit.
Priscilla: we think we are entitled a medal of geniusness in experimental music for our "edgy" DIY work "with obscure and niche and cultured influences"
Priscilla: which weirdly enough sorta puts us back to the start, like, that's why we're into OFF and that's why we wanted to get back into pokemon, was to defy deifying ourself as being into the most premiere niche obscure cultured stuff imaginable that a Video Game Fan would never be into and to prove ourself as greater than
Priscilla: but dome is as corporate as pokemon, the experimentalpostpunk white music legend who alternates between rocking the hot 100 and deconstructing the society
Priscilla: like the observation earlier that glossy new wave and edgy industrial are two sides of the same coin, that "i'm going to kill and devour sans undertale" is just unexpectedly speaking two different dialects of the same language at the same time
Priscilla: that tmbg put out a press statement "if bush wins we will kill ourself live on stage" around the same time they released No! and mink car
Priscilla: getting into dome because we're sick of pokemon, getting into pokemon because we're sick of dome - we're just running back and forth between the two different mouthparts of the same venus fly trap
Priscilla: i mean LITERALLY
Priscilla: LITERALLY. if you remember that time we were watching transparency boo's Hey You Pikachu review and we put on dome and we were like OH MAN I CAN FEEL THE CORPORATE HORRIBLENESS THE INDUSTRIAL MEANINGLESSNESS SETTING IN! and now here we are and we hate dome and how pretentious they are so we return to OFF and we start feeling like OFF is still too pretentious and we come across FRLG.ips and the pokemon boards and think in a tiny corner of our mind "this could be the new thing we're into". literally running back and forth between pokemon and dome
Priscilla: i would say "maybe there is something between being an 'edgy experimental music edgelord who is deeply genuius and deeply white and lives on a passive income of perhaps not money but certainly respect and reveration' and pretending for the four billionth time we can ever become a siivagunner fan" but - but the point is, those are the same thing
Priscilla: there can't be anything "between" the two because they're the same thing, just different expressions of it, one more archaic than the other
Priscilla: the megacorporate franchise is just the success state of the experimental music edgelord who lives on a passive income
Priscilla: dome's problem shouldn't be that they're pretentious, it's that they're clueless
Priscilla: "pretentious" as i see it is a light ribbing, if there was any weight to it it's long since been knocked out, we make stuff we regard as pretentious in an "and i wouldn't have it any other way!" way, and yet we keep holding onto dome and off and tmbg being pretentious as why they're bad
Priscilla: dome listens to joujouka and goes Whoaoaoa thats so destablizing my whole society i need to make a songs about this. off - we really want to believe off is about situationism and culture jamming and all these tongue in cheek intellectual movements, and maybe to some degree it is, but it owes so much to those industrial aesthetics that situationism bonds with, and in the end the ultimate framing device is "it is all, a coma dream, from a sick childs mind!", the most mindless overused cliche of the late 2000s/early 2010s