TYSHE

There’s a widespread belief (almost a meme) that culture is dead. That we live in the ashes of something once profound. And I get it. I feel it too.

A deep sense of nihilism runs through how we talk about culture today. Social media giants, microtrends, and endless consumption depict a culture cannibalising itself, feeding and regurgitating its remnants until there’s nothing left to digest.

Our dominant cultural outputs aren’t ephemeral or momentary anymore; they’re designed to be eternal. Think Fortnite: once a fresh cultural moment, now an infinite simulation. Peter Griffin, Balenciaga, Travis Scott all coexisting digitally. A boundless crossover of intellectual properties, collaged into something yearning to feel greater than the sum of its parts, yet often hollow. Culture, once emergent and reactive, has become prepackaged and self‑referential.

Music follows suit. Deluxe albums layered atop originals, designed to inflate streams, blur vision with filler. Thirty‑song projects nobody completes, engineered for playlist placement. Sound has transformed into strategy. Experimentation replaced by repeatability. Everything filtered until it trends on TikTok.

Even language deteriorates. “Algospeak” replaces genuine expression. We twist our words, abbreviate our feelings, dilute our voices, not for poetry or brevity, but to avoid shadowbans. Our speech is compressed by the algorithm’s merciless chokehold.

Fashion drowns in volume. Resort collections, runway shows, thousand‑look capsules. The cultural weight of garments is lost amidst production cycles, clickbait, and Instagram slideshows. Everything is designed to grab attention, not evoke emotion.

If you feel numb, you’re not alone.

Yet culture isn’t dead.

We’ve hit the plateau, the edge of the S‑curve. This curve, often illustrating technological growth, applies here too. We’ve innovated, accelerated, commodified, and finally stagnated. Postmodernism was the crash, turning utopias inside out: irony, pastiche, despair.

Now we’re suspended in that aftermath. The middle children of history, as Fight Club famously put it:

“No purpose or place. No Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.”

It hits because it feels true. We live in the existential hangover of a future that never arrived. Our inheritance is content. Aesthetic noise. A constant hum resembling culture but lacking the spiritual force we crave.

But this isn’t the end; it’s the inflection point.

We must reimagine culture not as nostalgia, not as commerce, but as practice, commitment, resistance. Through shared discourse, criticism, imagination, and community, we can revive the intellectual rigor culture once demanded. And in doing so, we create again, not merely produce.

So make. Write. Speak. Share.

Start conversations. Start brands. Start bands.

People often say, “There are too many clothing brands, too many musicians, too many creatives.” But that’s false. There aren’t too many; we have too many mediocre ones. Our issue isn’t abundance, it’s meaningful contribution. We don’t need more noise; we need more signal.

Support what matters. Vote with your wallet, your words, your eyes, your heart. Elevate those pushing culture forward, not exploiting it.

Let this piece, this strange, messy, passionate manifesto, be the beginning of a metamodern renaissance: a new canon of art, politics, engineering, science, philosophy. These were once the tools to build our future. They can be again.

Modernism taught belief. Postmodernism taught doubt. Metamodernism allows us both—oscillation between irony and sincerity, past and future, despair and hope.

Break disciplinary boxes. Reject institutional rigidity. Collapse boundaries between fields. Make art that’s scientific, science that’s poetic, philosophy that’s wearable, fashion that’s spiritual. Let ideas bleed into each other. Create hybrids previously unimaginable.

Embrace chaos. Inject entropy. Invite randomness and intuition to the table.

There’s beauty, raw ecstatic beauty, in colliding things that don’t belong. From the mess emerges something new: a form, a rhythm, a way of being previously unseen. Cultural identity shaped by fusion, contradiction, possibility.

So: support, create, rethink, destroy, rebuild.

We are not observers; we are agents.

We are not merely scrolling; we are scripting.

We are not dead; we are becoming.

Let this be the first draft of a future cultural exposition.

Let this be your call to arms.

Let this be proof that culture lives, and you are part of it.

The background ambience bleeds through my ears as the thumping kick smashes in my headphones—a subtle reminder of the world's chastity, of the ghosts seated across from me. The hairs on my neck rise, sensing their icy breath, the chill spinning like a fan that strips sweat from every anxious face in the room.

This plane of space is cluttered, performed. The fan can never truly correct the room's energy unless we exert the agency to break a sweat.

The first time I went clubbing, my body was drenched, dragging itself through corridors and vast open spaces. Frightened and insecure, my emotions punctured by the icicles of alcohol, my brain became a fried motherboard, alight.

The dread I'd typically feel in such foreign territory was absent—not because I didn’t recognize it, but because I couldn’t conceive of it at all. I entered a plane disconnected from modern life's surveillance. No one was watching—yet everyone could witness. It felt like every light had dimmed, leaving only me and a cigarette swaying gently, intimately.

It's a place we endlessly seek—the essence of what that experience ought to be. Contemporary clubbing can't always provide such bravado, but it's important to find the mini-clubs within our minds. I enter voids and zones—spaces of liminal imagination where dreams imperfectly reflect reality, never truly convincing me I've escaped.

“Shit.” I sharply inhale my cigarette, smoke cascading down my throat, laughter shattering my fragile solace.

Electricity floods my veins, space and peace intermingling. Dopamine from drugs surges, rendering this contemplative moment morphine-like—an out-of-body clarity rolled in a cylindrical paper cancer tube.

Morphine pulses through me; violently erupting into cascading reflections of my self-image. I breathe deeply into this peace—like stepping into a dark cupboard amidst a bustling room. No one outside knows what's happening within, yet somehow everything remains understood.

I dream of injecting myself with mushroom, oxygen, water—acidic innocence—to regenerate the purity of my childlike awe.

I yearn for Mother—the space, the sensation. The wet ceiling of sweat and bodies, the forgiving slip of tongues, the loving movement of each moment.

It’s a sanctuary of escape.

If I am to live only once, and heaven lies at my feet, then—if I must consume—I shall dine only upon life's finest dishes.

Escapism as a vice is mischaracterized; instead, it's paint on the canvas of existence. It cuts fragments from magazines, rearranging them into new visions.

Thus, it bleeds red, breathing the shared air of our collective spaces.

I look up and see a family—a network. My experience intertwines within spaces of liminality, flickering between coffee shops, clubs, parks.

Our sonder surpasses any single definition—brief flashes of shared air in life's pan. A dance, a glance, a shifting motion, endlessly reimagining love and being.

I adore feeling, moving, dancing, writing—experiencing all rebellious forms of music. I journey, I observe, I consume, I comprehend, and I create.

Yet beneath it all, I remain exposed, naked in expression and self-doubt, mirrored in your trembling eyes—a once-stranger, now shared consciousness.

"Thus, in the name of:

ROBESON, GOD’S SON, HURSTON, AKHENATON, HATSHEPSUT, BLACKFOOT, HELEN,

LENNON, KAHLO, KALI, THE THREE MARIAS, TARA, LILITH, LOURDE, WHITMAN,

BALDWIN, GINSBERG, KAUFMAN, LUMUMBA, GANDHI, GIBRAN, SHABAZZ, SIDDHARTHA,

MEDUSA, GUEVARA, GURDJIEFF, RAND, WRIGHT, BANNEKER, TUBMAN, HAMER, HOLIDAY,

DAVIS, COLTRANE, MORRISON, JOPLIN, DU BOIS, CLARKE, SHAKESPEARE, RACHMANINOV,

ELLINGTON, CARTER, GAYE, HATHAWAY, HENDRIX, KUTI, DICKERSON, RIPPERTON,

MARY, ISIS, THERESA, PLATH, RUMI, FELLINI, MICHAUX, NOSTRADAMUS, NEFERTITI,

LA ROCK, SHIVA, GANESHA, YEMAJA, OSHUN, OBATALA, OGUN, KENNEDY, KING, FOUR

LITTLE GIRLS, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, KELLER, BIKO, PERÓN, MARLEY, COSBY,

SHAKUR, THOSE STILL AFLAME, AND THE COUNTLESS UNNAMED."

– Saul Williams

I condemn you to life.

If someone were to ask me why I am the way I am,

I think I’d offer several relevant answers.

First:

I am an amalgamation of my personal experiences—

and a bastardised version of those who came before me.

Beyond standing on the shoulders of giants,

I think we are the fucked-up shadows of the ones who cast the line.

Naked and elusive.

Reconstructing ourselves in the liminal cracks of our psyche.

This, in itself, feels like a kind of liberation—

to retrain experience into context.

To hope, foolishly, that one day a god may land on our skull

and cast its spell,

returning us to the dirt we crawled out from.

A pet cemetery is the metaphor.

We exist in that eerie afterlife now—

Love, pain, and idea

looping through us like old ghosts.

I am the failure of originality that I’m desperately trying to find.

A meta-construct that breathes, walks, and shits

inside the house it explores.

I want to be called.

To be seen.

To be understood.

I am at war—

between my current self, my future self, my past self,

and the self that will never be.

Every moment is a whisper of lost time,

tearing something away from me.

I am a renaissance woman.

Born man,

but lived in that space.

And so I offer you these lyrical weapons—

with the hope they carry the resonance of a song,

the direction of a film,

the abstraction of a painting.

There is a beauty inside me

that I try, desperately, to paint—

but I need you.

To interpret.

To affirm.

I only exist in conjunction with you.

Even now, I create without an audience,

but the audience is always there.

And the past me—

they knew the future was coming.

This is to say:

I am a virgin, ovulating.

My body soaked in the sweat of creation,

haunted by the same nightmare

that fuels this endless self-excavation.

BLACK. BROWN. TAN.

All around.

All I am left with is the exposition:

slavery, belief, and music.

Though I am not touched by all these geists,

they echo through my body.

Horny to be loved.

Horny to be wanted.

Horny to be seen.

My material identity should assault you—

punch you into fragments,

rip your throat and vocal cords out

until the fibers snap beneath my fist.

Blood splatters the lens

like a horror film.

Your expectations,

gutted.

Your body limps into its soulless husk—

an empty void from what once was.

Entropy

is just an echo

of once having been.

It is a music piece.

It is mine.

This is not to offend—

but to use wrath as scalpel.

To open the cranium of taboo,

explore its amygdala,

and repair what trauma left behind.

I am man of space.

I am man who fills space.

I am renaissance.

And this renaissance is programmed—

carried within the binary code and branching logic

of every wall around me.

Why ask if we are in a simulation

when every piece of concrete, steel, and glass

is held together by the same force as your thoughts?

Air.

Oxygen.

you fell out of love with me.

i’ve travelled the seas but remain bound to my chair.

i’ve seen everything.

witnessed everything.

a hundred lifetimes flash in a single second.

i see the futility in it all.

one page. one click.

i’ve seen the president, a singer, a lawyer, a killer.

just vessels of experience.

but i’ve lived it all.

my dreams are real.

i’ve touched them.

i’ve felt their heat.

you fell out of love with me.

i have understood death.

i have understood god.

i have studied physics, chemistry, biology —

none of it changed the ache.

i have seen it all.

you fell out of love with me.

and still —

i am satisfied.

i am cold.

i am experience itself.

and joy?

joy was a guest.

i let it leave without a fight.

i think i’m okay with one last click.

a check.

a breath.

a blink.

you fell out of love with me.

now i sit

a void of experience

devouring the earth into my core

draining the last light of the universe.

i do this because —

well, it doesn’t matter.

what matters is the final line:

a final choice.

a final rhyme.

i fell out of love with myself,

and the world will swallow me

back into time.