Dystopian Fallout Tunes in the Wake of the 1950's Nuclear Family; (Or, Why Purim, Elin Nordegren, the Supermoon, and Forever 21 are in this Title)

By Wes Unruh
If you want to understand social media SEO and figure out why I referenced Purim, Elin Nordegren, the Supermoon, and Forever 21 in the title to this piece, forget what gavin said about the 1950's - the 1950's were far from a wonderful time - though the rest of his piece makes sense and is a much more logical thing to read. Let me explain what I mean with these five songs which, for some strange reason, drip with dystopian essence for me, and which were all written by people trying desperately to escape the energies of the 1950's:

The Animals rendition of We Gotta Get out of This Place, recorded 1965.

Lyrics clip: Now my girl you're so young and pretty / And one thing I know is true / You'll be dead before your time is due, I know.



The Cyrkle song Red Rubber Ball, recorded 1966.

Lyrics clip: Something for your pride / Always running, never caring / That's the life you live

Tommy James + the Shondells some I Think We're Alone Now, recorded in 1967.

Lyrics clip: we're running just as fast as we can / Holding on to one another's hands / Trying to get away into the night

Zager + Evans song In the Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus), recorded in 1969.

Lyrics clip: Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies / Everything you think, do, or say / Is in the pill you took today

String Cheese song Empty Streets, recorded 1971.

Lyrics clip: If you feel the fall / And it's all closing in / Where can you hide? / When it all comes running down

Together these five songs create a confluence of imagery in my mind - of the young trying desperately to flee the pills and drudgery of an uncaring world. Beautiful monsters we must become, to feel immune in a panopticon mediaspace obsessed with body image - either you can shill or you cain't - ain't no two ways about it. And if you cain't shill, you better come up with some way of distracting the others. Dark, the world - and those what make it run - and the only source of paranoia and terror was the mounting cultural noise of the 1950's hegemon rising in the polarizing rhetoric like today we experience the 1980's and Ronald Reagan's zombied ghost. I believe there is something telling in the transition of the monster from the horrid, dripping monstrosities of the 1950's into the celebrated, fetishized monsters we see today - even the mutants seem sexier, more fluid (see the film Society(1989) for some spectacular visual leverage points between monstrous and fetishized, a much stronger focal point than the more obvious Hellraiser(1987) if you want to dig beneath the surface of this superficial post).

I know the blank, nuclear horror holocaust lurking mutant ridden underneath desert wastes in the alien red lands of the American southwest - I've seen it played out in The Hills Have Eyes, numerous times, in two iterations - that energy like iron you can suck up at the right vortex if you're clever, or lost. But there's other energy out there too, something the 1950's instinctively had to nuke with their tests at Trinity - an energy. It's hard to define - like a washing out of cloth, or a sack of pups, eager for milk. Squirming in the gut - that's the coiled horror of the 1950 era, when human testing was going full swing and the urgent sentiment of normalicy was cover for a hegemon gone apeshit - clearly powermad in the jittery wake of a devastating world war, warding against more. I've got nothing else to go on to build this mything out further, but rest assured that we are all better off for having placed more time between us and the soft naive lunacy of the 1950's...

We got it good. With our 1950's nuclear power plants now popping one after another on the edge of the ocean. That's nothing, a tsunami wiped out atlantis - lybia is detonating, the middle east is tinkering with rhizomatic networking and it's freaking the mundanes. But this was supposed to be about SEO. Let me tell you why SEO is shit - it's a rigged game and the players hold the cards already.. although you can create your own cards from scratch. Getting in means getting someone to begin dealing you some cards, but the cards themselves ain't worth shit unless they're already in the deck and are getting dealt out - so you gotta trade in some of your cards you created until they're mixed into the common pool. That's SEO today - a huge game of go fish and everyone's already chipped in to the max. Real-Time SEO? Well, today it's about Japan - is it radioactive? Are we? Tomorrow it will be something else; I know exactly what James means when he talks about scanning for what stands out... and today SEO is goddamn depressing - perhaps next Friday we will meet the next Rebecca Black and jump towards another polarizing Sheen-ish Swan event, SEO's enmass following culture like so much hanger's on trailing a conquoring army sweeping through a heathen land. (Empire much? no - more post-empire - see ellis.)

SEO is waking up and looking at the ambient information management structure you have crafted for your specific knowledge base, then seeing what's hot on the day's search patterns, and wondering - can I actually reference Purim, Elin Nordegren, the Supermoon, and Forever 21 donating all their sales to Japan in one blog post for a significant boost to other articles on that blog's site? The reality is that nearly everything that actually matters about real-time SEO I said in this article two years ago and it's really never changed: Good SEO is the result of successful transmedia narratives you play out with utterances in publicly accessible spaces. Even more important - if I do write this article, how the hell do I write large enough anchor tags to reference these urls in unique and motivating ways to give the search engines unique metadata they can interpret with reverence? I see SEO (and more importantly, OSO) as an infinite game, the long kind, a glass bead game, for those of you who've read your Hesse, and I say:

Game on.



Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.