Below is a transcript of C:O’s communications with Madjestic Kasual, henceforth known as MK. MK speaks on their obsessive media consumption and the manipulative nature of the platforms we use daily. MK is viewed as an all-seeing, powerful entity from within and beyond the SoundCloud universe, overseeing and presiding over the constellations of overlapping scenes and generations that exist within this unique online ecosystem.
MK is a self-described “satire farm, lifestyle simulator and art aggregator” – created during its brother, Majestic Casual’s (similarly named, but not to be confused with MK) brief absence in 2015,
“Majestic Casual went down temporarily and we wanted to fill the void left by, at the time, the world’s foremost ‘music and pictures of women’ platform. We saw it as our responsibility, as a public service. It was an act of heroism and we should be rewarded for it with money.” – MK recounts.
Both MC and MK hold a similar purpose; a space on YouTube where music can be shared with the masses. MC’s content consists of uplifting, dancey house tunes, paired with colourful images depicting a dreamlike lifestyle. Usually an image of a beautiful woman, a sunset, or a beach – MC says “this could be you”. MC viewers escape reality and shelter in the warmth of MC’s idealistic approach to life. In comparison, MK’s content is raw, unfiltered and organic. MK is a trickster, for whom, in their own words, “a clearly stated artistic objective or critique is beside the point”. MK uses the beanie as a defining visual asset within its mission, an absurd but necessary motif.
The Origins of MK:
Cloaked in a garment constructed entirely of grey sweatpant fabric and beanie fur, MK stares through the window of his sibling’s tech bro house party. Thumping tropical house can be heard from outside the building as an animalistic display takes place inside. Some guy in Carhartt overalls requests Rap Caviar. There’s Sriracha pop art on the walls. Limited-run BrewDog ale soaks the floor. People are sincerely enjoying themselves and it’s really annoying. MK decides something must be done. By an act of God, a flash of lightning strikes our Beanie-clad antihero. From this moment on, MK is eternally fused with the music sharing platform “SoundCloud”. MK now sees and hears all – meticulously trawling through new uploads for all eternity, saving only a select few deemed worthy of the Madjestic Kasual YouTube upload. Once uploaded, these musical pieces are immortalised and raised above their peers on the SoundCloud stream, these tracks have been anointed the MK seal, the highest of honours in the underground scene.
The following is a transcript of a conversation between C:O and MK, translated to English for the ease of human readers.
Madjestic Kasual [IG:madjestickasual] has joined #CO
<CO>
As an omnipresent entity, how has MK been utilising this time where a large percentage of humanity is confined to their immediate living spaces?
<MK>
I find myself compulsively returning to SoundCloud and like four other websites. Platforms, really. This is a phenomenon that’s much discussed, media companies having colonised vast swaths of the Internet and our attention. I think for the vast majority of people, you find yourself looping back to a handful of platforms habitually.
I can remember an era when that was much less the case, when the Internet wasn’t as boxed in. So I’m glad to be able to add CONTACT Online to my little browsing repertoire. A lifeline beyond the platform-based content trough.
<CO>
It's interesting as well because these sites are - I don't want to say they're evil at the core because they're not, but their main purpose is to keep you on as long as possible. It's interesting that the reason you keep returning to SoundCloud is for content that people create, in their bedrooms or makeshift studios, making their art. So in some ways you are hooked on the platform, but it's also the people - without the people there would be no reason to visit sites like SoundCloud in the first place.
<MK>
Yeah, but I can’t help but be aware of these platforms, in a sense, reducing people to little production nodes in a huge, indifferent content monolith. It’s trite but… they have us deep-throating these little dopamine inputs that both incentivise the production and consumption of content. I wouldn’t say the people behind these platforms are actively malicious. The end result is more evil than the sum of its parts, but it’s not like there’s a cabal of twisted reptilian supervillains plotting destruction. Maybe there is though. Maybe this is the exposé they’ve been fearing.
<CO>
How long have you been utilising SoundCloud as a tool to source underground music?
<MK>
I would say since around 2012. This was pre-Madjestic Kasual. I don’t know when SoundCloud started, but I’ve seen it go through a few transformations in this time.
<CO>
Would you segment SoundCloud scenes/trends as generations? What trends have you noticed in the time that you've been paying attention?
<MK>
So that’s the thing, right? I’ve been here for a while, and I’ve always been quite deeply immersed in [SoundCloud and underground music]. It feels like the development of scenes or generations happens in a way that’s simultaneously very gradual and very rapid, to the point where I find it difficult to process any sort of generational transition. The boundaries are blurred, it’s not discrete. It feels like the dust never fully settles, there’s always something new on the horizon and it overlaps with what’s current. It feels futile to draw hard lines in the sand. The rate at which these little scenes grow, expand, metastasise, and then dissipate is so incredibly quick that, before you can fully process it, it’s gone.
Trying to categorise this stuff too strictly… it’s like trying to find a not cliché metaphor for a concept that’s already self-explanatory. The conversation moves on before you’ve thought of one, and no one cares. I’ve learned to stop taking stock. It took time, but I’ve successfully neutralised my capacity for reflection and analysis. I click play and I listen and I like. And that’s kind of it.
<CO>
I definitely feel that shortened attention spans and the way these apps are optimised to encourage users to create/consume as much as possible also influences this rapid life cycle.
<MK>
100%. There’s always been frivolous, disposable music, but maybe it’s even more disposable now. Or maybe we’re less introspective now, maybe we just have less respect for or awareness of history. The past had more of a monoculture, with more of a shared set of reference points. And obviously a slower pace of media consumption. There were a handful of dominant cultural gatekeepers, pre-online, that had the ability to mythologise culture and music and art so much more effectively, on a much broader scale, in a seemingly more definitive way.
In the past you had whatever magazine – Rolling Stone, NME, these dominant mainstream ‘cutting-edge’ publications – who pushed and promoted a select number of albums every year, through constant reinforcement. You had this system of gatekeepers and media and marketing whereby certain albums were ultimately anointed as ‘chosen’ albums. “We as gatekeepers have decided these select albums are the best of all time”, “The Beatles are the best band in all of history”, etcetera. This output was inducted to the canon by a selection of trusted gatekeepers, who legitimised and validated media for public consumption.
It’s interesting to observe and read about the mechanisms by which albums were and are chosen, and the way musicians are semi-arbitrarily inducted to the canon. I referenced Rolling Stone, but as recently as 10, 15 years ago, you had Pitchfork who just, as a single platform, had the power to make or break not just a band or album, but an artist or band’s entire life, their legacy. If you played your cards right, you could construct an entire career off the back of that. Obviously there’s plenty of bands who still fucked that up, but it’s interesting to see the means by which consensus over what is considered the best music in all of human history was manufactured at the time.
So really, the question of merit has always been redundant. There’s no truly organic or authentic way for us to decide what is the best art or music in the world. No one deserves attention, no one deserves applause.
You mentioned attention spans being eroded. On a neurological level, our receptors will slowly but surely be worn down or become accustomed to a kind of hyper-stimulation, with the unending cascade of content on the feed. You get this echo chamber phenomenon, people just kind of existing in their own curated content bubble. It’s cool to see little micro-universes of music and art spring up in this way but… this is a very long-winded way for me to say that my view of SoundCloud musical scenes or generations is very distorted by my own very splintered mode of media consumption. So I just wonder how any conclusions I draw could even translate to others. I find it hard to generalise my observations. I’m a coward.
<CO>
SoundCloud could be seen as its own virtual universe, constantly expanding, dying and reinventing itself.
<MK>
Always dying. There’s tons and tons of collapsing stars on SoundCloud. I mean, just the sheer level of talent that I encounter every day from sub-thousand-follower SoundCloud accounts blows my mind.
Within spaces like that, with a constantly refreshable flow of information, you’re not going to engage with ‘content’ – and I hate to use that word – with the level of depth you might have with more traditional media, in the past. I don’t think our cognitive processing power can expand at a rate fast enough to keep pace with this constant barrage of content. These platforms are built in a way that incentivises shallow engagement over all else. In some way I feel that way about music too.
<CO>
What do you think MK’s role is within music archiving?
<MK>
I like the idea of capturing and preserving a little sliver of reality, to the degree that it can even be truly preserved. Majestic Kasual is built on this seemingly secure, but ultimately fallible foundation that could just be wiped out one day to the next. Which would make my entire existence an exercise in misspent time. Which it probably already is, but I wouldn’t have a 7K follower YouTube account.
<CO>
Is Madjestic Kasual satire? If so, what is it satirising?
<MK>
It’s easy to conclude that it’s some satirical thing, and I guess on some level it is. At this point, I don’t really know what it’s satirising though. It’s just a reflection of my general sensibilities, sensibilities I suspect a lot of our followers implicitly understand.
I’d say it’s probably rooted in a general disdain for intelligibility and easy answers. I try to embrace impenetrability and crudeness because it’s funnier to me than doing some boring template-based meme shit or some shallow post-vaporwave style capitalist critique.
I think on some level, Madjestic Kasual is driven by contempt. I kind of like the idea of leaning very hard into contempt for the audience. The surface-level premise of the channel is pretty dumb and goofy, but I want it to have this cruel, contemptuous underlying streak, too. I want it to be disdainful of anyone honest enough to admit they don’t ‘get’ it.
<CO>
So in some ways everyone is the joke, including yourself.
<MK>
Well, I don’t know that I would mock myself. I am a magnanimous overlord who is beyond reproach. I am untouchable, the beanie God.
<MK>
I’m not trying to shill, but I think that compared to Spotify and the main streaming platforms, SoundCloud is much more creator-friendly. It’s much easier for artists to connect directly with their audience than it is on other platforms, where they’re often more removed from the whole process. Not to give SoundCloud too much credit, though. They’re just as beholden to ‘the bottom line’ as anyone else.
All I can say is I just really, really like the platform. What I can also say, once again, is that I’m in no way shilling.
I wish I could critique [Soundcloud] more substantially, with more depth. I wish I could extract myself from [the platform] as well. I definitely think there’s a danger to investing too deeply into anything. It’s important to cross-pollinate and distribute your presence as much as possible. There’s a writer I like named Nassib Taleb. He’s funny and contemptuous in this way that I enjoy. Long story short, he’s this statistician who arrived at this concept he calls antifragility, which, in practical terms, is sort of a mode or a state of mind of trying to mitigate risk, building resilience against uncertainty. His thinking relates to what we’re talking about now – not committing all of yourself to any one thing. Just not putting all your eggs in one basket, I guess. So while I understand the Madjestic Kasual association with SoundCloud, it’s something I’m hesitant to wholeheartedly commit to.
<CO>
A couple of years ago SoundCloud was rumoured to be shut down. A lot of people were upset because a wealth of music would essentially disappear. Is that fragility of these platforms something that contributes to you archiving/uploading music to YouTube?
<MK>
Maybe subconsciously. Just the sheer volume of content pumped out every single minute means that – unless you attain a certain level of scale and presence within the media ecosystem – you do not exist.
You can distribute your music, get it in front of people, maybe post a song and have it get 2000 plays and 200 likes. But online is so fragmented that, for all intents and purposes, your music does not exist. If me posting a song to YouTube can make someone’s music marginally ‘realer’, then that makes me happy.
But it’s not like we get hundreds of thousands of views on our shit. The channel doesn’t have the presence, the critical mass, to leave anything resembling a dent on ‘the culture’. Maybe archiving is hubris. Maybe Madjestic Kasual should just be a Spotify playlist. Maybe I should carve the name of every artist I follow on my face and my ass. Maybe it would all be realer then. I don’t know.
<CO>
What are your thoughts on Spotify?
<MK>
I don’t use Spotify personally. I feel like in theory that kind of platform is great for users, having essentially every recorded piece of music ever in a single centralised location, streamable from the cloud. Platforms like Spotify and Netflix, recommendation-based and algorithmically-driven platforms, determine what you will like based on your past pattern of consumption. But they’re not built to challenge and expand the things you like. They’re there to serve and reinforce past consumption behaviour.
<CO>
The nature of these algorithms is that they show you what they think you want - which works for most users, but your utilisation of SoundCloud is completely organic and therefore the algorithm cannot be trusted to provide you with the content you need. MK is mining and every so often you find this little bit of gold and you add it to your little beanie sack.
<MK>
For the vast majority of people, these algorithmically driven suggestions are perfectly fine. But I’m such a glutton when it comes to music and media in general, that those kinds of platforms don’t do it for me. I root around like a truffle hog. I obsessively search and scan. I’m never sated.
Madjestic Kasual [IG:madjestickasual] has left #CO
MK has attached a 35 min mix to accompany our conversation, a soundtrack to their eternal mission as the world’s greatest lifestyle based music influencer.
