An orogeny of questions such as these gather inside Spurge’s White Guilt? Venmo Us. via voiceless expressions of black rhythm percussive structures through the use of acid, electro, early Chicago house dialects, and the ever-yet-named sound that someone will commodify inside the language of whatever is currently coming out the New York scene right now.
White Guilt? Venmo Us. minces no word on its posture. In the bleak landscape that immediately followed June 2020, much of whatever self-made mojo that encapsulates Black aesthetics inside various macro cultural objects was finally molded into a non-terminating, ever-reproducible representative recognizable object for the masses to license and distribute by the powers that be in a way that American history has yet to witness until now. The gap between the marketability of selling blackness as a product and selling black people as a product has now widened so much as to introduce a viral psychological opacity resulting in a sort of modern reappraisal of the age old question: “Can I be Black too?”
Willful socio-historical amnesia has led many Western cultural actors who, under a binaural trance beat of uninterest, refuse to see their acts as guided by simple deluded capitalistic greed— having nothing to do with honor or respect or any “We Are The World” flat platitude substituting material redistributive recognition with hot air branded as blissful falsehoods of oneness where those inside the hegemony who benefit seem to sacrifice perspective at the ever unsatiated altar of Whiteness. Certain moments in recent history resemble this always-already extraction game, such as the Black Madonna being prompted to reconsider her stage name only when being confronted with a consistent cry for black folks alongside footage of black death across their timeline ad nauseam to finally recognize their folly inside their late-1990’s decision to call themselves that in the first place. Another can be addressed to a track namesake on the record itself, Nina Kraviz, whose weaponized cultural ineptitude evoked more insult than the cornrows placed on her head. Spurge joins the resistance of somatically expressive retribution in dance music with his latest release. You can’t spell plunder without PLUR. - Ryan C. Clarke