Panopticon

The Club of the 110: A Bunch of Albums to Increase Your Avant-Rizz

Chapter 10: The System of Vigilance (list at: https://www.albumoftheyear.org/user/devonflick/list/472693/the-club-of-110-how-to-become-avant-garde-and-fail/)

Let me tell you a little story this time for the cold nights. The panopticon was a prototype of a super prison, designed by Jeremy Bathman. The idea was simple: to put a tower in the middle of a lot of cells to create an illusion of vigilance to the prisoners, who would develop paranoia thinking they were being seen at every second. They would also have to answer a philosophical answer to themselves:

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" - "Who guards the guards?"

The project was rejected thanks to something bigger than money: morality. Even to the standards of the Eighteenth Century, that was considered to go too far in the torture mechanisms to some finance high commands and radical architects of the Ancient Britain. The system of hidden vigilance would later be adopted by multiple dictatorships and autoritharian states. The panopticon, since then, has been pointed as one of the key developements of shadow government espionage in modernity. Why am I talking about it?

Well, it's in the album title, idiot. That's the album topic. Masses control. Did you expect something else? When the metal album is political, you know it's gonna be absolute fire. The Isis frontman, Aaron Turner, together with modern writers, consider the idea a danger to the world, and the album clearly criticizes the existence of internet itself as a big panopticon, where individual ideas are gone forever, and everything becomes more and more centralized. It's a big flat circle. The album also draws anger from the administration of George W. Bush, and the hostility of the president and the civilians to foreigners.

I want to draw comparisons between this album and Hail to the Thief, my favourite Radiohead record: both of them were developed around throw shit at Bush, and the frontmen of both bands became highly paranoid about the rapid progression of the political presence in the media. And I can't blame anyone who prefers to keep themselves away from the big bubble of paranoia and chaos that is the political discourse. The things are grimmier and odder as the extremism is becoming a lot more promiment in modern world. It's a matter of time until the things start to collide.

You can see the topics of the panopticon being prominent in the music: the fear in the instruments, the anger in the voices and the cover all represent the distant feeling of the modern world. The fast change of the things definitely makes the people like Turner and me to feel disconnected and disjointed from society, and that is the hardest strength of the record: it's a claustrophobical storm hitting you in the most fragile parts of the mind.

🌠: Every track
🐒❌: No track