The Third-World Is Probably the Future

At least Human Nature still has some cultures out there to freely inhabit!

Remember 30 years ago when grunge girls were still unashamedly and unambiguously feminine? Well, they still are, just not in the First World.

I’m usually not a fan of those amateur YouTube song-cover videos, but I stumbled across a young singer-songwriter named Alicia Widar who does some pretty good ones. She picks great songs to cover and makes them all her own. Her performances are simple: just her melancholy vocals and acoustic guitar. And just like the grunge girls of the early 90s, she does not have any pronouns in her bio.

Straight outta the early 90s: singer-songwriter Alicia Widar

Nowadays, American cultural elites tell young people, “Hey, that awkwardness and confusion and self-consciousness you feel? That’s certainly not you experiencing the same exact thing that millions of other people your age feel — and have felt in generations past — from trying to navigate a fast-changing, terribly artificial world while simultaneously forging your own identity within that world! No, those feelings of awkwardness and confusion and self-consciousness must mean . . . that you were born in the wrong body! And if you just let us rip out your uturus and cut off your tits and maybe add a fake penis manufactured like sausage out of your thigh tissue, you’ll be a proper man, and all those feelings of confusion and awkwardness and self-consciousness will go away forever, because you will be, thanks to the expensive surgeries we perform and the lifetime of artificial hormones we inject you with, your true and natural self!”

In the case of this talented young musician, I am happy to report that she does not appear to have any pronouns in her bio or demonstrate any transgender tendencies whatsoever. How did she go grunge in the 2020s without succumbing to the rainbow-pride mind-virus that has so horribly infected youth culture throughout the West? I wondered about this, until she mentioned in one of her videos that she is Brazilian, so English is her second language. Well, that perfectly explains it! She escaped the most pernicious influences of America’s rotten culture by not being American.

Fortunately, there is an entire world outside of the evil transnational empire known as the First World. In the Anglosphere, our ruling class seems determined to destroy everything of any potential value in the countries they govern, including the younger generations’ fertility and their capacity to form families naturally. While Globohomo Inc. has collected satrapies across the Second and Third World, there are also nations, like Hungary and Argentina, that stubbornly refuse the Great Satan’s yoke. From these nations may well emerge the vibrant cultures of the future.

Back to Alicia Widar. In addition to her YouTube videos (which include a few originals in addition to the covers), she has made a handful of studio recordings that she has released independently on all the big streaming platforms (like Spotify). Here’s a cover video she did of the Alice in Chains song Down in a Hole, so you can hear for yourself how good she is:

For comparison, here’s the original by Alice in Chains:

I think I actually prefer Ms. Widar’s cover to the original — and I say that as someone who loves Alice in Chains (or at least the original iteration of the band with Layne Staley), especially their album Dirt. I wouldn’t say that her version is better, only that I prefer it. Her version is uniquely hers and is so different from the original, that it’s really difficult to compare them.

Now, I wondered why I preferred her rendition to theirs. I practically grew up with the Alice in Chains version (or at least I formed my post-adolescent “narrative self” to a soundtrack that definitely included this song), and normally that’s how I rank my preferences when it comes to different versions of the same song: whichever one I was familiar with first is the one I generally prefer, regardless of whether that version is the original or a cover. Every now and then, I’ll hear the original version of a song I’m already familiar with as a cover, and I actually prefer the original, but I don’t think I have ever preferred a cover version that I first heard after I was already familiar with the original. Nevertheless, in this case, after a lifetime of listening to Layne Staley sing the original, I think I prefer the way Alicia Widar sang it in her YouTube video. Why is that?

Beyond the qualities of Miss Widar’s voice, which is phenomenal and matches the mood of the song perfectly, I think there’s something else at play: gender roles.

This is a sad, self-pitying song. Sure, who among us doesn’t sometimes indulge the guilty pleasure of self-pity? But most of us prefer to keep our pity parties private (or at least we should, thought that is becoming rarer with each generation), and we certainly don’t enjoy crashing the pity parties other people throw for themselves. With this song, however, the melody is so hauntingly beautiful that we can enjoy the performance of the musician who sings it well. Perhaps while listening to it, we can vicariously experience the dark emotions in a cathartic way, like how Aristotle describes the role of Tragedy in Poetics.

Given the way we are wired, biologically, I think that with this song, it is probably easier to indulge the professions of self-pity from a female singer than from one that is male. If a man complains about being in a hole, the natural response is to ask, “Okay, what are you doing to get out of this hole?” And that, too, is as it should be. Because for a man in a hole, the deadliest thing for him to do is to embrace life in the hole and to make it part of his identity.

I’m not saying it’s easy for women to be in a hole without an exit strategy, but for men it leads straight to those “deaths of despair” that have become epidemic in the Godforsaken West.

For a man, you have to have a goal, and you have to make some effort, however humble and ineffective that effort might be, to attain that goal.

All of this is probably true of women as well, but it’s even more true — and much more a matter of life and death — for men.

So I probably prefer Alicia Widar’s version of Down in a Hole because I’m being sexist. But, hey, gender is biologically real. We are a sexually dimorphic species, and it’s contrary to Human Nature to treat men and women as if they are identical and interchangeable, which is why the propaganda and brainwashing and censorship are so omnipresent and heavy-handed around these issues.

Our civilization is built on some awfully big and very destructive lies, and the lies about gender are among the biggest and most destructive. Fortunately, those lies haven’t captured the rest of the world, like they’ve ensorcelled the West, and that leaves a lot of fertile ground for new, healthier cultural movements to form and flourish. A feminine grunge girl with no pronouns in her bio and not even the least hint of transgender tendencies¹ is possible someplace like Brazil, but much less so in the US of Gay or the rest of the degenerate Anglosphere. Maybe after the United States of Enron collapses, we can learn to be Human again from the countries and cultures where people never lost that ability.

1. Miss Widar did sing the lyrics of the song Down in a Hole exactly as written by Jerry Cantrell and originally sung by Layne Staley, and this includes the line, “Look at me now, I’m a man who won’t let himself be.” Now, if you think singing these words counts as a “transgender tendency,” then watch her Q&A video to see how she talks and presents herself when not singing. This woman presents 100% as a woman, and a feminine woman at that: