half-formed thoughts on the political economy of Nirvanna the Band the Show
this post is about [matt johnson, the character] and {Matt Johnson, the director}. i hope its formatting is parseable.
this is a show about alienation and its effects on the parasitic non-haute-bourgeoisie / consumer aristocracy. {Matt Johnson} didnt know that thats what its about, and that (the fact that he didn't know) is why it is so rich. the core tension at the heart of ntbts isnt actually about their relationship or fame or music but about the fantasy of totally unalienated labor that the band represents to him.
this hit me the hardest in The Buena Vista Social Club, a very sweet and funny episode. the ending montage is basically the first time we see [matt] enjoying interacting with people other than jay, on his own, in Cuba, a country marked by poverty but with the kinds of social relations only found on the margins of capitalism or outside it to some extent. it serves as a little glimpse into that contradiction at the heart of the show (the veil gets pulled back a bit in Viceland too in their interactions with homeless people and street musicians? but it seems moreso played for laughs there).
[{mMatt jJohnson}] is constantly alienating himself from the social world via fiction and metafiction, both its [{consumption}] and its {creation}. but more than anything else, he fears the alienation of his labor. in Cuba, he experiences kindness, welcoming, surpassing the language barrier, intertwined with the shock of meeting people who have never seen an iPhone, meeting a man who sets fires and herds cattle, dancing with a group of kids who welcome him in. he's from Queen Street.
he's apart from jay for just a day. he's torn away from his little world - immersed in a revolutionary proletarian culture, surrounded by people who welcome him in despite the language barrier and his obvious commodification of their culture. he's torn - he's inspired by the promise of fame, he realizes he misunderstood the situation, he says these are just some stupid cuban dancers - he puts down the phone and looks and for a second he gets it, or starts to. and i think he might even realize what makes Cuba Cuba, and what makes its art and culture so greatly different from what he's used to in klanada.
and the realization shocks him, and [he] misses jay, so he goes back home. he goes back to toronto because unalienated labor & the material comfort he's used to are irreparably at odds. {He} goes back to insisting, in interviews and podcasts, that klanadian culture is just the nicest, the coolest, people are so good to you. (thought shamelessly ripped from @petrodragonicapocalypse <3).
expand scope. matt's control over jay, his dramatic highs and lows, his suicide attempts and time-turning, at the thought of jay leaving him, it's all inextricable from his discomfort with the idea of alienated, or even socially-organized, labor. jay getting a job doesn't stick in matt's craw so much because it would take jay away from him - compare his reaction to jay having a girlfriend (upset, lashing out, misogynistic) to his reaction to jay wanting a part time job as a jingle writer (suicidal, life-ruining, show-ending) - it's because it would merge their little self-contained u/dys-topia with (alienated, albeit non-exploited) labor.
it's the link between his watsonian deepest fear (losing jay) and [matt from ntbts]/{Matt Johnson}'s doyleist deepest fear (being proletarianized, no longer being [a trust fund kid LARPing as a] {a famous and well-regarded} self-sustaining artist, having to work the same kind of menial job as the people [delivering his pizza and showing him around clothing and tech stores] {hanging around in the background, sometimes almost prop-like, in everything he makes})
everything about [matt] and jay's life is sustained by the labor they abhor. they get food delivered, they pester customer service workers, hell, the money in matt's trust fund didn't come from nowhere. this is nothing out of the ordinary for a good old artist-story. where it becomes especially interesting, though, is the fact that they have nothing to show for it. they are parasitic (in the political economy sense, not the Nazi sense, don't have a cow, man!) without even cultural output to show for it, just a constant spinning of wheels. {Matt and Jay}, on the other hand, bear a similar economic and social position without the futility and stagnation.
for all that Matt's work is intentionally harshly self-critical, i think that recognition of the petit-bourgeois (and thus slowly dying) nature of Artistic Individuality is beyond his grasp. he imagines his idea of “making it” as being disconnected from fame and fortune per se - less about money and more about “self-expression” - but still this desire for self-expression and self-dissection is ultimately just as bourgeois a goal as if he were in it for the money in the first place, and this is the one part of his process that he’s not self-aware of.
"it's cogent, but because his sole goal is "making it" (even if hidden behind characters, the fact that this is the central premise of ntb is absolutely a reflection of a real feeling in real life matt and jay), everything is kind of secondary. so if he "makes it", if he gets the attention and the funding and the license to do what he loves, he views everything that led him there as necessary and proof of the truth of his worldview" -phyrex h. @phywreks, 2026
at the end of the day: the Rivoli is the resolution of the contradiction between bourgeois-imperialist social life and true artistic novelty, and the Buena Vista Social Club is the promise of a higher form of art, art serving a purpose, and matt will always be inspired by, not the promise of that reconceptualization of art, but the possibility of cannibalizing it, and he will always be let down but quietly pleased by the nameless and non-famous Cuban dancers, and then he will always come home from Cuba, and {[he]} will always write pastiches of rap {that win awards}, and they are never getting that show
