This is a conversation with Jason Myles, author, podcaster, musician and filmmaker, and the brains behind cult podcast THIS IS REVOLUTION. On YouTube, Jason interviews and co-hosts deep dives into left-wing politics, pop culture, anarchism, sports and more, often hosting daily live shows from his home in Mexico.
He joins us to talk about his new video essay series Kayfabe: The Political Burlesque of Modern American Politics, produced in association with a new video platform offering a fair deal for creators, Means TV.
We cover everything from the symbolism of professional wrestling and sports entertainment, to Jason’s deep roots in 90s Oakland hip-hop, his time touring with his bands Le Fin Absolute Du Monde and Bitter Lake, and much, much more.
Kayfabe, hip-hop, metal and more
We start out talking about Jason’s experiences growing up in and around the Oakland hip-hop scene in the early to mid-90s, which rap fans will know was a mecca for innovative lyrics and production. He mentions Del Tha Funky Homosapien’s early album I Wish My Brother George Was Here as an example of hip-hop that felt fresh and experimental at the time. Here’s Del interviewed by DJ Vlad about the making of the album.
We both mention Oakland rap crew Souls Of Mischief, and their clique Hieroglyphics. Their debut album ’93 til Infinity is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time. Jason mentions the late Saafir, and his album Boxcar Sessions from 1994. Stones Throw alumni Peanut Butter Wolf also gets a mention, as do Living Legends, Planet Asia, E-40, and Too $hort.
Jason also makes it clear that the music scene in Oakland was thriving across genres, with regular shows from punk bands like AFI and others attracting a crossover audience. Heavy music is the genre that would eventually gain Jason’s full attention — we moved on to discuss his post-metal and trip-hop influenced duo La Fin Absolute Du Monde. You can find their album Killing The Host at Neo Noir Music. They also carry a track by Jason’s later project, Bitter Lake, named for the 2015 documentary of the same name by Adam Curtis.
We then go on to talk about the origins of THIS IS REVOLUTION, which has an incredibly engaged audience of 18,000 or more over on YouTube. Jason broadcasts shows there almost daily, with a mixture of video essays, interviews, and cultural deep dives into various topics. He interviewed me for TIR when my book came out - that’s worth revisiting if you missed it at the time. This Is Revolution briefly lived under the auspices of the Mark Fisher-founded Zer0 Books during the tenure of the then-editor Doug Lain (now host and editor of Sublation Magazine).
After the end of the Lain era, Jason launched the podcast independently, and has been running it ever since. Later, he talks about Lain’s early influence on his writing and podcasting, and we mention a few projects which sprang up in the wake of Lain’s departure from Zer0, including Alfie Bown’s Everyday Analysis (they published Jason’s short work I Was A Teenage Anarchist, now sold out). You could argue Revol Press is part of the post-Lain diaspora — Mike Watson, founder of Revol, was also a Zer0 author.
We briefly talk about the Bristol ‘trip-hop’ sound of the mid to late 90s, which spawned bands like Massive Attack, Portishead and others. This was a direct influence on La Fin Absolute Du Monde, but it was also a galvanising sound for me as a young guy. I moved to Bristol for university in 1998, and had the good fortune to see Portishead, Massive Attack, Reprazent and even a rare Beth Gibbons solo show during my time there. It was a good era for music. Here’s Portishead performing Wandering Star on Jools Holland in 1994.
Jason also mentions touring with Godflesh, the project by ex-Napalm Death member Justin Broadrick. This is a band Roy Christopher and I discussed at greater length in Episode 26 of Strange Exiles — Roy’s book Escape Philosophy was directly inspired by the 1989 album Streetcleaner. The film director Jason briefly mentions is J. Douglas Smith, and the movie is The Period, which as he says, is about a woman whose period never ends. Sadly it’s no longer on Netflix, and I couldn’t find the trailer!
We go on to talk about Jason’s video essays and interviews, many of which you can watch free on his YouTube channel. More recently, he’s struck up a deal with Means TV, a new platform for cultural, political and philosophical content that aims to offer a fairer deal for creators, and a new home for podcasters and podcast listeners.
Jason’s new essay series, which we go on to talk about for most of the rest of the show, is called Kayfabe: The Political Burlesque of Modern American Politics. He also has video essays there on Blaxploitation, the LA riots of the early 1990s, and the ‘fake news’ phenomenon among other topics. If you want to watch Part 1 of the Kayfabe series, you can sign up at Means TV for a free 7-day trial. Use the code THISISREVOLUTION and you’ll get 20% off the $9.99 a month cost of accessing their library of content.
Jason’s Kayfabe video essay was inspired in part by another Means TV documentary — Steven DeCastro’s Revolution Selfie. This sounds really interesting, so I’ll be watching it — it’s about the New People's Army (NPA), a Maoist guerrilla force in the Philippines with whom DeCastro was embedded.
In examining the rules and symbolism of kayfabe, one essential research thread Jason mentions is the Vice documentary series Dark Side of the Ring. You can watch all the episodes on Vice, or dig about for paywall-free links — UK viewers can watch 3 seasons via ITV.
These are incredible documentaries, and even if you have no interest in professional wrestling or sports entertainment, I defy you not to find them compelling. The men and women who give their bodies to this industry, often dying young, are remarkable character studies. If you find yourself falling down the Dark Side rabbit hole, you’ll also want to check out Mr. McMahon on Netflix, and Who Killed WCW? (also on Vice).
We talk about The Montreal Screwjob, which saw Canadian wrestler Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart lose his title, despite it being a hometown bout, where he would rightly have expected to win (and retire in a blaze of glory). Instead, he was beaten by long-time rival Shawn Michaels, in a move that (so the story goes) was an unscripted power play devised by Vince McMahon to humiliate Hart, as he outlines in this clip from Dark Side of the Ring.
The endless speculation over whether this is true or not is one of wrestling’s favourite debates — and nicely illustrates the grey territory between kayfabe and reality. As Jason asks, was the Montreal Screwjob a work, a shoot, or both? This ambiguity would go on to be explored in the narrative arc of the ‘Attitude Era’, with McMahon’s entire family pulled into the storylines, playing out a fictionalised version of a real struggle for control of the company, and wrestling as an industry.
This arguably cumulates with McMahon’s real-life acquisition of rival wrestling company WCW, leading to what is undeniably one of the greatest moments of broadcast TV. Vince appearing unexpectedly to crow about the acquisition was both a pitch-perfect wrestling promo — you can feel the heat as the crowd pops — and a very real corporate power move. Reality and kayfabe are at this point inextricable — one mirrors the other. This is a theme Jason’s later video essays in the series will explore.
It would be remiss not to mention the allegations against McMahon, which led to his exit from the company. The recent Netflix documentary, which was being filmed when the allegations surfaced, does a decent job of showing how the company’s questionable corporate culture and the increasingly sexualised content it produced under McMahon’s tenure were inextricably linked. It’s also true that some of the allegations against McMahon are so colourful, one could imagine them being part of a WWE storyline.
Thankfully the company has stopped short of referencing the sex trafficking allegations in contemporary kayfabe — storylines of the vivid and sensational kind McMahon clearly relished are conspicuous by their absence from the more athletic, but markedly less interesting matches and rivalries that constitute the dismally-named “Netflix Era” of WWE. Love him or loathe him, Vince knew how to create a compelling angle for a wrestler, and tell a good story with it — even if that involved him getting lamped in the face with a bedpan.
We go on to talk about kayfabe escaping the world of wrestling in the 1990s and infecting the broader culture — in particular the Jerry Springer show. The recent Netflix documentary about Springer, Fights, Camera, Action, goes into a lot of detail about the lengths to which producers would goad, taunt and rile up the guests before they appeared on TV, but stops short of admitting that some guests were paid actors.
It’s hard to deny that while the violence on Springer’s show was real, the ‘storylines’ often felt fake — the sound of a boxing ring bell, followed by guests flinging themselves at each other, ripping off clothes and chunks of hair, was certainly a spectacle that was of a piece with WWE’s Attitude Era.
Jason mentions Morton Downey Jr. (no relation to the Iron Man actor and his also-famous Dad), a prototype ‘shock jock’ and therefore in some ways a forerunner of figures like Howard Stern, or even Joe Rogan. The documentary about this sensationalist commentator is called Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie.
This leads into some reflections on the early 90s talk show milieu — Jason shouts out the Arsenio Hall show for being genuinely groundbreaking, in terms of the topics it covered, and the artists it featured. I’ll take any excuse to share this clip, the greatest hip-hop cypher of all time, from the show’s final episode.
Jason briefly mentions The Grifters, a 1990 movie with John Lithgow, Anjelica Huston and John Cusack. I’ve not seen it in years, but Jason says it’s got some interesting parallels with our scam-infested era. He gives the example of the Theranos scandal as proof we live in an age of grift — if you haven’t seen it, The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley is a good overview of Elizabeth Holmes’ activities.
Jason goes on to talk about Ana Kasparian, host of The Young Turks, and the perception that her criticism of the left is a form of right-wing grift. There’s plenty of people who would agree with this, you can probably even find some of them here on Substack, but Jason is skeptical — his thoughts on how commentators like Kasparian make money and maintain their credibility are worthy of consideration. He links this to the misappropriation of funds from the Black Lives Matter movement by organisers and activists — another example of grift on a grand scale, despite good intentions and impassioned activism on a vital issue.
I talk about the Keir Starmer government’s strange echoes of Trumpian policy in the UK, from their celebratory ad about deportations to their Scottish wing’s odd mumblings about setting up their own version of DOGE. I see these as very short-sighted strategies from nominally left / liberal parties unwilling to do what their voter base wants, and levy taxes on the rich. Jason believes we can still mount an effective resistance to right-wing policies, especially on immigration, if we unify — and use tactics like those employed by LA activists to disrupt ICE raids in their city.
There’s a brief mention for Jason’s recent interview with Ashley Frawley, which was a deep dive into the proposed changes to euthanasia laws. Then we start to wind up, with some chat about The Crisis Papers, the zine-style essay series available through Jason’s website. There’s a manifesto coming up there from his occasional collaborator Deep State Kuba. And keep an eye on Damage Magazine for the new piece Jason mentioned - he has one from 2023 up now about Ibram X. Kendi.
Up next…
Join me next time for a conversation with punk-rap poet, promoter and podcaster Mark McG, frontman of Glasgow legends The Girobabies, and host of You Call That Radio. We’ll talk about his career in the Scottish DIY music scene, his prolific adventures in podcasting, and the incredible new Giros album, Dreams Are Mental.
We’ll be back soon. Until then… take care of each other.
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