This month I spoke to award-winning poet and theorist Alex Mazey, a contributing researcher on sociology and postmodern theory for the international academic journal Baudrillard Now, and author of the theory books Sad Boy Aesthetics (2021) and Living in Disneyland (2020), both published by Broken Sleep.
Alex’s debut poetry collection, Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition, was published in 2024 by Bad Betty Press. His next book is Rival Streamer, coming soon from Trickhouse Press.
We sat down to discuss his background, the influence of Jean Baudrillard and Mark Fisher, and his love of ‘sad boy’ rap music, especially the work of Lil Peep, as explored in Sad Boy Aesthetics. This was a great conversation — Alex and I share many of the same interests as writers, poets, and fans of music and video games.
For those of you who want to watch this episode as a video, scroll to the bottom of the post, or follow Strange Exiles on YouTube.
Recommendations from Alex Mazey
Alex mentions the Battle Royale manga as one of his favourite books as a young teen — it kicked off in 2000, the same year the film was released. Both are based on the original 1999 novel by Koushun Takami. It is widely credited for kicking off the ‘YA dystopia’ genre that has become a literary and box office staple in the last two decades, from The Hunger Games to Maze Runner to Squid Game (and countless others), end even games like Fortnite.
In retrospect, it makes sense that this is one of Alex’s early influences, featuring as it does themes of teenage disaffection, and a pared-down, futuristic Japanese setting that lends itself to liminal vibes. The aesthetic of the manga led him into reading translated books by Japanese authors, including Yukio Mishima (check out Confessions of a Mask and the short but brilliant Star if you are new to him, and the incredible documentary Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, directed by Paul Schrader with a score by Philip Glass).
From there, the young Alex found his way to Nietszche, and a more in-depth exploration of philosophy — eventually gravitating towards the work of Jean Baudrillard, and becoming a regular contributor to the journal Baudrillard Now. As followers of Strange Exiles will know, I’m a massive admirer of his thinking and writing, especially the seminal text Simulacra and Simulation (I mention its influence on The Darkest Timeline, and connections to the 1960s/70s novels of Philip K. Dick). Alex’s first essay on Buadrillard and Mark Fisher appeared in issue 2 of Baudrillard Now; here’s a more recent essay exploring similar territory.
I love Alex’s description of why Baudrillard resonated so much — capturing for him the experience of “the way you feel walking through Primark after drinking two Monster Energy and eating a Burger King.” He namechecks Fatal Strategies and his theories on reversibility as other key concepts from Baudrillard.
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
— Jean Baudrillard
This leads into a discussion of Alex’s latest essay series, ‘Baudrillard X Galaxy Quest’, which runs to 8 parts (so far). Read it at the following links: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8. It’s a fascinating series, wringing some brilliant insights about culture, reality and psychology from the 1999 comedy starring Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver. I also mention the U.S.S. Callister episodes of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror as another example of metafictional play with the concepts and aesthetics of the original Star Trek.
Alex mentions Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky, both of whom he discovered in university. He goes on to recommend Hyperculture by Byung Chul-Han, another writer I greatly admire. I later briefly mention Guy DeBord’s The Society of the Spectacle as a similarly aesthetically-pleasing example of philosophical writing, connected to many of the topics Alex and I discuss.
We switch over to fiction, and Alex praises the author and poet Tao Lin as a “modern existentialist”. He runs a great Substack these days — his 2009 breakthrough into mainstream awareness was Shoplifting From American Apparel. His more recent book Leave Society is also a classic of alt-lit / autofiction, discussed in this 2021 profile in The New Yorker.
Before university, Alex discovered poetry, and would go on to publish (as mentioned above) with the respected indie presses Broken Sleep and Bad Betty. His collection Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition dropped in 2024. Here’s Alex performing his poem ‘Certified Classic’ for Bad Betty:
Next we talk about Mark Fisher, including the classic Capitalist Realism, and his early work on the k-punk blog (collected in a gorgeous edition by Repeater). For Alex, it was Fisher’s work exploring the concepts of ‘hauntology’ that drew him in — this is best discovered through his seminal text Ghosts of My Life.
For both of us, Fisher’s writing about music was a key part of his appeal — Alex mentions the resonance of the ‘vaporwave’ genre as a key element of this, for me it was Fisher’s interview with Burial (a full transcript of which is published here by The Wire). Alex’s key vaporwave recommendation is 2184’s breakthrough Birth of a New Day, from 2015, and the Fisher book he recommends is the unfinished and posthumously published Post-Capitalist Desire.
After the break, we move from music and Fisher into a discussion of video games. I mention my recent obsession with the brilliant and immersive Cyberpunk 2077, and an early fixation on the Sega Megadrive. For Alex, a key example is the liminal horror of Silent Hill 2, which he writes about in Sad Boy Aesthetics. Alex also mentions the ‘cozy’ classic Animal Crossing, and we discuss Nintendo’s excellent fan-service in providing free access to legacy titles from early systems, including Sega, though the Switch and Switch 2. There are some fascinating ideas to unpack here about how aesthetics and nostalgia are intimately connected, including how titles like Grand Theft Auto have paid tribute to 80s and 90s musical and cultural aesthetics in games like Vice City, Liberty City and San Andreas.
Finally, we get down to talking about Lil Peep and other ‘sad boy’ artists, and how Alex set about exploring the aesthetics of Peep and his contemporaries in Sad Boy Aesthetics. If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Gustav Ahr, aka Peep, Alex kindly put together a playlist of some of his best work, along with examples from collaborators like Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, peers like Yung Lean and Bladee, some of the influences the scene draws upon, like My Chemical Romance, Burial and Nirvana, and even progenitors like Morrissey (who Alex argues, in his book, is the original ‘sad boy’ lyricist). It kicks off with this collaboration between Peep and Wicca Phase — listen to the full playlist here.
Peep started out as a pioneer of ‘Soundcloud rap’ — eventually forming a core part of Goth Boi Clique, alongside some of the artists mentioned above, and included in Alex’s playlist. For Alex, this online approach to creation, collaboration, and the forming of collectives is a key influence on the aesthetics these rappers came to embody. That a rapper like Peep crossed from the world of the bedroom rapper into the next — one of international stardom and unimaginable commercial appeal — is one of the things that makes his story so enduringly interesting.
We discuss and compare the aesthetic approaches and tragic ends of Lil Peep and Kurt Cobain, and Alex brings up a quotation from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, where he wrote about Nirvana’s lasting impact on culture. Here’s an excerpt from that passage:
In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to have give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realising it is a cliché. The impasse that paralysed Cobain in precisely the one that Fredric Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in ‘a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, where all that is left is to imitate dead styles in the imaginary museum’.
I think all of this could apply equally to Peep, but Peep’s fixation on status symbols of money and wealth, and his unequivocal endorsement of hedonism as escape, mean that Peep’s work could only have been possible in a post-Cobain world. Alex argues that Nirvana must be understood differently, as a product of anti-establishment 90s values, rather than post-millennial, terminally-online-era angst. Alex references some of Fisher’s thoughts on Drake and Kanye West to underline this point:
A secret sadness lurks behind the 21st century’s forced smile. This sadness concerns hedonism itself, and it’s perhaps in hip-hop—the genre that has been most oriented to pleasure over the past 20-odd years—where this melancholy has registered most deeply. Drake and Kanye West are both morbidly fixated on exploring the miserable hollowness at the core of super-affluent hedonism. No longer motivated by hip-hop’s drive to conspicuously consume—they long ago acquired anything they could have wanted—Drake and West instead dissolutely cycle through easily available pleasures, feeling a combination of frustration, anger, and self-disgust, aware that something is missing, but unsure exactly what it is. This hedonist’s sadness—a sadness as widespread as it is disavowed—was nowhere better captured than in the doleful way that Drake sings, “we threw a party/yeah, we threw a party,” on Take Care’s “Marvin’s Room”.
Fisher’s review of Drake’s Nothing Was The Same, also for Electronic Beats, is also worth reading to unpack more of his perspective on the sadness at the heart of post-90s rap. A lot of this, including our discussion of the use of ‘liminal’ aesthetics and spaces in Sad Boy music, connects directly to Fisher’s writings on hauntology in Ghosts of My Life.
Alex also mentions Ken Hollings, who wrote an introduction for Sad Boy Aesthetics, who argues there that we must now find a way to resist music, as much as to enjoy it, due to the darker territory that artists like Peep explore. This leads us on to discuss the excellent (if heartbreaking) documentary about Peep’s life, Lil Peep: Everybody’s Everything.
This is a comprehensive account of Peep’s life and journey, framed by letters written to Gustav Ahr by his grandfather, John Womack, a prominent left-wing academic. We discuss whether Womack’s politics were an influence on Ahr’s creation of the Lil Peep persona, and the interesting contradictions that arise between the (at first glance) materialist concerns of a track like ‘Benz Truck’ and the Marxist approaches in Womack’s beliefs and published writing.
One of the themes Alex’s book describes so well is the way Peep and other Sad Boy artists evoke materialist, hypercapitalist desire by making it feel ‘haunted’ — arguably showing the emptiness at the heart of capitalist consumerism and excess, much as Fisher describes “the miserable hollowness at the core of super-affluent hedonism.”
We finish by discussing misogyny in Peep’s lyrics, and how this relates to his deconstruction of ‘gangsta rap’ tropes, and masculinity more generally. I tend to agree with Alex (and his wife) here — the invocation of misogynist tropes being used to define Peep as a misogynist seems like missing the point, even if some of the lyrics he and the GBC rappers used do induce the occasional wince of disapproval.
Just before we finish, Alex mentions Marc Augé’s Non-Places, one of the best books about liminal space out there (also referenced by Fisher).
Here’s the full episode on YouTube:
After we spoke, Alex got some good news - he’ll be teaching at the New Centre for Research and Practice next year, going deeper into some of his existing interests in Baudrillard, Fisher, and perhaps even Sad Boy music. Read more about his new position on his blog, below.
Next up…
I’ll announce the next guest on Strange Exiles very soon, along with some news about our plans going forward for podcasting with Revol Press. We’ll be more closely aligning these two projects, so you’ll be seeing more Revol authors and subjects under the Strange Exiles banner in the months to come.
For now, keep an eye on the new section of the Strange Exiles site, Crisis Masculinity — an ongoing, book-length essay project I am writing and publishing here over the next 12 months, digging into the ‘manosphere’ and male identity, and how these operate in late-stage capitalism. It’s incredibly exciting to be kicking this project off — read more about it, and how you can get involved, in the post below.
A huge thank you to the people who took the plunge and signed up for paid subscriptions this month to support the publication of Crisis Masculinity, and my ongoing work on Strange Exiles. I’m incredibly indebted to you! I hope this is a new phase for this community of readers and listeners we’ve built here together. More details about the extra benefits for paid subscribers are covered in the post above. If you can afford to upgrade to paid, hit the button:
Until next time, look after each other — and thanks for your support.
-Bram, Glasgow, October 2025
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