Music
For anyone who came of age in the noughties, back in the early (and arguably golden) days of mass internet access, conspiracies were a fun corner of the los-res web to get lost in. The likes of the HAARP weather machine, John Titor, the other Area 51, water-fuelled cars, FEMA camps, Bohemian Grove and even the relatively apolitical theories about 9/11 were all symptomatic of a more innocent time; one built on a mix of nineties pop culture paranoia, and early evidence of how human epistemology becomes muddied in the face of infinite streams of information.
In short, the appeal of these outlandish narratives about how the world ‘really’ worked lay in the fact that you didn’t have to ideologically buy into any of it. Grainy videos of supposed ‘FEMA camps’ or Alex Jones’ now-disproved (in hilariously droll manner by Jon Ronson) footage of weird goings-on at Bohemian Grove were fun to send your friends via MSN Messenger. That was about as far as the immersion went for many viewers. Pre-big tech domination, the internet was a far more user-autonomous place. Sites and platforms hadn’t yet discovered how to trap you with malicious, data-scraping algorithms. In short, you were able to click away from the silly videos and forums.
One person who did venture deeper down the rabbit hole, however, was Muse frontman Matt Bellamy. In this late-noughties period, Bellamy became what we’d today call ‘red-pilled’. Conspiratorial flights of fancy and their elaborate world-building lends well to Muse’s operatic space rock and, in some form or another, this stuff had long been on his mind. References to ‘free-thinking’ date back to earlier albums by the Devon trio, with ‘Citizen Erased’ from 2001 breakthrough ‘Origin of Symmetry’, offering a grand vision of humans throwing off the shackles of society’s enforced ways of thinking. Bellamy took his own advice and, despite his band becoming chart-topping stadium-fillers, felt comfortable expressing some controversial views, such as declaring in 2006 that 9/11 was an ‘inside job’ (although by 2012 he’d rolled back on this take).
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However, the ne plus ultra of Bellamy’s conspiratorial worldview is Muse’s 2009 glam rock epic ‘The Resistance’ (which, if you haven’t clocked it already, was of course released on September 11th). A brash, daft, sort-of conceptual stew of lyrical nonsense sprinkled with a few grains of acute socio-economic anger we’ll return to later. It’s internal language of uprisings, oppressive elites and sci-fi-inflected dystopia now reads as a fascinating, mass culture-penetrating (the album reached number one in 19 countries) document of a very different era of conspiracy culture.
First, it’s necessary to outline some of the album’s content. There’s the revolutionary pomp of ‘Uprising’ (a top 10 UK hit single), which encourages humanity to “flick the switch and open your third eye” in order to overthrow nefarious rulers that “push drugs that keep us all dumbed down”. There’s the self-explanatory ‘MK Ultra’ (Wikipedia is your friend if you’re unfamiliar with that one), ‘United States of Eurasia’, which intriguingly, if inelegantly, uses images of globalist power grabs as a metaphor for human connection; as well as ‘Unnatural Selection’, with its lines about “no religion or mind virus/is there a hope that the facts will ever find us”, which unfortunately, although logically given that his cultural reference points remain stuck around 2009, sounds like something Elon Musk would tweet.
A recurring reference point throughout the album is George Owell’s 1984: the first port of call for those seeking a language to describe oppressive politics. To give ‘The Resistance’ some credit; a couple of tracks, notably the title track, tap into the illicit romance side of 1984’s narrative, in service of some sweepingly romantic moments whose sincerity you can’t help go with, like ‘Resistance’s “it could be wrong, could be wrong” call and response vocal exchange. This image of love and sex as an emancipatory act continues with ‘Undisclosed Desires’, whose textures and rhythms attempt eroticism, and end up about as erotic as a prog rock trio from Devon can manage.
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But it’s Bellamy’s conspiratorial theorising that bulldozes through any and all other layers of ‘The Resistance’. It makes for a fascinating listen, given the last fifteen years of cultural and political changes. The dominant conspiracy theories of the album’s era were unique in that they appealed to willing participants across the political spectrum, although specifically those with anti-establishment tendencies. Beyond the aforementioned early-internet era hokum, the works of Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein (popular leftist thinkers of this period who utilised sharp analysis of economics, history and geopolitics to shed light on the power dynamics of global elites), and the considerably less academically-rigorous Zeitgeist documentary films could all have fallen under the ‘conspiracy theory’ banner in this era.
Cut to today, however, and the culture has regressed to a whole different form. For one, the works of those aforementioned intellectuals have long been proven correct, but their scholarly analysis of late capitalism’s failings never quite possessed the easily-graspable appeal of fantastical modern conspiracies. There’s the fact that this stuff is no longer a subcultural interest. Beyond the well-known nonsense dished out by populist world leaders about the ‘deep state’, in 2021, Statista found that a remarkable 15% of Americans believe in the QAnon conspiracy (which likely has its roots in an art collective prank).
The key difference, however, is the right-wing reactionary nature that these ideas have adopted. Climate change denial, Great Replacement theory (Google that one at your peril), rejections of trans and LGBTQ+ identity and a general backlash against progressive thinking (usually under the guise of ‘cultural marxism’) are now key tenets within the culture of conspiracy theories and their proponents. Something strange has happened to modern western conservatism. The right have seemingly wholly embraced these wild ideas, from Trump and much of the modern Republican party, to Suella Braverman and the swelling UK far-right, to the online ‘manosphere’ and its adjacent culture.
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As this 2023 investigation shows, in America, conspiracy theories that support Republican or right-wing causes are the dominant slant of these beliefs; such as mass shootings being faked to promote gun control laws, voting machines in the 2020 election being rigged and top Democrats being involved in child sex-trafficking rings. Things aren’t all that different in the UK, with research showing a similar left-right political divide on conspiracies, such as 31% of Leave voters believing that Muslim immigration is part of a deliberate plot to make Muslims the majority in Britain (a variant of the ‘great replacement’ theory), while the comparable figure for Remain voters stands at just 6%.
To clarify, it’s not that real acts of conspiratorial aggression by malicious actors don’t happen. It’s been proved, for example, that Perdue Pharma intentionally misled the public regarding the dangers of OxyContin. That’s a real, very destructive conspiracy. It’s also now widely known that Big Oil spent decades sublimating evidence of fossil fuel damage to the environment. Again, a real, provable act of conspiracy. However, much like Bellamy’s silly and archaic dystopian imagery, these are not the kind of stories that contemporary, right-leaning conspiracy culture is interested in telling.
Bellamy’s ideas do possess some intellectual rigour when viewed in the context of their relevance to the Great Recession and ensuing Occupy movements. ‘The Resistance’ came out in the wake of the financial collapse and, if reading it with a charitable eye, this adds a layer of accuracy to some of the album’s themes. The most on-the-nose lyric is ‘Uprising’s “it’s time the fat cats had a heart attack”, but there’s also an appearance from the now-familiar anti-political aphorism “we know that whoever holds the reins, nothing will change” (‘United States of Eurasia’). In light of the political response to the Great Recession, where the culprits were bailed out and the neoliberal order upheld, this is a blunt but undeniably accurate assessment.
The Occupy movement, which began in 2011 and continued for another several years, was a true mass movement against the very financial elite that the conspiracists of old and new both decry. There’s actually a meta-conspiracy that posits that batshit ideas like QAnon were deliberately disseminated by right-leaning interest groups because the Occupy movement, and its more accurate but comparably-mundane critique of elite financial capture was gaining a little too much popular traction. The truth, however, is probably darker; that the last twenty years of political and economic failure to provide societal narratives has led people to craft their own, more-extreme ideas of how the world works.
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Beyond the text itself, ‘The Resistance’ and Bellamy’s conspiratorial afterlife also reveals a lot about how the nature of these beliefs has changed across the ensuing 15 years. As if moving with the tides of change, Bellamy is now outspoken in his opposition to conspiracy theories. In 2022 he went as far as to admit, with impressive, Dunning-Kruger beating self-awareness that “I’m not an intellectually trained thinker. I made the usual mistakes that people from my background make, which is conspiracy theories and all that kind of stuff.”
Nonetheless, Bellamy and Muse have never really left the land of speculative, dystopian world-building. ‘The Resistance’ follow-up ‘The 2nd Law’ was inspired by Bellamy’s love of World War Z (seriously), while 2015’s ‘Drones’ title says it all, as does 2018’s retro-futuristic ‘Simulation Theory’. The band’s most recent album ‘Will of the People’ (another unashamedly on-the-nose title) is a lean, heavy collection that finds Bellamy in especially despairing mood, ending with a track titled ‘We Are Fucking Fucked’. No resistance or uprisings to be found here.
Despite his pessimism, Bellamy’s intellect has clearly expanded and his reflections on his own dabblings in conspiracism make for rare reading from a person who has escaped the clutches of its ill-informed worldview. In the same 2022 interview, he makes an excellent observation, one that surmises why people get suckered in by conspiratorial narrative-building: “In terms of human psychology, there’s a comfort that maybe human beings somewhere are in control,” he explains. “When the truth is far more frightening – there are no humans in control and it’s all a bunch of chaos.”
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Words: Tom Morgan
