The Raygun debacle (Australian breakdancer) is so fking rich in contemporary rs-approved debate

Aside from the actual physical comedy of the performance, more and more details and touchstones relevant to contemporary culture are emerging from the "controversy".

Like she's literally a middle-aged Deleuzean academic who writes essays on breakdancing, but performs with all the pizzazz of an introductory voguing class at a white, gentrified, pseudo-alternative part of a liberal city. So immediately you think: how did she do it?

And that's surely academic privilege, i.e. she can write applications and justify her position in speech and prose far better than, say, a poor teenager from a little-talked-about part of Australia.

Then there's this appropriation angle, where she's basically performing a black dance, created by black people on an incredibly corrupt, morally dubious, white, Western stage and not even doing it performatively. Australia is literally a nation of wiggers - from the Greeks, to the Lebanese, to the Italians, to Scots-Irish eshays - every one has a subsection of people who explicitly celebrate and emulate black culture. Yet here's an Australian non-wigger woman failing to be performatively performative. In Baudriallard's terms, a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes—through sociocultural compression—truth in its own right.

So Raygun's performance is literally hyperreal, taking the simulacrum of Australian Wiggerdom and distorting it again, becoming a third order sign. A hollow, neutralised, "white women voguing" tier shadow of something else, which itself basically reflects the neoliberal psyche.

"Babe, wake up, a Deleuzean professor just did a kangaroo hop into Big Spin Laydown on The Olympics breakdancing". We are not living in reality.

Welcome to the hyperreal.