Becoming the Fool: (A Hyper Online Take) On Bladee’s Beauty and Blind Faith Network Spirituality

by Matthew Lorence

Frankly, I’m going Ted Kaczynski mode. I have felt my brain rot off its stem while keeping up with the post-irony/post-cringe/post-sincerity cycle of social media. Watching my peers become infographic-pilled has made me lose hope in a legitimate anticapitalist organization. However, through a deep search for meaning and purpose, I think I have finally found a true savior: singer, rapper, and prophet, Bladee. Over the last year, I have been obsessively listening to Bladee’s 2021 album, The Fool: his most optimistic, accessible, and spiritually rich project yet. Bladee is a Swedish artist and member of the iconic underground rap group ‘Drain Gang,’ an enigmatic collective whose music takes influences from cloud rap, trap, trance, and other niche, online electronic genres like vaporwave and witch house. Throughout the 2010s, Drain Gang pioneered their novel sound by combining cloud rap tropes of drug use, depression, and materialistic flexing with esoteric references to folklore and spirituality- an enigmatic blend of the darkest elements of cloud rap and youthful playfulness that captivated a fanbase of internet fluent forum-dwelling teenagers. Over the last two years, the group has experienced an explosion in popularity coinciding with a transition from doomer Sad Boy rappers to a futuristic divine boy band. They have since begun converting their 4chan incel-leaning fanbase to a group of optimistic (and androgynous) young people searching for meaning (and magic) in their lives.
Though Bladee has always dabbled in spirituality both in his lyrics and visual art, his spiritual explorations pre-The Fool rarely moved beyond aestheticized Tumblr-esque explorations, seemingly devoid of actual religious practice. On The Fool, however, Bladee expands the realm of his spirituality from artistic garnish to a genuine theological fascination, rapping on one track how he was “Interning at faith but… just got hired”. Songs on The Fool suggest devout Christianity at one moment (“I’m praying to God, please god may you bless me”) and shameless idolization of others (“I’m not Christian but I’m busting down the cross”). The crossover of the two makes Bladee’s specific religious beliefs vague and fascinating. Though this ambiguity may appear as a lazy or even offensive co-option of religious beliefs, I find this spiritual aggregation to be both a) the most fascinating and beautiful aspect of The Fool and b) a legitimate foundation for a spiritual awakening among children of the internet epoch.
Rather than ripping aesthetics from legitimate religions without substantial exploration, The Fool promotes worship of aesthetic itself, taking bits and pieces from multiple theological practices and accepting them as simultaneously legitimate. The album orbits three central concepts: Ignorance, Beauty, and Agency, all of which are tied together through The Fool’s liturgical tracklist, culminating in a manifesto track that bridges the gap between the album’s philosophical base and hypermodern ideas such as network spirituality and global consciousness. In the world of The Fool, fairies are real, Jesus loves them, and he promised us both a good spot both in heaven and a step up in reincarnation. My time with The Fool and its contemporary philosophical movements made me realize that unabashed optimism, love, and make-believe are ten times more radical than ACAB Hello Kitty, and it’s time for spiritually-bankrupt NYU kids to take the while pill and become productive members of society… by listening to Bladee.

Blind Faith: Loss and Gain are the Same
The captivating philosophy of The Fool lies primarily in its mix-and-match approach to sundry spiritual practice, and the intro track “The Fool Intro” confronts these “contradictions”. The track begins with an electrifying beat drop featuring trace-style synths and Bladee’s reverb-coated (nearly otherworldly) voice pleading with the audience to “confess your sins,” calling out: “Saint George these demons in me, kill kill kill, kill kill kill kill kill”. This line has caused issues for me, both while walking down the street wearing AirPods muttering “kill kill kill” and while trying to decipher the specific philosophy of The Fool. “The Fool Intro” seems to place the album in a Catholic framework, both through the reference to repenting for one’s sins and the direct call to Catholic Saint George, a militant Saint often represented killing a dragon. This has large implications, the first being that Bladee is specifically Christian or Catholic as opposed to a nebulously “spiritual” (or gnostic) person, and the second being that his faith is actively violent or militant – that The Fool will be a direct missionary project to potentially convert the listener. This intuition is instantly subverted as Bladee invokes the character of the Fool for the first time, singing, “If you look at me and say I’m not drainy/You lying, I’m the fool…/ I don’t know anything”.
The ‘Fool’ is a tarot card that basically represents the adage “ignorance is bliss”. Users on Genius point out that this line could reference the Plato-recounted Socrates maxim “I know that I know nothing” which suggested Socrates’ humble attitude towards acquiring knowledge – that there will always be infinite things he does not know. Interestingly, Bladee has a line that almost exactly inverts this phrase in the song “Let’s Ride” where he confidently raps “I know what I know/ I know what I know” to affirm his newfound faith. Bladee suggests a complete ignorance to the truths of the world but insists that what he does know is, well, what he knows: his truth. Throughout the album, Bladee makes references to joker cards as a substitute for the Fool tarot card. The joker card is used both as a tool to disarm and confuse those who don’t understand him (“Pull a joker card on you, I didn’t mean to startle you” on ‘Trendy’) and as a description of how he feels discovering new truths about himself and the universe (“I’m dancing with the stars and I’m pulling Joker cards” on “egobaby”).
This “I’m the fool” line is also the first appearance of the “Drain” philosophy on The Fool. “Drain” (the central idea of the Drain Gang universe) is shorthand for the phrase “Loss and Gain are the same.” As explained by Bladee in an interview with i-D magazine “Drain is about loss and gain; it could be good or bad — you could be drained of energy or you could drain something to gain energy.” In Drain Gang lore, draining something (or taking its energy) is both a gain for the drainer and a loss for the thing being drained: the events are one in the same. On “The Fool Intro” Bladee directly confronts the listener: “You think I’m not draining” (taking and giving to these ideas) “you’re wrong: I’m the Fool.” “Drainism” is thus present throughout the album and gives way to some fascinating lines like the now-iconic: “I’m King Nothing I am nothing/ take a bunch of empty words and make them mean something” from “Hotel Breakfast.” Bladee continues to “Drain” ideas across the album; Catholicism on ‘The Fool Intro,’ ‘Let’s Ride’ and ‘Search True’, ideas of reincarnation on ‘Let’s Ride’ and ‘Thee 9 Is Up’ and various incarnations of Pagan/Wicken/Magick belief systems across other tracks. Most interestingly, on The Fool, each of these belief systems can coexist and provide meaning for listeners despite their historical clash.
Throughout The Fool, the key to finding Beauty is Agency: a force that Bladee simultaneously claims he does and does not have. Though the central idea of The Fool is that Bladee is, well, the ‘Fool’ in question, there are multiple moments where he suggests that he is a godlike figure who is able to manipulate reality around him with reality-bending bars like “How could I lose when I exist in something I made?” (BBY), “If I win I’m gonna get out of the rebirth cycle (Let’s Ride), “Change the tide/Just happy to be alive/visualize your change and go to that place” (I Want it That Way) and “Rain don’t drop till i say so/ Im the rain king ayo” (The Fool Intro). Recalling Saint George, Bladee’s “Blind Faith” seems to require the murder of one’s ego – direct participation in one’s de-intellectualization and transition to the whimsical worldview of love and adoration: ignorance as innocence. At the same time, The Fool’s Beauty is something that finds you, and not the other way around. Though one can actively change their mindset and attempt to enjoy reality more fully, Bladee also says that “The truth finds you/Intentions pure for all/and nothing’s unholy at all” (Search True). Bladee suggests that one must push to enlightenment and be pulled towards it concurrently (loss and gain are the same). In this way, The Fool is the embodiment of Drain. Bladee is at once a childlike spirit that absorbs energies around him and also a Saint-like spiritual warrior who translates the world around him into a positive and magical paradise.

Trendier than Them
“Trendy” is the Bladee song that prompted this essay and my fascination with Drain as a legitimate philosophy in general. On the track, Bladee lays out the central tenants of Drain – which we will return to – but more importantly, he remarks on the relevance of his spiritual journey saying his enlightenment does not make him:
“…holier than thou/but we’re trendier than them.”
This line electrifies the entire philosophy of The Fool, as Bladee reveals that his path towards spirituality is both a personal journey and a culturally relevant shift towards a cooler (more based) mode of interpreting the world. At the beginning of the track, Bladee tells the listener to “kill the part of you that’s not true to the heart of you,” and while this line is similar to a generic “be yourself” mantra, I couldn’t help but relate it to the “don’t kill the part of you that is cringe, kill the part of you that cringes” meme, a part of the“cringe/post-cringe” cycle I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. While that may seem like a stretch, I think that while the philosophy of The Fool is fascinating in a vacuum, but the content of the album is truly activated when considered within its context as an internet artifact. I purposefully mentioned that The Fool is a modern and internet-adjacent project not because the album references any internet content specifically but because Drain Gang is (whether they want to be or not) a niche internet commodity consumed primarily by people who are highly involved in online communities. The primary channel for consumption and discussion of Drain Gang products is web-based. Their genre-bending influences are mostly hyper-online artists, and their visual language is heavily shaped by internet art trends (though that is another essay in itself). These post-internet hunches are further solidified when investigating The Fool alongside current internet spirituality movements. Early in this essay, I described the magic of Bladee’s worship of aesthetics, a sentiment which may seem contradictory my criticism of the 2020s infographic era. However, I think that I could redefine the worship of “aesthetic” instead as an acceptance of “network spirituality”.
“Network spirituality,” as defined by online art collective Remilia Group, is “the futurist embrace of experiential hyperreality found in the web’s accelerated networks” – an internet ideology that suggests a spiritual connection to the online experience. Invoking occult concepts such as egregores (non-physical entities which form from an interaction between groups), network spirituality suggests that online activity is otherworldly and generates intangible connection and meaning between users. The disparate religious references in The Fool feel present in the network because they recontextualize old-world icons (angels, demons, gods, faith, community) onto the internet world by disseminating all real faith to listeners.
The popularity of network spirituality in conjunction with ideas such as global consciousness lead to a modern art movement called the “vibe shift”. On alt-podcast Wet Brain, internet spirituality writer Angelicism01 called the shift a “contemporary phenomenon of radical pivots in culture, self-organized … made possible by the esoteric new practice of ultra-high-speed maximalist posting… not-irony, post-irony, sincerity, return to irony – its a frenzy.” Bladee’s The Fool is that same frenzy. It is not ironic in its religious references (as some of DG’s early work may have been) nor is it post-ironic (as some drainer memes could be) – it is wholly sincere post-internet-post-vibe shift frenzy of emotional and spiritual awakenings disseminating through hyper online communities. Through the cult-like following of Bladee, he is reborn as a lain-esque persona with legitimate spiritual significance within the network: an internet angel.
The Fool, though, is a specifically important addition to network scripture compared to Bladee’s other works. The grueling combination of the Covid-19 pandemic, multiple political and social uprisings, wars, and the looming climate crisis has caused a deeply poisonous pessimism among young people (see the black pill). The setting is bleak, but it is from this black pilled hell that the “drain” ideology can rise and act as a beacon of hope. Drain Gang, in many ways, reflects Gen Z’s past and possible futures. If Drain Gang can move from a drugged-out doomer band to euphoric spiritual leaders – maybe we can too. The group’s effortless combination of cloud rap and electronic music is about as relevant as a genre of music could be, and the music requires a baseline amount of internet experience to discover, let alone understand the variety of influences, references, and visual-cultural information. The music is ‘online’ enough to be culturally relevant but personal enough to be emotional. We experience an overwhelming amount of information every day, and The Fool (and the Drain philosophy as a whole) offers us consolation that these disparate experiences and notions of impending doom can be rerouted by a sense of Beauty, Blind Faith, and spiritual ecstasy.