TYB
Cake Debut “Billionaire In Space” From Their First New Album In 14 Years
October 27, 2024
It’s been a long time since we’ve heard from Cake.
Their most recent studio album Showroom Of Compassion came out back in 2011; since then, they’ve put out a compilation of B-sides and rarities, a live album, and the 2018 one-off charity single “Sinking Ship.”
But they’re getting ready to release a new album next year, so they told KSTX recently.
During a visit to the Texas radio station, they performed a yet-to-be-released song called “Billionaire In Space” live from an elevator.
Vocalist John McCrea did not clarify whether it’s an Elon Musk diss track, but the clues are there. Watch the performance below.
https://www.stereogum.com/2285581/cake-debut-billionaire-in-space-from-their-first-new-album-in-14-years/music/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEDCX_Qkyec
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-25/-tartarian-empire-conspiracy-theory-enters-us-election-fray
The Tartarian Candidate
October 25, 2024 at 5:00 AM PDT
How did a bizarre architectural conspiracy theory insert itself into the US political discourse — and why do so many adherents insist that Donald Trump is a believer?
At a New Hampshire GOP meeting in January, Donald Trump took off on an odd tangent. Lamenting the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he talked about its architectural heritage.
“I mean, the country, how does it ever rebuild those cities, those magnificent buildings that came down that are a thousand years old with the gold domes? You can’t do that.”
A few weeks later in Georgia, Trump went from talking trade policy to marveling at Washington, DC’s neoclassical buildings: “Beautiful columns built 200 years ago and 100 years ago, gorgeous columns.
You say, how did they ever build them? How did they move them? They didn’t have the equipment to move them. They moved them through force of will.”
At a June rally in Racine, Wisconsin, the presidential candidate brought up the gold domes again. “All those cities destroyed.
You can never rebuild them, never rebuild them like they were. Beautiful thousand-year-old buildings with the gold domes. You can never rebuild that. But what a shame.”
To most ears, the references could be attributed to any number of things. Trump’s speeches often range far afield of his teleprompter, and his background in real estate demonstrates that he understands the power of buildings to communicate prestige; a gold dome is very much his style.
Kyiv does have a famous (undamaged) landmark that fits part of his description — the gold-domed St. Sophia Cathedral was completed in the 11th Century.
Trump’s affection for neoclassical ornament is no secret, either, given his administration’s attempt to mandate traditional architecture styles for federal buildings.
But for some listeners, the former president’s recurring expressions of interest in supposedly unbuildable buildings signaled something else: They’re hallmarks of the Tartarian Empire theory, a fantastical whirl of conspiracy belief whose adherents posit that we’re the brutish inheritors of a forgotten golden age built by a hyper-advanced ancient civilization.
Moreover, the return of this lost empire and their attendant architecture could be imminent — a glorious restoration Trump’s regime will lead.
Tartarian theory emerged about a decade ago, circulating online among amateur architecture and alt-history enthusiasts who share photos, videos and speculations.
Variations abound, but the core belief revolves around the notion that there was a Central Asian empire that rose to global power centuries ago (the timeline is murky) and either built or inspired the ornate premodern structures that are now beloved by fans of traditional architecture.
Star forts, gold domes, European cathedrals, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the Tower of Babel, the show-palace cities built for late 19th century and early 20th century World’s Fairs — all are really examples of Tartarian workmanship, constructed with their unfathomable “antiquitech” that perfected anti-gravity hovercraft and drew energy from the air.
Either through world wars or cataclysmic natural disasters (a global “mud flood” is a popular explanation), Tartaria was largely erased from the landscape and the history books in a “Great Reset,” and what survived the bombs or peeked out above the mud was falsely claimed as our own.
All that we know of Tartaria now, the theory goes, has been clawed back from a nefarious cabal bent on demolishing or concealing the wonders of the past.
Since Bloomberg CityLab last checked in with Tartarian theory, there’s been a surge in new online interest and activity: On Reddit, the Tartaria subreddit has 51,000 members, a six-fold increase since 2021, and the Tartarian architecture subreddit has seen a four-fold increase.
Tartaria’s millenarianism — its fixation on a past cataclysm and a coming utopia — is common among conspiracy theories, say experts who study the phenomenon.
“What the Tartarian theory does is promote a connection between a perfect future and a restoration of a perfect past,” says Michael Barkun, a professor emeritus at Syracuse University’s political science department.
“That is suggesting that there was once a golden age and that this golden age can be recovered.”
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Such fringe beliefs are hardly new: Tartaria joins any number of made-up spaces that beguile conspiracy-seekers, from the lost city of Atlantis to the UFO hangers in Area 51.
But recently the theory has been creeping closer to mainstream political discourse, expressing the worldview of figures of the populist right and functioning as a barometer of wider issues of aesthetics.
With his norm-shattering bluster and promise to “Make America Great Again,” Trump’s rhetoric fits neatly within Tartaria’s mix of nostalgic yearning and historical revisionism.
So when he noodles on the beauty of gold domes and the technical impossibility of constructing big columns, it’s greeted with a full Tartarian salute.
With its 61,000 followers, the @TartariaLives account on the X social media site (formerly Twitter) is a clearinghouse for the state of the conspiracy.
It’s run by Travis Bosdell, who lives in Georgia. He started investigating Tartaria after researching his own ancestry; he’s of Cherokee descent, he says, and some — including him — have theorized that Indigenous Americans were Tartarian or influenced by Tartaria.
“What if people K N E W they were living in a 350-year-old post-apocalyptic society and we are de-evolving, that everything is a re-discovery from a civilization that was completely different just 350 years ago,” he says in a direct message on X.
He’s also convinced that Trump is on Team Tartaria. “With some holistic thinking and a little pattern recognition, it becomes harder and harder to deny some connections with the Trump epoch and the Tartaria epoch,” he says.
“I see this as a coordinated movement, larger than a simple hidden empire — of which there was — but of an idea that has been lost to us, that we almost remember in our collective peripheral.”
The Tartarian theory sustains itself through basic technical misunderstandings of how architecture works.
For example, believers often cite the large below-grade windows that allow light and air into the basements of older buildings as evidence that these were actually upper stories that have been submerged in the great mud flood.
But most Tartarians don’t get too tangled up in the theory’s underlying logic or plausibility; it’s more like fun, freaky thought exercise — and a statement of style preference.
Adherents refuse to believe that their own culture could create the quality of handicraft they venerate or that it could move architectural ideas across the globe.
There is also the very real cultural dislocation resulting from how the products of the Industrial Revolution and modernism truly did reshape the built environment during the 20th century.
The idea that a forgotten empire must be responsible for all the world’s most beautiful buildings and the banality of contemporary architecture is a ploy foisted on us by elites is essentially a more theatrical version of the obsession with traditional architecture seen in some conservative circles.
Here, modernism — often embodied by its much-loathed subgenre, Brutalism — is indicted because of its lefty Bauhaus origins (even though it’s also the face of global capital, Trump’s towers included).
The rationalism, functionalism and subdued material palette of the style are not an attempt to “make the best for the most for the least,” as a modernist design maxim goes, but a cruel prank antithetical to human nature.
You don’t have to be a literal believer to join this party.
In an August op-ed headlined “Why We Don’t Build Beautifully,” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat marked a milestone in Tartaria’s journey to the mainstream, calling it “a puckish contemporary conspiracy theory” and describing himself as a “semi-Tartarian” who sees the theory’s poetic truth:
“I expect future civilizations to regard the break in architectural styles as indicating a more serious declension than what our contemporary self-image would expect.”
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has embraced other aspects of the Tartarian mythos. Modern architecture, he has proclaimed, “is designed to oppress the human spirit and make people feel without value.”
On his X-hosted show, he’s also said that we have no idea how or when the pyramids were built, and the idea that there were past advanced civilizations that are a total mystery to us “kind of seems to be true.”
Within this kind of spotlight, Tartarian restorationists have become increasingly successful at seeing their beliefs reflected in current events.
After Carlson’s February 2024 interview with Vladimir Putin and subsequent discussion of the origins of Russia and Ukraine, some Tartarians concluded that Putin is implicitly threatening to release a trove of archives that will expose the empire’s hidden history.
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Another high-profile semi-Tartarian, New York Jets quarterback and vaccine skeptic Aaron Rodgers, mused about the theory (and others) on a podcast appearance earlier this year.
“It’s interesting when you go to a big city,” he said. “We play a lot of big cities, and you look at some of the architecture, you’re like, man, that’s f-g crazy. But [it] doesn’t match some of the other stuff in the same time period.
It’s very strange. What is this all about?”
Rodgers’ wide-eyed comments largely echo the “just asking questions” tone of the Tartaria subreddits, where posters exchange images and conjecture without going explicitly political.
(That’s by design: The Reddit forums are tightly moderated, essentially banning political posts.) For amateur architecture and preservation nerds, these are hospitable spaces for spitballing about cool old buildings as well as gateways to a set of off-kilter political beliefs.
Pseudo-histories like the Tartarian Empire use ambiguity in the historical record to give the conspiracy authority, says Ronald Fritze, a history professor who has written several books on myths and false histories.
Examples include the persistent (and often antisemitic) beliefs involving Freemasonry, the Illuminati and other stalwarts of the conspiracy canon.
Purveyors of conspiracy-themed popular entertainment like the Netflix docu-series Ancient Apocalypse often ground theories in ancient or distant events so that they’re archivally inaccessible enough to make definitive repudiation difficult, but still cling to a wisp of social science credibility.
Adding disciplines that are not particularly well understood, like archaeology and architectural history, allows for all manner of fevered revisionism. “There’s a lot more interpretation involved there than with genuine historical documents,” says Fritze.
Sometimes genuine historical documents can be stirred into the mix as well. One piece of evidence Tartarian aficionados point to is a declassified 1957 US Central Intelligence Agency file that mentioned Soviet directives to rewrite the “history of Tartaria.”
Though this was certainly a reference to the Muslim populations of Central Asia, the word puts conspiracy theorists in the odd position of having to vouch for the veracity of the CIA when they were discussing their sworn enemy, the Soviet Union.
Since the start of this year, the connection between Tartarian activity and the populist right has turned up a notch on the right-wing social media platform Gab and the anonymous message board 4Chan.
Beyond Trump’s florid praise for traditional architecture, Tartaria sleuths point to other details that tell them the former president is a Tartarian emperor-in-waiting.
Trump’s Secret Service code name is “Mogul,” which sounds a bit like “Mongol,” signaling his status as the heir to Central Asian Tartarian homeland.
There’s a loose and zanily cinematic chain of custody that has Trump’s uncle and former MIT professor John Trump analyzing Nikola Tesla’s trove of Tartarian technology.
One often-repeated Tartarian post (a strange hybrid of poetry and a QAnon-style “Q drop”) celebrates Trump’s youngest son, Barron, as the “heir of Tartaria.”
As far as we know, Trump has never publicly spoken the word “Tartaria.” (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
And though believers wait expectantly for this to happen, he doesn’t really need to — what “Make America Great Again” really means, to quote one believer, is “BRING BACK TARTARIA!!!”
In many ways, Trumpism is right at home in this fabricated realm: Tartarian theory emerged roughly concurrent with Trump’s ascent to the presidency, and we have since entered a golden-domed age of conspiracy and misinformation.
The Trump campaign, and the broadly defined populist-right, often launch sweeping, gonzo claims that brand political enemies as unknowable and reprehensible others; that rigged voting machines were used to steal the election, that satanic pedophiles have infiltrated the US government, that Democrats are manipulating the weather, that immigrants are eating cats and dogs.
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Such dark fantasies also serve to tear down traditional sources of expertise. “If Tartarianism is proven to be true, it makes the experts, historians and archeologists in the mainstream look like idiots,” says Fritze.
“Either they missed it, or for some nefarious reason, they’re suppressing it. That’s all part of the campaign to destroy the credibility of experts.”
There is an undercurrent of grievance politics in much Tartarian content — the idea that the spoils of history are being kept away from the people that deserve them.
The Great Reset that sheared the Tartarian Empire from the world echoes the antisemitic “great replacement” in darker corners of the internet. Occasional mentions of “Hyperborean” theory point toward a Tartarian final boss: an idealized white ancestral ethnostate.
As with so many things, you can blame the internet for all this. “The internet can make conspiracy theories a massive multiplayer online game,” says Neil Levy, who studies conspiracy theories as a senior research fellow at the Uehiro Oxford Institute in the UK. For self-identified conspiracy theorists, there’s a vast online archive of data, visual material and texts to reinterpret, and a community of fellow searchers with which to collaborate.
Barkun and Fritze also see US income inequality as another cause of the flourishing of conspiracy theories. The top 1% of Americans now earn more than the entire middle class, which does not sound like something that happens by accident; little wonder that some people are grasping for alternative explanations.
As for the content of the Tartarian theory itself, culture war is often the only terrain either side of the political mainstream will agree to fight on, and the conflict demands new material to polarize around. In Tartaria, it’s architecture’s turn.
The conspiracy landscape is full of outlandish notions that have effectively penetrated mainstream political discourse, from the climate denialism that continues to derail carbon reduction efforts to the antisemitic and anti-immigrant tropes that elected officials routinely air to score political points.
This process doesn’t necessarily reflect the level of literal belief out there, says Levy, but it does indicate how helpful it would be to sow fear and distrust:
“It may well be that Tucker Carlson thinks that zero percent of this is true, but it’s still useful because it helps promote his political agenda.”
But for the vast majority of people without a media platform to spread the theory, conspiracy is mostly a “simulacrum” of political involvement, he says, a distraction that redirects energy into sectarian discourse rather than real-world action.
Are Trump’s odes to old architecture and nods to this fringe theory a vote driver for this election? Probably not. But should he return to the presidency, there’s no one better to test just how thin the veil between conspiracist delusion and the real world really is.
As Bosdell of @TartariaLives says, “We are way beyond pretty buildings and mud floods.”
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