I WAS THERE™: POP-UP EDITION!

Tonight on Here Comes the Backklash: Poolhouse links up with Lobster Thermidor for a warm, wide-ranging, and deeply charming conversation about sound, memory, and the secret ways music changes us. A seasoned veteran of many scenes, eras, and genres – as well as a regular caller to I WAS THERE™ –, Lobster joins the program to reflect on the moments when rhythm, bass, and atmosphere do not merely entertain us, but actually transform the very fibre of our being.From the initiatory power of rave and electronic music to the organic devotion inspired by truly communal sounds, this episode explores the dance floor as a place of communion, revelation, and soul-level change. Along the way, Poolhouse and Lobster trade colorful stories, cultural memories, and beautifully funny detours — touching everything from underground scenes and spiritual reverence for records to the lost race of the Appalachians, casino sauce, and other delightful absurdities.Thought-provoking, moving, and easy to sink into, this episode is an attestation to the awesome power infinite beat — and to the magic we risk losing if we forget what music can really do for the human soul.Follow LobsterFollow Poolhouse EPISODE MIXTAPEJ. Majik - Your SoundDJ Dan - Put That Record Back On (Peace Division Mix)BRUISEFIIST - Walkin’ the Beat (The Nuns cover)(unreleased)The Pharcyde - Passin’ Me By (DJ Aphrodite Mix)Metalheadz - Terminator Sunday Sessions · Teebee This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com

Hey guys, pardon the delay on this one! It has been a teensy bit busy ‘round BACKKLASH HQ, but I am thrilled to share this recent edition to the IWT cannon with y’all – better late than never! It’s been so crazy that I can’t even remember what we discussed on this one, other than we heard from a plethora of the warm, familiar voices of regular callers. I also recall a certain hilarious, rabble-rousing caller giving me a run for my money. Honestly, I just know this one was a blast and I am as excited to listen to the playback as you are! Me and Oso and the gang will return to the X dot com airspace next SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1. Until then, enjoy, and don’t forget to stream my album heheh!Follow Oso Blanco:https://x.com/OsoBlanc0Follow PoolhouseLINKTR.EE/DJPOOLHOUSE This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com

What can a $15,000 mechanical bird, a Brooklyn curiosity shop, and America’s sweetheart Kelly Clarkson teach us about the true nature of class in America? Quite a lot, actually. In this episode of HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH, DJ Poolhouse takes the delightfully absurd controversy known as Mollygate and turns it inside out, challenging the fashionable assumption that wealth is class, celebrity is power, and the proprietor of a small business is necessarily a member of the proletariat. Giving both Clarkson and the shopkeepers the benefit of the doubt, Poolhouse proposes a more provocative interpretation: that beneath the familiar spectacle of rich celebrity versus humble merchant lies an older, subtler, and far more enduring architecture of social distinction, one built not merely upon money, but upon inheritance, institutional authority, cultural recognition, and proximity to the machinery of commerce itself. Drawing upon his own Poolhousian theory of class, he interrogates the curious contradictions of contemporary class solidarity, the bourgeois sympathies of self-appointed champions of the working class, and the rise of POPULISSIP, a new populist strain of celebrity journalism that mistakes the famous for the powerful and public humiliation for social justice. Perhaps Kelly Clarkson behaved badly. Perhaps the shopkeepers did too. Perhaps everybody is telling the truth as they experienced it. But what if the real story isn’t about who could afford the bird, or even who was entitled to buy it, but who was understood to belong in the room? Money can purchase luxury, influence, even fame, but it cannot purchase the history of having been born into power. And once you begin to recognize the invisible codes through which class perpetuates itself, you start seeing them everywhere. Sometimes it takes a fifteen-thousand-dollar mechanical bird to reveal the bars of a cage nobody knew they were living in.Poolhouse is online.Poolhouse on the rise of reactionary populist celebrity media:Stream Platinum Hunc - the latest single from DJ POOLHOUSE:https://ffm.to/a53ea03681fea716e152564ffd247222a0846c459dc1482f This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com

Oso, Poolhouse, and the I Was There gang are back!Our previous episode was wrecked by archonic havoc when Poolhouse was mysteriously removed from the timeline, leaving a gaping hole in the archives where a confirmed banger should be resting.This time around, we managed to keep everyone aligned on the same frequency long enough to eke out a show. Most of it, anyway. Because when you’re blasting the airwaves with ultrasonic bursts of unc-tastic radiotronic counter-programming, you can bet The Man has a target on your back. (In other words, the broadcast was abruptly terminated by forces beyond our control about an hour in.)But until the plug was pulled, we managed to pack in plenty of laughs, love, and high-grade conversational contraband.This week: the rise of fun beverage culture, the D4vd Question and the merits and pitfalls of true crime, the many ghosts of Rick Rubin’s house, the joys of opium tea, The Residents, and so much more.Another transmission salvaged from the wreckage of the timeline. Tune in while it still exists!Osohttps://x.com/OsoBlanc0PoolhouseLINKTR.EE/DJPOOLHOUSE This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com

BACKKLASH™ Worldwide returning guest and Christmas Secretary Hagalaz joins Poolhouse for an incendiary blast of motherfucking TRVKE.Hagalaz returns to talk about the cult she recently started, her new occasional podcast series Hyacinth House, and to lead Poolhouse through a tarot reading on the theme of redemption before the two descend into a sprawling discussion of Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 cult masterpiece Possession.Using the film as a lens, Hagalaz and Poolhouse unpack the contemporary gender war: the increasingly distorted relationship between men and women, the tension between traditionalist expectations and progressive feminism, motherhood and paternal responsibility, surveillance, identity, domestic obligation, and the suffocating gap between who we are and the roles we are expected to perform.From there, the conversation turns to the Lindsay Clancy case and the way competing ideological camps consume real human catastrophe as evidence for pre-existing narratives about women, men, motherhood, mental illness, family, and social decline. What happens when concern for children becomes another weapon in an endless culture war? And what happens when the people supposedly defending human beings become more invested in winning the argument than understanding them?Finally, Possession opens onto something larger and considerably darker: an era in which technological life itself increasingly feels supernatural. Algorithms feed anxiety back to us, political and gender archetypes replace actual people, private fears become mass-media spectacles, and reality arrives already processed through an invisible machinery of signs, incentives, surveillance, and polarization.REPODEMPTION: Poolhouse and Hagalaz on possession, redemption, gender war, mass informatics, and the monster growing behind the algorithm.Hagalaz is on X.Poolhouse is online. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com

Fan favorite Detty returns to HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH, and whenever she and Poolhouse get together, the conversation tends to unlock something strange.THE INFORMATION WON’T SAVE YOU is a free-ranging journey through the hidden architecture of modern life: media manipulation, memetic contagion, scapegoating, collective thought forms, spiritual exhaustion, and the increasingly perceptible sense that something ancient and sacred still hums beneath the surface of the world. Detty and Poolhouse zoom out to ask not simply what is happening, but how we should think about what is happening, and how to navigate an information environment designed to lure us into endless rabbit holes.Eventually, plumbing the depths of the rabbit for more information stops being a worthwhile pursuit. The real quest becomes how to keep your reason, intuition, curiosity, and sanity intact while moving through the labyrinth of the 21st century.Follow Detty on X - [link]DJ POOLHOUSE IS ONLINE.Detty’s viral post comparing media market PR impresario Mitchell Jackson to the proprietor or Arkham Asylum:a relevant Poolhouseism: The classic Backklash about 1950s comics culture, featuring TheNaniState:Check out the Spotify playlist for the entire collection of Backklash Dettysodes: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com

On this episode of HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH, Poolhouse descends beneath the material machinery of marketing to investigate its stranger, more esoteric twin: influence itself.Taking Charli XCX’s prophecy of “anti-marketing” as a point of departure, Poolhouse traces pop culture’s mutation from please love me, to please notice me, to the new commercial imperative: I don’t care if you like me. Just don’t stop talking about me.Enter Lizzo, Lola Young, Audrey Hobert, Charli XCX, Slayyyter, Tiga and more – all avatars through which Poolhouse decodes moderns notions of manufactured authenticity, invisible PR, algorithmic friction and the strange new economy in which polarity may be worth more than popularity, backlash becomes distribution, and being called cringe might be the ultimate prestige strategy.A material and octolectical analysis of how ideas move, celebrities are manufactured, and culture changes before anyone quite realizes it has changed.Mimesis is not material. Influence is intangible. Cringe is the new prestige.The university set has everything more figured out than Ms. xcx…. right rightPoolhouse on anti-marketing, pt.1 Poolhouse on anti-marketing, pt. 2DJ POOLHOUSE IS ONLINE. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com

On this episode of HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH, Poolhouse dives into the strange and relatively uncharted realm of pop authorship, an already nebulous concept made even more slippery in an age when persona, performance, identity, and technology are becoming impossible to separate, let alone authenticate.From Audrey Hobert’s clownish, hyper-aware pop persona, and the uncanny specter of one Ms. Sue Heck looming over the project, to Tyga’s critically detonated and AI-assisted $TARFACE, Poolhouse asks what we actually mean when we call an artist “authentic.”Does authorship reside in the hand that makes the thing, the mind that conceives it, the voice that performs it, or the persona that holds the entire construction together? Are pop auteurs even real, or are they carefully manufactured illusions designed to obscure the collaborative, technological, and highly industrial nature of mass-produced pop product?Along the way: cringe as creative strategy, authenticity as artistic currency, AI panic, pop-star identity, machine production, inherited archetypes, Pitchfork’s resting bitch stance, and the increasingly unstable line between artist, producer, persona, and avatar.Pop music performance has always relied on artifice – but does this dilute the artist’s agency, or extend it? Poolhouse delivers a soaring meditation on the pop auteur with the type of episode you will ONLY find on BACKKLASH.Episode Mixtape:Peech Boys NYC - Stay With Me (Tom Moulton Twelve Inch Extended Mix)DJ POOLHOUSE - Track ID (unreleased)DJ POOLHOUSE - Ramon Novarro’s Revenge Dub (unreleased)DJ POOLHOUSE - Put It All On Ice Tyga - Rack City (DJ POOLHOUSE All Screw No Chop Remix)BRUISEFI.IST – The Box (unreleased)DJ POOLHOUSE IS ONLINE. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com

Hi! this one is just a quick update from backklash studios east….I promise I will get a proper microphone for the next one. We don’t have to live like this! Thanks again for your lovely support of my ice reggae musical projects, ARCTIC SUNSPLASH and HYPERBOREAN DUB EXCURSIONS. It means a lot when you take the time to listen. I’ve so thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating these albums, that there is an audience for them at all is such a joy and a blessing! Thank you, backklashistas. And remember, inside of you, there are two Poolside Dub Versions…P.S. … Stick around to the end of the episode (as if you would ever not do this!) for a special treat – my “Acid Cotton Candy Hurricane Mix” of BELSHAZZAR. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com

Recorded LIVE on X Spaces - August 7, 2026Poolhouse was beyond thrilled to team up with TwinkTheory and Detty and a few special guest callers for this all-the-way-live, audience-powered deep dive into the strange cultural power of *Vanderpump Rules*. From cult Bravo curiosity to full-blown zeitgeist, we get into the fame machine, what the show did to its cast, what was happening behind the story, Twink Theory’s recent rewatch, favorite moments, and why a bunch of beautiful disasters working at a West Hollywood restaurant somehow became one of the defining television sagas of its era. Shoutout to special guests Toast, Starr and Honky for joining in the discussion.Sexy. Unique. BACKKLASH.Follow Twink Theory Follow Detty This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit backklash.substack.com