HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH

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 right

Poolhouse on anti-marketing, pt.1

Poolhouse on anti-marketing, pt. 2

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

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, 2026

Poolhouse 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

What makes a viral moment? Is it some improbable combination of circumstances, a near-impossible collision of timing, spectacle, and human curiosity that, once captured by consumer surveillance technology and injected into the massive public library of shame we call the internet, suddenly ignites an electric connection and spreads from user to user until the clip reaches critical mass?

Maybe.

But in my esteemed opinion, that is what is happening only ten or fifteen percent of the time.

The rest of the time, it is advertising.

Welcome back to the program, Backklashistas. I have wrested control of this episode away from BRUISEFI.IST to bring you a juicy little nugget about the featured players in one of the summer’s recent mega-viral moments, a detail that validated an assumption I had already formed about this bizarre story.

From the jump, something about the clip set off my fnord detector. Something was not right. Why was this even considered noteworthy enough to record in the first place? What was it about two people becoming annoyed after being filmed making out in a park that guaranteed the footage a permanent berth across my timeline?

Then I took a cursory look at the people involved, and suddenly the whole thing began to acquire a scent: passion, indiscretion, retaliation, and the synthetic musk of a story engineered for maximum exposure.

Once Poolhouse went on the case, it all started to make sense.

Join me for this special episode as we move beyond the headline, beneath the viral spectacle, and into the strange machinery that may have carried this story onto the public stage.

Plus, I reflect on the invincible summer of the heart, that private reserve of warmth, memory, and freedom we can return to even as the season begins to fade.

One out of the like, 6 million articles the NY Post ran about this stupid viral clip:

“the TikToker, who has a history of posting antagonizing content” so like I was saying, a scum of the earth shitbag.

Episode Mixtape

Ace of Base - Dancer in the Dark

DJ POOLHOUSE - Invincible Summer

The Blackbyrds - Rock Creek Park (Twelve Inch Extended Mix)

Fallout Boy - Dance Dance (Tommie Sunshine Brooklyn Fire Remix)

Slayyyter - Brand new chanel$ [instrumental]

DJ POOLHOUSE: https://linktr.ee/djpoolhouse

BACKKLASH: https://linktr.ee/backkklash

HQ: backklash.substack.com

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

Sometimes a case hits the news, and you don’t feel compelled to engage any more deeply than the headlines, talking heads, influencers, and sound bites allow.

It’s a busy, chaotic world. Not everyone has time to learn the ins and outs of complex criminal cases, such as those involving Tyler Robinson or David “D4vd” Anthony Burke.

But it is always surprising when you push just slightly beyond the headlines and discover that the portrait painted by those topline takeaways is actually a disturbing distortion of the truth.

When that happens, it often reveals something about the true nature of the case. Something ROTTEN.

Tonight, Poolhouse touches down on two very different but spiritually aligned cases. The murder of Charlie Kirk and the murder and mutilation of Celeste Rivas Hernandez could hardly be more divergent in their circumstances. However, it is not merely notoriety that links the recent preliminary proceedings involving the two cases. There is also something deeply troubling about the way public relations and media propaganda have been deployed to manufacture public perception.

In the case involving Burke, we have lies by omission. An entire cast of characters who may have enabled the circumstances leading up to the death of 14-year-old Hernandez has been carefully obscured from the reporting.

In the case involving Robinson, we have outright misrepresentations of what was actually shown in the courtroom.

In both cases, Poolhouse attempts to demonstrate what can be learned by analyzing the methods through which these two tragic stories are being spun for public consumption.

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

Poolhouse and Oso are BACKK with the most unc-tastic Sunday night zoo on the internet radio dial. This week: World Cup fever winds down, but Plus-Sized Park Hopper season is only heating up. A caller’s streaming dilemma leads to a spirited debate about the prevalence of technology in society. Plus, the gang remembers a mutual friend who left us too soon. Also: Is Mac the Dirk Diggler of Canadian construction projects? If you couldn’t make it, dear remote viewer, fear not. A shockingly heart-stirring episode of I WAS THERE! awaits you!

Oso

https://x.com/OsoBlanc0

Poolhouse

LINKTR.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

Detective Poolhouse is BACKK on his beat for a special edition of HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH, bringing an octolecitcal eye and a gumshoe’s intuition to true crime stories ripped straight from the headlines.

Tonight: the fallout from the Graham Platner allegations, the media manipulations shaping the public perception of the Tyler Robinson case, and shocking new developments in the D4vd investigation, including a report about troubling questions surrounding the medical examiner’s office.

Poolhouse strips away the official packaging to ask the real question: who is telling the story, and what exactly is it that they are trying to make you believe?

On the LA County Internal Probe Into Improprieties at the Office of the Medical Examiner:

DJ POOLHOUSE: https://linktr.ee/djpoolhouse

BACKKLASH: https://linktr.ee/backkklash

HQ: backklash.substack.com

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