ABSTRACT
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis’s satire on the rise of neoliberalism in 1980s America, draws a direct causal link between the ambient vacuity of corporate rock and violence—or at least the fantasy of violence. It is not just that American Psycho was the literary equivalent of Phil Collins, it is that Phil Collins was the general equivalent of all culture, including literature. In 2007, Phil Collins triumphantly returned as the apotheosis of modernity in his overcoming of the history of western metaphysics in the form of an animatronic gorilla in a television commercial for chocolate. In the gorilla’s embodiment of the continuity between music and violence, Collins is disclosed as the extimate heart of consumer culture’s amusical ecstasy.
