Harrison Patrick Smith used to be a substitute school teacher. Now he is a music star who shares the same music label as some of the biggest musicians in the business, including Taylor Swift, Drake, Nicki Minaj, and Pearl Jam. The list of artists is long, and their combined financial and cultural power is amazing.

Smith’s music name is The Dare, and he is having a moment. His album Sex is getting reviewed in some big magazines such as Rolling Stone, and is getting lots of play out there.

Here is the album cover:

A substitute school teacher for 6th graders releases an album under his performance name, The Dare.

Depicting young girls stimulating sex acts with grown men.

Of course, nothing to see here.

Paedophiles often hide in plain sight. And are encouraged by others doing the same. https://t.co/JWsuK2jXfz

— Miss Jo (@therealmissjo) May 26, 2023

Pitchfork magazine begins its review of the album thus:

Maybe the reason that indie sleaze is back is that it allows you to be really, unashamedly horny. It makes sense that following the prudish detente of the 2010s, there is nostalgia for the era of Terry Richardson sexploitation, smoking a cigarette in your G-Star Raws next to a dumpster, Uffie rapping about popping the glock in a British accent. Indie sleaze brings us full circle to decadence, to licentiousness, to the come-hither gaze of American Apparel ads of yore that seems to say: Let’s fuck.

A bunch of American Apparel ads were banned as kiddie porn. Some of the less scandalous include:

Yes, there are worse ones.

At least these ads were of teenagers, and people who get excited by them are not strictly pedophiles, but ephebophiles. The Dare and Taylor Swift’s record label decided to go full pedophile and show grown men and young girls grinding their crotches together on an album cover with the word Sex splashed on it.

Nice. Very nice. Straight to the point.

W Magazine describes a performance by The Dare, making it seem like just another day at the rave:

Engulfed by white balloons, the indie electro artist Harrison Patrick Smith, better known by his moniker, The Dare, tore through his debut single, “Girls,” with the intensity of a pulsating strobe light. “I like the girls that do drugs / Girls with cigarettes in the back of the club,” he sang, tossing his body back and forth between the speakers. As he stopped to genuflect in front of the crowd, the kinetic energy generated from the stage threatened to short-circuit the sea of glowing iPhones. “When I perform, I just want to kind of go nuts and put on this Dare persona, which is very different from me in real life,” Smith, 27, said.

Charli XCX said “Girls” “goes off at parties,” and The New York Times named the track one of its Best Songs of 2022. His performance that night has become legend among those in attendance—much like Blondie’s at CBGB or Madonna’s at Palladium. Or, more fittingly, the Rapture playing somewhere like Plant Bar, Lit Lounge, or the raucous basement of Luxx, the famed Brooklyn nightclub, in the early aughts.

By design or mere happenstance, The Dare has become a poster boy for “indie sleaze,” a term for today’s post-TikTok embrace of the Golden Age of Pitchfork, when DFA Records was the only label that mattered and the electro act Fischerspooner was big enough to land an official remix of Kylie Minogue’s “Come into My World.” “Freakquencies,” a popular party Smith throws at Home Sweet Home on the Lower East Side—with DJ sets full of bangers from Digitalism, Justice, and Soulwax—is certainly a love letter to that period. On Twitter, a partygoer called the night “like if Spirit Halloween had sex with a luxury fashion show,” a reference, maybe, to Smith’s moonlighting as a DJ at afterparties for Celine and Gucci, with young revelers working their best turn-of-the-millennium Dior Homme–esque pipe cleaner suits.

Nothing like a fun night celebrating pedophilia. It is “indie sleaze,” after all.

Rolling Stone didn’t like the album, but not because it was disgusting, but because even disgusting is just plain boring these days. Pantomiming having sex with children just isn’t outré enough these days. Perhaps a good murder or two would spice things up.

REVIEW: The Dare is bringing back early 2000s New York rock, and adding his own unique twist: this time around, it sucks.https://t.co/unnx7iMkwx

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) May 24, 2023

Or, maybe, I am wrong about that. The Dare should have been pantomiming sex with transgender boys, not young girls. Maybe that would be spicy enough until next year when actual human sacrifice would be required to get the juices flowing.

Given the ages of the child models, one has to imagine that their parents were actually in the room as this photograph was taken. Clearly, they are 5-7 years old and couldn’t possibly understand what was going on. But their parents and all the adults in the room knew exactly what they were doing, and did it anyway.

“I think ‘Girls’ in a way, and what I do with The Dare in general, is a rejection of the last five years of music." https://t.co/HKgXQbZIdQ

— GQ Magazine (@GQMagazine) May 20, 2023

Many people–perhaps most–will shrug and just say that The Dare is trying to provoke fuddy-duddies like me into objecting, juicing sales.

Perhaps, even probably. But looking back can you say that the fuddy-duddies of yesteryear were wrong when they were horrified in the 60s by what music celebrities had become? The drugs and degeneracy and yes, the sex with 13 and 14 year old girls turned out to indeed have cheapened our society.

Lots of people like it because it gives us permission to indulge in our basest desires. That is not a recommendation–that is a reason to express disgust. Being a degenerate is not a good thing because it is popular, and its popularity is precisely the problem. When you encourage people to give in to their id they will take you up on the offer.

Civilization exists because we learn to harness and suppress our worst instincts, not because we give them free rein.

As with so many degeneracies the powers that be declare we are being alarmist when we warn of the normalization of pedophilia. They will continue to do so until the very moment when they do a 180 and declare that, yes, pedophilia has been normalized and this it is a wonderful thing it has been.

So it goes.