SSION

As an BFA student at the Kansas City Art Institute, Ssion leader Cody Critcheloe produced an animated short called The Lemon Cookie Revolution. Effectively, and often hilariously, blurring the two most popular definitions of “cult” beyond recognition, Critcheloe imagined himself poisoning his heroes with delicious snacks of the film’s title, thereby assuming a place among them in the cred-fed indie pantheon. It’s a crude and campy stop-motion animation piece with a soundtrack boasting Wire and the Pet Shop Boys, and it allows Critcheloe to indulge his two fascinations: ironically chiding subcultural “outsiders”, and indulging in over-the-top wish-fulfillment fantasies. In his narrated introduction to the film, he introduces its two themes thusly: “Underground music cult figures you’ve probably never heard of, nor do you even care about. My second favorite thing in the whole wide world is, without a doubt, revolution.” If “Fear Us”, from Fool’s Gold, Ssion’s second album, is any indication, Critcheloe is now a member in good standing. The song documents (as “we”) a caricatured, nihilistic hipster netherworld— mirrored in the album’s butched-out cover image— as a cartoonish, unambiguously bold amalgam of gay subcultural stereotypes, which Critcheloe both calls attention to and celebrates.