If that sounds deadly, it was, and Currin made his reputation by doing the most defiant and scandalous thing he could think of.
It is true that there is an implicit, if defiant, acknowledgement that things are not going well in a speech by Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi made public on 26 December.
The excuse seemed as watertight as the Australian cabinet but she signed off in typical defiant style: "The important thing to remember is that I'm not retiring any time soon and I am gonna get to Australia as soon as I can".
Proudly defiant, Brown declared: "One thing more I got to say right here/ Now, we're people/ Just like the birds and the bees/ We rather die on our feet, Than keep living on our knees".
So having gone to quite a dark place I remember feeling a bit defiant, and getting that competitive thing back".
Whether this sort of thing represents their defiant rejection of the superheated art market and late-capitalist decadence, as Deitch and others suggest, is an open question.
This blindly defiant stance – that the only thing worse than being tweeted about is not being tweeted about – comes to mind this week with Miley Cyrus's Twitter address to her "Smilers", in which she declared: "My VMA performance had 306,000 tweets per minute.
The acrobatic tempo shifts, the wicked solos, Butler's structured bass runs, the defiant, resolute abandonment of all things holy -- these foundational texts can be heard in nearly every heavy metal song recorded since.
As a moral statement, a hunger strike is two things: (1) a defiant assertion of freedom in the face of authorities with seemingly-total control, and (2) an affirmation of resolve, to the point of willingness to endure suffering and personal risk.
The slow-build voiceover, all toughness and defiant pride, was the kind of thing speechwriters and ad men drool over.
