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Right now, we are at a place of polarization, yet all of our art sucks (my opinion obviously but it seems to be shared). If you look back at the last time our country was this divided in the 1960's, we saw some of the greatest output of music and literature we have ever seen. We had incredible artists like the Beatles among others. Then of course that was probably the peak of black culture with incredible artistic output that they will probably never reach again. This was probably the last time you saw many black musicians and guitarists be better than their white counterparts. If you take it back to the French Revolution, you saw some of the best political philosophy ever created such as with Rousseau. Political discord creates art and philosophy that has usually never been seen before, but today we don't see any of that. Even Monty Python is more subversive than anything we see today. Clockwork Orange was more subversive than anything we see today. Why aren't we seeing a peak in art again like the time should predict?
I disagree that
There's plenty of good music.
For starters, The Beatles are boring. Maybe it's my zoomer ass not having grown up with them, but it's 4/4 pop-rock with uninteresting lyrics.
Which is...fine. It's easy listening music, maybe the production was impressive back then, but I don't feel it's stood the test of time.
The 21st century has brought a lot of innovative, unique, or masterfully composed music releasing.
Deathspell Omega's "The Furnaces of Palingenesia" is possibly the only sober depiction of the platonically ideal fascist society in humanity's art output. From a composition perspective, it's masterful, but I suspect people more schooled in music could explain why better than I could, so I'll just excerpt a couple lyrics.
From the song "The Fires of Frustration"
This exact mentality is present everywhere and I've never seen it summed up quite this succinctly. You see it in a Twitter mob ruining a life, a riot burning down a small business owner's life savings, a primitive tribe butchering its foes purely on instinct, a mass shooter waging war against the universe - encapsulated in a short statement that makes perfect sense, underpinned by echoing, growled vocals, a wall-of-sound guitar mass that has tantalizingly discernible melodies amidst the chaos, and impossibly frenetic drumming. It's art in its purest form, raw human reality given form.
Another quote from the song "Ad Arma", which I feel needs no accompanying commentary:
If this doesn't resonate with a Motteposter I don't know what will.
On the topic of violence, give Mili's "Dandelion Boys, Dandelion Girls" a listen.
At 1:53, the vocalist whispers
As her voice grows in strength she sings, almost triumphantly,
Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Temptations, with Fortunate Son and War respectively, probably win the anti-war songs competition just through the test of time, but I would contend that Dandelion Boys, Dandelion Girls comes damn close in artistic merit, even if it falls far short in raw popularity.
Alright, that's a heavy topic, so let's go to more "fun" music. For now let's stay in the land of the rising sun with a Japanese electronic music producer:
Camellia's "Berserkerz' Warfare 345" is proof that music is still innovating. Nothing like this was even being conceived of in the days you speak of, but here it is now. It's purely digital, it's way too fast for your grandparents, your parents, or even your older siblings, and in the 60s drums were not doing this nonsense. We can debate quality or artistic merit, but it's certainly innovative, and it gets my blood pumping faster than anything released before this millennium. See also Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" EP, which spawned an entire genre of purely computer-generated piss-off-your-dad music, and was tremendously popular to boot. Electronic music existed well before this, but it wasn't anywhere near as belligerent, chaotic, or willing to subvert genre trends.
Oh dear. I've mostly gone off into niche genres. Even Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" (the most popular song off the EP of the same name), only has 195 million plays on Spotify, a pale shadow of The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" with over a billion, or Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper", a personal favorite of mine, with half a billion.
So let's talk popular music. Lil Nas X dropped "Old Town Road", which was catchy enough to get almost 1.5 billion plays on Spotify, and innovative enough to damn near spark a race war between rap and country fans. He then released "Industry Baby", which has more plays than Old Town Road, and is similarly earworm-y. I think it's a fascinating cultural artifact, because the music video (NSFW warning) is almost downright pornographic in an extremely morally degenerate manner. It features homoerotic black nudity in the context of "prison bitch" culture and a touch of Satanic imagery just for kicks, and somehow spawned next to no controversy. Debate its quality all you like, it's a useful cultural landmark - much like The Beatles.
I take issue with the statement
"End It" is a black-fronted punk/hardcore band that is blowing any traditionally white bands in the scene out of the water, in my opinion. "New Wage Slavery" transcends the entire discography of Knocked Loose or The Acacia Strain, both traditionally popular bands in those genre circles. And if you haven't heard of a little band called Death Grips, watch "I've Seen Footage" performed live and realize that black-fronted punk bands can captivate a majority-white audience of angry kids better than almost any white musician right now. These are my niche examples and entirely disregard the fact that black rappers can pull white crowds big enough that literal deaths occur.
Beyond music,
I don't watch many movies, so I can't speak to a 21st-century equivalent to Monty Python or Clockwork Orange. Despite that, I'll take a stab at movies that subvert expectations. In "The Departed", the finale where (spoilers) basically every major character dies is masterfully executed, and also subverted the shit out of my expectations. "You Were Never Really Here" is a movie about a mercenary with PTSD, and its inaugural fight scene presents itself like it's going to be a John Wick style one-man-army movie, only to cut to security cameras showing the protagonist vomiting at the doorway before muted, off-camera, implied, or out of focus violence occurs to all the nameless security guards. Subversive and brilliant.
I started compiling a list of literature like Peter Watts' "Blindsight" and John Scalzi's "Old Man's War", and then some YouTube content that has more or less supplanted things like SNL in my eyes like Almost Friday TV's sketch comedy, but it occurred to me that I'm not sure I've touched on your central argument.
Is any of this a peak in art?
That's a more fascinating question, and one I'm substantially less qualified to answer. Other posters, I think, have made reasoned arguments for whether a peak is occurring, will occur, or can occur due to technology fragmenting fandoms, and I don't wish to rehash their arguments here. But I take major issue with the statement
because from my perspective it's simply not true. There's more and better art available to us than at any point in human history. We just can't tell what of it will stand the test of time yet.
Excellent post overall, and not just because you included a Mili track. But I don't think you justified this line with your post, although I think you successfully demonstrated that music is not suffering the same disease as other areas of the entertainment industry. More certainly, but better?
The fact that there is too much variety is part of the problem too. Artists would like to pretend otherwise, but popularity plays a vital role in the determination of quality art, because art that "stands the test of time" is art that resonates with a lot of people. That was a lot easier to produce back when a) there were only four channels and three studios to choose from and b) content creators weren't forced to jam propaganda into everything.
Take your comedy example - pretty good production and decent joke structure, but being a youtube clip it can never have the reach of the kind of comedy that we used to get. You can't have memes spawned from memes spawned from memes based on the gay dream accusation sketch, because it just doesn't have that cultural reach. Music doesn't suffer this problem because of genres, which are being stripped from visual media as both financial and social factors force creators to colour within increasingly rigid lines.
So while I agree it's not fair to say all our art sucks, and there is some excellent stuff out there if you can find it, I do think our culturally iconic art sucks. Or more appropriately, our cultural icons aren't art any longer - they are just products.
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Isn't that a remake of a Hong Kong movie with Chow Yun Fat, I'm nearly certain? Looked it up, it's Andy Lau but it is a Hong Kong movie remake.
I think much of this is "wow, first time I have ever seen this" but that doesn't mean it hasn't been done before. Crime/heist movies where "everybody dies at the end" include The Killers from 1964 and Get Carter from 1971.
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Fast electronic is older than you think. Nothing against Camellia, but just for the one I know, DJ Sharpnel were making this style of music in 2001. Hell, Project Gabbangelion was in 1996. It almost makes more sense to view its current popularity as a revival.
(It's from 2005, but I really enjoy this best-of album.)
True, why in the 50s our grandparents were only demurely dancing the waltz, yes? And true, this is a more demure version for TV from the early 60s (and evidence that sadly white people cannot dance) but it's not 'roses by the moonlight' type music either.
I'll agree nosebleed techno didn't happen in the 60s but again, that's not saying each generation did not have its moment of shocking the squares and the olds.
EDIT: That Camellia track gave me fond flashbacks to Einstürzende Neubauten, but yes, your parents generation (of which I'm probably part, if not quite old enough for the granny generation) would be shocked by current music 😁
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Much like claiming Seinfeld is unfunny, or that Star Wars (1977) is overrated, characterizing the Beatles as "basic pop-rock" is doing them a disservice and missing the point. To the degree that they seem boring/cliche today (debatable IMO) it is only because we've all grown up listening to entire generations worth of other artists trying to emulate them.
As for the rest, I remain convinced that only real measure of "quality" when it comes to art is whether it remains relevant 50, 100, or 1,000 years after the fact. The Beatles seem to have ticked that checkbox, we'll see about Peter Watts.
Like the anecdote about the old lady who saw a Shakespeare play for the first time in her life, and said she didn't think much of it because it was full of quotations. The joke being, Shakespeare originated a lot of those, which later became so often used and so well-known that they were "well that's not very original, it's basic, isn't it?"
Indeed.
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I'm gonna second this and add that I think there's a lot of great art coming around right now, of various degrees of relevance to current social issues, but a lot of it is in other media like anime, video games, and web video, and not merely familiar things like music and film.
On the topic of music, though, HEALTH's new album Rat Wars is shaping up to be something quite special; check out "DEMIGODS" and "ASHAMED."
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Moby made his 1000bpm track 30 years ago, and although he doesn't have any children at 58 he's old enough to be a grandfather. Pre electronic music there were people making experimental noise music using jackhammers.
The Camellia track sounds more developed but at base it's an iteration on the paradigm of making artificially intense music. It's not that it's too fast for the olds, it's that it's too fast full stop. There's a point of diminishing returns and there's a point beyond that of negative returns. Pushing the limits or indeed wilfully smashing them is, at this point, if not a stale idea then at least a very long way from radical and unfamiliar.
If you disagree that it's too fast you can increase the speed to 2x on YouTube, but I expect you'd agree it doesn't make it twice as good.
These days if you want to shock the olds you have to get a face tattoo and cut your dick off, and even that's just upping the ante on the kind of shit flinging, blood spilling, dick stroking, gender bending performance art that's been happening since the '60s. Radicalism just isn't radical anymore. It's been tried and where it hasn't been largely rejected the remainder has been assimilated.
Screamin' Jay Hawkins from the 50s, Arthur Brown from the 60s, Alice Cooper in the 70s, The Cure etc. Goth sub-genre of New Wave in the 80s, Marilyn Manson in the 90s (and by then he to me was "seen it all before") - the beat goes on! I couldn't tell you who the most recent examples are since I'm too old to be following the Top 100 any more, I just sit in my rocking chair with my knitting and my Marsen Jules mp3s 😂
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I disagree that it's too fast, and I would submit that making it 2x on YouTube doesn't make it better is an argument for it. This is music that is intended for that speed, not speed purely for speed's sake.
The point is that exploring our cultural frontiers diminishes the amount of territory left unexplored, and a lot of the charted territory has been marked as being of limited interest and value for more than a generation. We know the extremes are out there and most people choose the alternative not out of ignorance but out of preference.
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Maybe it's my Gen-X backside talking here, but metal? Yes, dear, I'm sure it's very nice, now here's your milk and cookies 😁
Let's tick off the bingo card:
SCARY BLACK! growly voice, fake Latin, pompous prog-rock pretentiousness in titles and subject matter, Gothick imagery, faux-Satanic imagery, horror imagery - check, check and check. And the music follows the same progression in sound, rhythm, speed, so on that is all the usual pattern of the genre.
I'm going to insult a lot of people's musical tastes here, and I'm genuinely sorry, but metal (in all its sub-genres and sub-sub-genres) is music for 14 year old boys. When you're in your young teens (be you male or female) you have this vast sense of your own importance and that includes deepity. I wrote my share of terrible sixth-form poetry at that age, I have no leg to stand on there.
Iron Maiden's Eddie was fun, though, they had that proper tongue-in-cheek not taking themselves 100% seriously that you do need for metal.
But now I am older, and if I want both novel and profound in music, I go here.
This is a beautiful piece. The piano has a an ethereal, sort of haunted sound to it, like something you'd hear faintly in the Hill House.
Yeah, Arvo Part is one of the modern composers I find listenable (Sir Harrison Birtwhistle may be rightly celebrated but I can't listen to anything of his longer than ten seconds or so before my ears start bleeding).
Erik Satie, as an older composer, I also like. I tend to find the French rather than the Germans more to my taste.
(Don't take from the above that I know anything about music, I don't, just "oh this sounds nice!")
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That's such a mischaracterization of the Beatles. If you think that, then you simply haven't listened to the full span of their music, and I'll guess you're missing out on both middle and mid-late Beatles.
Quantitatively, they did so much stuff besides sticking to common time all the time. For examples of well-known Beatles tunes that do weird things from a metric perspective: She Said, Good Morning, All You Need is Love, Two of Us, Rain, We Can Work it Out, Revolution, Across the Universe. Even Here Comes the Sun, which you mention, is not just 4/4, listen to the part that goes "Sun, sun, sun, here it comes".
As far as it being "easy listening" is concerned, my god, some of their stuff is so experimental, it's even barely listenable to! Revolution 9 comes to mind. And there's every point in-between, as well. Listen to Sgt Pepper, and tell me that's easy listening. Mr Kite is haunting with eerie sound experiments. Sgt Pepper and Reprise really rock. Fixing A Hole is wistful and thought provoking. A Day in the Life is downright depressing.
Seconding your point on "Here Comes the Sun". My sister asked me and my brother to play it at her wedding, and I had to notate the entire melody on sheet music for my brother to play on the cello. Notating all of those time signature changes in the bridge was a nightmare, it's practically math rock.
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You're right, like I said I've barely listened to The Beatles, so I only had a shallow, pop-culture understanding of their music and some knowledge of their greatest hits. I gave a lot of what you mentioned a listen and some of it really stood out to me.
Sgt Pepper and the reprise are absolute jams. Sounds like Jimi Hendrix on guitar. I hate the rest of the album, it's musically impressive but just not for me. No accounting for taste.
Revolution 9 is super cool. I'm surprised I had never listened to this before. It's like an amalgamation of sounds from every odd, experimental song I've ever heard.
I'll leave the original comment unedited for posterity, but you're right, The Beatles are a lot more than what I knew of. Thanks!
Oh yeah, you should also check out I am the Walrus and Tomorrow Never Knows. Those would be like if Revolution 9 tried to be a little more like music.
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Cool, I'm glad you gave them a listen!
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Small correction: Dubstep was a thing in the UK since the early 2000s, Skrillex made it popular in America.
Yeah, I have to laugh at that, because I'm old enough to remember (and be the teen audience) for punk when it was punk, and not some trendy American sub-culture. I'm presumably the generation for the "pissed-off dads/moms" parenting age for the producers and consumers of this, and I have to say, I'm not feeling particularly pissed-off at that tune? Starts off with vaguely ska beat, goes into disco/vocaliser voice over mid-tier electronics?
Kid, my generation invented the "music is now electronic and drums have been replaced by synths" 🤣
This is part of it, though; every new generation thinks their parents are hopelessly unhip, out of touch, and shockable. The generations that grew up on rock and punk are the parents/grandparents of today, we lived through disco and the Second Summer of Love (Acid), you think some bap-bah beat is gonna piss us off?
Dubstep even made it to Eurovision in 2013. Now this is a song!
I think the main novel factor of the electronic music scene that started 2000-ish is the really high BPM, enabled by speeding up samples and using digital tracks. I don't think you'll ever see that in the mainstream. Dubstep is just a melodic direction, a kind of novel instrument, and thus can be absorbed, but if the rhythm is too fast for most people to even parse, it stops sounding like music entirely. So while that song uses dubby elements, I'd still fundamentally call it artsy pop-rock at heart. Which to be fair, goes for lots of current electronic music too.
Well, what constitutes the "mainstream"? This is our winning qualifier to send to Eurovision this year, and it's selected on "The Late, Late Show" which is a very conventional weekend chat show that has been going for decades and is now on its third host. If the Plain People Of Ireland (or those who bother voting) can select this, what does "mainstream" mean?
And if we're guessing Eurovision winners, I don't think this will do it. It fits in nicely with the "at least two or three quirky entries" grouping for Eurovision every year, may even make it to the final, but is not a winner. Not because it's too wacky or Gothick Threatening eek!, but just because "eh, nothing to stand out".
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Yes, but do you cbat?
Never heard of it, not particularly improved my life to have heard it, but it's part tongue-in-cheek and part the spirit of 70s and 80s progressive noodling and self-indulgence lives on.
I'm not sure whether it fits better with Crazy Frog or Industrial. I think the Frog wins this one 😁
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