kopperfish
3mo ago
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.
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!
kopperfish
3mo ago
I disagree that
all of our art sucks
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.
Little darlin', I feel that ice is slowly melting
Little darlin', it seems like years since it's been clear
Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun
And I say, it's alright
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"
We will burn and not explain, and this will feel ecstatic
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:
The perfectibility of human nature is infinite: we shall therefore nurture infinite dreams with infinite amounts of blood. Failures are therefore successes and mere steps on the triumphant march towards bliss
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
Whose child was I dreaming to pierce through the unworn tip of my bayonet?
As her voice grows in strength she sings, almost triumphantly,
Whose life had I decided was less worthy of respect?
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
Then of course that was probably the peak of black culture with incredible artistic output that they will probably never reach again.
"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
all our art sucks
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.
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.
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