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Do American on The Motte feel that the country is generally in favour of breaking from its old European alliances? I am not sure I have got that sense when visiting but I've visited only fairly D-leaning areas in recent years.
From the British/European point of view, one has the sense from current reporting that a significant rebalancing is happening, one that I would characterise as going beyond wanting to reduce American spending on e.g. Ukraine, and towards decisively breaking with European countries out of gut dislike, and beginning instead to form either a US-Russian alliance of sympathies, or if not that, then at least a relationship with Russia that is rhetorically much friendlier than that with Europe. I think the fear is starting to take root in Europe that the US would effectively switch sides in return for Russia granting it mineral rights in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. This heel turn seems unlikely, but things are murky enough that it is worrying people.
I feel that this rebalancing is already working in a way towards achieving stated Trump goals – it certainly is succeeding in restoring Europe's appetite for military spending (underinvestment here is one thing Trump has been consistently right about but European leaders have buried their heads in the sand on, hoping he'd go away). But the current situation re Ukraine is also sending confusing signals, as it had previously seemed as though the US wanted Europe to step up and be part of a solution for Ukraine, whereas currently it seems they actively want to stop Europe from having a role in peace talks. The motive for this appears to be stopping Europe from asking terms of Russia that would delay a solution the US and Russia find jointly satisfactory, though perhaps there is more going on beneath the surface.
I did not have the impression that the American population generally has gone through this kind of Europe->Russia realignment in their hearts, Russians still being a regular foil for the good guys in movies (said movies coming from liberal-leaning Hollywood, sure). I have the impression that moving towards Russia is an aspect of foreign policy that Trump has not built domestic support for. But maybe this is wrong. Maybe the average American now thinks not only "Europe should contribute more to solve their own defence problems", but furthermore, "Europe should get its nose out of international affairs and attempt to help only when it's spoken to. We, Russia and China are in charge now."
I'm writing this without especially detailed knowledge of foreign policy, but I'm more interested here in the emotional calibration of ordinary Americans generally. What outcomes would they accept, what outcomes are they afraid of, who do they feel warm to and who not, and to what extent do they feel entirely insulated from global events, alliances and enmities?
I live in EU and I have different take here. EU is increasingly growing irrelevant on global stage. You can look at it from the perspective of GPD, where the share decreased from 31% of World GDP in 1980 to 15% now. Or you can take it through most successful companies in EU where two out of top 5 EU you just have bunch of luxury apparel companies like LVMH and Hermes or old IT companies like SAP or Accenture representing the IT sector with some pharma companies added. Top 15 top EU companies have less value than Apple with 3,6 trillion market cap.
You can look at it from the perspective of security. EU countries cannot do anything for themselves in this front for last 70 years at least. We could not resolve issues in Yugoslavia, we could not resolve issues in Syria or Lebanon and we cannot do shit in Ukraine. The whole EU cannot even produce the same amount of artillery shells as North Korea.
Culturally EU is dead. In the past there were at least some italian spaghetti westerns, some interesting French movies and music. This is now completely overwhelmed by USA. There is basically nothing produced in EU, the culture is thoroughly US based.
Politically, EU countries are weak as well, it is much worse than in other countries. We now basically have permanent unelected bureaucratic structure with zero legitimacy. Our current President of the European Commission - Ursula von der Layen - is career bureaucrat, she was just a party figure in local German politics. She does not represent shit, most people in EU do not even know she exist. She is a dwarf not even compared to people like Trump or Xi Jinping, she is a dwarf compared to Macron and other elected EU leaders. This whole structure is a joke.
When I am thinking about the whole debacle with Trump, it is just another nail in the coffin. Some people in EU may be surprised, but in reality EU countries are not US allies, we are just vassals. If anything I do actually consider this as a "tough love". In a sense it is liberating to see somebody who actually talks to EU leaders as irrelevant dogs as they are instead of getting pets and platitudes from figures like Obama or Biden, while inevitably going into irrelevancy.
It also opens a very interesting conundrum for many people in Europe, who so far thought of themselves as "The West" or some such. This may even continue if some other countries - especially Germany o France elect more nationalistic governments that will try to forge their own path in the world. In a sense the whole Russia narrative is just a red herring. It is the topic of this decade, but there are other heavy-weights: India, China, Turkey or some up-and-coming countries which may have increased importance in upcoming decades such as Nigeria. European countries will have different geopolitical goals even compared to one another - like when Germans were cozying up to Putin for decades despite many warnings from other countries like Poland - until he was suddenly a bad guy. But there will be different goals compared to these other great powers or superpowers.
I will point out that Europe is still a major force in music. Particularly in the realm of electronic dance music; DJs and producers like David Guetta (French), Martin Garrix (Dutch), Armin Van Buuren (Dutch), R3HAB (Dutch of Moroccan ancestry), Alesso (Swedish), Tiësto (Dutch), Sebastian Ingrosso (Swedish), Ofenbach (French), the recently disbanded Daft Punk (French) and the late Avicii (Swedish) have all been massive figures in dance-pop music for decades, including composing and producing mega-hits with famous artists from America, the UK, Australia, etc.
Yes, this is not a cultural achievement on the level of the great European orchestral music tradition, nor even of the intellectually-stimulating European high cinema of the 20th century, but I think it’s at least as respectable as Spaghetti Westerns, and certainly considerably more popular and lucrative.
Music is dead as a cultural touchcpoint.
I think this is a delusional take, and that major music artists are still an extremely important part of the cultural zeitgeist. I don’t know what it would take to convince you otherwise.
It's far more fragmented bc of online archives.
People have way more options now.
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Really? Dylan, Hendrix, The Beatles, etc all touched culture. They molded it and it molded them and what was spit out changed the world. You can’t help when you think of Vietnam thinking of the soundtrack to Vietnam.
Today? There is some small commercial stuff. You see people trying to make statements but it comes off less organic and more “we are supposed to stand for something.”
Who is the soundtrack of the 2020s?
HEALTH? bbno$? Post Malone?
I only know who one of those even is. I don't know if online life is to blame like someone else said - it seems to me to slightly predate modern social media - but whatever the reason, music is so fragmented now that it's almost inconceivable someone could get the whole culture following them the way the Beatles did. Taylor Swift is probably the closest thing currently possible but it's not that close.
That's fair, I think once rock music was finally out of the spotlight by the end of the 2000's and streaming took hold, the music landscape became massive and manifold.
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I think I saw those words..once or twice?
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In my filter bubble ‘Vietnam’ brings up thoughts of lily-livered anti-American pinkos in the media and the soundtrack is understood to be Okie from Muskogee.
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To be clear, are you claiming that there are no massively-commercially-successful musical artists today? Thats just demonstrably and profoundly false.
As for your claims about how musicians in the 2020s don’t have the power to mold young people’s entire brains and ethos the way the big 60’s and 70’s acts did, that’s partially a result of those acts’ legacies being inflated retroactively by the use of their music in media created by the very Boomers who grew up listening to them. Yeah, we associate Creedence Clearwater Revival and Buffalo Springfield with the Vietnam War now because Boomer liberal filmmakers intentionally cultivated that association.
There’s nothing going on in America today which unites a cross-section of the young people in opposition to the government quite the way that the Vietnam War did. We haven’t had military conscription in this country in two generations. Whatever you want to say about all the bad things the government is doing, none of them are as viscerally threatening as forcibly shipping you across the world to get shot at. If the next Big War pops off in the 2020’s — and it’s not exactly looking unlikely that it will — and it results in a reintroduction of the draft, it’s going to forge a shared culture among young people that’s only nebulous today. It’s amusing to imagine films (or whatever the next step in media content will be) about World War III, with montages of mass drone strikes set to the music of Olivia Rodrigo and The Weeknd, and for those to be the retroactive associations future generations perceive when they think about our time period.
In the meantime, the soundtrack of the 2020s is not difficult to identify if you just look at what artists are selling the most albums, having their music streamed the most often on Spotify and other similar services, whose concert tours are the most successful, who appear the most on TV, etc. Taylor Swift still dominates, plus the aforementioned Olivia Rodrigo and The Weeknd, Ariana Grande, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, Doja Cat, BTS, Chappell Roan… and that’s not even getting into the resurgence of country music as mass culture, with Morgan Wallen’s One Thing At A Time being the longest-running #1 album of the decade so far.
No, U.
No, he's claiming there's none that have the cultural impact of those in the past, and he's right. Your explanations only confirm this, though they are wrong in the sense that were the causes of past artists' status that you identified reproduced, it would not inflate them to the level of the people he mentioned. That is: you can put Taylor Swift's music in every movie, and none of it will matter because movies lost their cultural impact as well.
Taylor Swift is the only one that's remotely close to what he's talking about, and that's by the skin of her teeth.
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That’s the point Kubrick was making in Full Metal Jacket when he set the Battle of Hue scene to Surfin’ Bird ie the forgotten, low artistic value bubblegum crap that was actually at the top of the charts in 1968. Not the historical hindsight classics like CCR and the Doors.
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I mean I have some idea but that's more like 2010s.
A fairly niche band and not even its most recognizable song?
If you think people at large know any other MGMT song better than Little Dark Age, you're not paying attention to zoomer culture.
It's a meme song at this point, has specific (if unintended) political salience and enough cultural impact that a whole genre of musical videos is named after it.
You want the equivalent of Dylan's boomer hymns, this is it.
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How old are you? This song is instantly recognizable to a huge portion of Millennials, zoomers and gen alpha across cultures.
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I believe the user you’re responding to is saying that the 2020’s are, in some important sense, a “Little Dark Age”, which is why that song would be an apropos soundtrack.
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I think you’re right but European dance music has little cultural relevancy.
Nobody cares what Armin van Buren or Afrojack has to say the way they did about the Beatles, Bob Dylan, or hell, even Taylor Swift.
As an art form, EDM is sterile, mere decoration. It has nothing to say about the cultural moment except as a monument to escapism and hedonism. Its closest historical parallel is disco.
All of the artists I named have major followings, and perform at festivals that attract tens of thousands of attendees. David Guetta has sold over 10 million albums and 65 millions singles globally, and has over 30 billion streams on Spotify. These artists’ music is played ubiquitously on the radio, and again, they collaborate with some of the most famous singers in the world.
Yes, you’re correct that nobody cares what Armin Van Buuren has to say about philosophy or geopolitics or whatever. This is a good thing! It’s actually a terrible thing for our culture that young people started taking the political opinions of drug-addicted twentysomething musicians seriously! Disco kicks ass! Hedonistic pop music is infinitely preferable to supposedly “deep and counter-cultural” music by midwit pseudo-intellectuals like Bob Dylan seeking to poison relationships between the generations.
Worth also noting that "luminary" artists like Dylan also seem to tend to lose favor and popularity, as people realize that these artists stop being/never were what people thought they were (as what happened to Dylan post-50's/60's) and/or these artists disappear up their own ass later in life.
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I like disco music and EDM for what it is, but it's not high art.
In some ways it really is the perfect European music. It's trans-national. Much like the disconnected global elite, it is not from a place. It is from anyplace. It is generic, bland, almost always in English, etc... Swedish, Dutch, Irish, who cares? It's all the same. Performance consists of a DJ pressing play and then bopping his head around.
Fair enough. Most artists are firmly midwits, and I'd put Dylan in that category, though he's smart enough to let his music stand on its own. But the music of Dylan, The Beatles, or Taylor Swift exists as an art form in a way that EDM music, which is inherently disposable, does not.
As an art form, American music is vastly superior to European music.
I'm sorry, did you really say Taylor Swift exists as an art form in way that EDM music cannot? Corporate Taylor Swift? Basic white girl Taylor Swift? The most generic music of the decade, Taylor Swift?
Also The Beatles were British. And if you retort that they don't really count because of their still Anglophone, there's Rammstein, Stromae, Bladee, for your none EDM music consideration.
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Based. The greatest European music has always been transnational. Classical music was very intentionally cosmopolitan, and even the more nationalist composers were still working within a template that was extremely recognizably Pan-European. Even when it came to opera, which requires the use of a specific language and thus presents some thorny questions of national specificity, composers would set their operas in languages other than their native tongues.
The development of a shared culture transcending borders is an extremely positive development in European history, and I’m happy to see it recapitulated in European pop music. It’s not true that these musicians could be “from anywhere”; I don’t see them taking much influence from Southeast Asian music, or Amerindian folk music, or anything like that. Their music is clearly descended from a European tradition.
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