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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38199 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Does anyone else find it interesting that despite going through a momentous era of nation wide protests through BLM, Covid lockdown protests, etc. there’s been very little in the way of protest music produced by the culture? This may just be the function of my being mid 30s and being out of touch, but unlike the 1960s-70s which produced some amazing protest music (bob dylan, Nina Simone, Beatles, etc) there’s been…nothing of any note these days. Feels like a cultural wasteland tbh

Is this the youth being a much smaller generation now? Is music too corporate now? Or are the youth simply more conformist and love authority?

Bunch of songs came out on the theme of BLM, but then again it's not like there isn't already significant over-representation of that theme amongst popular music anyway.

Hard to really do a protest song for COVID without getting absolutely nuked from orbit by the media.

Arcade Fire did some banger pseudo-protest tracks. Man I really need to write up a top level post about their front man getting cancelled.

Unironically, Pepe memes are this generation’s protest songs.

The same cultural dynamics are there - just not in the places you’re used to looking for them, and not in the same forms.

Topher's The Patriot released in December 2020 and stirred up some controversy after the rapper performed it on January 6, 2021 at a Veterans for Trump rally and it was pulled from Spotify.

I don't know, maybe these sorts of things have to come from counterculture rather than the dominant culture. That doesn't seem like a very satisfying explanation, but it pattern matches from what I can see.

For another example of this: I think that "Amazonia" and "The Chant" by Gojira are both great protest songs at a musical and lyrical level. The problem is that, in the abstract, opposing the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the Chinese occupation of Tibet is a mainstream opinion. You have to be careful how you express these opinions in the concrete, e.g. it's not mainstream to blame Brazilians or say China Flu, but in the abstract these are establishment opinions. It's like Nixon saying "I, too, want peace!" in 1972-1973.

Such abstract mainstream assent takes the wind out of the sails of protest music, which itself tends to be abstract and cautious, though not always. Rage Against the Machine managed to resist this, but only barely, and post-2008, their "Bring down the system, man!" is very mainstream - just as long as it doesn't actually mean nationalising Amazon/Microsoft/Google or closing Wall Street, because the Democrat (or Tea Party) policies are enough for Change We Can Believe In, and bring down the system as we know it.

It's hard to imagine now, but late 1960s protest music was controversial, was risky, and did make many people suspicious about your character. How many parents still get worried if their kids play Rage Against the Machine or Public Enemy? Only insofar as some parents will worry their kids using naughty words or what could be construed as antisemitic rhetoric ("crucifixion ain't no fiction") or gun violence (one of the very few remaining respectable reasons in liberal reasons to be worried about 90s rap, or Wheatus).

I'd draw a difference between Gojira and RATM, both bands whose musical stylings I quite like, incidentally. With Gojira, I've never got the feeling that political subjects are the primary thing; lyrically it's a part of a greater spiritual/ethical theme, but even beyond that, the actual music seems to come first. With RATM, politics always comes first (and it's worth remembering that RATM's political views in the 90s really went as extreme as they could; they praised Sendero Luminoso, and even within commie spheres that's really the one thing that's guaranteed to get people to go "whoah, that's going way too far, comrade."

Yes, that's a good distinction between the two. I suppose I would classify Public Enemy as closer to RATM, though I haven't listened to a large proportion of the former's songs.

There are a few reasons why protest music fails to capture an audience that it used to in the 60s through the 80s. While corporatism/consumerism wants music that captures the widest audience to be marketed the most aggressively, the biggest part of it is that there is simply so much music being produced at any given time. The volume of music being produced at any given moment is staggering, so the largest and most promoted voices are focused on capturing the biggest share of music possible. Any protest songs will find a comparably niche audience. As @greyenlightenment also eluded, popular cultural leaders can simply post on social media rather than making specific music about current events. This allows consumers who like their music to not be ostracized by political statements in music while at the same time claim to support the latest cultural zeitgeist.

One of the other problems is that we have lost our understanding of harmonic and musical language. Take Shostakovich's 9th symphony for instance(https://youtube.com/watch?v=16MIEhqoHNI). If you listen to the piece, you may have some understanding of the harmonic and melodic choices that he chose when writing the piece. However, unless you know this piece was written as a celebration of Russia's success on the Eastern front and purposefully subverted the Soviets expectations of bombastic and nationalistic success, you might be hard pressed to understand the cultural impact and relevance of the piece. Most of us have forgotten that the music itself used to be a form of revolution, not just the lyrics. Most people do not understand it because they have become ignorant to how music can subvert and commentate on cultural relevance and still be timeless.

Speak of national commissions, the lack of national involvement in the arts, and the lack of promotion of this in western media beyond the Proms in England and maybe the Presidential Inauguration, there is a distinct lack of public artistic works being commissioned and promoted into mainstream culture. The NEA in the US is essentially a blind pool of money partially sent for National Orchestras and for other personal pet projects of the political elite which rarely if ever reach cultural relevancy. Likewise, the lack of national and public broadcasting beyond NPR makes new works incredibly difficult to spread, and NPR's audience is not that large beyond it being considered a propaganda arm. Likewise, NPR and PBS have separated their musical efforts from NPR proper (or have at some point) further removing music broadcasting from cultural relevance.

This leaves individual songs and artists with much less impact on cultural discussion than any previous generation and makes musical genre as the way to define political alignment rather than individual artists or songs. Too much music is a stronger entropic force than too little music.

The 60s and 70s had protest songs that were keep alive in the public consciousness through tv and movies in the decades that followed, notably Forest Gump, but nowadays I think entertainment has become more fragmented, so it's hard to find protests songs that are emblematic of generation like in the past. Green Day , Rage Against the Machine had some notable protest songs in the early 21st century.

I think there's a lot you can say.

What was the position of minorities in the sixties? Of women? Of young men facing potentially being drafted to fight in Vietnam?

The world these young people were protesting against was so different from the one we live in today. i think that's the most major factor.

I don't know if music is 'too corporate' now, we'll call that the Lester Bangs theory, that rock/pop/etc. is now just an "industry of cool." Probably plays a part. Pink came out with "What About Us?" in 2017, I think that could be called something in the range of a protest song. Clapton made "This Has Got To Stop" during the pandemic...which has less than 1 percent of the views that Pink's song has. So I guess if you're going to write a protest song, be young and stay cool.

From the other tribe. "Anti-Fascist Blues" by Five Times August

The comments on the youtube video seem to suggest that this song is actually serious and not a parody, unless everybody in the comments is doing a great job of keeping up kayfabe or something.... I understand it's a song and they are using hyperbole in a lot of the statements in a sort "fuck it we'll just double down on all the dumb shit we're accused of" type of way, but I genuinely can't fathom a song containing the lyric "everyone's a fascist till they're all controlled" not being a parody. As in, if somebody made a song with that line as a parody to ridicule antifascists I wouldn't have thought it funny because it would seem too blunt to me.....

EDIT: It is actually a parody ridiculing the left. I quickly skimmed through a few comments on the vid and didn't see anything immediately indicating it was being interpreted as a parody (stuff like 'they don't want people to wake up, so they can keep controlling them' is something which can be said by both tribes), but having skimmed through some more comments due to the replies I got, it is indeed ridiculing the left. I'm not exactly honoring my username having been a bit too hasty here......

Five Times August is Red Tribe. I don't know what you mean by the comments on the video, "They don't want people to wake up so they can keep controlling people," "music that resonates with the silent majority," "Now we have protest music against the woke Left and the government."

They are ridiculing antifacists. Yes, it is pretty blunt.

The comments on the youtube video seem to suggest that this song is actually serious and not a parody,

What comments are you reading? I saw mostly references to freedom truckers, lockdown protestors, and "G-d". Looks right-wing to me.

There's tons of protest music now, just like there's tons of all other kinds of music now. There's so much music being made now that it's not possible to keep track of it all. The question isn't "why isn't anyone making protest music?" it's "why isn't protest music very popular?" My take is that in such a hyper-competitive environment, nothing reaches the level of popularity required for the average Magusoflight to be aware of it except the most hyper-optimized pop music.

A few examples:

I'm surprised how much rap/hip hop was in those links -- I would have expected mostly country, but I wasn't surprised at how pro-God it was.

I was listening to a secular rock playlist and these 2 songs both came on back to back. So it's not just marginal ideological Christians talking about this stuff. Although, these 2 try to be less confrontational about it, so maybe it's not "protest music"

At least in Finland, the anti-vaxx movement has attracted more than a few local rappers, some of whom seem to have made a wholesale switch to the conspiracy-theory oriented, at the very least right-wing adjacent movements. For instance, there's a Youtube podcast made by two rappers, who started with a sort of a Joe Rogan -style "we're just interviewing guests" thing but soon pivoted to full-fledged conspiracy theory beat when the Covid passport became a topic of discussion and now are active in a minor far-right antivaxx party. Antivaxx rallies, when they were still being held as mass events, have also prominently featured rappers. Most of them are white (since Finland is a 98% white country), but not all - for instance, arguably one of the first black rappers in Finland to have a Finnish-language rap hit has pivoted to this scene, and one of the podcasters I mentioned is Iranian.)

Of course conspiracy theories have always had a large stock among hip-hop culture, and if the society moves to a direction where the main thrust of the conspiracy theory culture is on the right, that's where some of them might indeed gravitate, and they'll hardly stop making music in the style that's familiar to them.

Wow, Shinedown was a pretty large name in music and their new album is full of stuff like this. I never thought a major name would be singing (somewhat less in your face) protest music. First comment on the linked Youtube video, "Rock right now is returning to what rock is all about: saying fuck you to the idiots and the mainstream. Shinedown has big ass balls, and I stand with them." Maybe there is a bigger movement that the average person is missing, since radio only plays the same 20 songs?

On this note: how do you discover new music? I tried to get into Soulseek recently. Is last.fm still a thing?

I personally mostly find music either through Bandcamp's front page thing in their mobile app, or I go look for it if I hear something interesting in a livestreamer's background. Bandcamp is my platform of choice, though I am the kind of guy who buys digital music.

The YouTube channel 4AM Breaks showcases D&B and Jungle stuff, there's ArtzieMusic and ElectronicGems, there's probably channels dedicated to obscure metal and punk rock.

Think it's because it's implied. Rappers do not need to rap about supporting George Floyd..they can post BLM stuff on social media instead or rap about how bad white people or cops are. Also, rock and roll was major medium of protest music, which as a genre has been in relative decline for the past 2 decades compared to pop, electronic, rap and other genres.

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