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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38204 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?

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.

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