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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I mean, I think it's cool to sing about, e.g., The Moon Landing, or The possibility of Extraterrestrial life, (no, really), or the sweeping cosmic history of 'life' in the Universe.

But in that case the only genre taking on those topics is Progressive Rock.

So while I'm complete granting the point that there are a limited number of themes which are likely to generate commercially viable songs, there are whole books full of topics that might be cool to sing about.

I would argue that Country and Rap are thematically limited in part because they're inextricably tied to their culture of origin, which is to say that 'authentic' country and rap are going to be about things that were common in the culture of the respective artists that originated it.

Granted, sometimes you'll get a weird outsider who manages to pull an out-of-left-field hit.

Some days I get actively annoyed that there hasn't been any pop song similar to Bohemian Rhapsody (or others in Queen's ouvre) in, seemingly, decades.

Granted, sometimes you'll get a weird outsider who manages to pull an out-of-left-field hit.

I could stand to watch roughly 20 seconds of it before closing it and thinking to myself "Maybe the North Koreans are right".