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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27715 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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"Cringe" is a super useful word, IMO. So is "creep". These words occupy the space that "gay" and "lame" used to occupy before they were cancelled.

The best way to defeat a label, of course, is to own it. You want to call me a Yankee Doodle Dandy? That's cool. I'm the gayest, lamest, Yankee Doodle Dandy you ever saw.

Still, in 2023, no one wants to be cringe or creepy. These words still have power.

You know what was cringe? Alt-right people dressing up in Hawaiian shirts and carrying Tiki torches. You know what's not cringe? Bill Ackman waging a crusade against Harvard wokists.

Wait a second, you say. Who gets to decide what is cringe, and what isn't?

Answer: The Elite. The elite gets to decide who is lame and gay cringe and creepy and who is not. Control of the narrative is what defines the elite.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Richard Hanania does. In one of his less annoying pieces he makes a great point about the possibility of a Jewish realignment.

When you correct for IQ, when you correct for tribalism, Jews are something like 30-50% of the elite population in the US. Look at university presidents, look at cabinet members, look at Nobel Prize winners. You're bound to notice something.

Jews are under attack in the Western World right now. We are seeing the largest outbreak of anti-semitism since WWII. And it's the far left that is responsible. If, and it's a big if, this results in American Jews abandoning the left, it could end with the biggest political realignment since the 1970s. Already we see the the strands of a nascent movement among the cognescenti. Is an intellectual, philo-Semitic conservative movement possible? I think, surprisingly, the answer is yes.

Populists are cringe and creepy. Elite realignments are cool and edgy. The fashion barber pole has made another rotation and the mustaches are slightly less ironic.

In the modern West, the elite only partly define what is cool. And it's not the political elites who do it, it's media elites - people like music journalists, influencers, and marketing professionals some of whom are elite in their fields, but who are not elites in the traditional sense of "super-rich people who have a lot of direct political power".

But cool also often emerges from organic movements. For example, rock in the 1950s, hip-hop in the 1980s, and grunge in the 1990s were organic movements that got accelerated significantly by music journalism and marketing, but were not created or made cool by those things. Journalism and marketing played a role in making those things popular, but journalism and marketing only latched on to them after they had already become popular at least in some subculture.

But cool also often emerges from organic movements. For example, rock in the 1950s, hip-hop in the 1980s, and grunge in the 1990s were organic movements that got accelerated significantly by music journalism and marketing, but were not created or made cool by those things.

Watching the past couple years unfold has made me very skeptical about the organic nature of anything that makes it to the mainstream. Them not creating it is irrelevant, and in my opinion they absolutely did make it cool. The fact that it was popular in some nieche begore that doesn't change the fact that they made it cool. Christian Rock was popular too (kind of massive, in fact) but it was cringe, while Ggrunge was cool. I see no reeasosn to think it couldn't be the other way around, if this is what the elites wanted.

Cool is relative and both temporal and location-limited. There were almost certainly circles (maybe large parts of the country) where Christian rock was in practice considered more cool than grunge. Similarly, wearing avant garde fashion to a suburban Nashville stay-at-home-mom meetup is extremely cringe and uncool, but wearing the kind of skinny blue jeans and tan cowboy boots uniform that was cringe in NYC a decade ago is perfectly normal.

There were never circles where Christian rock was cool. I get your point you're trying to make and your misunderstanding as a trans Atlantic coastal elite, but it's misunderstanding both the concept of cool and the concept of Christian rock and indeed the concept of rock.

Cool is relative and both temporal and location-limited

Yes, but not in the way you describe. No high-status person ever thought, "shit, better up my Christian game, or I'll look cringe". Some did that for the money, but not for the coolness.

Yeah, because (high) society is based around the culture of the richest and most powerful cities (NYC and to a much lesser extent LA) where most elites haven’t been religiously Christian for 70+ years.

I don’t doubt that, say, a sole Jewish kid at a heavily Christian suburban high school in a deep red part of a red state might start listening to Christian rock.

I mean, there's plenty of Christian rock that's generally accepted as decent enough to have a large secular fanbase, the idea that Christian rock is entirely the kind of cringefest niche market it was in the 80s is just not up to speed. And most Christians listen to secular rock music nowadays, too- even in Tyler, Texas(where Greg Abbott relocates to to sign particularly controversial bills), there's not a public school demographic that will only listen to Christian rock- they homeschool.

Then there's no way to call it organic. Local elites are going to block hostile culture from becoming cool, no matter how popular it is at the bottom.

I don’t doubt that, say, a sole Jewish kid at a heavily Christian suburban high school in a deep red part of a red state might start listening to Christian rock

I do doubt that, actually. Why wouldn't the Jewish kid hang out with the nerds and geek out about Star Wars, instead of trying to fit into something he obviously isn't a part of?

I think post internet, the chances of organic discovery and development more or less died. The gatekeepers can simply downgrade a music type or movie or TV show in streaming services and never ever talk about it in journalistic articles, and suppress social media posts to quash new trends before they even start. In previous eras, you could pass around physical media like mix tapes and introduce your friends to a cool band. You could tape a show and hand it around.

I think post internet, the chances of organic discovery and development more or less died.

Post-Web 2.5, anyways. It used to be that "going viral" had a fairly organic component to it. Yes, in an age where algorithms power everything, the platform owners reserve the right to put their thumbs on the scale, and only weird, brand-unfriendly shit is the kind of stuff that you could argue becomes organically memetic. But back in the days of early YouTube? Not so much.

I don't see how these alternative methods of distribution give you an edge over uploading something to Odysee, or Rumble. At the end if the day for something to go from the underground to the mainstream, it had to get the green light from some suit. This is why there were, and still are, things stuck in the underground for all intents and purposes, despite being popular.

I think the bigger factor here is the recent concentration of media ownership, there used to be more competition in the past.

Yeah, that makes sense to me.

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