This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Right now, we are at a place of polarization, yet all of our art sucks (my opinion obviously but it seems to be shared). If you look back at the last time our country was this divided in the 1960's, we saw some of the greatest output of music and literature we have ever seen. We had incredible artists like the Beatles among others. Then of course that was probably the peak of black culture with incredible artistic output that they will probably never reach again. This was probably the last time you saw many black musicians and guitarists be better than their white counterparts. If you take it back to the French Revolution, you saw some of the best political philosophy ever created such as with Rousseau. Political discord creates art and philosophy that has usually never been seen before, but today we don't see any of that. Even Monty Python is more subversive than anything we see today. Clockwork Orange was more subversive than anything we see today. Why aren't we seeing a peak in art again like the time should predict?
I disagree that
There's plenty of good music.
For starters, The Beatles are boring. Maybe it's my zoomer ass not having grown up with them, but it's 4/4 pop-rock with uninteresting lyrics.
Which is...fine. It's easy listening music, maybe the production was impressive back then, but I don't feel it's stood the test of time.
The 21st century has brought a lot of innovative, unique, or masterfully composed music releasing.
Deathspell Omega's "The Furnaces of Palingenesia" is possibly the only sober depiction of the platonically ideal fascist society in humanity's art output. From a composition perspective, it's masterful, but I suspect people more schooled in music could explain why better than I could, so I'll just excerpt a couple lyrics.
From the song "The Fires of Frustration"
This exact mentality is present everywhere and I've never seen it summed up quite this succinctly. You see it in a Twitter mob ruining a life, a riot burning down a small business owner's life savings, a primitive tribe butchering its foes purely on instinct, a mass shooter waging war against the universe - encapsulated in a short statement that makes perfect sense, underpinned by echoing, growled vocals, a wall-of-sound guitar mass that has tantalizingly discernible melodies amidst the chaos, and impossibly frenetic drumming. It's art in its purest form, raw human reality given form.
Another quote from the song "Ad Arma", which I feel needs no accompanying commentary:
If this doesn't resonate with a Motteposter I don't know what will.
On the topic of violence, give Mili's "Dandelion Boys, Dandelion Girls" a listen.
At 1:53, the vocalist whispers
As her voice grows in strength she sings, almost triumphantly,
Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Temptations, with Fortunate Son and War respectively, probably win the anti-war songs competition just through the test of time, but I would contend that Dandelion Boys, Dandelion Girls comes damn close in artistic merit, even if it falls far short in raw popularity.
Alright, that's a heavy topic, so let's go to more "fun" music. For now let's stay in the land of the rising sun with a Japanese electronic music producer:
Camellia's "Berserkerz' Warfare 345" is proof that music is still innovating. Nothing like this was even being conceived of in the days you speak of, but here it is now. It's purely digital, it's way too fast for your grandparents, your parents, or even your older siblings, and in the 60s drums were not doing this nonsense. We can debate quality or artistic merit, but it's certainly innovative, and it gets my blood pumping faster than anything released before this millennium. See also Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" EP, which spawned an entire genre of purely computer-generated piss-off-your-dad music, and was tremendously popular to boot. Electronic music existed well before this, but it wasn't anywhere near as belligerent, chaotic, or willing to subvert genre trends.
Oh dear. I've mostly gone off into niche genres. Even Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" (the most popular song off the EP of the same name), only has 195 million plays on Spotify, a pale shadow of The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" with over a billion, or Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper", a personal favorite of mine, with half a billion.
So let's talk popular music. Lil Nas X dropped "Old Town Road", which was catchy enough to get almost 1.5 billion plays on Spotify, and innovative enough to damn near spark a race war between rap and country fans. He then released "Industry Baby", which has more plays than Old Town Road, and is similarly earworm-y. I think it's a fascinating cultural artifact, because the music video (NSFW warning) is almost downright pornographic in an extremely morally degenerate manner. It features homoerotic black nudity in the context of "prison bitch" culture and a touch of Satanic imagery just for kicks, and somehow spawned next to no controversy. Debate its quality all you like, it's a useful cultural landmark - much like The Beatles.
I take issue with the statement
"End It" is a black-fronted punk/hardcore band that is blowing any traditionally white bands in the scene out of the water, in my opinion. "New Wage Slavery" transcends the entire discography of Knocked Loose or The Acacia Strain, both traditionally popular bands in those genre circles. And if you haven't heard of a little band called Death Grips, watch "I've Seen Footage" performed live and realize that black-fronted punk bands can captivate a majority-white audience of angry kids better than almost any white musician right now. These are my niche examples and entirely disregard the fact that black rappers can pull white crowds big enough that literal deaths occur.
Beyond music,
I don't watch many movies, so I can't speak to a 21st-century equivalent to Monty Python or Clockwork Orange. Despite that, I'll take a stab at movies that subvert expectations. In "The Departed", the finale where (spoilers) basically every major character dies is masterfully executed, and also subverted the shit out of my expectations. "You Were Never Really Here" is a movie about a mercenary with PTSD, and its inaugural fight scene presents itself like it's going to be a John Wick style one-man-army movie, only to cut to security cameras showing the protagonist vomiting at the doorway before muted, off-camera, implied, or out of focus violence occurs to all the nameless security guards. Subversive and brilliant.
I started compiling a list of literature like Peter Watts' "Blindsight" and John Scalzi's "Old Man's War", and then some YouTube content that has more or less supplanted things like SNL in my eyes like Almost Friday TV's sketch comedy, but it occurred to me that I'm not sure I've touched on your central argument.
Is any of this a peak in art?
That's a more fascinating question, and one I'm substantially less qualified to answer. Other posters, I think, have made reasoned arguments for whether a peak is occurring, will occur, or can occur due to technology fragmenting fandoms, and I don't wish to rehash their arguments here. But I take major issue with the statement
because from my perspective it's simply not true. There's more and better art available to us than at any point in human history. We just can't tell what of it will stand the test of time yet.
Moby made his 1000bpm track 30 years ago, and although he doesn't have any children at 58 he's old enough to be a grandfather. Pre electronic music there were people making experimental noise music using jackhammers.
The Camellia track sounds more developed but at base it's an iteration on the paradigm of making artificially intense music. It's not that it's too fast for the olds, it's that it's too fast full stop. There's a point of diminishing returns and there's a point beyond that of negative returns. Pushing the limits or indeed wilfully smashing them is, at this point, if not a stale idea then at least a very long way from radical and unfamiliar.
If you disagree that it's too fast you can increase the speed to 2x on YouTube, but I expect you'd agree it doesn't make it twice as good.
These days if you want to shock the olds you have to get a face tattoo and cut your dick off, and even that's just upping the ante on the kind of shit flinging, blood spilling, dick stroking, gender bending performance art that's been happening since the '60s. Radicalism just isn't radical anymore. It's been tried and where it hasn't been largely rejected the remainder has been assimilated.
I disagree that it's too fast, and I would submit that making it 2x on YouTube doesn't make it better is an argument for it. This is music that is intended for that speed, not speed purely for speed's sake.
The point is that exploring our cultural frontiers diminishes the amount of territory left unexplored, and a lot of the charted territory has been marked as being of limited interest and value for more than a generation. We know the extremes are out there and most people choose the alternative not out of ignorance but out of preference.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link