Some people with somewhere said that there are two types of joy:
Consider going on a hike and the weather turns bad. You slip in the mud, hurt your butt and mess up all your clothes, drop your phone in there too, possibly breaking it. You continue and get blocked by a torrent of a mudslide blocking your path meaning you have to find an alternative route, get lost, and end up getting back to your hotel tired, weak, starving.
Months later though, boy what a great story! The moment you landed on your butt - your expression was priceless! And to be fair, the views in the rain amongst the clouds was something you will remember for a lifetime.
This is the second type of joy, an investment in joy.
The same, I think, can be said for culture. You can appreciate culture in the moment: classic movies, various parades and celebrations, Christmas day.
But there are other elements of culture that were probably fairly awful or of little impact at the time which we now can be brought to tears in awe at their mere existence: Cathedrals and architecture that were under construction for centuries, Canals whose purpose was to haul massive amounts of coal through the water, pulled by horses on the sidelines, 18th century novels whose now very famous author may have died in obscurity.
Either way, these cultural elements need to be cherished and protected in every country. We can progress and adapt around them no problem. London is a fantastic example of a city who can expand and progress into the future (for better or worse) while maintaining vast swathes of its history.
One only needs to walk for 5 minutes before you find some monument that has been around anywhere between two hundred and a thousand years. Just sitting there in public between glass skyscrapers.
Every decade for a long time now has been clearly defined by a musical style that was 'in' at the time. Lining up with this were fashion trends, both of which seem to align perhaps deliberately.
Grunge, Swing, Rock n' Roll, Bebop. They all had an assigned period in history. This was made easy because all the powers that be - radio, print media, TV, the whole hog - easily coordinated with major record labels, distributing and creating the preferred narratives.
Nowadays, this has been completely overwhelmed by the invent of streaming platforms and more illicit access via things like torrents and P2P file sharing (Kazaa, Napster).
This destroyed the mass media's ability to control a narrative as they had done since time immemorial, and now there is just a cacophony of, well, everything.
This sounds great! Everybody gets to listen to exactly what they want. At the time, you would have been subject to the dominant forces, like it or not.
But in hindsight, to me it's clear this is a big cultural problem.
The 2000's had a vague, hard-to-define association with a style, maybe, but the concept rapidly became extinct. Now, the idea is long gone.
Hell, even the idea of 'genre' in its entirety is becoming a thing of the past. Modern musicians take influence from all over. You'll find insufferable mainstream musicians like Katy Perry or Billie Eilish or whatever taking influence from all sorts of places; Classical, Bossa Nova, Rock, it no longer matters.
And now, well, look around you.
Where are the Emos? The Goths? The Hipsters? You might find one or two in the wilderness scattered randomly in the cities, if you're lucky. But that's it.
Everybody dresses the same, everybody, on average, has the exact same perspectives and outlooks - made binary by politics of course. The cultural impact of those past decades were huge and we reap the benefits to this day. And yet we are no longer leaving anything for our own future generations to define our time other than war and outrage.
Somebody in the year 2000 will dress almost identical to people now, quarter of a century later. It's boring. Depressing. Repetitive. And so is the music.
Look at rap music. It was a truly defining error in the early 2000's with legendary artists like Eminem, Dre, Snoop, Xzibit, Nate Dogg, D12.
Since then, rap has kind of gone downhill, a bit underground, and stagnated significantly. Rappers almost universally rap in mono-rhythmic triplets and emotionless vocal mumbles or tacky, overpowering autotune. All have identical personalities and demeanours and mostly just dress up like they're collectively going to flash mob a luxury brand store. I know 'culture' and 'art' is technically subjective but come on. We have to draw a line somewhere between 'art' and 'pissing about'
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We know the musical culture is dead because whenever big events happen, or something needs to grab attention, we by and large hear music from previous generations rather than current music. A pop song by a current pop musician is almost indistinguishable from one 20 years ago. Often, it's the same musicians still lingering on as long as they can because name recognition is now more powerful than the art itself.
People have said musicians 'sell out' and such for forever, but I think it's reached its maximum at this point. Music has stopped being edgy or risque. It has stopped attempting to break any new ground. It is a savvy business decision and little else.
In big business, they use research and algorithms to decide what grabs the most attention through clever psychology and marketing. This means, like literal commercial music, the mainstream sound is inoffensive, aimless, and just like everything that came before it that demonstrably worked.
Even the offensive stuff like, say, WAP, was still in essence 'inoffensive'. At every level it was just another shitty RnB song or whatever. Just with a bit of a cringey lyrical base. This is the last ditch effort from media trying to grab attention - shock value. Also demonstrated perfectly in Ye's latest 'Heil Hitler'. A catchy song, no doubt. But outside of the HH concept, the music and lyrics themselves are... meh.
In small independent artists, they are victim of the same shit. They see the writing on the wall and they recognise that they will never get listens if they don't precisely follow the expected narrative and algorithm. They do this with trial and error. They start out as budding musicians with a new awesome idea. But after a year of crafting their works, they get about 4 views.
So they study. They realise they have to combine their music with things like TikTok. Well that means two main things:
So they redesign their entire brand to fit. They might get 100 views and some negative feedback which they take on board and re-brand once more until they inevitably become one with the rest. Inoffensive, commercially acceptable, predictable.
Then, of course, the groundwork is laid perfectly for AI to slip in and effortlessly take over because there is no expectation of a new Queen or David Bowie to come out. Everybody has just accepted that music will forever be the same basic groove, covering the same basic paltry topics in the same triplet rhythm or that insufferable Spanish drum groove (Buhm - TAbuhm - TA. You know the one).
Even those insisting on sticking to an old genre like heavy metal have softened their perspective to incorporate more pop and tik tok-friendly aesthetics.
100 years from now, history will be defined by this black hole of a generation, the moment where musical culture died, around the 2000's. People will look back in envy at the 60's, the 80's. People will know the names of these musicians far more than anybody coming out from the 2010's.
I mean, seriously, who is there? Justin Bieber? Come on, his music is written by 15-man writing teams like the rest of them. Why do you need 15 writers for a Bieber song? Of course, to meticulously craft every syllable to maximize attention according to the algorithm.
We can liken this to Youtube content creators to. Previously it was a free-for-all of brilliant and unique individuals. Some terrible and controversial, some genuinely talented beyond anything we could imagine.
Now, top creators have entire teams working on the thumbnail of the video, marking and correcting every pixel, studying the effects of one facial expression compared to another with eyebrows 4 pixels higher. You have them researching colour combinations that grab attention, from a hot red-yellow combo text to the calming trust of blues and greens - and the effect they have according to what percentage of screen space they use up.
Smaller users, again, are no different. I've noticed plenty of times a video's thumbnail change because they learn that one did not grab attention, so they have to review it and make it more click-baity before it's too late and their video vanishes into obscurity.
We're all just playing the game, being puppeted around by higher powers, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Musical culture is dead.
