Tuesday, August 30, 2022
It's all boring
In yesterday's New York Times, Michelle Goldberg wrote about the relative lack of innovation in our culture today, noting that the music young people listen to now sounds a lot like what I listened to in college-- and in the case of Kate Bush's 1985 hit "Running Up That Hill" literally is what I listened to in college. Goldberg chalks this up to a loss of art as a status marker, but I'm not buying it.
It's true, though: there is no truly challenging movement emerging in music or film or books or fine art right now.
I'm surprised by this-- after all, I predicted that the later Trump years would produce a tsunami of artistic output, in part driven by the weird dystopia of the pandemic. The perfect storm of dislocation and emotion seemed to be there. But... that didn't happen.
My theory was probably flawed in that I expected a counter-culture to emerge from under the boot of the Trump regime. In retrospect, though, the Trumpies were the counter-culture. They were never a majority, and they viewed themselves as outsiders (and still do). But rather than decent art, they just produced bad speeches, new blather-channels, conspiracy theories, and red hats. Worst counter-culture ever!
Worse, they pulled us all into politics in a way that produced little other than repetitions of the same tired discourse. Which party did Andy Warhol or Mark Rothko support? Who knows? It didn't matter.
Art allows us to get at things deeper than politics, principles and truths that the language of politics cannot approach. We need it now more than ever.
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A couple of thoughts:
1) I do think this dearth of newness is less universal than it's often made out to be. Film, for instance, has plenty of people in it pushing boundaries despite Marvel/Disney's homogenization – the highest-grossing non-adaptation film of the year is a heady art-horror film chock-full of obscure biblical references, for instance. I think pop music is a special case: it's a medium that has been defined since the sixties by new instrumental possibilities (what innovation was going to happen in Eighties pop without cheap synths becoming available?), a well that has dried up now that decent production suites can imitate any possible instrument, and Spotify's market-share chokehold and deep catalog mean that most Americans have access to a near-complete library of pop music in their pocket with little preference given to newer work, making it FAR easier to rediscover older songs than, say, it is for a young author to discover older novels.
b) That said, I don't think it's true that there's nothing new and popular happening in pop music! Hyperpop is extremely popular with young people, especially young queer people, and while, like any genre, it draws from plenty of influences (in its case, EDM, ska, pop-punk, and occasionally mainstream country), it sounds like absolutely nothing else out there. (And, like all new musical genres before it, either you "get it" or it sounds like a bunch of Ewoks on fire.) It's rare for a hyperpop song to top the charts, sure, but was it common for the Talking Heads to be in the Top 40? I honestly don't think the early 2020s are shaping up that differently than any other decade as pop music goes: the safe stuff you'll forget in five years gets radio play while the weird queer art students are hunkered down in their basements making something truly new.
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1) I do think this dearth of newness is less universal than it's often made out to be. Film, for instance, has plenty of people in it pushing boundaries despite Marvel/Disney's homogenization – the highest-grossing non-adaptation film of the year is a heady art-horror film chock-full of obscure biblical references, for instance. I think pop music is a special case: it's a medium that has been defined since the sixties by new instrumental possibilities (what innovation was going to happen in Eighties pop without cheap synths becoming available?), a well that has dried up now that decent production suites can imitate any possible instrument, and Spotify's market-share chokehold and deep catalog mean that most Americans have access to a near-complete library of pop music in their pocket with little preference given to newer work, making it FAR easier to rediscover older songs than, say, it is for a young author to discover older novels.
b) That said, I don't think it's true that there's nothing new and popular happening in pop music! Hyperpop is extremely popular with young people, especially young queer people, and while, like any genre, it draws from plenty of influences (in its case, EDM, ska, pop-punk, and occasionally mainstream country), it sounds like absolutely nothing else out there. (And, like all new musical genres before it, either you "get it" or it sounds like a bunch of Ewoks on fire.) It's rare for a hyperpop song to top the charts, sure, but was it common for the Talking Heads to be in the Top 40? I honestly don't think the early 2020s are shaping up that differently than any other decade as pop music goes: the safe stuff you'll forget in five years gets radio play while the weird queer art students are hunkered down in their basements making something truly new.
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