"Well, that's what we're givin' 'em! Something to believe in."
First of all, 10 points to anyone who names that movie quote.
Okay, this rant is very much a 1:45am kind of post, but the underlying idea here is legitimate, even if the articulation is bad. I just read an article pointed out to me by my writing teacher that describes the disappointing trend in rock and pop music, that a lot of artists are simply re-hashing the sounds of previous decades, be it punk, R&B, 60s/70s British rock, or what have you. It's a retrogression that contradicts the expected trend of culture, which is constantly evolve and innovate, not to remember the good ol' days. Rap is now old enough that it can do this too, and I believe that it is doing this.
I think the music scene is one aspect of a larger identity crisis that 21st century culture is having. We don't seem to have a voice, or a focus, to our culture anymore - indeed, most art history classes, it seems to me, talk about art movements the way most people might talk about polytheism: something that used to happen, something we don't have anymore. I risk oversimplifying, but it really seems to me that the intellectual history of the 20th century knocked out everything we could have faith in. Religion (not God, whom I will not bring into this) and country have long since betrayed our trust, and the secular, stateless institutions that gave us hope in the 60s - peace, love, rock & roll - have failed to make the world any better. It's been almost two generations since then; the late 70s and 80s brought back a temporary and false hope in selfishness and individualism, but we felt the backlash of that in the 90s. Things went well in the 90s, but it was an aimless kind of success; we prospered, but there wasn't a movement behind it, no ideology to justify or explain why things were going so well.
Then, at the turn of the century, a corrupt idiot and his gang of puppet-masters take power in an election whose legitimacy is still to this day a joke; some very evil people start a fight, and the aforesaid idiot gets carried away in a response, then turns into an imperialist. Now nobody believes in him or his people, but neither does anyone believe enough in democracy to get him impeached. The religious right take ideological refuge in a form of Christianity so flawed and hypocritical that it's almost laughable (that is, it would be funny if there weren't so many of them), but it makes the rest of the country even more reluctant to take stock in God.
And that culture I was talking about? It isn't just the music. Look at the "art" pieces I mentioned a few months ago, whose authors are so disillusioned with their profession that they are trying to pass three avocadoes off as profound. To speak a little more broadly, the art world is now consumed with the concept of "found" art, art made from everyday media and objects; go to any modern museum and you'll find that most of the recent work is a re-interpretation of previous art movements, or else a re-interpretation of quotidian material. I wonder if the people who make that stuff see how desperate they look, rummaging through everyday junk for meaning and inspiration.
And the cinema? American directors are trying to make a new genre out of the genre piece. Tarantino, the pride and glory of 90s cinema, is teaming up with hacks like Robert Rodriguez to re-make the shitty movies they went to when they were kids. Michael Mann, a director I love, is spending his time recycling the neon aesthetics of the 80s. There have been some really high quality movies in the last couple of years, but none of them are particularly encouraging to someone in need of an optimistic ideology: Good Night and Good Luck, Kingdom of Heaven (a flunk in the box office and with the critics, but I stand by this film), Munich, Brokeback Mountain, and so many others have gloomy endings. Movies like Little Children, Children of Men, American Beauty, and Stranger Than Fiction all point to some kind of vague contentment with the world, but I personally am not satisfied in any permanent way by their vague allusions to a world that is beautiful in spite of itself.
Where can we turn now? Who's going to give us faith in something again? And even someone does do that, won't we go into that revolution with the knowledge that the new ideology will eventually become old and corrupt? Maybe that's the thrust of this regressive cultural trend, that there's no point in trying to innovate anymore. Maybe it's not that we're failing to rebel, but that we're rebelling against progress.
Okay, this rant is very much a 1:45am kind of post, but the underlying idea here is legitimate, even if the articulation is bad. I just read an article pointed out to me by my writing teacher that describes the disappointing trend in rock and pop music, that a lot of artists are simply re-hashing the sounds of previous decades, be it punk, R&B, 60s/70s British rock, or what have you. It's a retrogression that contradicts the expected trend of culture, which is constantly evolve and innovate, not to remember the good ol' days. Rap is now old enough that it can do this too, and I believe that it is doing this.
I think the music scene is one aspect of a larger identity crisis that 21st century culture is having. We don't seem to have a voice, or a focus, to our culture anymore - indeed, most art history classes, it seems to me, talk about art movements the way most people might talk about polytheism: something that used to happen, something we don't have anymore. I risk oversimplifying, but it really seems to me that the intellectual history of the 20th century knocked out everything we could have faith in. Religion (not God, whom I will not bring into this) and country have long since betrayed our trust, and the secular, stateless institutions that gave us hope in the 60s - peace, love, rock & roll - have failed to make the world any better. It's been almost two generations since then; the late 70s and 80s brought back a temporary and false hope in selfishness and individualism, but we felt the backlash of that in the 90s. Things went well in the 90s, but it was an aimless kind of success; we prospered, but there wasn't a movement behind it, no ideology to justify or explain why things were going so well.
Then, at the turn of the century, a corrupt idiot and his gang of puppet-masters take power in an election whose legitimacy is still to this day a joke; some very evil people start a fight, and the aforesaid idiot gets carried away in a response, then turns into an imperialist. Now nobody believes in him or his people, but neither does anyone believe enough in democracy to get him impeached. The religious right take ideological refuge in a form of Christianity so flawed and hypocritical that it's almost laughable (that is, it would be funny if there weren't so many of them), but it makes the rest of the country even more reluctant to take stock in God.
And that culture I was talking about? It isn't just the music. Look at the "art" pieces I mentioned a few months ago, whose authors are so disillusioned with their profession that they are trying to pass three avocadoes off as profound. To speak a little more broadly, the art world is now consumed with the concept of "found" art, art made from everyday media and objects; go to any modern museum and you'll find that most of the recent work is a re-interpretation of previous art movements, or else a re-interpretation of quotidian material. I wonder if the people who make that stuff see how desperate they look, rummaging through everyday junk for meaning and inspiration.
And the cinema? American directors are trying to make a new genre out of the genre piece. Tarantino, the pride and glory of 90s cinema, is teaming up with hacks like Robert Rodriguez to re-make the shitty movies they went to when they were kids. Michael Mann, a director I love, is spending his time recycling the neon aesthetics of the 80s. There have been some really high quality movies in the last couple of years, but none of them are particularly encouraging to someone in need of an optimistic ideology: Good Night and Good Luck, Kingdom of Heaven (a flunk in the box office and with the critics, but I stand by this film), Munich, Brokeback Mountain, and so many others have gloomy endings. Movies like Little Children, Children of Men, American Beauty, and Stranger Than Fiction all point to some kind of vague contentment with the world, but I personally am not satisfied in any permanent way by their vague allusions to a world that is beautiful in spite of itself.
Where can we turn now? Who's going to give us faith in something again? And even someone does do that, won't we go into that revolution with the knowledge that the new ideology will eventually become old and corrupt? Maybe that's the thrust of this regressive cultural trend, that there's no point in trying to innovate anymore. Maybe it's not that we're failing to rebel, but that we're rebelling against progress.