Songs Implicated In Bullying Scandal (Top Singles, Five-Sixths Through 2016)

Nov 03, 2016 03:03

I feel emotionally battered by the election, feeling simultaneously vulnerable and malicious, as if I'll be attacked for anything and nothing and I run constant fantasies of going back and settling old scores ( Read more... )

poll prelims 2016, bullies, k4ty p3rry, t-ara, cha eun-taek, aly & a.j., brown eyed girls, serebro, hwang soo ah

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koganbot November 3 2016, 23:43:07 UTC
In my high school the greasers and freaks didn't conflate, in fact hated each other, even if they had a lot in common. To be oversimplistic about class, the freaks were the sideways middle-class and vaguely leftish while the greasers were working class and pro-the-war and racist at that. But this was, like, in 1970, and the situation was not nearly so simple, of course: the numbers were probably more like 70%-30% as to the working-class and middle-class origins of the greasers, and probably the reverse for freaks and jocks. And the more impact the freaks had the more the greasers and the jocks-cheerleaders took on freak characteristics, while the freaks' successors tended to veer glam or punk. And the greasers were succeeded by grits and then burnouts, and many of them switched on the war and some probably sincerely tried to switch regarding race; and the original "burnouts" had been freaks. Or something. I hardly know how it all played out once I graduated. Did you ever see Dazed And Confused? The dope-smoking quarterback in that movie (set in 1976) wasn't so far from the senior class president/soccer goalie in my high school (1972). As for K-pop, I don't know the society, of course, and the economy was transforming so rapidly for so many years anyway. It makes sense that there'd be a tension within many of the performers as to whether they were in it for the art of it or for the money (not that the two motives need to cancel each other out). To switch to 1950s/early '60s Britain, Art Into Pop by Simon Frith and Howard Horne describes how a lot of the Brit art school kids (many working-class) were fed art values* which they took with them into the jazz, blues, and rock 'n' roll bands they were forming. Don't know if there was/is an equivalent in Korea. I've barely one-zillionth skimmed Korean indie. The little I've heard seems pretty boring.

The only thing I know about the Ramones' social background (other than what the words and music told me, which is that the band were in it for the art, and the Jewish gallows humor), is that Joey's dad was Lester Bangs' psychotherapist, which puts the dad in the middle class culturally no matter where he was financially.

*The Who Sell Out is a great example of '50s visual-art ferment finding musical expression in the '60s.

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