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Have political messages in culture ever changed your views?

Started by markburgle, January 17, 2021, 02:42:37 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

RenegadeScrew

Quote from: Paul Calf on January 18, 2021, 09:41:28 AM
When did I say that Noel Gallagher wasn't mainstream?

Well at least you've dropped your smug condescending tone.  How you coming along listening to that "dancehall" track?  Trim was in Roll Deep, right?  You've looked it up now I hope.

You said grime was "the closest thing we currently have to a mainstream working class artform".

I said I must've missed that and suggested guys with guitars will still be far more popular.  I should've chosen someone more modern who is still charting.  And just as shite as Gallagher I suspect.

And that's before even opening up the can of worms about what actually constitutes popular.  Is it selling some shit tunes to kids on Spotify, or is it going around the world on a massive shitty sold out tour?

Sin Agog

Quote from: Paul Calf on January 18, 2021, 08:18:23 AM
Couldn't you regard a lot of nu-skool hip-hop as right wing, as it concentrates on acquisition of money and consumer goods and conspicuous consumption? Even grime - which is the closest thing we currently have to a mainstream working class artform - is pretty apolitical.

Most of the Soundcloud, Cloud Rap and Emo Rap that I hear these days seems to be more about going on some Jungian Red Book-esque journey inside their own whacked-out subconscious and bubbling feelings than any of that money and ho'z shit, which seems pretty estimable to me.

SpiderChrist


TrenterPercenter

Quote from: Marner and Me on January 18, 2021, 09:52:33 AM
They don't need to engage with that bollocks to sell records any more and are wealthy enough (if they invested correctly) for it not to matter.

Exactly.  Whilst those that are in the biz are beholden to the media and their record company ditching them if they decided to be too overtly political.

On the woke stuff a certain amount of leftism is intentionally allowed you need to give people something.  As a Marxist I see class (And that is not as simple as most people interpret it as) is a superstructure (that sits beneath and is relational to capitalism) in which race, gender, sexual politics etc are derivatives thereof. 

Commodification is a mode of control; so artist X wants to sing about X derivative issue; so you own the record company and buy their labour, tell them you are going to make them rich and give them reach, and then make them and their work a commodity.  Commodities are vulnerable to the market and therefore then have to conform or the agreement with your investors and benefits are put at risk. 

This is all actually fine, it's a long way to go around things, but as long as all these individuals strands us their moderate status to "organise" then they are just playing an adapted conciliatory version of Capital.

Marner and Me

Same as big companies and Pride Month they don't give a fuck. They only do it so people will buy their product with a rainbow on it.

bgmnts

I didn't like Marx & Engels second album but feel their third was a return to form. Definitely changed how I feel politically about 70s pop.

TrenterPercenter

Quote from: bgmnts on January 18, 2021, 10:39:15 AM
I didn't like Marx & Engels second album but feel their third was a return to form. Definitely changed how I feel politically about 70s pop.

Yeah that second album really was a red flag.

earl_sleek

Are there any genuinely popular (by which I mean househould names, not "popular on 6Music") "guys with guitars" at the moment? Apart from Ed Sheeran, who I don't think is quite what RenegadeScrew had in mind. Whereas Stormzy is a household name and a few years back headlined Glastonbury, a festival perhaps better known for white men with guitars.

earl_sleek

As someone else said upthread I think it's more often the case that politics influences culture. As much as I properly got into music through stuff like punk and RATM, I tend to agree with Kurt Vonnegut:

QuoteDuring the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

That said, reading the Illuminatus! trilogy as a teenager almost literally blew my mind, changed my perspective on things and opened up my world to a whole host of ideas I'd never considered before. So culture can definitely change individuals.


Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: earl_sleek on January 18, 2021, 11:16:23 AM
Are there any genuinely popular (by which I mean househould names, not "popular on 6Music") "guys with guitars" at the moment? Apart from Ed Sheeran, who I don't think is quite what RenegadeScrew had in mind. Whereas Stormzy is a household name and a few years back headlined Glastonbury, a festival perhaps better known for white men with guitars.

I'm not sure it matters too much, as both things like britpop and later landfill indie managed to amass large enough followings that a lot of unadventurous fans never felt the need to see beyond it and are still clinging on.

JaDanketies

#40
Quote from: earl_sleek on January 18, 2021, 11:16:23 AM
Are there any genuinely popular (by which I mean househould names, not "popular on 6Music") "guys with guitars" at the moment? Apart from Ed Sheeran, who I don't think is quite what RenegadeScrew had in mind. Whereas Stormzy is a household name and a few years back headlined Glastonbury, a festival perhaps better known for white men with guitars.

yeah rock and metal aren't in the healthiest state at the moment imho. Imagine Dragons did a big song in 2017 called 'Believer'. Can't really think of anything other than them. There's some other song I can think of but I can't name it. The music video is Gladiators fighting and the chorus is like 'remember us do do do do', I thought it was Fall Out Boy but I might be wrong. It's definitely a band from a long time ago.

Most of the big rock stars at the moment have been going for decades. A paucity of new blood.

edit: it's Centuries by Fall Out Boy and it's from 2014!

Buelligan

I once read a mug from the Labour Party and it made me stop voting for them.

RenegadeScrew

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on January 18, 2021, 11:21:10 AM
I'm not sure it matters too much, as both things like britpop and later landfill indie managed to amass large enough followings that a lot of unadventurous fans never felt the need to see beyond it and are still clinging on.

Yeah. Things are also seen as popular depending upon how they (and their fans) want to be seen (to some extent).  And also by how tolerable they are to the average person.  People who dislike Lily Allen are really quite ambivalent.  People who dislike Bjork feel like someone is pulling their ears off.

Popularity also weans over time.  Everyone with a record player once had an Elvis record.  Or with a TV, watched whatever was on.  We are now blessed with choice, especially post-punk. It's a rather pointless discussion anyway based on different people's notions of what it means to be popular.  Which I stupidly started.

And it's far less interesting than the OPs original question anyway.

gib

Yeah, there's a discussion to be had about the death of rock but it's probably for another thread.

NoSleep

In the late 60's there were lots of political influences coming from the music I was listening to, some more direct than others (about the environment, war/peace, race & sex equality) and I was starting to read the underground press: Oz, IT, underground comics etc... and then there was - The Little Red Schoolbook:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSveXJ7Besw

Captain Z

Quote from: earl_sleek on January 18, 2021, 11:16:23 AM
Are there any genuinely popular (by which I mean househould names, not "popular on 6Music") "guys with guitars" at the moment? Apart from Ed Sheeran, who I don't think is quite what RenegadeScrew had in mind. Whereas Stormzy is a household name and a few years back headlined Glastonbury, a festival perhaps better known for white men with guitars.

Sorry to continue the off-topic chatter then, but there's a guy called Sam Fender that was touted ~a year ago as the one bringing back the guitar-based indie/rock sound. His album went to #1 but his highest-charting single didn't even enter the top 40. Arctic Monkeys also had a #1 album in 2018 and managed to break the top 20 with a single, but there's really no one else to my knowledge.

Paul Calf

Quote from: RenegadeScrew on January 18, 2021, 09:59:26 AM
Well at least you've dropped your smug condescending tone.  How you coming along listening to that "dancehall" track?  Trim was in Roll Deep, right?  You've looked it up now I hope.

You said grime was "the closest thing we currently have to a mainstream working class artform".

I said I must've missed that and suggested guys with guitars will still be far more popular.  I should've chosen someone more modern who is still charting.  And just as shite as Gallagher I suspect.

And that's before even opening up the can of worms about what actually constitutes popular.  Is it selling some shit tunes to kids on Spotify, or is it going around the world on a massive shitty sold out tour?

Oh, you think Oasis are working class.

You're obviously trying to pick a fight. Good luck with that xxx

RenegadeScrew

Quote from: Paul Calf on January 18, 2021, 12:52:38 PM
Oh, you think Oasis are working class.

You're obviously trying to pick a fight. Good luck with that xxx

Oh, you obviously think Oasis is an artform.

So wildly looking for a fight that I said it wasn't worth discussing in a previous post. Good luck with that agenda xxx


JaDanketies

What's My Name? by Rihanna ft Drake turned me into a solipsist. "Oh na nah, what's my name?" Really makes you think. How can we know what our names are?

Billy

Quote from: JaDanketies on January 18, 2021, 11:27:13 AM
yeah rock and metal aren't in the healthiest state at the moment imho. Imagine Dragons did a big song in 2017 called 'Believer'. Can't really think of anything other than them.

I also assumed this was big as I heard it a few times, but it didn't chart top 40. Peaked at #42.

TrenterPercenter

Most modern pop songs are music for adult babies - a form of musical valium.  It's the kind of stuff that parents used to put on to keep children at parties distracted and occupied, now grown adults will consciously do this to themselves.  Parents still do put on Rhianna etc.. for young kids and it doesn't matter about mature themes because the words are never processed, they don't mean anything, it's a thing to repeat and do some silly dance too.  I know loads adults that have to listen to this shite or they seriously struggle to cope; it's something they're minds can bop along too and ignore the realities of life.*

It's like when I was at Uni and I realised there was all these people out there that just saw music as something to pull other people too, it works I'm not saying it doesn't, but it is such a narrow dimension for it to exist in.

*Also see K-Pop, which from what I gather is a mix of musical valium and an excuse for adult men to lear at suspiciously underage looking women.

kngen

Trying to escape the stultifying aspects of my socialist upbringing led me to edgelord shite like Answer Me and Apocalypse Culture in the 90s (although I was level-headed enough to dismiss some of the more outre nonsense contained within), but I'm not sure if that really influenced me or just reflected my nihilism and deep self-loathing back at me (staring into the abyss and all that). My self-worth for most of my 20s was pretty much zero, so the thought of participating in society (or thinking that I might have anything of value to offer) was inconceivable to me. My pat answer to anyone asking what I did actually  believe in was: 'If you're asking me what political system would benefit the most amount of people, then socialism is the answer, but I'm not sure I'd want to live in that system.' (I hadn't read Bakunin yet, which was probably for the best, as I'd most likely be even more insufferable.) I always hated fucking nazis though, so would have to perform some ludicrous mental gymnastics to entertain the inclusion of cunts like Boyd Rice and Michael Moynihan into my listening and reading habits (that this was merely 'intellectual fascism' was the keystone apologia for this horseshit). [nb]Feel free to mock me for this ridiculous double standard. My only defence is that it least gave a better idea of how these cunts operate than most, which has been useful in the past couple of years living in the US.[/nb]

Thankfully, once I hit my 30s I was actually able to connect with some members of the opposite sex, which gave me a welcome and long-overdue boost to my sense of self-worth. And combined with the (previously cited) double-whammy of The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, as well as Homage to Catalonia, I managed to find my way back to the bedrocks of empathy, understanding and righteous anger that socialism had instilled in me as an idealistic child.

I checked in on the likes of Jim Goad and Adam Parfrey around the time of Obama's inauguration out of morbid curiousity, and it was a bracing moment: 'Oh, so you were just racists cunts all along. How fucking pathetic.'

I dread to think what could have happened to me had I been born a few years later and fallen into the 4chan/incel/intellectual dark web trap. I'd like to think that I would have had too much savvy to be seduced by it all, but - by Christ - I'm glad I never had to find out.

TL;DR - fucking George Orwell, man. I think about him every day, when I make my first cup of tea in the morning.

TrenterPercenter

Quote from: kngen on January 18, 2021, 02:56:29 PM
And combined with the (previously cited) double-whammy of The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, as well as Homage to Catalonia

These are great books all three of which are transformative and so relevant today;

The Road to Wigan Pier: To be poor, to be dirty to smell and to internalise that into self-hatred = Brexit
Down and Out in London Paris: To see poverty as a tourist and the segregating/liberalising impact of removal from society = Thatcherism and later Blairism
Homage to Catalonia: To be be betrayed; to fall for the hijacking of human needs by people espousing human needs = The current media landscape

To Shoot an Elephant and Why I Write are incredibly important books also.

Mister Six

I don't have studies to hand but I do think that portrayals of progressive politics in the media have positively shaped society - having LGBT+ protagonists and major characters in TV shows and film, as well as openly gay actors and presenters, goes some distance towards normalising them in the eyes of the mainstream. Hard to think "Urrr the gays are all horrible" when you've got lovely Graham Norton or funny Lily Savage entertaining you night after night, and sympathetic gay characters in soap operas, comedies and dramas.

If we can extend "culture" to social media - and we should - then the effects are even faster and more pronounced.

This is also why liberal-run media is quite happy to commission shows and film that push socially progressive politics but not proper left-wing politics. Liberals want social, not economic, change.

bgmnts

Quote from: TrenterPercenter on January 18, 2021, 02:40:30 PM
Most modern pop songs are music for adult babies - a form of musical valium.  It's the kind of stuff that parents used to put on to keep children at parties distracted and occupied, now grown adults will consciously do this to themselves.  Parents still do put on Rhianna etc.. for young kids and it doesn't matter about mature themes because the words are never processed, they don't mean anything, it's a thing to repeat and do some silly dance too.  I know loads adults that have to listen to this shite or they seriously struggle to cope; it's something they're minds can bop along too and ignore the realities of life.*

It's like when I was at Uni and I realised there was all these people out there that just saw music as something to pull other people too, it works I'm not saying it doesn't, but it is such a narrow dimension for it to exist in.

*Also see K-Pop, which from what I gather is a mix of musical valium and an excuse for adult men to lear at suspiciously underage looking women.

I don't really know anything about the mechanics or art of music but I imagine something like Karma Chameleon and Bad Blood are probably the same. There's presumably deep pop and musical valium and this transcends modernity.

TrenterPercenter

Quote from: bgmnts on January 18, 2021, 04:26:40 PM
I don't really know anything about the mechanics or art of music but I imagine something like Karma Chameleon and Bad Blood are probably the same. There's presumably deep pop and musical valium and this transcends modernity.

Possible but as always there are degrees and context; i.e. if tunes like Karma Chameleon were ubiquitous in the absence of other music.  There is more to it than this though; music that is simple and catchy is not imo automatically musical valium-  just like any form of art regardless of it's material style there are telling things about care, craft and origin that become imprinted in the aesthetics of it.

chveik

Quote from: TrenterPercenter on January 18, 2021, 02:40:30 PM
*Also see K-Pop, which from what I gather is a mix of musical valium and an excuse for adult men to lear at suspiciously underage looking women.

mate

NoSleep