Either you really don't understand what I mean by "great" or you're being willfully obtuse to stir the pot. It has been a large cultural change for the worse. Prove me wrong.
You are operating under another definition of culture. One that I never addressed once. I never mentioned anything about housing conditions or computer skills. So I was right: you do not understand what I mean by great culture. You are bringing up points that are completely irrelevant. In which case, I can't help you.
Bookmarking this long screed cuz I have to go to work but just wanted to say I'm halfway through it and
(1) was reflexively a bit cynical about the title, and opened the article just to affirm that cynicism,
(2) in actually reading the first half of the thing I've wanted to stop, drop to the comments, and engage on three different points already. This is really thought-provoking stuff, especially as a mid-Millennial. I look forward to reaching the end! Kudos on roping all these thoughts out into a coherent argument. How long did you work on this?
1. American culture especially is just played out. The increasing reliance on shock value and transgression was already a sign that the culture was losing its vitality and the most powerful and elegant expressions had already been used, reused, and used up. Now even the transgression is old and tired, like Dimes Square's aimless offensive posturing, like an Encyclopedia Dramatica article or some death metal band called Necrobestiaskullfuckication that sounds like a Cryptopsy tribute band and has lyrics about pouring hot lead down a little girl's vagina. It's not just gross, it's boring, it's not saying anything that hasn't been said a thousand times before.
2. I think there is a real public resentment and disgust with auteurs and they're not going to put up with them anymore, and if that means the age of American cultural excellence is over, that's too bad. I first saw this with #MeToo and the glee people took in being able to desecrate cultural idols and put "genius" back in its place, and a lot of it is the geniuses' own fault for continually abusing the cultural authority 20th century liberalism gave to them. The sentiment is strongest among women, not surprising considering they bore the worst of auteurs' excesses, but the anti-art sentiment goes far beyond them. It also goes hand in hand with the spirit of negation and nihilism that is sweeping Western societies and, far more than any classical sort of fascism, animated the modern right wing.
Really I probably should have said "Trump voters" because I was really thinking of the ones who *aren't* ideological reactionaries. I think a lot of Trump's voters in the normie world are people who have given up on the prospect of the American republic and its institutions. I think many of them don't really believe in "make America great again" beyond a wistful irony; they see a society that has betrayed them and Trump as a destroyer and punisher who will exact revenge on their behalf. Whether he will actually fix anything is beside the point. When you've slid down into vengeance you're not expecting anything to get better, you just want to take out all the rage and resentment that has built up from things getting worse. This is one of the reasons why a lot of the liberal attacks on Trump's character and performance not only don't harm him but sometimes even feed into him; he was elected not despite being an amoral, proudly ignorant, philistine bastard but because of those qualities.
On the opposite side of normie politics, liberal women today seem to find the very idea of the artistic genius threatening, even if the auteur is herself a woman, and seek outlets to discharge, in a more indirect and passive-aggressive way, their own resentful rage against decades of figures like Tarantino treating them as "muses", sexually objectifying and exploiting them, and denying them honor and dignity in their work. If this means an end to America's global cultural power, they don't give a damn; that power means nothing to them. Beyond this is a communalist and conformist vision of the artist's place in society (one that, throughout human history, has been vastly more common than the artist as a romantic genius!), where the artist is a sort of public servant who is obliged to tell the audience's own stories and uphold the audience's norms--in short, to be relatable. An auteur, a creative individual whose charisma and prowess insulates them from the power of whisper networks and coalitional politics--that sort of artist is destablizing, a threat, somebody who could do "harm" to individuals or the community and get away with it. An esoteric subculture of artists who have each other's back pose an exponentially greater threat, which is why the fears of "esoteric Hitlerism" and "pipelines" often involve a fear of the esoteric itself, and why liberals are so fervently opposed to "gatekeeping" even in subcultures that don't have many people at the gates trying to get in anyway. If it is not fully legible to Us, who can be certain a malicious agenda against Us is not at work within it? If they will not readily and immediately reveal everything about themselves to Us, then their existence is inherently unsafe to Us. (using the capitalized Us because this dynamic reminds me a lot of the Scandinavian idea of "Jante law": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante)
Of course, both of these are broad generalizations, and many exceptions apply, and my observations and thoughts on this subject are still kind of inchoate and fuzzy. Take all this as you will.
Not to single out the author but one major problem with culture and cultural commentary is the lack of editorial restraint. This essay and many others are far too long and say too little.
This is actually a good example of what I'm talking about. It's not a criticism; it's a thinly veiled potshot. I guess Eternal September has come to Substack.
You're entitled to your opinion, but as a reader, I rather resent the implication that Mo is some kind of wind bag. If you had been in a more charitable mood, you could have added your ideas as an extension, thereby stimulating discussion. Even just bullet points, since you're so into brevity.
I loved homestar runner so much! Maybe this is all just one giant artwork filled with a thousand interesting moments per person, then you die. And maybe to ur point, there is a new Dunbar law online, 1k subscribers or less, and you have best chance of escaping the gossip trap?
Well i do agree that the Internet itself is not the gossip trap and an internet with less social and more dark forests can be pretty effin cool. Shit Homestar Runner had its own primeval forest.
Also consider the healing world...a lot of movement seems to be happening there. The culture around longevity, biohacking, and patient led initiatives to me is where a lot of the online game is. Is it art? I dunno, could be. It's def culture tho. And it's changing ur Walgreens
https://youtu.be/k3NjyMSUSAo - witchhouse witchhouse. There are a couple strains of witchhouse which do not overlap but this to me is quintessential witchhouse
https://youtu.be/v-A1NyhwoiU - more witchhouse witchhouse. Does overlap with balam acab but is a different strain (there's a turbo noise and metal strain that specifically doesn't overlap, witchhouse is droning over hip hop beats with the droning meant to evoke being in a witch house)
https://youtu.be/NsnPI-8sBcI - more weird 2015 stuff. 2015 was really good for music if you knew where to look. It's like post hipster stuff or even hipster's hipster stuff. I have a ton of it. You'd sometimes meet people on the streets who knew but it was young adult culture hidden on YouTube. Same place lofi got big
https://youtu.be/_7fxoWOFCa4 - insane French house, French house developed after daft punk a bit with Cherokee and stuff. It's more dancey and less deep than early 90s late 80s French house but there were some gems
https://youtu.be/SJfb5Px-GKM - 2015 banger that never saw the light of day. Notice the yaas comment, an absolute gem that's criminally ignored
https://youtu.be/SnBrLeV5624 - sorta in the same boat. Just insane. Other music definitely crosses over with the infamous millennial depression that was big in 2015 corners of the internet
Yeah, they are "underground". I never got into movies. I tried to watch things like Gummo, or other weird stuff from the alt 90s movement, but I couldn't really get into the medium.
For music, I'd say it tapered off around 2016. The sad boy rap thing, or mumble rap or whatever, followed the emo, hardcore, scene thing and the 2015 millennial depression wave but yeah idk anything. I listened to some incelcore stuff and it's pretty good but it's about as sincere and meaningful as memes were. Just metamodernist stuff. Kinda basic pop punk in a more DIY social outskirts punk direction. Nowadays I just catch music from cafés.
But even before 2016, the music industry pretty much killed it and ik that's the same for literature. You had DFW then John Green so.
B.J. Novak's minor masterpiece Vengeance, from 2022. More like "slipped through the cracks" than "underground."
There are some other fairly recent movies worth noting: American Fiction, Lady Bird, No Country For Old Men. I guess Barbie makes the cut. (Oppenheimer, Killers Of The Flower Moon? Neither one is all that great.) Both Love And Mercy and Straight Outta Compton were remarkably effective in a subgenre I typically don't care for (music biopics.)
But the new visual medium of streaming series has been where the real action is in the 21st century. For one thing, the multi-episode format has allowed for a lot more plot depth. Speaking as a text guy first and foremost, feature length movies have typically been lacking for me, especially those that are adaptations of novels. But the multi-episode depiction has allowed for some terrific adaptations: Little Drummer Girl (very faithful to the book), Man In The High Castle (not faithful to the book, but still terrific.)
Lastly, the original sagas, like the justly famed The Wire, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul. The Bureau, which is peerless. The Tunnel. Undone. And most daring and disturbing of all, The Black Mirror--the only TV I've ever seen deserving of a trigger warning; some of the episodes are terribly transgressive. And not out of want of anything else to do; they're transgressive precisely because they examine the very real lurking potential to stumble into the dystopian, psychotic, despairing portals and traps that are latent to private voyages into the Internet and online social media afflictions. I can't call myself a fan of The Black Mirror. I've left off watching after only a handful of episodes. But I have to grant that The Black Mirror is an unsparing gaze into the abyss of the Shadow of the Internet. It isn't just playing around with the nihilistic potential within for shock value. It's a guided meditation into that underworld, employing its plot narratives as metacommentary on the suggestive power of social media that should best be taken a warning about the perils of guided meditation and the suggestive power of social media. But I'm not sure that's the takeaway I would have gotten if I were to be watching it as a young teenager. Instead, I might have been traumatized, and influenced to the edge of despair. Or driven to flattened affect as a defensive response. Injured by premature disillusionment, before ever having a chance to sufficiently experience the innocent delights and common enjoyments to be had from real world, real life experience. I don't think the show is for teenagers. It really isn't even for sheltered adults. But for parents who have already seen something of the seamy side of the world, so to speak, and want to get an idea of the possible perils awaiting their young children and newly minted teenagers on their initiation into the realm of the adult Internet and online social media, the Black Mirror conjures some scary worst-case scenarios.
The more I think about it, the more I consider the likelihood that exposure to the hitherto undreamt-of fringes available via online social media in childhood and early adolescence often provides much the same self-guided "rite of passage" initiation into "adulthood" that the clandestine teenage 'subculture of illicit drugs use, market commodification, and social status games has already quite often assumed for decades--a scarily risky and unsatisfactory substitute for the more traditional rites of passage to emotional maturity and social acceptance provided with the guidance of mentoring adults. And also the only experiences resembling a rite of passage initiation that many young people get, in a modern world where community cohesion is absent.
I disagree with a few things. It's not a numbers game and the only tribes that survived did so through promoting cultural depth. If you look at the Chauvet cave painting you have a caveman Leonardo da Vinci from 30k years ago. The Lascaux one paints men with bird heads which is really interesting given later religious developments like the fertility goddess who paints the bird over woman. Gobekli Tepe was a pre agricultural megalithic cult that had angels, who were vultures, who lifted heads to the sky deities who watched over them. They aligned their megalith with the stars. One might even say that the cultural isolation or alienation is more relatively modern than that. Socrates was hardly isolated although Da Vinci did feel isolated at times.
Your pre-agricultural examples prove my point. There are examples of pre-agricultural art but they are few and far between. That we know of anyway, but that's my point. If there were civilization there would be so many more examples of art like this that were properly preserved. More alarmingly, this echoes are current state. Again, there are scattered works of greatness but not enough for a whole movement -- though I suppose the poptimists will disagree.
I don't know what you mean when you say Da Vinci felt isolated. Also in a roundabout way you prove my poo
I agree with your point just I think it ironically uses some tech sector framings like quantity over quality and history as a linear progression to now. I'm definitely more interested in how and why civilizations developed and I see instead everyone in these societies are extremely engaged in these cultural artifacts because they weren't separate. They ate and breathed all this stuff and it happened independently everywhere and a lot of these were maintained. The easter island moai statues were not from a big population. The scale when it was imported from mesopotamia into Egypt was given a theological interpretation. These cultural developments were never separate from the society and that was the whole point of societies then. It wasn't until the Renaissance that we start to see a separation of that. There were hints in the ancient greeks but if you didn't have these large cultural narratives everyone engaged in then your society simply vanished into a hellish landscape. The issue of atheism was extremely existentially important for them and they never even meant atheism like the modern sense. The modern society holds things together economically, by law and technologically that we now face mental disorders more often.
Interesting stuff, to the point where I am willing to cede that I may have been wrong about preag art. Even so, this just makes our current post -2008 state that much more woeful. We are certainly not a spiritually integrated society now. Owing to the virtual gossip trap.
Thanks for the concession here about preag art. It was a large sticking point for me in your essay. The art that survives from the pre-civilization period—the cave paintings, the monoliths, etc—clearly demonstrates to me a sophisticated grappling of what it means to be human in the world, the mystery of our existence, our relationship to the natural world, our cosmological place, our relationship to ourselves. Those handprints on the rock walls? To me, they are almost modernist in their sensibility, seemingly simple but touching on an ambivalent exploration of self and other, a perhaps startlingly cogent realization of what makes humans human—our hands are at least as much what makes us who we are as our language and brains—and a feeling of the condition of being both separate from each other and the world around us as well as a grasping toward some essential unity. And what survives from those cultures is necessarily limited. Pre-civilization cultures were nomadic cultures, and as such their art would have had to be mostly portable, poetry and song and what you wore. You couldn’t have carted around big paintings or stone tablets or whatever—that was for settled people. I think it’s interesting that, even after civilization became a main mode of life in the Middle East or north Africa or whatever, that the nomads fiercely clung to their ways of life, their culture, their means of expression. They actively resisted, in fact, becoming settled, even though they must have known that in many ways their lives would have been made easier if they settled down. They kept wandering and hunting and herding their animals. They kept their songs and poetry—oral culture—alive. Bruce Chatwin, in his book Songlines, talks about how these nomadic people in their resistance to settled life took pride in their “outlaw” ways, preying upon the civilized people as they could, raiding and stealing, their songs and other storytelling celebrating that brigand life. Some groups still hold as best they can to their unsettled lives, the Roma, the Travelers in the UK. Their art, music and stories, their particular languages or dialects, are one way they do it. You might say that non-civilization cultures, both before and after civilization took hold, are Dionysian in outlook, as opposed to the Apollonian modes of the city. I don’t know if that’s all that accurate, but it sounds “smart” to me lol.
Yes to all of this. He quotes graber on bullshit jobs but I think would benefit greatly from reading dawn of everything before trying to shoehorn weird-highschool nerd jock relations onto our ancestors modes of social organization.
I also think that critics at large are hamstrung by their individual appetites in a world where more art than ever before is being created every millisecond. How are we supposed to have time for any great work when the next piece demands attention? I think examples like Jesse Welles, a tiktok songwriter being compared by his commenter's to Bob dylan, is a great example. He writes rather good songs for every political ill or aim he feels strongly about (although he has veered into some conspiracy territory) but by nature of social medias pace no song can have lasting impact or travel. Forget hair-metal, the thing we are outraged about today is gone tomorrow and the Art made fresh has already gone stale before the thing is dead and buried in a textbook. Welles songs would've snaked their way across the airwaves in another era, now they zip out and fizzle.
Yeah, I mean I do agree the medium has forced some acceleration but we have to keep in mind that art doesn't serve some larger narrative. There is no mass teenage angst or clothes or social groups, places cliques hang out. That's not to say those things don't exist but nirvana and grunge sort of put an overarching narrative to it. In a large part, you can have extremely deep music or books but it never sticks because there's no place for some sorta supraconcious area. It can't ever bridge out from being some emotional intensity. I think that's the main issue with current art cultures. Everything is just vibes I suppose.
I'm a famous artist and musician - 50 years old - better, stronger, and more talented every day. I'm on the internet because I've moved abroad and I simply must be here now. I hate it. I've never watched TV, movies, internet, porn, listened to recorded music. My whole life is work and art. There are incredibly talented people everywhere in culture all around the world - everywhere. THE INTERNET works against this with all its might - it is technology and industry which keeps culture down. I broke down and spent $1200 in 2012 when I have a momentary lapse of reason - convinced I needed 'internet marketing for my new band.' Do you know what $1200 would have gotten me if I paid human beings and put of flyers like a normal human? I got NOTHING
I've been thinking about this drought of culture a lot. I find that there's a lack of depth, both in creating and critiquing. So much of what we consider culturally significant seeks to answer a question, explores curiosities, takes historical references and updates them. Now, there seems to be a lack of history to create anew and a reliance on the familiar (see: the number of movies that are remakes).
I have been thinking that generative AI might actually give rise to an analog counterculture, although I don't know how that would happen, other than how it already is happening and has always happened before, or what it would look like, not wanting to say “live theatre” or “painting on canvas” because the forms can always be something else. My point is, there are corners where AI does not reach, and in those crevices, real art can take root again.
Keep running through this to jot and chew on the best parts. The whole essay is so great it ends up crushing your last couple paragraphs, as I think time'll tell: I don't like the phrase "anti-woke," cuz I think we're going through something broader, but it seems to me that you're connecting the right dots at the right time.
Maybe it's early-morning delirium to some extent but I think this is exactly the sort of 1960s culture essay you were describing here; that this whole piece is so sweeping and clear-headed--it ends up lamenting the loss of exactly the kinda thing it manifests; like your point that we're nearing teh right moment, but not *quite* there, crystalizes the fact that, like fingers snapping, here we are.
I like Martin Amis's argument about Shakespeare's tragedies that a great work of art can never ACTUALLY be upsetting. If it's really great, you walk away from it with a charge, feeling opened to new things. This essay made me genuinely excited in that same way.
Ahdunno man this is just an outstanding outstanding piece--congrats.
“Has anything great not had the potential to be a big miss” - this is why I’m glad Coppola still had the balls to make Megalopolis despite the mediocre reviews!
Either you really don't understand what I mean by "great" or you're being willfully obtuse to stir the pot. It has been a large cultural change for the worse. Prove me wrong.
You are operating under another definition of culture. One that I never addressed once. I never mentioned anything about housing conditions or computer skills. So I was right: you do not understand what I mean by great culture. You are bringing up points that are completely irrelevant. In which case, I can't help you.
Bookmarking this long screed cuz I have to go to work but just wanted to say I'm halfway through it and
(1) was reflexively a bit cynical about the title, and opened the article just to affirm that cynicism,
(2) in actually reading the first half of the thing I've wanted to stop, drop to the comments, and engage on three different points already. This is really thought-provoking stuff, especially as a mid-Millennial. I look forward to reaching the end! Kudos on roping all these thoughts out into a coherent argument. How long did you work on this?
About two weeks thanks.
I think there are two other factors at play:
q
1. American culture especially is just played out. The increasing reliance on shock value and transgression was already a sign that the culture was losing its vitality and the most powerful and elegant expressions had already been used, reused, and used up. Now even the transgression is old and tired, like Dimes Square's aimless offensive posturing, like an Encyclopedia Dramatica article or some death metal band called Necrobestiaskullfuckication that sounds like a Cryptopsy tribute band and has lyrics about pouring hot lead down a little girl's vagina. It's not just gross, it's boring, it's not saying anything that hasn't been said a thousand times before.
2. I think there is a real public resentment and disgust with auteurs and they're not going to put up with them anymore, and if that means the age of American cultural excellence is over, that's too bad. I first saw this with #MeToo and the glee people took in being able to desecrate cultural idols and put "genius" back in its place, and a lot of it is the geniuses' own fault for continually abusing the cultural authority 20th century liberalism gave to them. The sentiment is strongest among women, not surprising considering they bore the worst of auteurs' excesses, but the anti-art sentiment goes far beyond them. It also goes hand in hand with the spirit of negation and nihilism that is sweeping Western societies and, far more than any classical sort of fascism, animated the modern right wing.
Delve more into those last two sentences please.
Really I probably should have said "Trump voters" because I was really thinking of the ones who *aren't* ideological reactionaries. I think a lot of Trump's voters in the normie world are people who have given up on the prospect of the American republic and its institutions. I think many of them don't really believe in "make America great again" beyond a wistful irony; they see a society that has betrayed them and Trump as a destroyer and punisher who will exact revenge on their behalf. Whether he will actually fix anything is beside the point. When you've slid down into vengeance you're not expecting anything to get better, you just want to take out all the rage and resentment that has built up from things getting worse. This is one of the reasons why a lot of the liberal attacks on Trump's character and performance not only don't harm him but sometimes even feed into him; he was elected not despite being an amoral, proudly ignorant, philistine bastard but because of those qualities.
On the opposite side of normie politics, liberal women today seem to find the very idea of the artistic genius threatening, even if the auteur is herself a woman, and seek outlets to discharge, in a more indirect and passive-aggressive way, their own resentful rage against decades of figures like Tarantino treating them as "muses", sexually objectifying and exploiting them, and denying them honor and dignity in their work. If this means an end to America's global cultural power, they don't give a damn; that power means nothing to them. Beyond this is a communalist and conformist vision of the artist's place in society (one that, throughout human history, has been vastly more common than the artist as a romantic genius!), where the artist is a sort of public servant who is obliged to tell the audience's own stories and uphold the audience's norms--in short, to be relatable. An auteur, a creative individual whose charisma and prowess insulates them from the power of whisper networks and coalitional politics--that sort of artist is destablizing, a threat, somebody who could do "harm" to individuals or the community and get away with it. An esoteric subculture of artists who have each other's back pose an exponentially greater threat, which is why the fears of "esoteric Hitlerism" and "pipelines" often involve a fear of the esoteric itself, and why liberals are so fervently opposed to "gatekeeping" even in subcultures that don't have many people at the gates trying to get in anyway. If it is not fully legible to Us, who can be certain a malicious agenda against Us is not at work within it? If they will not readily and immediately reveal everything about themselves to Us, then their existence is inherently unsafe to Us. (using the capitalized Us because this dynamic reminds me a lot of the Scandinavian idea of "Jante law": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante)
Of course, both of these are broad generalizations, and many exceptions apply, and my observations and thoughts on this subject are still kind of inchoate and fuzzy. Take all this as you will.
Not to single out the author but one major problem with culture and cultural commentary is the lack of editorial restraint. This essay and many others are far too long and say too little.
This is actually a good example of what I'm talking about. It's not a criticism; it's a thinly veiled potshot. I guess Eternal September has come to Substack.
You're entitled to your opinion, but as a reader, I rather resent the implication that Mo is some kind of wind bag. If you had been in a more charitable mood, you could have added your ideas as an extension, thereby stimulating discussion. Even just bullet points, since you're so into brevity.
This is a cook 😮💨
I loved homestar runner so much! Maybe this is all just one giant artwork filled with a thousand interesting moments per person, then you die. And maybe to ur point, there is a new Dunbar law online, 1k subscribers or less, and you have best chance of escaping the gossip trap?
Well i do agree that the Internet itself is not the gossip trap and an internet with less social and more dark forests can be pretty effin cool. Shit Homestar Runner had its own primeval forest.
Also consider the healing world...a lot of movement seems to be happening there. The culture around longevity, biohacking, and patient led initiatives to me is where a lot of the online game is. Is it art? I dunno, could be. It's def culture tho. And it's changing ur Walgreens
Not seemingly driven by social media. Maybe that's why it's working.
Is this the post 2008 good music comment list? I'll go first:
https://youtu.be/ITaZoAGCCTU - 90s artist but 2012 post rave vibes
https://youtu.be/GbA_rOg2yzE - insanely great. If you like Kendrick Lamar this is sorta the techno version of him.
https://youtu.be/cfyFt5riFHY
https://youtu.be/x0-2VArww4c - 2015 stuff
https://youtu.be/Ki-fATpXa00 - vaporwave adjacent stuff
https://youtu.be/4iL2V5GzU5A - post witchhouse, along the emo, scene, hardcore strain of music
https://youtu.be/-SqHC8RGHrI
https://youtu.be/tv8Se8xSMiw - witchhouse adjacent
https://youtu.be/k3NjyMSUSAo - witchhouse witchhouse. There are a couple strains of witchhouse which do not overlap but this to me is quintessential witchhouse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3I1IFz0eZ0 - witchhouse. https://youtu.be/LbbkWciWLnw (sorta video for it which is why that video uses the thumbnail. This era had a lot of artistic crossover like simpsonswave stuff, vaporwave etc)
https://youtu.be/F7khiq25Xr0
https://youtu.be/X0C6SygZ0fU
https://youtu.be/1qC9wS6hnQ0
https://youtu.be/v-A1NyhwoiU - more witchhouse witchhouse. Does overlap with balam acab but is a different strain (there's a turbo noise and metal strain that specifically doesn't overlap, witchhouse is droning over hip hop beats with the droning meant to evoke being in a witch house)
https://youtu.be/NsnPI-8sBcI - more weird 2015 stuff. 2015 was really good for music if you knew where to look. It's like post hipster stuff or even hipster's hipster stuff. I have a ton of it. You'd sometimes meet people on the streets who knew but it was young adult culture hidden on YouTube. Same place lofi got big
https://youtu.be/hTBPPSNGYi8
https://youtu.be/9m4jpMkS8oM - 2015
https://youtu.be/_7fxoWOFCa4 - insane French house, French house developed after daft punk a bit with Cherokee and stuff. It's more dancey and less deep than early 90s late 80s French house but there were some gems
https://youtu.be/2cL9YBD9B4A
https://youtu.be/SJfb5Px-GKM - 2015 banger that never saw the light of day. Notice the yaas comment, an absolute gem that's criminally ignored
https://youtu.be/SnBrLeV5624 - sorta in the same boat. Just insane. Other music definitely crosses over with the infamous millennial depression that was big in 2015 corners of the internet
https://youtu.be/sm91qsXwr2g
https://youtu.be/gUvup5xdoSA
https://youtu.be/o04k9t0KlGY
https://youtu.be/NBO-BZGwAoc - 2015
https://youtu.be/Cz5ElgbvBP0
https://youtu.be/oJj9ZjnDp-g
https://youtu.be/pjpn9d4yn1E
https://youtu.be/owvnZv8UQyQ
Thanks. How about movies? Also these all seem underground which is my point. Was a time when Wu Tang and Radiohead were all over the radio.
Yeah, they are "underground". I never got into movies. I tried to watch things like Gummo, or other weird stuff from the alt 90s movement, but I couldn't really get into the medium.
For music, I'd say it tapered off around 2016. The sad boy rap thing, or mumble rap or whatever, followed the emo, hardcore, scene thing and the 2015 millennial depression wave but yeah idk anything. I listened to some incelcore stuff and it's pretty good but it's about as sincere and meaningful as memes were. Just metamodernist stuff. Kinda basic pop punk in a more DIY social outskirts punk direction. Nowadays I just catch music from cafés.
But even before 2016, the music industry pretty much killed it and ik that's the same for literature. You had DFW then John Green so.
B.J. Novak's minor masterpiece Vengeance, from 2022. More like "slipped through the cracks" than "underground."
There are some other fairly recent movies worth noting: American Fiction, Lady Bird, No Country For Old Men. I guess Barbie makes the cut. (Oppenheimer, Killers Of The Flower Moon? Neither one is all that great.) Both Love And Mercy and Straight Outta Compton were remarkably effective in a subgenre I typically don't care for (music biopics.)
But the new visual medium of streaming series has been where the real action is in the 21st century. For one thing, the multi-episode format has allowed for a lot more plot depth. Speaking as a text guy first and foremost, feature length movies have typically been lacking for me, especially those that are adaptations of novels. But the multi-episode depiction has allowed for some terrific adaptations: Little Drummer Girl (very faithful to the book), Man In The High Castle (not faithful to the book, but still terrific.)
Lastly, the original sagas, like the justly famed The Wire, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul. The Bureau, which is peerless. The Tunnel. Undone. And most daring and disturbing of all, The Black Mirror--the only TV I've ever seen deserving of a trigger warning; some of the episodes are terribly transgressive. And not out of want of anything else to do; they're transgressive precisely because they examine the very real lurking potential to stumble into the dystopian, psychotic, despairing portals and traps that are latent to private voyages into the Internet and online social media afflictions. I can't call myself a fan of The Black Mirror. I've left off watching after only a handful of episodes. But I have to grant that The Black Mirror is an unsparing gaze into the abyss of the Shadow of the Internet. It isn't just playing around with the nihilistic potential within for shock value. It's a guided meditation into that underworld, employing its plot narratives as metacommentary on the suggestive power of social media that should best be taken a warning about the perils of guided meditation and the suggestive power of social media. But I'm not sure that's the takeaway I would have gotten if I were to be watching it as a young teenager. Instead, I might have been traumatized, and influenced to the edge of despair. Or driven to flattened affect as a defensive response. Injured by premature disillusionment, before ever having a chance to sufficiently experience the innocent delights and common enjoyments to be had from real world, real life experience. I don't think the show is for teenagers. It really isn't even for sheltered adults. But for parents who have already seen something of the seamy side of the world, so to speak, and want to get an idea of the possible perils awaiting their young children and newly minted teenagers on their initiation into the realm of the adult Internet and online social media, the Black Mirror conjures some scary worst-case scenarios.
The more I think about it, the more I consider the likelihood that exposure to the hitherto undreamt-of fringes available via online social media in childhood and early adolescence often provides much the same self-guided "rite of passage" initiation into "adulthood" that the clandestine teenage 'subculture of illicit drugs use, market commodification, and social status games has already quite often assumed for decades--a scarily risky and unsatisfactory substitute for the more traditional rites of passage to emotional maturity and social acceptance provided with the guidance of mentoring adults. And also the only experiences resembling a rite of passage initiation that many young people get, in a modern world where community cohesion is absent.
I disagree with a few things. It's not a numbers game and the only tribes that survived did so through promoting cultural depth. If you look at the Chauvet cave painting you have a caveman Leonardo da Vinci from 30k years ago. The Lascaux one paints men with bird heads which is really interesting given later religious developments like the fertility goddess who paints the bird over woman. Gobekli Tepe was a pre agricultural megalithic cult that had angels, who were vultures, who lifted heads to the sky deities who watched over them. They aligned their megalith with the stars. One might even say that the cultural isolation or alienation is more relatively modern than that. Socrates was hardly isolated although Da Vinci did feel isolated at times.
Your pre-agricultural examples prove my point. There are examples of pre-agricultural art but they are few and far between. That we know of anyway, but that's my point. If there were civilization there would be so many more examples of art like this that were properly preserved. More alarmingly, this echoes are current state. Again, there are scattered works of greatness but not enough for a whole movement -- though I suppose the poptimists will disagree.
I don't know what you mean when you say Da Vinci felt isolated. Also in a roundabout way you prove my poo
I agree with your point just I think it ironically uses some tech sector framings like quantity over quality and history as a linear progression to now. I'm definitely more interested in how and why civilizations developed and I see instead everyone in these societies are extremely engaged in these cultural artifacts because they weren't separate. They ate and breathed all this stuff and it happened independently everywhere and a lot of these were maintained. The easter island moai statues were not from a big population. The scale when it was imported from mesopotamia into Egypt was given a theological interpretation. These cultural developments were never separate from the society and that was the whole point of societies then. It wasn't until the Renaissance that we start to see a separation of that. There were hints in the ancient greeks but if you didn't have these large cultural narratives everyone engaged in then your society simply vanished into a hellish landscape. The issue of atheism was extremely existentially important for them and they never even meant atheism like the modern sense. The modern society holds things together economically, by law and technologically that we now face mental disorders more often.
Interesting stuff, to the point where I am willing to cede that I may have been wrong about preag art. Even so, this just makes our current post -2008 state that much more woeful. We are certainly not a spiritually integrated society now. Owing to the virtual gossip trap.
Yeah, I 100% agree with all that. Lots to unpack there. I'm still reading the article.
Thanks for the concession here about preag art. It was a large sticking point for me in your essay. The art that survives from the pre-civilization period—the cave paintings, the monoliths, etc—clearly demonstrates to me a sophisticated grappling of what it means to be human in the world, the mystery of our existence, our relationship to the natural world, our cosmological place, our relationship to ourselves. Those handprints on the rock walls? To me, they are almost modernist in their sensibility, seemingly simple but touching on an ambivalent exploration of self and other, a perhaps startlingly cogent realization of what makes humans human—our hands are at least as much what makes us who we are as our language and brains—and a feeling of the condition of being both separate from each other and the world around us as well as a grasping toward some essential unity. And what survives from those cultures is necessarily limited. Pre-civilization cultures were nomadic cultures, and as such their art would have had to be mostly portable, poetry and song and what you wore. You couldn’t have carted around big paintings or stone tablets or whatever—that was for settled people. I think it’s interesting that, even after civilization became a main mode of life in the Middle East or north Africa or whatever, that the nomads fiercely clung to their ways of life, their culture, their means of expression. They actively resisted, in fact, becoming settled, even though they must have known that in many ways their lives would have been made easier if they settled down. They kept wandering and hunting and herding their animals. They kept their songs and poetry—oral culture—alive. Bruce Chatwin, in his book Songlines, talks about how these nomadic people in their resistance to settled life took pride in their “outlaw” ways, preying upon the civilized people as they could, raiding and stealing, their songs and other storytelling celebrating that brigand life. Some groups still hold as best they can to their unsettled lives, the Roma, the Travelers in the UK. Their art, music and stories, their particular languages or dialects, are one way they do it. You might say that non-civilization cultures, both before and after civilization took hold, are Dionysian in outlook, as opposed to the Apollonian modes of the city. I don’t know if that’s all that accurate, but it sounds “smart” to me lol.
Yes to all of this. He quotes graber on bullshit jobs but I think would benefit greatly from reading dawn of everything before trying to shoehorn weird-highschool nerd jock relations onto our ancestors modes of social organization.
I also think that critics at large are hamstrung by their individual appetites in a world where more art than ever before is being created every millisecond. How are we supposed to have time for any great work when the next piece demands attention? I think examples like Jesse Welles, a tiktok songwriter being compared by his commenter's to Bob dylan, is a great example. He writes rather good songs for every political ill or aim he feels strongly about (although he has veered into some conspiracy territory) but by nature of social medias pace no song can have lasting impact or travel. Forget hair-metal, the thing we are outraged about today is gone tomorrow and the Art made fresh has already gone stale before the thing is dead and buried in a textbook. Welles songs would've snaked their way across the airwaves in another era, now they zip out and fizzle.
Yeah, I mean I do agree the medium has forced some acceleration but we have to keep in mind that art doesn't serve some larger narrative. There is no mass teenage angst or clothes or social groups, places cliques hang out. That's not to say those things don't exist but nirvana and grunge sort of put an overarching narrative to it. In a large part, you can have extremely deep music or books but it never sticks because there's no place for some sorta supraconcious area. It can't ever bridge out from being some emotional intensity. I think that's the main issue with current art cultures. Everything is just vibes I suppose.
very sharp, smart writing.
Thank you.
I'm a famous artist and musician - 50 years old - better, stronger, and more talented every day. I'm on the internet because I've moved abroad and I simply must be here now. I hate it. I've never watched TV, movies, internet, porn, listened to recorded music. My whole life is work and art. There are incredibly talented people everywhere in culture all around the world - everywhere. THE INTERNET works against this with all its might - it is technology and industry which keeps culture down. I broke down and spent $1200 in 2012 when I have a momentary lapse of reason - convinced I needed 'internet marketing for my new band.' Do you know what $1200 would have gotten me if I paid human beings and put of flyers like a normal human? I got NOTHING
I've been thinking about this drought of culture a lot. I find that there's a lack of depth, both in creating and critiquing. So much of what we consider culturally significant seeks to answer a question, explores curiosities, takes historical references and updates them. Now, there seems to be a lack of history to create anew and a reliance on the familiar (see: the number of movies that are remakes).
“the culture is lit and I had a ball."
I have been thinking that generative AI might actually give rise to an analog counterculture, although I don't know how that would happen, other than how it already is happening and has always happened before, or what it would look like, not wanting to say “live theatre” or “painting on canvas” because the forms can always be something else. My point is, there are corners where AI does not reach, and in those crevices, real art can take root again.
Agreed.
This is already happening. Museums are fuller, bookstores have business again, and theaters that had been shuttered are scheduled to reopen again
Makes sense to me. :)
Keep running through this to jot and chew on the best parts. The whole essay is so great it ends up crushing your last couple paragraphs, as I think time'll tell: I don't like the phrase "anti-woke," cuz I think we're going through something broader, but it seems to me that you're connecting the right dots at the right time.
Maybe it's early-morning delirium to some extent but I think this is exactly the sort of 1960s culture essay you were describing here; that this whole piece is so sweeping and clear-headed--it ends up lamenting the loss of exactly the kinda thing it manifests; like your point that we're nearing teh right moment, but not *quite* there, crystalizes the fact that, like fingers snapping, here we are.
I like Martin Amis's argument about Shakespeare's tragedies that a great work of art can never ACTUALLY be upsetting. If it's really great, you walk away from it with a charge, feeling opened to new things. This essay made me genuinely excited in that same way.
Ahdunno man this is just an outstanding outstanding piece--congrats.
Thanks! I hope we win (against Big Tech; perhaps we can get the robots to turn on their puppeteers [it's already happening with Grok]).
“Has anything great not had the potential to be a big miss” - this is why I’m glad Coppola still had the balls to make Megalopolis despite the mediocre reviews!
My upcoming review of Megalopolis for The Metropolitan Review touches on this point.