Yesterday, over at the Z Blog, the Z Man took up the thread of this blog’s posts on the death of rock music and Cultural Ground Zero.
Approaching these related phenomena from an alternate angle, he gleaned some new insights.
Not discussed is the culture of the managerial class. The people running the music business are no different from the people running the other centers of cultural production in that they have had the antiwhite bug for a long time. The music industry went all in on hip-hop in the 1990’s. Part of it was the belief that it was a fresh market and part of it was cultural. For managerial types, hip-hop was cool because it was not white, while rock-and-roll was pale, male and stale.
If you read my review of the classic John Hughes comedy Uncle Buck, you may recall that it’s noteworthy as one of the first Hollywood films to depict hip-hop as suburban teens’ preferred music genre instead of rock.
One result of the money drying up for all forms of music that appeals to white people is white people stopped making that music. They stopped learning to play instruments, stopped forming garage bands and stopped cutting their teeth at clubs. Elementary school bands are full of Asian girls playing violin. There has been a steady decline in the sale of musical instruments over the last few decades, even though technology has made it easier to record at home and make it sound good.
For rock music, this has killed the feeder system for generating new sounds and new acts that made the genre possible. Even if young people were still dreaming of being a rock star, the clubs where they would learn how to perform have dried up. The culture around going to club to find new sounds and new acts has also dried up. When the music industry shifted to hip-hop and corporate pop, they also shut down the development system for creating various genres of rock music.
Grunge was a fad manufactured by record companies and was never an organic movement. Similarly, there are those within the music industry who claim that the rap craze is being manipulated from the top down – to boost sales, yes – but also for more sinister reasons.
Race is not the only reason for the decline of rock music. As those Niemeier posts explain, the industry is suffering from systemic failure. There lies another useful example that applies elsewhere. The federal government failed in its duty to maintain a marketplace for music. They allowed corporate players to monopolize radio stations, which coincided with the consolidation of the music business. The result is a narrow system that operates as skimming operation.
We see this in tech. Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems and office productivity products. Innovation is non-existent in this area. Apple and Google own the mobile telecommunications industry. Despite the hype, there has been nothing interesting in mobile computing for a decade or more. The whole tech space is consolidating to the point where every business will be forced onto one of a few clouds of the cloud computing leviathan.
People online have asked me why the government doesn’t break up Audible’s monopoly on audiobooks. To find the answer, just ask yourself who owns Audible. Then ask who that company’s biggest customer is.
Of course, all of this can be chalked up to the end of empire. Empires are the result of failed societies, not successful ones. The Roman Empire grew out of the rubble of the failed Roman Republic. For half of its existence the Roman Empire operated like a mafia bust-out operation. The same is happening with the American empire, which grew out of the republic that died at Gettysburg. The main difference with the American empire and prior empires is speed due to the state of technology.
And that technology itself is rapidly degrading.
Evidence continues to mount that politics really is downstream from culture – in chronological, if not causal, terms.
Speaking of chronology, file the following video from 1996 under “unintentional anachronistic projection”
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Hip hop had the same corporate weaponizing done to it as everything else. In the 1980s it was seen as a flavor of R&B and a new style to play with. In the ’90s it turned into Gangsta Rap, entirely corporate driven, glorifying criminal behavior and degenerate behaviors with a lazy and boring beat. It was inescapable.
Also, it did serve a form of rebellion. Eminem’s popularity stemmed from the fact that, despite how catchy his early material was, he went out of his way to insult what was then mainstream pop music constantly, and everyone above the age of 13 was grateful for it because someone was finally saying what they knew was true.
But Gangsta Rap was a dead end, choking the life out of a subgenre that was fresh and fun in the 1980s and turning into social conditioning of the worst kind. The amount of kids that imitated the dress, speech, and behavior, of these artists was not small, and you still see its effects today. Pure poison overall.
And despite the fact that none of it was organically popular, it was still more popular than the likes of Taylor Swift, because it was inescapable. The music industry had the power to MAKE you hear it, whether you wanted to or not. They can’t do that anymore, and that is a very good thing.
To this day, I can count on 1 hand the number of rap tracks that aren’t just retrograde poems set to repetitive drum beats.
I’ve been poisoned against it ever since encountering “Baby Got Back.” I’m given to understand it’s a classic of the genre?
Is that “real history of hip hop” video real or a parody?
Also, I saw that in the Twitter thread resulting from your tweet about this blog post, you wrote that John C. Wright had said that “popular music degraded from melody to harmony to rhythm.”
What would you consider the timeline of this (ie, roughly when did each switch happen in a significant way), and what are some examples of musicians and bands from the 1950s-today that have fallen into each of those three categories?
I’d assume, for example, that 1950s-1960s pop musicians like Connie Francis would fit squarely into the “melody” category, but would pop musicians from the 1970s-1980s (like the Carpenters, ABBA, and Olivia Newton-John, for example) fit more into “melody” or “harmony”, and did any start drifting into “rhythm” territory?
I remember the ‘switch’ to hip-hop and rap very well. I was a student at the time, and found myself bitching and moaning about ‘the music these days’, in my 20s! Even mainstream pop music in the 80s had to have melody and rhyme, and all of a sudden it was dreck. The New American Rock of the early-mid 90s was a refreshing change, but it degenerated into variations of Metal.
After that, young people seem to have diverged into 2 fandoms: execrable, talentless material mostly created by the producer; and ‘retro’. You can even see he decay in individual acts, U2, Taylor Swift, Mumford and Sons spring to mind immediately, even if their debut was relatively recent. U2 knew full well 30 years ago they’d become something they hate, and it shows.
My daughters aged around 20 unashamedly listen to The Smiths, The Killers, and despite being Swifties, readily admit her modern stuff is lousy.
The Killers are another notable example of the Y2K Curse – or perhaps a post-Y2K curse since they debuted in the aughts (named after a New Order video from the year 2000), broke out, and disappeared.