Is it wrong of me to find this video philosophically fascinating? It is, isn't it?
In all seriousness (By which I, naturally, mean "more than a little tongue in cheek"), though, I wanted to change tack a bit with this post and discuss something I don't talk about terribly often: music.
This comic, from back before XKCD jumped the shark (Yeah, I said it. More on webcomics in a future post. Await with anticipation!) illustrates perfectly my feelings on the matter. We suck, guys. We really do.
This is not to say that there aren't artists, that we don't produce excellent music, or even that some of it isn't popular. But good music and great music are two different things. When you listen to Bach or Beethoven or Mozart, you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this is great music, that this is art which transcends everything that came before it and will be the bar to which all after it must be held. And the same, I will contend, is true of art from the musical revolution that preceded my generation. There is a sense of greatness, of achievement, of some kind of transcendental musical experience, that you get when listening to Queen or the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. Whether or not you like their music, there is a quality of greatness which must come through.
I'm going to go on the record here with an address to future musical historians:
Dear Future Musical Historians,
When you decide that the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s were a period of musical rennaissance which rivaled that of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, please remember that I totally called it.
Love, Etarran.
PS. I agree, Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" is totally awesome.
It is telling, I think, that university campuses, supposedly bastions of cultural revolution, primarily have the sounds of forty-year-old music drifting from students' rooms. Not even the generation making modern music thinks it's better than our parents' music.
Perhaps it is too much to expect. After all, a great cultural revolution can come along only once in a very great while. And we do, of course, have our cultural successes. But even those, which are primarily internet-related, are based on technologies and cultures that fundamentally belong to the generation before. And I can't help but think that, in an era of unprecedented cultural freedom and diversity and intercommunication, surely we should be coming up with something better than webcomics and the Rickroll.
Perhaps art simply isn't our destiny. After all, we have more practical problems to deal with. Our parents may have produced excellent music, but they also produced a hell of a lot of carbon dioxide and enriched uranium. But surely we could save the world and rock out?
Get on that, will you?
PS. I was totally serious about Hot n' Cold being philosophically fascinating. I invite you to contemplate its symbolism, which is surpassed, perhaps, only by this video.
Moving (New Blog)
13 years ago
4 comments:
You're so right about all of this that I don't know where to begin. I'm curious as to when you think xkcd jumped the shark, though. If you're referring to the recent spate of sub-par comics, that sort of thing has happened before. I'd agree, however, if you said that the shark was jumped the moment millions of fans mindlessly acted out one of the comics (ie. Wood in popular culture). Exception granted for stuff he actually thought people should do for fun, ie. Geohashing. Still, shark jump or no shark jump, isn't it just so sad that a comic which tried so hard to impress upon people the value of individuality and autonomy is so relentlessly mimicked? I'll admit my part in endlessly quoting it, but at least I'm not among those vandalizing wikipedia...
As for music, you'll note that the decades you named saw the birth/popularization of a parade of new musical styles, particularly the offspring of Rock and Roll: Punk Rock, Prog Rock, Metal, Surf-Rock, Art-Rock, New-wave, and Alternative (I think I got them all?). Then there's disco, electronica, pop, and hip-hop. By contrast, the generation before us got Grunge, and we grew up with the boy-bands and girl-bands of the '90s, followed by Indie (insofar as one can call it a cohesive genre), Emo, and...well, that's about all I can think of. Everything good had its start before we were born. Is it that our generation has sold out? Doubtful; there have been sellouts before, and the most infamous purely commercial group – The Monkees – wasn't our doing. I think that what's happened is that our generation is trying to do something new with the genres introduced before, but that's necessarily a process of evolution, and not revolution. As to why “we” haven't managed to introduce any truly novel genres, that's your fault. Yes, YOURS! If Fluorescent From the Waist Down were to release an album, it would clearly not fit into the definition for any known genre of music. For that matter, I'm not sure it would fit any known definition of “music”, but I digress. In all seriousness, though, I think it's not so much a failure on the part of our generation; we just had the misfortune (if you want to call it that) to be born into a time where all the musical innovation had just been done.
I think your casual dismissal of webcomics as “insufficient” is on the right track (of course they're not high art!), I think you may have missed something. The newspaper comic, as it was pretty much since the end of Bloom County or Calvin and Hobbes is pretty much dead. Even before these shining examples, the format had already been reduced to such a small size as to preclude any artistic flamboyancy, but after their passing, there was no one left who was willing to use what was there to say anything. Granted, some webcomics are just as guilty of saying nothing and being tragically unartistic (I'm looking at you, PvP). Some are guilty of being largely unfunny (Penny Arcade). Some are guilty of jumping the shark (xkcd, Questionable Content), yes. However, it's hardly fair to look at only the bad and say that webcomics aren't all that great. So I don't find QC narratively as interesting as I used to, it's still a hundred times better illustrated as anything in a newspaper. Our generation resurrected the comic, something that previous generations had rendered pretty dead.
On the subject of Katy Perry, I present to you one possible legacy for our generation (hint: it's not her!). Upon listening to the rest of the album upon which both of those tracks reside, there are – at best – two more decent-to-good songs, and then filler. What I hope the eventual dominance of digital distribution in music will do is eliminate these filler tracks from albums. Unlikely, 'cause I'm sure there will always be devoted fans and tweens to buy up awful music by the truckload, but I can't let go of that faint glimmer of hope.
You got me with that rickroll at the end. You rat bastard.
" And I can't help but think that, in an era of unprecedented cultural freedom and diversity and intercommunication, surely we should be coming up with something better than webcomics and the Rickroll."
Could it perhaps be, that as communication technologies allow any given piece of content theoretical access to everybody, they begin being produced for the mainstream rather then the exceptions.
The Beatles developed their (original) sound largely as a result of their Liverpool incubation. The internet removed barriers that prevent people from accessing culture, but it may very well have stopped the development of the isolated scenes which drive it forward.
Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl":
"This video has been removed due to terms of use violations."
Oh, that's too bad. Thanks for pointing that out, I'll see if I can find a better link.
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