Kieran and I both appear in this interesting piece by Spencer Kornhaber at The Atlantic, which inspects the discourse of decline in culture - mostly focused on music, but also taking into account contemporary visual art - via some well-known gloomsayers: Ted Gioia, Dean Kissick, and Jaime Brooks.
Kieran naturally is present to represent the Anti-Declinist position - what would you call that? Flourishism? - and I pop into view towards the end as a sort of semi-reformed / semi-retracted declinist. We also figure as "dad hands over the family business to son", i.e. chasing after new micro-genres and giving them names *.
Seems to me that with most eras - apart from exceptionally supercharged, forward-thrusting decades like the Sixties - there's usually sufficient evidence someone could draw on to argue either the Declining Times or It's A Golden Age case ( especially if the positive stance is modified with a "if you know where to look"). Stagnation and new shoots of growth are always going on simultaneously. Pop music and its unpop offshoots seem particularly amenable to these kinds of competing arguments - a schism of temperament as much as a generational divide - because from very early on (1968, I'd say) there has been a kind of internal battle between postmodern and modernist impulses within pop music. The archive of past achievement builds up and this stokes an ever-growing temptation to revisit and reenact the high points of recent history, whether you're a consumer or a creator. Also there's something about pop music that makes it particularly susceptible to nostalgia for its own earlier phases of surging excitement, those virgin moments of emergence. You don’t get quite the same plangent yearning to time travel in other art forms or areas of entertainment, the ache to go back.
Talking about decline and the political gloomscape... I also pop up in this nice piece by Meredith Blake about the protest song, which asks where are the anti-Trump anthems in the charts, eh? It's written for The Contrarian, which I recommend subscribing to if you need your doomscroll jitters counteracted by some reasoned and informed analysis. 33 Revolutions Per Minute author Dorian Lynskey also appears with some astute comments.
Update
W. David Marx chips into the declinism conversation. (He has a book out soon called Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century). And brings up poptimism as causing a "crisis of valuation" - there can't be agreement whether decline is happening if you can't agree on a shared metric. But how far back do you have to go to find anything like that prevailing? Warhol and Kael and Sontag were already complicating that in the 1960s, taking up the cause of "plastic" and "trash" and "camp" and "sensation". By the end of the decade, Nik Cohn was making that move within the domain of pop music, refolding the fissure between high and low back into pop itself and aggressively taking up the low as crusade. (Even as many high culture elitists still continued to regard all pop culture as lowly and beneath consideration). That Cohn-style move of championing the low within the low, the lowest of the low, has remained a fixture of criticism ever since - an option on the menu of stances available, a culture-critical space you could occupy. It was over 30-years-old when the poptimism debate "kicked off" in the early 2000s.
Marx mentions a glass half-full piece from last year, "No, Culture Is Not Stuck", by Katharine Dee at Wisdom of Crowds, that argues for new emergent cultural forms, TikToky stuff etc. Alternate title for the piece: "No, Your Brain Is Not Rotting".
* some family busy-ness - recent columns by Kieran Press-Reynolds
on Drake shilling for online gambling sites and the get-rich-quick mysticism of luck that is so very Trumpian
on phonk (of all the genres K has introduced to my ears this is the one whose appeal I find most mystifying - reminds me a bit of nu-skool breaks)
on the afterlives of dariacore
on the brainrot royalty of internet rap
Oh and here is a No Bells at NTS mix Kieran made of "the sounds of the rap abyss and beyond"
Personally I don't think growth or decline really applies to post-war popular music very much. It was more a temporary moment that reflected certain specific conditions - US military/economic/cultural ascendency, the baby boom, the electrification of musical instruments, innovations in pharmaceuticals, new forms of media and their concentration in limited hands, etc. I think you yourself once described it as a bubble, and that is exactly right.
ReplyDeleteMost of those conditions are now gone, or have been superseded, and so popular music now persists as a kind of cultural habit, to lesser and lesser effect. As we are now entering Chinaworld, all cultural forms that originated in the US will have increasingly little purchase.
Agreed. As you say, there was a special set of circumstances around pop / rock music in and around the 1960s that had never existed before and will never exist again. It's like Classical music: that had never been as exciting as it was in and around Vienna in the 1790s, and was never that exciting again afterwards. Alex Ross will write in the New Yorker about an exciting new opera from a composer in her forties that will be on for a few nights at the Met, and for all I know it might be a really great piece, but no-one has any illusions about it being anywhere near the center of our culture. It's a minority interest for a cult of dedicated enthusiasts, and rock is going the same way.
DeleteThe big difference in rock is that its period of genuine cultural dominance is within living memory. There are lots of Boomers - and maybe some Xers as well - who can remember the time when rock actually was the most exciting art form on the planet, and changed society in so many profound and trivial ways. It's not really a surprise that they find it hard to accept that it has slipped away to the margins. There's no-one around to fret about why a new opera doesn't create the same frenzy it would have in Mozart's day.
I think of it as being like the problem of post-imperial decline. Countries that lose an empire have all kinds of problems - sometimes lasting for centuries - because they have folk memories of their imperial greatness and cannot reconcile themselves to their diminished standing in the world.
I have been reading Ross's Wagnerism, and one of the things I have learned is that Wagner was an Elvis / Sex Pistols type event in 19th century European culture, dividing everything into Before and After. His fans, mostly younger, thought he was the only composer worth listening to. The older generation who liked Chopin and Mendelssohn felt alienated and bemused by his success, like Bob Harris watching the New York Dolls. It all seemed incredibly urgent and vital at the time. But in the 21st century, most of the tension, and the thrills, have faded away. It's all just entries in the universal archive.
60s rock and Wagner both still sound great, of course. But listening to them is a different kind of experience from hearing the singles when they dropped on the radio for the first time, or the opera had its first performance.
A lot of critics (including I think Simon) have compared guitar rock to jazz - a music that was once at the centre of pop culture, now consigned to its margins, it's signature works now decades old, it's primary audience comprised of other musicians.
DeleteLike jazz, it lives on as an influence - sampling, iconography- but is no longer a driving culture force in its own right.
One thing I remember about the '80's, which is forgotten now, is the expectation that there would inevitably be a "next Sex Pistols". The idea was that every era had its bad boys, from Jerry Lee Lewis to the Rolling Stones to the Pistols, and the next bad boys were just around the corner.
DeleteThere were lots of candidates, such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, the Beastie Boys, etc. All of these eventually fell flat either through lack of substance (Frankie, SSS), or because they were careerists who were accidentally mistaken for radicals (J&MC, Beasties).
But the initial excitement, the mania even, that accompanied the sudden appearance of these groups, was genuinely electric, absurd as that might sound in hindsight. In the end though there would be no "next Sex Pistols", no more bad boys (at least in rock) and I think this is where the vital force started to depart.
Attending a function in a bar in 2023, I was taken aback by the music playing. Despite the clientele being overwhelmingly in their mid - late 20s, the music was entirely comprised of 00s hits from my youth (Pink, 50 Cent, MGMT, Eminem, Killers, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake, Kings of Leon). Strong anecdotal support for declinism.
ReplyDelete(Speaking of Kings of Leon, I recall a Pitchfork review identifying them - correctly, I think - as the last ever band to go from the garage to something approaching international stardom. Another era ended).
I hear "All Right Now" ambiently in public spaces at least once every week.
Delete"Decline" implies continuity. There is no continuity.
ReplyDeleteI clicked through to Ted Gioia's Substack and read his longer explanation of his declinist stance. He sees it as a stage of stagnation typical to all civilizations and envisions a revival of the arts through YouTube and Substack. It's completely out of touch with reality.
Meanwhile, Kieran's piece on brainrot royalty insightfully describes the true state of things. What I took away is that it's not a question of art "declining" or "stagnating" but a profound change in what culture means and how it's consumed: "Good", "bad", "true", "honest", "innovative", "original", "thought-provoking", etc.-- all of those concepts are now archaic and irrelevant. What counts in culture is whatever is "clearly addictive and contagious". If it keeps you staring at your phone, it's good.
These are two completely different phases of cultural production and consumption.
When referring to the older, expiring mode, I like the metaphor of a bubble, as mentioned by Phil, but for me it somehow doesn't quite capture the nature of the radical technological break we're living through.
There's been a lot of writing based in this traumatized sense of a drastic cognitive disruption caused by the internet and social media and smartphones - going back at least far as Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, but probably earlier. However I thought this recent piece My Brain Finally Broke by Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker was a vividly written addition to the literature of plaintive elegies for linear thinking - a twilight stand for the essayistic mode in the face of all that's disintegrating it.
Deletehttps://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/my-brain-finally-broke
I missed "The Shallows" when it was published, though I absorbed some of the ideas secondhand. I didn't pass up the chance to read Carr's new one, though. His recently published "Superbloom" is a very good account of the incredible folly of believing the internet will improve human connections rather than destabilize and break them, which is obviously happening.
DeleteThe literature of drastic cognitive disruption goes back to Plato's Phaedrus, if you consider writing itself a disruption, and I think a few of the (relatively) recent authors on the subject, like Neil Postman ("Amusing Ourselves To Death", "Technopoly"), offer a more useful perspective by focusing more attention on the shift from print to electronic media. It seems like we're not talking about it the right way, going back far enough in time to ground our understanding, which is something I pick up on all the time in piece's like Tolentino's. Toward the end of her (very good) essay she writes, "I imagine the ludicrous lectures I’ll give [my children]: 'Darlings, it’s so much better to look at an actual, imperfect human nude.'” Of course it's a ludicrous question, we all feel that, but *why*?
There's a weird blindness about our situation. I remember all the grumpy gray gargoyles scolding kids like me for playing too many video games. Video games would obliterate our attention span, they said, impair our ability to think! Even as an Atari-addicted kid I remember conceding they had a point. My brain felt different if I played games for a few hours, and I caught the change when I watched hours of TV. I didn't stop what I was doing, naturally, but I never thought the scolds were completely wrong.
A few decades on, after the internet but definitely a few years before the conditions Tolentino describes, people I knew not only joked about their shrinking attention spans but clearly accepted it as an inescapable feature of modern life. Even before matters reached this fever pitch of hallucinatory despair, it seemed like we were strangely ignorant of what it was the various new forms of electronic media were replacing.
Gotta hand it to Tolentino, though, her essay really raises the bar on recent doom-saying. I can relate.
I'm going to defend the Ted Gioia position. It does depend what you are measuring (the whole of the arts? a specific genre? internal innovation? external influence?) but some sectors are clearly in trouble. His strongest case is cinema. It didn't even exist in the 19th century, boomed between 1918-1950, took a big hit from TV, managed to recover, but streaming and social media seem fatal to it. I actual go to a local arts cinema regularly. The sold-out shows are live streaming of theatre and opera (!) and re-released rock concert films; new showings of actual films are a third full, at best. It reminds me of a county cricket: you can sit where you like and eat your own sandwiches in peace.
DeleteOr take the visual arts. How many UK readers of the blog can name, without Googling, the last 5 winners of the Turner prize? No one feels they need to know about this stuff anymore, for better or worse. It is a big contrast with high modernism: a lot of people then felt they needed to know about Picasso or Surrealism, even if they didn't like it.
I also think Gioia’s prediction that there will be some kind of counter-culture reaction based around Romanticism or the Arts and Crafts, is a decent bet. Lots of people don’t like social media, or binging on Netflix drama: there will be some kind of reaction against it. I think he is quite open to it coming from young people or outside the North Atlantic countries.
I agree with the likelihood of people returning to older art and craft forms. The formidable machinery of algorithm-fuelled monkeymatic dopamine hits is still subject to the principle of habituation and the law of diminishing returns. Ultimately, being outside in the sunshine is still more fun than sitting at a computer.
Delete"Hawk Tuah is good brainrot," a quote from Kieran's i-D article, didn't age so well.
ReplyDelete