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| Thread: Popular Culture |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 · NEXT» |
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Stevie
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 14, 2017 07:23 PM |
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Kipshasz
Undefeatable Hero
Elvin's Darkside
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posted February 14, 2017 07:33 PM |
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Pretty much what this chap said.
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"Kip is the Gavin McInnes of HC" - Salamandre
"Ashan to the Trashcan", "I got PTSD from H7. " - LizardWarrior
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LizardWarrior
Honorable
Legendary Hero
the reckoning is at hand
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posted February 14, 2017 07:50 PM |
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Stevie said:
Thoughts on today's popular culture?
garbage
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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 14, 2017 08:08 PM |
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I don't like it, but given the accessibility of alternatives, I can almost entirely avoid it, so I don't see much point in complaining about it.
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Eccentric Opinion
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Stevie
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 14, 2017 08:21 PM |
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 14, 2017 09:47 PM |
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YouTube is obviously part of the popular culture, so, with regard to a different thread, it would seem a bit of self-irony involved here.
Anyway, the guy is a fool (or uses this to make money or something). Last time I looked we still lived in capitalism, and in capitalism every need is served eventually, when it is possible to make a profit with it. By necessity, popular culture is MAINSTREAM culture, which means, it caters to a significant part of society.
If you don't like the tastes of the mainstream, blame the educational mechanisms, be it at home or in school.
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EnergyZ
Legendary Hero
President of MM Wiki
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posted February 14, 2017 09:57 PM |
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A culture that has people turn their mobiles phones around and take pictures of themselves naked, then post it online deserves much to be in the trash. It's not even porn; you cannot say "it's that type of art".
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Come and visit the Might and Magic Wikia!
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 14, 2017 10:13 PM |
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That's PART of the culture - as well as you saying, "it's not EVEN porn", whatever it is you want to express with it.
The amazing thing is, it's something there for everyone, and you are not forced to do or consume anything.
By the way, is actually anybody realizing that this is more or less what fundamental muslims are accusing "the West" of? Undermining all "values" and corrupting everything with shallow frivolity?
Interesting, isn't it?
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Stevie
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 14, 2017 10:28 PM |
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Edited by Stevie at 22:45, 14 Feb 2017.
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JollyJoker said:
YouTube is obviously part of the popular culture, so, with regard to a different thread, it would seem a bit of self-irony involved here.
A platform that delivers popular content is not the same with that content, the video could've been uploaded anywhere else. If you draw any irony, you're essentially saying that low rating content like this video is somehow popular because it's hosted on a platform where popular content is uploaded. That's a fallacy by association. This video, by any stretch of the imagination, is not popular. It doesn't even have 100 views. No self-irony was involved in the making of this post. And even if the video had a billion views, it wouldn't detract from the point that it's trying to make.
JollyJoker said:
Anyway, the guy is a fool (or uses this to make money or something). Last time I looked we still lived in capitalism, and in capitalism every need is served eventually, when it is possible to make a profit with it. By necessity, popular culture is MAINSTREAM culture, which means, it caters to a significant part of society.
If you don't like the tastes of the mainstream, blame the educational mechanisms, be it at home or in school.
Rather, Capitalism is the main culprit here. Mass producing culture in the interest of money is not so very different from mass producing fast food: it's easy to consume, it satiates low brow necessities (therefore the many), but in reality it's total garbage with adverse effects on your health.
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Guide to a Great Heroes Game
The Young Traveler
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AlHazin
Promising
Supreme Hero
النور
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posted February 14, 2017 10:44 PM |
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JollyJoker said:
By the way, is actually anybody realizing that this is more or less what fundamental muslims are accusing "the West" of? Undermining all "values" and corrupting everything with shallow frivolity?
Interesting, isn't it?
Ah, mate, if you knew how much of Islam there is in humans very nature...
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Nothing of value disappears from this world, it will reappear in some shape or form ^^ - Elvin
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 14, 2017 10:49 PM |
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Stevie said:
JollyJoker said:
YouTube is obviously part of the popular culture, so, with regard to a different thread, it would seem a bit of self-irony involved here.
A platform that delivers popular content is not the same with that content, the video could've been uploaded anywhere else. If you draw any irony, you're essentially saying that low rating content like this video is somehow popular because it's hosted on a platform where popular content is uploaded. That's a fallacy by association. This video, by any stretch of the imagination, is not popular. It doesn't even have 100 views. No self-irony was involved in the making of this post. And even if the video had a billion views, it wouldn't detract from the point that it's trying to make.
It's a bit sad that you miss the point here, because the point is that this guy would not have ANY view AT ALL without popular culture and the opportunity for every nutcase to be POTENTIALLY heard by EVERYONE. That he has only a few views - well, his rants are not popular or spectacular or artful or true or in any way interesting for most people, so what?
Quote:
JollyJoker said:
Anyway, the guy is a fool (or uses this to make money or something). Last time I looked we still lived in capitalism, and in capitalism every need is served eventually, when it is possible to make a profit with it. By necessity, popular culture is MAINSTREAM culture, which means, it caters to a significant part of society.
If you don't like the tastes of the mainstream, blame the educational mechanisms, be it at home or in school.
Rather, Capitalism is the main culprit here. Mass producing culture in the interest of money is not so very different from mass producing fast food: it's easy to consume, it satiates low brow necessities (therefore the many), but in reality it's total garbage with adverse effects to your health.
I'm afraid you don*t understand the nature of capitalism or freedom, because you are not forced to eat or consume anything - and, again, blame EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS.
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Salamandre
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
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posted February 14, 2017 11:34 PM |
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JollyJoker said:
the point is that this guy would not have ANY view AT ALL without popular culture and the opportunity for every nutcase to be POTENTIALLY heard by EVERYONE. That he has only a few views - well, his rants are not popular or spectacular or artful or true or in any way interesting for most people, so what?
The guy has almost 1 million of views in 10 days for this video, in its original form. He is very known for his alternative news, presented in an unique and sarcastic manner.
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Stevie
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 14, 2017 11:41 PM |
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Edited by Stevie at 23:44, 14 Feb 2017.
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JollyJoker said:
It's a bit sad that you miss the point here, because the point is that this guy would not have ANY view AT ALL without popular culture and the opportunity for every nutcase to be POTENTIALLY heard by EVERYONE. That he has only a few views - well, his rants are not popular or spectacular or artful or true or in any way interesting for most people, so what?
I haven't missed the point, I addressed it. To me, it appears that you do not understand the difference between platform and content. Content is what gives a platform popularity, a platform doesn't necessarily give popularity to content (unless advertised). And to serve you a bit of artu's wisdom, potentiality and being are two different things. I will reiterate, just because something is posted on youtube does not mean it's popular for it to be ironic when arguing against popular culture. The fact that youtube is popular does not make anything on youtube necessarily popular.
But let me echo back to you your reasoning in a reductio ad absurdum type of way: the internet as a whole is a very popular tool for sharing content, if not the most popular by now. Does that meant that anything posted on the internet is necessarily popular? Not any more than putting words in a book or singing at an opera for anyone to "potentially" get access to that content. You don't have a case, might as well admit that all you wanted a "gotcha" line in there somewhere and that was the best you could come up with.
JollyJoker said:
I'm afraid you don*t understand the nature of capitalism or freedom, because you are not forced to eat or consume anything - and, again, blame EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS.
You are not forced to consume anything, that's true. It doesn't override the fact that a majority of people still consumes it, reason why it's called "popular". That's the crux of the issue and the point of this thread.
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Guide to a Great Heroes Game
The Young Traveler
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 14, 2017 11:50 PM |
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It's FREEDOM. You also have the freedom to commit suicide. If you give in to "temptation", are you really going to blame the fact that something is allowed to tempt you? No. It*s all about education/information - and in that department we are sadly lacking. And the difference between platform and content?
Meaningless - because who is this guy? He doesn't have to have any credentials, he can just post his crap, and that makes him the same as McDonalds or Fox or whatever else, because he's vying for attention. He's trying to become popular. He's profiting from the popular culture trend to give everyone a platform for their utterings.
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artu
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted February 15, 2017 12:45 AM |
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About the video in the original post, there is little of potentially substantial criticism there embedded in insufferable amounts of good ol’ bigoted rant and most shallow generalizations. Putting Kim Kardashian’s reality shows and conceptual art in the same basket or confusing moral relativity, which is a sociological fact and can only be countered by authoritarianism in practicality, with consumerism, will only be possible if you are completely clueless about things such as art history or philosophy of ethics. The age of internet and mass media has its ups and downs but rather than contemplating on them, he picks the pitchfork, never even considering the possibility that his gems of wisdom are not less ignorant than Kardashian herself, takes everything he dislikes and blame it on some hear-say boogey man, which in this case would be the cultural Marxists, as ridiculous as that term sounds in such a context. The biggest irony would be that in reality, if you actually read popular culture studies, Marxist thinkers significantly specialize in such studies and they are usually the most critical towards popular culture. Even if they see some counter-cultural categories as potential but ineffective tools of liberation, they mostly evaluate the mainstream products as instruments that pump up consumerism and see them as capitalism’s panem et circenses. (Yeah, masses weren't reading Vergilius in Roman times either!) Of course, to know that, you had to go to the bookstore, invest time to read people such as Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Zizek and so on. However, since Youtube guy with his devastating misconceptualizations is “the gangsta’ rapper” of his own medium, it’s the usual pitchfork grabbing instead. All this sex and drugs and weird art! That fountain of Duchamp in the video is from 1917, not from these “decadent” times and it was meant as a satire targeting "the circus." Not to mention, what falls under the category of “circus” is always debatable for sure. Apparently, Youtube guy likes genres such as rock, punk or grunge, so they are off the hook despite the “sex and drugs.” Salamandre would call them “musical porn” just as well. Even something such as Jazz, which is now considered “high-art” was labeled as the devil’s music with all its sexual innuendo, back in the 1920’s.
Sometime ago, I was watching a talk show, the guest was a poet who was at the time translating Harry Potter. It’s a nice book, he said, but when I was a kid, we used to read simplified versions of great classics such as Moby Dick , Crime and Punishment, etc.. This used to prepare us into adult reading. Nowadays, the trend is the opposite, they are marketing polished children’s literature to grown ups. They are not bad books, but they shouldn’t be the main dish, rather the dessert. Another guest, a novelist, replied that during the first half of the 20th Century, literature got so focused on political criticism and social realism with the influence of Marxism among intellectual circles, it resulted in a counter movement of literature with fantasy and rhetorical games of fun in which introvert characters' mind shuffles are usually the main story. Just like a pendulum’s ball swinging in the opposite direction. It was interesting criticism and observation from people who actually knew what they were talking about. Had he been there, Youtube guy would probably say something like “look at all these corrupt morons reading Japanese comics while I read James Joyce.” Sorry, he’s certainly not reading James Joyce, he’s probably reading Bill O Reilly’s Culture Warrior.
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Stevie
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 15, 2017 01:14 AM |
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Edited by Stevie at 01:15, 15 Feb 2017.
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Speaking of generalization then elaborating terms of comparison with rock, punk or grunge on the assumption that "youtube guy"'s preference includes those promoting sex and drugs, or that today's scrutiny towards popular culture is along the same lines of the devil's music with jazz at least at the level of social context and motivation (we're indeed all puritans today), or the cherry picking behind the allegedly bad arguments that he presents at the complete disfavor of any redeeming one (he must've been utterly wrong in everything he said, indeed), indignation and quite frankly eloquence taken for pitch-fork rhetoric and angst, other make-belief gems of actual wisdom... all of that meant to miss the wood for the trees when the reality of what he is essentially communicating is quite frankly true and plain to see.
Meanwhile, JJ compares popular culture with suicide on the grounds of freedom.
I'm done.
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Guide to a Great Heroes Game
The Young Traveler
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artu
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted February 15, 2017 01:53 AM |
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Edited by artu at 02:11, 15 Feb 2017.
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There is no cherry-picking, his analysis is wrong at its core, as I already said, there is little of substantial criticism there but anybody can point out that reality shows are shallow or popular music industry delivers fast food products, that's not the end of the world. Everything isn't going worse, everything, including the good or the bad, is simply more accessible, hence more transparent. Artists or entertainers living in a bohemian fashion is nothing new, them having casual sex or using drugs is nothing new either and not "evil." Youtube guy wouldnt be fond of the way Rimbaud lived his life either. Creative people are seldom conservatives. At some point he mentions "oh, where's Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde now." There are very good authors in this age, too but I highly doubt he spends his time reading them and I'm not even sure that he is aware of the fact that Oscar Wilde, back in those good ol' moral times, was put in prison simply for being a homosexual and this finished him.
The only part in his rant significantly specific to this age is that Warhol's prophecy, that "everybody is going to be famous for 15 minutes in the future" is turning out real, so yes, young people are obsessed with fame but think little on how to earn that fame by producing something of substance. As life gets faster and faster, attention spans are getting shorter. Every generation has its circumstancial flaws. But it's hardly a devastating moral corruption as he makes it sound, 150 years ago people were less tolerant, less open-minded, they had much less ability and space to decide things about their own lives. Most of them werent even literate. And whatever radical Islamists may think about MTV culture, nobody is running away to their countries to seek moral purity, do they? On the contrary, a lot of Muslims are running away to liberal democracies. And a lot of the ones who run are the intellectual ones. They may not be on MTV, they may not even like MTV, but they still prefer an environment where MTV isnt banned in the name of moral puritanism, to countries that it is indeed banned. So, if anything is socially suicidal, it is certainly not what he is talking about.
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Are you pretty? This is my occasion. - Ghost
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Salamandre
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
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posted February 15, 2017 04:49 AM |
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There is a major difference between people bashing the first audition of 3rd of Beethoven because of the dissonance in the beginning, the people whistling the first audition of Debussy's La Mer because of chords and harmonies strangeness, the people bashing jazz back in the 20 because its devilish accents, which are aesthetic reactions because they conflict with a long time due and well formed culture, then the popular music today which not only has no substance, but is technically outrageously poorly done then it is mostly composed to support vulgar and trivial feelings, as quality education is not yet available to everyone. I am not including in the list the well known styles as jazz, pop, country, just the nonsense people waddle on, I don't even know how is called.
And I would add that, whether we want or not, we are still forced to consume it, be it when you take a bus, enter a parking, go in a gym hall (thats my nightmare, 2 hours of gym on sunken rap, I finish pedaling like Speedy Gonzales hoping for a fast death), people talking about around and so on. Even when you go on Youtube, if not logged and no cookies, the first thing you are offered is a list of most recent "cultural" enrichment.
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artu
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted February 15, 2017 05:52 AM |
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Edited by artu at 06:47, 15 Feb 2017.
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The difference between conceptual art and cheap consumer products would be more like... you may not like atonal composers of the 20th Century but they are not amateurs singing off key. To mistake atonal music for tonal music badly performed off key would be the equivalent of his ignorance. And as I said, the problem is how he arbitrarily puts everything in one basket (or out, if he personally likes them himself), not because there is some rational reference point that connects them, but simply because he dislikes them. Anything he is not fond of is the sign of corruption to him, sometimes only because he is unaware of the concept behind it. Duchamp is not Kim Kardashian. Although I don't like it much myself, electronic music is not noise. I have friends performing electronic music and they are really curious people, experimenting with different sound combinations day and night. It's a sub-culture with its own parameters of deep versus cheap. Just simply condemning everything you are alien to, as corruption, then jumping to some weird notion of how this is due to loss of conservative values on the other hand is not even a weak argument but rather typical rant and he inevitably and openly arrives at the same spot with radical Islam's reaction, which btw, as we both know, would not think too different on Oscar Wilde or Ravel either, so that part is really "off key." Some people consuming shallow products has nothing to do with losing family values or moral relativity etc, majority of the people consuming shallow products are badly educated conservatives THEMSELVES. The way he goes on and on about being exposed to sex... Do you know that unwanted teenage pregnancies are much more common in conservative, religious small towns than they are among urbanized "progressive leftists." Btw, you do realize that your bachelor life style is among the things he counts as moral decay, don't you?
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Are you pretty? This is my occasion. - Ghost
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Salamandre
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
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posted February 15, 2017 07:02 AM |
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Its not some Oxford level analysis and he has 15 minutes to put his thoughts, which of course will end sounding as generalizing. Personally I stopped watching at Miley Cyrus sequence where I got what was about, and I mostly agree with, for what is worth. Culture, analyses and thoughts today are distributed in various ways thus we must learn to have different exigency on reception, depending how and where they are distributed.
Btw, you electronic fan friends are just experimenting random sounds until they fit, I can do same thing when collecting let's say shells on a beach, after 100 shells collected I bet two of them will look like married for life, and so on. This is not curiosity, this is boring process due to the fact that there is no true knowledge behind, I mean musical, not software -well, after a while they will get used to successful patterns and the process will speed up. I know this rather well, as I had to work with a team of DJ's for a thesis long time ago. Do you know Mozart never rubbed out anything in his manuscripts? He knew which sound will work with another before marking them down, probably same conservative talent stereotype; is sure that today with transgender toilets we better put electronic music in, to be sure history remembers us as progressist and open minded. 
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Era II mods and utilities
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