Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>Movies are still important, pop music is important, graphic design (of magazines and web sites and apps) is more important than it has ever been before.

Pop music is not as important as it was either. Musicians used to be huge cultural phenomena, and a kind of escape into another world, now there are tons of similar escapes (computer games, for example, a huge thing, weren't even available to the common how when pop was huge, nor where social media, chat, YouTube, Instagram, the modern "artistically relevant and high production quality" tv series and tons of other things). Now you can ask 10 people and they wouldn't know a current top 10 song -- whereas in the 70's for example it would be inescapable.

And graphic design has faded too -- there was a brief period in the mid-eighties to early 00s were graphic designers were huge pop heroes -- interviews in magazines, stars like Neville Brody, David Carson that you get to hear about even as a layman, etc. Now it's only other graphic and web folk care about graphic and web designers.

>People change, and the culture changes.

It's also good however to be making judgement calls on those changes too. Else we accept everything and anything as fate.

>Musicians used to be huge cultural phenomena

It still is. Is there any music from the 70s that's been heard by as many people as Gangnam Style? Psy currently has nearly 5 billion total views on YouTube.

That's a novelty hit, not a cultural phenomenon in the sense of something that affects culture. It was forgotten as soon as the next thing came along, the same way Harlem Shake or whatever were, and it never had any deep emotional or cultural impact to those who saw it in the first place.

And even that it's more due to the video than the music -- even you measured it on "billion views".

> it never had any deep emotional or cultural impact to those who saw it in the first place.

How could you possibly know what had a deep emotional impact on anyone other than yourself or possibly the people you interact with most closely in life?

Here's an alternate proposal for you: You've grown as a person, and all the deep emotional impacts that music might be able to make on you have been made. To those still growing, you aren't able to assess the impact, because you now view the world through the eyes of an adult.

Give it 30 years, and watch as all these things come back again into pop-culture because those kids from today will be in your shoes, as decision makers at TV/Internet/Whatever companies that push pop-culture -- being guided by their own sense of nostalgia about the things that impacted them as kids.

>How could you possibly know what had a deep emotional impact on anyone other than yourself or possibly the people you interact with most closely in life?

By being a human, involved with culture, and plain being able to see and place cultural artifacts upon certain contexts.

How do we know that a war has left "deep emotional impact" to lots of people other than ourselves or "possibly the people we interact with most closely in life"? Because we do, we know what war is, we know what it does to people, etc.

In the same way, we know what novelty pop hits are. As opposed to regular pop hits that mostly capture some teens attention for a few years (e.g. Bieber or NKOTB back in the day) and more involved pop that goes deeper.

>Here's an alternate proposal for you: You've grown as a person, and all the deep emotional impacts that music might be able to make on you have been made. To those still growing, you aren't able to assess the impact, because you now view the world through the eyes of an adult.

I'm quite atypical in this regard, as despite being mid-late-30s, I follow lots of music and still have deep emotional impact from all kinds of stuff, from techno to regular chart pop to some obscure garage-psychedelic or jazz record (I really like from The Residents to Westbam, Deep Freeze Mice and Mingus, and can even hum something like Redfoo's songs).

But even as a teenager, I can tell you that there were lots of novelty hits I went for that meant really nothing for me (or anyone else that forgot about them after their peak) and stuff that had deeper impact, which was of a different kind (could still be pop: it just wasn't a novelty track like, say, Cotton Eye Joe or The Scatman).

> and still have deep emotional impact from all kinds of stuff

Amen. Wish its more common than commonly perceptible.

I'll bet Stairway to Heaven has had at least as many listens. And it's still being listened to, not "viewed", every single day.

Bands like Led Zeppelin were indeed cultural phenomena that transcended their music - they represented a lifestyle and way of thinking that was genuinely exciting to young people of the time (not me personally, well ahead of my time).

I'd guess the underground metal scene of the '90s had a similar feel.

I beg to disagree that not making judgment calls equals acceptance and fatalism. Actually, accepting the fact is good (yes, I just made a judgment call) as it gives us the opportunity to learn; but making judgment calls without acknowledging that you have all the facts is not much different from fatalism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com