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Comment by AlecSchueler | Hacker News Reader

I grew up on '60s and '70s WDR electronic music; it was super important for me in my teens, not only musically, but also as a gateway to my interest in computers, signal processing and European history.

They mention in the article a bit about the political push against experimental music in the 1930s, but it's interesting to consider that the re-surfacing of such music was also very political: the West were very happy to broadcast free and progressive music across the wall. I definitely have a feeling that experimental music has become a lot more niche since relations softened, the extra funding and promotion has dried up a bit, and now the world of that music has moved almost entirely to the back rooms of various universities.

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I think some of this has to do with the people making experimental music. All the noise artists I know would be pretty averse to the idea of government grants to work on their music, it's just against their whole ethos.

> All the noise artists I know would be pretty averse to the idea of government grants to work on their music, it's just against their whole ethos.

I'm sure their government isn't buying their music but simply letting them put something on the table while they spend their life making music. I would totally love the same applied to other forms of art, except of course those that already have a market.

I get you, though I do think of the noise scene as having a somewhat separate lineage to the more academically focused dialectic of the WDR and places like IRCAM which still operates.

I can see both sides of the argument about publicly funding music but for me the big differentiator is that something which is publicly funded will inevitably be publicly debated, and I think that critical attention can be very important in creating cohesive schools of thought in art that can have enough appeal to make a difference.

Yes, it was a way for western powers to show their support of free speech and liberal values. Now that the communist block is gone, there is less incentive to support the arts and claim cultural victory.

Actually, communism controls our own movie industry. Take the famous case of the remake of Red Dawn where they changed the antagonist from China to North Korea. That was done at the TOP levels, communist pressure on Obama, who then exerted pressure on the studio. On behalf of Xi.

John Cena learning Chinese so he could apologize for supporting pro-democracy protests in Taiwan is another one. Our bland culture is partly designed by communism.

> That was done at the TOP levels, communist pressure on Obama, who then exerted pressure on the studio. On behalf of Xi.

Source? All I can find is https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/18/407619652/... a producer named Peter Shiao claiming that "Chinese diplomats asked him to arrange a conversation with the makers of Red Dawn" but by then they "were already erasing references to China in post-production." Which seems to suggest they were persuaded by some other means, but doesn't tell us how.

Probably not some shadowy conspiracy. There was a lot of pandering to China from the studios back then because they held onto the hope that the market in China would open up to them more. But it never really materialized.

You don't need a conspiracy theory here when there is a far simpler explanation:

China has 1B potential viewers/customers that hollywood wants as an audience to grow and increase profit, so they'll do their best not to anger the chinese government. As a consequence movies avoid showing China in a bad light and they avoid topic that could get movies censored or forbidden in China.

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