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Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

> social breakdown begins with an increase in prosperity and the weakening of sexual restraint ...

> that the decline of a civilization can begin in the decline of its music.

This essay suffers by ignoring the elephants in the room.

Any such analysis must look at how, for example, the Nazis objected to the "weakening of sexual restraint" during the Weimar Republic, and the "decline of ... music" to justify why they needed to take power. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_music

Nor was Nazi Germany unique. Authorities in the Soviet Union and the US both opposed, for example, jazz music; in the US, for the racist view that “wild African jungle music” was a plot to destroy American culture. (Eg, https://archive.org/details/ChristianPatriotsCrusadeF.AllenM... )

This is quite relevant as the author specifically regards jazz music as a sign of not being in decline.

Who gets to determine if music is in decline? She doesn't say.

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> Who gets to determine if music is in decline

It is odd you ask that when most of the article is about it, but

"a cybernetic entity with developed proprioception and taste buds capable of evaluating the emotional (as per the article) direction the sample can cause".

As a father of young teens I find some of the music quite disturbing and borderline soft porn. Music in the 70s/80s were more about romance, today is more about sex and drugs. I agree with article about the correlation between society in decline and I see the nature of music as one of the signals.

The best music is about sex and drugs.

Edit below to respond to that downvote and expand on my comment in the context of parent.

The best music is about sex and drugs, implicitly or explicitly. Perhaps the parent is worried about their children's exposure to the best bits of youth, fair enough, but I'd totally counter that the music of the 70s and 80s was in any way unconcerned with such things.

In the late 60s/70s Marvin Gaye was not being in the slightest bit coy when he suggested him and his lady should "Get it on", nor were Black Sabbath shy about their love for the Sweet Leaf. There's the Beatles with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Donna Summer was into Hot Stuff, Frank Zappa was filthy and deeply offensive by today's standards, and there's anything by ACDC. Clapton's singing about cocaine, Lou Reed is singing about heroin, reggae is huge and hugely into ganja.

And the eighties, ho-boy. You've got Prince, the Red Hot Chili Peppers (back when they were good), even more ACDC, Madonna was pretty raunchy back in the day. White Lines and the thin White Duke, Golden Brown, Passing the Dutchy pon the Left Hand Side. I'm getting exhausted just thinking about it all.

You're really going to have to justify the late 20th century as some sort of heyday of romantic and innocent music.

From the article:

> Specifically, the confusion of the genre system disturbed the means for the proper release of the soul’s passions, causing audiences to be ruled instead by their unfettered emotions and impulses

I.e.: there are more ways to tackle the same topic, to develop an artistic work about some area. And there are progressive and regressive experiences. The topic is clearly too hefty to be summarize here - but the very submission has several points of "progressive vs regressive" expression as its theme...

If the poster writes «quite disturbing», probably he means that "the progressive is not there" (as sensible interpretation).

Many of the acts I listed there were truly genre-defying, progenitors, originators and auteurs: I'd point to the Beatles, Sabbath and Zappa as some cases in point. For me it's a tough stretch to argue that any of them had a genre system disturbing the release of their soul's passions.

Sex and intoxication, two of life's finer pleasures, have for millennia been captured in art, song and poetry -- at various points in civilisations' rise and fall. Pearl-clutching around "disturbing" modern music is, I'm sorry, something that's been going on pretty much as long as there's been music.

> finer

You chose an especially wrong word there (etymonline: «unblemished, refined, pure, free of impurities»).

But it leads to revealing that you seem to be embracing "one side", while the whole of the article was about "that side of yours fighting the other side" - can you see the other side?

If when speaking about music you refer it to intoxication, then of course since that kind of music has been there some noted it's "disturbing".

Edit: incidentally: it seems checking again the chain of posts that you definitely misunderstood my use of 'progressive'. (If you related it to «genre-defying, progenitors, originators» - no, that's really not the direction meant.)

It is again something that has "intoxicant" as an opposite.

You can as easily find music about romance about now as you could find sexually charged music back in 70s. It's about what you look for. Hell, in 70s disco culture was a thing.

every generation that has ever been has said society is in decline. what makes you correct?

isn't that the defintion of decline? when every generation see morales falling slowly one generation a time?

Just because it seems to fall, doesn't mean it's actually falling.

The Shepard tone is an auditory illusion where the tone seems to be continually rising or falling in pitch.

I've seen old films. They had terrible morals, like rich people straight-out slapping servants they felt were doing wrong, and of course the near omnipresent racism and sexism.

I totally expect the generation at the end of this century to despise our immoral pollution of the planet.

Only if you assume that everyone claiming this is _correct_, or more specifically that they're incorrect when they're young and correct when they're old (this is usually something primarily claimed by old people).

Cato the Elder used to moan about this a lot. Society is clearly better now by any conceivable measure in any developed country than it was in his day.

I am sure there is a ton of people that used more or less your exact words 55 years ago when talking about The Doors, for instance...

Are you sure what you're feeling isn't basically a generic knee-jerk reaction many parents have when trying to shield their kids from sex?

There will also be people that identified the "Harlem Shuffle" (1963) as a gem worth of respect, "Lick my Love Pump (Trilogy in D-minor)" (1984?) as joke worth of warmth, and "I want to #### you in the ###" (~2000) as rubbish.

...With good points.

I've always been fond of that 1920s foxtrot classic that celebrated stripping down past clothing to enter into a vertical expression of a horizontal desire, Tain't No Sin

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq69ioCrX9U - George Olsen and his Music ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9bW4qauva8 - Lee Morse )

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (is all my brain and body need) by Ian Dury was originally released as a Stiff Records single on 26 August 1977.

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfp8xrNAS6I it has a nice piano break )

Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine by by James Brown with Bobby Byrd backing was released in 1970.

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VDzezv7atU .. oh, those crazy russians )

Roll that forward 30 years ... TISM- Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me the only single off The White Albun (2004).

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENnAa7rqtBM .. it's all cute rabbits animated by a future Walt Disney Studios animation director )

Hardly The Decline & Fall ...

I agree there were always be examples like that, but my point is kids hardly had any exposure to these, whereas kids feel entitled to listen to explicit music nowadays and when you try as a parent to enforce rules everyone else seem to say "it's okay, all kids do that", it's never okay to let kids watch or listen to these explicit Nicky Minaj or Dojo Cat songs, and I will always speak against it.

When I was a kid, long long ago, we watched stallions put to mares, bulls to cows, and rams tupping ewes .. we grew up generally bemused by sexuality and made a lot of explicit sexual jokes in puberty.

I'm pretty sure the Athenians and those in the Roman Republic did also .. Pēdīcābo ego vōs et irrumābō has it over Nicky Minaj in several ways, it just lacks a music video.

Explicitly vulgar latin I also read as a teen.

The songs I listed, with the exception of TISM, I heard as a young teen - kids view the world and make their own minds up, Dojo Cat will be kind of lame to the next generation if not already.

Relax (1983) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yem_iEHiyJ0

Just like parents said in the 1980s.

Just like parents said in the 1950s.

Wait until you find out what Jelly Roll Morton's nickname means, acquired when he was a fourteen year old piano player in a brothel, back around 1904.

> Music in the 70s/80s were more about romance

> today is more about sex and drugs

I mean I think you're just being very selective about, well, both eras.

There were plenty of lyrics about sex and drugs in the 70s and 80s. Some of them quite disturbing (I'm still slightly traumatised by Spotify serving me what I _thought_ was "Ca plane pour moi" but was actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_Boy,_Jet_Girl a while back - it's the same tune, but... very different lyrics). And there's plenty of fluff in the 21st century.

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