Why has American pop culture stagnated? | Hacker News Reader

Why has American pop culture stagnated?

noahpinion.blog

6 pointssurprisetalk6 comments

Not just America: see https://archive.ph/9684B which says Japan hasn't made an excellent JRPG since the 2016 Persona 5... Instead we keep getting remakes of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games (so cringe to turn a 2-d isometric game to a 3-d game!)

As for music I blame autotune. If there is autotune music on at the gas station... there is autotune music at the gas station. If I hear autotune on the radio I turn the knob, hear it on the phone, hit the thumbs down. People in the industry don't want to hear that message so for me "new music" is all the Neil Young (often post-1990) that I never heard on the radio, Super Furry Animals, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Jay-Z, etc.

2016 is nine years ago, why should anyone expect stellar cultural artifacts every year? Art is hard, and no one should expect culture-defining art with any regularity over a short period of time, unless there is currently an art movement which propagates creation and dissemination, e.g., Impressionism, Blues, or the creation of a new technology, like TV.

If social media is where the masses hang out, then it won't be where the avant-garde is. You're going to have to look for it and it's probably not something you're going to just run into while scrolling on your phone. We're past the "Google was awesome and actually found what you searched for" trend of the 2000's, and the social media oversharing trend of the 2010's. So increasingly there's stuff happening but you're not going immediately run into it on Facebook, Tiktok, etc. or even a Google search.

> Discovering good artists in the old days was a very difficult endeavor.

> Fast-forward to the 2020s, and the artistic community has been largely disintermediated.

You had art forums before Facebook, but just because you could join, view art and possibly even post it, didn't mean you were in any elitist circle of artists. But it did seem like all kinds of weird stuff was easier to find when Google search was worth a damn, e.g. you could literally type in what you wanted and it would come up, but phone apps and web apps have made things like Discord forums the place where that stuff happens now.

The gallery scene is still a thing, but even it suffers from capitalist enshitification as Art has shifted from the signifier of taste to a place to keep your money where it can't be taxed. Making the art world more of a stock market than a laboratory.

On thing I find interesting in all of this is the nearly complete avoidance of the viewer's role in Art. That removing taste, deadening the palate of the viewer through political alienation of the educated class where taste is fostered has largely allowed this to happen. Art made for artists is Art made for viewers with taste. Why can't everyone be taught to understand Art. Media literacy is how our culture can grow, but it has been defunded for decades.

https://epiloguemag.com/2020/08/the-future-is-cancelled/

>For the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, this manifested itself in a culture industry that became addicted to pastiche and nostalgia, and which could no longer experiment with novel forms and anticipate a future of any substantive difference to the present.

I honestly can't believe this article doesn't mention Mark Fisher, a philosopher who talked about exactly this to an incredible degree. He said that there has been a "slow cancellation of the future" and that this is in large part due to having a profit-driven, and therefore risk-averse social structure and access to the entire backlog of human creativity up to this point. People like nostalgia and are comfortable with the familiar, so it will almost always be a safer bet to create things based on proven formulae than it will be to experiment. We have everything people have ever created to draw from, and a sort of combinatorial explosion happens when you realize you can just start recreating forgotten things from the past so that they seem new or mooshing any number of things together. From a profit perspective it just makes sense: creating these things is expensive and getting pricier, and as independent creators either get gobbled up by industry conglomerates or leveraged into a position where they have to deal w said conglomerates you start dealing with people who judge the value of a piece of art the same way they judge the value of everything else: if I put $x into this today how much will that be worth in a year? Framed that way, it makes total sense to do nothing but spinoffs, rebroadcasts, remakes, reboots, resets, prequels, sequels, reissues, remasters and 25th anniversary tours. There's enough depth to the back catalog now, and we live in an age where all of it is available instantly, that you can mine old culture for things that aren't familiar to a generation until that generation passes on, then just do the same thing again to the next generation. Idk if y'all have noticed but bellbottoms are back. My mom is a boomer, I'm a millenial, and my niblings are gen alpha. Having someone from the 70s, someone from the 70s revival of the late 90s and someone from the 2020s revival of the 90s revival of the 70s all in the same room at the same time is more illustrative of this point than anything else I can come up with.

At a guess I'd say because most good entertainers have been sidelined in favour of those compromised in sexual exploitation schemes for the last quarter century?

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