Culture As Advertising.

luka

luka

Well-known member
other_life said:
poptimism feels overbearing at this point. rockism is defeated, it's a non issue, no one wants to be a rockist. but i shouldn't have to figure out why people really like billie eilish or whoever, or even admit they really do. i shouldn't have to accept this shit that doesn't appeal to me just to prove to nobody i have broad taste or, worse, can 'see something of aesthetic value in anything'. the narrative around and presentation of beyonce's s/t (even if i liked lots of the production on it). conde nast's pitchfork and everything ab pitchfork that made conde nast interested in the first place.

thirdform is just so lucid i'm stupefied to respond.
how can i know, for example, if being into the pistols in the 70s or new order in the 80s really did mean something, why would it mean something fundamentally different, really substantially be a marker of some kind of Subcultural Leftism, than it does now, than what being into migos means: that it resonates with your body?
really keen on describing 'right wing deconstruction'. the inability to draw lines of demarcation, to ground one's self in materiality, as politzer puts it to know the hurtling bus is real and not ideal without getting in its path... it's pathological. it's suffocating. and it somehow feels linked to what feels that way about poptimism.
ofc a partisan for third's position of hypermodernism/continuing modernism/realising we're still in modernity?, setting restrictions with intent in order to open aleatory possibilities.
Click to expand...

I absolutely agree poptimism needs to be destroyed as rockism was a generation before. My point is that you can't do that be defaulting to a rockist critique. This is why I asked you Marxists what the next dialectical step is. We have to critique pop as corporate product as propaganda and advertising I think, have to be allowed to do that, without regressing to the old banalities and illusions
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
i never said i was a marxist im just sympathetic to/intrigued by it my understanding of how to apply it is very very poor.
do u see rockism in my interventions in this thread so far? (real question not a rhetorical one)
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Like Barty I see pop as corporate hegemony and the erasure of difference. We fully buy into the mythos of Jedi resistance and the underground as against the evil empire. What the invocation thread does though is it allows for the expression of the unconscious, for the underlying occult reality, to express itself through corporate product. That thread is really our after the fact entry into synchromysticism, which played the same games with the mass market products of hollywood
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Where it gets terribly complicated is that these resonances and allusions and symbolisms are also, now more than ever, placed in corporate product, deliberately and consciously and in that sense, detourned and perverted. It becomes a minefield.
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
so that to you is the appeal of vigilant citizen, that this occult messaging in top-down culture is by design, channeled into it from inception. it's something we uncover not something we conjure. warmer?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
other_life said:
so that to you is the appeal of vigilant citizen, that this occult messaging in top-down culture is by design, channeled into it from inception. it's something we uncover not something we conjure. warmer?
Click to expand...

I thought I'd given an array of reasons for why I'm fascinated by it and the surrounding discourse. As I said I think it is a minefield because you have both conscious and unconscious messages, often working at cross purposes. I don't care about warmer I don't think. I care about the real thing. I mean, I think this stuff has a reality ("of some kind")
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
luka said:
Like Barty I see pop as corporate hegemony and the erasure of difference. We fully buy into the mythos of Jedi resistance and the underground as against the evil empire. What the invocation thread does though is it allows for the expression of the unconscious, for the underlying occult reality, to express itself through corporate product. That thread is really our after the fact entry into synchromysticism, which played the same games with the mass market products of hollywood
Click to expand...

Some of the fundamental questions this opens up who are the players , how many players are there (1,2 or many?), is there an enemy?

All of these questions I consider open. Various things have seemed true to me at various times. I touched on this in the dematerialisation thread when I asked if the Internet, and a posited conscious, self aware Internet would represent God or anti-Christ. Obviously you can think of Gnosticism in this context also. The evil, idiot, drooling God.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Will God or something else, some King Arthur returned in our hour of need return to save the day before the cell door swings shut and the key is turned in the lock once and for all?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
In football you have what are known as feeder clubs. These are small clubs in lower divisions or in countries outside the financial elite who have a relationship with a larger richer club in which the youth players and players outside the first team will be sent to the feeder club to be developed. The larger club has a great deal of say in matters such as training, nutrition, hours played, injury treatment etc when/if these players start to show promise they are returned to the parent club. Additionally, if players belonging to the feeder club start to show promise they to are sent to the parent club. This has benefits for both parties but it sets a hierarchy in stone. There is now a level above which the feeder club cannot climb.

This seems to me to be very similar to the relationship between underground and mainstream in music.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
I absolutely agree poptimism needs to be destroyed as rockism was a generation before. My point is that you can't do that be defaulting to a rockist critique. This is why I asked you Marxists what the next dialectical step is. We have to critique pop as corporate product as propaganda and advertising I think, have to be allowed to do that, without regressing to the old banalities and illusions
Click to expand...

Well for me, albeit I am on the most ultra-left fringes of marxism, for me the next step entails a dissection of the way we consume *the form* of music as opposed to the consumption product inherently. It seems impossible for the rockist discourse to have emerged without the album being the default medium of musical currency in the 60s-80s. I mean this is why Aphex Twin gets so many acolades right? Most of his music is not a huge departure from existing techno/ambient/gabba/acid/industrial sounds etc etc - although as a fan of quite a bit of his material I can recognise his own signature sound. But he's no Xenakis, and neither would he claim to be. But yet when our music is ever talked about the sonically colonialist intelligentsia defaults to him because of this very album-based format.

I.E: why do we listen to jungle and acid house alone in our rooms? Someone trained in the fundamentals of music theory could tell us it's pointless. and whilst i would disagree with them, i could see some merit in what they are saying. the problem, as i said in the other thread and which you agreed with, the dematerialisation process is an attempt to harken back to an era when music was hyper-material. all the effort put into the [productions so they don't come out as dematerialised, and yet they obviously do because of the uncanny.
 
Last edited:
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
albeit this next dialectical leap has to correspond to a change somewhat in the acting social forces. So far it seems to me that it is the most socialite liberals rather than the decrepit remains of the left who are the most superficially political about music. Cardi B as a great subversive icon when that is anything but the case, and I like some Cardi...

It seems there is a stultifying and paranoid culture that is designed to kick the working classes out of music. or if they aren't kicked out of music they have to be sold as rags to riches or authentic. whereas previously this seemed to take place on anonymous lines. The question is how do we resist the complete erasure of the class and is it even possible to do so in 2019? Because the era of localism is over, whether we like it or not.

We seem to be living in very uncertain times. I can't seem to make it out. clearly there are strikes, occupations and cooperative efforts taking place on small scales, but as opposed to the gruff bosses of the previous era it's the technical composition of the labour process that seems to impose its iron will on everyone. most working class people simply don't have the resources to build an advertising brand. at best, £150 for a few hours in the studio to make a tune, put it out and work the grind. that was the previous hustle.

Now you can make music at an almost close to nothing price. But you have to murder your dead and already crystalised music for it to have a remote chance of success. this is why measuring music making by democratisation seems to be the wrong starting point.

But then the most basic question of all emerges. Do people actually have the time to be invested in subcultures in the 2010s? I don't think so. Sure, you can say I spend 4 hours a day collecting jungle, I go to jungle nights every weekend, but the idea of this spilling out nto your social interactions, of you quite literally saying im going to share a space with ravers is nonexistent. music rarely if ever serves as a catalyst for friendship these days, unless on places like here, but again this whole model is one of internet 1.0 to a degree.
 
Last edited:
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It seems to be that there is a need for satisfaction and cleaning of moral conscience in all areas of what remains of social life. Like, not to drag this too much into politics, I'm not exactly a partisan of Maduro's leftism, but then you had people (and even some people laying claim to the working class) cheering on Guaido because of his appeals to democracy and fighting corruption, even though his connections to the transnational far right and Bolsanaro are well known.

Why are people afraid to be cunts and dangerous? Why do people want to be seen as humanist, but only humanist in the sense of agreeing with the voice of capital? Not that I'm advocating the infantile salafist puerility of ultra-Stalinist sects like the CPGBML and WWP...
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
luka said:
irst you have self-service registers in the supermarket, next thing you know a robot is singing you lullabies.
Click to expand...

well maybe, who knows? in the meantime, there are "robots" curating all sorts of cultural products for you: music, newspaper articles, television programmes. Except they're not robots, they're search and recommendation engines, and they work statistically, taking what's popular (according to some relevant criteria - amongst similar ppl, e.g.) and recommending it to you. the process therefore contains a feedback loop: popular things become more popular - "going viral" or "blowing up" (becoming runaway) and dominating cultural attention for essentially no reason - everything else languishes in obscurity.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top