Culture As Advertising.

luka

luka

Well-known member
sadmanbarty said:
so you're largely after a paradigm through which to absorb this kind of culture.

as someone who's more comfortable doing so than you (to the point i can actively venerate a certain north atlanta rap trio), i'd say acknowledging it's cultural place doesn't necessarily preclude engagement with it.


so hat adidas one we always talked about that inspired this thread:

1) you first reaction is to distance yourself from it. it's a lie. it's condescending and it's gross. (this is as it happens the position i took)

2) some people might try and acknowledge as if it wasn't adidas music, but that's a bit dumb and pointless. it's meritless on it's own anyway.

3) so i'd suggest that you embrace it's potency as a part of the adidas thing. it is this weird, ostensibly innocuous mantra that follows you round every youtube video you click. it is a completely fictionalised representation of peckham. so embrace the aesthetic of those things; it is scary music. it is uncomfortable. lean into that.


so it's that third perspective that allows me to relish in psychedelic materialsim for example.
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What I need to do is register my discomfort with the way subcultures are stripmined and replaced with commodified artificial versions of themselves. the local razed in favour of the universal. I don't think there is anything wrong with saying, in a very straightforward way, I don't like it. theres nothing wrong with recognising the ravages of capitalism, the various ways in which the complexity and variety of reality itself is radically reduced. The homogenising aspect of capitalism. All this stuff is very real.

You can make various counter arguments. You can say the creativity of the underground directly fed by this need to be constantly starting from zero. That without the empire you don't have the Jedi. I think that those are good moves. But it's not the same as cheerleading for empire per se.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
To a degree, yes. But also important to remember that accelerationism, in the sense of a speeding up of history, is objective fact. It's not just a Nick Land ideology. It's part of the nature of our experience. Thousands of years of grubbing up roots and spearing mammoths, then the whole of recorded history in an eyeblink.
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Sure, capital accelerates. The left position is to lament this, and the landian position is to take joy in it. I find both of them equally as nonsensical. Speed is just quotidian and blasé. absolutely nothing remarkable about it in the 2010s than there was in the 1960s. it's not that I can't take joy in it, there is nothing to take joy in. you can't take joy in an abstract process.

Which brings me onto sometimes the attempt to elevate sexiness and caresses as a strived for value set. I understand that cognitive obliteration through overstimulation is just as accommodationist as anything else, but it's simply a value set that accords with my more atomised self.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
like accelerationism, you don't need to fully buy into baudrillard/hyperreality to get something out of these ideas, they're clearly looming in the background of this discussion
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
thirdform said:
Sure, capital accelerates. The left position is to lament this, and the landian position is to take joy in it. I find both of them equally as nonsensical. Speed is just quotidian and blasé. absolutely nothing remarkable about it in the 2010s than there was in the 1960s. it's not that I can't take joy in it, there is nothing to take joy in. you can't take joy in an abstract process.

Which brings me onto sometimes the attempt to elevate sexiness and caresses as a strived for value set. I understand that cognitive obliteration through overstimulation is just as accommodationist as anything else, but it's simply a value set that accords with my more atomised self.
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I think that assuming we value musics ability to act as a mirror to the moment, to partake in and reflect its own historical moment in some sense (and this as an argument against traditionalism) then we would expect it to run abreast if not in front of history itself. If history is speeding up then we would expect music to also speed up.

The history of art really picks up pace from the start of Italian mercantile societies.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
vimothy said:
like accelerationism, you don't need to fully buy into baudrillard/hyperreality to get something out of these ideas, they're clearly looming in the background of this discussion
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The first post is a baudrillard quote attributed to corpsey.
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
luka said:
What I need to do is register my discomfort with the way subcultures are stripmined and replaced with commodified artificial versions of themselves.
.
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yeah, fuck it. what am i trying to do? course i hate that adidas song. course i hate russ' studded leather jacket. i'm not going to pretend to defend them just to stimulate conversation on dissensus.

i pretended to be in the bnp for the very same reasons and look where that got me.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
I think that assuming we value musics ability to act as a mirror to the moment, to partake in and reflect its own historical moment in some sense (and this as an argument against traditionalism) then we would expect it to run abreast if not in front of history itself. If history is speeding up then we would expect music to also speed up.
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Well that happened in the internet 1.0 decade, ironically enough.
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
thirdform said:
luka said:
I think that assuming we value musics ability to act as a mirror to the moment, to partake in and reflect its own historical moment in some sense (and this as an argument against traditionalism) then we would expect it to run abreast if not in front of history itself. If history is speeding up then we would expect music to also speed up.

Well that happened in the internet 1.0 decade, ironically enough.
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Wait, I'm getting mixed up here. I thought you were talking about speed of change not BPM
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T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
vimothy said:
like accelerationism, you don't need to fully buy into baudrillard/hyperreality to get something out of these ideas, they're clearly looming in the background of this discussion
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Yeah but it's just the academic nonce version to make some money isn't it. let's be real.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
sadmanbarty said:
yeah, fuck it. what am i trying to do? course i hate that adidas song. course i hate russ' studded leather jacket. i'm not going to pretend to defend them just to stimulate conversation on dissensus.

i pretended to be in the bnp for the very same reasons and look where that got me.
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:crylarf:

That was the last time we lured vim into a music thread! He thought the long awaited rightward shift was finally happening!
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It was still possible to live without the internet before 2006.

Since then, however, our daily lives have been militarised to accord with this virtual reality.
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
Say something intelligent vim. Throw us a bone. We've got as far as commodification happens. Local subcultures are stripmined and human beings are replaced by disgusting alien clones with no souls and studded leather jackets like the one Russ wears in 'Gun Lean'. We know that we don't like it and that it has something to do with capitalism. We know that this particular commodified version of London is really quite new and is linked to the birth of radio one xtra, channel u, and the legalisation of rinse fm. There are questions to be asked about the side effects of 'representation'... Economic opportunities for the few are perhaps bought at the expense of the collective. A trade off. Dizzee gets to be a millionaire while grime as a genre collapses.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I know this is going to sound like an utterly stupid question:

But...

Does anyone actually still listen to 1xtra?

Back in the day you could hear j da flex or EZ on there or whatever. now? isn't it identical to a youtube playlist?
 
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