is music too middle class?

[john eden]

The middle class has put a donk on it.

 

[wild greens]

*

There are loads of things in dance music leading to current stagnation. They probably relate more to major agent and PR proliferation imo, but RA wouldn't cover those as they are part of the press cycle large event ecosystem that allows them to survive. Hey ho

 

[shakahislop]

that study they're talking about here was quite interesting to see. the headlines painted it as 'the proportion of people from working class backgrounds has halved since the 70s', but probably the more interesting thing is that its gone from 16% to 8%. which is to say that even in the egalitatarian high-point of the 70s it was a pretty small proportion, and that now its an even smaller proportion.

i was into talking about class for a long time. a really long time. because it was the main barrier to doing things that i wanted to do. even more than class, just not having enough money, and other people being given money by their family so that they could do the things i wanted to do. its been liberating to gradually get away from that way of thinking, even if all of that class discourse is completely 100% true, like any of these lenses it does get to be a bit of a drag when that's the primary way you're seeing the world when there's so many other things going on simultaneous to class

class is a central aspect in most forms of music i think. i think it comes out in the sound to some extent, obviously it comes out in the lyrics pretty often, and it most obviously comes out in the general milieu around any form of music - the people who make it, the audiences they have, the peope they get commenting on their instas, the people taking the photos you see on the internet etc, the people who are behind the scenes making things happen. the world is class stratified and so music is as well, i mean its totally obvious i think

the nice thing is that with music its not totally rigid and there are always people seeping through the cracks both 'upwards' and 'downwards'. even moreso when you forget about scenes and infrastructure and think about musical forms instead. coz basically anyone can listen to a thing they like and replicate it eventually without having anything to do with the originators

 

[john eden]

Good post!

 

[IdleRich]

that study they're talking about here was quite interesting to see. the headlines painted it as 'the proportion of people from working class backgrounds has halved since the 70s', but probably the more interesting thing is that its gone from 16% to 8%. which is to say that even in the egalitatarian high-point of the 70s it was a pretty small proportion, and that now its an even smaller proportion.

i was into talking about class for a long time. a really long time. because it was the main barrier to doing things that i wanted to do. even more than class, just not having enough money, and other people being given money by their family so that they could do the things i wanted to do. its been liberating to gradually get away from that way of thinking, even if all of that class discourse is completely 100% true, like any of these lenses it does get to be a bit of a drag when that's the primary way you're seeing the world when there's so many other things going on simultaneous to class

class is a central aspect in most forms of music i think. i think it comes out in the sound to some extent, obviously it comes out in the lyrics pretty often, and it most obviously comes out in the general milieu around any form of music - the people who make it, the audiences they have, the peope they get commenting on their instas, the people taking the photos you see on the internet etc, the people who are behind the scenes making things happen. the world is class stratified and so music is as well, i mean its totally obvious i think

the nice thing is that with music its not totally rigid and there are always people seeping through the cracks both 'upwards' and 'downwards'. even moreso when you forget about scenes and infrastructure and think about musical forms instead. coz basically anyone can listen to a thing they like and replicate it eventually without having anything to do with the originators

I had that Joe Muggs book in my car and my friend was asking about it and I said "I thought that I should probably read it cos he went to the same school as me" and my friend said "Oh what a fucking surprise, music journalist went to public school" - and I said "But I didn't go to public school" and h sort of nodded but I could tell he didn't believe me.

 

[IdleRich]

With perfect timing... they are saying that if they removed the charitable status/tax breaks of private schools then a number of private schools would close and 100,000 poor kids would be forced to move into the state system - something that is obviously too awful to contemplate.



I always find it weird when they talk about parents of children of fee-paying schools being "squeezed" - I'm not sure that anyone who chooses to spend £50k or more a year on something they could get for free can really plead poverty. I mean, I'm sure it's more complicated than that or sometheing... but is it?

 

[Leo]

i was into talking about class for a long time. a really long time. because it was the main barrier to doing things that i wanted to do. even more than class, just not having enough money, and other people being given money by their family so that they could do the things i wanted to do. its been liberating to gradually get away from that way of thinking, even if all of that class discourse is completely 100% true, like any of these lenses it does get to be a bit of a drag when that's the primary way you're seeing the world when there's so many other things going on simultaneous to class

I have a good friend who's locked into this mindset, nice guy but can come off as so cynical about everything, gets tiring after awhile. It's the lens through which he views everything, sometimes bringing an unnecessary edge to conversation. I've known him for a long time and he's got lots of very good qualities, so I just roll with it. but I've sometimes seen it be off-putting when we hang in a group with people who don't know him well.

I understand his grievances, and as you say Shaka, some of them are legit. but it can fester and become an all-encompassing grudge against the world.

 

[shakahislop]

I have a good friend who's locked into this mindset, nice guy but can come off as so cynical about everything, gets tiring after awhile. It's the lens through which he views everything, sometimes bringing an unnecessary edge to conversation. I've known him for a long time and he's got lots of very good qualities, so I just roll with it. but I've sometimes seen it be off-putting when we hang in a group with people who don't know him well.

I understand his grievances, and as you say Shaka, some of them are legit. but it can fester and become an all-encompassing grudge against the world.

its basically all true most of the time isn't it, the grievances themsleves. i've got a black friend in nyc who does something similar and approximately a billion feminist-ish friends who have this to some degree. it's all legit. all of this stuff is going on and is mostly a very accurate analysis of the world. its obviously also totally unfair, one more injustice in a sea of them, that you are the one who has to work past your resentment when that resentment is something that has been blithely generated in the first place by other people. but i think there is a way, or at least for me there was, of going too far down that route and seeing everything in those terms. coz the reality of course is a multiplicity. there's a thousand things going on at once. so while you're totally accurate and on the money you're also in another sense totally wrong.

 

[shakahislop]

k-punk: Viva resentment!

k-punk.abstractdynamics.org

Resentment of privilege and unfairness is in many cases the first step towards confronting introjected and taken-for-granted feelings of inferiority. 'Yes... why should they get more than us?'....

...[C]lass consciousness,' he wrote, 'turns first and foremost around the question of subalternity, that is around the experience of inferiority. This means that the "lower classes" carry around within their heads unconscious convictions as to the superiority of hegemonic or ruling-class expressions or values, which they equally transgress and repudiate in ritualistic (and socially and politically ineffective) ways.'

i always think of this k punk post in respect to this. a post which quotes tricky and neitzsche is obviously quite an amazing thing for me, so aligned with stuff i'm interesed in. although this post says the opposite of what i'm saying above. possibly resentment is a thing that's good to experience and then to move past, rather than plumbing its depths

its all the same though isn't it, a major thing that's going on all across culture, people reading the internet en masse and realising that some of their feelings, the structure of their feelings, comes from some structural force

 

[IdleRich]

Private (public whatever) schools are something I have a real problem with. Also religious schools in fact - when I finally get made emperor they are one of the first things that I will do away with. I really don't like the idea of separating people at a young age for any arbitrary reason and bringing them up as different. I think that private schools are horrible in that they do give the people who attend them a huge advantage with their education. A lot of people think that the teachers are better which isn't really true as they are all drawn from the same pool and trained in the same places, but the advantage lies in having better facilities, smaller classes, less disruptive classes and so on. In many inner city London schools the first class you join when you start at primary school will be bigger than the private equivalent and it will have a huge range of abilities including (most likely) several students who don't speak English which means that there is no "right" pace to teach the course, it will inevitably be too fast for some and too slow for others and so already those students are losing out compared to students in a smaller group of roughly similar abilities as in a private school. And this will just carry on through all the years of education. One will simply have better targeted learning taught to them more personally with better facilities and less disruption and of course the same student will do better in the better environment (and in the same way, the teacher in the better environment will preside over better results and then peopel will start to say that they are a better teacher).

But to me that's only part of the story; as well as the privately educated student receiving a better education they will also meet and mingle with people who are likely to be successful later on and willing and able to give them a leg up should it be needed at some point.

That's all very obvious of course, we all know it. The thing for me though is the fact of the privately educated people getting a better education is their advantage, but from what I've seen it comes at quite a price. I've met - in fact known - quite a few public school boys over the years, I guess we all have, but with growing up in a posh village and having had a girlfriend who did her phd at Oxford, I reckon I'm well above average in terms of posh kids known - and I really feel that at private school, as a rule, you really do miss out on part of the education about life you're supposed to get. It's hardly surprising but alll the people I knew who went to a school with no girls tend to act really weird around girls - or even more weird than the rest of us do! In fact in my experience most of them generally don't know how to interact with normal people, they've learned more in their classes and got better qualifications but a lot of them seem to have missed out on learning how to be a person.

Of course that's a gross generalisation, most people manage to pick those things up outside school or in some other way - I know a lot of you lot are public school and most have managed at least some autodidacticism on this aspect - but my point is, although on the face of it pubic schools n seem to benefit the posh and punish the rest, I actually think that overall it's a bit like sexism in that even while the sexist system is run for the benefit of men at women's expense, living under that kind of inequality is in fact a bad thing for all of us.

I really think that the public school system is a terrible thing that separates people, unfairly disadvantages the less wealthy, but also fucks up the rich who supposedly benefit from it. I found out a few years back that Mum and Dad really wanted to send me to a private secondary school but - thank fuck! - they couldn't afford it. That was a lucky escapen cos i was so shy and, I suppose, socially awkward when I was young and I really reckon it would have done me a lot of harm and I can't imagine that i would have ever been... I dunno, normal, or whatever.

 

[IdleRich]

Oh, one more thing - I often hear people on the right saying that they are in favour of "equality of opportunity not equality of outcome" - which I suppose is a way of saying that everyone should be given a fair shake of the stick but ultimately some people are just smarter or more talented than others and if that means that they end up on top then so be it, they have earned it. I always think that anyone who says that they have that stance should certainly be in favour of abolishing public schools and of having a whacking great inheritance tax so that those opportunities are evened up... but strangely they never seem so keen on either policy.

 

[IdleRich]

And, even if you love public schools and think that they are great in every way, I still don't see how you can possibly argue that they should have charitable status - that is compleely fucking ludicrous and it ought to be a national scandal. It's fucking crazy - I thought Tories believed in capitalism and that if a business needs all these handouts from the nanny state to stay afloat it should be allowed to go under. Fucking scroungers.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I think anyone who says "equality of opportunity not equality of outcome" but also supports the continues existence of exclusive, fee-paying schools can be bracketed along with people who say "We should help our own poor first" as an argument against state-funded foreign aid, who are invariably the kind of people who cross the road to avoid walking past a beggar.

 

[wild greens]

that study they're talking about here was quite interesting to see. the headlines painted it as 'the proportion of people from working class backgrounds has halved since the 70s', but probably the more interesting thing is that its gone from 16% to 8%. which is to say that even in the egalitatarian high-point of the 70s it was a pretty small proportion, and that now its an even smaller proportion.

I would assume this is salaried jobs in "the arts" as opposed to the idea of someone being an artist, as its not quite a "job" is it, and harder to o survey. It would be good to know tbh.

Most initial media jobs in London are fucking terrible money, not sure about elsewhere, but its hard to see how someone in modern day gets into i.e. these unpaid intern jobs or low rung PR or studio runner, unless you have the financial background to be sustained by your family, or you're working a million jobs etc

If that expands then in five/ten years all those interns or low rungs are in better jobs and unless theyre the type to want to cosplay as working class or have the old urban fascination etc, then surely they align with people from their own background.

There are plenty of artists pretending to be working class when theyre not, too, of course

The class conflict/resentment thing you talk about is part of it in a way as well, need to think about that

 

[wild greens]

 

[wild greens]

Shouldn't pick on Fred too much as hes given Flowdan a big payday but fucking hell

 

[version]

Shouldn't pick on Fred too much as hes given Flowdan a big payday but fucking hell

Reminds me of Miranda Hart having relatives who live in a castle, but claiming she doesn't consider herself upper class.

 

[thirdform]

bizarre thread this. All culture is bourgeois cos we live in bourgeois society. The proletarian dictatorship will suppress your public school mates from politically and culturally assembling, of course. there is nothing particularly wrong with this, and any violence from the deposed class will have to be met with violence, though ideally it would be better to phase the reproduction mechanisms of the middle classes out of existence rather than develop some kind of bizarre genocidal gun fantasy.

So yes, dance music journalists will not be able to have the freedom of press. More the better. it is better for them to work as electrical engineers anyway, as I'm sure Liza would agree. @IdleRich I mean just look at this abomination!

https://mixmag.net/feature/we-went-on-a-five-day-tech-house-cruise-and-it-broke-us

jesus wept.

 

[Corpsey]

 

[wild greens]

There's a lot of wikipedia edit wars going on with his page, its pretty good actually. Either him or his PR team have been working hard over the weekend to hide this shit ha