Friday, January 16, 2004
What are we doing here?
I was flipping channels and I came across this really awesome video montage, all pop-art inspired with crazy good music.
Turned out to be a Much More Music station promo.
I can't help but wonder what great things that video editor would create if he wasn't spending all of his time making station promos.
Our current culture rewards artists not based on the merit of their work, but on their ability to sell themselves. To "make it" you have to be singularly focussed and driven. I think that comes through in their work. It has to, when so much of your life is tied up in that dream.
I always say that culture is our society's way of talking to itself. Like the voice in your head that's reading this article to you.
It's alright, we're all a little crazy.
The music we listen to, right now it's all made by people who had to fight and struggle their whole lives to get where they are. Is it any wonder that a lot of successful artists have substance abuse problems, and that most celebrity marriages end in divorce?
These are the voices in our heads. These are the people who sing the song you listen to when you kiss a girl for the first time, or the song that you play when you get home after your mother's funeral. These moments, taken one at a time, are our lives. Who do we want writing the soundtrack?
We need to nurture and support artists. We need to bring culture back into the fold. The rebel has been king in popular culture since the 1950s, and no wonder. In the 1950s, exploitation was rampant in all of the cultural industries. The screen- and songwriters of the day can't have been happy with the situation, so it's little wonder that they began to idolize the outlaws and iconoclasts of society. The system, after all was not so good to them.
The McCarthy communist witchhunts drove a wedge between the american government and cultural industries that remains in place today. And lets not forget that in 1963, 50% of the world's population was 18 or younger. That's fucking weird. We still live in the shadow of this enormous demographic anomaly.
The rebel is our parents' hero, not ours. So lets get over it already. Lets stop fighting the system and lose ourself in the enormous, complex, beauty that is civilisation. We can't change the system ourselves, it's too deeply ingrained in our beings. But we can change ourselves and we can change each other.
The baby boom has seriously fucked us over. We have gotten used to social conditions that are far from what is normal. The process that's happening now, with the advent of the internet, and the reduced significance of the large centralized media is simply a return to normal. We've just never seen it before.
But neither have our parents. And we're younger and faster than they are.
The meteor has hit.
-Trevor
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Turned out to be a Much More Music station promo.
I can't help but wonder what great things that video editor would create if he wasn't spending all of his time making station promos.
Our current culture rewards artists not based on the merit of their work, but on their ability to sell themselves. To "make it" you have to be singularly focussed and driven. I think that comes through in their work. It has to, when so much of your life is tied up in that dream.
I always say that culture is our society's way of talking to itself. Like the voice in your head that's reading this article to you.
It's alright, we're all a little crazy.
The music we listen to, right now it's all made by people who had to fight and struggle their whole lives to get where they are. Is it any wonder that a lot of successful artists have substance abuse problems, and that most celebrity marriages end in divorce?
These are the voices in our heads. These are the people who sing the song you listen to when you kiss a girl for the first time, or the song that you play when you get home after your mother's funeral. These moments, taken one at a time, are our lives. Who do we want writing the soundtrack?
We need to nurture and support artists. We need to bring culture back into the fold. The rebel has been king in popular culture since the 1950s, and no wonder. In the 1950s, exploitation was rampant in all of the cultural industries. The screen- and songwriters of the day can't have been happy with the situation, so it's little wonder that they began to idolize the outlaws and iconoclasts of society. The system, after all was not so good to them.
The McCarthy communist witchhunts drove a wedge between the american government and cultural industries that remains in place today. And lets not forget that in 1963, 50% of the world's population was 18 or younger. That's fucking weird. We still live in the shadow of this enormous demographic anomaly.
The rebel is our parents' hero, not ours. So lets get over it already. Lets stop fighting the system and lose ourself in the enormous, complex, beauty that is civilisation. We can't change the system ourselves, it's too deeply ingrained in our beings. But we can change ourselves and we can change each other.
The baby boom has seriously fucked us over. We have gotten used to social conditions that are far from what is normal. The process that's happening now, with the advent of the internet, and the reduced significance of the large centralized media is simply a return to normal. We've just never seen it before.
But neither have our parents. And we're younger and faster than they are.
The meteor has hit.
-Trevor
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