sus
Moderator
What the fuck are you talking about?
Joanna Newsom --- "Ys"
- Thread starter Ivan Polygon
- Start date
sus
Moderator
That's the whole problem!!
It's not about a subculture! It's not about picking sides in a fucking culture war! Holy shit!
It's about finding art that you think is beautiful and paying attention to it. That's it!
Like I said, the concept of beauty is problematic, I prefer not to use it. What I find beautiful someone else might find perverted.
I'm mixed race but I look white.
sus
Moderator
You've explicitly appealed to beauty in the last half hour of this discussion.
sus
Moderator
I'm glad we've established the local hegemony. Now can we get some growth via otherness?
please calm down.
Yes, clubs and concert venues have often employed selective discrimination. A lot of black and working class culture post-disco developed from exclusion.
Where this is probably somewhat different in the UK is black people are by and large proletarianised. There is not really a black middle class here, culturally or socially, only in a vaguely economic sense. That is probably beginning to change, but those older cultural forms were based on the proletarian alienation of whites and the double alienation of blacks, brown people etc.
I have, for the purposes of argument, where I make the qualification I just reiterated.
No, I see that. But it's a case of cultural filters isn't it. Everyone is a john peel if we don't say, right, I'm going to filter this out. You haven't told me why I should identify with her. I can't connect it to any of my personal history. There are lots of dynamic and vulnerable people I can listen to instead. A tyranny of choice will always reassert itself in the internet age like no other. So of course if you say third listen to this and it's not a genre I have aesthetic leanings towards, I'm going to listen to it technically. How do you expect something to emotionally resonate for me with no resonances in my life?
And Granted I probably couldn't give you a convincing reason as to why you should identify with my music. Music is not as universal as we think it is, it is far more particular.
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Music is not as universal as we think it is, it is far more particular.
I think this is key to this argument. Me and Third are saying, actually it's not all neutral platonic pre-existing "values" that affect our choices. The real social hierarchies that are at play also affect our choices and shape our tastes.
I think this is key to this argument. Me and Third are saying, actually it's not all neutral platonic pre-existing "values" that affect our choices. The real social hierarchies that are at play also affect our choices and shape our tastes.
Yes, the idea I would tell a hot white girl at the bar who went to oxford to listen to indie makes me want to shrivel up and die. I'd rather she listen to Boulez or Stockhausen any day.
I mean this is why I like a lot of modern classical. Because I'm not anti-western music, I'm not anti-white (whatever that is supposed to mean for a brown man like myself.) But when I listen to Ligeti, I hear the humanism, the intellectual culture of Europe, the turbulence of the 20th century. I hear something very broad. I also hear his attempt to escape out of the restrictions of socialist realism and try and create a truly modern music that uses pianos and coral textures percussively, as an attempt to grasp towards an unattainable universal (coltrane in his most free moments also has this.) There is of course pain and vulnerability there, as there is in Xenakis' shaar, but its a pain far greater in scope and magnitude, and it doesn't ask me to identify with Iannis the person but allows me to relate to it conceptually.