The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success • Hacker News Board

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#181

Post by scarecrowbob » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 8:03 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #129

scarecrowbob wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal, but my parents (whoil like, Hendix/ Zep / Floyd) thought that Tool / Nirvana / et al sucked. Hard. Both my parents have pretty good formal music education; my dad was a high school band director for a while. They never said as much, but I am pretty sure that from their perspective most of what I listend to in high school in the early 90s was "absolute dog shit pop" and " objectively awful". To be fair, Coa…

I'm surprised someone with formal music education wouldn't take at least some interest in tool, even if they didn't actually enjoy it.

IMO (and heavily-- just my opinion) it's incredibly repetitive stuff that's often making fun of its audience.

I love Alex Grey's art and I liked the music when was in high school, but I get why folks who are into stuff like hard bop or Chopin think that it's not super refined.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#182

Post by marcus_holmes » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 8:04 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #179

marcus_holmes wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would respectfully submit that you're talking from a standpoint of utter and complete ignorance about your subject. There are a thousand games that have an "ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking". I've been moved to tears by several (killing the dragon in Minecraft after literally months of effort, This War of Mine). Stupid things l…

Please stop calling names in HN comments. It's against the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . Nasty swipes like 'Have you ever heard of "classical" music?' aren't ok either ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375636 ). We're trying to have curious conversation here, not sharp elbows.

True. My apologies. My only excuse is that I'm passionate about this.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#183

Post by marcus_holmes » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

voldacar wrote: post #163

marcus_holmes wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would respectfully submit that you're talking from a standpoint of utter and complete ignorance about your subject. There are a thousand games that have an "ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking". I've been moved to tears by several (killing the dragon in Minecraft after literally months of effort, This War of Mine). Stupid things l…

No we agree much more than you think. I really like minecraft, some of my greatest teen memories are of running a server with a bunch of my friends that had 40+ mods. I think the world is made better by minecraft's existence, and people have made all kinds of beautiful and artful things in minecraft. My point was not to say that there are no games that provide powerful, meaningful, beautiful experiences to the humans…

Awesome, I apologise for judging your ignorance then.

I have studied Art. I have an "O"-level in Art History. I have been to famous museums, and looked at world-class paintings, sculptures, etc.

I mean, I've stood in front of the Night Watch in the Reiksmuseum, and it was great. I get that. I sketch (badly), and I appreciate the craftsmanship that went into that. It's a great piece of art, and it moved me.

But to say that that, awesome as it is, is more "Art" than any video game... is bollocks. It's just not true.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#184

Post by scarecrowbob » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

api wrote: post #139

scarecrowbob wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal, but my parents (whoil like, Hendix/ Zep / Floyd) thought that Tool / Nirvana / et al sucked. Hard. Both my parents have pretty good formal music education; my dad was a high school band director for a while. They never said as much, but I am pretty sure that from their perspective most of what I listend to in high school in the early 90s was "absolute dog shit pop" and " objectively awful". To be fair, Coa…

They are not totally wrong, though I would debate Tool with them. Even if you don't like the style or content Tool is really well done musically. Grunge was innovative and creative but wasn't that musically "serious." I can see classically trained musicians hating it. Same goes for punk. There can be musically well crafted music and there can be creative music. Occasionally you get music that is both. My point was th…

"The slide of music toward mindless manufactured repetitive pop started in the 80s, but it was in the late 90s that it became really obvious. "

Just an opinion (and I am aware it's not a popular opinion), but the Beatles going on Ed Sullivan is what really screwed up our system... prior to that the contemporary popular music was jazz, and that was a moment when every boomer musician I know gave up accordion or clarinet or whatever and got into a shitty garage band.

Like, I think there are worthwhile developments even in the shittiest, most repetitive music. Lately I've been having a grand time making electornic music in a single groove box...

my main point is that there's no transcendent "goodness" to US pop music, as various generations each think the newer generations stuff sucks for one reason or another.

Personally, I love the stuff my teenager sends me, even if a lot of it heavily rips of Devo or the Talking Heads or the Dandy Warhols or whoever.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#185

Post by asdff » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #51

pjc50 wrote: post #3

Well, there's something you don't see very often these days: conservative intellectuals. The old stalwarts of Ross Douthat and the AEI. The problem is though, if you skip ahead to the conclusion: > [T]he only thing more frightening than the possibility of annihilation is the possibility that our society could coast on forever as it is—like a Rome without an Attila to sack its palaces, or a Nineveh without Yahweh to p…

As a counterpoint to this entire line of thought, I'd recommend reading "The Fremen Mirage", a series of blog posts linked to below. It does a fantastic job of going through the history of the idea of "decadence" as what destroys society, and of the idea of "hard times" as the crucible to form strong fighters. The long and the short of it is that there is no historical evidence for this idea, that the "decadent" grou…

I thought decadence equated to a corrupt and inefficient ruling class, where decline is inevitable if power is handed over to whoever has the biggest bag of coin to offer or highest number of spears.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#186

Post by marcus_holmes » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 8:14 PM UTC

jhoechtl wrote: post #172

marcus_holmes wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. But it's circular reasoning isn't it? "there were less people, so less innovation. Then there were more people, so more innovation. But now there's more people, but less innovation, so it must be a dark age" doesn't really work as a self-evident statement. You could make an argument that innovation follows the money. The innovation boom of the late 20th century correlates with the music industry profit b…

I think inovation is stagnant because of team work. No tongue in cheek. But when you take a look at the sea changinf inventions it has been the work of a nerd who was passionate for a prlonged period of time. Not a team which has to publish every brain-fart as a paper. Universities favouring publish-or-perish are another dead end development.

This may be true, but a lot of the early 60's music was very much collaborative. I think it's more about a risk-taking culture. Universities are not risk-taking cultures.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#187

Post by manifestsilence » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 8:25 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #177

voldacar wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah like I said in another comment, I'm really not trying to deny the validity or value of individual games or anything like that. Portal is brilliant, and I really liked DA:O (though not quite as much as Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity). I just think that the Shakespeare of the video game medium, whatever form that would even take, hasn't been born yet.

Portal may be ok puzzle, but I just really fail to see that as some kind high art equivalent. I mean, it is fun for enough people for me to be sure it is something valuable, but calling it "exploring human condition" would be a massive stretch. It is enjoyable puzzle that was big deal when puzzles like that were rare. But it is not a game you will show next generation of children so that they learn something about hu…

Yeah, that's fair. But I'd put it in the category of like sci-fi movies (she's obviously based on Hal from 2001), and Portal 2 has movie-equivalent levels of storyline.

I think it's an art form in its infancy, and that different arts have different levels of both time spent and depth of understanding gained by taking them in. How much does a painting teach you about the human condition?

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#188

Post by dang » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #182

dang wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop calling names in HN comments. It's against the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . Nasty swipes like 'Have you ever heard of "classical" music?' aren't ok either ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375636 ). We're trying to have curious conversation here, not sharp elbows.

True. My apologies. My only excuse is that I'm passionate about this.

Understood, and appreciated!

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#189

Post by N1H1L » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

jhoechtl wrote: post #170

api wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the part I completely agree with. Music is absolutely stuck. There have only been micro-genres, such as the many micro-genres of techno/EDM or hip hop. There has been nothing approaching the birth of hip hop, techno/rave, grunge, "alternative" rock, and so on. Those all came of age in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. For some reason after 2000 music died. My personal explanation is the collapse of the record industry. I…

Another issue is that today discovering new music becomes hard. An algorith will tell you what you like based on your past hearing habits. New music will come to you as a surprise by the one who is paying most to feature it to you. Passive consumption like listening to radio which virtually no one seems to do these days means to be confronted with new things you may dislike but there might be something new which beco…

The past decade has been acknowledged as the Golden Age of Television. Art evolves - and Breaking Bad is as much art as Anna Karenina.

There is a very irritating snootiness in the review that only thinks classical music as art, and just passingly acknowledges jazz - which by the way was denigrated often in vehemently racist terms when it first appeared.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#190

Post by N1H1L » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

bluetomcat wrote: post #70

eanzenberg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn’t 80’s pop music disco?

Probably disco was still important, but the mentioned artists were hugely popular and influential, despite not being strictly in the "pop" category.

Also disco, when it first appeared on the scene was strongly associated with an LGBT audience, and the Moral Majority crusaders then absolutely denigrated it.

Good art is by definition subversive, and you won't find subversion in the Billboard Top 40. Which is why conservative criticisms of stagnation in art/science feel so blatantly hypocritical too.