I do appreciate your attention, but the fact is that there are so few of you visiting me, you can’t pose a threat if you are offended. Moreover, if I were to incriminate myself, you people would not present as credible witnesses for the prosecution.
May I? Okey dokey.
Brexit and Trump and The Backlash were predicted years and years ago. Culture steers politics, and guys? We’ve been in a stultified, petrified, freeze-dried culture for years. Whazzhemean?
Give me a new idea that caught fire in popular culture in the past ten years. I’ll wait.
It’s been a decade of vampires or zombies, or Judd Apatow’s smirking half-improv movies, or self-referential fan-service reboots, or Explodey Old Action Franchises Parts 5.
We’ve been watching, listening, playing, doing the same things for how-many-years and whenever someone has something new, it either drops off the earth or is scorned as idiocy.
Example: The Juggalos. A group that considers itself a great big family of people who just want to shock people with homegrown, Halloween rap music, professional wrestling, and cheap bootie. Hah! What a buncharoobs! They won’t have that kind of vulgarity at Cocachella, and certainly not at Burning Man (that’s how we know Burning Man actually had something going, because the rich people co-opted it)!
Example: The creative paralysis called JJ Abrams. How did one man’s vision get control of not only Star Trek and Star Wars, but set the tone for all other major productions? His style of shakey-cam, blue-lit quirky action heroes can be found on every damn channel. This is like the 1970s only having George Lucas writing and directing Star Wars, Star Trek 1 – 6, and Indiana Jones, and having ILM create “Charlies Angels”, “Hart To Hart”, and “The Six Million Dollar Man” franchise.
Just as business as usual kept going in American politics with Obama (oh yes it did, guys, or did we send any bankers to Guantanamo or Iraq?), that same gritted-teeth durance went into consuming entertainment. That DC movie was not so good? Maybe they’ll get it right next time. That new group sounding like anything else on your iTunes feed? Meh, it’ll do.
It’ll keep your mind off of the war and the oligarchy and what your neighbors hung on their porch.
Pissed off about it? Grab some punk rock or angry rap, read some Bukowski, and drink a Pabst, thanks 20th Century!
We do not have a language for our values. We got comfortable and took it for granted, then leased it, and then sold it.
This is the Western World’s Premier Underground Satirist. Think On This.
You want to know the big difference between music of the 70s and 80s and today? The artists didn’t use it to sell commercials.
Except DEVO and they did it as a big meta-satire.
Even before the Alt-Right, there were artistic clues of seismic discontent. Micropress and self-pub starting taking all the revenue. “Bizarro”, “Weird”, and religious-themed fiction appeared en mass, and would never have gotten attention from TOR or Ballentine. None of them would have gotten shelf space if it weren’t for micropress.
Why Lovecraft? Because so desperate for a new idea that we went back almost a century.
Yet these touch our imaginations, our adrenal glands, and our amigdala. Does anything speak? Does anything touch our hearts?
Who has come forward to just tell of any broken, gutsy dumbass who made good?
IS THERE ANYONE WHO CAN TELL A STORY? NOT PREACH. JUST TELL AN ORIGINAL STORY?
