Populism learned its craft in popular music. The Top 40 was one of the earliest populist inventions, where…
Populism learned its craft in popular music. The Top 40 was one of the earliest populist inventions, where music was ranked entirely on popularity. To this day you can’t have a sensible discussion about the quality of music, without hearing ‘it’s all subjective’. /1 https://t.co/11dI6bEmR9
Music is no more subjective than anything else. There are all sorts of ways to understand what’s good and what’s bad music, or at least what’s better or worse. Just as you can for painting, or plumbing. Art deals with reality, not fantasy. /2
Artists generally have the most acute and powerful insights into what’s happening in a society. It’s not an accident that the value of that art was forced to be purely a matter of personal opinion. Just as personal opinion has replaced expertise everywhere else now too. /3
But I think it happened in music first. That softened us up. To sell records, that’s why it was invented. To decouple evaluation of music from anything except whether somebody ‘likes’ it. Social media is driven by likes. It’s the endgame, the Top 40 was the starting line. /4
It’s very simple to say you don’t like a piece of music, but to also recognise it’s probably a great piece of music. As Wilde I think said, Wagner is apparently not as bad as he sounds. This might seem like a trivial topic, but it really isn’t. /5
If you want to understand how we ended up living in societies where no expertise is allowed to determine anything, our personal opinion is the only sovereignty, you have to trace where that rot started. Popular music was the breeding ground. /6
It’s still one of the main ways we maintain the millions of fractured tribes that replaced the public. Their music is a key totem, for each tribe. Try telling a friend that their favourite artist is crap, and see how they react. Adolescents territorialise with music. /7
It’s one of the only territories you have, at that age. But now it’s migrated into adult life too. People well past middle age whose response to a pandemic for example is to go to gigs. Society is stuck in adolescence. Driven into reverse by economies. /8
Economies are ‘free markets’, meaning each to their own. Personal opinion rules. It’s the same mechanism. I can’t imagine my own parents having a favourite band. They had them growing up. Then they grew up. Now people into their 60s or beyond are like groupies. /9
The economy replaces society with a giant high school, as I’ve Tweeted about a lot. Not capitalism, none of those -isms. Socially we no longer develop after high school. The same platforms teenagers use to transact their social lives are used by their parents. /10
The mess many perceive around us is not the terrible force of capitalism, which doesn’t even exist. It’s social stagnation, retarded development. What used to be a circle of life is now just a flat line. An eternal lifestyle present. Teenagers forever. /11
If you look you’ll find teenage behaviour in everything adults now do. Eating out multiple times a week, huge amounts on booze and recreational travel. Faced with the option of solar panels or double-glazed windows, they’ll buy a boat. Politicians live for selfies. /12
Covid is a social phenomenon. Not political, not medical. Because all things in a society are social, it’s what societies are. If we want to fix the mess, we have to understand how humans behave, socially. You have to remember high school. Because that’s now everywhere. /end