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Location: New Albany, Indiana (Greater Louisville)
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If you think music today is stagnant I'd like to know what you're listening to. Only halfway into this decade I'd already call it a major change for the better. Alt rock has basically died and been replaced with indie rock, which now has strong old school rock elements and techno elements. Usually one or the other. If you miss the music of the 1960s and 1970s you should like what's new
Not in comparison to many third world countries.Even many western countries financially.Many need deep reform or headed to be another Greece. Europe in fact is under going a brain drain has most talented are headed here and to east to make their fortunes without be punished by tax rates totally unfair.
I don't think it is stagnating. On the contrary. If one considers all the technological advances in just the last couple of years, one could argue our culture is changing and evolving at hyperdrive speed.
As far as music goes, the new trend is that every new huge mainstream Rap artist is a regular white person from some quiet safe white environment. This trend is not new at all seeing as Elvis co-opted Rock 'N Roll, a formerly extremely underground ghettoized black genre of music, and introduced the music to mainstream white America. Macklemore and Iggy Azaela are top grossing new Rap artists who don't have the same background as Eminem. Eminem was like the Bill Clinton of Rap. Eminem grew up poor and was raised by a single mother and actually spent time growing up in inner city Detroit. A few years ago, white female Oakland rappers Kreayshawn and V-Nasty of the White Girl Mob scored a viral hit with "Gucci, Gucci", a jab at materialism and brand-whoring much like Macklemore's "Thrift Shop". However, the White Girl Mob's ironically rough street background and unabashed use of the n-word were not in any way cross over friendly as mainstream America could never understand the shockingly diverse, integrated and accepting multicultural world of the inner city streets of the Bay Area. Macklemore's biography is that he is a just a white guy from Seattle, the whitest major city in America. He is completely inoffensive and uncontroversial and white people who don't even listen to Rap love him. Iggy Azaela is a white girl from Australia who raps in a faux deep Southern blaccent. Another top selling artist is Logic from suburban Gaithersburg, Maryland. Despite the fact that Logic is biracial in being half-black and half-white, he looks wholly Caucasian and his innocent boor-next-door look has helped his record sales considerably. The next big crossover inoffensive white Rap star of the next year is probably going to be G-Eazy from Berkeley, California, who has been making waves in recent months. Rap truly is going the way of Rock music as white rappers don't even need approval from a black and or inner city fanbase to gain hits, win Grammys and sell millions of records. This is a big change since the days of the 90's when Vanilla Ice's career ended the very moment he was exposed for lying about growing up in the hood in Miami when he was born and raised in suburban Dallas. In the next 20 years, I believe most top selling Rap artists will be white people from suburban backgrounds.
Another difference nowadays is that social media has become more ubiquitous and intrusive since the dawn of the decade. Social media sites like Facebook are actually killing freedom of speech. There have been people who have been fired from jobs and arrested for things that they have posted on Facebook. Some of these things justifiably were grounds to get fired or arrested (i.e. confessing to a serious crime to which evidence could be linked). But other Facebook arrests of the past few years were just absurd and scary.
It seems like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are the beginnings of the future world which will resemble life in the movie The Matrix in a few decades.
Last edited by LunaticVillage; 12-20-2014 at 02:45 PM..
I can even imagine anyone thinking there is only one culture in this huge country. Its this thinking that diversity brings anything but conflict. Room for everyone in this country. If you look where its is most common your have most violence and conflict.
I personally don't feel much of a difference from early 2000's to now, but that might be my age.
It would be interesting to ask a teenager who was a kid in the last decade and may have noticed more of a cultural shift, like I did between the 80s-90s..although I think they actually were very distinctive anyway.
I don't think the USA has culturally stagnated it continues to change like anywhere else, however I think the USA has become too powerful for its own good. The general mindset of the country is rather insular and shows a lack of understanding of the world outside its borders. The decline of the West's relative power is inevitable, the USA needs to start engaging with the rest of the world.
Some really interesting observations. I don't necessarily agree with all of them, but his assessment of the effects of the rise of social media is pretty incisive. He talks about music trends as well, which also seem accurate. The point is that in the current cultural age (2000's and 10's) people are coping with a huge influx of information, but it's all fragmented, mostly inconsequential information and not digestible in any meaningful way. This is leading to a hodge-podge of revivals from past decades and no real new innovations (here is where I disagree, I think there are some new innovations but they are mostly pretty gross to me).
He claims there haven't been any new music genres since rap (and he's not counting all the minor tweaking and repackaging of old genres).
Also, news: Electronic music was invented in the 70's.
Last edited by Basilide; 12-23-2014 at 04:01 PM..
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