Isn’t part of this phenomenon also that technology makes a lot of “old” pop culture much more available than it used to be too? Back when radio and, to a much more limited extent, record shops were tastemakers, there was a focus on new stuff within the mainstream. Radio stations can only play so much and record shops have limited inventories. Similarly, for films you’d have either the cinema or what you could rent in a Blockbuster, again with limited inventories. TV was even more restricted.
Now, however, you can access almost everything with an available master recording if you have a few subscriptions and a smartphone. The tastemakers are also algorithms that have much less regard for what’s new - except for specific playlists or promotions.
I bought my own copy of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless on CD back in the day. But that was about 20 years after the album was released. I had to hunt around different shops to find it in an era when smartphones and streaming were only just becoming a thing. Now I could find it pretty much instantly if I wanted to, as long as I have a Spotify or Apple Music subscription.
"Hard" is relative. Having a music service like Amazon gives you access to almost anything on a whim. Same for streamers with movies and shows.
Books and written material are different. I'd love a "netflix" model for journalism. Years ago I expected it. But I guess the economics of it doesn't work out.
Oh, but they were! Well, the movies were. You could probably find a bookshop or record shop that would keep an eye out. But movies! In the 70s, one of my friends was obsessed with "Harold and Maude," which had come out in 1971, I think. By 1975 it just didn't show up in the regular theaters, and when it showed up at one of the rare theaters that showed oldies, she'd call everyone and we'd all bundle off to see it again. It was an event!
Everything's relative. They were hard*er* to find than they are now.
You had to actually go somewhere; browse, perhaps make a phone call. I remember finding a certain double CD of an out-of-print Prince album on Ebay and, in a rejoicing mood, listening to literally nothing but it for two weeks solid.
Music's availability today is, in comparison, embarrassing. You just click a button. Maybe search YouTube, if you can't find it on Spotify et al.
People are lazy; just saying. Yes, I include myself there.
Also 'tastemakers' crave novelty more than the average person, regardless of the genre. Which probably exerted some pressure on everyone else downstream of them.
Lots of (most?) people eat more or less the same 7-10 dishes for decades on end. And before, say, the 1970s probably 99% of humanity was like that.
Watching sitcoms on rerun has been a thing for decades.
Lots of people seek exactly the same kind of book over and over again. How many Jack Reacher books are there now? But even decades ago there were tons of Jack Ryan or Dirk Pitt books. And there are 33 Hercule Poirot books. Many of which came out before TV was widespread.
Yes, but it’s still weird that old music seems so much more successful now than it was back in the day. There were lots of classic rock radio stations. Why is Queen, for example, such a streaming juggernaut now when they were just as available in the 90s and 00s on the radio dial? If people liked them so much they could listen on the radio and buy CDs.
There also used to be real oldies stations - like 50s and 60s real pop stuff like the Big Bopper, Four Tops or Herman’s Hermits, which I haven’t noticed getting any streaming renaissance. Interestingly, from what I remember, those real oldies station had only the earliest Beatles and Stones songs on - their later output was firmly on the Classic Rock stations, which was an interesting line of demarcation to think about.
I think that’s partly marketing, and the format. Having a classic rock station demarcates it by time period. If you listen to it, you’re making a conscious choice to listen to “old music”. But Queen songs pop up on all sorts of Spotify playlists that aren’t era-specific, and have more to do with theme, mood, origin, or occasion.
I do think it’s interesting that the early 1960s are the cutoff point, with two notable exceptions: Christmas music and Elvis. I guess rock and R&B/soul music are just more enduring genres.
Rick Beato goes into this on his YouTube channel - why Queen and Fleetwood Mac, for example, are significantly more popular on streaming than the Beatles or Rolling Stones and massive staples of classic rock like Hendrix or Zeppelin are comparatively way down.
I remember the changeover period where the 50s-60s Oldies stations suddenly became scarce, 70s Classic Rock transition to those sorts of stations and 90s grunge showed up on Classic rock stations.
Excellent point. I would add that this continually raises the bar for mass consumption of new art, music, films, etc. Personally, I find that new art rarely beats the best of the old art (which is easily accessed). People have limited time, so they focus their time on what they perceive as the best regardless of how old it is.
In the past artists were competing largely with new art. Now they are competing with all art.
This is a good point! I can listen to endless 80’s New Wave and pop (my personal favorite) from Amazon or Spotify. There are even playlists where other fans of neon and shoulder pads can get their perfect mixes of Duran Duran and Cyndi Lauper. Yes, you could always get the albums, or at least most of the albums or a “greatest hits” one, at a record store. Later you could get them on ITunes. But now with streaming services and public playlists, it’s “thanks for the mix tape, kind stranger!” You want the perfect mix of Iron Maiden, Scorpions and other 80s metal luminaries? If you can’t find them you can make your own. Same with your very favorite Stevie Nicks tracks or shoegaze or 60’s folk rock or anything else you might be into.
Transgression is critical to cultural development. A new generation must not fear transgressing the boundaries of taste and culture set by the previous. But in today's cultural world transgression can carry with it enormous costs - cancel culture, despite the rise of Donald Trump, is still very real. The incredibly offensive humor and art of the 80s and 90s, the mixing of Disco into Eurobeat to create House music, the mimicry of fashion catwalks to create Voguing etc... would today be met with cries of "cultural appropriation" and/or mockery by the cultural elite.
I would add to this that in the past teens tended to adopt an adversarial culture to adults. That has changed as helicopter parents have spawned a generation of neurotic teens obsessed with college prep. Adversarial cultures have many flaws, but they are famously artistically productive.
While I think that a specific *adolescent subculture* is new in the 20th century - because it’s the first time a critical mass of adolescents had been together with one another with minimal supervision (high schools, specifically teenage meeting spaces like malt shops and so on) - I am interested in anthropology and so have done some skimming on the subject. Adolescence does exist across cultures, though in most it’s fairly brief, and in few is it a stage of life where special products are marketed for teens and teens are sheltered from the adult world. But “my parents are SO uncool” “let’s sneak off behind the bushes and make out” etc. are widespread.
As a teen in the 80’s, even if you loved your parents, you wanted to distance yourself from them. They weren’t supposed to like your music! They were supposed to say “what is that guy singing about?” “What is the meaning of that haircut?” Parents were also much easier to evade, even if you were, like me, an only child with more helicopter-y parents for the time period. Modern parents put trackers on their kids! That gives me the heebie jeebies, thinking of my parents being able to track my every nose pick!
Parents also want to be “friends” with their kids, presumably so their kids will like them and not cut contact, so they become Amy Poehler’s Cool Mom. And “cool” parents were so much more cringey, back in the day, than the fuddy duddies who disapproved but stayed out of the way. (The *really* cool parents were the kind who were still parents, and didn’t try to love the latest in music, but were understanding and broad minded and you could confide in.)
I think this feeds into not just the cancel culture thing but the “Your brain doesn’t mature until you are 25, so I’m still a baby at 21” idea that some Terminally Onlines love to indulge in.
I don't think of Japan as a particularly adversarial culture, but it's probably the most significant non-Anglosphere center of art production.
Just from a volume standpoint, Japan is so far and away the leader of independent publishing and zines, the scene there is treated as an entirely separate thing to western independent publishing.
Maybe in more recent years you could argue that Korea has caught up and surpassed Japan, especially in corporate art production, but again, not particularly adversarial.
Katharine Dee and Spencer Kornhaber can try to be as Pollyanna-ish as they like, but I have no problem stating that the newer forms of media are worse. Memes and short-form videos are not novels and films and albums.
It's like arguing "Sure people date and get married less and spend less time with friends, but we have hookup culture on Tinder and Hinge!"
I am SO GLAD I’m not trying to date in the age of Tinder. I did have Match.com and those little ads of M seeing F and so on in the back of alt weeklies. Those were not nearly on the same toxicity level as Hinge and Tinder.
Same thing happened in journalism, right? Journalists used to be their own gatekeepers. The way to have a good career was to impress other journalists. Land big scoops, do risky reporting from war zones, etc.
But I, the audience, don't much care whether I read a story from the first person to report it or the tenth. And my appetite for stories from far-away war zones is very limited.
So in the disintermediated journalism era, we get aggregation and "takes" instead of news.
Especially the low cost and indie games! Balatro came out of nowhere and is ridiculously fun. Blue Prince has sucked up so much of my time I have to physically turn off my gaming PC to get anything else done lately.
I agree that there is a sense of cultural stagnation. In rock music at least through the 1980s, songs were often introduced with long instrumental riffs or were a sort of intermezzo in the middle, which demonstrated the musical capabilities of the band's members. I'm not sure why that seems to have largely disappeared.
Attention in all arenas where it once was the norm does seem to be an issue. At the university where I teach, with the exception of the best students, reading appears to be a lost art. If what my students need for an assignment or a paper can't be summarized in a few lines, it won't be read.
In a similar vein, Trump's success seems based on a portion of the population that uncritically accepts what's promulgated on social media because not to do so would require attention that they are unwilling to apply.
It's as if technology has engendered a form of population ADHD. A fundamental principle of our country's founding fathers was the need for an educated citizenry capable of making informed and rational choices. Is Adderall for all the solution?
Have you noticed that old movies can often start with like 2-3 minutes of credit where nothing much happens? I think expectations and attention were just different then.
Yes. The movies used to view themselves as a visual art form, but also as plays on film. Most plays come with a playbill, so older cinema's version of the playbill was the opening credits.
I think we see less of that now, in part because of technology. As CGI and other non-human actor roles increase, the number of participants behind the scenes to create such effects becomes enormous. So the closing credits with their attributions to the various companies that produced such effects roll for minutes at a time.
I had heard that the credits were at the beginning due to a push from studios to advertise their actors and create individual followings, though I suspect there are many intertwined reasons for the tradition.
Yes, it started with the MGM lion, but the number of such splash screens in current movies is significantly different. I recently saw a film that had five splash screens. I'm guessing how films are underwritten differs greatly from the days of "big studios," and the splash screens' number (and grandiosity) reflects that.
One of my hot takes is that genre TV shows have become to uniformly and relentlessly serial in nature. I'm not wanting for a return to random, disconnected episodes. However, you never get to see the characters doing anything but relentlessly driving for the season arc, or if you do, the showrunner still feels the need to torture it back into plot somehow. It's like every season is just a movie chopped into 8-10 somewhat arbitrary segments, and I wouldn't mind that format except for its ubiquity. I think this is due to the streaming model where they get much fewer episodes per season and 2-3 years between seasons, so there's pressure not to waste a second of film. Going back to shows of yesteryear that did have overarching plots, DS9 or X-Files did some of their best work where they just put the characters in a novel situation, and you don't get episodes of new shows with that kind of experimentation anymore. I like the Andor model too, don't get me wrong, it's just far too dominant.
I second this take. I enjoy serialization, but think it probably has gone too far. Lately my toddler has become obsessed with Pokemon and I found watching old episodes of that more engaging than most of the shows I am currently watching, precisely because of how episodic they are.
I mean yeah, at the beginning of the episode before the hijinks start they usually mention they're walking to some gym to fight the gym leader to win the SomethingBadge, and then a few episodes later they actually get to the gym and have a giant battle with the gym leader. Or maybe in one episode Team Magma steals a McGuffin and then 20 episodes later uses it to summon Groudon to destroy the ocean. But most episodes are fairly self contained.
Yeah, they were. Pokemon did have substantially more continuity than the American cartoons of the 1980s and early 1990s, though. For example, Ash would catch and also release various Pokemon throughout his journey, and if you watched the episodes in order, you'd never see him using a Pokemon that, according to the story, he wasn't supposed to have.
American shows with any kind of continuity at all, other than daytime soap operas, were rare before the age of the Internet, because the people that made TV shows would make most of their money on syndication instead of during the initial run on network TV, and one of the requirements demanded of syndicated TV shows is that they be able to be run in any order. This requirement in particular limited the kind of stories that television could tell in a way that made them noticeably worse than feature films that didn't have those restrictions. Among other things, it enforced Status Quo is God: nobody could undergo any change whatsoever that lasted beyond the end of the episode. For example, if the hero's best friend lived through one episode, he'd have to live through every other one, too.
See also https://youtu.be/AxFzf6yIfcc?si=hbphbe6KOnhSm5sJ , in which game designer Jonathan Blow gives a talk comparing the bad incentives that resulted in the extremely forgettable "bad TV" of the 1970s with the bad incentives of free-to-play video games that give us things like Candy Crush.
How does Marx's distinguishing of "art" and "entertainment" account for someone like Shakespeare, who was basically wrote popular entertainment in a different age, but was good enough at it that his work has come to be treated as art?
An important question. But I think he'd merely respond that Shakespeare was so good he could do both at once. Shakespeare plays have a little something for everyone -- high concepts and references for the upper class, dick jokes for the lower class!
And Shakespeare did write things that were explicitly aimed at "high art" style legitimacy, namely his sonnets...
(Which, if the footnotes are to be believed, are written in what amounts to a code that's less comprehensible to this particular modern reader than *untranslated* Chaucer.)
As I wrote in a rather strange article a few years ago (the title was "From Printing Press to Nation-state, From the Internet to Neo-medieval Globalism"), the internet is radically altering culture by changing the ratio of the costs of content creation to the costs of distribution. In the age of printing, books got far cheaper, leading to mass literacy and the evolution of reading publics into nation-states. But mass production of a book involved high fixed costs that were specific to that book. And then the commercial reach of the book depended on physical distribution networks. The vast majority of potential content couldn't surmount the fixed cost hurdle, so it never saw the light of day. The result was to cut off the long tail of this statistical distribution of expected book popularity. Little works didn't exist.
With the rise of the internet, the long tail comes to light. The number of "publishers," so to speak, multiplies exponentially. And although the vast majority of publishers have too small a reach to matter individually, collectively this grassroots army of small publishers may have more weight than the giant ones, and certainly at any rate much more weight than they did in the past.
In the article, I comment that in certain ways the new economics of text might counterintuitively, echo the Middle Ages. For example, it favors purpose-driven over commercial publishing. Also, I think it's important that the concept of a book going out of print is essentially obsolete. Now it's easy to have everything accessible online. The immediate effect of the internet was to put a premium on novelty: older stuff wasn't online. But over time, the effect of the internet is the opposite: older stuff gets online, and older stuff that was born online stays, so the past is at your fingertips in a way that it wasn't in the age of print.
Indeed, that points to a very simple explanation of popular culture stagnation: competition from the past. Technology has made the past so conveniently available that people have less incentive to look around for something new.
Not disagreeing about most of this, but books definitely still go "out of print". I have a large collection of SF books that are unobtainable even used (or only at high cost) and not available in any kind of online way.....
That's a good point, though I don't think it changes the big trend.
In part, that actually underscores the perversity of copyright law in the current technological environment. Scanning and uploading tons of old out of print books, then posting them online with a bit of advertising to pay the bills, would be a really easy business model, and all upside for the public interest. Authors would like it too, for the most part. They like reach, and if the book is out of print anyway, they're probably not losing any royalties. But as it is, you'd trip over tons of ghost copyright problems and get sued and all sorts of nonsense.
I don't think it affects the big picture too much, though. Actually, if the problem got fixed, that would make the power of the past to compete with current content creation even greater.
I enjoy reading children's books from the 20th century. I've read 26 books this year and 13 of those are out of print since the 1980s or 1990s - but available second-hand at reasonable prices. Not everything I want to read is easily available second-hand though. Last year I spent £60 to buy "The Dimsie Omnibus", published in 1937. And I discovered recently that some of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks I own from the 1980s and 1990s (the later ones with smaller print runs) cost £30 second-hand.
A particular problem with children's books in England is that if old books are republished, the text or illustrations are often changed to be less offensive to modern sensibilities. For example, all of Enid Blyton's books have been reprinted with "modernised" text since the late 1980s. Many of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks are still in print, but without the original illustrations, I think because they are considered to be too gruesome for today's children.
Books for adults in England, such as those by Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse, are also being republished with modernised texts, and e-book versions automatically "updated". I'm reluctant to replace my physical media (books, DVDs) with digital media now.
> But it’s also possible that movies themselves may have exhausted a large fraction of their available novelty,
I graduated university in the late 1990s when Netflix was first taking off and stumbled across the American Film Institute's 100 Best Films list. Over the next few months I watched everything on the list.
And, as someone who isn't a die hard cinemaphile, it definitely almost killed movies for me. Of course those 100 movies didn't explore the entire creative space but they sure covered a lot of ground!
I think this is a profoundly weird take. Here's 10 American movies made before the late 90s that aren't on the AFI list:
The Shining
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
The Great Escape
The Birdcage
Terminator 2
Reservoir Dogs
Beauty and the Beast
Out of the Past
Eraserhead
Halloween
I'm not saying the above movies are necessarily great (though many are) or should be on the list, but I do not think the AFI Top 100 even scratches the surface of what film can offer
I've noticed that some people seem to vary in the depths that they want an idea explored. Some people like seeing variations on a theme, other people seem to think that if you have seen a theme once, you have seen them all, and all variations are basically the same to me.
This was brought home to me when I read some reviews of a couple Doctor Who audio dramas that I listened to and enjoyed. Both of them were dark comedies set in commercial spaces (an airport and a warehouse) that had been cut off from civilization and reverted to savagery over the centuries. I enjoyed both and thought the different ways the societies in each differed was interesting. Other people, however, claimed that they were both ripoff of a Doctor Who TV story about an apartment complex that had been cut off from civilization and reverted to savagery..
I'm a former game dev who's still pretty well connected in the industry. There's definitely an obvious financial bust going on. But, artistically, I think games are in a quite healthy space. Indie innovation has been going strong for a long time, and awards are becoming increasingly presitigious, so artistic games are getting more recognition, too. I think that can coexist with an industry-wide revenue problem.
I wonder: is porn as an art form really going strong? I confess I’m not a connoisseur but I’ve gotten the impression that long-form story-based porn has basically died in favor of quick videos targeting ever more, uh, niche interests. Maybe it’s making more money than ever, but so are the movies Noah talked about.
Well, I have "niche interests", and I've seen a lot of originality and talent in these spaces. I would call some of it art - but only people with certain tastes would appreciate it 😅
I've not seen any long-form story-based porn though. Erotic or semi-erotic movies and TV shows must be one area where there is still plenty of low-hanging fruit to be picked.
"In the absence of laws or other forms of government power to stop the market from working, the market will give people what they demand."
Classic economist mistake - and even a logical mistake. Algorithms mean just the reverse - you are shown what everyone else wants to see (the classic lowest common denominator) and then you choose, if at all, from that. Thus markets makes us all converge on a relatively limited number of products. This is then exacerbated by the fact that it is cheaper to produce at scale, so what most people want is more profitable to produce. Anything that only a few people will want, will not be produced unless those people are willing to pay a lot for it, or if it is produced not-for-profit. Even then, it assumes those people are willing to spend a lot of time (opportunity cost) looking for that unpopular stuff. Fortunately for the rest of us, there are some people who are willing to produce and consume culture at great expense to their own economic self-interest.
People's wants are simply not autonomous of what other people want, as econ 101 assumes and any sociologist will tell you is untrue. It is a major defect of econ 101 thinking. It simply has no theory of the power of social influence, so assumes there is no power outside outside the sue of coercion/fraud by government or others.
Fascinating blog entry. I have a lot of thoughts on this.
First of all, music. I love shoegaze. I'm a 52 year old and shoegaze defined my 20s. I went to the Slowdive concert here in L.A. recently and my 16 year old and her friend saw me wearing the t-shirt. I was shocked to find out they thought it was the coolest thing ever and began asking me about my music tastes. I told them about MBV, Ride, etc. and the response was "your dad is fire." Again, when your 16 year old and her friends think you're cool as a 52 year old dad, I knew something was different and amiss. That clued me into the retro aspect of kids' culture. I took these girls to another Slowdive concert in Pomona later that year.
However, as far as music is concerned, I think the reporting of the demise of avant-garde good indie music is not totally correct. I try to stay young by making a point of listening to new music. I rely on blog radio for this. I used to love Hipster Runoff a/k/a Carles.buzz, which is gone now, but I still listen to Gorilla Versus Bear, The Yellow Button, Aquarium Drunkard, etc. There are some amazing new songs and old songs I never knew about (from Aquarium Drunkard). So it's out there; I think the issue is that unlike when I was younger, there is a mass proliferation of entertainment content and music and it takes effort to find the good stuff, which tends to be obscure. My kids find it from their friends, spending time cultivating Spotify playlists, etc., but for a middle aged dude like me, I rely on the music bloggers and thank god they're out there.
As for movies, I completely agree they are in stagnation with very little original out there. I recall this quote from a book I read which sums it up nicely:
"Movies, like bands and books, were once amazements, little bridges between wonder and trauma; now, it seems, they're just blunt force repetitions, sequels to things we've already seen even on those rare occasions they're literally otherwise. Tell me the last movie you saw that didn't feel reheated... When was the last time you saw something unprecedented, that set the world on its side for an hour and a half? The movies, in 2015, may or may not be a dead art form -- I certainly don't give a fuck about them, myself - but all this dyspepsia melts away when I consider the Z Channel, one of those L.A.-specific conduits (like The Source or Hamburger Hamlet, like Rodney's English disco or the Germs) melding art and gaudiness, and a little bit of sleaze." -Matthew Spektor, Last Button on the Left: The Late, Great Z Channel, from Los Angeles in the 1970s by David Kukoff
And one of my other theories is that the cold war and the conflict of different ideologies lent itself to a rich cultural and artistic environment in which ideas held a premium over things or even money, and thematic context was valued and explored, whereas with the end of the cold war and the supposed triumph of market capitalism, the premium on ideas and ideology fell by the wayside and in the absence of such ideological tension, art and culture became a parody of itself and the old ideologies (i.e., t-shirts with images of Che Guevera) with market capitalism coopting everything and creativity languished with many regurgitations of old stories and franchises.
So for me, the demise of avant-garde music seems to be premature, but television and for sure movies, I agree. The originality and art is gone. And that's very sad indeed.
American pop culture definitely hasn't stagnated. (Though people who feel that it has become a 'den of woke' may wish to portray it that way). For one thing, we're living through a golden age of TV at the moment. The volume of quality output (especially from the US) is extraordinary. Just one great series after another. There are great films being made and the best are probably better than the best of previous eras. But cinema doesn't hold centre-stage like it did in the 70's - cinema's artistic peak for your average movie buff. The switch to TV and the decline in attention being paid to cinema, even though movies have improved markedly is, as you say, due to changes in platform technology enabling new forms of artistic production and changes in media consumption. For example, VOD means writers can vary the length of episodes rather than having to squeeze things into an exact timeframe. This attracts great writers, which attracts great actors and other talents with the result that middle class elites are no longer embarrassed to say they watch TV - or even have a TV.
In addition to the problem of finding a cool spot on the pillow that you discussed, popular music is wrestling with three problems, at least two of which are directly technology-related. Firstly, the sheer amount of music being made is mind-boggling and there is no real filter for separating the great, from the good from the bad. Secondly, musicians can no longer engage in creative 'arbitrage', taking riffs, sounds or lyrics from other times or cultures not familiar to their audience and presenting them as novel. Even the Beatles did this back in the day but now the source will be discovered in the time it takes to run an online search. Finally, all the youth 'tribes' have vanished. Back in the 50's there were two or three (mods, rockers and beatnik/ jazz fans). Over time they became more numerous splitting and combining like the delta of river. But the delta has now become a sea of individual preferences marketed to by algorithms. Acts no longer have a clearly segmented market to aim at which makes creating a distinctive sound far more difficult.
It's also worth remembering with music, that if you're over 30 absolutely none of the new, vital stuff is being produced with you in mind and the lives and minds of people between the ages are 13 and 25 are utterly opaque to you. This has always been the case of course, but now it seems to matter more.
There's always that one comment that feels like someone read the title of the post and then used it as an essay prompt instead of reading what I wrote ❤️
Thanks for the tip. In no particular order . . . No Country for Old Men, Donnie Darko, Blue Jasmine, The Power of the Dog, The Cabin In the Woods, It Follows, Birdman, X-men First Class (weirdly), Crash, Gravity, Memento, Identity, The Hateful Eight, Downfall, The Bourne trilogy, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Casino Royale. Pretty much any of the top films of the last 25 years, really. These are just some of the ones I liked. The crafts, techniques, technologies and collective creativity that go into film-making have now reached such a standard (under the intense pressure for audience attention) that far more of the films made now that work are great by comparison to what went before - once you strip away the perceived value that accumulates with age in our culture. So I don't care how 'important' The Birth of a Nation was for the history of film - it's a bad movie; a profoundly clunky, frame-breaking and unenjoyable experience (even if you could ignore its dreadful politics).
Can you list these? I am doubtful. Please, do not mention The Bear. I've started to wonder if people harping on about the Golden Age simply have low standards. We were told in the early 2000s that we were in a Golden Age then - the Wire, Sopranos, Deadwood. I think that one is far more believable than the one we are in right now.....
I'd include those three in the Golden Age but even stronger contenders would include, just off the top of my head: Fargo, Succession, Orphan Black, Modern Family, Better Call Saul, True Detective, Mindhunter, Fleabag, The Leftovers, Killing Eve, The Walking Dead, GoT, Barry, Queens Gambit, Andor. Even things with relatively unpromising subject matter such as, The Kominsky Method, The Crown and yes, The Bear, are brilliantly-paced, well-written, well-casted, well-acted often breathtaking television.
Of course, there's nothing now that can stand comparison with the noughties' high water mark, Sex In the City. But everything pales next to perfection! (I'm kidding about that last one of course - that's so 'Samantha', of me).
That is quite a mixed bag of TV you've listed there, including some painful and generic examples. I'm not sure what else to say other than these do not belong being mentioned altogether, unless you're purely talking about shows from the 21st century.
This provokes quite a few dissonant thoughts. While I agree the dopamine urge isn’t helping, I think part of your perception of the problem is the decline of what the late Joseph Nye called US soft power. New music now is dominated by non US and non European artists, for example. Unless Bad Bunny is seen as fully American.
As far as the avant garde is concerned, i put this down to yet another failure of western academe. If you can’t have free expression, including the right to trigger, let alone disturb, all creation processes are made more timid.
Isn’t part of this phenomenon also that technology makes a lot of “old” pop culture much more available than it used to be too? Back when radio and, to a much more limited extent, record shops were tastemakers, there was a focus on new stuff within the mainstream. Radio stations can only play so much and record shops have limited inventories. Similarly, for films you’d have either the cinema or what you could rent in a Blockbuster, again with limited inventories. TV was even more restricted.
Now, however, you can access almost everything with an available master recording if you have a few subscriptions and a smartphone. The tastemakers are also algorithms that have much less regard for what’s new - except for specific playlists or promotions.
I bought my own copy of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless on CD back in the day. But that was about 20 years after the album was released. I had to hunt around different shops to find it in an era when smartphones and streaming were only just becoming a thing. Now I could find it pretty much instantly if I wanted to, as long as I have a Spotify or Apple Music subscription.
That could be a factor too! But I think old movies, books, and records were never that hard to find...
"Hard" is relative. Having a music service like Amazon gives you access to almost anything on a whim. Same for streamers with movies and shows.
Books and written material are different. I'd love a "netflix" model for journalism. Years ago I expected it. But I guess the economics of it doesn't work out.
Oh, but they were! Well, the movies were. You could probably find a bookshop or record shop that would keep an eye out. But movies! In the 70s, one of my friends was obsessed with "Harold and Maude," which had come out in 1971, I think. By 1975 it just didn't show up in the regular theaters, and when it showed up at one of the rare theaters that showed oldies, she'd call everyone and we'd all bundle off to see it again. It was an event!
Everything's relative. They were hard*er* to find than they are now.
You had to actually go somewhere; browse, perhaps make a phone call. I remember finding a certain double CD of an out-of-print Prince album on Ebay and, in a rejoicing mood, listening to literally nothing but it for two weeks solid.
Music's availability today is, in comparison, embarrassing. You just click a button. Maybe search YouTube, if you can't find it on Spotify et al.
People are lazy; just saying. Yes, I include myself there.
Also 'tastemakers' crave novelty more than the average person, regardless of the genre. Which probably exerted some pressure on everyone else downstream of them.
Lots of (most?) people eat more or less the same 7-10 dishes for decades on end. And before, say, the 1970s probably 99% of humanity was like that.
Watching sitcoms on rerun has been a thing for decades.
Lots of people seek exactly the same kind of book over and over again. How many Jack Reacher books are there now? But even decades ago there were tons of Jack Ryan or Dirk Pitt books. And there are 33 Hercule Poirot books. Many of which came out before TV was widespread.
I wonder how many of The US Office’s streams are people rewatching it for the nth time
Yes, but it’s still weird that old music seems so much more successful now than it was back in the day. There were lots of classic rock radio stations. Why is Queen, for example, such a streaming juggernaut now when they were just as available in the 90s and 00s on the radio dial? If people liked them so much they could listen on the radio and buy CDs.
There also used to be real oldies stations - like 50s and 60s real pop stuff like the Big Bopper, Four Tops or Herman’s Hermits, which I haven’t noticed getting any streaming renaissance. Interestingly, from what I remember, those real oldies station had only the earliest Beatles and Stones songs on - their later output was firmly on the Classic Rock stations, which was an interesting line of demarcation to think about.
I think that’s partly marketing, and the format. Having a classic rock station demarcates it by time period. If you listen to it, you’re making a conscious choice to listen to “old music”. But Queen songs pop up on all sorts of Spotify playlists that aren’t era-specific, and have more to do with theme, mood, origin, or occasion.
I do think it’s interesting that the early 1960s are the cutoff point, with two notable exceptions: Christmas music and Elvis. I guess rock and R&B/soul music are just more enduring genres.
Rick Beato goes into this on his YouTube channel - why Queen and Fleetwood Mac, for example, are significantly more popular on streaming than the Beatles or Rolling Stones and massive staples of classic rock like Hendrix or Zeppelin are comparatively way down.
I remember the changeover period where the 50s-60s Oldies stations suddenly became scarce, 70s Classic Rock transition to those sorts of stations and 90s grunge showed up on Classic rock stations.
Excellent point. I would add that this continually raises the bar for mass consumption of new art, music, films, etc. Personally, I find that new art rarely beats the best of the old art (which is easily accessed). People have limited time, so they focus their time on what they perceive as the best regardless of how old it is.
In the past artists were competing largely with new art. Now they are competing with all art.
This is a good point! I can listen to endless 80’s New Wave and pop (my personal favorite) from Amazon or Spotify. There are even playlists where other fans of neon and shoulder pads can get their perfect mixes of Duran Duran and Cyndi Lauper. Yes, you could always get the albums, or at least most of the albums or a “greatest hits” one, at a record store. Later you could get them on ITunes. But now with streaming services and public playlists, it’s “thanks for the mix tape, kind stranger!” You want the perfect mix of Iron Maiden, Scorpions and other 80s metal luminaries? If you can’t find them you can make your own. Same with your very favorite Stevie Nicks tracks or shoegaze or 60’s folk rock or anything else you might be into.
https://youtu.be/YXh4gOd8GlY?si=kSSFO1k0ugbujL6D
Transgression is critical to cultural development. A new generation must not fear transgressing the boundaries of taste and culture set by the previous. But in today's cultural world transgression can carry with it enormous costs - cancel culture, despite the rise of Donald Trump, is still very real. The incredibly offensive humor and art of the 80s and 90s, the mixing of Disco into Eurobeat to create House music, the mimicry of fashion catwalks to create Voguing etc... would today be met with cries of "cultural appropriation" and/or mockery by the cultural elite.
I would add to this that in the past teens tended to adopt an adversarial culture to adults. That has changed as helicopter parents have spawned a generation of neurotic teens obsessed with college prep. Adversarial cultures have many flaws, but they are famously artistically productive.
While I think that a specific *adolescent subculture* is new in the 20th century - because it’s the first time a critical mass of adolescents had been together with one another with minimal supervision (high schools, specifically teenage meeting spaces like malt shops and so on) - I am interested in anthropology and so have done some skimming on the subject. Adolescence does exist across cultures, though in most it’s fairly brief, and in few is it a stage of life where special products are marketed for teens and teens are sheltered from the adult world. But “my parents are SO uncool” “let’s sneak off behind the bushes and make out” etc. are widespread.
As a teen in the 80’s, even if you loved your parents, you wanted to distance yourself from them. They weren’t supposed to like your music! They were supposed to say “what is that guy singing about?” “What is the meaning of that haircut?” Parents were also much easier to evade, even if you were, like me, an only child with more helicopter-y parents for the time period. Modern parents put trackers on their kids! That gives me the heebie jeebies, thinking of my parents being able to track my every nose pick!
Parents also want to be “friends” with their kids, presumably so their kids will like them and not cut contact, so they become Amy Poehler’s Cool Mom. And “cool” parents were so much more cringey, back in the day, than the fuddy duddies who disapproved but stayed out of the way. (The *really* cool parents were the kind who were still parents, and didn’t try to love the latest in music, but were understanding and broad minded and you could confide in.)
I think this feeds into not just the cancel culture thing but the “Your brain doesn’t mature until you are 25, so I’m still a baby at 21” idea that some Terminally Onlines love to indulge in.
I don't think of Japan as a particularly adversarial culture, but it's probably the most significant non-Anglosphere center of art production.
Just from a volume standpoint, Japan is so far and away the leader of independent publishing and zines, the scene there is treated as an entirely separate thing to western independent publishing.
Maybe in more recent years you could argue that Korea has caught up and surpassed Japan, especially in corporate art production, but again, not particularly adversarial.
Katharine Dee and Spencer Kornhaber can try to be as Pollyanna-ish as they like, but I have no problem stating that the newer forms of media are worse. Memes and short-form videos are not novels and films and albums.
It's like arguing "Sure people date and get married less and spend less time with friends, but we have hookup culture on Tinder and Hinge!"
Yes, we do have those, but they are worse.
I am SO GLAD I’m not trying to date in the age of Tinder. I did have Match.com and those little ads of M seeing F and so on in the back of alt weeklies. Those were not nearly on the same toxicity level as Hinge and Tinder.
Same thing happened in journalism, right? Journalists used to be their own gatekeepers. The way to have a good career was to impress other journalists. Land big scoops, do risky reporting from war zones, etc.
But I, the audience, don't much care whether I read a story from the first person to report it or the tenth. And my appetite for stories from far-away war zones is very limited.
So in the disintermediated journalism era, we get aggregation and "takes" instead of news.
That's a good point.
Technologies shift .... there is a lot of innovation in gaming.....
Especially the low cost and indie games! Balatro came out of nowhere and is ridiculously fun. Blue Prince has sucked up so much of my time I have to physically turn off my gaming PC to get anything else done lately.
Slay the Spire is genius and deserves some kind of prestigious great work of art award.
I agree that there is a sense of cultural stagnation. In rock music at least through the 1980s, songs were often introduced with long instrumental riffs or were a sort of intermezzo in the middle, which demonstrated the musical capabilities of the band's members. I'm not sure why that seems to have largely disappeared.
Attention in all arenas where it once was the norm does seem to be an issue. At the university where I teach, with the exception of the best students, reading appears to be a lost art. If what my students need for an assignment or a paper can't be summarized in a few lines, it won't be read.
In a similar vein, Trump's success seems based on a portion of the population that uncritically accepts what's promulgated on social media because not to do so would require attention that they are unwilling to apply.
It's as if technology has engendered a form of population ADHD. A fundamental principle of our country's founding fathers was the need for an educated citizenry capable of making informed and rational choices. Is Adderall for all the solution?
Have you noticed that old movies can often start with like 2-3 minutes of credit where nothing much happens? I think expectations and attention were just different then.
Yes. The movies used to view themselves as a visual art form, but also as plays on film. Most plays come with a playbill, so older cinema's version of the playbill was the opening credits.
I think we see less of that now, in part because of technology. As CGI and other non-human actor roles increase, the number of participants behind the scenes to create such effects becomes enormous. So the closing credits with their attributions to the various companies that produced such effects roll for minutes at a time.
I had heard that the credits were at the beginning due to a push from studios to advertise their actors and create individual followings, though I suspect there are many intertwined reasons for the tradition.
Yes, it started with the MGM lion, but the number of such splash screens in current movies is significantly different. I recently saw a film that had five splash screens. I'm guessing how films are underwritten differs greatly from the days of "big studios," and the splash screens' number (and grandiosity) reflects that.
Citizen Kane had the credits at the end, although they did have a slow montage of Xanadu leading into the falling snow globe scene.
Do you think Wells was demonstrating his creativity and how much his film deviated from the then-current cinema norms by doing so?
Absolutely, and apparently it confused moviegoers who thought the projectionist was screwing up.
One of my hot takes is that genre TV shows have become to uniformly and relentlessly serial in nature. I'm not wanting for a return to random, disconnected episodes. However, you never get to see the characters doing anything but relentlessly driving for the season arc, or if you do, the showrunner still feels the need to torture it back into plot somehow. It's like every season is just a movie chopped into 8-10 somewhat arbitrary segments, and I wouldn't mind that format except for its ubiquity. I think this is due to the streaming model where they get much fewer episodes per season and 2-3 years between seasons, so there's pressure not to waste a second of film. Going back to shows of yesteryear that did have overarching plots, DS9 or X-Files did some of their best work where they just put the characters in a novel situation, and you don't get episodes of new shows with that kind of experimentation anymore. I like the Andor model too, don't get me wrong, it's just far too dominant.
I second this take. I enjoy serialization, but think it probably has gone too far. Lately my toddler has become obsessed with Pokemon and I found watching old episodes of that more engaging than most of the shows I am currently watching, precisely because of how episodic they are.
Pokemon was serialized back then too, just not as dramatically.
I mean yeah, at the beginning of the episode before the hijinks start they usually mention they're walking to some gym to fight the gym leader to win the SomethingBadge, and then a few episodes later they actually get to the gym and have a giant battle with the gym leader. Or maybe in one episode Team Magma steals a McGuffin and then 20 episodes later uses it to summon Groudon to destroy the ocean. But most episodes are fairly self contained.
Yeah, they were. Pokemon did have substantially more continuity than the American cartoons of the 1980s and early 1990s, though. For example, Ash would catch and also release various Pokemon throughout his journey, and if you watched the episodes in order, you'd never see him using a Pokemon that, according to the story, he wasn't supposed to have.
American shows with any kind of continuity at all, other than daytime soap operas, were rare before the age of the Internet, because the people that made TV shows would make most of their money on syndication instead of during the initial run on network TV, and one of the requirements demanded of syndicated TV shows is that they be able to be run in any order. This requirement in particular limited the kind of stories that television could tell in a way that made them noticeably worse than feature films that didn't have those restrictions. Among other things, it enforced Status Quo is God: nobody could undergo any change whatsoever that lasted beyond the end of the episode. For example, if the hero's best friend lived through one episode, he'd have to live through every other one, too.
See also https://youtu.be/AxFzf6yIfcc?si=hbphbe6KOnhSm5sJ , in which game designer Jonathan Blow gives a talk comparing the bad incentives that resulted in the extremely forgettable "bad TV" of the 1970s with the bad incentives of free-to-play video games that give us things like Candy Crush.
How does Marx's distinguishing of "art" and "entertainment" account for someone like Shakespeare, who was basically wrote popular entertainment in a different age, but was good enough at it that his work has come to be treated as art?
An important question. But I think he'd merely respond that Shakespeare was so good he could do both at once. Shakespeare plays have a little something for everyone -- high concepts and references for the upper class, dick jokes for the lower class!
And Shakespeare did write things that were explicitly aimed at "high art" style legitimacy, namely his sonnets...
(Which, if the footnotes are to be believed, are written in what amounts to a code that's less comprehensible to this particular modern reader than *untranslated* Chaucer.)
As I wrote in a rather strange article a few years ago (the title was "From Printing Press to Nation-state, From the Internet to Neo-medieval Globalism"), the internet is radically altering culture by changing the ratio of the costs of content creation to the costs of distribution. In the age of printing, books got far cheaper, leading to mass literacy and the evolution of reading publics into nation-states. But mass production of a book involved high fixed costs that were specific to that book. And then the commercial reach of the book depended on physical distribution networks. The vast majority of potential content couldn't surmount the fixed cost hurdle, so it never saw the light of day. The result was to cut off the long tail of this statistical distribution of expected book popularity. Little works didn't exist.
With the rise of the internet, the long tail comes to light. The number of "publishers," so to speak, multiplies exponentially. And although the vast majority of publishers have too small a reach to matter individually, collectively this grassroots army of small publishers may have more weight than the giant ones, and certainly at any rate much more weight than they did in the past.
In the article, I comment that in certain ways the new economics of text might counterintuitively, echo the Middle Ages. For example, it favors purpose-driven over commercial publishing. Also, I think it's important that the concept of a book going out of print is essentially obsolete. Now it's easy to have everything accessible online. The immediate effect of the internet was to put a premium on novelty: older stuff wasn't online. But over time, the effect of the internet is the opposite: older stuff gets online, and older stuff that was born online stays, so the past is at your fingertips in a way that it wasn't in the age of print.
Indeed, that points to a very simple explanation of popular culture stagnation: competition from the past. Technology has made the past so conveniently available that people have less incentive to look around for something new.
https://openborders.info/blog/printing-nation-state-internet-neo-medieval-globalism/
Not disagreeing about most of this, but books definitely still go "out of print". I have a large collection of SF books that are unobtainable even used (or only at high cost) and not available in any kind of online way.....
That's a good point, though I don't think it changes the big trend.
In part, that actually underscores the perversity of copyright law in the current technological environment. Scanning and uploading tons of old out of print books, then posting them online with a bit of advertising to pay the bills, would be a really easy business model, and all upside for the public interest. Authors would like it too, for the most part. They like reach, and if the book is out of print anyway, they're probably not losing any royalties. But as it is, you'd trip over tons of ghost copyright problems and get sued and all sorts of nonsense.
I don't think it affects the big picture too much, though. Actually, if the problem got fixed, that would make the power of the past to compete with current content creation even greater.
I enjoy reading children's books from the 20th century. I've read 26 books this year and 13 of those are out of print since the 1980s or 1990s - but available second-hand at reasonable prices. Not everything I want to read is easily available second-hand though. Last year I spent £60 to buy "The Dimsie Omnibus", published in 1937. And I discovered recently that some of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks I own from the 1980s and 1990s (the later ones with smaller print runs) cost £30 second-hand.
A particular problem with children's books in England is that if old books are republished, the text or illustrations are often changed to be less offensive to modern sensibilities. For example, all of Enid Blyton's books have been reprinted with "modernised" text since the late 1980s. Many of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks are still in print, but without the original illustrations, I think because they are considered to be too gruesome for today's children.
Books for adults in England, such as those by Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse, are also being republished with modernised texts, and e-book versions automatically "updated". I'm reluctant to replace my physical media (books, DVDs) with digital media now.
> But it’s also possible that movies themselves may have exhausted a large fraction of their available novelty,
I graduated university in the late 1990s when Netflix was first taking off and stumbled across the American Film Institute's 100 Best Films list. Over the next few months I watched everything on the list.
And, as someone who isn't a die hard cinemaphile, it definitely almost killed movies for me. Of course those 100 movies didn't explore the entire creative space but they sure covered a lot of ground!
I think this is a profoundly weird take. Here's 10 American movies made before the late 90s that aren't on the AFI list:
The Shining
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
The Great Escape
The Birdcage
Terminator 2
Reservoir Dogs
Beauty and the Beast
Out of the Past
Eraserhead
Halloween
I'm not saying the above movies are necessarily great (though many are) or should be on the list, but I do not think the AFI Top 100 even scratches the surface of what film can offer
I've noticed that some people seem to vary in the depths that they want an idea explored. Some people like seeing variations on a theme, other people seem to think that if you have seen a theme once, you have seen them all, and all variations are basically the same to me.
This was brought home to me when I read some reviews of a couple Doctor Who audio dramas that I listened to and enjoyed. Both of them were dark comedies set in commercial spaces (an airport and a warehouse) that had been cut off from civilization and reverted to savagery over the centuries. I enjoyed both and thought the different ways the societies in each differed was interesting. Other people, however, claimed that they were both ripoff of a Doctor Who TV story about an apartment complex that had been cut off from civilization and reverted to savagery..
I mean, sure, but if you can't enjoy variations on the same theme, that rules out pretty much all art. Ugh The Aeneid! SUCH A WANNABE ODYSSEY!
Seems you are missing two art forms that are going strong: Games and Porn.
Not to be a downer, but games are not doing too hot since the pandemic: https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025
TLDR: Revenue has stagnated, and even before it did most of the growth was in mobile gaming and in China, and concentrated in very few games.
I'm a former game dev who's still pretty well connected in the industry. There's definitely an obvious financial bust going on. But, artistically, I think games are in a quite healthy space. Indie innovation has been going strong for a long time, and awards are becoming increasingly presitigious, so artistic games are getting more recognition, too. I think that can coexist with an industry-wide revenue problem.
I wonder: is porn as an art form really going strong? I confess I’m not a connoisseur but I’ve gotten the impression that long-form story-based porn has basically died in favor of quick videos targeting ever more, uh, niche interests. Maybe it’s making more money than ever, but so are the movies Noah talked about.
Well, I have "niche interests", and I've seen a lot of originality and talent in these spaces. I would call some of it art - but only people with certain tastes would appreciate it 😅
I've not seen any long-form story-based porn though. Erotic or semi-erotic movies and TV shows must be one area where there is still plenty of low-hanging fruit to be picked.
There's also text porn, audio-only porn, and a few other formats that still have stories (such as hentai anime and manga).
"In the absence of laws or other forms of government power to stop the market from working, the market will give people what they demand."
Classic economist mistake - and even a logical mistake. Algorithms mean just the reverse - you are shown what everyone else wants to see (the classic lowest common denominator) and then you choose, if at all, from that. Thus markets makes us all converge on a relatively limited number of products. This is then exacerbated by the fact that it is cheaper to produce at scale, so what most people want is more profitable to produce. Anything that only a few people will want, will not be produced unless those people are willing to pay a lot for it, or if it is produced not-for-profit. Even then, it assumes those people are willing to spend a lot of time (opportunity cost) looking for that unpopular stuff. Fortunately for the rest of us, there are some people who are willing to produce and consume culture at great expense to their own economic self-interest.
People's wants are simply not autonomous of what other people want, as econ 101 assumes and any sociologist will tell you is untrue. It is a major defect of econ 101 thinking. It simply has no theory of the power of social influence, so assumes there is no power outside outside the sue of coercion/fraud by government or others.
Fascinating blog entry. I have a lot of thoughts on this.
First of all, music. I love shoegaze. I'm a 52 year old and shoegaze defined my 20s. I went to the Slowdive concert here in L.A. recently and my 16 year old and her friend saw me wearing the t-shirt. I was shocked to find out they thought it was the coolest thing ever and began asking me about my music tastes. I told them about MBV, Ride, etc. and the response was "your dad is fire." Again, when your 16 year old and her friends think you're cool as a 52 year old dad, I knew something was different and amiss. That clued me into the retro aspect of kids' culture. I took these girls to another Slowdive concert in Pomona later that year.
However, as far as music is concerned, I think the reporting of the demise of avant-garde good indie music is not totally correct. I try to stay young by making a point of listening to new music. I rely on blog radio for this. I used to love Hipster Runoff a/k/a Carles.buzz, which is gone now, but I still listen to Gorilla Versus Bear, The Yellow Button, Aquarium Drunkard, etc. There are some amazing new songs and old songs I never knew about (from Aquarium Drunkard). So it's out there; I think the issue is that unlike when I was younger, there is a mass proliferation of entertainment content and music and it takes effort to find the good stuff, which tends to be obscure. My kids find it from their friends, spending time cultivating Spotify playlists, etc., but for a middle aged dude like me, I rely on the music bloggers and thank god they're out there.
As for movies, I completely agree they are in stagnation with very little original out there. I recall this quote from a book I read which sums it up nicely:
"Movies, like bands and books, were once amazements, little bridges between wonder and trauma; now, it seems, they're just blunt force repetitions, sequels to things we've already seen even on those rare occasions they're literally otherwise. Tell me the last movie you saw that didn't feel reheated... When was the last time you saw something unprecedented, that set the world on its side for an hour and a half? The movies, in 2015, may or may not be a dead art form -- I certainly don't give a fuck about them, myself - but all this dyspepsia melts away when I consider the Z Channel, one of those L.A.-specific conduits (like The Source or Hamburger Hamlet, like Rodney's English disco or the Germs) melding art and gaudiness, and a little bit of sleaze." -Matthew Spektor, Last Button on the Left: The Late, Great Z Channel, from Los Angeles in the 1970s by David Kukoff
And one of my other theories is that the cold war and the conflict of different ideologies lent itself to a rich cultural and artistic environment in which ideas held a premium over things or even money, and thematic context was valued and explored, whereas with the end of the cold war and the supposed triumph of market capitalism, the premium on ideas and ideology fell by the wayside and in the absence of such ideological tension, art and culture became a parody of itself and the old ideologies (i.e., t-shirts with images of Che Guevera) with market capitalism coopting everything and creativity languished with many regurgitations of old stories and franchises.
So for me, the demise of avant-garde music seems to be premature, but television and for sure movies, I agree. The originality and art is gone. And that's very sad indeed.
American pop culture definitely hasn't stagnated. (Though people who feel that it has become a 'den of woke' may wish to portray it that way). For one thing, we're living through a golden age of TV at the moment. The volume of quality output (especially from the US) is extraordinary. Just one great series after another. There are great films being made and the best are probably better than the best of previous eras. But cinema doesn't hold centre-stage like it did in the 70's - cinema's artistic peak for your average movie buff. The switch to TV and the decline in attention being paid to cinema, even though movies have improved markedly is, as you say, due to changes in platform technology enabling new forms of artistic production and changes in media consumption. For example, VOD means writers can vary the length of episodes rather than having to squeeze things into an exact timeframe. This attracts great writers, which attracts great actors and other talents with the result that middle class elites are no longer embarrassed to say they watch TV - or even have a TV.
In addition to the problem of finding a cool spot on the pillow that you discussed, popular music is wrestling with three problems, at least two of which are directly technology-related. Firstly, the sheer amount of music being made is mind-boggling and there is no real filter for separating the great, from the good from the bad. Secondly, musicians can no longer engage in creative 'arbitrage', taking riffs, sounds or lyrics from other times or cultures not familiar to their audience and presenting them as novel. Even the Beatles did this back in the day but now the source will be discovered in the time it takes to run an online search. Finally, all the youth 'tribes' have vanished. Back in the 50's there were two or three (mods, rockers and beatnik/ jazz fans). Over time they became more numerous splitting and combining like the delta of river. But the delta has now become a sea of individual preferences marketed to by algorithms. Acts no longer have a clearly segmented market to aim at which makes creating a distinctive sound far more difficult.
It's also worth remembering with music, that if you're over 30 absolutely none of the new, vital stuff is being produced with you in mind and the lives and minds of people between the ages are 13 and 25 are utterly opaque to you. This has always been the case of course, but now it seems to matter more.
There's always that one comment that feels like someone read the title of the post and then used it as an essay prompt instead of reading what I wrote ❤️
And it will usually be mine. So sue me!
(Emollient love heart emoji, I can't work out how to do in substack). Your writing gets me up in the morning. That's got to count for something!
I just copy and paste
https://getemoji.com/
What are these great films that are "probably better than the best of previous eras" then?
Thanks for the tip. In no particular order . . . No Country for Old Men, Donnie Darko, Blue Jasmine, The Power of the Dog, The Cabin In the Woods, It Follows, Birdman, X-men First Class (weirdly), Crash, Gravity, Memento, Identity, The Hateful Eight, Downfall, The Bourne trilogy, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Casino Royale. Pretty much any of the top films of the last 25 years, really. These are just some of the ones I liked. The crafts, techniques, technologies and collective creativity that go into film-making have now reached such a standard (under the intense pressure for audience attention) that far more of the films made now that work are great by comparison to what went before - once you strip away the perceived value that accumulates with age in our culture. So I don't care how 'important' The Birth of a Nation was for the history of film - it's a bad movie; a profoundly clunky, frame-breaking and unenjoyable experience (even if you could ignore its dreadful politics).
"we're living through a golden age of TV"
Can you list these? I am doubtful. Please, do not mention The Bear. I've started to wonder if people harping on about the Golden Age simply have low standards. We were told in the early 2000s that we were in a Golden Age then - the Wire, Sopranos, Deadwood. I think that one is far more believable than the one we are in right now.....
I'd include those three in the Golden Age but even stronger contenders would include, just off the top of my head: Fargo, Succession, Orphan Black, Modern Family, Better Call Saul, True Detective, Mindhunter, Fleabag, The Leftovers, Killing Eve, The Walking Dead, GoT, Barry, Queens Gambit, Andor. Even things with relatively unpromising subject matter such as, The Kominsky Method, The Crown and yes, The Bear, are brilliantly-paced, well-written, well-casted, well-acted often breathtaking television.
Of course, there's nothing now that can stand comparison with the noughties' high water mark, Sex In the City. But everything pales next to perfection! (I'm kidding about that last one of course - that's so 'Samantha', of me).
That is quite a mixed bag of TV you've listed there, including some painful and generic examples. I'm not sure what else to say other than these do not belong being mentioned altogether, unless you're purely talking about shows from the 21st century.
Really? Which ones don't you like?
Ahh, "shoegazer music"; surely a tribute to William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch and staring at your shoe all day under the influence.
This provokes quite a few dissonant thoughts. While I agree the dopamine urge isn’t helping, I think part of your perception of the problem is the decline of what the late Joseph Nye called US soft power. New music now is dominated by non US and non European artists, for example. Unless Bad Bunny is seen as fully American.
As far as the avant garde is concerned, i put this down to yet another failure of western academe. If you can’t have free expression, including the right to trigger, let alone disturb, all creation processes are made more timid.