The Age of Cultural Stagnation

[gvopedz]

The brilliant and restless civilization that rampaged through the second half of the twentieth century, the culture whose genius spanned the wrestling guitars of “I Saw Her Standing There”...has come to a standstill. 

You can read an essay on the "Stagnation Generation (anyone under 30, let's say)" here:

https://newrepublic.com/article/179432/age-cultural-stagnation

 

[Rabshakeh]

There's a flood of these sorts of article at the moment, many of them, like this one, reviews of these sorts of books. Something seems to have tipped in the legacy media.

Whilst I do agree that it feels like culture is a bit 'stuck' at the moment, I'm always a bit mystified that so much emphasis is put on algorithms and tech as the only real culprit. However bad culture might be now, is it really any worse than in the late 1990s or early 2000s? I remember that as an era of near-complete cultural exhaustion, with the massive cultural gatekeepers still in control.

[mjzee]

It's because of progressivism, aka enforced groupthink.

[Rabshakeh]

13 minutes ago, mjzee said:

It's because of progressivism, aka enforced groupthink.

That explains why nothing cultural happened in the 60s or 70s.

[mjazzg]

29 minutes ago, Rabshakeh said:

That explains why nothing cultural happened in the 60s or 70s.

All downhill since the Enlightenment really.  Good job we had the Renaissance...

[Pim]

1 hour ago, mjazzg said:

All downhill since the Enlightenment really.  Good job we had the Renaissance...

The Renaissance was the start of the decline. I wish I was born during the middle ages

Edited March 22 by Pim

[optatio]

1 hour ago, Pim said:

... I wish I was born during the middle ages

... and living as a 'minnesinger' 😂?

Neidhart – Ensemble Leones, Els Janssens-Vanmunster • Baptiste Romain, Marc Lewon – A Minnesinger And His 'Vale Of Tears': Songs And Interludes  ... 2012

[John L]

Even if you accept that notion that culture today is stagnating relative to the second half of the 20th century, it is still a question as to what is the "normal" pace, ie. the 20th century could have been above normal and now we are back to normal.   

I find it interesting that the "wrestling guitars of I Saw Her Standing There" is put up as the standard of cultural advancement.   I recall in the 1960s how the musical establishment would give you a similar lecture on how the Beatles represented cultural decay in popular music relative to the supreme sophistication of Tin Pan Alley. 

Edited March 22 by John L

[Pim]

42 minutes ago, optatio said:

... and living as a 'minnesinger' 😂?

Nah I’d rather make myself useful riding the trolley of death trough town

 

[Rabshakeh]

46 minutes ago, John L said:

I find it interesting that the "wrestling guitars of I Saw Her Standing There" is put up as the standard of cultural advancement.   I recall in the 1960s how the musical establishment would give you a similar lecture on how the Beatles represented cultural decay in popular music relative to the supreme sophistication of Tin Pan Alley. 

I thought that was funny too. 

[rostasi]

I guess picking a favorite historical point and then screaming at clouds seems to be the preferred attention-getter. Perceptions of cultural stagnation are highly subjective and depend on one's values, interests, and the aspects of culture one deems most significant. What one person sees as a lack of innovation, another might view as a period of rich, albeit less conspicuous, cultural evolution. Cultural movements and their impacts are usually easier to recognize in retrospect. What might seem like a stagnant period could be laying the groundwork for future cultural explosions that we're simply too close to see. Maybe we've created an environment where survival takes precedence over cultural innovation, or where creativity is stifled by commercial pressures and the pursuit of profit over artistry (which has never suddenly been a "new" thing). Seems like a lot of pearl-clutching to me.

Edited March 22 by rostasi

[Aggie87]

32 minutes ago, rostasi said:

I guess picking a favorite historical point and then screaming at clouds seems to be the preferred attention-getter. Perceptions of cultural stagnation are highly subjective and depend on one's values, interests, and the aspects of culture one deems most significant. What one person sees as a lack of innovation, another might view as a period of rich, albeit less conspicuous, cultural evolution. Cultural movements and their impacts are usually easier to recognize in retrospect. What might seem like a stagnant period could be laying the groundwork for future cultural explosions that we're simply too close to see. Maybe we've created an environment where survival takes precedence over cultural innovation, or where creativity is stifled by commercial pressures and the pursuit of profit over artistry (which has never suddenly been a "new" thing). Seems like a lot of pearl-clutching to me.

Agree with this post almost verbatim.  I suspect that as many folks get older, they feel like there's stagnation when in reality there may not be.  We just tend to focus on the stuff we like/liked, often to the exclusion of newer things.  Because of that we don't see the firehose of "new" that is continuously pouring out.

I'm 58, and enjoy music, movies, shows, theater, and the like.  I like to think I'm on top of things, but I'm really not.  My daughter and son-in-law that live here locally sing along with songs passionately, yet in many cases they're songs that I've never heard of before.  For them it's a rich time I think.  Same with our kids that live in other states.

I actually like that, and it helps me realize culture kept moving along, and I'm simply not in the target age demographic for the most part anymore.  I'm fine with that, and still like what I like, some new, some old.  But I know it all continues.

Edited March 22 by Aggie87

[Ken Dryden]

At this time in my life, I feel that far too much of "culture" emphasizes politicalization more than creativity. Movies often seem to focus on diversity for diversity's sake, instead of telling a good story, what we get are boring, often insipid remakes of old films or endless half-assed sequels. The same can be said of various sitcoms, dramas and talk shows on television. I don't care what race or sex a character is, it's up to writers to come up with an entertaining plot and script that will develop the characters. Likewise in many genres of music, there have been a lot of highly promoted posers that have had little to offer. I felt rock was steadily going downhill back in the 1970s, which is why i narrowed my listening to groups already in my collection. Yet in jazz there are always young, up and coming musicians of either sex and various nationalities who produce compelling music worth investigating.

[JSngry]

A bad movie with a diverse cast is worse than a bad movie with a homogenous cast? 

[medjuck]

As I often argue about movies: the greatest year for culture  was whenever you were 18. 

[sgcim]

As far as music goes, I only post this every time this topic comes up:

 

[Ken Dryden]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

A bad movie with a diverse cast is worse than a bad movie with a homogenous cast? 

They're both bad. A perfect example of a rotten remake, The Ladykillers, starring Tom Hanks. It was so over the top and vulgar that it just wasn't funny at all. The subtleness of the original British film with Alec Guinness, Herbert Lom and Peter Sellers was far superior. My wife walked out of the remake after 10-15 minutes due to the overflow of obscenities and by the time I had sat through the entire film I wished I had as well. Shaft didn't exactly have a diverse cast, but I remember enjoying the film when I saw it in college. It was as entertaining as a typical film starring a white guy as a detective.

There was a terrible movie that I remember being released in the summer of 1977 when I was in grad school with nothing to do, a group of us made the mistake of going to see a supposed comedy, Between the Lines, labeled by one critic as "the American Graffiti of the 1970s." It was so lame that I started making remarks out loud from the audience and I was getting more laughs than the film. Finally, we all left after about 15, 20 minutes. We should have known it was going to be terrible, a group came out from the previous showing and everyone was scowling and one woman uttered, "God, what a waste!" 

The Blade Runner sequel was absolutely dreadful, far too long with a story line that made no sense, the villain's character seemed to be particularly badly written. 

Another example is the most recent CBS Star Trek series, I didn't even make it through the pilot, it was so bad. Glad that I missed the blowhard failure Stacy Abrams guesting as President of Earth in a later episode.

Who is to blame, casting directors, producers, studios script writers?

 

 

[Rabshakeh]

7 hours ago, medjuck said:

As I often argue about movies: the greatest year for culture  was whenever you were 18. 

I hear this a lot whenever I voice a complaint about current culture. I think it might be true occasionally, but (without wanting to start a fight) it does also get deployed to shut down discussion.

I was 18 in 2001, and that was *not* a good year for culture. There is very little between 1996 and 2006 that I think was much good. 

The cultural run from around 2006 to 2013, on the other hand, I remember as a good time - the point at which the pre-algorithmic social media internet really cut through the decaying structures, in my opinion.  I really remember that feeling when the corporate cultural monoculture that had sat over my childhood and young adult life cracked and, however briefly, things in the mainstream and alternative cultural spaces became interesting. 

Anyway, the article that was originally posted is actually quite good. It criticises the idea of stagnation constructively, rather than adopting it wholeheartedly. I enjoyed reading it.

For my part, I do think that there is something there.

With respect to music, it is telling that all figures for consumption (streaming, purchasing, in person attendance) show that interest in recent music is way down. If even 18 years are not listening to the current music much, then that tells you something, I think. Fashion and design seems to just be cycling through past "aesthetics", and that has been the case for a while.

But it isn't spread evenly. I don't think that the state of films is that bad at the moment - In fact Hollywood seems to be doing better than in recent years. Thankfully the superhero films seem to be on the way out, too.  Other areas, like comedy, also seem to be getting better again.

The truth is that things do come in cycles, with periods of stagnation and growth, albeit I think they are much shorter than the usual 'generations' that get talked about in the media and online (including in this article).

It is quite easy to pinpoint periods of stagnation, provided you take a suitably restricted view: 1974-6 for example would be a good example for rock music - a point that sits between the exhaustion of the musical and political developments of 1969 and the remarkable turning of the cultural, social and political tides that started in 1976-1977.  Sure enough, the retrospective appearance of a difference in quality to the preceding and following periods is not just subjective / retrospective: music consumption figures were down in real terms then too, enough that the music industry was in crisis (although some blame the oil shock, I believe).

I'm sure that there were many 18 year-olds alive then who still think that 1975 was the best musical era, just in the same way as I occasionally meet someone who thinks that it was all downhill after Limp Bizkit or 50 Cent, but they're in the minority.

At the moment, culture does seem to be edging away from the twin meta-influences that seemed to me to define post-2016 culture: "poptimism" (or whatever you want to call the critical distrust of 'difficult' culture that seemed to take hold in around 2016) and the valorisation and reward of high politicisation in art.

There has been a sudden flood of articles, decrying the state of culture, not just from older writers on legacy media but also from younger writers on social media / substack etc.

I think that all of that is coinciding for a reason, in that we've reached a point where the post-2016 moment, perhaps never as great as it thought itself to be, has exhausted itself, and people are tired of the same old thing.

Whether we are about to see a flowering of something more interesting is another question. As our chosen genre of jazz and improvised music shows, periods of stagnation and low sales can sometimes just be followed by periods of worse stagnation and even lower sales.

Edited March 23 by Rabshakeh

[soulpope]

13 hours ago, optatio said:

... and living as a 'minnesinger' 😂?

Neidhart – Ensemble Leones, Els Janssens-Vanmunster • Baptiste Romain, Marc Lewon – A Minnesinger And His 'Vale Of Tears': Songs And Interludes  ... 2012

😂😇😂 ....

[Teasing the Korean]

The more "culture" a society accumulates, the more that society is competing with its own back catalog. 

Edited March 23 by Teasing the Korean

[soulpope]

4 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

The more "culture" a society accumulates, the more that society is competing with its own back catalog. 

Btw and the more the "own back catalog" comes haunting ....

[Teasing the Korean]

Just now, soulpope said:

Btw and the more the "own back catalog" comes haunting ....

Yup.

[JSngry]

I want to hold your band. 

[Rabshakeh]

4 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

The more "culture" a society accumulates, the more that society is competing with its own back catalog. 

Cultural black hole.

[Teasing the Korean]

1 hour ago, Rabshakeh said:

Cultural black hole.

Yes. And as you posted further up, the trend began before AI and digital culture.