Yesterday, over at the Z Blog, the Z Man took up the thread of this blog’s posts on the death of rock music and Cultural Ground Zero.
Approaching these related phenomena from an alternate angle, he gleaned some new insights.
Not discussed is the culture of the managerial class. The people running the music business are no different from the people running the other centers of cultural production in that they have had the antiwhite bug for a long time. The music industry went all in on hip-hop in the 1990’s. Part of it was the belief that it was a fresh market and part of it was cultural. For managerial types, hip-hop was cool because it was not white, while rock-and-roll was pale, male and stale.
If you read my review of the classic John Hughes comedy Uncle Buck, you may recall that it’s noteworthy as one of the first Hollywood films to depict hip-hop as suburban teens’ preferred music genre instead of rock.
One result of the money drying up for all forms of music that appeals to white people is white people stopped making that music. They stopped learning to play instruments, stopped forming garage bands and stopped cutting their teeth at clubs. Elementary school bands are full of Asian girls playing violin. There has been a steady decline in the sale of musical instruments over the last few decades, even though technology has made it easier to record at home and make it sound good.
For rock music, this has killed the feeder system for generating new sounds and new acts that made the genre possible. Even if young people were still dreaming of being a rock star, the clubs where they would learn how to perform have dried up. The culture around going to club to find new sounds and new acts has also dried up. When the music industry shifted to hip-hop and corporate pop, they also shut down the development system for creating various genres of rock music.
Grunge was a fad manufactured by record companies and was never an organic movement. Similarly, there are those within the music industry who claim that the rap craze is being manipulated from the top down – to boost sales, yes – but also for more sinister reasons.
Race is not the only reason for the decline of rock music. As those Niemeier posts explain, the industry is suffering from systemic failure. There lies another useful example that applies elsewhere. The federal government failed in its duty to maintain a marketplace for music. They allowed corporate players to monopolize radio stations, which coincided with the consolidation of the music business. The result is a narrow system that operates as skimming operation.
We see this in tech. Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems and office productivity products. Innovation is non-existent in this area. Apple and Google own the mobile telecommunications industry. Despite the hype, there has been nothing interesting in mobile computing for a decade or more. The whole tech space is consolidating to the point where every business will be forced onto one of a few clouds of the cloud computing leviathan.
People online have asked me why the government doesn’t break up Audible’s monopoly on audiobooks. To find the answer, just ask yourself who owns Audible. Then ask who that company’s biggest customer is.
Of course, all of this can be chalked up to the end of empire. Empires are the result of failed societies, not successful ones. The Roman Empire grew out of the rubble of the failed Roman Republic. For half of its existence the Roman Empire operated like a mafia bust-out operation. The same is happening with the American empire, which grew out of the republic that died at Gettysburg. The main difference with the American empire and prior empires is speed due to the state of technology.
And that technology itself is rapidly degrading.
Evidence continues to mount that politics really is downstream from culture – in chronological, if not causal, terms.
Speaking of chronology, file the following video from 1996 under “unintentional anachronistic projection”
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