We used to have music subcultures all over the place, growing up "underground," getting "discovered." I haven't seen much of that in the last 20 years. It's like there is no underground now, nowhere for weird and cool ideas to grow up before they're shown to the world.
Each decade in the 20th century had a distinct "sound." For the last 20ish years, we've basically been listening to the same music, just mixed and matched a little. Our biggest change is the prominence of ambient "background music," which isn't as fun as, say, the rise of gangster rap or grunge to me.
It feels like books aren't changing that much lately either, except I guess how morality is now the most important part of many of them. A friend told me that "morality" is the new "cool." Maybe she's right.
> Our biggest change is the prominence of ambient "background music," which isn't as fun as, say, the rise of gangster rap or grunge to me.
This is very dependent on your POV. I've always really liked ambient and instrumental/non-vocal music and it's vastly more accessible now than it was 25 years ago. Grunge + gangster rap and a lot of popular music post the 70s was pretty overstimulating in an unpleasant way to me. I think those of us who like calmer sounds or who listen for ambiance (rather than lyrics and/or the spectacle of shows [ which are of course valid ways to like music and probably more common]) are eating pretty well. I think it's fun - I'm listening to more new stuff than I did from 2000 - 2020.
Of course you're gonna have some like me chiming in with: actually yes underground culture still exists.
Today's punk/alternative ideology is to reject the ad driven visibility industry. Thus it is invisible to everyone not actively looking for something like this.
The point GP is making is that Nirvana wasn't invisible to everyone not actively looking for something like this, because there were DJs, who controlled radio shows, who were actively looking for something like this.
I feel like I'm living in a different world than you man. I'm listening to music that basically no one else listens to. I'm in communities that very few other people know about. I see subcultures all over the place with vibrant and hilariously distinct traits to them.
And I think this is a result of the opposite of what you're thinking. The subcultures you used to see were one of maybe a dozen. It was easy to see them and notice them because they were quite large and you couldn't miss them very easily.
Nowadays, the subcultures are so diverse broad and specific that you really just will never hear about them if you don't go looking for them
Goes for the musical artists. Do you want unique and distinct music? Go online, search for random off the wall genres, and you're going to find little vibrant community surrounding them.
I basically don't use a mobile device, but I am adjacent to a large media market. It would be nice if the radio stations still did this, so I could get some variety on the commute.
I noticed that too, the radio seems to be playing the same stuff they were playing when I was in high school.
And I think it's a consequence of the fact that the only people listening to the radio are the same people who were listening to the radio when I was in high school, everyone younger is on Spotify.
About 4 or 5 years ago I was walking on the street and a person who had to have been in his 20s was listening to a song from Meteora. It's a great album, and I certainly listen to stuff from when I was young, or even before I was born. It just struck me.
Edit to add: In case statista paywalls you.
> Weekly radio reach in the United States as of June 2021, by age and gender
A low of 71.1% for those aged 12-17 to a high of 87.5% for those aged 35-64.
Maybe that's simply because you are older now? Sorry.
More seriously, I suspect this is mainly an artifact of how we currently perceive every form of human activity from a purely economic and commercial perspective. That automatically renders invisible any form of culture production that is not obviously commercially relevant today. Historic subcultures remain visible if some of their aspects had time to get exploited commercially.
And it's easier than ever to find books in non-traditional form or with non-traditional content because it's nowadays possible to publish decently made books for minority audiences. A credible path to commercial success is no longer a precondition, as long as someone is willing to pay for publication (but of course the visibility issue still applies).
Also, you can flip that Mark Fisher perspective around: the 20th century fetishization of "something that has never been done" now kind of seems like a quaint pre-information era fallacy. We now know that everything's a remix. We know the simpsons did it. We know the grand narrative has always been an illusion, whether govt funded or simply based on a lack of access to other schools of thought. Maybe you need to stop fetishizing this obsolete mode of cultural production in order to recognize the historically unprecedented scale of ideas completely alien to you own experience that are currently all around you. Honestly we are so spoiled.
The GP is saying globalization homogenized things. But we've always lived and traded on a globe.
You're saying the Internet did, but I don't remember the "wild west" days of the Internet as anything like that.
I think you're both dancing around "profit motive" being the only ostensible reason both of those led to same same everywhere. No "general well-being," no "public benefit," nothing that seeks to understand and preserve anything except maximal profit. And large corporate profit-seeking entities are global, beholden to no government anywhere, really, to no people beyond their shareholders. So here we are.
Not terribly. Try visiting different parts of the world -- you can find some of the same movies, music, and clothing, but the culture continues and evolves, often _wonderfully_.
