> an excess of liberty, a confusion of social norms, and the weakening of authority that soon descends into lawlessness.
Well, that describes about every ranting grumpy grandpa unhappy with the younger generation. Seems a tad too generic and conservative to be worth anything.
Sure, but I would view it as a proxy for a reduction in societal cohesion. Kind of like a cliff function, an example of which is like traffic, as you add more cars to the traffic speeds drop linearly until you reach a threshold and the speeds drops dramatically, a traffic jam.
In the same way if societal cohesion drops, initially it is linear until it reaches a threshold and then the it drops off like a cliff and societal self sustaining emergent behaviour starts to disappear; until chaos and/or revolution. The prime example being rule of law, once laws become unevenly applied and/or subjective then they lose their network effect of sustaining a society. Somewhat like inoculation, a lack of herd immunity allows disease to run rampant.
Sure, but it's the rate at which it happens, and whether it is broadly across all of society rather than a minority. For example, "show me a time where there hasn't been fraud" vs "corruption was so endemic that it lead to the collapse of this society".
> social breakdown begins with an increase in prosperity and the weakening of sexual restraint ...
> that the decline of a civilization can begin in the decline of its music.
This essay suffers by ignoring the elephants in the room.
Any such analysis must look at how, for example, the Nazis objected to the "weakening of sexual restraint" during the Weimar Republic, and the "decline of ... music" to justify why they needed to take power. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_music
Nor was Nazi Germany unique. Authorities in the Soviet Union and the US both opposed, for example, jazz music; in the US, for the racist view that “wild African jungle music” was a plot to destroy American culture. (Eg, https://archive.org/details/ChristianPatriotsCrusadeF.AllenM... )
This is quite relevant as the author specifically regards jazz music as a sign of not being in decline.
Who gets to determine if music is in decline? She doesn't say.
It is odd you ask that when most of the article is about it, but
"a cybernetic entity with developed proprioception and taste buds capable of evaluating the emotional (as per the article) direction the sample can cause".
As a father of young teens I find some of the music quite disturbing and borderline soft porn. Music in the 70s/80s were more about romance, today is more about sex and drugs. I agree with article about the correlation between society in decline and I see the nature of music as one of the signals.
I've always been fond of that 1920s foxtrot classic that celebrated stripping down past clothing to enter into a vertical expression of a horizontal desire, Tain't No Sin
I agree there were always be examples like that, but my point is kids hardly had any exposure to these, whereas kids feel entitled to listen to explicit music nowadays and when you try as a parent to enforce rules everyone else seem to say "it's okay, all kids do that", it's never okay to let kids watch or listen to these explicit Nicky Minaj or Dojo Cat songs, and I will always speak against it.
When I was a kid, long long ago, we watched stallions put to mares, bulls to cows, and rams tupping ewes .. we grew up generally bemused by sexuality and made a lot of explicit sexual jokes in puberty.
I'm pretty sure the Athenians and those in the Roman Republic did also .. Pēdīcābo ego vōs et irrumābō has it over Nicky Minaj in several ways, it just lacks a music video.
Explicitly vulgar latin I also read as a teen.
The songs I listed, with the exception of TISM, I heard as a young teen - kids view the world and make their own minds up, Dojo Cat will be kind of lame to the next generation if not already.
There will also be people that identified the "Harlem Shuffle" (1963) as a gem worth of respect, "Lick my Love Pump (Trilogy in D-minor)" (1984?) as joke worth of warmth, and "I want to #### you in the ###" (~2000) as rubbish.
Only if you assume that everyone claiming this is _correct_, or more specifically that they're incorrect when they're young and correct when they're old (this is usually something primarily claimed by old people).
Cato the Elder used to moan about this a lot. Society is clearly better now by any conceivable measure in any developed country than it was in his day.
Just because it seems to fall, doesn't mean it's actually falling.
The Shepard tone is an auditory illusion where the tone seems to be continually rising or falling in pitch.
I've seen old films. They had terrible morals, like rich people straight-out slapping servants they felt were doing wrong, and of course the near omnipresent racism and sexism.
I totally expect the generation at the end of this century to despise our immoral pollution of the planet.
You can as easily find music about romance about now as you could find sexually charged music back in 70s. It's about what you look for. Hell, in 70s disco culture was a thing.
I mean I think you're just being very selective about, well, both eras.
There were plenty of lyrics about sex and drugs in the 70s and 80s. Some of them quite disturbing (I'm still slightly traumatised by Spotify serving me what I _thought_ was "Ca plane pour moi" but was actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_Boy,_Jet_Girl a while back - it's the same tune, but... very different lyrics). And there's plenty of fluff in the 21st century.
Edit below to respond to that downvote and expand on my comment in the context of parent.
The best music is about sex and drugs, implicitly or explicitly. Perhaps the parent is worried about their children's exposure to the best bits of youth, fair enough, but I'd totally counter that the music of the 70s and 80s was in any way unconcerned with such things.
In the late 60s/70s Marvin Gaye was not being in the slightest bit coy when he suggested him and his lady should "Get it on", nor were Black Sabbath shy about their love for the Sweet Leaf. There's the Beatles with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Donna Summer was into Hot Stuff, Frank Zappa was filthy and deeply offensive by today's standards, and there's anything by ACDC. Clapton's singing about cocaine, Lou Reed is singing about heroin, reggae is huge and hugely into ganja.
And the eighties, ho-boy. You've got Prince, the Red Hot Chili Peppers (back when they were good), even more ACDC, Madonna was pretty raunchy back in the day. White Lines and the thin White Duke, Golden Brown, Passing the Dutchy pon the Left Hand Side. I'm getting exhausted just thinking about it all.
You're really going to have to justify the late 20th century as some sort of heyday of romantic and innocent music.
> Specifically, the confusion of the genre system disturbed the means for the proper release of the soul’s passions, causing audiences to be ruled instead by their unfettered emotions and impulses
I.e.: there are more ways to tackle the same topic, to develop an artistic work about some area. And there are progressive and regressive experiences. The topic is clearly too hefty to be summarize here - but the very submission has several points of "progressive vs regressive" expression as its theme...
If the poster writes «quite disturbing», probably he means that "the progressive is not there" (as sensible interpretation).
Many of the acts I listed there were truly genre-defying, progenitors, originators and auteurs: I'd point to the Beatles, Sabbath and Zappa as some cases in point. For me it's a tough stretch to argue that any of them had a genre system disturbing the release of their soul's passions.
Sex and intoxication, two of life's finer pleasures, have for millennia been captured in art, song and poetry -- at various points in civilisations' rise and fall. Pearl-clutching around "disturbing" modern music is, I'm sorry, something that's been going on pretty much as long as there's been music.
You chose an especially wrong word there (etymonline: «unblemished, refined, pure, free of impurities»).
But it leads to revealing that you seem to be embracing "one side", while the whole of the article was about "that side of yours fighting the other side" - can you see the other side?
If when speaking about music you refer it to intoxication, then of course since that kind of music has been there some noted it's "disturbing".
--
Edit: incidentally: it seems checking again the chain of posts that you definitely misunderstood my use of 'progressive'. (If you related it to «genre-defying, progenitors, originators» - no, that's really not the direction meant.)
It is again something that has "intoxicant" as an opposite.
In the article one will find several points of apparent confusion between symptoms and causes: e.g., of course decadence can easily be accompanied by «weakening of authority» - that is because those that raise to power cease to be authoritative after the decadence in quality. Edit: but it is because of the compromise after the difficulty of properly organizing text in descriptive (historic) essays.
But surely, when you see societies that have become insensitive, and especially insensitive to the quality of sound tapestry - societies which have forgotten the value of silence, which is health and especially mental health - you can immediately see the signs of a downfall.
Its an interesting take and insight that old, independent cultures and philosophies came to the same conclusion about music, as well as tying it back to Eliot, the eternal and universal.
Not sure how it relates to today though. Did Woodstock signal the beginning of the end? Plato would be horrified by our drug fueled raves.
Also spending a whole article lamenting discordant music and then on the last note praising jazz is a great punchline.
I am not suprised about anything coming out of soft "sciences" since I witnessed my former gf basically blackmailing her supervisor into accepting her rather unscientific PhD. Actually, I basically lost all trust in the perceived value of many forms of titles.
yeah a lot of people saw that and it's why Trump won on an anti intellectual platform and the media can't comprehend it because every single talking head is very proud of their mass communications degree from whatever Ivy got them their cushy media job
How you mixed Trump into this is actually fascinating. I have a different stance. Democrats would have won if half of the feminist/left weren't hung up on useless social studies and other modern soft science bullshit. Its a turn off that cost them more then they might think.
A few interesting historical tidbits buried inside a pompous vehicle for the author's many subjective value judgments. This gatekeeping rant about 'degenerate' music is a generational drum beat by moral conservatives many times over.
Music is universal to all cultures and time periods, and has as many facets. It's incredibly arrogant to think that you've landed on some unique vision of the 'right' kind of music, especially when you've fallen into the easy trap of thinking harmony is the true core of music simply because it's intellectually interesting. If anything, the core of music in most cultures is dancing.
"Such poets, being “ignorant of what is right and legitimate in the realm of the Muses,” rebelled against the traditional conventions of music and poetry."
this is the much fabled Plato? The genius? The big brain who thought there was a "right and legitimate" taste in music? Glad to see this fluff has been preserved for millenia
The article essentially claims that changes in musical styles and traditions can lead to broader societal changes, potentially undermining the established order and laws of the state, and that the emergence of "new music" that prioritized sensationalism and audience pleasure over traditional forms and harmony could be seen as a threat to social and political stability (based on Plato's assumptions). From my humble point of view yet another instance of "correlation does not imply causation".
Having done my graduate work on large scale music analysis, I read the entire article with great interest. The author makes great arguments, though they have not addressed one key topic – whether all this is causation or correlation, or perhaps reflection (causation in reverse.)
The author’s thesis is here: “The poets’ disregard for musical laws, provoked by their museless art, soon inspired in their audiences a contempt for all laws. This occurred because the poets engendered a skepticism toward the very idea of the good—precisely the kind of skepticism that results from the sophistry defined by Plato elsewhere.”
We can think about this from the perspective of two recent artistic movements – gangsta rap (think Wu Tang Clan, Biggie, Raekwon, Eminem) and melancholy pop (specifically, Lana del Rey.) Both are derided by civil society. In college (in the 1990s) there were plenty of debates on whether Rap even constituted music. Both are often pointed to as the cause for decline. Yet, both seem to the author to be either reflections or outcomes of civil decline.
Gangsta rap is the reflection of a society which progressed ahead, but left a sector of neighborhoods to decay, extracted from them, and celebrated success without acknowledging the costs. Gangsta rap, as violent and explicit as it may be, exposes this, comments on this, and brings the hypocrisy into full view for all to hear. Gangster rap was an outcome (not a cause) of purposeful policies which drove urban decay in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
On the opposite side, not all is well with the “successful” side of society. Lana del Rey reveals it well. The excesses and extreme freedoms are equally harmful within.
With Gangsta rap, the author sees people who had no voice, were disenfranchised from traditional media, and worked hard to establish their own voices and get their own stories out.
Also, the author notes “He did, however, condemn another kind of poet who had “native genius” but abused his talent to subvert order and harmony.” I wonder though – “order and harmony” for whom? Order and harmony often have winners and losers. The losers do not consider it harmony. As exemplified by Lana del Rey, even the winners may not consider it harmony.
The author points out: “Instead, they experimented with strange and unearthly sounds to arouse the excitement of the audience.” Could this be because the narrow confines of music – as the winners have described it – limit full freedoms of speech and expression. Could it be that the narrow confines might purposefully be narrow to only allow a set of specific narratives which perpetuate the status quo?
I’m glad the article notes “Such a hermeneutic of suspicion might have us believe that the mousikoi’s governance of the theater was no more than an exercise of power for power’s sake and that their laws were simply a set of arbitrary rules designed to control the masses.” But the author notes “Thus, harmony—understood not just as the momentary agreement of musical notes but as a complex unity born out of opposition and contrast—sustains the universe. Such a notion of harmony formed the criterion not only for good music but for the very idea of justice itself, defined by Plato as the flourishing of diverse individuals within a unified social body.” The key error is that Plato has defined Justice (as the article notes.) I wonder whether the slaves of ancient Greece agreed there was justice? Finally, the author highlights a line about bringing “audiences into communion with divine reason” yet I highly doubt there was true communion when a third to half of society were slaves.
Sorry, I see I copied a wrong quote with respect to the letter of my reply but it should be clear anyway:
decadence produces drives that increase decadence ("causation"); decadence is a multi-front attack and all its facilitators contribute (not simply "correlation").
Well, that describes about every ranting grumpy grandpa unhappy with the younger generation. Seems a tad too generic and conservative to be worth anything.
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