Thanks for this post. I linked his Exiting Vampire Castle in the other thread. I think it's more important now than ever, even if a bit dated and flawed in parts.
This is the kind of post that has me wishing tierce would come out of commenting retirement.
Neither know nor care about music, but I think comparisons with massively influential people like the Beatles are flawed. The Beatles could only be so influential because they appeared at the peak of mass media: 3 tv channels in the US, and everyone tuning in every night. Since then every audience has fragmented massively, so no one can be as influential. (In proportional terms. In absolute terms of course you have Beyonce and Swift and k-poppers getting a billion views a video. But it's totally possible to go through life without being aware of their existence.)
There really isn't an "envisioning the future" marketing mode that takes us way in the future, at the moment, like a TomorrowLand.
Colonising Mars?
The whole UBI debate was stimulated in part by people saying things like "50% of jobs will be computerised in the next 40 years and what are we going to do about that - how do we run a post-work society?"
And it comes as no surprise that the person who wrote this
While 20th Century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st Century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn't feel like the future.
was clinically depressed and suicidal. The whole article seems to have been written to demonstrate what it feels like to have severe depression. Nothing seems real, nothing seems to have any interest or emotional significance, everything is flat and dull and gloomy and is only going to get worse.
In 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today.
Yes, mate, that's because in 1981 you were thirteen years old. But did it really feel so long since the 60s? Who was dominating the musical scene of 1981? Let's look at the top-selling artists...
Diana Ross! Dolly Parton! Barbra Streisand! Neil Diamond! JOHN LENNON, ffs.
Yes indeed, the Sixties were truly a long-forgotten era by 1981.
I wonder if my parents knew who the Beatles were beyond the things that were in the newspaper (e.g. they exist, one of them got shot)? Like if you played a Beatles song and a Byrds song from the same year, I don't think they would know the difference.
My mom at least could probably recognize a Monkees song because us kids used to watch the reruns of their show.
4 is true, but I'll bet money my parents have never heard of Taylor Swift. And I know for a fact I've never heard of any Chinese or Indian stars, or anyone lw mentions in the OP.
I have no idea about any of those either.
the 21st Century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn't feel like the future
...he wrote on his powerful desktop computing machine, connected by laser light channelled down a ribbon of ultra-pure optical glass to an encrypted global information network capable of accessing knowledge from around the world at the tap of a button.
...connected by laser light channelled down a ribbon of ultra-pure optical glass...
Except for the last mile which is run down a corroded copper wire installed in 1930.
There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges' Funhouse or Sly Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On will be released.
This sentence amazes me. Is he saying, "Of the tiny group of people for whom these 2 albums are exemplars of musical greatness, only a small percent believe another equally great album will come out next year." Maybe? But I'm sure there are many more people that think that Lemonade is the best album ever, and are excited to find out if anyone can top it.
3: Thing is, progress (in the West at least) has slowed on some measures. Maybe you can find more optimism in Chinese SF today, or Japanese from the 1980s?
When I was in my old office and the internet got back, we called to complain. The next several days there was a Verizon truck parked nearby pumping water out of the ground so they could get to the wiring.
Probably should just leave well enough alone, but 12 was written by an earlier version of me.
You can't step into the same peep twice.
13: there's plenty of optimism in Western SF today, come to that. But I don't think this guy is talking about SF, he is mostly talking about music and marketing.
Current Sci-Fi doesn't make me feel the same optimism as it did in the 70s. For example, after seeing the most-recent-but-one Star Wars movie, I didn't try a single time to make something move using only the power of my mind.
All the optimism in the world is presently squeezed into this thread in comments here. And mostly ajay's.
Two days people. Two days.
And Funhouse fucking rocked.
Where is the optimism of Harlan Ellison, or Thomas Disch, or Philip Dick?
No question you'll find fucktons of aspiration in Chinese marketing today.
This was science fiction with none of the traditional trappings of the genre, no spaceships, no ray guns: no anthropomorphic foes only the unraveling fabric of the corridor of time, along which malevolent entities would crawl, exploiting and expanding gaps and fissures in temporal continuity
AAAARGH. This is pure Atwoodery. ("It's not science fiction, science fiction is talking squid in outer space").
Yes, for sure you can't say that TIME TRAVEL is a traditional trapping of science fiction.
Except for the last mile which is run down a corroded copper wire installed in 1930.
Speak for yourself. Fibre to the premises, baby!
Have to agree with Ajay. If nothing else, Silicon Valley utopianism/dystopianism (depending on your point of view), kind of dominates the cultural discussion, even if not all that many people actually adhere to its apparent ideals, envisages a radically different future, where among other things we literally eat Soylent. Seasteading is almost a thing. Commercial manned space flight is almost a thing. Driverless cars may not almost be a thing, but an awful lot of people are invested in making us think they are.
Billionaires may live forever! Hooray!
And two major political issues right now are "should we use flying killer robots to assassinate terrorists" and "should we use enormous supercomputer farms and artificial intelligence to eavesdrop on computer-to-computer communications". Those may not be particularly cheerful debates to be having but you can hardly say that they're a sign that our culture is marked by "anachronism and inertia".
Like I said, this piece was written by someone with a serious and ultimately fatal mental illness and its conclusion that everything seems grimy and pointless and a bit shit nowadays should be seen through that lens.
His music claim sounds like someone who's discovered he's not 20 anymore. There are still big, ambitious albums. Kendrick Lamar's album being a recent example. (12's Lemonade is another good example.)
As a culture, I feel like we talk about the future all the time. Everyone's talking about AI like it's around the corner. The reason why UBI is in the news is that people are actively planning for a future when work is no longer necessary for most people. If you read /r/futurology, you would think we already know the exact shape of the future -- it's just a matter of waiting.
Yeah, 27 makes me think that Lemonade is sort of Beatlesesque in terms of the evolution from shameless pop to odd and interesting things going on while maintaining popularity. And also that I really need to buy the censored version for car listening probably now that the older two girls are obsessed with "Hold Up."
The OP is one of the things that seems like a universal belief. It's always been too late and we can't have the love and excitement we did when we were young and really it's not the media, it's us I'm pretty sure.
Silicon Valley utopianism/dystopianism (depending on your point of view), kind of dominates the cultural discussion
What is 'the cultural discussion'? Op-eds and the ashes of the lefty blogsphere? I think media markets are too fragmented for there to be a single artistic zeitgeist. So far as America has one it's presumably comic book movies, most of which are set essentially in the present.
I'm convinced that the next wave of great artists are currently 19 year-old animators fucking around on YouTube. They've defined a brand new genre using tools that basically didn't exist 10 years ago, and have developed a huge audience of youngsters who know there work with the same familiarity that my generation shares with regard to basic knowledge of 1980s TV.
Eventually, they will get a little older and move on from making statements about video games to making statements about politics. It won't necessarily be good lefty politics either, but that's another thing...
...everything seems grimy and pointless and a bit shit nowadays should be seen through that lens.
Two days, ajay. Two days.
And then there's Brexit.
31: When Trump is inaugurated, I'm sure I'm going to be out in public with big fat tears of grief rolling down my face, and I'm not even going to be embarrassed. But we need to screw our courage to the sticking place. Listen to the speech at the end of The Great Dictator, if that helps, or play Funhouse. Or Lemonade. Drink a big shot of whiskey. And then get ready to fight and win.
There was an ACT-UP activist who said something that always stuck in my head. *After we kick the shit out of this disease, I intend to kick the shit out of this system, so that it never happens again." He was literally dying of an incurable disease when he said that (I read it in his obituary). If he can have that kind of course, we can have a little bit of our own.
33 is one of the fifty exhortations a day I give myself. Feel free to ignore it.
31 Alright Funhouse it is. And I have off Friday's here. The only question is: bourbon or vodka? I was leaning towards the vodka for obvious reasons plus the bourbon's Maker's Mark and the last of the good stuff I'm likely to get my hands on for a while.
35 No, I'm going to try to take it to heart.
(I left the AC cranked in my apartment and usually it gets about 65 at the coldest. Found myself shivering and checked, it's fucking 62 in here. )
What is 'the cultural discussion'? Op-eds and the ashes of the lefty blogsphere? I think media markets are too fragmented for there to be a single artistic zeitgeist.
Sure, but I'm not really talking about the artistic zeitgeist (or at least,not only that). Our courts are filled with cases about whether gig economy workers are employees or entrepreneurs. Legislatures are hurrying to regulate autonomous cars and consumer and commercial drones. Adverts promise an end to the drudgery (!) of cooking and eating. CEOs of giant companies are forming taskforces on the ethics of AI. Our web browsers are the battlegrounds for ever escalating wars between adblockers and media companies trying to find a working business model in this future that couldn't be imagined in 1995 where people streaming themselves playing video games have larger audiences than television programmes and people get their news on what amounts to a community message board, or a chat app.
Oh, and, you know, climate change. It's increasingly apparent/inevitable that the very world on which we live is going to be radically different within our lifetimes.
Like I said, this piece was written by someone with a serious and ultimately fatal mental illness and its conclusion that everything seems grimy and pointless and a bit shit nowadays should be seen through that lens.
I heard this story in a lecture and I've never found any corroboration for it -- that Saul Bellow was asked by a reporter why these were the worst of times, and he replied that it was because these were the only times in which we were going to die.
38: I'm increasingly convinced that America peaked in the 90s and we are now on the downhill slope towards being just another country. In terms of economic opportunity millenials are increasingly fucked (the average millenial is $17k in debt), having bought into the promise of a college education as the ticket to success, but getting utterly screwed by the inflation of college costs and the outsourcing of jobs that used to be a ticket to the middle class.
Fisher was writing about the UK, though.
I wonder if my parents knew who the Beatles were beyond the things that were in the newspaper (e.g. they exist, one of them got shot)? Like if you played a Beatles song and a Byrds song from the same year, I don't think they would know the difference.
Your parents what, early eighties?
But as someone who at like 11 turned around and went wtf at the radio the first time "Twist and Shout" was played, the Beatles were always HARD. Much harder, progressive and bleeding edge than the folky and then country Byrds all the way to "Hey Jude" and "She Ain't Heavy" No not as hard as the Stooges or Led Zep, but those weren't pop either. Pop was still fucking Bobby Goldsboro and "Grandma's Hands" and Abba and still kinda is.
"The future is here, it is just not evenly distributed." said some cyberhippy.
It's ok. Sure there is dystopia, but as I have said there are so many opportunities for exoticism, and so much archived now available that there is no mass audience or mass product but dozens of niches open for each of us. As to whether there is much culture that is formally new, part of the point of modernism is the dissolution of the boundary between form and content, so an Iranian movie that follows Hitchcockian tropes feels new, and arguably is.
And quantity becomes quality.
I'm quite sure that I'm expected to quote a verse from B Movie:
The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can - even if it's only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment. The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse - or the man who always came to save America at the last moment - someone always came to save America at the last moment - especially in "B" movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan and it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at -like a "B" movie.
We're repeating this as very dark farce.
I had a friend who said in 1999: "What if this is the peak for the US? What if it's all downhill from here?" The fact that events have yet to prove him wrong still freaks me out.
43: To be fair, the first time was also farce.
they looked for people like John Wayne
As one spends more time flying into Omaha, one keeps noticing the billboard with John Wayne's picture and the caption "Don't much like quitters son." I guess trying to instill values in people via billboards is a tricky business and maybe nobody made the obvious lung cancer jokes until it was too late.
the first time was also farce
Maybe The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte should be our next reading group. Bob could take the lead.
Yes, but for that you want Re-Ron:
And through it all we closed our eyes, didn't we, at 33 and 1/3. Going down for the third time under the 3rd degree. Watching a third of all our fellow Americans breaking their backs for third-class citizenship. Taking home a third less on payday because of wild inflation, while thirty years after segregation was tried and banished from the nation, here it comes again: Discrimination!
And the world watching our reaction to the 3rd World because the stakes are the Third World War
It's the neutron bomb for Lebanon
He's the gladiator invader of Grenada!
It's millions more for El Salvador
and he's up to his 'keisters' with the Sandinistas!
Would we take Fritz without Grits?
We'd take Fritz the Cat
Would we take Jesse Jackson?
Hell, we'd take Michael Jackson!
only the unraveling fabric of the corridor of time, along which malevolent entities would crawl, exploiting and expanding gaps and fissures in temporal continuity
So Trump fanfic?
I mostly agree with ajay in this thread.
Perhaps that's influenced by the fact that I came to the great music of the 70s restrospectively, and I was aware of how helpful it was to be able to take advantage of the criticism which had identified albums with staying power. Raw Power is great, but I'm sure that I wouldn't have been a fan if I'd heard it when it came out. So I assume that it's always harder to identify the diamonds in the moment, without the benefit of time and hindsight.
I'm increasingly convinced that America peaked in the 90s and we are now on the downhill slope towards being just another country.
Eh, local maximum. Even if the US is becoming, "just another country" it doesn't mean that things will never be better than they were in 1999. Not that I'm an optimist, personally, but if I was forced to make a prediction I'd say that there are more futures in which things get better than ones in which they never get better.
In terms of economic opportunity millenials are increasingly fucked (the average millenial is $17k in debt), having bought into the promise of a college education as the ticket to success, but getting utterly screwed by the inflation of college costs and the outsourcing of jobs that used to be a ticket to the middle class.
On the first part of this, Drum did a post awhile back showing that, inflation-adjusted, college graduates have about the same debt they've always had. Counterintuitive, and maybe there's some caveat (e.g., it's private college grads), but I basically trust Drum on this.
On the latter part, 100% true.
There was a mini thing on twitter the other day (not sparked by Fisher, I don't think). I do kind of thing that music is in a fallow period at the moment.
I don't think it's the first time, and it won't be the last, and something really new and exciting will break through into the mainstream at some point.
But it feels to me like the last 10 years or so have largely been treading water. I don't think that's a function of me being old. I was pretty old 10 years ago and still hearing quite a lot of new and exciting things, and I still try to make the effort to read music reviews and blogs and follow up on new stuff and listen to new releases, and so on. I'm not wallowing in nostalgia.
It may be a function of fragmentation, or the way the music business is right now, or something else. I don't think people's basic creativity is poorer.
the outsourcing of jobs that used to be a ticket to the middle class.
Again, these manufacturing jobs have, in the main, not been outsourced, if by that you mean ripped from the hands of the worthy American Working Man and shipped overseas to the Heathen Chinee. They have been outsourced to technology. They have gone away altogether and they are not coming back.
I'm increasingly convinced that America peaked in the 90s and we are now on the downhill slope towards being just another country.
This seems to be conflating prowess in relative and absolute terms. The Netherlands used to be a world power, but they peaked in the late 17th century and are now "just another country". Still a nice place to live though. Much nicer than it was in 1690.
53 B-but they told me they're on a farm upstate.
53:Steel Production By Country By Year
US 1967 = 115/497 (world)
2015 = 105/1599 (China 804)
What that means is arguable, but it is a change.
If I were to give advice on understanding today's world and getting encouragement, I advise studying the last Gilded Age, say 1880-1914. This much wealth and technology concentrated and distributed does actually "trickle down" or leak in weird and uncontrollable ways. Shit gets all fucking centrifugal and hits the fan.
Really neat stuff abounds and finds funding, from Stravinsky to the Pankhursts, from Hull House to Sorel, from the Fabians to Joyce, from crazy health movements to Belgian Congo to Conrad writing it.
Best and worst of times, dizzying and terrifying and exciting. Those who have property or culture or places/loved ones to protect will be scared and lose, those with nothing to lose adventurers will travel and do great shit.
The young should just fucking default on obligations and attachments and split. Watched South Seas sailors the other, young couples who managed a quarter mill bought a sailboat and hit Tahiti. Think it over.
Sorry, Belgian Congo not really "neat" But you know what I mean.
And of course the Last Gilded Age, did not end well, or got better, depending on what time frame you choose, or where you were, or what you cared for. Life goes on, goddamit.
And maybe you always feel guilty about finding compensation or surviving in times of radical change.
All those fucking horses got shot. So many horses.
One cannot help but cosign 57 last.
Our next secretary of agriculture will be a horse.
Or Secretary Mr. Ed because I don't think Trump has ever read a book.
54: I'm really thinking in terms of the accessibility of the American dream. The whole strutting about the world stage with our cocks out thing is secondary.
53: I'm thinking less of jobs like manufacturing and more of ones like programming or engineering. Things that require a bit of education.
Points taken about economic realities and material progress.
I'd say in response that the post-embargo seventies were a kind of dismal time economically in the US and also the UK, but people still imagined a brighter future and definitely there was music that was anti-nostalgic then.
I would guess that part of the grimness and sameness in current depictions of the future is that our current problems are so clearly self-imposed rather than external. External problems, imagining hyperloops and tricorders as meaningful solutions kind of makes sense.
When we use our already miraculous devices in the aggregate to spread cat videos and fake news, it's harder to be optimistic about the next decade. Maybe the social effect of better communications is different in places that have been politically awful for all of living memory, so plausibly improvable, rather than in places getting visibly worse socially despite material advances by the truckload.
Maybe you can find more optimism in Chinese SF today, or Japanese from the 1980s?
I haven't read much Japanese SF, but I've read some Chinese, most particularly Cixin Liu's "Three Body Problem" trilogy. Don't want to go all spoilery but even though it ultimately has a sort-of-happy ending it's as depressing as all hell. Lots of whiz-bang future tech, though, and on-Earth and off-Earth mega-projects.
Very little SF is really about the future; it's about the present recast into the future. Why do think millennials and Gen Z got excited by The Hunger Games and the other "doomed kids" YA stuff? Why do you think the Baby Boomers were excited by Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke?
Cixin Liu's trilogy is full of mass surveillance, big infrastructure spending, useless politicians, crowding and other things that resonate with Chinese people.
64: Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke (Blish, Sturgeon) are too early for boomers, their peak readership being say 1945-1955, with the telling exception of Stranger in a Strange Land. Of course they were writing and read, rather as old comfort food.
Our generation identified itself SF-wise with Ellison, Dick, Disch, Delaney, Russ, Wilhelm, Zelazny, Herbert of course, Tolkien, the New Waves and avant garde...maybe more mystical, reflective, rebellious, narcissistic.
Forgot Silverberg and LeGuin
The change is obvious around 1967-1969, although there is overlap
I suppose you can ask if the SF is important for 10-15 yr-olds formative years, or 15-25 year olds critical years, the ones that vote for Hugos. I overwhelming identify with 65.2
Moon is a Harsh Mistress was fun. Dying Inside and Left Hand of Darkness were important
64 makes me think I really should read more Chinese SF. Three Body Problem obviously - any other recommendations?
You have a shortage of useless politicians?
Know nothing o the Chinese, but obviously if you want to understand Japanese SF, you avoid the texts and look at manga, which has since the late sixties been an acceptable and varied medium for serious writing by serious writers (as far as pop is serious)
There are cultural gaps to be overcome for those who think serious SF looks like Silverberg and LeGuin, a mix of genres and moods
Birdy Cephon Altera is a Federation agent chasing interplanetary criminals to the planet Earth. While in pursuit of one such criminal, she accidentally kills a high school boy named Tsutomu Senkawa. Fortunately for Tsutomu, there is a way to keep him alive. He ends up being merged into Birdy's body and must remain so until the repair of his body is complete.So, Tsutomu is stuck sharing a body with an attractive, strong, and impulsive space police agent while trying to keep his family and friends from finding out about Birdy. In the meantime, Birdy continues her investigation. Together, they take on a secretive group of evil aliens planning to perform experiments on the unsuspecting inhabitants of Earth.
Example chosen to avoid obvious late Tezuka or Akira
There was a famous assessment around 1900 comparing haiku to Pope and bunraku to Shakespeare that "the Japanese have no poetry" Ritchie is his book comes too damn close. Need a third term to compare anime to Stross and MacLeod. Scott Adams is decent, but he doesn't much compare text to image.
I'm wondering if the West's worship of language, of intricate form and polysemic complexity, of ever accumulating mountains of categories, and named distinctions, and newly created meaning is a symptom of racism and imperialism. And capitalism.
It's comorbid with science, which in turn is comorbid with state formation and weapons development.