The arts in America are dying. In the 20th century, Americans defined the world’s popular culture, but the 21st century world has no need of America’s arts. Through technology transfer, the world entertains itself with knock offs like Bollywood and K-Pop. In the 20th century, Americans created a new art form in jazz and its derivatives, and turned Hollywood into the world’s dream factory. In the 21st century, African American music has collapsed into monotone misogyny, and digital sex (see Julie Bindel) is America’s real movie business. Americans are in the gutter, looking up at porn stars. And the rest of the world is barely looking, or listening, or reading at all. (...)
Everything is derivative and nostalgic. Nothing of note happened in painting or dance — or criticism, because the task of the American critic is to write obituaries and rewrite press releases. In music, Taylor Swift, once the Great White Hope of a dying industry, emitted a scrupulously bland album by committee. The jazz album of the year was, as it was last year, a studio off cut from John Coltrane, who died in 1967. The show, or what remained of it, was stolen by Lizzo, an obese but self-affirming squawker who, befitting an age of irony and multi-tasking, is the first person to twerk and play the flute at the same time. Meanwhile at the Alamo of high culture, 87-year-old John Williams marked the Tanglewood Festival’s 80th anniversary by perpetrating selections from Star Wars and Saving Private Ryan for an audience of equally geriatric and tasteless boomers.
In a dying culture, the best cases, like Wynton Marsalis and Bob Dylan in music, are curators of the Museum of American Greatness. The worst reflect a spiral into coarse nostalgia, as the needle wears out the groove: Stadium Country, Quentin Tarantino, the decay of fiction into self-help and affirmative action. The worst of all subordinate aesthetic values to political dogma, which is why it’s an offense to point out that the decline from Duke Ellington and Aretha Franklin to A$AP Rocky and Lizzo is a slide from civilization to barbarism.
by Dominic Green, The Spectator | Read more:
Image: MTV
[ed. See also: Who’s Got the Country Music Blues? (The American Conservative).]
Everything is derivative and nostalgic. Nothing of note happened in painting or dance — or criticism, because the task of the American critic is to write obituaries and rewrite press releases. In music, Taylor Swift, once the Great White Hope of a dying industry, emitted a scrupulously bland album by committee. The jazz album of the year was, as it was last year, a studio off cut from John Coltrane, who died in 1967. The show, or what remained of it, was stolen by Lizzo, an obese but self-affirming squawker who, befitting an age of irony and multi-tasking, is the first person to twerk and play the flute at the same time. Meanwhile at the Alamo of high culture, 87-year-old John Williams marked the Tanglewood Festival’s 80th anniversary by perpetrating selections from Star Wars and Saving Private Ryan for an audience of equally geriatric and tasteless boomers.In a dying culture, the best cases, like Wynton Marsalis and Bob Dylan in music, are curators of the Museum of American Greatness. The worst reflect a spiral into coarse nostalgia, as the needle wears out the groove: Stadium Country, Quentin Tarantino, the decay of fiction into self-help and affirmative action. The worst of all subordinate aesthetic values to political dogma, which is why it’s an offense to point out that the decline from Duke Ellington and Aretha Franklin to A$AP Rocky and Lizzo is a slide from civilization to barbarism.
by Dominic Green, The Spectator | Read more:
Image: MTV
[ed. See also: Who’s Got the Country Music Blues? (The American Conservative).]
