To finish the thought, I sometimes wake up, startled, when something like "Stop Making Sense" tells me how bored I am by everything else. It's like remembering you used to be a different person because someone shows you an old picture of yourself.
I think everything constricted in fast time during the Covid era. Yet creativity comes from a place of nonjudgement. Imagine a young child drawing something nice and the parent or teacher calls it unacceptable and throws it away. That's what they've done writ large
I can barely stand to listen to my friends who mindlessly repeat the narrative of the day. It’s the same mindless conversation. The same influencer reels on social. The people look alike and their homes look alike. People recording the same videos over and over. It’s boring and bizarre.
I look back and think there isn't a moment in my life that you could plunk me down into and I wouldn't do things differently. But I can't, so all I can do is realize that I am, right now, that person in the past that the future me wishes had been a better person.
Remember the first ‘big shot’ author that folded to the woke-scolds? Remember when Stephen King made a comment that quality was more important than other qualities in artmaking (I think the immendiate topic at hand was some affirmative action thingy, not enough diversity visible in movie awards that time or something.) When the scolds targeted him it took very little time before he folded and publicly apologized for his statement. Remember that? Given the regular violence of his output, and that his bad characters tend to parrot leftie stereotypes, it seemed odd that he’d be attacked so vehemently - until I remembered good ol’ classic revolutionary policies regarding art. Had to quit laughng after that thought.
I used to be an enthusiastic fan of King's horror novels, but I actually burned every copy of his books that I owned after he became a proud and hate-filled TDS proponent. It was quite a blaze.
I think people connect to it because it is true and beautiful. My favorite coverage of it is from the African-American community, often from folks old enough to remember when music was beautiful and people could say things that they meant.
The Left really is limiting creativity. The WoQaeda have deemed it unacceptable for actors and actresses to play roles that don’t align with their personal identities:
The woke scolds have also decided you’re not allowed to write outside your immediate experience. This not only stigmatizes imagination, it handcuffs writers and deters them from taking creative risks. Taken to its logical conclusion, fiction becomes impossible:
I hate Spotify but I have spotify which for me assists an endless scouring of the past. Sometimes I get lucky. Otis Redding died at 26 and, sure, you've heard all his big songs, but did you know that he never sang a wrong note. Died at 26. Like Keats. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know." I used to laugh at that line, but I don't laugh anymore. Any artist who takes the left seriously is permanently crippled because he has forgotten Rule Number One. The antidote is Chekov.
The US literary world had some of this tense, super-free, powerful energy in the 80s and 90s, and some ways into the early 2000s. WoQaeda-ism coming out of the universities mined the fields and so maimed and even killed many of our most talented and creative spirits. The ones who have had the sense and the wherewithal to remove themselves from this grim landscape, they're the ones to watch. What they're up to will be outside the realm of the universities, outside NY, and a galaxy beyond the radar of the mainstream press. They will also be studying, celebrating, and drawing upon the vast and magnificent literature we have from before the reign of this anti-human nonsense.
I knew what a disaster we had on our hands a few years ago when the mother of a teenager enrolled in a top-rated Silicon Valley public high school told me that in senior English the kids were reading graphic novels (graphic in both senses, I guess) about gender identity. Edith Wharton, Willa Cather? The mother hadn't heard of them, they weren't on any reading list.
Puritan origin + post-modernism + feminism + anti-intellectualism + emotional maturity of a 2-year old = today's (pop)-culture.
At least the part that is endlessly exposed to make it seem normal in all senses of normal.
I remember being in school. Every week another novel to read and write a report on. From 4th grade, in english as well as swedish. From 7th grade (unless you took Art or Shop instead) french or german as well.
Now, and for the past 20 years, more than one novel per semester is considered "a bit much"...
When I was in public high school, back in the good old, late-Cold War days, most of what we read were classics or books destined to become classics. However, one of the novels assigned, whose name is lost to me now, was an account of growing up in a ghetto in the 1960's (?) by a black author. Perhaps because we had been exposed to so much good writing over the years, all of us felt the book was, well, subpar. Maybe not so much the story itself, but the guy really was a lousy writer.
When we finished the book, each of us was expected to write or create something that expressed our impression of the novel. I distinctly remember the smartest kid in the class standing up and showing a poster board onto which he had glued an assortment of rubbish. Pretty much all of us felt that way, but this guy had the guts to announce that the book was dreck. He'd be a racist now, of course, maybe the teacher would even call the school cop on him or something.
Thanks for this. Back in the days, I considered homeschooling a bit fringy, but no more. If I had school-age kids now they'd be homeschooled, no question.
Butting in because I would like to ask your opinion on a hypothesis a friend of mine - an artist (drawring, painting) who's become a bricklayer - put forth when "The Phantom Menaced" premiered over here:
"Creative types need the constraint of lack of resources to actually be creative", was the gist of it. He went on to explain that with an abundance of resources, anyone could in principle just throw money at something to succeed.
Now, on to the actual point and question:
I've been pondering this since then, and have found it rings true again and again be it music, art, film or other. What if we - Occidentals of all sorts - as a civilisation have simply reached such a level of material abundance that we have lost the ingenuity that comes from want, lack and need and that this is what is behind the last 30-odd years of increasing corruption, degradation of kultur and the rest of it?
now they're on strike and are about to be replaced by AI, and nobody cares. The matrix will now produce the sanitized, pc entertainent without the constraints of creativity. 60 more avenger and 30 more star wars spinoffs, without those pesky human ideas getting in the way. Art is dead.
I've been asking myself since 2021 how things went so wrong across the NATO states, but esp the US. As an explanation this may sound mundane.
What happens to a society where a consciousness state of overt hate becomes the norm for a sizable minority? Isn't that what we're seeing? The left's hatred of conservatives has been going on for decades, but it's been ramping up steadily. It seemed to gradually escalate with each GOP President: Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2, Trump. It was helped along by msm news, talk shows, Hollywood stars, and so it became legitimate, justified, expected. It's like conservatives are the new reviled group deserving a kind of gulag, or worse.
A judge recently sentenced a man who drove his vehicle over a young Trump supporter, crushing his chest, then backed up over him again, crushing his skull. The judge sentenced the man to 5 years, saying apologetically, "I know you meant well, but you really shouldn't have killed him." He implied the man's action was understandable, but it went too far. The hate has metastasized into something else.
Feeling and expressing an extreme negative emotion on a daily basis, being affirmed for it, changes a society fundamentally. It seems inevitable now that much of civil society and hard-won basic human rights will rapidly disappear as 'power' becomes the only criterion of value.
In religious terms a society with such a hate-sated consciousness has succumbed to something like demonic influence. Is that so far-fetched when you see the daily effects of such routinized hate?
The seething hatred by the left for Christians and conservatives is horrifying. They see us as less than human. And, like other times when such dehumanization has occurred, they will murder us. No doubt in my mind. What's to stop them? Respect for human rights? The human rights that come specifically as an outgrowth from the Christian faith that they reject with hostility?
The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King won because he responded to firehouses and attack dogs by loving his neighbor and giving his tunic when they asked for his coat.
MLK and Gandhi were successful because they confronted flawed, but fundamentally decent societies. Both would've been beaten to a pulp in Lubjanka had they pulled their stunts in Stalin's USSR. Our leftist culture is not fundamentally decent. As Mr. Bray has pointed out, they are trying to sever the bonds between children and parents.
Ted Gioia writes in a similar vein at his "Honest Broker" Substack, which I recommend. He notes with increasing alarm that Americans are not listening to new music. We seem to be on a nostalgia kick. Oldies reign, especially on streaming but also in vinyl sales, which is returning to supremacy. It's weird. (Some good stuff is out there, believe it or not, but it isn't so easy to find. Gioia regularly posts his discoveries.)
I've been saying for a while to anyone who might listen that our job now is one of preservation, like the Irish monks during the Middle Ages, so that a later, possibly saner generation might rediscover the good stuff, revive it, and, one hopes, make something even better. We certainly can't leave the work of preservation to the universities, which appear hellbent on "decolonizing" and "deconstructing" everything beautiful and true.
The song "Once in a Lifetime" was popular when I was in basic training. In downtime in the barracks when it came on a radio playing on a bunk nearby we'd stop and look at each other singing these lyrics louder than the rest:
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful house”
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful wife”
And you may say to yourself, “My God! What have I done?”
...with that last line sung the loudest, accompanied by a hand chop down our arm, then a clunk in center of our forehead like in the music video. And we'd all laugh at how appropriate those verses were for our present circumstances.
My forever memory of that album, that song. David Byrne and Talking Heads, musical genius, thanks for reaching into the vault!
The truly heartbreaking degeneration of black music from the wonder days of Tamla Motown to the nasty brutish thing that is WAP-type rap....this is a parable of our times.
Agree. I'm so old I remember watching a neighbor's band rehearsing "Where Did Our Love Go?" while it was still a radio hit. Saxes, girl singers, the whole empanada. I was ten and it was a magical sight and sound.
Thank you, I did. I would add to your list of greats the entirety of Rubber Soul, a bona fide work of art that any schlub with $4 could own. Recorded sparely on four-track in 1965, you'd struggle to find a better sounding record, before or since, imo. I was one of perhaps millions of pre-teen boys whose DNA and lives were altered by this record, so I admit bias. I still have my original (US version) LP on vinyl.
Yes Rubber Soul was one of my first LP's (aged 14). Yes, the Beatles and the Stones were in my teenage DNA too. However, the only album that I was motivated to get on cd decades later was George Harrison's All Things Must Pass.
We all need a break from the relentless scolding and messaging. That's one thing that for me makes "red neck entertainment" just better at entertaining. Things like rodeos, air shows, car racing on a dirt track, tractor pulls, county fairs -- no overt politics, no message, it is what it is. Just people doing a fun thing. It's great.
In my later years, I find myself frequently retreating to writings from GK Chesterton when I am trying to make sense of the world and feeling like I don't belong anymore. I just came across this and think it is fitting for our time: “That is what makes life so splendid and so strange. We are in the wrong world. When I thought that was the right town, it bored me; when I knew it was wrong, I was happy. So the false optimism, the modern happiness, tires us because it tells us we fit into this world. The true happiness is that we don’t fit. We come from somewhere else.” from The Ballade of a Small Town from Tremendeous Trifles
Felt that way about so many actors, authors and musicians whose work I loved when I found out they were pro mandates and/or caved to men are women. Springsteen insisting on a vaxxed only audience, Joni Mitchell! Stephen King dropping his support of JK Rowling, not to mention all the climate scam nuts... ugh.
For me too. In high school in the early ‘80s, Byrne was something of an oblique revelation to me. His aesthetic, his stance, his pained irony helped start me writing. And helped set my tone. Which was set for many years: the genres I wrote in, etc. But eventually, somehow, he lost the sense that his irony was powerful because it always also implicated the self. For a long time now, to see his work or see him in interview, my reaction is: “He’s gotten comfortable, even with himself.”
All this however is familiar with so many artists/writers from the last century. There’s something that doesn’t quite fit. It’s not just aging.
I’ve spent years trying to figure it out, not just in relation to artists/writers, but old friends as well. The question is always: “How does this person not see what they are now siding with? How can they not see it?”
What I’ve realized is that the answers are different in every case. But there’s one answer that frequently fits. Namely: A lot of generally smart people, including very gifted artists, are incapable of thinking in political-theoretical terms. They relate to the people around them and conduct their careers in a generally “social” way without any sense of the political implications of this or that. Because they’ve never learned to think in such terms. Thus they’ve been able to go through the last couple decades STILL assuming that our Democrats or “liberals” are somehow “speaking truth to power”. They are blind to the massive realignments that have occurred. What “truth” is and what “power” might be at present are questions entirely beyond them.
What I’ve realized is how many otherwise intelligent-seeming Americans have probably *always* been blind to such things, having never learned to think in political terms. They’ve never learned, for instance, why utopia is impossible, or that the *polis* as such is a problem that needs constant thought and maintenance, or it falls. They’ve no sense what such a fall might look like. Our political order, for them, is something that basically grows on trees.
Worst tell of all is their indifference to the fact that free speech is being killed.
Sure, this answer doesn’t cover everyone. There are many who understand the stakes, but just keep mouthing along to protect their status. But I’m willing to bet the great majority of our professionals, from artists to lawyers to doctors to educators, are characterized by just this naivete. In the deep sense, they are apolitical. As in: Babes in cribs who can’t see what’s being done to the nursery.
David Byrne? He might be in similar intellectual swaddling. Why not?
I think it's much simpler. These "artists" and artists just wanted to be part of the shitty cool kids until they become a shitty cool kid and must do whatever is necessary to stay amongst that crowd.
It's clearly very difficult for musicians who become high celebrities to make original music, to "break new ground." Maybe Bono got interested in Africa and charity work because he realized U2 no longer had much to say or do.
To finish the thought, I sometimes wake up, startled, when something like "Stop Making Sense" tells me how bored I am by everything else. It's like remembering you used to be a different person because someone shows you an old picture of yourself.
I think everything constricted in fast time during the Covid era. Yet creativity comes from a place of nonjudgement. Imagine a young child drawing something nice and the parent or teacher calls it unacceptable and throws it away. That's what they've done writ large
I can barely stand to listen to my friends who mindlessly repeat the narrative of the day. It’s the same mindless conversation. The same influencer reels on social. The people look alike and their homes look alike. People recording the same videos over and over. It’s boring and bizarre.
Boxes made of ticky-tacky....
You lived a fairly decent life, then.
I look back and think there isn't a moment in my life that you could plunk me down into and I wouldn't do things differently. But I can't, so all I can do is realize that I am, right now, that person in the past that the future me wishes had been a better person.
I think what is considered “art” these days is largely propaganda. Thrown in our faces by people with no talent. I am so tired of ugly things.
"I am so tired of ugly things."
So tired.
Remember the first ‘big shot’ author that folded to the woke-scolds? Remember when Stephen King made a comment that quality was more important than other qualities in artmaking (I think the immendiate topic at hand was some affirmative action thingy, not enough diversity visible in movie awards that time or something.) When the scolds targeted him it took very little time before he folded and publicly apologized for his statement. Remember that? Given the regular violence of his output, and that his bad characters tend to parrot leftie stereotypes, it seemed odd that he’d be attacked so vehemently - until I remembered good ol’ classic revolutionary policies regarding art. Had to quit laughng after that thought.
I used to be an enthusiastic fan of King's horror novels, but I actually burned every copy of his books that I owned after he became a proud and hate-filled TDS proponent. It was quite a blaze.
Oliver Anthony's Rich Men north of Richmond is beautiful. Have you given it a listen?
I think people connect to it because it is true and beautiful. My favorite coverage of it is from the African-American community, often from folks old enough to remember when music was beautiful and people could say things that they meant.
The Left really is limiting creativity. The WoQaeda have deemed it unacceptable for actors and actresses to play roles that don’t align with their personal identities:
https://www.euphoricrecall.net/p/the-andrea-riseborough-race-storm
The woke scolds have also decided you’re not allowed to write outside your immediate experience. This not only stigmatizes imagination, it handcuffs writers and deters them from taking creative risks. Taken to its logical conclusion, fiction becomes impossible:
https://www.euphoricrecall.net/p/the-rewriting-of-roald-dahl
This has ruin in it, and nothing else.
I hate Spotify but I have spotify which for me assists an endless scouring of the past. Sometimes I get lucky. Otis Redding died at 26 and, sure, you've heard all his big songs, but did you know that he never sang a wrong note. Died at 26. Like Keats. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know." I used to laugh at that line, but I don't laugh anymore. Any artist who takes the left seriously is permanently crippled because he has forgotten Rule Number One. The antidote is Chekov.
WoQaeda!
Standing ovation from here - the neologism (?) is spot on.
Let's try meme-ifying it and spread it!
Touché
The US literary world had some of this tense, super-free, powerful energy in the 80s and 90s, and some ways into the early 2000s. WoQaeda-ism coming out of the universities mined the fields and so maimed and even killed many of our most talented and creative spirits. The ones who have had the sense and the wherewithal to remove themselves from this grim landscape, they're the ones to watch. What they're up to will be outside the realm of the universities, outside NY, and a galaxy beyond the radar of the mainstream press. They will also be studying, celebrating, and drawing upon the vast and magnificent literature we have from before the reign of this anti-human nonsense.
I knew what a disaster we had on our hands a few years ago when the mother of a teenager enrolled in a top-rated Silicon Valley public high school told me that in senior English the kids were reading graphic novels (graphic in both senses, I guess) about gender identity. Edith Wharton, Willa Cather? The mother hadn't heard of them, they weren't on any reading list.
Puritan origin + post-modernism + feminism + anti-intellectualism + emotional maturity of a 2-year old = today's (pop)-culture.
At least the part that is endlessly exposed to make it seem normal in all senses of normal.
I remember being in school. Every week another novel to read and write a report on. From 4th grade, in english as well as swedish. From 7th grade (unless you took Art or Shop instead) french or german as well.
Now, and for the past 20 years, more than one novel per semester is considered "a bit much"...
When I was in public high school, back in the good old, late-Cold War days, most of what we read were classics or books destined to become classics. However, one of the novels assigned, whose name is lost to me now, was an account of growing up in a ghetto in the 1960's (?) by a black author. Perhaps because we had been exposed to so much good writing over the years, all of us felt the book was, well, subpar. Maybe not so much the story itself, but the guy really was a lousy writer.
When we finished the book, each of us was expected to write or create something that expressed our impression of the novel. I distinctly remember the smartest kid in the class standing up and showing a poster board onto which he had glued an assortment of rubbish. Pretty much all of us felt that way, but this guy had the guts to announce that the book was dreck. He'd be a racist now, of course, maybe the teacher would even call the school cop on him or something.
Thanks for this. Back in the days, I considered homeschooling a bit fringy, but no more. If I had school-age kids now they'd be homeschooled, no question.
Butting in because I would like to ask your opinion on a hypothesis a friend of mine - an artist (drawring, painting) who's become a bricklayer - put forth when "The Phantom Menaced" premiered over here:
"Creative types need the constraint of lack of resources to actually be creative", was the gist of it. He went on to explain that with an abundance of resources, anyone could in principle just throw money at something to succeed.
Now, on to the actual point and question:
I've been pondering this since then, and have found it rings true again and again be it music, art, film or other. What if we - Occidentals of all sorts - as a civilisation have simply reached such a level of material abundance that we have lost the ingenuity that comes from want, lack and need and that this is what is behind the last 30-odd years of increasing corruption, degradation of kultur and the rest of it?
😢
WoQaeda! ❤️❤️❤️
now they're on strike and are about to be replaced by AI, and nobody cares. The matrix will now produce the sanitized, pc entertainent without the constraints of creativity. 60 more avenger and 30 more star wars spinoffs, without those pesky human ideas getting in the way. Art is dead.
AI Art = Zombie Treats
To the congenitally uncreative, stupidly literal mind, creativity seems like dangerous magic. They'd rather stamp it out than enjoy its fruits.
WoQuaeda!
I've been asking myself since 2021 how things went so wrong across the NATO states, but esp the US. As an explanation this may sound mundane.
What happens to a society where a consciousness state of overt hate becomes the norm for a sizable minority? Isn't that what we're seeing? The left's hatred of conservatives has been going on for decades, but it's been ramping up steadily. It seemed to gradually escalate with each GOP President: Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2, Trump. It was helped along by msm news, talk shows, Hollywood stars, and so it became legitimate, justified, expected. It's like conservatives are the new reviled group deserving a kind of gulag, or worse.
A judge recently sentenced a man who drove his vehicle over a young Trump supporter, crushing his chest, then backed up over him again, crushing his skull. The judge sentenced the man to 5 years, saying apologetically, "I know you meant well, but you really shouldn't have killed him." He implied the man's action was understandable, but it went too far. The hate has metastasized into something else.
Feeling and expressing an extreme negative emotion on a daily basis, being affirmed for it, changes a society fundamentally. It seems inevitable now that much of civil society and hard-won basic human rights will rapidly disappear as 'power' becomes the only criterion of value.
In religious terms a society with such a hate-sated consciousness has succumbed to something like demonic influence. Is that so far-fetched when you see the daily effects of such routinized hate?
Any dystopian outcome now seems possible.
The seething hatred by the left for Christians and conservatives is horrifying. They see us as less than human. And, like other times when such dehumanization has occurred, they will murder us. No doubt in my mind. What's to stop them? Respect for human rights? The human rights that come specifically as an outgrowth from the Christian faith that they reject with hostility?
Embrace it, brother!
The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King won because he responded to firehouses and attack dogs by loving his neighbor and giving his tunic when they asked for his coat.
MLK and Gandhi were successful because they confronted flawed, but fundamentally decent societies. Both would've been beaten to a pulp in Lubjanka had they pulled their stunts in Stalin's USSR. Our leftist culture is not fundamentally decent. As Mr. Bray has pointed out, they are trying to sever the bonds between children and parents.
I hear ya, about embracing it. We have no choice.
And God will win again (still).
Good art nourishes the soul, raises one up. Bad art destroys man.
Okay, this made a certain “old person” happy! Also, notice the people making music are actually happy, too. An amazing time, really.
Ted Gioia writes in a similar vein at his "Honest Broker" Substack, which I recommend. He notes with increasing alarm that Americans are not listening to new music. We seem to be on a nostalgia kick. Oldies reign, especially on streaming but also in vinyl sales, which is returning to supremacy. It's weird. (Some good stuff is out there, believe it or not, but it isn't so easy to find. Gioia regularly posts his discoveries.)
I've been saying for a while to anyone who might listen that our job now is one of preservation, like the Irish monks during the Middle Ages, so that a later, possibly saner generation might rediscover the good stuff, revive it, and, one hopes, make something even better. We certainly can't leave the work of preservation to the universities, which appear hellbent on "decolonizing" and "deconstructing" everything beautiful and true.
I think about this a lot. Libraries are discarding and destroying books at an accelerated rate, with the excuse that everything is online.
Repeating a quote “ghost dancing though old books.”
The song "Once in a Lifetime" was popular when I was in basic training. In downtime in the barracks when it came on a radio playing on a bunk nearby we'd stop and look at each other singing these lyrics louder than the rest:
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful house”
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful wife”
And you may say to yourself, “My God! What have I done?”
...with that last line sung the loudest, accompanied by a hand chop down our arm, then a clunk in center of our forehead like in the music video. And we'd all laugh at how appropriate those verses were for our present circumstances.
My forever memory of that album, that song. David Byrne and Talking Heads, musical genius, thanks for reaching into the vault!
I'm just glad there is one less book by Elizabeth Gilbert out there.
A fair point.
Silver lining...
Self-censorship is the end of creativity.
The truly heartbreaking degeneration of black music from the wonder days of Tamla Motown to the nasty brutish thing that is WAP-type rap....this is a parable of our times.
https://youtu.be/S5xAtsXb8Vs?si=Cwu7q6Ft3TYeNL-K
Agree. I'm so old I remember watching a neighbor's band rehearsing "Where Did Our Love Go?" while it was still a radio hit. Saxes, girl singers, the whole empanada. I was ten and it was a magical sight and sound.
You might find this article of mine interesting then: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/imagine-theres-no-muzak/
Thank you, I did. I would add to your list of greats the entirety of Rubber Soul, a bona fide work of art that any schlub with $4 could own. Recorded sparely on four-track in 1965, you'd struggle to find a better sounding record, before or since, imo. I was one of perhaps millions of pre-teen boys whose DNA and lives were altered by this record, so I admit bias. I still have my original (US version) LP on vinyl.
Yes Rubber Soul was one of my first LP's (aged 14). Yes, the Beatles and the Stones were in my teenage DNA too. However, the only album that I was motivated to get on cd decades later was George Harrison's All Things Must Pass.
Nice work.
We all need a break from the relentless scolding and messaging. That's one thing that for me makes "red neck entertainment" just better at entertaining. Things like rodeos, air shows, car racing on a dirt track, tractor pulls, county fairs -- no overt politics, no message, it is what it is. Just people doing a fun thing. It's great.
Yes! So much this!
In my later years, I find myself frequently retreating to writings from GK Chesterton when I am trying to make sense of the world and feeling like I don't belong anymore. I just came across this and think it is fitting for our time: “That is what makes life so splendid and so strange. We are in the wrong world. When I thought that was the right town, it bored me; when I knew it was wrong, I was happy. So the false optimism, the modern happiness, tires us because it tells us we fit into this world. The true happiness is that we don’t fit. We come from somewhere else.” from The Ballade of a Small Town from Tremendeous Trifles
Old person here. In the ‘80s, Byrne was more or less my spirit animal. Later, less so. Later still, meh.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/03/the-tragedy-of-david-byrne/
That's really sad to read.
Felt that way about so many actors, authors and musicians whose work I loved when I found out they were pro mandates and/or caved to men are women. Springsteen insisting on a vaxxed only audience, Joni Mitchell! Stephen King dropping his support of JK Rowling, not to mention all the climate scam nuts... ugh.
Conformist frauds. All of them.
Springsteen is yet another one who's choking on his mandates now.
For me too. In high school in the early ‘80s, Byrne was something of an oblique revelation to me. His aesthetic, his stance, his pained irony helped start me writing. And helped set my tone. Which was set for many years: the genres I wrote in, etc. But eventually, somehow, he lost the sense that his irony was powerful because it always also implicated the self. For a long time now, to see his work or see him in interview, my reaction is: “He’s gotten comfortable, even with himself.”
All this however is familiar with so many artists/writers from the last century. There’s something that doesn’t quite fit. It’s not just aging.
Re: "There’s something that doesn’t quite fit. It’s not just aging."
It's like some weird masochistic piety-worm got into their mind.
I’ve spent years trying to figure it out, not just in relation to artists/writers, but old friends as well. The question is always: “How does this person not see what they are now siding with? How can they not see it?”
What I’ve realized is that the answers are different in every case. But there’s one answer that frequently fits. Namely: A lot of generally smart people, including very gifted artists, are incapable of thinking in political-theoretical terms. They relate to the people around them and conduct their careers in a generally “social” way without any sense of the political implications of this or that. Because they’ve never learned to think in such terms. Thus they’ve been able to go through the last couple decades STILL assuming that our Democrats or “liberals” are somehow “speaking truth to power”. They are blind to the massive realignments that have occurred. What “truth” is and what “power” might be at present are questions entirely beyond them.
What I’ve realized is how many otherwise intelligent-seeming Americans have probably *always* been blind to such things, having never learned to think in political terms. They’ve never learned, for instance, why utopia is impossible, or that the *polis* as such is a problem that needs constant thought and maintenance, or it falls. They’ve no sense what such a fall might look like. Our political order, for them, is something that basically grows on trees.
Worst tell of all is their indifference to the fact that free speech is being killed.
Sure, this answer doesn’t cover everyone. There are many who understand the stakes, but just keep mouthing along to protect their status. But I’m willing to bet the great majority of our professionals, from artists to lawyers to doctors to educators, are characterized by just this naivete. In the deep sense, they are apolitical. As in: Babes in cribs who can’t see what’s being done to the nursery.
David Byrne? He might be in similar intellectual swaddling. Why not?
Thanks very much for this.
As you say, "Worst tell of all is their indifference to the fact that free speech is being killed."
I think it's much simpler. These "artists" and artists just wanted to be part of the shitty cool kids until they become a shitty cool kid and must do whatever is necessary to stay amongst that crowd.
Same with father rin law. He has literally become what he hated because the tribal labels reversed.
It's clearly very difficult for musicians who become high celebrities to make original music, to "break new ground." Maybe Bono got interested in Africa and charity work because he realized U2 no longer had much to say or do.
Yuck and so predictable.
I think if I were Elizabeth Gibson, I’d be apologizing for “Eat Pray Love” instead, but that’s just me.
Correct
Keep in mind we’re being deliberately demoralized.
It works