He’s the One Who Likes All Our Pretty Songs

By in media/propaganda, music 1 Comment

Casey Chalk:

But who would accuse the favored bands of the last quarter-century of being truly innovative, of carving out new, uncharted territory? Most of them seem as artificial and intentionally mainstream as The Monkees. Does Maroon 5 even play their own instruments? And as much as I adore the Black Keys, a band that in its early years perfectly represented the frustrated, post-industrial tenor of Rust Belt Ohio, they are at their best when retreading, or modifying and improving, paths made by earlier blues rock musicians many years before. And they are self-aware and self-deprecating enough to make light of their wealth and mainstream fame.

But Creed, like many of the other post-grunge poser bands of the late 1990s—Nickelback, Puddle of Mudd, Staind—were simply jejune copycats of perhaps the last legitimately novel rock movement, the authentically counter-cultural grunge bands of the late 1980s and early 1990s, most of whom hailed from the Pacific Northwest.

If I were feeling like an ornery li’l cuss, I might argue that “the last legitimately novel rock movement” was actually the rap-metal hybrid generally known as nü-metal. In the late-80s and early-90s, there were a few cross-genre collaborations, like Run-DMC and Aerosmith, Anthrax and Public Enemy, and the Judgment Night soundtrack. Rage Against the Machine was probably the first band to make it big by combining elements of rap and rock, and given that they were basically Noam Chomsky’s politics set to music, they were widely acclaimed by music journalists. The same could not be said, to put it mildly, for those who followed in their wake around the turn of the century. Bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park and Hed PE were seen as the worst of both worlds. I have my theories about why this was so, but regardless, allowing that the whole debate over “originality” in such a mongrel beast as popular music is a fool’s errand to begin with, I think it’s still fair to say that the nü-metal bands were, if not original, certainly no less derivative than the punk/metal/alternative hybrid that we call grunge music. The fact that one style is glorified while the other is vilified tells you more about the agenda of the music journalists themselves, who often seem to suffer from sociology-envy, much to the detriment of their craft.

Which brings me to my real point, which is that Chalk is doing the same thing. He feels nostalgic for grunge music, and he wants to arrange a shotgun wedding between it and his national conservative/populist politics somehow. Grunge is vital because he sees it as a musical expression of the abandoned white working-class. If only they hadn’t been so hostile to organized religion, he sighs. Well, yes, that, combined with their predictable left-wing politics, is what makes this an exercise in fantastical narrative-crafting. Grunge was inextricably part of that first wave of political correctness in the early-90s and music journalism was right there with it. Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were just as insufferably snobbish and full of themselves as their descendants are today.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Only aspiring commissars want or expect their favorite artists to reflect their own opinions back to them. Most of us have long since made our peace with the fact that the majority of the people whom we pay to entertain us are abject morons. (I made the mistake years ago of reading Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, and my respect for the artists still hasn’t entirely recovered.) We wince when they share their vapid opinions on world events, and then get back to the important business of enjoying their acting, athleticism, or songwriting. It’s only when journalists in search of a narrative show up that we get these exercises in Procrustean plastic surgery. It’s fine, even laudatory, that Chalk loves grunge despite its inherent antipathy to his political ideology. The heart wants what it wants, and all that. That’s where it should end, though. Don’t try to reconcile the two and diminish them both in the process.

They Made Me Tap the Sign

By in editorial vigilantism, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

I warned them:

I’m sorry; I’ve tried to be lenient, but since you all can’t be trusted with responsibility, I will hereby be confiscating the Internet license of anyone caught conflating “tenet” with “tenant.” If this trend continues, I will add a whole new wing onto the correctional facility where I currently keep all those who misuse “begs the question.”

Well, I wouldn’t have guessed that my first big bust would be a kingpin like the Chronicle of Higher Education, but I can’t ignore this blatant challenge to my authority:

What a shame. I’ve browsed that website for years, but the law is the law.

Do Your Own Bit of Saving

By in books, the geist of the zeit 2 Comments

Sweet baby Buddha, Charles, I’m only a third of the way toward my complete Wodehouse collection! Don’t give them any more ideas! I get that this is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum, but irony and satire are feeble weapons against such literal-minded philistines.

I do wonder if this Dahl episode, like the Seuss episode of a couple years ago, represents a new front in the culture wars. Do we have to worry about the estates of unfashionable authors falling into the hands of woke dogmatists who then give their legal blessing for “sensitivity readers” to set about bowdlerizing the original works? Maybe we should start building our samizdat networks now, fellows.

I’m Hokey, You’re Hokey

By in fresh hell, language No Comments

But seriously, what is it with this infantile phrasing?

Well, yes, I suppose it is “OK” to be angry about capitalism, though if you’re a lifelong politician, i.e. unskilled labor, and “capitalism” has still seen fit to reward you with enough wealth to own three homes and avoid working for a living, it might be “stupid” to be angry about it, but I digress. Point is, why is this being framed as having permission to have feelings? Is this yet another instance of therapeutic jargon leaking out into the real world? What can we do to quarantine these freaks and their verbal pattycake-games?

Never Again Is What You Swore the Time Before

By in extraordinary popular delusions, gender 2 Comments

Theodore Dalrymple:

If we try to look on this episode with the eye of a future social historian, on the assumption (by no means certain) that western societies will someday come to their senses and that their social historians will be at least moderately sensible, what will we hypothesise? How to explain that societies that prided themselves on having overthrown superstition and on basing themselves to an unprecedented extent upon scientific enquiry, and that had a higher percentage of educated people than ever before in human history, nevertheless believed in the grossest absurdities? What could have possessed them?

I’m not much for prognostication. I’m content to just marvel at the absurd spectacle of daily events without trying to show how clever I am by guessing how it’s all going to turn out. However, I have been convinced for a while that the trans-cult is destined to fade into ignominy, and that once it does, all the invertebrate progressives who supported it are going to slink away and pretend they never had nothin’ to do with it, no sir. Now, as whistleblowers are followed by attorneys general, and even the Paper of Record begins tentatively pushing back against the pressure of activists, I feel even more confident in my opinion that the modern-day glass delusion is on its way out. What could have possessed them? Well, there are many circumstantial factors that could be cited — activists desperate for a new civil rights crusade, an individualist tendency in liberalism taken to its extreme, social contagion spread by new social media technologies — but, remember, it was only forty or so years ago that people convinced themselves that daycare centers were hotbeds of sexual abuse and Satanic rituals, and none of those factors played a role then. The question assumes that these episodes are the deviations requiring explanation. What if lunacy and irrationality are actually the default setting, and “normality” is the aberration that requires explanation?

Go, Bagehot, Go!

By in language No Comments

Isaac Waisberg:

Jacques Barzun (From Dawn to Decadence) on Walter Bagehot:

The first thing to know about him is how to pronounce his name. It is Badjet.

As one whose reading has always far outrun his hearing, this was useful, to have a mental sound file to go along with the text. I’ve never read Bagehot, nor heard him spoken of, so even though I’ve seen his name many times, it never “sounded” in my head. It might as well have been like when Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph for a few years. I see the particular arrangement of letters, I know to whom it refers, and that’s where it ends. (I had read Barzun’s book a long time ago, but obviously this never stuck with me.) Now, though, thanks to an old cartoon theme song, I feel confident I’ll never forget how to pronounce it. 🎶Doo-dee-doo-dee-DOO, it’s Walter Bagehot…🎶

What Brand of Skin Do You Occupy?

By in foolosophy 2 Comments

David Harsanyi:

According to surveys, upwards of 75 percent of adults with tattoos experience at least some remorse about their body art. One of the most common regrets is that they were too young when they got their tattoos. Of course, most of us engage in questionable and embarrassing behavior in our youth, but not all of us are branded with a lifelong pictorial reminder of it. The other most common reason cited for tattoo regret, tied with the first, is that there has been a personality change and the art no longer represents the person’s existence or worldview. Listen, once upon a time you thought Kurt Vonnegut wrote poignant novels and you pretended to enjoy and understand David Lynch movies. No one is pointing fingers here. If I hadn’t been a chicken when I was young, I’d probably have a portrait of Johnny Rotten tattooed on my chest right now. I’d also be desperately searching for a professional tattoo fixer — which is a real thing — to alter that image into Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. To be young is to be ridiculous, but to be walking around in your old age with the vestiges of youthful indiscretion must be torture.

Another leading cause of tattoo regret is that the art was poorly rendered and unprofessional. At some point over the past decade, it seems to me, many Americans began simply showing up at the closest tattoo “parlor” — tattooists work in “parlors” in much the same way that men frequent “gentlemen’s” clubs — and instructing the nice man with the extended earlobe to “do what you will.” The randomness of tattoo placement is becoming more noticeable. People just look messy. Their art looks increasingly amateurish. All I can think is, My God, you’re all going to regret this.

This again? Look, speaking from the ink-stained perspective of middle-age, there are plenty of things I regret more than my tattoos — moments of cowardice, terrible relationships, choices unexplored, things either said or left unsaid, and even those are all dissolved in the healing waters of amor fati. They all played a necessary role in bringing me to where I am, so they have to be accepted as part of the package. Regret? Torture? Ironically, this sounds more like the perspective of adolescence than adulthood, to be incapable of imagining anything worse than looking silly or feeling awkward. If the worst thing you have to worry about as a senior citizen is how your pectoral tattoo looks like a paintball splotch, well, you’ve probably lived a remarkably comfortable life.

Granted, there are plenty of particular tattoos that most would agree should never have left the realm of imagination; you can google “regrettable tattoos” to amuse yourself with other people’s terrible choices. Personally, I think all neck tattoos look horrible, to say nothing of ones on the face. If I were thirty years younger, I’d most likely see them as no big deal. My own preferences are similarly conditioned by the time when I came of age. But just for the sake of discussion, let’s imagine that one day, tattoos can be effortlessly applied, altered or removed, no different than clothing. You can have an elaborate back piece with full arm sleeves, or take it all off for a bare minimalist look. While I can imagine now how it would look if I had chosen a different color, design, or placement for any of my tattoos, I don’t think I would actually choose to alter any of them, even if some magical new technology did exist to make it possible. The reason being, the commitment is what made them meaningful to begin with. They represent my first attempts as an adult to reckon with what I, and life, were all about, independently of what my family or society in general told me. They represent those first conscious, tentative steps through doors that will close and never reopen. Of course those choices we make in late adolescence won’t entirely represent how we feel thirty years later. Of course they’re often heavily influenced by the maudlin romanticism of youth. But how long are we supposed to hover in suspended animation while trying to keep all options open? How, outside of the messy act of living and learning things the hard way, are we supposed to acquire the perspectives to even judge our embarrassing missteps? If anything, my advice to my younger self would be to lighten up and not take everything too seriously.

Superficial From Profundity

By in foolosophy, music No Comments

Charles C.W. Cooke:

Occasionally, I meet people who are unimpressed by Mozart. They insist that his music is “light” and “simple.” They are irritated by the myth-making around him. They’re so used to hearing about him that they’ve relegated him to being part of the wallpaper. I must confess that I’ve never understood this. In my view, Mozart isn’t a composer; he’s the composer. He’s the Shakespeare of the genre. He’s The One.

The writer Douglas Adams has an oft-repeated line that “Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.” I agree with Adams’s characterization of Beethoven, and I agree with his characterization of Bach. But he’s wrong about Mozart. Mozart doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be human, because Mozart barely was human. I forget who said that they didn’t believe in God but that Mozart made them wonder, but whomever it was, I understand it. The scale of Mozart’s talent is such that it’s almost impossible to accept at face value without wondering whether he was merely transcribing from somewhere else.

Cooke seems to have an Epicurean sensibility of his own, as evidenced by this and his previous appreciation of P.G. Wodehouse. I love Mozart and Wodehouse for the same reason: it’s a delight to watch virtuosos at play, especially when they’re so obviously enjoying themselves.

You Know They’re Going to Come for You and Drag Your Silly Name Into the Mud

By in atheism, history, the great awokening No Comments

Ed West:

The writer Peter Juul has identified three religious strands to the awokening. Most important is anti-racism, with whiteness and white supremacy ‘as the mystical and all-pervasive source of evil in the world’. Juul writes how ‘the concept of “white privilege” stands in for the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, complete with ritual confessions of sin that can never fully absolve a person of their fallen state’. White supremacy is a form of evil that explains all sorts of injustice, however logically implausible.

Then there is climate apocalypticism, which has more straightforward biblical undertones. I’m concerned about climate change — I’m fairly pessimistic about most things — but I agree that there is an obvious apocalyptic element to the movement, which is not backed up by the (admittedly worrying) scientific models.

Finally, there is gender identity, whereby someone’s ‘soul’ might be separate from their body. This last belief is the most recent of the strands, and in some ways the most extreme. It also feels the most obviously religious; the endless wrangling debates about whether someone has a female or male essence is perhaps the most theological our politics has got in years.

That this is proclaimed by people who otherwise declare that we ‘trust the science’, including members of the scientific establishment, makes it doubly strange (of course, what many people say about this is issue in public varies with what they say in private). But then, I suppose, it is only strange if you don’t appreciate that politics and religion are inherently linked.

I don’t know that history is merely “one damn thing after another.” More accurately, we could say, “This again? Are you kidding me?” History displays less imagination in rebooting old ideas than Hollywood does. Is it really so strange to consider that we may be moving back toward a political definition of atheism, as in ancient Rome, in which failure to pay obeisance to the official state cults can get one charged with impiety and exiled from professional life? Not to me. Luckily, the Epicurean injunction to “live unnoticed” was in my DNA from the beginning. I’ve been secretly heresying all my life.  And so I say, to all my newly-minted “atheist” friends:

The Real Work of Epicureanism

By in books, philosophy No Comments

The real work of Epicureanism, then, is cataloguing, organizing, and minding the store of our desires. Remember that Epicurus doesn’t think happiness results from mere subtraction of corrosive desires. We must keep the store stocked with necessary items, which means devoting the time and energy we once expended in corrosive arenas to cultivating the prudence, habits of mind, knowledge, virtuous dispositions, and close relationships with like-minded people that make tranquility possible for creatures like us.

— Emily A. Austin, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

I must admit, my ataraxia had been chronically ruffled by my inability to find a pleasurable book about Epicurus to read. I was being deprived of the literary companionship of one of my closest philosophical friends, you might say, and we know how much value Epicurus places on friendship. Thankfully, Austin’s book came along to calm my troubled waters and serve as a corrective to Catherine Wilson’s book of a few years ago. Austin is conversational without oversharing, funny without forcing it, and thankfully, her attempts to make Epicurean perspectives relevant to current issues are only lightly applied, so we are blessedly spared from hearing what “Epicurus” would have thought of Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, Greta Thunberg, or Elon Musk’s stewardship of Twitter. This is one of those rare books about philosophy which I eagerly looked forward to picking up again each night.

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