Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5d ago
Again, the claim is superficially plausible as long as you don’t actually listen to the music in question. Yes, I’d be perfectly willing to believe that pop music had been reduced to an undifferentiated miasma of formulaic crap, except for when I actually listen to it that’s not the reality I encounter.
Like, I don’t read modern YA fiction, so if you made an effortful case to me that it’s all just formulaic indistinguishable garbage, I might be willing take you at face value because I don’t have any firsthand experience with the phenomenon you’re discussing. If someone who reads a lot of the books in question were to push back on your claim, though, I would have to take their claims seriously and actually investigate it myself, or else remain studiously neutral.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5d ago
Most people would call anything harder than Slipknot "death metal" and say it all sounds alike.
Oh, I’m intimately familiar with this. I cannot count the number of times I’ve had to explain (unsuccessfully, as if my words were harmlessly impacting a brick wall) that “death metal” and “screamo” are actual distinct genres of music, and not just interchangeable terms meaning “any music with unclean vocals.”
You are of course correct that it’s common for the average person, with a passive approach to music and zero music theory training, to lack the ability to discern somewhat subtle differences between pieces of unfamiliar music.
What I find bizarre is the claim that pop music used to be more differentiated and varied, but that it has recently started to all sound the same.
Yes, I’m aware that some YouTubers, courting the engagement of boomers (both literal and spiritual), have produced some videos claiming to demonstrate objectively that all modern pop music sounds the same. As someone who is an avid listener of music spanning several decades, though, I’m just not seeing (hearing?) it. As you’re getting at, it’s almost certainly just that most of the people commenting here have no interest in any music produced after their mid-20’s at the latest, and thus they have no ear for it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5d ago
I think I’d be annoyed by it if I had to hear it more than three times a day for any significant length of time. But I imagine that for anyone who isn’t spending a significant amount of daily time at malls, supermarkets, or other public locations where music is being piped in, one is unlikely to encounter the song that often every day.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5d ago
Yes, obviously millions of people unironically like the song, which is why it was such a massive hit at the time and remains a mainstay now. Retail workers just get sick of it because they have to hear it dozens of times every day for a couple of months; that’s enough to make any song annoying. It’s an objectively top-tier pop song, and uses interesting chord structures that are more typical of early-20th-century jazz-inflected Christmas music than they are of modern, more musically simple pop music.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5d ago
This is such a bizarre take to me. Can you provide some specific examples of songs that you think sound “exactly the same”? I think there’s plenty of differentiation among pop artists today - easily as much as there was during any previous era, and almost certainly more than in, say, the 1960’s.
I think this community suffers from a general inability to actually appreciate pop music, and apparently even to detect differences between different songs, artists, and sub-genres. This is a reflection of the limitations of the user base, not of these artists.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
When it comes to both queer artists and black artists, you’re talking about a specific subculture, which comes with shared slang, shared points of reference, and shared social hierarchies based on knowledge of in-group signifiers. A person who wishes to participate meaningfully in the queer subculture will want to be familiar with the musical artists that others within that subculture are listening to; this allows for participation in a larger cultural dialogue. Knowing about the new Chappell Roan song is helpful for participation in conversation, and can be a source of bonding with others. The same is also true of people who wish to consciously identify with the constellation of black subcultures and to acquire/demonstrate knowledge of the shibboleths of those cultures.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11d ago
These people hate you, they will say it to your face, and then you will ask for more.
To be clear, I don’t watch TV (I haven’t watched a new TV series since Game of Thrones ended) and I haven’t watched a full episode of Modern Family in probably over ten years. So I may be misremembering it somewhat, or maybe I just didn’t have the political consciousness I have now and I would notice everything you’re pointing out if I were to watch it now with clear eyes.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11d ago
Oh definitely. The first trans friend I had, I did not clock him, but that’s only because I assumed he was just a very unfortunate-looking and unfortunate-sounding woman. This was when trans was starting to get public attention but before it was everywhere; if I’d known then what I know now, I think my “trans alarm” would have gone off, but I agree that there are some women out there (“stone butch” lesbians, people with medical situations) who also risk setting off “trans alarms”.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11d ago
Hunter Schafer would be the one I think a lot of people would point to as the pinnacle of “passing trans”. I won’t go so far as to say that Schafer looks “obviously like a man”; rather, Schafer is in a weird sort of androgynous zone. Certainly not someone I would ever see as an attractive woman, but I can imagine not clocking Schafer if I passed him on the street.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11d ago
I’m not aware of any studies on it, but my experience is that every single time somebody tells me about a “passing” transwoman, I end up seeing the person and it’s obviously a man. Sure, it’s true in a sort of unfalsifiable way that there could be all of these undetectable transwomen walking around among us, but at that point you’ve reached a sort of Russell’s Teapot, “invisible dragon in the garage” level of claim.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
If a man can successfully pass as a woman then he should be allowed to use women's restroom, although it seems like saying we "allow" that is pretty meaningless in that case. If we can't tell that it's a man how could we stop him?
The problem here is that the percentage of MtF who “pass” is vanishingly low. It’s nearly always spectacularly easy to “clock” an MtF - especially once you hear the voice.
I’m actually agnostic about so-called “bathroom bills” myself, but however we end up resolving the issue, “an MtF can enter the women’s bathroom if nobody notices it’s an MtF” is not a solution, because it will lead to 98% of the same outcome as “no man can enter the women’s bathroom.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
They then impose a standard that many white people can meet, few black people can meet, and that they most likely wouldn't give a rat's arse about if it were un-correlated with race.
Do you genuinely believe that businesses do not have a preference for intelligent employees over non-intelligent employees? Like, all else being equal I can’t think of any reason (except maybe that smart employees are likely to expect/demand higher pay and better working conditions) to not value intelligence as a factor in hiring. If less black people are meeting that standard, that’s unfortunately on them.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
I’m pretty squarely within the “Griggs v. Duke Republicans” camp, if such a thing exists, and I agree with this basic analysis. I didn’t watch any of the RNC speeches, and would have been deeply embarrassed if I had. You are, of course, correct that the party, from Trump on down, is ashamed of my support and would be relieved to be able to fully jettison and disavow it in favor of “Enrique and Jamal”.
Like @Primaprimaprima, though, I wonder what you actually want me to do, in practical terms. I’ve already said that my long-term hope is that the Democrat Party can be remade into something like my image; I’ve joined Bluesky to try and add my small contribution to the conversations happening among a certain dissatisfied segment of the online center-left. If this slow conversion of smart liberals to the anti-Civil-Rights side is going to happen at all, though, it’s going to take a full generation or more. I’ll be lucky to see a true “platform shift” in my lifetime, if I’m being honest with myself. So while that’s happening, why shouldn’t I vote Republican?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
13d ago
Right, yes, again, there are perfectly legitimate counterarguments. I’m just saying that this would not be an antisemitic argument.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14d ago
Right, I agree that at this point Israel is where it is and needs to make the best of it. I guess I could imagine a potential future in which Israel in its current location becomes so untenable that the people there are forced to relocate to, I don’t know, the greater NYC metropolitan area. This seems unlikely, though, given the recent track record of Israeli foreign policy victories. All I’m saying is that it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to believe that the measures necessary for Israel to thrive in its current location are morally unacceptable, not worth the tradeoffs, etc., and for that to not be an anti-Semitic position.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14d ago
The present-day Germans think of themselves as the same people as the Germans from 100 years ago
This is actually more complicated than you are making it sound! The thorny questions of German “nationhood” were the source of many wars over the course of centuries. There was a dialect continuum of German (or German-adjacent) languages, but the extent to which these various peoples were culturally- and politically-unified was very much in dispute for a very long time. “German” identity in many ways had to be imposed from top-down. (And we can see the extent to which this process was not completely achieved by, for example, the existence of a separate Austrian state.) The same is equally true of “the French” as a people. Once you start digging into the specifics, the “unbroken chains of continuity” start to look more like frayed ropes held together by tape.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14d ago
What about the position that it’s perfectly fine and dandy for the Jews to have somewhere they can exist, but that it should be somewhere other than the Levant?
A great many peoples of the world currently reside somewhere other than where their primordial ancestors lived thousands of years ago. If every ethnic group on earth were welcome to pursue irredentist claims on territory that changed hands in the Iron Age, the planet would be consumed by wanton slaughter.
Let’s take, I don’t know, Poland. The current geographic boundaries of Poland are substantially different from the political boundaries of Polish-speaking people 300 years ago. The current borders were carved out of the former territory of states that were defeated in the World Wars, leading to the forced deportations of huge numbers of non-Poles from the newly-delineated territories. If I were to argue that this was a bad policy and that the Poles should have continued to occupy their previous borders, it would be risible to accuse me of hating Polish people, of not wanting Poles to exist, etc.
Similarly, Ashkenazi Jews have occupied several different territories throughout Europe since their ethnogenesis as a people. What if I say, “Why don’t you build your homeland in the old Pale Of Settlement instead? It’s more fertile, has more natural resources, more space, and is not in the middle a powder keg of religious hatred which will require you to be a nuclear-armed siege state for the rest of your national existence?” Is that anti-Semitic? Now, certainly there are plenty of totally valid rejoinders to such an argument - and to be clear, such an argument is not my position - but I don’t see how it’s questioning the Jewish people’s right to exist or to have their own territory. It’s a practical argument about what territory is realistically defensible for the Jews to carve out.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14d ago
It's not hard to come up with a fairly coherent principle that rationalises this pattern: if your homeland gets seized by another people, your people get a perpetual moral claim to reconquer it from the people that seized it, but not from anyone else that may further seize it from those people and thus has not perpetrated a direct injustice against you and yours
This is only coherent if you set the clock at a completely arbitrary cutoff and commit to ignoring the fact that nearly every slice of land on the planet has changed hands numerous times. The “Germans” are only considered a coherent people now, in hindsight, as a result of millennia of mutually-hostile civilizations slaughtering each other. Why do “the Germans” have a legitimate claim against “the Arabs”, but the Western Hunter-Gatherers of 20,000 years ago (themselves certainly not a unified ethnic group) do not have a permanent claim against any descendants of Neolithic Farmers and/or Proto-Indo-European pastoralists?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
16d ago
Have to wonder if OP meant Macau
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
16d ago
I’m still getting a feel for it, but to be honest early observations are very concerning. A lot of academics just spouting extremely simplistic leftist takes. I’m trying to see how my pushback is received. I’m sure I’ll have more observations later.
When I mentioned "the worship of the weak and ugly and broken" I was referring to Wokeness as a whole that elevates ugly and broken people.
The big point I’m trying to get across is that while ressentiment toward popular attractive normal white people is a major component of wokeness, it has not significantly impacted pop music during the time you’re claiming that it did. There were still tons of normal attractive white pop stars during this time, selling out arenas. For every Lizzo there’s a dozen thin and sexually normative men and women outselling her and outperforming her on the charts.
If anything, pop music is far more the exclusive domain of pretty people than it was in previous eras you’re pointing to; the collapse of “bands” as a viable commercial music model led to a marked decrease in the number of unattractive-but-musically-gifted pop musicians. In the 1970s and 80s, Billy Joel could become a successful popular musician, selling out arenas to young people. There is no equivalent whatsoever in the world of pop music today. Maybe Adele? But of course Adele was noted as an extreme exception at the time because it was so rare for unattractive people to become successful and marketable pop musicians - and it still is today.
Can you just acknowledge that Katy Perry's "persona" is not the same as Taylor Swift's? And that the latter is playing a straight archetype of popular white girl? Katy Perry is not going for that, she has her own image and look. I don't think Katy Perry plays the "popular girl next door" persona like Swift does. I don't think Perry goes for the "Prom Queen white girl vibe" like Swift embraces.
No, I do not acknowledge that, which is the whole source of our disagreement.
Firstly, on the subject of Katy Perry: I would submit her music video for “Teenage Dream” as a perfect encapsulation of the “popular and attractive white girl has sex with jocky white guy” archetype you’re pointing to. Katy Perry in her prime was every bit the gorgeous prom-queen type of woman you’re gesturing at; is it just the fact that she isn’t blonde and Germanic-looking responsible for you associating her with some other sort of image? I’m not sure what “archetype” you imagine her to be portraying.
Now, on to Taylor Swift. Which era of Swift’s career are we talking about? Like, the whole conceit of the Eras tour is based on the fact that her image, the thematic content of her music, her appearance, have all fluctuated dramatically throughout various junctures in her career. These fluctuations can roughly be sorted in terms of her different albums, or at least in clusters of albums.
The first stage of her career was her “country era”: her eponymous debut album (2006), Fearless (2008), and Speak Now (2010). On these albums she absolutely does not embody the “popular girl/prom queen” archetype; again, on her biggest hit from this era (“You Belong With Me”) she very explicitly places herself in contrast with this archetype. Her lyrical themes in this era are about vulnerable and wholesome teen romance, from the perspective of a sort of outsider. (Swift herself never finished high school, instead transferring to a homeschooling academy that could accommodate her extensive touring schedule.) Her Christian upbringing heavily influenced her lyrical content and image at this time. The “girl next door” archetype may be tentatively applied to her at this time, although it’s specifically the kind of girl who will expect you to marry her before she puts out. (So, certainly not the archetypal “prom queen”, who traditionally has a healthy sex life with her jock prom queen boyfriend.
Then you have her pop-transition era with Red (2012) and 1989 (2014). I will grant you that in this specific era, she’s more comfortably embodying the “hot popular girl with conventional interests and opinions common to mainstream white people” archetype. She also surrounded herself in public with a bunch of models and attractive female celebrities, nearly all of them white. If you were making your argument during this period of time, I would uncontroversially agree with you. Still, though, none of these albums include any swear words, so she’s still hanging onto her more reserved and conservative roots at this time.
Then on Reputation (2017) she becomes more jaded, self-conscious, and ambivalent about her fame, her public reputation (hence the album title), her romantic failures, etc. It’s the first Swift album with a swear word, and it also contains a ton of more “urban” musical influences. Its lyrical content contains a lot of personal introspection, discussion of her own personal foibles, and emotional depth. It is certainly not the work of someone who is blithely comfortable in her own skin and her own high-status normality, which is what the “prom queen” archetype is all about.
On Lover (2019) she’s somewhat back to the popular-girl side of her personality; it’s also the first Swift album containing political commentary, with the song “You Need To Calm Down” crudely attacking “homophobia”. Still, though, it’s decent ammunition for your claim that she’s leaning into the “popular girl” thing. (Other than on “Paper Rings”, my favorite song on the album.)
However, this archetype is totally abandoned on Folklore (2020) and Evermore (2020). This is where she begins her “crunchy art hoe” era. These albums have an almost Joni Mitchell style singer-songwriter vibe. They’re not anything that a prom queen would be capable of producing or identifying with. Everything from the production to Swift’s image during this time is very understated, very organic, very unpreposessing. (During this time, Swift put out a ton of videos of her at home with no makeup, in her pajamas, hanging out with her cats and writing music. This is the work of someone who wants to project a very different sort of “normality” than the popular girl/influencer type.)
Now with her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, she’s still pretty much in her artsy era, although of course the authenticity of it is somewhat complicated by the fact that she’s now a billionaire. And of course especially now that she’s dating Travis Kelce and is looking hotter than ever, that “popular girl with the jock boyfriend” is an unavoidable part of her public persona, since it’s actually uncontrovertibly true about her for the first time in her life. But it has not been a constant throughout her career, is not the primary reason for her popularity (since it wasn’t true during large portions of her success and popularity) and is only one element of her appeal. Popular girls can see themselves in Swift, but so can gawky PMC and academic types, and even conservative Christian purity types can vibe strongly with her first three albums. She’s a chameleon of sorts, not really an “archetype” or “persona” in the way you’re claiming. She’s many things to many people, and any attempt to reduce her to a particular archetype is going to run up against counterexamples from her own life and career, depending on where you want to point to.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
17d ago
So with Swift's fame the DR was right to pick up on it as a signal for a "return to normalcy"
Swift does represent a retreat of wokeness, a return to normalcy from the worship of the weak and ugly and broken.
These are your words! The very clear implication here is that Swift is a change from the prevailing trends. Therefore, pointing out that the overwhelmingly majority of pop stars during the entire era you’re referencing did not in fact workshop weakness and ugliness and brokenness, and did represent the exact same “persona” you’re claiming Swift does, is a pretty strong counterargument against the claim that Swift represents a meaningful deviation from the norm. Swift is just better at the “conventional attractive white girl” thing than the other women I named, because she can do everything they can do and also transcend it; she plays guitar, she writes her own lyrics (unlike most of her female contemporaries in pop music) and those lyrics have a depth and wit and vulnerability that the others’ don’t. Also no amount of dieting and careful skincare and application of style and makeup is going to make the average white women look like Katy Perry (who was blessed by genetics with some truly prodigious endowments) but it can make her look like Taylor Swift - who, as you noted, was not stunningly beautiful at the beginning of her career.
I of course agree with this, and that's why I relate the backlash to Swift's fandom as a ressentiment against the archetype of the conventionally attractive white girl. So I don't know why you are accusing me of inappropriately applying a political lens when you basically agree with me that backlash towards her fandom is driven by resentment towards Swift's white-coded attractiveness and persona.
You still have to explain why Swift is getting that backlash, and other comparable popstars do not get the same backlash, despite not doing any of the things you claimed it’s necessary to do - uglifying oneself, “worshipping weakness”, making a postmodern critique of femininity - to avoid backlash. Why are black women not furious at Katy Perry and Gwen Stefani and Kesha and etc. etc. etc. It’s not because those women made themselves ugly and unpopular and Swift didn’t. That was your original claim, and I believe I’ve conclusively demonstrated that it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. I think it’s difficult to identify precisely why Swift has become a lightning rod in the way that many other extremely similar figures have not, but I don’t think there’s any merit to the idea that Swift, unlike her contemporaries, is a “return” to something that was missing.
Let’s separate out the distinct claims being disputed, and see how much you and I actually disagree:
This is the specific claim of yours that I took issue with:
those pop stars play a persona that's basically a postmodern critique of their conventional attractiveness. They make themselves look disgusting as part of their act, maybe they even get an audience by appealing to ugly people through uglifying themselves and yet attaining fame and acclaim.
She doesn't appeal to her audience by making herself look or behave ugly, which does stand out among those other pop stars.
But it is you who, I believe, picked two very specific individuals who are helpful to your point, and ignored the vastly larger number of counterexamples which conflict with your narrative. Again, how many normal and conventionally-feminine pop stars from that era do I need to name - women who did not “make themselves look disgusting as part of their act”, nor did they “uglify” themselves. Do you have a single example of any of the women I named trying to downplay their attractiveness or femininity? In what sense are any of them attempting to glorify weakness, brokenness, etc.
All of this is, in my opinion, extremely separate from your (accurate) observation that Taylor Swift is explicitly associated with whiteness in a way that, as far as I’m aware, none of the other women I named are. Prior to her collaboration with rapper Kendrick Lamar on “Bad Blood”, I know there were arguments that she was intentionally cultivating whiteness by not collaborating with any non-white artists - something that most white female popstars (Katy Perry, Kesha, Gwen Stefani, Ellie Goulding, obviously Fergie, etc.) had done repeatedly. Many suspect that Swift’s collaboration with Kendrick was precisely calculated to deflect those accusations. Yet it hasn’t stopped her from being seen as a paragon of whiteness.
I think we can identify a few factors that contribute to why Swift’s whiteness is so remarked-upon. One obvious one is her roots in country music. Now, she was not raised in the South, was never working-class, and has no authentic connection to the culture of normal Southern white people; however, her decision to associate herself with that extremely white-coded (and, given what was true of who was purchasing country music albums at the time, this coding is 100% backed up by reality) genre solidified her whiteness very early. She also gained a huge amount of viral fame due to being accosted onstage by Kanye West - a very black man who embodies many negative black stereotypes - for explicitly racial reasons. (West accused Swift of “taking” a Grammy deserved by a black woman, Beyoncé.) So, she became a battleground for racial conflict even when she was quite young and nowhere near as famous or influential as she is now.
In addition, I would said another thing that’s very white about her is that, contrary to your claim, she is not portraying “the popular girl” in the same way that, say, Katy Perry was. Remember that one of Swift’s most famous early hits - “You Belong With Me” - sees Swift explicitly contrasting herself with the popular girls. (In the music video, her archnemesis and romantic competitor, whom she overcomes, is in fact the prom queen.) This would be far from the last time that Swift would lean into her own fallibility, awkwardness, vulnerability, and discomfort with popularity and fame. I could name songs like “Mean”, “Gorgeous” (where she says she’s going to go home alone to her cats), “Delicate”, “Paper Rings”, “Shake It Off”, etc.
I think that what Swift specifically is embodying, in the subconscious of at least some large segment of her fans is, “A mildly-brainy and introspective girl who found a way to push past her insecurities and stay one step ahead of the predatory world of male executives, without sacrificing the authentic core of who she is.” She’s basically “what would I do if I became famous” to a lot of these women: if they woke up tomorrow as a pretty famous girl, they would have a bunch of flings with hot famous (white) celebrities, get dumped because of a combination of their own personality flaws and the fact that Men Suck, and have to navigate all of the various cultural/low-key-racial tripwires thrown in front of them - just like PMC women have to do in their actual lives!
Swift is beautiful but in a very white way that doesn’t appeal to most black and brown guys - narrow hips, flat ass, comes off as sort of frigid and sexually-unconfident. I think she triggers a ton of the neuroses and insecurities of non-white women in this country; I’m hesitant to speculate on the deep psychological reasons why. I remember seeing a post on Tumblr by a black girl saying something like. “You say you like a thick girl with big titties and curves. Well, I have all of those, and I still know you’re going to end up falling for a white girl who has none of those things, because she makes you laugh.” And Taylor Swift, I think, embodies that in the minds of black women. So, since non-white women find Swift viscerally unappealing, who does that leave to enjoy Swift? White women. (And, to a lesser extent, Asian women.) Swift’s white-coding is as much a result of non-white women rejecting her as it is anything specific that Swift is doing to cultivate whiteness.
Swift and her fandom is materially different from those other pop-stars. Everyone has picked up on this.
And now you're saying that pop music in the 2010s was apolitical. I mean, seriously. No, pop-culture and pop stars and their fandoms, absolutely NONE of that is "incredibly apolitical."
The synthesis here is that Taylor Swift’s fandom is politicized/racialized in a way that none of the other popstars’ fandoms of the era were! There was nothing political or controversial about being a Katy Perry fan, or a Kelly Clarkson fan, or any of it. These were not figures with a political valence; their music and image appealed to normal people who don’t care particularly about politics. Obviously certain pop musicians made political noises outside of their music, and a few - P!nk and Lily Allen come to mind - even made political statements within their music. That was very far from the norm, though. And the reasons you presented for why Swift got politicized are, in my opinion, not supported by evidence and are not the actual reasons.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
17d ago
Taylor Swift's persona is "The Popular Girl", which all those other pop stars you mention try to subvert by dressing and acting in a way that openly defies conventional attractiveness or how a girl is supposed to behave. She doesn't appeal to her audience by making herself look or behave ugly, which does stand out among those other pop stars.
I feel like you didn’t actually engage with @Goodguy’s straightforwardly correct observation that 2000’s and 2010’s female popstars were still overwhelmingly conventionally-attractive women who unselfconsciously owned their heteronormatively female sex appeal. Katy Perry certainly never portrayed herself as ugly or weak or broken; she was every bit the bubbly popular girl. Ditto for Kesha, and Christina Aguilera, and Ariana Grande, and Shakira, and Fergie, and Camila Cabello, and Dua Lipa, and Ellie Goulding, and Gwen Stefani… like, I could go on and on. I honestly feel like you didn’t really pay very much attention to what was going on in pop music during that time, and are retroactively applying a political lens to something that was, to be frank, incredibly apolitical the vast majority of the time.
I just finished reading The Cider House Rules by John Irving. It’s a great bildungsroman — a coming-of-age novel — with a large and lovable cast of side characters and subplots. Irving has a wry sense of humor, and is a keen observer of human psychology. I appreciated the non-judgmental, philosophically nuanced way he treats his characters; this is not a plot-heavy, action-packed adventure story, but rather a cozy and thought-provoking journey through the minds of people making the best of highly suboptimal situations. Irving’s carefully-researched attention to detail lends the book authenticity and a “lived-in” vibe.
That being said, abortion is a central element of the story, including graphic descriptions of both the procedure and the reasons why women seek abortions. Although some of the characters are morally-conflicted about the practice, ultimately the book presents a persuasive case for the necessity of abortion access, even given that some characters avail themselves of it for selfish or bourgeois reasons. The author’s boomer-leftist/soft-socialist sympathies shine through at times, filtered through the perspectives of his point-of-view characters.
For those here who have strong pro-life beliefs, and/or those who would be made squeamish by frank and explicit depictions of abortion and dead fetuses, I would definitely not recommend this book. I have not yet watched the film adaptation (featuring, from what I understand, stellar performances by Michael Caine, Tobey Maguire, and in-her-prime Charlize Theron) but I gather that it tones down the graphic nature of the book somewhat.
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