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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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it's way too fast for your grandparents, your parents, or even your older siblings [...] Electronic music existed well before this, but it wasn't anywhere near as belligerent, chaotic, or willing to subvert genre trends.

Moby made his 1000bpm track 30 years ago, and although he doesn't have any children at 58 he's old enough to be a grandfather. Pre electronic music there were people making experimental noise music using jackhammers.

The Camellia track sounds more developed but at base it's an iteration on the paradigm of making artificially intense music. It's not that it's too fast for the olds, it's that it's too fast full stop. There's a point of diminishing returns and there's a point beyond that of negative returns. Pushing the limits or indeed wilfully smashing them is, at this point, if not a stale idea then at least a very long way from radical and unfamiliar.

If you disagree that it's too fast you can increase the speed to 2x on YouTube, but I expect you'd agree it doesn't make it twice as good.

These days if you want to shock the olds you have to get a face tattoo and cut your dick off, and even that's just upping the ante on the kind of shit flinging, blood spilling, dick stroking, gender bending performance art that's been happening since the '60s. Radicalism just isn't radical anymore. It's been tried and where it hasn't been largely rejected the remainder has been assimilated.

that's just upping the ante on the kind of shit flinging, blood spilling, dick stroking, gender bending performance art that's been happening since the '60s

Screamin' Jay Hawkins from the 50s, Arthur Brown from the 60s, Alice Cooper in the 70s, The Cure etc. Goth sub-genre of New Wave in the 80s, Marilyn Manson in the 90s (and by then he to me was "seen it all before") - the beat goes on! I couldn't tell you who the most recent examples are since I'm too old to be following the Top 100 any more, I just sit in my rocking chair with my knitting and my Marsen Jules mp3s 😂

I disagree that it's too fast, and I would submit that making it 2x on YouTube doesn't make it better is an argument for it. This is music that is intended for that speed, not speed purely for speed's sake.

The point is that exploring our cultural frontiers diminishes the amount of territory left unexplored, and a lot of the charted territory has been marked as being of limited interest and value for more than a generation. We know the extremes are out there and most people choose the alternative not out of ignorance but out of preference.