this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Post well known tunes into the megathread. Post fresh vibes individually.
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It was a pseudo-revival of mid-century folk music. It didn’t last because much of it didn’t have genuine proletarian roots like real folk music. It mimicked the aesthetic and sounds of folk music but none of the content. It never will when it’s just wealthy urbanites cosplaying as poor country bumpkins.
Folk music and related genres (like soul and country and blues) have all suffered for the same reason. Their class character is fake and purely aesthetic today. At least, for the super mainstream bands that make it on the Starbucks Spotify playlist.
There was a megathread a while back about Woody Guthrie. His music lasted because it captured a genuine aspect of working class America in a way that stomp clap hey never can. This Land Is Your Land was a political song. We don’t do that enough anymore, in the name of mass appeal and profit and merchandising. Even Bill Withers, who was merely center-left as far as I know, made music that mattered with lyrics opposing racism and war.
This pattern occurs with leftist/populist expression all the time. It’s heard by many for what it is, but for others it’s merely a catchy tune or a nice painting. I’ve mentioned the Surrealist art movement a few times here, but that’s another example. Salvador Dalí is ostensibly the face of the movement in the average person’s mind, but the Surrealists and he didn’t get along; he ultimately rejected their political message, believing that he could drop the political baggage and just focus on the abstract aesthetics of the movement. While I wouldn’t say his work was necessarily bad (he still applied his paranoiac critical method inspired by Freud) it didn’t have the same significance as Surrealists imo.
Dalí only dropped the leftist politics. He was at least a fascist sympathiser and painted hitler a couple of times. The whole ‘apolitical’ thing was on a spectrum of politically unaware liberalism to cryptofascism to overt fascism in denial.