(02-24-2017, 05:20 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Yes, we disagree. The 3T in America was not "devoid" of culture, but often a tone of despair was evident. I think rap, punk, grunge and heavy metal are both ugly and negative in their message. It seems like it contributes to the mood of despair. I contrast them with an uplifting, melodious song from 1967 that came to my mind the other day. "Hey, 98.6 it's good to have you back again.... lovin' is the medicine that saved me...." The poor state of our TV contributes even more, perhaps. Violent and shallow. But disagree as we might about all that, I think it goes well beyond this. There is a low attitude toward education and the media in many segments of our culture, white and black and in between, young and old. Many people prefer to be uninformed. And most do not read books anymore. They may cruise and surf social media, but does that provide a suitable substitute? Philosophy and history, two of my favorite studies, are not so popular these days. There's the loneliness and social isolation I mentioned from the PBS report too. Our politics itself contributes too, of course. Negative, polarized, stalemated; it does not give much cause for hope from that quarter either. You don't see ads for heroin on TV, but lots of other drugs with lots of side effects are advertised to the hilt. And then there's the gun culture, of course. Makes suicide very handy.
Weimar culture was the outgrowth of turn of the 20th century culture, which was an epochal change of age in civilization. It guess it's no wonder that it took up where things left off since the 1890s-1910s era, which historians often agree was a turning point on a once in 500-year scale. And Europe had such a fertile foundation for vibrant culture to begin with going back thousands of years.
The article mentioned something of a resurgence of culture in Europe in the sixties. I guess the sixties in the United States did not have such an impact. 30 years later, the outgrowth of the sixties was limited to the new age and neo-pagan movements and other similar counter-cultural expressions like raves and multi-media computer arts. By the 3T, our culture had been already dumbed down to a remarkable degree. Concentration of media ownership was a major factor in this. Arguably, the anti-rational approach of the sixties itself contributed to a less vital intellectual life, along with the generally anti-intellectual, pragmatic, materialist mindset of America to begin with. So, there couldn't have been a 3T Weimar culture in the USA such as Germany had. The foundations just weren't there.
But the negative racist, nationalist currents of those times in Germany were hard to avoid, too. They had been building up for decades. Add the great depression, and they pushed the positive culture aside. Something like that has happened now in the USA, and perhaps in Europe too.
I have no info though about a mood of despair and shorter lifespans among Germans of middle age in the 1930s, such as we have in America today.
Well, yeah...except that also in 1967 you had a song called "The End" where the guy screamed about killing his father and raping his mother. The sixties weren't all sunshine and roses, not in reality nor in pop music. And in 1991, the year of grunge and rap, there was a song, popular enough to reach #2 on the Billboard charts, that sang "Right here, right now--there is no other place I wanna be...watching the world wake up from history." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwpjsToHzAE
Even rap and grunge could be very idealistic--more so than you give them credit for. Kurt Cobain spoke against apathy in his generation, as did L7--"When we pretend that we're dead, they can't hear a word we've said." [/url][url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTzhjjk9VoE]This song by Nas encourages youth to believe in themselves. "During your life, never stop dreaming. No one can take away your dreams." --Tupac Shakur.
But I know, the music was "ugly," so it doesn't matter. That is your personal opinion. If your music was so much better why didn't it change the world? Why did we have the malaise of the seventies, and Reaganism?
The second bolded I agree with. God, I don't want to see it, but I do.