02-06-2022, 04:43 PM
(02-04-2022, 08:35 PM)galaxy Wrote: Replying to the first post...I think you've got your timings a little off. Rap is today's "new great dominating genre," its rise driven by Adaptives, just like rock in the 1940s and 1950s. It will remain dominant for decades. Trust me, if you spend any time around Homelanders you'll know - rap is by far the largest genre for the majority of them, regardless of race, class, or any other divisions. The rap dominance extends up to late Millennials too, maybe up to around 1998 or so. I'm not a fan of most rap, which makes me distinctly the odd one out among people my age.
Rap is cr@p, which should not surprise one when a Boomer says it.
All fads fade. I am predicting that people will end up with more time on their hands, and people will want music of deeper substance such as more musical lines or more philosophical lyrics. There's a damned-good reason for Bob Dylan winning a Nobel Prize in literature and the diction of the computer "Watson" being modeled after Bob Dylan's song lyrics.
Classical music largely disappeared from the marketplace because people have been obliged to work two jobs to make ends meet. That is likely to come to an end as people can satisfy their material needs more easily with fewer hours of work. We could of course have another economic meltdown that forces down costs of real estate (the real cause of the rise of the cost of living for the last 40 years) and the disappearance of bullsh!t jobs. We need more people doing genuine, productive work and not doing pretend-work that supports a parasitic elite of well-paid bureaucrats.
Quote:(At one time I would have progressed from that sentence about how I'm not a fan into a lengthy complaint about how music was forever declining and how the world is perpetually going to hell in a handbasket and I should prepare for a life of relentless slow and steady worsening of everything. I'm glad T4T led me away from that way of thinking.)
Cut the normal workweek from 40 to 32 or even 28 hours a week, and we are going to have much more leisure time to fill. If people are working more hours it is in second jobs just to meet rent because moderately-priced housing isn't being built. Yes, I know that it is far easier to make a profit in dealings with people flush with cash, and it is easier to build and sell one $480K house in a poor part of Michigan than it is to build and sell four houses that cost $120K. I recognize that the clientele is different and that foreclosures are far more common at the low end than at the high end. On the other hand, in the last 1T the emphasis was on housing near the low end for ownership.
We have gone from "you get what you pay for" to "you pay -- really pay, and consider yourself lucky for what you get". That reflects a society that has pushed monopoly and cartels because such maximize profit and thus elite gain as the ideal. That is very 3T. Rodeo Drive practically needs Watts to keep things truly exclusive.
Quote:(Though to be fair, for me, a person who has never experienced any turning other than late-3 and 4, expecting a life of relentless decline is a pretty reasonable conclusion to come to, even if it's not correct).
Nearly half of a car tire is headed backward with respect to the car, and nearly half is headed forward. The part heading backward is the part causing the car to go forward. Two turnings is half the cycle.
At my age I have seen a small part of the last completed 1T, and a whole 2T and 3T. Most likely I have seen most of the 4T. Of course I have known people who lived through a completed 1T, like my parents (born in the early 1930's) and the latter half of a 3T. My paternal grandparents (born in the early 1910's) lived through the latter half of the previous 3T (Roaring 'Twenties) -- but I asked my grandfather what the Roaring Twenties were like. In his time the Roaring Twenties meant that the rum-runners were using US 12 (now supplanted by Interstate 94), US 112 (Detroit to Elkhart, diverted later and renumbered US 12), US 20 (still connecting Chicago, South Bend, and Toledo), and US 6 (not quite reaching either Chicago or new York City, but the most direct route for all but about thirty miles all in all). US 6 and US 20 are of course largely supplanted by the Interstates. His parents must have told him that cities like Chicago and Detroit were modern-day equivalents of Sodom and Gomorrah. My paternal grandfather (1883-1966) obviously got to know the Gay Nineties , and my maternal grandmother (1891-1973) got to know most of them -- sort of them... because one missed out on a lot if one lived in a rural area.
As a Boomer I got my idea of the Roaring Twenties to a great extent from The Untouchables.
Relentless decline is predictable for a thoroughly-corrupt, inequitable society under incompetent leadership wither mad, despotic, or dictatorial leaders. When such is so, practically nothing can go right. This isn't the last 200 years of the Roman Empire. It could be that the cyclical nature of American history prevents any destructive trend from dominating everything else.
Quote:To add to the above, EDM is perhaps analogous to the big-band music of the late 1930s and early 1940s - as big-band was the transition between the jazz era and the rock era, EDM is the transition between the rock era and the rap era.
We shall see. Maybe tastes will be for music that more soothes and numbs than that causes people to think.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.