Sounding Off: 21st Century Culture
David Glasper
People + Opinion : Sounding Off
What can we do to save ourselves from the misery and bathos of 21st century culture? Simple: hide in the past.
Popular culture in the 21st century is a desolate mire of vapid, moronic and endlessly-repeating crap. It is a wasteland of reality TV and cyclical revivals of music and fashion. No-one, it seems, has an original idea in their heads, and if they do there’s clearly not enough enthusiasm from the rest of us to allow it to survive.
Tired though they may be, the same clichés are endlessly dragged out, tarted up and foisted upon us again — possibly for the first time in as many as three years. How many separate ’80s revivals have there been in the last decade?
I think I know why this is — it’s the Internet. The Internet hasn’t made us free. It hasn’t given us the means to exchange all wisdom and a friendly shove down the path of enlightenment. It has given us an enormous forum for every wretched idea anybody ever had and hurled us into the pit of our own stupidity. It is a vast swirling pool of co-dependent idiocy, a place where Steven Fry getting stuck in a lift is news and David Hasselhoff is a folk-hero. It is nothing more than a retarded hive mind.
The Internet comes along and for the first time in human history, culture just groans to a halt. It can’t possibly be a coincidence. Nothing else — not wars, famines, revolutions, active systematic oppression — has ever managed to have the same effect: culture has always carried on regardless. But now we can spend our days exhaustively detailing the tedious minutiae of our lives on Twitter, we suddenly don’t give a toss any more.
Even if I’m quite wrong to blame the Internet, chief suspect though it may be, culture is clearly quite destitute at the moment, so the question is: what to do with ourselves until it sorts itself out? My solution has been to create my own elaborate fantasy world to retreat into. OK, so maybe ‘elaborate’ makes it sound a bit cleverer than it actually is: it’s a bit more sophisticated than the traditional ‘pretending to be Unity Mitford pretending to be a horse’ type business, but it’s still fairly simple. It basically involves ignoring any art, music or literature that I don’t find appealing and praying that it all goes away. I think this is the best way to deal with the revulsion I feel for contemporary culture and it saves me the trouble of having to do anything particularly complicated or difficult — like reinventing Art in my own image, for example.
Until it was discontinued, culture was happening all over the place and had been doing so since, well, more or less forever. This means that there’s a lot of it. An awful lot of it. So there’s no reason to take any notice at all of any of it if you don’t want to, because there’s always going to be something else to choose from.
I used to DJ a lot, and when I stopped and I realised that I no longer had to listen to whatever dismal odium was currently in vogue, I felt a blessed sense of relief. I started to only listen to the records that I wanted to listen to and I slowly began to realise that I was free.
If that sounds incredibly self-indulgent, that’s because it is. Culture is an indulgence. It’s perhaps the only area in our lives where we can afford to be entirely self-centred — so for God’s sake why not be?
It’s not just music either. You don’t have to accept anything you don’t like. For example, I tend not to stray this side of 1950 when it comes to books. I’ve found that I don’t like modern novels as much as older ones, so I don’t read them. Why on earth should I? And as there are far more good novels from before 1950 than I will ever be able to read in my lifetime, I will never need to read another modern one if I don’t feel like it.
There’s no reason to lazily accept third-rate recycled bosh because third-rate recycled bosh is readily available. Remember that you don’t have to settle for anything that doesn’t excite or engage you. Why should you when there are an almost limitless number of alternatives within reach?
So next time you find yourself confronted with something that you consider to be moithering toss, don’t just sit there and take it, go and find something better. The Internet’s a good place to start looking... 0
About The Author
David Glasper is Reviews Editor for Sound On Sound. He probably disapproves of whatever it is that you’re doing right now.
Home |
Search |
News |
Current Issue |
Digital Editions |
Articles |
Forum |
Subscribe |
Shop |
Readers Ads
Advertise |
Information |
Links |
Privacy Policy |
Support
In this article:
Have Your Say!
If you would like to air your views in this column, please submit your ideas (900 words max) by email or by post to the address at the foot of this screen. We pay for contributions we print in the magazine.
SOS Forum
Got a burning question to ask or an opinion to share? Join the community in the ever-popular SOS Forum
If you would like to air your views in this column, please submit your ideas (900 words max) by email or by post to the address at the foot of this screen. We pay for contributions we print in the magazine.
SOS Forum
Got a burning question to ask or an opinion to share? Join the community in the ever-popular SOS Forum
Mon 13 Feb 2012
Sound On Sound : Est. 1985