I had a Eureka Moment today. Thanks to some random person on youtube. Just some woman sitting in her back yard that gives Stoic-ess rants on society and culture.
She’s not trying to be anybody, influence. Just a regular person that has thoughts on life and society.
This one resonated with me more than anything else i"ve read or watched in a long time.
Something has been bugging me that I couldn’t put my fingers on. We could all make a loong list of things that are wrong with society, but the sum total of all these things still didn’t identify this floating sense of discontent. Yeah, we have immigration and border problems. We have corruption to the gills. We have woke America and the declining American Education system, but I think she went to the core of what is so usnettling.
We no longer have a national identity. Cultural anchors. Stories that we have in common.
In the late 30’s, Superman comics came out and it began the golden age of comic books. We had common super hero’s. We had a centralized media, radio and comic books that gave us all access to the same collective stories.
In the 70’s, when movies like Star Wars or Jaws came out. There was a buzz. Something exciting that had collective archetypical experiences we could all relate to. Common stories we all could relate to.
And then music. Despite growing up being a jazz fanatic, and college years investigating classical and different world traditions, the radio provided a common listening ground and the lyrics and music came into us.
I’d go to school after a new song came out and we would compete to see who could remember the lyrics of the newest song.
Rick Beato gets into it here on his new video “The New Dark Ages of Pop Music”
The institutions that gave us these common stories have all died. Corruption.
Hollywood, Record companies and radio. Jazz clubs died, the music districts died, and orchestra’s and opera struggle every year with budgets. Most the bookstores went out of business where you could go and flip thru books and media has bi-furcated over and over again.
If they produce new theater and musical theater, I’m out of the loop. And I haven’t had cable tv in years. I could feel my brain atrophying. But at one time we had televisions shows that we could talk about at the water cooler with a fellow employee. Does that exist today?
Sure, there are talented musicians. Probably more prodigies than ever existed at one time. There are video’s of kids that aren’t even ten years old that are prodigies on guitar, bass, drums, and difficult to keep up with all the classical prodigies and I follow the classical music channels. All the music sociologists like Beatos analysis and commentary are on the greatness of the past except when he plays the top ten songs on spotify just to show us how God awful the music is that they are producing.
We have lost collective stories and collective identity. Media is bi-furcated so there is no central repository that we all listen or watch. We have no super hero’s, no Joseph Campbell telling us the inner workings of the Jungian archetypes in the Star Wars trilogy because they all went woke.
Baseball and sports have been taken over by the banks. Every stadium in the USA is named after one of the corporate financial gods. Our hero’s are named Claude or Chatgpt and some form of divine discontent is sweeping the globe.
We’ve entered a cultural dark ages.