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Pusillanimous subversion
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Readers, listeners and viewers are equally treated, not as well educated, with wide interests and concerns, which most are but primarily as consumers of goods and services. You open any paper and can’t escape fashion-instructions, food/restaurant-hints, wine tips, holiday-spots, latest gadgets, girlie-crap… Do not dare mention Pinot Noir!?
It is not only the entertainment zone but every aspect of living that philistinism, dumbing down and a growing lethargy to truth and knowledge are the norm. Popular culture has retreated from risk-taking, the hostility to science and soft-paddling on religion.
The growing contempt for objective truth and transmissible knowledge is the sign of a deeper malaise within society - a loss of trust in rational thought and a flight towards ‘social inclusion’, where this means, in effect, mob rule.
From Eurovision crap, via faux-artrock [Keiser Cheifs, The Futureheads, Bloc Party], retro-electro ‘Cold Wave’, chart-hits [a weekly comedy of errors!], to the Urban-pop the R&B has become and diluted rap aspires to, one is fuct if something genuine is required to be consumed.
Labels, tags, stereotyping - where would we be without them? Somewhere in the vicinity of discovering something we never knew we could like? But then, why would you gladden your life when you can binge-drink it into oblivion? Sickening shallowness of mass taste is staggering at this day when information is a rodent move away. Manipulated, no doubt.
Popular culture was more desirable in the bygone age because it wasn’t so readily available or so massively exploited.
Ivan Zao
23-3-2005