One world, one operating system

[imomus]

I very much agree with what John Harris says in his article in today's Guardian, The Bland Play On. Selected highlights of the piece:

'Anglo-American popular music is among globalisation's most useful props. Never mind the nitpicking fixations with interview rhetoric and stylistic nuance that concern its hardcore enthusiasts - away from its home turf, mainstream music, whether it's metal, rap, teen-pop or indie-rock, cannot help but stand for a depressingly conservative set of values: conspicuous consumption, the primacy of the English language, the implicit acknowledgement that America is probably best.'



'Though the output of MTV, VH1 and the snowballing number of radio stations owned by Clear Channel might be dressed up in pop's customary language of diversity and individualism, the music they pump out is now standardised to the point of tedium.'

'In 2004, there are but a handful of international musical superstars: Beyoncé, 50 Cent, Justin Timberlake, Eminem, Norah Jones, Coldplay. To characterise the process behind their global success as top-down is something of an understatement. MTV may have initially been marketed with the superficially empowering slogan, "I want my MTV"; more recently, with billions gladly hooked up, it has used the flatly sinister, "One planet, one music". Those four words beg one question: who decides?'

'Two factors hardened pop into the hegemonic monolith it is today. Firstly, though the transatlantic cultural exchange brought pop a new artistic richness, it failed to repeat the trick elsewhere. With a few notable exceptions, continental Europe has long been barred from offsetting an ongoing deluge of Anglo-American imports with any lasting worldwide successes of its own; even the popular music of Africa, where the fusion of regional styles with western pop has long been inspirational, seems unable to snare our attention. And then there is the aforementioned domination of a once chaotic industry by those lumbering corporations. Whither such examples of creative autonomy as Chess, Tamla Motown, Island and Creation? Long since gobbled up, like so many of the western world's more interesting elements.'

'Underlying that picture is a tragic irony indeed: music founded in a spirit of spontaneity and self-expression ending up at the core of an ever-more standardised planet.'

Read the whole article...

Comments

above

[(Anonymous)]

I really hope you aren't harking back to some mythical golden age before MTV where pop music was pure and untainted. That Tamla Motown or Creation records were not as manipulative as the next person. Is there something inherently wrong with liking Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake?

Dominic

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think the point here is that success-tending-towards-monopoly changes everything. Humans are wonderful animals, but when their success threatens every other animal on the planet, we may want to ask ourselves questions about diversity, pluralism, conservation and so on. The same is true with 'the western way', 'western pop and rock' etc.

The swastika flag is shorthand, for me, for the idea that we must never forget that we ourselves are the problem: the very things that make us successful and great are also the things that threaten everybody else. Good and bad must combine in the symbol in a startling way to show this; it must become paradoxical and rather shocking. 'Oh, the new Nazis might be us!'

By becoming the correct way we become incorrect, and in fact a kind of plague. To bring historical memories of Nazism to the swastika symbol would detract from this meaning, because Nazism was a short-lived and radical regime which, although imperialistic, was too extreme to become any sort of human norm and was wiped out. It did not become 'the international system' or 'the free world' or 'the international community' or 'globalism'. It never achieved its empire. We did.

hedge-a-money

[(Anonymous)]

First of all, I'd have to say that the u.s. flag/swastika graphic (along with any and all likening authority figures to Hitler, fascists, etc.) is just laziness. The swastika is shorthand for evil in the same way the Mona Lisa is shorthand for culture, and they're about equally exhausted as icons. Anyone who is moved by the likening of the American flag to the swastika has apparently missed out on decades of trite, easily dispensed cultural criticism from Jello Biafra and all of his pals ("Frankenchrist"? ouch...biting...).

In terms of the meat of the argument, the crimes commited by the American army have nothing to do with American pop culture, and it is misleading to link the two. Torture is crime, and binding it to American cultural export is a poorly informed, reactionary gesture.

Of course American pop culture is, as it ever was, a force for conformity. It is the glue that holds high school crowds together--Britney is a sort of aural Tommy Hilfiger. I don't understand why this is anything new, or why this is a specifically American--or indeed contemporary--pattern. I mean, I am American and only know American pop culture, but is there any substantial advantage in having home-grown conformity? If you grew up in a small village in the 16th century in which that one insanely catchy Alpentanz tune is the only thing the minstrels will play at the annual ankle-slapping competition, how is that essentially different from Britney? If your horizon ends at the village borders, how does regional variation count as diversity? You go from cradle to grave only knowing a single music style. The village mindset will always be dominant, it is, I would argue, quintessentially human. It's just that the village is getting global. Independently minded folks should revel at the new scale of hegemony--the bigger it is, the less total it is--the more cracks there are in the totalizing veneer, the more opportunities there are for the development of communities of independent viewpoints.

By the by, how on earth does Motown represent an alternative viewpoint? They owned American pop music for about ten years.