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imomus
In my quotes for AFP about the Last King of Pop, I outlined the idea that social networking software might be joining with increasing Gini-gaps and the collapse of postmodernism's flattening of high and low culture to produce a new social stratification, or, rather, a return to a kind of social stratification not seen since the 1960s:"I think we're seeing the re-appearance of class and caste. Michael Jackson's fame comes from a cultural period -- postmodern global consumerism -- when the distinction between high and low collapsed. When Pierre Bourdieu surveyed French cultural tastes in the 1960s, he found that blue collar and white collar workers had completely different cultures -- classical music for the brain workers, cheap pop for the hand workers. A few decades later, postmodern consumer culture had leveled that, at least superficially: now, people with college degrees spoke about Michael Jackson "intelligently", people from lower class backgrounds spoke about him "passionately". But everybody spoke about him. Now that postmodernism is coming to an end, and now that narrowcasting and social networking limit our encounters with "the class other", I think we'll see different classes embracing different cultures again. Things will settle back into the kind of cultural landscape Bourdieu described in "Distinction"."
Another way to put this is to say that the only kings to exist in the future will be actual blue-blood kings (since monarchy seems to show no sign of going away) rather than self-proclaimed meritocratic entertainment world kings whose pomp, though it might have annoyed some, was also a way to say "anybody, from any background, can become a king". Calling yourself "the king of pop" was therefore, in a sense, a statement about social mobility, and a deconstruction of the blood claims of the aristocracy.Yesterday I happened to be reading a Guardian Media article about -- of all things -- Graham Norton, the camp BBC host. The article quoted BBC1 controller Jay Hunt calling a Norton show "popular with C2DE viewers who we traditionally struggle to bring to the channel". The journalist (Stuart Jeffries) added "I'm not actually sure what a C2DE viewer is".
Since I wasn't sure either, I looked the term up. The NRS social grade scale was devised in the 1930s and describes the British class system (except for aristocrats, mysteriously absent) in a coded way. The letters are assigned according to the occupation of the principal breadwinner of a household (ah, that's why the aristocrats aren't there!):A = Upper Middle Class: Higher managerial, administrative or professional (doctor, solicitor, barrister, accountant, company director)
B = Middle Class: Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional (teacher, nurse, police officer, probation officer, librarian, middle manager)
C1 = Lower Middle Class: Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional (junior manager, student, clerical/office workers, supervisors)
C2 = Skilled Working Class: Skilled manual workers (foreman, agricultural worker, plumber, bricklayer)
D = Working Class: Semi and unskilled manual workers (manual workers, shop worker, fisherman, apprentices)
E = Those at the lowest levels of subsistence: Casual or lowest grade workers, pensioners and others who depend on the state for their income (casual labourers, state pensioners)
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These categories can still describe the British class system fairly well -- and are still widely used by media and marketing people, despite the advent of rival systems from potato graphics to Mosaic geodemographics. You can use the NRS system to say things like "80% of Auto Trader readers are made up of social grade bracket B, C1 and C2" or "87% of Society Guardian readers are social grade ABC1 and 86% are educated to degree level or higher", and advertisers will know exactly who they have lined up in their sights. There's a fairly strong link between your NRS ranking and your cultural consumption patterns: "57% of Independent readers are deemed A or B on the NRS social grade, while just 11% of Sun readers, 14% of Daily Mirror readers, and 29% of Daily Mail and Daily Express readers occupy these socio-economic spaces," for instance.
But there's been a shift in the actual spread of the British population across the grid. The balance between ABC1s (middle class, white collar, broadsheet-reading) and C2DEs (working class, blue collar, tabloid-reading) has altered. The majority of British people are now ABC1s, whereas in the 1970s the middle classes would have been outweighed by C2DEs. This has happened through what we might call the "internationalisation of labour"; Britain doesn't really manufacture any more, so its working class has, in a sense, been outsourced to China (picture millions of Chinese in flat caps pigeon-fancying, supporting United, and watching Benny Hill). So it isn't so much that class has disappeared as that it's been internationalised. You have to travel a long way to see the people who smelt your steel now. They've been "hidden on the far side of the world".
Another reason that class has become less visible even as it's become more determinant is social networking. The internet has allowed us to filter our contact with others to such an extent that we're seldom likely to encounter anyone who thinks or feels significantly differently online -- unless we consciously seek them out. And why would we do that? To "challenge our own values"? Because "it's good for us"?
But perhaps the ultimate class gap today is between people who are and people who aren't on the internet. If you have internet access, you're part of a 15% global elite. Don't expect to encounter the other 85% online, your highness. They ain't here.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 10:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 10:35 am (UTC)"Interesting to note that China, seen by most analysts as a big growth market for Web technologies, has an Internet penetration of only 8.5%. Considering that great parts of China are rural, this isn't overly surprising."
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 10:57 am (UTC)"The Internet penetration rate reached 25.5% as of June 30, up from 22.6% at the end of last year. While this puts China above the global average of around 24%, China’s Internet penetration rate remains low compared to developed countries (the U.S., for example, has a penetration rate of around 75%)."
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 10:44 am (UTC)http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124363359881267523.html
I also read a thread on Feministing talking about the gap between the class of people who use Myspace and that of people who use Facebook, which quoted some white teenagers calling Myspace "ghetto" and that raised all kinds of hell in the comments section.
http://www.feministing.com/archives/016430.html
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 11:00 am (UTC)When I wrote for Wired, the piece they loved the most -- they even increased my salary because of it! -- was the one telling people (ahead of the curve; it's all a matter of timing) to delete their MySpace pages (http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/imomus/2006/04/70717)!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 12:11 pm (UTC)The problem is right there in the title -- "the not-so-hidden politics of class". Should the politics of class be hidden, or not? Are things only stigmatised when they're visible? Does making difference invisible make it go away? Do we want difference to go away? Are we distinguishing between "the bad difference" and "the good difference"? Can we banish "the bad difference" without banishing "the good difference"?
We've seen time and again how the identity politics movement of the 60s and 70s was about making class conflicts visible, bringing them to the surface, whereas the PC inheritors of those same conflicts, in the 80s and 90s, tended to want to hide and bury them by policing language and appearances. Boyd says:
"The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to everyone out there."
Why should it send warning signals? Isn't that exactly what we'd expect? That the digital world would reveal the same class segregation patterns as the meatspace world?
I totally agree with her that the internet is not classless, and may in fact be entrenching class attitudes rather than escaping them. To blame the internet, though, is to shoot the messenger.
Anyway, she continues:
"And if we think back to the language used by teens who use Facebook when talking about MySpace, we should be truly alarmed. Those who are from privileged backgrounds tend to be far more condescending towards those who are not than vice versa. Many of us in this room come from privileged worlds where we want to "help" those who are not well-off. Here is where a privilege-check is necessary. How often do our language and mannerisms reflect a problematic level of condescension? Perhaps we should look at our teens. They are certainly speaking in a manner that reveals distrust and condescension."
Now, a lot of class struggle -- not to mention education, foreign aid, progressive taxation, charity and activism -- is precisely about people from more privileged positions helping people from less. One class or group helping another is not necessarily "condescension", and "condescension" is not to be confused with mistrust. In classic Marxist theory, for instance, the intelligentsia can be "in league" with the proletariat, pressing their smarts into the service of the workers. Is that "condescending"? Should it stop? Difference exists, in cyberspace and in meatspace. To acknowledge it is not to shaft anyone. What matters is what you do with that.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 12:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 03:09 pm (UTC)Caught you summarising! LOL
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 02:57 pm (UTC)I think the big problem with class condescension is when, for example, we're talking about communism--a movement meant to put the workers in control of production--but the prodding is all coming from rich, intellectual revolutionaries, who also end up holding key party positions and all that good stuff. It's perfectly fine for the intelligentsia to come up with ideas ... that's part of their societal role. But we can't afford to be naive and shed all skepticism of their motives in the process of accepting these ideas.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 02:46 pm (UTC)You say that MJ was part of a generation in which the field was leveled, in which anybody could be a "king." But are you sure he actually proved this, or do you really mean to say that he assisted in the creation of an illusion that such a thing could happen? Because I'm not sure that this idea of a "postmodern collapse of high and low" had any actual bearing on real life conditions. It's more likely that what we're seeing is the burning away of a fog, the emergence of an era in which the system of class and the structures of power are more transparent.
About the internet: I agree with you that people who cannot access the internet in essence "do not exist," as we come to spend more time online. But rather than use this as a critique of the internet, I'd turn it around and ask, since when did these people "exist" for us before the internet? Not ever, really. And what you're ignoring is that the internet, where it is available, does bring together a great many people who didn't exist for one another previously (I'm thinking about international, and even lingual, boundaries here).
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 03:19 pm (UTC)And yes, the hidden people were hidden before the internet too. I'm not convinced that one encounters any sort of other on the internet. It's true that bulletin boards taught me that not everybody sees life the way I do (and how!), but I find now that befriending even a slightly different type of person on Facebook (I think of my approach to McGee last year) causes all sorts of trauma on both sides -- trauma that you somehow manage to contain during a real world relationship because of what might be called "the empathies of presence".
The internet is just a lot more specific about your worldview, it encourages you to give more away about yourself, and this "more" includes your cultural DNA, which potentially alienates allies. For instance, I can say "the empathies of presence" here and not feel like a wanker! Sitting with McGee in a cafe in 1988, there's no way I'd say, "You know, Alan, I'm really enjoying the empathies of presence we have going here!" You'd censor yourself, precisely to keep those empathies going.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 03:37 pm (UTC)I think the only promise of the internet is that we will have greater access--access to information, access to communication, access to others. It doesn't promise to hold our hands and lead us to these things. Compare this to the "real world," which promises access to none of these things at all, by any measure, and I think the benefits of the internet become clear. My inclination, by and large, whether I'm internetting or meatspacing, is to stick with what I know. But with the internet, I have access to tons of shit I don't know, as well. And every now and then, when I get a hankering, I can take advantage of that access.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 08:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 11:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-20 06:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-20 06:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-20 08:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 06:15 pm (UTC)David Cameron. QED.
Ironically, I *intend* to do a long blogpiece this weekend in which I write at length (among many other things) about the first day in my life I understood and suddenly developed a sense of class awareness, with all the resentments that resulted ...
I have on quite a few occasions read and posted to forums (and the occasional blog) dominated by people of varying shades of far-right, opinions wholly antithetical to my own. I found them gruesomely fascinating, though every time I've had to stop when I realised that these people are unconvertible, and (worse) that their views were being normalised for me, seeming like just any old political views I happened to disagree with, rather than something far more disturbing and frightening.
But what I must concede is that I've always - probably subconsciously - avoided parts of the internet dominated by people from the "urban" demographic (by which I mean the racially-mixed, London-centred part of Britain's underclass, a class whose growth at the expense of the traditional working class during and since Thatcherism is the elephant in Momus's room here, rather than the white, provincial part of the underclass ... despite having had probably more first-hand experience of the latter, and having relatives who teeter on the brink of it, I have many more cultural sympathies with the former because I like much of what they create musically and pop-culturally, whereas white-underclass tastes are probably the most alien to mine in the whole UK). When I look at forums discussing hip-hop, grime etc. it's pretty much always Dissensus and other places dominated by middle-class bloggers, the people Simon Reynolds once identified as the *other* core audience (apart from the racially and culturally-mixed part of the underclass) for that kind of British music. When I see comments which are fairly clearly from even that part of the underclass on YouTube, part of me is unsettled, doesn't really want to talk to them - it isn't on a par with the alienation I feel from the stereotypical (i.e. white, provincial underclass) Sun readers, but it's still there. And, considering the huge sympathy I have for what the urban underclass creates culturally, and how it can hybridise multiple sources to do something that couldn't have happened anywhere else (which is how so much of the best British pop from the Beatles on has come about) that does unsettle me.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 06:48 pm (UTC)"w8 r u being agest now as well as sexiest just because im younger dan u doesnt mean i cant share my opinion and there is no such thing as harmless humour when ur talking bout 1 type of person being superior to other and i cant talk like a colour u idiot o and dont comment on my profile cause i dont want ur filth on my page!"
Allow it!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 07:00 pm (UTC)I suppose I just want to relate to everyone whose music I like and get frustrated when I don't. It's a natural yearning - the 60s generation felt it and managed to get a lot of very powerful music out of their internal turmoil. But then what world *am* I part of? Because my mother was educated to a much greater extent than any of my relatives I always felt alienated from my family ... how many people are there who even have relatives who are teetering on the brink of the underclass but who themselves were regularly taken to classical concerts as children? (which experience is the epicentre of the blog epic I've got in my head.) My ambivalent background may *theoretically* leave you at ease with everyone, by giving you a bit of everything, but in practice it can easily leave you at ease with no-one. That's the root of my alienation from the society I'm in - it's too tribalistically class-based for people like me to find a clear place for themselves.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 08:51 pm (UTC)I think I'm also going to continue this class theme tomorrow, specifically with a piece about how different parts of Berlin with different class profiles evoke different selves in me, different sets of attitudes.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 09:30 pm (UTC)I don't think the situation in my family is in any way unusual in the UK - a lot of families became divided, with siblings becoming tribalistically hostile to each other, as a result of the expansion of educational opportunities (but in practice only to *some* of those who had been poor, not to all) after 1945. It was a key post-war phenomenon, especially in the world my mother's family lived in - the upper working class or "respectable working class", a social axis which would itself be torn apart by Thatcherism, with those who had achieved academic and/or social advancement joining the middle class and those who hadn't slipping back to the new underclass.
I've witnessed a lot of this first-hand. In countless families one sibling (often, as in my mother's case, the eldest) was educated to the age of 21, the others typically went to low-horizon secondary moderns and left at 15, when you could, on the assumption that they would still have low-skilled jobs for life which would in fact be gone within 20 years. So if there's one part of class politics I'm particularly interested in it's where families were split by the expansion of opportunity after the war, which did much good for many (and was *far* better than the Thatcher settlement which supplanted it) but created huge tensions *within* the old working class ... we all tend to be most interested in what has divided our own families, if anything has.
Re: today's word:
Date: 2009-07-18 03:11 pm (UTC)A lot of people who do working class jobs (plumbers, electricians, contractors, etc) would consider themselves middle class in terms of how they can afford to live from year to year. In fact, it seems that much of the time, when Americans talk about their own class, they'll shift between "middle" and "working" depending on the tone they want to create. In this way, "middle" is often a stand-in for "normal" and "working" plays somewhere along the lines of "idiosyncratic," as in the case of growing up with divorced parents or something like that.
Realistically, I'd be inclined to agree that American class is as complicated as British class, when we're talking about objective living conditions. But Americans are far less likely to draw those distinctions themselves, preferring to lump themselves into the often interchangeable categories of "middle" or "working" class.
Re: today's word:
Date: 2009-07-18 03:52 pm (UTC)The US cares absolutely nothing about family background, history, etc, nor does it care much about any kind-of cultural education. You could be of noble blood back in the old country, have centuries of worthy family culture and history, etc. What does it all mean in the US? Nothing if you don't have 1) the money to back it up or 2) the high flyng Ivy League degree to wave around at parties.
So ... the British chart probably wouldn't reflect American tastes as much re: class. Cultural tastes in general mean nothing in the US since you're basically a "fuckin homo" if you're into anything other than football or cars.
Re: today's word:
Date: 2009-07-18 05:57 pm (UTC)I do tend to feel that the worst mistake the British babyboomers made was to regard the US as their model for a less class-bound society, rather than (say) Scandinavia. Obama obviously proves what can still be possible there, but never forget how and why Bush II was able to become president in the first place ... the US has many virtues, but Obama/Cameron, for all that it would reinforce a sense of the old British elite as unkillable if they're smart enough to know how to rebrand themselves, wouldn't really bring back 1961. That naive yearning we used to have here could not be recovered, partially because pop culture is now so omnipresent and partially because we all know too much now to be hysterically carried away by one leader (rather than regard him as A Good Thing compared to all the alternatives) in the way we did with JFK (probably more so in Britain, among the nascent Beatles generation, than in the US itself).
Re: today's word:
Date: 2009-07-18 07:59 pm (UTC)Despite the delusion that America is a classless society, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy how rich a person will be in life based on how rich his parents are. In fact, America has significantly *less* social mobility than countries such as Sweden and Germany.
Of course, that's "just" economic class. The social class indicators are just as real. Here's a great article referencing a great book on the subject:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/class-system
Re: today's word:
Date: 2009-07-18 08:08 pm (UTC)Re: today's word:
Date: 2009-07-18 09:24 pm (UTC)It's relevant to Britain because, unfortunately, a lot of people in this country fell for the delusion that the best and most complete escape from the class-bound dregs-of-empire Britain of the 1950s was in the US. If only Elvis and Buddy Holly and Little Richard had been Swedish ... or if *something* had come from Scandinavia which had captivated so many!
Re: today's word:
Date: 2009-07-19 12:05 am (UTC)Re: today's word:
Date: 2009-07-19 12:37 am (UTC)This led to hilarious spectacles like the Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, aristocrat, calling Barack Obama, of a mixed-race poor family, an "elitist" during the 2008 election season. A rothschild. No joke. That was when I knew the dialogue of class in America was incomprehensibly twisted.
Re: today's word:
Date: 2009-07-19 12:50 am (UTC)Annual income, the rest of the time, is the defining feature of social class in America. Look, for example, at how the democrats were able to cut right through the GOP claims that Obama was elitist, by simply mentioning that, while Obama owned one home in Chicago and a modest family vehicle, McCain owned something like 8 or 10 homes and a slew of luxury automobiles. They tried to turn Obama into an "elitist snob," and of course that was always going to work for the hardcore GOP members, but I think it actually ended up backfiring terribly. So I think that speaks even more to the fact that class in America is tied to demonstrable wealth. With Kerry, the "elitist" tag stuck, because he really was a terribly, ridiculously rich guy, going up against a less terribly, ridiculously rich sitting president. But there was no demonstrable way they could do the same with Obama, since McCain is married to a beer distribution heiress.
Re: today's word:
Date: 2009-07-19 01:06 am (UTC)I think you're right though. Now, there's co-ops and clubs here in NYC that I couldn't possibly join regardless of how much money I had in the bank, I'm too gay and my partner's too Jewish, but it's increasingly difficult to maintain that kind of thing in today's world. It's just less and less relevant, so eventually you get a painstakingly exclusive little club or co-op where everybody ages and dies in it and no new people come in, as their own offspring end up going elsewhere to have fun. I give you modern WASP culture in general.
Re: today's word:
Date: 2009-07-19 01:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 05:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 05:55 pm (UTC)One thing that almost never gets highlighted, though, is how popular culture in the UK is made by Oxbridge executives. So basically you have Oxbridge types making this stuff and Oxbridge types commenting "ironically" on it, and non-Oxbridge types both performing on and watching it. A class model for a reality TV show in the UK would look like this:
A: Devisers and producers of show, corporate execs, public broadcasting commissioners.
B: Administrators, camera, sound and lighting crew, production staff, editors.
C1: Accountants, ancillary personnel.
C2: Carpenters building set, painters, janitors at TV centre
D: People appearing on show as themselves, people out there watching it.
E: Hungry homeless people watching show wrapped in blankets, noses pressed to the glass of department store windows.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 06:03 pm (UTC)Yes - what I think the poster is saying is that this particular po-mo trend doesn't particularly seem to be reversing in the UK (it may well be elsewhere, in places where pop was never integrated into national patriotism in the way the Beatles became the centre of a delusionary, bathetic "we may have lost all our real power, but at least we can still beat the Americans at *one* of their games" patriotism here).
Perfectly true though that the producers of British popular culture, and *especially* reality TV, treat the participants with a disguised form of contempt perhaps more dangerous for not openly showing traditional, stereotypical forms of "snobbery" - Victor Lewis-Smith was particularly good on this in the Evening Standard (a paper where *any* kind of class awareness, however mild, is extremely radical in context). But I think what the poster is saying is that quite a few ABs who don't work on the show also watch them - however "ironically", they're still out there. This is pretty much why even BBC Radio 4 has had to change in the way it has - the controllers feared that the new generation of their traditional demographic would no longer "grow into" the station as they had historically done, so put in more and more "entrance points".
Whose Story is Selling?
Date: 2009-07-18 09:35 pm (UTC)I tend to think all power is decentralized to the grass roots; even when obedient to concentrations of class power (financial, institutional, and in media)—as when Warhol notes that Coca-Cola levels the class “playing field”: everyone, rich and poor alike, wants a cheap coke. But, I think it’s hard to revolt against long ingrained habitual traditions—even if revolution from the ground up is always a possibility. Revolution (not necessarily political, but cultural as well) requires some sort of communication amongst “the masses”—and all too often the communication media are owned by an elite class who have no interest in fomenting their ownership demise. Power structures in “the west” are often as circular as they are in Iran, where more decentralized cell-phone and internet communication became an avenue for subversive communication.
But even here, at Click Opera, where we can speak somewhat freely (that is, without being paid), we mostly have to pay to reach an audience, by way of internet bills etc. If there is a disconnect between 75% of the world, and the internet; I suspect the divide between them and other communication mediums is even more stark. I think Foucault was right, that we should seek out the disempowered “others” to let them “speak”—but whose going to BUY their story?
Re: Whose Story is Selling?
Date: 2009-07-18 10:24 pm (UTC)http://cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm
Re: Whose Story is Selling?
Date: 2009-07-19 12:13 am (UTC)In reality, are we "buying time" on the internet? Certainly. But I think it's important to note that most people perceive internet use as an always-on utility, like electricity, not as this fixed thing that must be rationed out.
Re: Whose Story is Selling?
Date: 2009-07-19 12:29 am (UTC)Re: Whose Story is Selling?
Date: 2009-07-19 12:58 am (UTC)Which musical acts get big is not a class issue, per se. All it signals is that we're moving toward a situation where production is no longer limited to what major record companies can afford to support and produce.
The problem is that just as production and internet distribution becomes easier, mainstream distribution is closing up. I don't think there's any more room for "niche acts" on radio or TV, for example, than there ever was. In fact, as time goes on, I think there's less and less room for that kind of thing. So the idea that these niche acts will ever be "big" has to go through a scaling down of expectations. What constitutes "big" now and in the future is going to be very different from what it used to be.
Re: Whose Story is Selling?
Date: 2009-07-19 01:14 am (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail
Yes… but even though Content may decentralize, certain distribution Channels will remain “dominant”: I don’t think media conglomerates like Bertelsmann, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, Vivendi, Disney, etc. will lose their power to make the wider public aware of what they want to. To contradict my earlier claim, It is still difficult for smaller acts to get attention without going through these larger portals. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails may offer free music, be independent, and still make a buck, but they had a lift up to their “fame” by the entrenched media power-structure. That’s one reason I don’t write a blog: no one would read it! (So I comment on more popular sites like Momus’ pub, Click Opera, where I hang out a little).
Re: Whose Story is Selling?
Date: 2009-07-19 01:44 am (UTC)I think the big issue is that, as of yet, no real "following" has ever been achieved on the internet alone. America has a pretty vast apparatus for live performance and touring, and that's how the most successful independent bands have made their names in the States. But what happens in a country like Korea, when the mainstream apparatus crumbles, and there is virtually nothing for artists to fall back on?
Re: Whose Story is Selling?
Date: 2009-07-19 02:27 am (UTC)Like dieting simply by eating smart and exercising, I don’t think there’s a secret formula to “fame success”: it often takes hard work promoting talent that a large group of people appreciate. But to pick up on our discussion on previous day… social connections help: getting a gig as an opening act for a more popular band can really help. Is there no “underground” scene in Korea?
Re: Whose Story is Selling?
Date: 2009-07-19 03:34 am (UTC)Those days are still alive and well in Korea. I'd say that, with some basic exceptions, Korea is really in its own version of the 1950s. It is a period of great affluence, and there is a staggering level of equality in the middle class. Most people really do seem to be thriving here, and most people can expect to live a fairly high quality of life. As such, there hasn't really emerged a vibrant underground to support those who fall outside the normal boundaries of pop culture.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 09:44 am (UTC)One thing I notice which may be connected to your theory. I think nepotism is becoming more and more shameless, more and more taken for granted and even celebrated, less and less something one might reasonably object to on grounds of merit. From George W Bush to Peaches Geldof and Paris Hilton the kids of successful people are being forced into our attention. Dynasticism is back big, it seems. Maybe it never went away, but it's now more overt, less ashamed.
Adam Bellow (son of Saul) has even written a book, "In Praise Of Nepotism".
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 07:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-20 07:20 am (UTC)lotro gold
Date: 2009-07-24 03:06 am (UTC)