Of course, people want stuff, they want to feel different, so they dye their hair, go on a march, scream slogans, put on silly red and pink hats, it doesn't matter, online it's otaku vs otaku. All to fill this void they are informed that they have, they should instead eat some chocolate and get on with the mundane tasks in front of them.
The big mistake many people make is thinking that modern tribal groups represent some kind of window into a romanticised past, rather than realising that hunter gatherers are our contemporaries and have been deeply shaped by the modern world and the recent history of western colonialism. They're windows into our present and that present includes terrible new age world music exploiting their culture for money.
But they're not exploiting our culture when they send their sick child to a Western hospital or demand recognition of ownership and title from our courts, without which they might easily fall prey to illness and invasion? Don't mean to be rude, but did you just get done watching Avatar?
"exploiting their culture" - how so? exploitation requires private property, but you are talking about hunter gatherers, who have no private property. unless you are saying that music is private property?
Yeah, anyone thinking that there exists some progression of culture should think again. All contemporary cultures are *equally* evolved and have had the same time to evolve (and in any mutating system the rate of mutations is determined by some natural process).
@C.D. I never said their existence presupposes "some dichotomy between that which is in and outside of the bounds of capitalism". The window metaphor refers to people not in the hunter gatherer group thinking about the group as a component of our current society. In just the same way that the facebook offices are a "window" into our present for somebody who does not work at facebook.
I almost died of laughter when I heard "somewhere deep in the jungle, are living some little men and women." The worst wording imaginable! It's not deep or thought provoking, its clumsy and hilarious.
There was a British comedy about a working mans club called "Phoenix Nights". One episode they had a psychic (who is terrible) and his intro is exactly like that. Just pretentious twaddle: th-cam.com/video/Rd79Ie_vWyQ/w-d-xo.html
Well, coming from people whose first language is not English, I think it's understandable. This is the least of the problems in the Deep Forest situation, if it is one, to be frank.
Thanks for bringing to light the history of Sweet Lullaby (known as Rorogwela in the language of the baegu people). My mother is a native Solomon Islander and her grandmother came from the northern part of Malaita (where Afunakawa is from) so this piece of music actually has some very deep cultural importance to myself. Interestingly enough there is nothing sweet about this lullaby, as it is sung from the perspective of an orphan boy consoling his younger sibling after their parents have died. I suspect Deep Forest did not know this or didn't care and instead focused on the pretty melody which is essentially a pentatonic scale so it fits well in a pop/edm framework. I actually arranged this piece for an SATB choir because I felt the piece did not receive its rightful treatment. It's been performed by a few choirs in the Midwest now and I hope that it might go on to educated more people about the music of the Solomons.
I've always despised the term "World Music", it's always implied a separation or even superiority of western music. Great video that clearly shows this as another symptom of capitalism's all consuming nature
I have the same despise with the term "Ethnic" for anything culturally non-western, usually from "brown people". Don't say this shitty word, at least try to say the region that piece of culture came from, such as Arabia or Iran or North Africa.
I feel like this idea of a lost future is best incapsulated in the vaporwave genre. Its nostalgic for a promised future that never came to pass, wherein the smooth corporate aesthetics of the 90's did give way to a utopia instead of the crumbling hellscape of modernity. The project of Green Capitalism that was promised in the 90's never came to fruition, and it has been replaced with the death cult of fascism and a future of a dead planet ravaged by climate change. So now we look back longingly at the pastel dream we were promised as we teeter on the brink of hell, and we hear the same corporate jingles now not as smooth, optimistic jazz, but as a distorted and melancholy memory.
Jordan Peterson talks about yung and how profound his ideas about the archetype and the role of religion and mythologies are yet jordan ignores the other part of yungs argument as presented in the video, which is that the very things that he is so cherished of (mythology, religion, spirituality) are being crushed by modernity and capitalism, the two things he also happens to be a defender of. Basically points to his self contradiction.
@@frankguan5044 JP CLEARLY does not ignore that, its 1 of the main things he goes on about, with the exception of laying it at the feet of capitalism. Modernity yes, but capitLism? Because Communism was all about propping up traditional religion myth and spirituality right? Hahaha so ridiculous
@@henrymoore4522 sure, as much as one can "defend" capitalism while "cherishing" religion, myth, and spirituality. I'm just not seeing the alleged "contradiction"
As an Asian person of mainly Chinese but also some Malay racial heritage living in Singapore, one of the most westernised Asian countries in the world (who happens to like Sweet Lullaby and Return to ainnocence), I wonder, if by neoliberal theory this would apply to me, since I am a ‘banana’ - genealogically oriental but unequivocally white inside. My beef with a lot of these notions of appropriation for capitalist benefit is that we judge these societies’ exploitation by the notion that they have not been justly ‘paid’; whether in terms of money or goods, or recognition on a CD track. The funny thing is, our neoliberalist notion of capitalism taking advantage of primitive people supposes that they are just like us - wanting credit and remuneration, because we see everything as a ‘job’, even parenting is a monetary investment for one’s future.
Parenting is a Biological investent for you genes future. And that takes fors depending on your surroundings. For us humans it eans being well of onetary ebcause that means shelter, food, status, etc. In any econoic system, raising children so that they will care for you, whether with oney or not, is in fact "a job". In a commune were ultiple people parent multiple children at the same time, even if none of those children is their own. They do so because in the sae way in the commune the children will indiscriminately care for the elders. Parenting is always a fucking job to secure your future well being. Has nothing to do with capitalism and is really quite simple.
@Sean Yeo I see your comment is a year old and I don't mean to dredge up old comments via TH-cam for petty political arguments, but that being said, here goes nothing hahaha. I think you make a fair point about the neoliberal capitalism supposition of remuneration. You're right. Perhaps the industrialized world is imposing it's own value systems on the people from the unindustrialized world. I think the point the video is making, however: is that neoliberal capitalism didn't even ask the people what they wanted! It just exploited them. It took what it needed, turned a profit from it and discarded the rest. Furthermore, to add insult to injury it did so under the guise of multiculturalism. That's part of what the video is trying to point out. Cheers.
@@gohannesgrahms I was about halfway through re-wording my comment when I saw you'd already said most of what I was going to say. I'd to go further by adding that, within the framework of our *own* capitalist, neoliberal culture, those who appropriate such cultural components are being hypocrites. Remember, the different established capitalist powers were fighting with one another over the rights to the music as if it were their *right* while completely ignoring the rights they should have provided to the person they stole the music from. It's arrogance on an incredible level, since they must necessarily act as if they're *morally* in the right for holding the rights to the music, while by the morality they claim to adhere to, the original creator should be the one who should have the rights to the music. Also, at the same time as whatever fetishized culture is being commodified (often without their permission), said culture is being pushed back and erased by that same system that claimed to want to promote multiculturalism.
The way my mother described it to me is "folk music by people of colour". It isn't inherently orientalist, but the distinction between folk music and world music is orientalist, and the way that the record industry markets it, particularly in the 80s, 90s, and 00s, is. See also the distinction between blues and country, or between pop and RnB.
This notion of returning to the innocence of an uncorrupted and pure tribal existence in communion with nature is not unique to late capitalism. The concept of the noble savage predates late capitalism by over 200 years. Tolkien prefigured these notions in Lord of the Rings which was incorporated into 60's counter culture along with the popularization of eastern spirituality. I think it would be more fair to point the finger at industrialization/urbanization than at capital, although the phenomenon are probably not entirely separable.
Well it wasnt to a pure tribal existence, but even in the renaissance they were "looking back" to the ancient greeks and to what they thought was even earlier, hermes trismegistus...
I suppose the 60’s counter culture didn’t quite incorporate Tolkien’s racialisation via his constant emphasis on bloodlines and distinctions between the different races of his fantasy world. Too much blood and soil for 60s counter culturists surely.
I agree. I have recently heard a lot of people relating it to late capitalism as well or as a reaction to "the coming singularity" through "A.I." and "modern technology" (I add quotes because I think most of those concepts are just wet dreams of few in the 1% and those who have wet dreams of being in that clique. I don't think that the technology available to most people is that impressive at all but I digress). I think the tendency to "go back" to pure or non industrialized times comes from something much deeper. A good example of this is Marie Antoinette's Hamlet, aka "mock farm", which was Antoinette's way of holding on to the modus vivendi of ·the good ol days", so basically while living in a time where she didn't even have plumbing available to her, she was already yearning for "simpler times".. that says a lot about this human tendency and while perhaps late capitalism exploits it or exacerbates it in some way, I don't think it's exclusive of late capitalism either.
When you realize your parents' entire identities are wrapped up in this stuff, and they're too old and exhausted to go through a major ideological shift... feels bad man
That's fine. There's still hope for some. My mom understood me and gave a laugh when I've described "Wind of change" by Scorpions as a song version of Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" while my father didn't understood what I've meant.
So many boomers grew up or were indoctrinated into this conception of progressiveness and still hold onto their colorfully packaged ethnology as a point of pride that they weren't like the other boomers. I honestly can't say younger generations are all that different though. We may be more "aware" of neoliberalism and empty corporate platitudes but everything gets funneled back into the same place at the end of the day - ideology as a form of identity. In 20 years our kids will be saying the same thing about us, how proudly their parents talk about socialism this and anti-consumerism that but ultimately we have succumbed to the same trappings of just inventing another demographic instead of making any meaningful structural change.
The intro triggered a Pavlovian response to get up and make a cup of tea. Sweet Lullaby was seared into my subconscious by a local TV station that used it as their self-branding ad between programs from the mid 90s until their licence changed and they were allowed to run for-profit ads. Thanks SBS.
Jim lastname - I miss those days as well. Growing up in the 80s and early 90s one of the most transformative experiences was watching SBS. Having a station that was not English exclusive and was curated by people who were able to put things on television simply because they felt it was important people saw them, rather out of the profit motive, was one of the best things about Australia. I'm still sad we lost the battle over SBS' funding.
Yeah, for me the song was forever imprinted on my mind by the Adelphia channel in Los Angeles. I think that's what Time Warner/Spectrum was called in the late 90's. I used to take naps to it as a kid, they played all sorts of new age ambient music. It's probably part of a conspiracy by all the local TV stations of the time, probably some kind of hidden messages about Satan or something if you play it backwards. *joking*
My mother played Sweet Lullaby for me as a young baby, and I would listen to it on my little fisher price tape player, and press it against my face as I slept. It has been this beautiful beacon of comfort for me for 21ish years, and knowing the name of the woman who sang to me is really lovely. I also hate that she wasn’t praised the way she should have been.
Ah yes, the 90s. World music, new age BS, "the end of history," turn-of-the-millennium paranoia, UFO cults, X-Files-inspired conspiracy theories, anti-NWO far-right militias, the Y2K scare... good times.
@shortbuspileup i. Think this happened because of the. Dissapointment caused by the fall of the soviet union and the pursuit of socialism ,we've been living the last 20 yesrs without a purpose or cause to fight for, kids nowdays have existencials crisis and turn to nihilism because they feel that theres no alternative, no choices to change their lives
There were great things about the 90s. Electronic music genres like Techno, Trance, House Music, Jungle, Drum&Bass and so on. Great TV shows and awesome cartoons.
Often, when I think about Neoliberalism, I remember this fascinating paragraph of my professor: Neoliberalism, It is insidious. It will educate you with individualistic belongingness while getting rid of your social belongingness. It also equals where you belong to what you can consume. The source of your unhappiness is not being able to consume, the source of your soullessness is consuming the same thing and the source of your uneasiness is moving away from the possibility of consuming. In the midst of all this consuming fable, you are far from all kinds of sociality, you have closed the period of learning the boundaries of things you can do from reading holy books(religion) and you are now searching for shopping catalogs(modern capitalism). At both ends, you are not yourself, and it is impossible for you to deal with the fear of choosing one of these two extremes (ie, losing the other end). This is why the individual of neoliberalism is in the middle. He/she can go neither here or there. She/he cannot peacefully choose either side. -Hakan Övünç Öngür. (9 January 2015)
Get a pair of Nikes and be like Jim, knit a hat, buy a red hat, eat vegan food, choose the carnivore diet, read books by the latest crazy person, read another book by another crazy person refutating the other crazy, wave a flag, burn a flag, like or dislike, defend a minority, hate a minority, be the new minority, find answers, ignore answers, be sane, be insane, believe in god, believe in the environment, guns kill people, people kill people, lives matter, a life is worth one bullet, study philosophy, live in a barrel, be in the barrel, conquer the market, hate the market...
Great Analysis. Just subscribed to your channel. Keep up the good work. As a footnote, I've wanted to add: I have studied music theory for over a decade (being a musician) and one thing particularly strikes me the most with this "World Music": A lot of this "style" works most of the time in a specific musical mode: The Dorian Mode (From D to D on the white keys of the piano). This mode is technically minor, with an major sixth that gives a certain major flair at some moments. This mode is predominant in most all celtic music, african music (as well as pentatonic scales) and other "washed-down-world-music" that has been used in the media to "standardize" this modern tribal association (without forgetting the prevalent use of acoustic instruments as the only timbre being used). Dorian mode is mostly used in music composition to create that sense of serenity and "back to nature" feeling, and while not all cultures has it (Norther India, Middle East, Central America), it has become a defacto characteristic of New Age Music that has capitalized on romanticised third world countries.
its like the recuperation of anti capitalist works as commodities and branding. there is no ideology to 'profit before all else' and so markets will always seek to find a way to exploit even anticapitalist sentiment without any internal conflict
Yeah, but this makes me think of earlier comments when people complain about travelling away to find people having mobile phones and enjoying coke in far away and poorer places, it doesn't mean there aren't other cultures and transformative things with potential just because capitalism has subsumed many parts of culture and life globally. Culture is a rich, human and creative thing, it's worth learning about and seeing I guess. I think it's a kind of cynical and narrow minded way of thinking to think that these kind of rebellions to do things outside of capitalism only lead to more capitalism than having other transformative affects be honest, although I do agree these things have also made capital a more fluid and inescapable thing, I think it does still give pockets of space for subjective development to resist capital, worth muling over more I guess, one idea is acid communism I've looked into recently could be worth checking out.
Anyone else notice that current movies more and more function by this opposition between evil institutions and folk-people resisting. Avatar, V for Vendetta, Player Ready One and other movies follow this same logic, first you have some evil corporations that are trying to exploit, dominate etc., and then you have free open-minded resisting group that succeeds in the end. Of course it is inherently paradoxical, because the very resistance, aim for authenticity is conveyed trough institutional, money oriented medium (hollywood movies). In avatar there is glorification of natural, tribal life against technology and brutal exploitation, in Ready player one there is idealized image of gamers who do not sell out, but of course Avatar was the peak of technology and Ready player one was probably the most cliche saturated movie ever, it was literally selling out all these inner gamer jokes for financial aims. That's why I like the concept of interpassivity; it is basically the idea that the other can do the thing for me, in this situation the movie acts out the aspiration to authenticity, resistance and etc. You dont need to do these things in real life anymore, movies and other mediums nowadays ensure the satisfaction of these needs.
also the victory of the good guys over the cartoonish evil corporation is very rarely revolutionary and the result is also not revolutionary; they simple slightly improve the capitalism that they live under. the monopolistic mega corporation is evil, yes, but the system it rules over and our status quo existence is presented as good. the victory is just a slight re-balancing act fisher actually goes into this with the film wall-e: capitalism has destroyed the entire planet, yet it continues without crises on corporate-ran spacecraft. the eventual victory of the film is that the corporation-owned robot is able to bring the humans back to earth, the earth having fixed itself somehow, and they can continue to live happily on earth as they did before... all this while enjoying the anti-corporate message at a monopolised cinema complex drinking coca-cola. letting hollywood do our revolutionary thinking stunts our ability to critique the status quo
By the same argument, you are hypocritical for criticizing capitalism via comments on a mega-corporation's website. Some of these films convey class and exploitation to a young adult audience that may have never considered them before. They can be a doorway to new attitudes, not just a palliative escape.
Brilliantly said. You perfectly described the faux-cathartic nature that is inherent to modern resistance fiction. In some ways, Mr. Robot could be added to that list, with it embodying this kind of empty (defanged) cathartic resistance. When the issues comprising the show's main themes of capitalist alienation and corporate greed are finally resolved, one is subconsciously tricked, if only for a brief while, into believing that its real world counterpart has been dealt with as well. Yet the real world issue still remains. Ironically, the show's anti capitalist rhetoric is distributed for public consumption by USA Network, a large broadcasting conglomerate. This unequal power dynamic in which the show's anti capitalist message heavily relies on its antithesis -- a large faceless corporation -- for its dissemination to the masses, results in its gradual co-optation by the distributor. The message is removed of its original political legitimacy and incorporated into capitalism's evergrowing toolkit.
Man I hadn't heard "Sweet Lullaby" and "Return to Innocence" in decades. Those songs used to be EVERY-FREAKING-WHERE. At the time this "whole world in capitalism" thing was referred to as the 'Benetton style', and while they were pioneers, it spread all over. Good video, and I completely agree the problem is, to slightly paraphrase Mark Fisher, the cancellation of the future. With the USSR, flawed as it was, died the idea of political utopia and escaping the slow grind to death of capitalism. Also the existence of the USSR as a countervailing force to global capitalism, and the space it provided in terms of raw material support, allowed the flourishing of a plethora of leftist projects which just got isolated and murdered in the years after. The fact that the lives of those poor people in the "Third World" (I really don't like this term, it's just a euphemism for "poor countries" and in the US at least is usually used in such derogatory ways) would not get to enjoy this connectedness and freedom to experience anything else but in the shallowest terms was something that always soured it for me, much as I enjoyed things like the "Lullaby" video. Those people are still sorting out toxic trash and breaking up rusty ships for scrap as they were then but now their horizon has closed up more.
and tbh the whole idea of the west's obsession with curated and romanticized exoticness isn't even exclusive to since the 90s. Back in the 50s there was this music genre called "exotica", which very much also tried to make up fantasy about what "ethnic" music is like. I found a martin denny quote super funny where he said exotica is about "armchair safari-ers".
For some non-exploitative world music, check out Sahel Sounds. Run by one guy who goes out to the Western African Sahel and records artists in the field and either puts their work into compilation albums or an album exclusively by that artist, splitting profits 50/50. There is a banging documentary about it too, and one of their artist's Mdou Moctar has achieved wide spread acclaim that he wouldn't have otherwise and is now touring the world.
The point on Avatar is especially relevant when you look into the development of its soundtrack. They wanted to make it as "Pandora" as possible but each demo was refused because the director thought it would be too alien for the average audience. Instead they settled on bog a standard movie soundtrack.
Its a relevant question. I think that the lecture and writings are more in depths of relation to the theme that Cuck shows us. I mean sure, Toto is idealistic and in the pejorative way, but in this case scenarios the plagiarism of ethnic culture and the misrepresentation is more relevant, than the viewpoint of liberal musicians in the 80's, whose related the "primitive" way of life to the romantique idea of being "african". About this kind of ethno - first world viewpoints there's a fantastic writing from Jean Fisher - "The Syncretic Turn" where she writes about South American artists and their way of representation in the contemporary art. She says that the art society sometimes want them to do artworks that are connected to their origins, and the preconceptions of their nationality their way of primitive life. Like: "You are from an indian tribe... why don't you represent your culture?" - which is very racist, and ordinary disguisting; should they? Like, necessary? Or is that the assimilation is the way to go as their choose of free will. Also if they start to copy the art of the first world's art which is the other side of the case, they might loose their pure cultural habits. Jean says that there must be an opened way in between where artists could do whatever and it might be in syncretic relation to their original culture, or represent the - as thinking outside of the box - whole problematic of being judged for copying contemporary art, or being "indian" "negro" or whatever...
Though this is a minor point in your video, I feel like bringing it up because it's something I only ever heard from my Dad and always sort of agreed with. That is the feeling like when the Soviet Union collapsed and desert Storm was an absolute slam dunk, we were in the era of the absolute end of all war. I remember the 1990s, and that historical context, coupled with rising high technology, and booming economy, gave everything a very optimistic outlook. Whether that was warranted or not I can't say, I was too young. Then came the tech crash and 9/11, and now we're in a period of never ending war, idealogical crisis, and technology seeming to limit possibilities more and more, dividing rather than uniting us. Because capitalism can't exist without crisis?
I think the problem is the opposite- Capitalism is a little too good at papering over crisis until they hit a boiling point and explode. Things were a lot better in the 90's without the crisis, but that was only because the system had it's means of hiding the underlying issues (worker's wages and foreign exploitation).
Humans can't exist without crisis. Communsim and Capitalism are disfunctional due to the human element. So far capitalsim has proven to be ironically less corruptable than comminism or rather so many people are corrupting it, it's being pulled in so many directions so no one imparticular person has absolute control so anyone in the middle class is just in the eye of the storm and hence not affecting them in a way that they care about.
@@johnercek: actually, I completely agree. Crisis is essential, it forces its constant maintenance, which is why it's really hard to dispense with as an economic system. It's like trying to save up to buy a new, more fuel efficient car while at the same time constantly needing to supply new parts for a hoopty that you can't afford to let break down or else you won't be able to get to work.
Wow you make some really great stuff. Very original topics and the way you treat them and the connections you make are interesting and refreshing. Gonna binge the rest of your channel now.
fantastic as always, man. please keep up the good work. you're my favorite channel on the platform and I can't wait to see more young theorists and writers like you on the scene! keep inspiring the next round of new criticism. we need it now more than ever!
I've always been a big fan of David Byrne's music and as I watched this I couldn't help but think of him. Even at the end as the infomercial is shown you see his name pass in the crawl. Interestingly, the song he wrote as a member of the Talking Heads titled "(Nothing But) Flowers" is very much an introspective look at the hypocrisy rooted in the capitalist romanticism of simplicity you describe in this video. "If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawn mower!" Classic. This is very well made! I'm glad I found your videos
I think George Harrison did it right: he went to india to record the people there, with his money, so they could release albums and get that money for themselves (under Dark Horse Records). He wanted to spread his love for Indian classical music. That's it.
The right arrangement of pictures and sounds supposedly coming from an unknown faraway place can create powerful associations, powerful enough to be quite profitable
The Promise bu Michael Nyman cropping up took me by surprise a little, because The Piano is my favorite film. There is a scene in the film where some Maori sit down to watch English theatre where a murder is being staged. Not understanding that it isn't real, the Maori are shown to invade the stage and attack the actors to "protect" the victim of murder. The film was written by Jane Campion, and has quite to say to say about the "Idealised" Other, with it's central character being a mute woman sold off to marriage to an English owner of Maori lands. Not to mention Nyman's minimalist score is fantastic.
I said to myself time and time again, "you know, it's so weird how there was this moment in my childhood when new age and world music was all over the radio and CDs and TV-ads, I wonder how that happened". But I had to resign myself to the fact that it would remain a mystery to me. Putting that phenomenon in a historical context and analysing it was clearly such an incredibly specific subject that my chances of ever finding someone doing that very thing were slim to none.
Maybe we could understand it from the POV of the 3rd world people portrayed there, even in a distorted way. The nice feeling of being included in the global conversation, of no longer standing on the sidelines. This creates an almost automatic empathic connection between the companies and these people, giving them the will to consume the brands and products. Because companies always need to expand, this was one of the things that gave momentum to consumerism globalization
The principle of profit, as a single mold which controls the surface level of cultural difference also could be found at the UNESCO convention on cultural diversity. In the convention the 'universal' concept human rights functions as the single framework which excludes the unseemingly differences which the market of cultural products would feel uncomfortable.
Even the Rain is a good example as well. The film crew goes to Bolivia to shoot a film about the landing of Colombus because it is cheaper. They use the indigenous labor to build sets and to play the parts of the natives as well. It goes on even more meta step because the actual film is filmed in Bolivia and used indigenous labor as cast and crew as well.
I would highly recommend you listen to Jon Hassell's music. He calls it Fourth World music, and he seems to be very aware of the topics discussed in this video. Also, Visible Cloaks, who have been influenced by Jon Hassell, have some very interesting music that deals with themes in a similar ballpark to those of this video as well. Both very conscientious artists worth exploring, artists who seem to be searching for that lost future.
One other thread may be the work of Paul Simon with South African musicians around the time his album Graceland's came out, 1986. He was widely criticised for breaking the cultural boycott in SA at a time when Nelson Mandela was still in jail (released in 1990). That was one reason why some genuine (I think) SA musical groups like Ladysmith Black Mambosa to achieve worldwide fame as they were, not by being sampled. So good outcomes sometimes possible?
A very interesting video. I still like Dead Can Dance, though :P But in all seriousness, you've articulated some thoughts that had been swirling around in my head for a while, such as "Is world music not a rather broad term for all these different genres of music, that likely have no cultural connection with each other?" Still, I was introduced to New Age/world music bands by my father, and for someone of his generation, who was interested in non-western music genres, this was likely the most accessible way to be introduced to them. It's not like they sold ethnomusicologist's recordings in record stores after all. Because of the internet, and sound archives putting more of their content online, listening to music from around the world, without the artists being deprived of their voice, without it being repackaged for the Western consumer is easier, at least. And yet, I'm reminded of this TH-cam channel I came across a while ago. It featured an insane amount of albums of traditional music from all around the world, from Scotland to Tibet. The channel's owner, however, had neglected to credit even a single artist.
Interesting video! Much of this rings pretty close to the Aesthetics of Hunger/Poverty/Dreams essays Glauber Rocha would write in the 60s regarding his view on "third world cinema" and the first world's fetishism of what they see and assume in third world countries as a more primal or primitive culture. Fairly short and really interesting reads too (his films are also worth checking out).
yeah but its more about "with our burgers and nike shoes we are corrupting the simple and innocent lifestyle of these people". Basically still believing that others lifestyle is primitive and simple. Just some orientalist bs to be short
Martin Ersatz there was an interesting article about Said that I read recently that discussed his inconsistencies both in his personal history, and in his theories: www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/enough-said-false-scholarship-edward-said
I guess, but, the venom of the author aside, Said wasn't a historian. Attacking him for not meeting the standards of academic history misses the point. Orientalism presents a broad model and challenge to consider, not unquestioningly accept or regurgitate. Similarly, you can punch holes in Foucault's Discipline and Punish as a work of history and point out it's a book written about torture and the body by a man into gay S&M, but again this misses the point; the panopticon remains an incredibly powerful metaphor and heuristic device.
** Flash Lights WARNING ** At 7:15 there is a flashed picture, while "black hole" is being said. Please avoid these evil practices, Jonas. If you guess it would compromise your artistical vision, a Health Warning would've been humane. Thanks for considering it.
As I was watching this video, an ice-cream truck pulled by my house. Although my family avoids sugar and opts for alternatives, I was suddenly taken aback by how ice-cream trucks have changed. Most people's impression of ice-cream trucks are mobile business-stands, with a local entrepreneur scooping a fist-sized dollop of hand-crafted ice cream into a cone, then handing it out to children. The different flavors - usually chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry - would be chosen by the children if they had enough allowance to buy it. Or, their parents would buy it for them. However, that was the typical mid-20th century example. The ice-cream trucks I remember organized their "flavors" into brands - Unilever's and Nestle's were the most prevalent. The ice-cream was usually put on a popsicle stick and was made to resemble iconic cartoon characters that were brands in themselves (but for some reason, I never got my hands on one). Either way, I just had something crazy to say, but I don't know what to say now.
I still remember I listened to this when I came home from a high school football game and I was like “holy shit there’s a whole nother world beyond what I’ve learned so far this is amazing.”
Good point. And i find it a bit naive that a video about neoliberals and music centers it’s argument mainly on 2 performers/artists (deep forest and enigma). It seems highly unlikely that two by that time established artists did their own negotiations. This was probably done by the lawyers of the labels they signed to. So it where not deep forest and enigma who did not pay any royalties or broke the promise not to use the sweet lullaby song in comercials, it was the record label that made these choices.
At 12:42 there is a pic of an article - "New-Age Music Searches For Its Proper Niche." Are you talking about New Age Music or World Music? Now I'm confused.
Thank you for articulating very well what I have felt and thought since first hearing the beginning voice-over of Deep Forest's first album (which you reproduced in this video) shortly after it came out, while taking the time to actually do the research into this phenomenon that I never have, and thus producing a well-informed video. I am curious what you think of Peter Gabriel's profuse use of and influence by "traditional" and contemporary African and Asian music, beginning (in his words) with "Biko," and influencing almost every part of his fourth album (which was given the title "Security," in 1982), much of his very commercially successful fifth album (which he allowed to be titled "So", in 1986) -- in which, for example, the still increasingly popular song "In Your Eyes" was based on an African-derived rhythm and featured the (credited) Senegalese musician Yousssu N'Dour singing backup vocals -- and then almost everything else he has ever produced since then, including numerous collaborations with (credited) "third world" artists? Even though on the one hand he was still under the influence of the supreme Orientalist Carl Jung in the early 1980s (though IMO trying with some difficulty to break free of it, before possessing the intellectual resources that might have helped him do so) and later also collaborated with Deep Forest themselves, his commitment to openly respecting, crediting, and promoting non-"Western" artists and his human rights activism, etc. give me feeling of greater "positive" ambivalence about his work. Frankly, I personally enjoy most of his music a great deal (which obviously might bias me), and I "feel" that he has risen above and beyond the trap of simple appropriation in many ways, but based on my limited knowledge, I also "feel" that he has never truly escaped the confines of liberalism in either his music or his activism. It seems to me that he has pushed the limits of liberalism as far as they can go, but it is unclear to me whether he has ever broken free of them. Since you are more informed on this subject than I am, I would be very curious to hear your opinion about it.
Well done not using the term cultural appropriation, maybe right wing members of your audience won't switch their minds off and actually pay attention enough not to strawman you!
That's because it's just exploitation combined with liberal ideology, a well known phenomenom outlied in Marxist theory. "Cultural appropriation" is unnecessary to describe it, and there's a reason for rejecting this term within the left. "Cultural appropriation", as it is used, is frequently liberal when it's used to shun and blame individuals (workers) for simply partaking in activities or wearing clothing not from their culture of birth (which is fascist), labeling them as cultural appropriators. It's trying to achieve some sort of reactionary cultural purity while attacking workers for how the bourgeoisie commodifies all things... Which they do, naturally, because we live in capitalism. There's no modern capitalism without imperialism and some sort of cultural exploitation. You can end the commodification of all things if you don't want Americans to profit off of clothes with Chinese characters, Mexican symbols or tribal drawings, otherwise it is impossible to fight just this particular aspect of capitalism. And workers are never at fault for liking music or clothes, ever. This kind of misguided attack happens when you have a real grudge against capitalism but don't have Marxism; you end up fighting your equals. Maybe the term doesn't ACTUALLY mean that, maybe it refers to the sistemic issues, but I've personally seen it being used in this "anti-worker" way several times, but fortunately only by students in academic circles which drink for the American fountain of liberalism. So, because of the praxis associated with this expression, we choose to reject it.
I don't feel I need to tell a Marxist that just because a piece of theory is misunderstood and misapplied that this makes a piece of theory invalid. Cultural appropriation as an abstract concept is morally neutral. In some cases it's a good thing. As a random example, when I was last over in Thailand I found that they had appropriated Jamaican culture in a big way, but as a means of liberating themselves from their socially conservative upbringing and with the culture being shared communally as opposed to through privately manufactured commodities. On the other hand, a morally repugnant example is the one stated in this video. Therefore I don't agree that cultural appropriation is necessarily always just a combination of exploitation and liberal ideology, I think the concept is best summed up by it's very name, i.e. it's literally just the act of appropriating a different culture, nothing more, nothing less. However, I do agree that too many people misunderstand it and blanket demonise any act of cultural appropriation and that this can in some cases attack innocent workers.
The people that fetishize tribal lifestyles only do so because they are unaware of how harsh that kind of life really is. A fish does not see the water he lives in, in the same way a modern urban citizen easily dismisses all the facilities and conforts their environment provides.
There's still a tension between those who think they're better people because of the facilities whilst being bored by thought of a rigged system - and those who realise that something is lost in fetishised modernity and seek more equalisation and less logo.
Thank you for this video, and more broadly, all your other videos. They are well written, offer interesting perspectives and insights into complex topics. I particularly enjoy how you relate socio-political themes with pop culture (video game, films, etc.). Now I would like to comment on this video in particular because it affects me emotionally. Although you did not mention or talk about cultural appropriation explicitly, I believe that how you criticized the 90s world music and new age culture is closely related to the former. Would the situation with the Sweet Lullaby be any different if it had not been a straightforward sample but an inspired melody ? For me, in makes a big difference, the former case being a classic case of copyright infringement which would have been no different had the melody be sang by, say, a Polish grandma from Poland's countryside or simply some other fellow "white" musician. Of course, I acknowledge that the latter may have more power to fight for its rights than the former but, I would say, this is another story. It's all about how some groups of an undefined culture (mostly "white" people) steal and use cultural characteristic (music, for example) from another undefined group (mostly from "Africa"). The problem I have is how the boundaries are defined, and by whom. Who is in charge of attributing every single musical style, genre, etc. to some specific group of people. How are these specific groups of people defined ? By their skin color ? Their geographical location ? Culture is not fix and static but ever-changing and evolving. It is impossible to trace back some root or essence of a particular music. I also acknowledge that the Sweet Lullaby story is an extreme case: the group of people from whom the music was stolen can, actually, be very precisely define, and the way that the music was used is very "tainted", almost obscene. However, where do we draw the line ? Would it have been alright if the music hadn't been used in some commercials ? Definitely, the person that was the origin of the sample should have received royalties. But What if the sample was only 2s long and distorted beyond recognition? Depending on your time and space resolution, every music can be classified as world music. I am particularly sensitive to this topic because I am of mixed origin and a musician: I was born in Brussels (Belgium), my father is from Kosovo (half Albanian, half Montenegrins) and my mother is German. I look quite non-western (people always situate my country of origin in the Middle East). My first name is an ancient name from the Ottoman times (old Turkey) and my last name has been translated two times within a single generation. My mother tongue is French, and I speak quite fluently German. I now live in Germany. I often ask myself the following: what am I allowed to do ? For Albanians, I am no Albanian since I do not speak the language, for Belgian I am not European, for Germans I am also a foreigner. Often, if you use "non-western" music as inspiration, you are expected to "fully" understand its origin and meaning, in some undefined level of depth. In my case, no group of people will grant me permission to "access" their culture. Anyway, I would add that, in practice, very few people care... As a final remark, I find your analysis very insightful in order to understand specific shifts in our capitalistic-driven cultural landscape. But when one has to solve issues, and apply it to concrete examples, it becomes quite cumbersome.
Not disagreeing with anything you've said, but I think it's important to remember that on the consumer side of things this music represented very positive and hopeful feelings. It was an attempt to look forwards while looking back and to the side, to be inspired by people who live in another place and seem to live in another time, to be uncertain about your own society's dominance of the world, and to feel like you belong to the earth's greatest species rather than it's greatest nation or culture. I don't know, maybe it's just because I was a younger in the 90s, but I can't help thinking that there's certain feelings embodied in this kind of music that seems to be absent from our society today.
When you talked about how precalitalist culture is packaged to us and it perpetuates capitalism, it blew my mind. I didn't even realize the people who shop at whole foods are perpetuating what they dont like about modern life.
I just bought a deep forest album last month for $1 and I had no idea what I was listening to. It’s blowing my mind right now that your talking about them haha
I think one thing I'd like to point out, a need too reconnect with being, authenticity and meaning is not necessarily wrong, Carl Jung I think would agree with me here. How we attempt to reconnect...as the video points out is a different matter. Look at Rome. When they conquered new(usually Tribal) peoples, often they would enslave them with reverence while they paraded them in the public forums. Would create tragic plays about them depicting them as noble great peoples whom had the misfortune of clashing with Rome. I would suggest this has happened before As the vid points out we are attempting to integrate new meaning into our lives via postmodern corporate fueled means. In which case I actually empathize with us more than condemn us. Because it shows how backward and desperate we are, like Jung pointed out, we are in an existential vacuum, that we are divorced from our sense purpose and being in the world.
I love the cultural criticism, and I wonder if, if you are interested in really delving into this, you might engage with Adorno, that founding father of Marxist cultural criticism. I think there is a lot to the thesis of the culture industry, but Adorno's vision that categorically damns pop music and jazz in their entirety is vulgar, and could use a re "inventing" so to speak. Obviously, Adorno's "Culture Industry" thesis relates to ideas of alienation, in which I know you expressed interest in another video. So, taking Adorno's essays on "popular music," and Marx's essay on "Alienated Labor" in the 1844 manuscripts, there's probably something interesting to be said there.
Great video. Your output is getting better and better! One thing I would mention is that the co-opting of counter-cultural values in corporate advertising, and in particular the sentiment/values of 'one world in peace and harmony' goes right back to the early 1970s. A classic example being this Coca Cola ad: th-cam.com/video/1VM2eLhvsSM/w-d-xo.html
Just different enough to sell, never different enough to matter.
Read Adorno's "Perennial Jazz Fashion," talks exactly about this
Of course, people want stuff, they want to feel different, so they dye their hair, go on a march, scream slogans, put on silly red and pink hats, it doesn't matter, online it's otaku vs otaku.
All to fill this void they are informed that they have, they should instead eat some chocolate and get on with the mundane tasks in front of them.
Great comment man.
to matter in what way? It seems to matter to the ones who bought it, no? Or are you waiting for the song that changes the world?
@@tommat86 Nah just one that can't or won't be co-opted. A punk band that doesn't have merch lol
Zizek makes this point of disguising racism as treasuring "primitive culture" and how it is a tool of imperial colonialism. Neat elaboration.
Have you got a reference for this?
@@markcostello236 th-cam.com/video/DRsrYi-wXro/w-d-xo.html
7:54
@@linusbromstrup1883 Thanks, was hoping for a reference from the great man himself. Nevertheless, thanks for pointing that out. It slipped me by
Asmongold 😂🤣🙌🙌
The big mistake many people make is thinking that modern tribal groups represent some kind of window into a romanticised past, rather than realising that hunter gatherers are our contemporaries and have been deeply shaped by the modern world and the recent history of western colonialism. They're windows into our present and that present includes terrible new age world music exploiting their culture for money.
+
But they're not exploiting our culture when they send their sick child to a Western hospital or demand recognition of ownership and title from our courts, without which they might easily fall prey to illness and invasion? Don't mean to be rude, but did you just get done watching Avatar?
"exploiting their culture" - how so? exploitation requires private property, but you are talking about hunter gatherers, who have no private property. unless you are saying that music is private property?
Yeah, anyone thinking that there exists some progression of culture should think again. All contemporary cultures are *equally* evolved and have had the same time to evolve (and in any mutating system the rate of mutations is determined by some natural process).
@C.D.
I never said their existence presupposes "some dichotomy between that which is in and outside of the bounds of capitalism". The window metaphor refers to people not in the hunter gatherer group thinking about the group as a component of our current society. In just the same way that the facebook offices are a "window" into our present for somebody who does not work at facebook.
I almost died of laughter when I heard "somewhere deep in the jungle, are living some little men and women."
The worst wording imaginable! It's not deep or thought provoking, its clumsy and hilarious.
There was a British comedy about a working mans club called "Phoenix Nights". One episode they had a psychic (who is terrible) and his intro is exactly like that. Just pretentious twaddle: th-cam.com/video/Rd79Ie_vWyQ/w-d-xo.html
@Stale Bagelz LMMAOOO STOP
Stale Bagelz they’re based off a African tribe
It reminds me of Nigel Tufnell's intro to 'Stonehenge.'
th-cam.com/video/qAXzzHM8zLw/w-d-xo.html
Well, coming from people whose first language is not English, I think it's understandable. This is the least of the problems in the Deep Forest situation, if it is one, to be frank.
Thanks for bringing to light the history of Sweet Lullaby (known as Rorogwela in the language of the baegu people). My mother is a native Solomon Islander and her grandmother came from the northern part of Malaita (where Afunakawa is from) so this piece of music actually has some very deep cultural importance to myself. Interestingly enough there is nothing sweet about this lullaby, as it is sung from the perspective of an orphan boy consoling his younger sibling after their parents have died. I suspect Deep Forest did not know this or didn't care and instead focused on the pretty melody which is essentially a pentatonic scale so it fits well in a pop/edm framework. I actually arranged this piece for an SATB choir because I felt the piece did not receive its rightful treatment. It's been performed by a few choirs in the Midwest now and I hope that it might go on to educated more people about the music of the Solomons.
I've always despised the term "World Music", it's always implied a separation or even superiority of western music. Great video that clearly shows this as another symptom of capitalism's all consuming nature
The same with "Ethnic" music. Basically the whole world, with the exception of the "Anglo-sphere", lumped into one category.
I have the same despise with the term "Ethnic" for anything culturally non-western, usually from "brown people". Don't say this shitty word, at least try to say the region that piece of culture came from, such as Arabia or Iran or North Africa.
These terms have utility bridging a chasm between the mainstream western mind and the other amidst it.
I feel like this idea of a lost future is best incapsulated in the vaporwave genre. Its nostalgic for a promised future that never came to pass, wherein the smooth corporate aesthetics of the 90's did give way to a utopia instead of the crumbling hellscape of modernity. The project of Green Capitalism that was promised in the 90's never came to fruition, and it has been replaced with the death cult of fascism and a future of a dead planet ravaged by climate change. So now we look back longingly at the pastel dream we were promised as we teeter on the brink of hell, and we hear the same corporate jingles now not as smooth, optimistic jazz, but as a distorted and melancholy memory.
good words
That Jordan Peterson flash after mentioning Jung is pretty slick.
@kaminoshiyo JBP always brings him up as an example of enlightened Western thinkers alongside Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, etc.
Jordan Peterson talks about yung and how profound his ideas about the archetype and the role of religion and mythologies are yet jordan ignores the other part of yungs argument as presented in the video, which is that the very things that he is so cherished of (mythology, religion, spirituality) are being crushed by modernity and capitalism, the two things he also happens to be a defender of. Basically points to his self contradiction.
@@frankguan5044 JP CLEARLY does not ignore that, its 1 of the main things he goes on about, with the exception of laying it at the feet of capitalism. Modernity yes, but capitLism? Because Communism was all about propping up traditional religion myth and spirituality right? Hahaha so ridiculous
i mean one can critique capitlism without supporting communism can they not?
@@henrymoore4522 sure, as much as one can "defend" capitalism while "cherishing" religion, myth, and spirituality. I'm just not seeing the alleged "contradiction"
As an Asian person of mainly Chinese but also some Malay racial heritage living in Singapore, one of the most westernised Asian countries in the world (who happens to like Sweet Lullaby and Return to ainnocence), I wonder, if by neoliberal theory this would apply to me, since I am a ‘banana’ - genealogically oriental but unequivocally white inside. My beef with a lot of these notions of appropriation for capitalist benefit is that we judge these societies’ exploitation by the notion that they have not been justly ‘paid’; whether in terms of money or goods, or recognition on a CD track. The funny thing is, our neoliberalist notion of capitalism taking advantage of primitive people supposes that they are just like us - wanting credit and remuneration, because we see everything as a ‘job’, even parenting is a monetary investment for one’s future.
Parenting is a Biological investent for you genes future. And that takes fors depending on your surroundings.
For us humans it eans being well of onetary ebcause that means shelter, food, status, etc.
In any econoic system, raising children so that they will care for you, whether with oney or not, is in fact "a job". In a commune were ultiple people parent multiple children at the same time, even if none of those children is their own. They do so because in the sae way in the commune the children will indiscriminately care for the elders. Parenting is always a fucking job to secure your future well being.
Has nothing to do with capitalism and is really quite simple.
@@cba000abc000 you're a clear example of that obsession with idealizing the past/present.
@Sean Yeo I see your comment is a year old and I don't mean to dredge up old comments via TH-cam for petty political arguments, but that being said, here goes nothing hahaha. I think you make a fair point about the neoliberal capitalism supposition of remuneration. You're right. Perhaps the industrialized world is imposing it's own value systems on the people from the unindustrialized world. I think the point the video is making, however: is that neoliberal capitalism didn't even ask the people what they wanted! It just exploited them. It took what it needed, turned a profit from it and discarded the rest. Furthermore, to add insult to injury it did so under the guise of multiculturalism. That's part of what the video is trying to point out. Cheers.
@@gohannesgrahms I agree. Its the intention
@@gohannesgrahms I was about halfway through re-wording my comment when I saw you'd already said most of what I was going to say. I'd to go further by adding that, within the framework of our *own* capitalist, neoliberal culture, those who appropriate such cultural components are being hypocrites. Remember, the different established capitalist powers were fighting with one another over the rights to the music as if it were their *right* while completely ignoring the rights they should have provided to the person they stole the music from. It's arrogance on an incredible level, since they must necessarily act as if they're *morally* in the right for holding the rights to the music, while by the morality they claim to adhere to, the original creator should be the one who should have the rights to the music.
Also, at the same time as whatever fetishized culture is being commodified (often without their permission), said culture is being pushed back and erased by that same system that claimed to want to promote multiculturalism.
so basically "world music" is orientalism but for everywhere instead of asia
depends on your definition of world music and what recordings you're supporting/listening to.
The way my mother described it to me is "folk music by people of colour".
It isn't inherently orientalist, but the distinction between folk music and world music is orientalist, and the way that the record industry markets it, particularly in the 80s, 90s, and 00s, is.
See also the distinction between blues and country, or between pop and RnB.
@Klas Wullt I think you're thinking of the Spartakusbund, who were not named for the Spartans, but for Spartacus, the leader of a slave revolt
Well, everywhere else including Asia, Comrade.
Klas Wullt you are a moron and a liar.
'The End Of History by Francis Fukuyama (with a new afterword)' is the height of irony.
This notion of returning to the innocence of an uncorrupted and pure tribal existence in communion with nature is not unique to late capitalism. The concept of the noble savage predates late capitalism by over 200 years. Tolkien prefigured these notions in Lord of the Rings which was incorporated into 60's counter culture along with the popularization of eastern spirituality. I think it would be more fair to point the finger at industrialization/urbanization than at capital, although the phenomenon are probably not entirely separable.
Well thought.
Well it wasnt to a pure tribal existence, but even in the renaissance they were "looking back" to the ancient greeks and to what they thought was even earlier, hermes trismegistus...
Montaigne has his own primitivism in On Cannibals. Some version of the idea seems to have been around for a long time.
I suppose the 60’s counter culture didn’t quite incorporate Tolkien’s racialisation via his constant emphasis on bloodlines and distinctions between the different races of his fantasy world. Too much blood and soil for 60s counter culturists surely.
I agree. I have recently heard a lot of people relating it to late capitalism as well or as a reaction to "the coming singularity" through "A.I." and "modern technology" (I add quotes because I think most of those concepts are just wet dreams of few in the 1% and those who have wet dreams of being in that clique. I don't think that the technology available to most people is that impressive at all but I digress). I think the tendency to "go back" to pure or non industrialized times comes from something much deeper. A good example of this is Marie Antoinette's Hamlet, aka "mock farm", which was Antoinette's way of holding on to the modus vivendi of ·the good ol days", so basically while living in a time where she didn't even have plumbing available to her, she was already yearning for "simpler times".. that says a lot about this human tendency and while perhaps late capitalism exploits it or exacerbates it in some way, I don't think it's exclusive of late capitalism either.
When you realize your parents' entire identities are wrapped up in this stuff, and they're too old and exhausted to go through a major ideological shift... feels bad man
That's fine. There's still hope for some. My mom understood me and gave a laugh when I've described "Wind of change" by Scorpions as a song version of Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" while my father didn't understood what I've meant.
So many boomers grew up or were indoctrinated into this conception of progressiveness and still hold onto their colorfully packaged ethnology as a point of pride that they weren't like the other boomers.
I honestly can't say younger generations are all that different though. We may be more "aware" of neoliberalism and empty corporate platitudes but everything gets funneled back into the same place at the end of the day - ideology as a form of identity. In 20 years our kids will be saying the same thing about us, how proudly their parents talk about socialism this and anti-consumerism that but ultimately we have succumbed to the same trappings of just inventing another demographic instead of making any meaningful structural change.
Sweet Lullaby's intro is going straight in my cringe compilation.
The intro triggered a Pavlovian response to get up and make a cup of tea. Sweet Lullaby was seared into my subconscious by a local TV station that used it as their self-branding ad between programs from the mid 90s until their licence changed and they were allowed to run for-profit ads. Thanks SBS.
Jim lastname - I miss those days as well. Growing up in the 80s and early 90s one of the most transformative experiences was watching SBS. Having a station that was not English exclusive and was curated by people who were able to put things on television simply because they felt it was important people saw them, rather out of the profit motive, was one of the best things about Australia. I'm still sad we lost the battle over SBS' funding.
Yeah, for me the song was forever imprinted on my mind by the Adelphia channel in Los Angeles. I think that's what Time Warner/Spectrum was called in the late 90's. I used to take naps to it as a kid, they played all sorts of new age ambient music. It's probably part of a conspiracy by all the local TV stations of the time, probably some kind of hidden messages about Satan or something if you play it backwards. *joking*
lol the intro is absolutely ridiculous 90s cringe but the album itself is fantastic imho
@Jim lastname Why yes, I always listen to my CDs backwards 😉
My mother played Sweet Lullaby for me as a young baby, and I would listen to it on my little fisher price tape player, and press it against my face as I slept.
It has been this beautiful beacon of comfort for me for 21ish years, and knowing the name of the woman who sang to me is really lovely. I also hate that she wasn’t praised the way she should have been.
Ah yes, the 90s. World music, new age BS, "the end of history," turn-of-the-millennium paranoia, UFO cults, X-Files-inspired conspiracy theories, anti-NWO far-right militias, the Y2K scare... good times.
@shortbuspileup i. Think this happened because of the. Dissapointment caused by the fall of the soviet union and the pursuit of socialism ,we've been living the last 20 yesrs without a purpose or cause to fight for, kids nowdays have existencials crisis and turn to nihilism because they feel that theres no alternative, no choices to change their lives
There were great things about the 90s. Electronic music genres like Techno, Trance, House Music, Jungle, Drum&Bass and so on. Great TV shows and awesome cartoons.
The 90s were a Golden Age compared to now, let me tell you !
Better than now tbh
Yes, they were.
we are the world we are the children... mein gott *sniff*
Lol
Love, devotion, feeling, emotion, and so on and so on.
Lmao
Man, I feel lonely.
:(
I'm with you in Rockland
Hey mate, we're here for ya.
A L I E N A T I O N
Welcome to the Internet citizenship...
It's so great that someone is finally doing some good analysis lately
This and contrapoints provides some excellent cultural critique
as an HxH fan, your username name made me laugh😆
@@sanidhyagaur3474 😉
Was hoping for a shout out to the infomercial of my childhood, PURE MOODS and was not disappointed.
Often, when I think about Neoliberalism, I remember this fascinating paragraph of my professor:
Neoliberalism, It is insidious. It will educate you with individualistic belongingness while getting rid of your social belongingness. It also equals where you belong to what you can consume. The source of your unhappiness is not being able to consume, the source of your soullessness is consuming the same thing and the source of your uneasiness is moving away from the possibility of consuming. In the midst of all this consuming fable, you are far from all kinds of sociality, you have closed the period of learning the boundaries of things you can do from reading holy books(religion) and you are now searching for shopping catalogs(modern capitalism). At both ends, you are not yourself, and it is impossible for you to deal with the fear of choosing one of these two extremes (ie, losing the other end).
This is why the individual of neoliberalism is in the middle. He/she can go neither here or there. She/he cannot peacefully choose either side.
-Hakan Övünç Öngür. (9 January 2015)
Thats pretty good. Sure will look it up
Get a pair of Nikes and be like Jim, knit a hat, buy a red hat, eat vegan food, choose the carnivore diet, read books by the latest crazy person, read another book by another crazy person refutating the other crazy, wave a flag, burn a flag, like or dislike, defend a minority, hate a minority, be the new minority, find answers, ignore answers, be sane, be insane, believe in god, believe in the environment, guns kill people, people kill people, lives matter, a life is worth one bullet, study philosophy, live in a barrel, be in the barrel, conquer the market, hate the market...
May i share this?
@@joermundgand Life is miserable... what is the alternative? is heaven on earth possible?
@@alr12 No, because heaven isn't possible because humans are present.
Great Analysis. Just subscribed to your channel. Keep up the good work.
As a footnote, I've wanted to add: I have studied music theory for over a decade (being a musician) and one thing particularly strikes me the most with this "World Music": A lot of this "style" works most of the time in a specific musical mode: The Dorian Mode (From D to D on the white keys of the piano). This mode is technically minor, with an major sixth that gives a certain major flair at some moments.
This mode is predominant in most all celtic music, african music (as well as pentatonic scales) and other "washed-down-world-music" that has been used in the media to "standardize" this modern tribal association (without forgetting the prevalent use of acoustic instruments as the only timbre being used). Dorian mode is mostly used in music composition to create that sense of serenity and "back to nature" feeling, and while not all cultures has it (Norther India, Middle East, Central America), it has become a defacto characteristic of New Age Music that has capitalized on romanticised third world countries.
I love you dad
He and your mom's bf love you back
Hey thanks for making this video. I remember my mom having VHS tapes filled with "World Music"
I must admit. This was pretty nostalgic
thank you, what strikes me about capitalism is that ppl may be the most capitalist even if they think they are running from capitalism
its like the recuperation of anti capitalist works as commodities and branding. there is no ideology to 'profit before all else' and so markets will always seek to find a way to exploit even anticapitalist sentiment without any internal conflict
Defiant Badger
The market is in part you and everyone else.
speaking of ideology
Exactly, beig communist is just an ideological product from capitalism.
Yeah, but this makes me think of earlier comments when people complain about travelling away to find people having mobile phones and enjoying coke in far away and poorer places, it doesn't mean there aren't other cultures and transformative things with potential just because capitalism has subsumed many parts of culture and life globally. Culture is a rich, human and creative thing, it's worth learning about and seeing I guess. I think it's a kind of cynical and narrow minded way of thinking to think that these kind of rebellions to do things outside of capitalism only lead to more capitalism than having other transformative affects be honest, although I do agree these things have also made capital a more fluid and inescapable thing, I think it does still give pockets of space for subjective development to resist capital, worth muling over more I guess, one idea is acid communism I've looked into recently could be worth checking out.
Anyone else notice that current movies more and more function by this opposition between evil institutions and folk-people resisting. Avatar, V for Vendetta, Player Ready One and other movies follow this same logic, first you have some evil corporations that are trying to exploit, dominate etc., and then you have free open-minded resisting group that succeeds in the end. Of course it is inherently paradoxical, because the very resistance, aim for authenticity is conveyed trough institutional, money oriented medium (hollywood movies). In avatar there is glorification of natural, tribal life against technology and brutal exploitation, in Ready player one there is idealized image of gamers who do not sell out, but of course Avatar was the peak of technology and Ready player one was probably the most cliche saturated movie ever, it was literally selling out all these inner gamer jokes for financial aims. That's why I like the concept of interpassivity; it is basically the idea that the other can do the thing for me, in this situation the movie acts out the aspiration to authenticity, resistance and etc. You dont need to do these things in real life anymore, movies and other mediums nowadays ensure the satisfaction of these needs.
also the victory of the good guys over the cartoonish evil corporation is very rarely revolutionary and the result is also not revolutionary; they simple slightly improve the capitalism that they live under. the monopolistic mega corporation is evil, yes, but the system it rules over and our status quo existence is presented as good. the victory is just a slight re-balancing act
fisher actually goes into this with the film wall-e: capitalism has destroyed the entire planet, yet it continues without crises on corporate-ran spacecraft. the eventual victory of the film is that the corporation-owned robot is able to bring the humans back to earth, the earth having fixed itself somehow, and they can continue to live happily on earth as they did before... all this while enjoying the anti-corporate message at a monopolised cinema complex drinking coca-cola. letting hollywood do our revolutionary thinking stunts our ability to critique the status quo
By the same argument, you are hypocritical for criticizing capitalism via comments on a mega-corporation's website.
Some of these films convey class and exploitation to a young adult audience that may have never considered them before. They can be a doorway to new attitudes, not just a palliative escape.
Brilliantly said. You perfectly described the faux-cathartic nature that is inherent to modern resistance fiction.
In some ways, Mr. Robot could be added to that list, with it embodying this kind of empty (defanged) cathartic resistance. When the issues comprising the show's main themes of capitalist alienation and corporate greed are finally resolved, one is subconsciously tricked, if only for a brief while, into believing that its real world counterpart has been dealt with as well. Yet the real world issue still remains. Ironically, the show's anti capitalist rhetoric is distributed for public consumption by USA Network, a large broadcasting conglomerate. This unequal power dynamic in which the show's anti capitalist message heavily relies on its antithesis -- a large faceless corporation -- for its dissemination to the masses, results in its gradual co-optation by the distributor. The message is removed of its original political legitimacy and incorporated into capitalism's evergrowing toolkit.
Man I hadn't heard "Sweet Lullaby" and "Return to Innocence" in decades. Those songs used to be EVERY-FREAKING-WHERE. At the time this "whole world in capitalism" thing was referred to as the 'Benetton style', and while they were pioneers, it spread all over. Good video, and I completely agree the problem is, to slightly paraphrase Mark Fisher, the cancellation of the future. With the USSR, flawed as it was, died the idea of political utopia and escaping the slow grind to death of capitalism. Also the existence of the USSR as a countervailing force to global capitalism, and the space it provided in terms of raw material support, allowed the flourishing of a plethora of leftist projects which just got isolated and murdered in the years after. The fact that the lives of those poor people in the "Third World" (I really don't like this term, it's just a euphemism for "poor countries" and in the US at least is usually used in such derogatory ways) would not get to enjoy this connectedness and freedom to experience anything else but in the shallowest terms was something that always soured it for me, much as I enjoyed things like the "Lullaby" video. Those people are still sorting out toxic trash and breaking up rusty ships for scrap as they were then but now their horizon has closed up more.
and tbh the whole idea of the west's obsession with curated and romanticized exoticness isn't even exclusive to since the 90s. Back in the 50s there was this music genre called "exotica", which very much also tried to make up fantasy about what "ethnic" music is like. I found a martin denny quote super funny where he said exotica is about "armchair safari-ers".
This reminds me of the hakuna matata lawsuit with Disney, who refused to give any royalty or residuals to the people who came up with the melody.
For some non-exploitative world music, check out Sahel Sounds. Run by one guy who goes out to the Western African Sahel and records artists in the field and either puts their work into compilation albums or an album exclusively by that artist, splitting profits 50/50. There is a banging documentary about it too, and one of their artist's Mdou Moctar has achieved wide spread acclaim that he wouldn't have otherwise and is now touring the world.
The point on Avatar is especially relevant when you look into the development of its soundtrack. They wanted to make it as "Pandora" as possible but each demo was refused because the director thought it would be too alien for the average audience. Instead they settled on bog a standard movie soundtrack.
Cases like this helps us to see what intellectual property laws are really stands for
Why isn't this an analysis of Africa by Toto?
Its a relevant question. I think that the lecture and writings are more in depths of relation to the theme that Cuck shows us. I mean sure, Toto is idealistic and in the pejorative way, but in this case scenarios the plagiarism of ethnic culture and the misrepresentation is more relevant, than the viewpoint of liberal musicians in the 80's, whose related the "primitive" way of life to the romantique idea of being "african".
About this kind of ethno - first world viewpoints there's a fantastic writing from Jean Fisher - "The Syncretic Turn" where she writes about South American artists and their way of representation in the contemporary art. She says that the art society sometimes want them to do artworks that are connected to their origins, and the preconceptions of their nationality their way of primitive life. Like: "You are from an indian tribe... why don't you represent your culture?" - which is very racist, and ordinary disguisting; should they? Like, necessary? Or is that the assimilation is the way to go as their choose of free will. Also if they start to copy the art of the first world's art which is the other side of the case, they might loose their pure cultural habits. Jean says that there must be an opened way in between where artists could do whatever and it might be in syncretic relation to their original culture, or represent the - as thinking outside of the box - whole problematic of being judged for copying contemporary art, or being "indian" "negro" or whatever...
Because it's a banger of a song.
@8:25 Mark Fisher did not write that. Fisher is quoting Jean-Francois Lyotard's book Libidinal Economy.
Though this is a minor point in your video, I feel like bringing it up because it's something I only ever heard from my Dad and always sort of agreed with. That is the feeling like when the Soviet Union collapsed and desert Storm was an absolute slam dunk, we were in the era of the absolute end of all war.
I remember the 1990s, and that historical context, coupled with rising high technology, and booming economy, gave everything a very optimistic outlook.
Whether that was warranted or not I can't say, I was too young. Then came the tech crash and 9/11, and now we're in a period of never ending war, idealogical crisis, and technology seeming to limit possibilities more and more, dividing rather than uniting us.
Because capitalism can't exist without crisis?
I think the problem is the opposite- Capitalism is a little too good at papering over crisis until they hit a boiling point and explode. Things were a lot better in the 90's without the crisis, but that was only because the system had it's means of hiding the underlying issues (worker's wages and foreign exploitation).
CA P
because humanity can't exist without crisis.
But to be honest, that "capitalism is the root of all problems" attitude is amusing.
@onlyhas99 Congratulations, you are an anti-liberal economist: www.uni-bielefeld.de/cias/wiki/c_Crisis.html
Humans can't exist without crisis. Communsim and Capitalism are disfunctional due to the human element. So far capitalsim has proven to be ironically less corruptable than comminism or rather so many people are corrupting it, it's being pulled in so many directions so no one imparticular person has absolute control so anyone in the middle class is just in the eye of the storm and hence not affecting them in a way that they care about.
@@johnercek: actually, I completely agree. Crisis is essential, it forces its constant maintenance, which is why it's really hard to dispense with as an economic system.
It's like trying to save up to buy a new, more fuel efficient car while at the same time constantly needing to supply new parts for a hoopty that you can't afford to let break down or else you won't be able to get to work.
Wow you make some really great stuff. Very original topics and the way you treat them and the connections you make are interesting and refreshing. Gonna binge the rest of your channel now.
fantastic as always, man. please keep up the good work. you're my favorite channel on the platform and I can't wait to see more young theorists and writers like you on the scene!
keep inspiring the next round of new criticism. we need it now more than ever!
I've always been a big fan of David Byrne's music and as I watched this I couldn't help but think of him. Even at the end as the infomercial is shown you see his name pass in the crawl. Interestingly, the song he wrote as a member of the Talking Heads titled "(Nothing But) Flowers" is very much an introspective look at the hypocrisy rooted in the capitalist romanticism of simplicity you describe in this video. "If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawn mower!" Classic. This is very well made! I'm glad I found your videos
I think George Harrison did it right: he went to india to record the people there, with his money, so they could release albums and get that money for themselves (under Dark Horse Records).
He wanted to spread his love for Indian classical music. That's it.
2:59 this is the most Flight of the Conchords thing I've seen in real life.
The right arrangement of pictures and sounds supposedly coming from an unknown faraway place can create powerful associations, powerful enough to be quite profitable
I was always into ethnic fusion as a teen in late 00s and never even thought about this.
Amazing video!
The Promise bu Michael Nyman cropping up took me by surprise a little, because The Piano is my favorite film. There is a scene in the film where some Maori sit down to watch English theatre where a murder is being staged. Not understanding that it isn't real, the Maori are shown to invade the stage and attack the actors to "protect" the victim of murder. The film was written by Jane Campion, and has quite to say to say about the "Idealised" Other, with it's central character being a mute woman sold off to marriage to an English owner of Maori lands. Not to mention Nyman's minimalist score is fantastic.
Dunning-Kruger Poster Child is my new favorite screen name.
I said to myself time and time again, "you know, it's so weird how there was this moment in my childhood when new age and world music was all over the radio and CDs and TV-ads, I wonder how that happened". But I had to resign myself to the fact that it would remain a mystery to me. Putting that phenomenon in a historical context and analysing it was clearly such an incredibly specific subject that my chances of ever finding someone doing that very thing were slim to none.
Your patreon patrons have amazing names.
Never hit a TH-cam notification faster in my life.
Maybe we could understand it from the POV of the 3rd world people portrayed there, even in a distorted way. The nice feeling of being included in the global conversation, of no longer standing on the sidelines. This creates an almost automatic empathic connection between the companies and these people, giving them the will to consume the brands and products. Because companies always need to expand, this was one of the things that gave momentum to consumerism globalization
The principle of profit, as a single mold which controls the surface level of cultural difference also could be found at the UNESCO convention on cultural diversity. In the convention the 'universal' concept human rights functions as the single framework which excludes the unseemingly differences which the market of cultural products would feel uncomfortable.
Nice subliminal image at 7:14
I got a sudden urge of cleaning my room and fighting Neo Post-Modern Marxists right at that moment of the video.
Time to play J B P W A V E
@kaminoshiyo JP has a boner for Jung.
The old Tyler Durden method.
Suddenly I had a craving for lobster
The man listening to world music as he guns down the men and women of the third world, the irony lost to him
The woman listening to world music as she buys products made by debts peons and child slaves of the third world, the irony lost to her.
Let's not kid ourselves. It's Five Finger Death Punch, AC/DC, and Migos in the ears of our hired killers.
Even the Rain is a good example as well. The film crew goes to Bolivia to shoot a film about the landing of Colombus because it is cheaper. They use the indigenous labor to build sets and to play the parts of the natives as well. It goes on even more meta step because the actual film is filmed in Bolivia and used indigenous labor as cast and crew as well.
Dead Can Dance ftw
YEEEEEE
no fuckin doubt mate
...and as a bonus DCD always correctly give credit when they adapt other people's music because they aren't douchebags...
Dead Can Dance are geniuses.
I love your content @Modern Hermeticist
I really appreciate your channel, way better than Philosophy Tube although with less decorum.
I would highly recommend you listen to Jon Hassell's music. He calls it Fourth World music, and he seems to be very aware of the topics discussed in this video. Also, Visible Cloaks, who have been influenced by Jon Hassell, have some very interesting music that deals with themes in a similar ballpark to those of this video as well. Both very conscientious artists worth exploring, artists who seem to be searching for that lost future.
I am binging the hell out of your videos right now
This is, in a nutshell, what the scary and misused words "cultural appropriation" mean.
Thanks for linking the PDF of Fisher's paper. It's given me a lot to consider.
One other thread may be the work of Paul Simon with South African musicians around the time his album Graceland's came out, 1986. He was widely criticised for breaking the cultural boycott in SA at a time when Nelson Mandela was still in jail (released in 1990). That was one reason why some genuine (I think) SA musical groups like Ladysmith Black Mambosa to achieve worldwide fame as they were, not by being sampled. So good outcomes sometimes possible?
That "black hole" dig was amazing :D
Would you consider this to be a form of generalized Orientalism?
I would consider it a perfect example of orientalism.
A very interesting video. I still like Dead Can Dance, though :P
But in all seriousness, you've articulated some thoughts that had been swirling around in my head for a while, such as "Is world music not a rather broad term for all these different genres of music, that likely have no cultural connection with each other?"
Still, I was introduced to New Age/world music bands by my father, and for someone of his generation, who was interested in non-western music genres, this was likely the most accessible way to be introduced to them. It's not like they sold ethnomusicologist's recordings in record stores after all.
Because of the internet, and sound archives putting more of their content online, listening to music from around the world, without the artists being deprived of their voice, without it being repackaged for the Western consumer is easier, at least.
And yet, I'm reminded of this TH-cam channel I came across a while ago. It featured an insane amount of albums of traditional music from all around the world, from Scotland to Tibet. The channel's owner, however, had neglected to credit even a single artist.
Im way too drunk for tyhis. remind me to watch latyer
Leukemia watch it later
Thanks
i hope you are not too hangover
watch it now
did you watch it m8?
Interesting video! Much of this rings pretty close to the Aesthetics of Hunger/Poverty/Dreams essays Glauber Rocha would write in the 60s regarding his view on "third world cinema" and the first world's fetishism of what they see and assume in third world countries as a more primal or primitive culture. Fairly short and really interesting reads too (his films are also worth checking out).
Didn't the music video for Rammstein's "Amerika" mock and criticize this whole corporate, neoliberal, U.S.-centric globalism?
Yes.
yeah but its more about "with our burgers and nike shoes we are corrupting the simple and innocent lifestyle of these people". Basically still believing that others lifestyle is primitive and simple. Just some orientalist bs to be short
I'm glad I found your channel, you're a serious gem!
I remember dancing to Deep Forest in my living room when I was 2 years old Deep Forest rules
Your videos are amazing. Fantastic work!
Nice. Wonder what parallels can be drawn with Said's Orientalism (most obviously re: the construction of an "other")
Martin Ersatz there was an interesting article about Said that I read recently that discussed his inconsistencies both in his personal history, and in his theories: www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/enough-said-false-scholarship-edward-said
I guess, but, the venom of the author aside, Said wasn't a historian. Attacking him for not meeting the standards of academic history misses the point. Orientalism presents a broad model and challenge to consider, not unquestioningly accept or regurgitate. Similarly, you can punch holes in Foucault's Discipline and Punish as a work of history and point out it's a book written about torture and the body by a man into gay S&M, but again this misses the point; the panopticon remains an incredibly powerful metaphor and heuristic device.
** Flash Lights WARNING **
At 7:15 there is a flashed picture, while "black hole" is being said.
Please avoid these evil practices, Jonas. If you guess it would compromise your artistical vision, a Health Warning would've been humane. Thanks for considering it.
More flashes around 10:XY.
Jung had a point (which he derived from his reading of Nietzsche)
As I was watching this video, an ice-cream truck pulled by my house.
Although my family avoids sugar and opts for alternatives, I was suddenly taken aback by how ice-cream trucks have changed. Most people's impression of ice-cream trucks are mobile business-stands, with a local entrepreneur scooping a fist-sized dollop of hand-crafted ice cream into a cone, then handing it out to children. The different flavors - usually chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry - would be chosen by the children if they had enough allowance to buy it. Or, their parents would buy it for them.
However, that was the typical mid-20th century example. The ice-cream trucks I remember organized their "flavors" into brands - Unilever's and Nestle's were the most prevalent. The ice-cream was usually put on a popsicle stick and was made to resemble iconic cartoon characters that were brands in themselves (but for some reason, I never got my hands on one).
Either way, I just had something crazy to say, but I don't know what to say now.
Real talk, i love ambient and world music. Deep Forest was one of the first groups i got into from that genre. this gives me something to think about.
I still remember I listened to this when I came home from a high school football game and I was like “holy shit there’s a whole nother world beyond what I’ve learned so far this is amazing.”
This would be a lot more valid if unpaid sampling wasn’t part of basically every popular music of the 90s.
Good point.
And i find it a bit naive that a video about neoliberals and music centers it’s argument mainly on 2 performers/artists (deep forest and enigma). It seems highly unlikely that two by that time established artists did their own negotiations. This was probably done by the lawyers of the labels they signed to. So it where not deep forest and enigma who did not pay any royalties or broke the promise not to use the sweet lullaby song in comercials, it was the record label that made these choices.
At 12:42 there is a pic of an article - "New-Age Music Searches For Its Proper Niche." Are you talking about New Age Music or World Music? Now I'm confused.
Saudade is a Portuguese concept that can only be translated as a somber remembrance of 'old times'.
Fashy
@@noumena9463 idiot
Thank you for articulating very well what I have felt and thought since first hearing the beginning voice-over of Deep Forest's first album (which you reproduced in this video) shortly after it came out, while taking the time to actually do the research into this phenomenon that I never have, and thus producing a well-informed video. I am curious what you think of Peter Gabriel's profuse use of and influence by "traditional" and contemporary African and Asian music, beginning (in his words) with "Biko," and influencing almost every part of his fourth album (which was given the title "Security," in 1982), much of his very commercially successful fifth album (which he allowed to be titled "So", in 1986) -- in which, for example, the still increasingly popular song "In Your Eyes" was based on an African-derived rhythm and featured the (credited) Senegalese musician Yousssu N'Dour singing backup vocals -- and then almost everything else he has ever produced since then, including numerous collaborations with (credited) "third world" artists? Even though on the one hand he was still under the influence of the supreme Orientalist Carl Jung in the early 1980s (though IMO trying with some difficulty to break free of it, before possessing the intellectual resources that might have helped him do so) and later also collaborated with Deep Forest themselves, his commitment to openly respecting, crediting, and promoting non-"Western" artists and his human rights activism, etc. give me feeling of greater "positive" ambivalence about his work. Frankly, I personally enjoy most of his music a great deal (which obviously might bias me), and I "feel" that he has risen above and beyond the trap of simple appropriation in many ways, but based on my limited knowledge, I also "feel" that he has never truly escaped the confines of liberalism in either his music or his activism. It seems to me that he has pushed the limits of liberalism as far as they can go, but it is unclear to me whether he has ever broken free of them. Since you are more informed on this subject than I am, I would be very curious to hear your opinion about it.
Well done not using the term cultural appropriation, maybe right wing members of your audience won't switch their minds off and actually pay attention enough not to strawman you!
That's because it's just exploitation combined with liberal ideology, a well known phenomenom outlied in Marxist theory. "Cultural appropriation" is unnecessary to describe it, and there's a reason for rejecting this term within the left. "Cultural appropriation", as it is used, is frequently liberal when it's used to shun and blame individuals (workers) for simply partaking in activities or wearing clothing not from their culture of birth (which is fascist), labeling them as cultural appropriators. It's trying to achieve some sort of reactionary cultural purity while attacking workers for how the bourgeoisie commodifies all things... Which they do, naturally, because we live in capitalism. There's no modern capitalism without imperialism and some sort of cultural exploitation. You can end the commodification of all things if you don't want Americans to profit off of clothes with Chinese characters, Mexican symbols or tribal drawings, otherwise it is impossible to fight just this particular aspect of capitalism. And workers are never at fault for liking music or clothes, ever. This kind of misguided attack happens when you have a real grudge against capitalism but don't have Marxism; you end up fighting your equals.
Maybe the term doesn't ACTUALLY mean that, maybe it refers to the sistemic issues, but I've personally seen it being used in this "anti-worker" way several times, but fortunately only by students in academic circles which drink for the American fountain of liberalism. So, because of the praxis associated with this expression, we choose to reject it.
I don't feel I need to tell a Marxist that just because a piece of theory is misunderstood and misapplied that this makes a piece of theory invalid. Cultural appropriation as an abstract concept is morally neutral. In some cases it's a good thing. As a random example, when I was last over in Thailand I found that they had appropriated Jamaican culture in a big way, but as a means of liberating themselves from their socially conservative upbringing and with the culture being shared communally as opposed to through privately manufactured commodities. On the other hand, a morally repugnant example is the one stated in this video.
Therefore I don't agree that cultural appropriation is necessarily always just a combination of exploitation and liberal ideology, I think the concept is best summed up by it's very name, i.e. it's literally just the act of appropriating a different culture, nothing more, nothing less. However, I do agree that too many people misunderstand it and blanket demonise any act of cultural appropriation and that this can in some cases attack innocent workers.
lol, aint no right wing people here, this is just another liberal echo chamber with extremely convoluted attempts to defend their political stance.
@george crouche, nice self-defeating comment there
>lol, aint no right wing people here
I'm center-right and I subscribed here 4 month ago.
Your stuff is so good, thank you for producing this
The people that fetishize tribal lifestyles only do so because they are unaware of how harsh that kind of life really is. A fish does not see the water he lives in, in the same way a modern urban citizen easily dismisses all the facilities and conforts their environment provides.
Reaction to an overly sanitized life, dirt is an requirement but not always a choice.
There's still a tension between those who think they're better people because of the facilities whilst being bored by thought of a rigged system - and those who realise that something is lost in fetishised modernity and seek more equalisation and less logo.
Thank you for this video, and more broadly, all your other videos. They are well written, offer interesting perspectives and insights into complex topics. I particularly enjoy how you relate socio-political themes with pop culture (video game, films, etc.).
Now I would like to comment on this video in particular because it affects me emotionally.
Although you did not mention or talk about cultural appropriation explicitly, I believe that how you criticized the 90s world music and new age culture is closely related to the former. Would the situation with the Sweet Lullaby be any different if it had not been a straightforward sample but an inspired melody ? For me, in makes a big difference, the former case being a classic case of copyright infringement which would have been no different had the melody be sang by, say, a Polish grandma from Poland's countryside or simply some other fellow "white" musician. Of course, I acknowledge that the latter may have more power to fight for its rights than the former but, I would say, this is another story.
It's all about how some groups of an undefined culture (mostly "white" people) steal and use cultural characteristic (music, for example) from another undefined group (mostly from "Africa"). The problem I have is how the boundaries are defined, and by whom. Who is in charge of attributing every single musical style, genre, etc. to some specific group of people. How are these specific groups of people defined ? By their skin color ? Their geographical location ? Culture is not fix and static but ever-changing and evolving. It is impossible to trace back some root or essence of a particular music.
I also acknowledge that the Sweet Lullaby story is an extreme case: the group of people from whom the music was stolen can, actually, be very precisely define, and the way that the music was used is very "tainted", almost obscene. However, where do we draw the line ? Would it have been alright if the music hadn't been used in some commercials ? Definitely, the person that was the origin of the sample should have received royalties. But What if the sample was only 2s long and distorted beyond recognition? Depending on your time and space resolution, every music can be classified as world music.
I am particularly sensitive to this topic because I am of mixed origin and a musician: I was born in Brussels (Belgium), my father is from Kosovo (half Albanian, half Montenegrins) and my mother is German. I look quite non-western (people always situate my country of origin in the Middle East). My first name is an ancient name from the Ottoman times (old Turkey) and my last name has been translated two times within a single generation. My mother tongue is French, and I speak quite fluently German. I now live in Germany.
I often ask myself the following: what am I allowed to do ? For Albanians, I am no Albanian since I do not speak the language, for Belgian I am not European, for Germans I am also a foreigner.
Often, if you use "non-western" music as inspiration, you are expected to "fully" understand its origin and meaning, in some undefined level of depth. In my case, no group of people will grant me permission to "access" their culture.
Anyway, I would add that, in practice, very few people care...
As a final remark, I find your analysis very insightful in order to understand specific shifts in our capitalistic-driven cultural landscape. But when one has to solve issues, and apply it to concrete examples, it becomes quite cumbersome.
Not disagreeing with anything you've said, but I think it's important to remember that on the consumer side of things this music represented very positive and hopeful feelings. It was an attempt to look forwards while looking back and to the side, to be inspired by people who live in another place and seem to live in another time, to be uncertain about your own society's dominance of the world, and to feel like you belong to the earth's greatest species rather than it's greatest nation or culture.
I don't know, maybe it's just because I was a younger in the 90s, but I can't help thinking that there's certain feelings embodied in this kind of music that seems to be absent from our society today.
When you talked about how precalitalist culture is packaged to us and it perpetuates capitalism, it blew my mind. I didn't even realize the people who shop at whole foods are perpetuating what they dont like about modern life.
7:15 flash of Jordan Peterson
I just bought a deep forest album last month for $1 and I had no idea what I was listening to. It’s blowing my mind right now that your talking about them haha
I think one thing I'd like to point out, a need too reconnect with being, authenticity and meaning is not necessarily wrong, Carl Jung I think would agree with me here. How we attempt to reconnect...as the video points out is a different matter.
Look at Rome. When they conquered new(usually Tribal) peoples, often they would enslave them with reverence while they paraded them in the public forums. Would create tragic plays about them depicting them as noble great peoples whom had the misfortune of clashing with Rome.
I would suggest this has happened before
As the vid points out we are attempting to integrate new meaning into our lives via postmodern corporate fueled means. In which case I actually empathize with us more than condemn us. Because it shows how backward and desperate we are, like Jung pointed out, we are in an existential vacuum, that we are divorced from our sense purpose and being in the world.
this is the soundtrack of my life, as afunakwa passed away the year i was born.
This is good.... really good.
Just saw the “global village coffee house” art and had to go back to this video
Omg I was literally just watching your kpop video before starting this.
Watch his video on kpop. Called "The late stage capitalism of kpop" I think.
I love how he mispronunciates certain words with a certainty that it's absolutely the right way of saying it.
LMFAO @7:16 when it flashes a pic of Jordan Peterson
"Yo Ho Ho a pirate's life for me" childish but it was the first thought in my head when I began to think of who is getting paid and who is not.
Awesome video, I really liked your perspective on privitivism and the lost future.
>The red menace was defeated
Haha. No.
10:45 WHY IS "FIRE WALK WITH ME" ON THAT CD WTF
I love the cultural criticism, and I wonder if, if you are interested in really delving into this, you might engage with Adorno, that founding father of Marxist cultural criticism. I think there is a lot to the thesis of the culture industry, but Adorno's vision that categorically damns pop music and jazz in their entirety is vulgar, and could use a re "inventing" so to speak. Obviously, Adorno's "Culture Industry" thesis relates to ideas of alienation, in which I know you expressed interest in another video. So, taking Adorno's essays on "popular music," and Marx's essay on "Alienated Labor" in the 1844 manuscripts, there's probably something interesting to be said there.
Also, I just want to say that this channel is a gem.
don't worry, Cuck Philosophy is quite fluent in Frankfurt School
Great video. Your output is getting better and better! One thing I would mention is that the co-opting of counter-cultural values in corporate advertising, and in particular the sentiment/values of 'one world in peace and harmony' goes right back to the early 1970s. A classic example being this Coca Cola ad: th-cam.com/video/1VM2eLhvsSM/w-d-xo.html
"A Pronounceable Name... thank you"