I always enjoy it when weirdo ideological alarmists try to write about pop culture. There’s something that’s just so, well, adorable about someone spewing forth angry, pompus tirades, full of bluster and overwrought prose, on the alleged culture-destroying properties of, say, Miley Cyrus.
The recent Return of Kings post “5 Things Wrong With Modern Music” is a lovely example of this genre of criticism, even though one of its points, that modern pop music is too clinically perfect for its own good, and could use a few more rough edges, is actually pretty much on the mark. But even when what author G.W. Rees says is more or less correct, the way he says it is risible. Also, he’s wildly incorrect most of the time.
So without further ado, here are My 5 Favorite Overblown Pronouncements from the Return of Kings post “5 Things Wrong With Modern Music.”
1) “Have you ever seen a room full of women in their twenties singing along to filth this shameless, while grandmothers stare catatonically on in horror, parents guffaw and smirk in direction of the floor, and the more “enlightened” boomers laugh delightfully as if the behaviour their daughters are displaying is of no significance at all?”
I’m going to go with “no” here.
2) “Whores, whores, and more whores. It seems like every other contemporary popstar parades herself with more zeal than a common street hussy.”
“Hussy.” Haven’t heard that one in a while, but then again I don’t usually spend a lot of time hanging out with 90-year-old misogynists.
3) “A dystopia where all things sexual have been reduced to an amoral form of childish amusement, and the segment of the population who have historically been the nurturers and caregivers of a society have decided to shirk the honourable traditions of their forebears and turn feral.”
It’s true. Most female pop stars are not socialized to humans and do not feel comfortable around them. They do not like to be touched. They are unlikely to “meow” in their attempts to communicate with humans. Many live in colonies with other feral pop stars.
4) “Blue jeans, fast food, Walmart, Hollywood, suburbs, and…”sick beats.” These are all emblematic of the colossally hideous Jabba The Hut-like behemoth—known as globalization—currently devouring tradition and genuine cultures.”
So you’re complaining about Hollywood colonizing the world … using a metaphor based on Jabba the Hut, a character from a blockbuster Hollywood movie that colonized the world?
5) “[T]he broadcasting of such content via mass media in conjunction with the female proclivity towards herd mentality spawns a toxic synergy. Such a combination ultimately results in debased sexual moral standards for young women and the normalization of slatternly behaviour, in turn sowing the seeds of cultural rot and the decline of our once mighty civilization.”
Ok, but it’s got a good beat, and you can dance to it. I give it a 72.
Oh, and speaking of Miley (which at least one of these quotes was doing), she’s not the only one destroying culture.
So wait, is this guy trying to say that he was born in le wrong generation?
@PI:
And after Secret Wars in May, Marvel’s axing 33 titles, including Thor and Amazing Spider-Man. The Mary Sue is confident that most of those titles are going to come back. Probably for a soft reboot, like when they started re-numbering ASM in like 2000 and went back to the old numbers in time to proclaim #500.
@LBT:
The trick is to not let them see you with the bottle, or they’ll figure it out and still
get on the counterclaim an entire medium.So, are sick beats misandry now?
Stupid Taylor Swift, sinking her nefarious tunes into my head so I think about Starbucks lovers all the time now. (How’s that for a mondegreen? The line is “long list of ex-lovers.”)
Falconer:
There’s so much going on in the new Thor comics that the only thing they’ll resolve by issue 8 (Last issue before Secret Wars) is Thor’s identity. It better come back after secret wars. Though at least she’ll be in a few comics during secret wars. Including THORS, a sort of Thor police force where the different universes’ Thors team up and solve murders.
RE: Falconer
The trick is to not let them see you with the bottle
Seriously! The more I read about the history of comics, the more obvious it is that the idea that comics were always Marvel and DC marketing superheroes to boys is FICTION. (It also helps that my specialty is LGBT comics.)
A lot of the CREATORS were men, but they weren’t stupid. They knew that little girls had pocket money too. In my opinion, part of why the mainstream US comics market is doing so poorly is because they aren’t reaching out to young kids, or women, or other people who used to be comics’ bread and butter. I’m really glad to see the indy scene blossoming with webcomics and manga coming in, making it proof that you can sell things to people outside the nerdboy demographic.
@LBT: Hear, hear! That’s my take on it, too. There were so many genres back in the Golden Age that disappeared somewhere along the way.
This was posted on RETURN OF KINGS!? Oh, the irony.
Loving men or “loving cock” isn’t a fatal flaw for feminism. Feminism doesn’t rely on hating men.
RE: cock addiction
*uncomfortable look* I dunno about you, G.W., but I love my husband for a lot of reasons, not just “he possesses a penis–I MUST JUMP ON IT.” That’s… not a particularly kind thing to say of men, eesh. Do you really feel your gender has nothing more to bring to the table?
RE: Falconer
There were so many genres back in the Golden Age that disappeared somewhere along the way.
Blame Wertham, the Comics Code Authority, and the advent of television and the fall of public transit. That’s what I do.
(The history I read actually made the interesting theory that the reason Japan’s comics market flourished while the US’s flopped was that it didn’t have TV in households until later, and there’s no better time to read than when you’re stuck in public transit.)
Wait, hang on, stop. Just stop.
“A dystopia where all things have been reduced to an amoral form of childish amusement”.
Amoral. As in, without impact on moral considerations? Outside the frame of moral frameworks? Actually I think viewing sexual relations between people as an amoral childish amusement could do a lot of good for a lot of people; you’d get rid of all that pesky moralizing and attribution of inherent value to a specific set of behaviours and instead just let people do what they want to do when they want to do it because you’re not making moral judgements on an amoral system. That sure would be nice! I bet you’d get laid more, too, mr. RoK poser. Sorry I mean poster.
Because there’s evidently something about sex that just makes people incapable of thinking.
For your edification I present to the jury the the words of R. Lindsay, which I read, who knows why.
Trends, multitendency, tendencies. Hm. I feel as if someone could easily have slipped in a “trend-able” and “trending” in that sentence cluster, and now that they haven’t, I’m missing out.
Also is there a rule that people with no capacity to argue coherently have to construct odd clusters that read like a series of precision mallet hits to the brain? “Emulate its fine potential as a GHEM”. Emulate? Emulate? As in, surpass by copy? I bet this entire spiel is going to be about how feminists just aren’t original.
Could you point an example of this? No, no, sorry, asking for sources and citations and references is uncharitable of me, I know, I should just accept that it’s obvious that feminists hate men – you can cut their thick hatred with a knife! Also, wait, you move from “Hate male sexuality” to “hate men”? That’s not the same thing at all. It’s almost as if you’re inadvertedly making an argument that men are just sexual creatures and nothing else, which would be silly, because they’re pretty clearly so much more than just–
Or maybe not. I guess cocks go with men as bicycles go with gears and the fish are all left out. Do you get a man sent to your home when you buy a dildo? I don’t know, I’ve never bought one. Of course it is a little strange that the argument moves from “Hating male sexuality” to “hating men” and doesn’t differentiate between the two concept at all, but I guess it’s logical, because if a man is attached to all penises everywhere then clearly it’s utterly impossible for sexuality and masculinity to ever be in any way disassocatied and all men are at all times are giant walking sex-beasts. LOGIC. So saying rape is bad is saying men are bad, and since if you like having sex you mus also like men that makes you an addict which means its okay to rape you.
What? It’s only the logical conclusion of the premises presented.
It’s a bi weird seeing someone argue against a premise they set up (“feminists hate men”), then conclude that they premise they set up is incorrect (“feminists don’t hate men”) and then use this as a way to argue that feminists rethoric is somehow bad or dense or incorrect, because if it was actually effective rethoric, it’d make people hate men as much as all the non-existent feminists keeps saying they do.
Wait, this guy is an educated journalist linguist? What the fuck? Didn’t anyone teach a course on modular arguments or premise resolution? Huh.
Oh.
“Fall prey to”
That’s a great phrase to use when talking about feminists and cock and feminist rethoric about male sexual behaviour. That is exactly the phrase I would use because I know from my journalist courses and linguistic training that it carries no awkward connotations or implicit evil assumptions. Why would it? Those feminists just fall prey to the cock every time, the cock that lurks in the shadows and strikes out if you’re not keeping up a steady enough guard. What? Stop staring at me like that. I’m not implicitly endorsing exactly the view of male sexuality feminists sometimes argue against.
So feminists say they don’t hate men, but you’ve read their stuff and they do hate men, except they don’t hate men because they like cock, and to have a cock is to be a man, so the only feminists who actually hate men are the ones who don’t like cock, which means feminists at large do like men…
… exactly as you point out they argue every time you ask them if they hate men? It’s even in the words. Feminists say they don’t hate men. And the conclusion of this article is that most of them don’t. It also conflates male sexuality and men, but I guess that’s pretty much what I’d expect because, pfh, come on, who would think a journalist and linguist would be able to write coherent words?
… I rest my case, honourable jury, because I have no words that can convey the magnitude of my confusion at this paragraph.
@Thalia
That’s because Roosh is getting old (he knows it), his shitty personality is becoming more obvious (except to him of course) and he isn’t having as a much success manipulating young women into bed like he used to. So while he is still kind of trying to cling to his old philandering lifestyle he is also realising that a) its not a satisfying way yo live and b) it’s slipping through his fingers anyway. So these days he spends his blog posts whinging about how the girls who slept with him before are dirty worthless skanks who should have stayed ‘pure’ so he could now find a good quality virgin to settle down with.
@Falconer
From the London Times, 1816:
The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced … at the English Court on Friday last … It is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies … to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females…[Now that it is] forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.
This handbasket we’re in sure is slow.
I’m with you on Wertham and the CCA. Stupid moral guardians.
Didn’t everybody have radios before television? What’s the diff there? Next shiny thing to come along (seeing as radio was popular before comics)?
Lesbian Separatists? Did we get a time machine and go back to the 70s? Seriously, how many of THEM are around these days, oy vey!
RE: Falconer
Didn’t everybody have radios before television? What’s the diff there? Next shiny thing to come along (seeing as radio was popular before comics)?
Enh, I personally find it a lot easier to tune out a radio than a TV, and I can READ and listen to the radio at the same time. While watching TV? Not so much.
@Buttercup: What kind of dances had they been doing?
Man, I hear you about TV, LBT. If the ol’ cathode ray is burnin’, my eyes ain’t turnin’ away.
Solar eclipse update: it was cloudy as fuck in the south of England, even in France and Paris, but other places in the UK got a good view. I could see nothing and would have had a great view from my garden too. So I split my time between watching it on TV and stepping outside to feel the bitter cold and witness the darkness (DAMN it was cold!).
BUT just as the moon was almost done passing the sun, about a third left, the cloud cover thinned so I could see a clear crescent shaped orb in the sky, without burning my eyes out. 😀 I even got a picture.
That’s good enough for me. ^_^
Falconer, I think they’d been doing contradances and quadrilles and gavottes and that kind of thing, where dancers mostly just touch hands while doing these elaborate figures with multiple couples. The waltz was a MAJOR SCANDAL.
Doesn’t RoK also host a Gamergate site? I thought politically-driven critiques of pop culture were unethical. Deeply, deeply unethical.
@Thalia: I figured they hadn’t been touching. Good thing the Times author never saw the tango.
@Falconer The minuet? Or possibly something involving distant hills and semaphore.
People were also scandalized by the whirling pattern of the waltz, which was supposed to disorient women and loosen inhibitions (in the same way alcohol would). Occasionally the man’s foot would disappear underneath the woman’s gown for a second or two. HIGHLY improper.
*fans self*
Everybody take a drink!
http://youtu.be/kqiUGjghlzU?t=1m20s