Max Roscoe, a self-described ‘aspiring philosopher king” who writes regularly for misogynistic garbage site Return of Kings, doesn’t like feminism. Or contemporary classical music.
So he’s decided to take down both of these allegedly awful things, by suggesting that they’re pretty much the same thing, if you think about it.
Modern culture tells us that short skrillex haircuts, defiling the body with metal shrapnel and inked graffiti, and massive, revolting body fat is “beautiful.” This message is so successful, that today, in the west, it is extremely difficult to find a female below the age of 25 who has not purposefully destroyed her physical beauty in multiple ways.
As this worship of ugliness has marginalized natural beauty, likewise, modern classical music teaches us that dissonant chords, out-of-key incongruous sounds, and loud, harsh noises are pleasant and desirable. Gone are the naturally pleasing chords and intonations which music theory teaches are good.
Damn you feminists with your blue hair and your 12-tone scales!
Also, feminists and modern classical music are both really, really repetitive.
Much as feminists do little more than repeat meaningless phrases like “Rapists cause rape” and “Still not asking for it” … instead of having a thoughtful discussion, modern classical music replaces creativity and musical complexity with repetition.
Roscoe reports with horror that he was FORCED to listen to one super-repetitive avant-garde piece this past weekend in which the same chord was played a whole bunch of times in succession. The horror!
It was like every other modern classical piece I have heard: an aural assault of dissonant noises, repetitive sounds, and unnatural rhythms….
In the piece … the same chord was repeated at least 50 times before another instrument joined in.
Golly. How could ANYONE think that playing the same chord over and over would ever sound good? Or that deliberate dissonance might make music sound … well, a heck of a lot more rocking?
Here’s one of the examples he offers as evidence of just how laughably awful contemporary classical music is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLckHHc25ww
Really, dude? Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians? That’s a bit like using the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds to prove that rock music is uncreative.
Roscoe fleshes out his argument with a segment trying and failing to show that dissonant chords are basically the musical equivalent of “deviant lifestyles.” It’s about as nonsensical as it sounds, and really just an excuse for Roscoe to rant ignorantly about trans folks, so I’m not even going to bother to quote it.
Add “music” to the long list of things that manospherans just don’t get.
@Matt
Sounds about right to me. There is this general category of bigoted expression that I’ve become increasingly aware of involving music. For example people that that justify their bigotry against black people based of a superficial exposure to “rap music”. I bet there are some connections to mocking another person’s language on some levels too.
I’ve got a female in my arms right now who is below the age of 25 and has not purposefully destroyed her physical beauty in any ways. Another female of the same description is in the other room, sleeping on my bed.
I strongly encourage everyone who can to seek out beautiful females under 25 — and males, and non-beautiful, and with luck some older than 25 — at your local SPCA.
First of all, if it’s modern it’s not classical. Classical refers to a specific period of music – roughly 1775 – 1825. Modern orchestral music is only referred to as “classical” by people who would lump Baroque, Romantic, Classical, etc. all together.
Second of all, nearly every period of music has prigs who think “this modern sound” is ruining music. Like those who bemoan “this generation”, they are also seen standing on their porches yelling at kids on the lawn…
@Mish That cat photo is perfect! 🙂
That’s kind of my reaction, too, but it doesn’t stop me from humming along. Maybe it should. 😉
This might be the place to let anyone who may be interested and doesn’t know this know that Ursula Le Guin did a album of modern serious music:
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Index-UttermostParts.html
@davidknewton
What’s the novel in question, might I ask?
@Gem
If this prig would have limited themselves to merely disliking new musical trends or pointing out that “classical” also involves a period of history your points would be relevant. This particular prig has chosen to use xenophobic bigotry of women and fear of rape being taken seriously as a means and end to their distaste for modern music. That makes this a worthwhile post.
@Brony, SJC
I wasn’t trying to imply that the post wasn’t worthwhile, just that the pompous ass’s opinion is trash. Which I think we all agree on. That he ties it somehow to feminists whose discourse he deems repetitive, and goes further with transphobic rhetoric is just disgusting. My point is that he looks ridiculous trying to be all pompous and educated about music, when he even has that all. wrong.
@Gem
Thanks for clearing that up.
I have nothing substantive to add, but I wanted to thank David for including the link to the Reich piece on Youtube. I never heard of it before, and it was precisely what I needed yesterday. I was going to just casually listen a bit, and ended up watching the whole hour. The 6th pulse was just pure joy. You can see how this piece (or this style) influenced so much other music. So yeah, thanks.
Youngest once got the chance (while still in comprehensive school) to take part in an outreach project with Steve Reich. Seems he was really nice with them all. Pretty cool for a superstar to do something like that with a bunch of state school kids.
Daphne B, Reich is great. Some of his stuff is a bit more austere and experimental, but he’s got a ton of stuff that’s just gorgeous like 18 musicians.
You might want to check out his Octet, six marimbas, and Music for a large ensemble, which are similar. Electric counterpoint is also a classic.
You can find performances of all of these on youtube.
You know, something about the phrase
struck me as familiar. I was sure I’d seen it used by someone who considered themselves very original and creative before, probably being mocked here. So, against my natural inclination I went to the ROK website and did a quick search for graffiti + shrapnel.
Imagine my surprise!
Max Roscoe on April 8, 2016:
OK, this woman is still revolting despite not being overweight, but he gets lots of fat-shaming of other women in elsewhere in his manifesto.
Max Roscoe on March 11 2016, on Lena Dunham and her ovaries:
But, he cautions, her chubbyness has caused her to have problems with her lady bits.
Max Roscoe on March 4, 2016, on whatever:
Max Roscoe on January 1 2016, on responsible dog or lady ownership:
Max Roscoe seriously needs to get himself a less repetitive vocabulary.
Too late for the edit window:
The saddest thing about this may be that for over 10 months now Max has been dropping his fetch little phrase all over ROK, and nobody else has used it there. Stop trying to make it happen, Roscoe, its not going to happen.
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/776/809/c19.gif
I knew it was the same guy before!
So he’s updated his “shrapnel and graffiti” into “metal shrapnel and inked graffiti”. He’s really running out of language to express his dislike of women’s appearance.
(“Modern classical music” mkaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay)
I have never been so proud of having both blue AND short-on-sides hair. Gotta get me some tattoos soon holy shit!
IMO, this whole “degenerate art” ranting was better in the original German.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art
As for Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity: I think us 21st century folks are jaded by now but at the time there was a lot of that moral hand-wringing about the idea that the universe, time and space is not a fixed thing but that it actually is relative based on an object speed. Already you had a bunch of folks having a though time accepting the Earth is not the fixed center of the universe because God, at least you could assume the universe itself was fixed even if our position in it was not. It was just another knock down the peg of that oh-so-important human exceptionalism.
I remember sci.physics back in my Usenet days being the target of an infinite number of kooks trying to demonstrate (badly) that proper modifications to Newtonian physics solved everything while Einstein’s crap was unscientific (*whispers* and I hear he was a Jew! unlike that good Christian Newton *whispers*).
Now that you’ve pointed it out (all this garbage tends to blur after a while), methinks he might have been snubbed by a particular blue-short-on-sides haired, tattooed, pierced woman, and is projecting.
Who hurt you, Max?
Thanks for the link to that power metal band. I’m more leaning towards black metal and “blackened” d-beat and crust/anarcho punk, but I’ll certainly take a listen when I’m back from work.
About Clockwork Orange and the reaction his author had to its popularity: I think the author was mostly flabbergasted by the fact that the protagonist he made to be purposefully vile and unlikable in order to make his argument even more powerful when we reject the terrible ways the state treats Alex in the latest part of the story ended up being celebrated and liked by a lot of “yobs” in youth subcultures who tried to emulate him. If some of my friends had had a nickle each time some punk dressed up as Alex or his “droogs” at punk rock Halloween parties or spoke in slang from A Clockwork Orange or listened to a song referencing it, they wouldn’t have lived in squats.
I have a confession to make–I didn’t know what a Croquembouche was until just now.
Also I have blue hair (well turquoise).
Also ‘good Christian Newton’ *snigger*.
Now that it’s Friday afternoon and I have the whole fucking evening free I’m going to to back through this thread and listen to all the music.
@Paradoxy ( may I call you that?),
I suspect we are seeing, from the MRA viewpoint, the lifecycle of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
The egg hatches into the larva or nymph. I suspect that young Max became infatuated with such a young nymph – tender, colourless, vulnerable to predators.
Unfortunately, women, as well as not being human, are also not butterflies – we are dragonflies.
Where a butterfly larva would quietly and decently retreat into a chrysalis and pupate before emerging as a fertile and decorative being that would reproduce and then die while still pretty, we dragonfly girls persist in remaining conscious and active as we mature.
Stages of maturation (moults) often make us more iridescent and spiky as we go along.
Poor Max is still mourning that the larva of his affection changed. How dare she get all colourful and barbed! Who cares if that’s part of growing (up)!
PS, I’m not dissing butterflies. Just people who to only like one phase of their lifecycle.
@Croquembouche of patriarchy:
Weirdly, my opinion of most moths is that they are insect equivalent of creepy dudes in trench coats…
@guest
Newton was a devout (if slightly unorthodox) Catholic. Admittedly, most of the jackasses who blither about the moral implications of physics are Protestants of the sort who think the Pope might be the Antichrist, so it’s a bit rich coming from them.
Re: tattoos and piercings
I am literally the only person of any gender that I know in meatspace who is below the age of 60 who doesn’t have at least one tattoo. Piercings besides ears are marginally less ubiquitous, but not by much. This is a local condition, I know that in many parts of the U.S. this is not so.
🙂 Newton was very religious, but virulently anti-Catholic–fantasising in some of his writings about murdering nuns. He would certainly have been prosecuted if the true extent of his heretical Protestant beliefs had been better known (he actually came very close to publishing what in theory would have been an anonymous pamphlet, but thought better of it at the last minute), but he managed to maintain a reasonable facade of orthodoxy (though, true to his beliefs, he received a special dispensation from King Charles not to have to take holy orders to stay at Cambridge).
Probably the closest label to his beliefs would be Socinianism:
https://isaacnewtonstheology.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/newton-and-socinianism.pdf
@guest
News to me, thank you for the clarification. I’d always been told he was a Catholic, but that actually makes a lot more sense given the rest of his personality. I know he spent a lot of time on alchemy as well, not that it got him any further than anyone else (unless you happen to live in the universe of Rivers of London, of course)