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As the country gets more diverse, the radio gets more homogeneous. I don’t mean this in the ethnic sense, of course; America’s rockstars are more colorful than ever! Instead, the songs that dominate the country’s charts are beginning to sound more and more alike. The average pop station tends to be an indistinct mass of the same noises promoted by different “artists” ad nauseam. The sound I am referring to most specifically is the “trap” beat, the infinitely malleable blueprint of rap tracks, IDM wankery, and painful dance festival remixes the world over.
This drum pattern was conceived in the early days of hip-hop. Absent actual drum sections, rickety synthesizers were employed as a substitute, later becoming a defined sound of their own. The hallmark of the trap beat is the intense sub-bass produced by the kick drum on a Roland TR-808 drum machine. By extending the decay on the kick drum out, one can create heady basslines that roll in time with the track’s rhythm. A sharp snare is placed on the 2nd and 4th beats of the bar, and these intense kick drums are syncopated around persistent closed hi-hats:
The end result is a drum pattern that is easily replicated by virtue of its rhythmic simplicity, easily riffed upon for its various manipulable factors (changed tempos, hat patterns, et cetera), and easily paired to even simpler melodies that can be cooked up in the bedrooms, multimillion-dollar studios, and laptops of the world. This drum pattern is ubiquitous in every sense of the word. It appears, in various permutations, in just about any genre I can think of. Its ease of production led to the absolute swamping of SoundCloud with amateur-produced, horrendous rap songs recorded by teenagers under the impression they’ll make it big in what is likely the most oversaturated musical market on Earth.
Some of the most popular trap songs on Earth feature the laziest possible production known to man. “Old Town Road,” a track that broke Billboard’s record for longest #1 position, was created by dropping the banjo strums on Nine Inch Nails “34 Ghosts IV” atop one of these drum patterns. It does not get more cut-and-paste than that.
This rhythm has staying power not just for its braindead simplicity, but also for the fact that it can make just about any collection of sounds swing. It is somewhat alien to the more cultured ear, but the primal bombastics of this rhythm allow producers to hide the fact that their melodic compositions are half-baked accompaniments, at best. Whole subcultures are devoted to what is plainly called “bass music,” with entire legions of people ready to be aroused by the fact that the club’s floor is shaking. Songs that feature this rhythm appeal to the untrained ear because they are predictable in the best way possible. Everyone knows where the snare drum will land, everyone knows when a drop is coming, and everyone knows how to “dance” to these tracks. They differ mostly in what sort of money, bitches, or rims the lyrics are discussing, or what “innovative” sample is chopped and screwed over the top.
In more ways than one, the trap drumline is the ideal form of commercial music, since it appeals to the least common of the least common denominators. Blacks seeking jungle beats get their fix of chest-thumping bangers, normies that lack a useful aesthetic sense get their fix of predictability and social affirmation, and record labels continue to rake in dough at the expense of the broader cultural landscape. It is all great fun!
The rhythm’s pervasiveness is so great that by my count, 23 of today’s Billboard Top 40 feature this exact percussive background. That is 58%. If you are looking for overrepresentation of anything, then you have it right there. For those curious about what rhythms comprise the rest of the charts, the answer is funk house and uninspired minor-key piano ballads. There is a certain self-reinforcing mechanism at play here as well. One could consider the obvious commercial explanation: music like this apparently sells, and so more and more of it is made. But this doesn’t fully answer the question as to why this rhythm appears in just about anything and everything. One might also consider that these rhythms are cheap and simple to produce, and are therefore churned out as part of a musical economy of scale. (I shudder at the thought of factories full of weed-smelling beatmakers.) Even this doesn’t really get to the crux of the matter. Perhaps these rhythms are so endlessly spewed out because they have become the musical equivalent of a forced meme, a pattern foisted onto the masses in such quantities that they have grown accustomed to it, or in the case of someone who has marinated in these thumpers since the first time they listened to the radio, they have grown to actually enjoy it. Every day until you like it, as they say.
Culture-manipulation is remarkably easy to pull off when one has power and money, because consumers of culture are mostly immune to criticisms leveled against their idols on a moral or critical basis. This is due in part to the fact that the average person doesn’t have much room for higher reasoning, and therefore just doesn’t care. Another factor in the average person’s calculus is the idea that absent their current favorite thing, culture would provide nothing to take its place. That makes sense to a mind that takes the world at face value. But I don’t think that it is a stretch of the imagination to suggest that these people would enjoy whatever the moguls of the world put on the radio and told them to like. I sincerely doubt that the natural course of the fine arts and the personal tastes of the demos led to giant ass balloons on stage at the VMAs. A very powerful hand must have been involved in this development.
It would be one thing if blacks were bumping about to phat beats in their own ghettos, or ideally, their own countries. But the fact that this very specific musical development, one that lacks any significant deviation from its standard archetype in any of the aforementioned pop music hits, is so utterly dominant over the charts is concerning. This is the music that the white people of the United States are expected to hear and expected to enjoy. Who, exactly, would stand to benefit from the hegemony of a creatively suffocating and culturally degrading 8-bar pattern, one that can be endlessly replicated into millions of albums’ worth of detritus? It’s repugnant enough that this has obvious financial incentives. But what about other incentives at play? Why might it behoove those in charge to douse American whites in a musical form that appeals to most degenerate baseness and artistic mediocrity possible?
Well, we might consider who made the first strides towards popularizing the trap rhythm in the mainstream. While the TR-808 drum machine enjoyed underground popularity, one man developed a specific technique that would lead to its rapid adoption in the musical mainstream, along with a healthy dose of pre-established clout in the industry. By dragging out the decay on the kick drum sound on the 808, rolling basslines could be created, the defining attribute of the trap rhythm. The man behind this development?
Rubin, at this point in time, was already a major player in the music business. His work at Def Jam Recordings, the label that brought rap music into the mainstream, meant that he rubbed elbows with some pretty influential figures. Many of these people, Rubin included, did not hang up their coats after the heydays of the 80s were over. Much more lied ahead of them; and much more lied ahead for the state of popular music.
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33 Comments
Ah, Rick Rubin and the (Echo Echo Echo) Beastie Boys. The first major “white” rap group.
I fell under their spell for years. I was never a wigger, but I was lured into their schtick the same way that Eminem coopted deracinated white kids in the early aughts.
I. Hate. Rap.
It was fine when it was a young genre and novel. But it has destroyed mainstream music, utterly obliterated it. destroyed culture. Destroyed whiteness. It is the single most egregious affront to our people. It is why these white women are gathering en masse at BLM rallies, tatted from head to toe, piercings, booty shorts and choker necklaces, screaming antiwhite hate and professing their negrophilia. They’ve been manipulated by these monotonous rhythms, it aids in the ease of their programming.
That’s what it is, a conscious cartelization and institutionalization of mediocrity. There is a youth audience of a certain size and it will consume whatever is put before it. Control and effortless profit are maintained by restricting access to the field to certain selected and likely connected individuals. Striving for excellence would create an arms race and competition which would make control more difficult to maintain because music is a difficult art and John Lennon’s are rare. You see the same thing in the film industry. That’s why movies are so bad. After they killed off the independent film industry, competition was gone.
It’s weird that however bad the music gets—I thought it couldn’t get any worse about fifteen years ago—somehow I am starting to feel a nostalgia for those dopey new age songs like hey ho and all. It was the sound track of our world I suppose. I like some Imagine Dragons. Are they good? There are some interesting melodies which everyone else seems to rip off. The lyrics are just the IT, but what do you expect?
By total accident, I ended up at a Lumineers concert in Brooklyn once. It was remarkable for the fact that it was the whitest place I had seen in all of New York.
I used to have a Facebook account connected to the “movement”. I remember years ago discussing rap music with another Gen Xer, who, unlike myself who had not, went through a wigger phase in the 90s and early 2000s.
The discussion we had was fruitful. And enlightening…because my dissident friend had done some deep thinking about what led him toward wigger culture. The nihilism and whiney anti-masculine tone of 90s grunge had pushed a lot of white kids away from popular “white” music, in favor of more raw, sexualized, violent, implicitly “masculine“ (thought not literally so) ghetto music.
Also, white boys are going to go where the white women lead them, because they want access to their vaginas. White women are the leading edge consumers nowadays in what constitutes popular music. Sexually liberated women want music they can grind to. Dance music, party music. Those monotonous, simple drum rhythms and bass are catnip to hypersexualized young women. It draws white men in, but has had the degrading effect of making those same women attracted to the black men who create that kind of music .
If white men were not so over-socialized and house broken, (emasculated), we might never have run into this problem. Blacks are permitted by social norms to be feral beings, but white culture suppresses this amongst our own kind. Mind you, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that we’re civilized, it’s what makes us who we are. Having said that. White men have been robbed of our masculinity and we have few venues in which to explore it. This is why it is so important for men to engage in physically challenging activities and push their bodies and minds to the limits. Music is a fake way of exploring masculinity that is no substitute for physical activity.
John, this is actually a crucially important cultural topic you bring up. Sorry to do a little self promoting, but I touch on that in my article here, you may enjoy:
https://counter-currents.com/2018/12/rock-n-roll-the-european-soul/
Thank you for an excellent read.
I am a child of the 70s and 80s. Old enough to remember bands/musicians like Rush, Queen, Genesis, Fleetwood Mac, Heart etc when they were in their heyday. I even vaguely remember Jim Croce when his music was still popularly played on the radio.
I grew up exposed to music that ranged all the way from campy 50s sock hop style to ELO, Deep Purple, Styx, Chicago, Hall and Oats, and even Poison and Bon Jovi.
I feel that in my lifetime I’ve witnessed rock music at its apex, in the 70s and early 80s, through to its death throes in the early aughts.
As you said in your essay, the life and death of rock music very much parallels the trajectory of the American empire (the culmination of western history) as it gained confidence in the post-war era and has lost confidence in the last 2 decades.
I agree with you that music at its core taps into sexuality when it is at its most grandiose. Like a cosmic orgasmic explosion.
The thing I bemoan, in the post that you replied to, is that rock music’s loss of panache in the grunge era left a void that money hungry corporate oligarchs (who may or may not be of a desert tribe) exploited with rap. They stripped white men of masculinity and confidence with grunge (not all of it terrible mind you) and force fed us Africanized Congo music set to rhymes. Music that absolutely fills that sexual need, but in the raunchiest of ways rather than the romantic ecstasy of more folkish rock.
It’s enough to boil a rage inside of me, having watched it all transpire.
John,
Fully agree, and glad to be acquainted. Thank you for taking the time to read my article. That music I mainly reference was made before I was born, which gave me a different perspective than many, not having the music I loved during adolescence be tied to my socialization. I wasn’t even part of a “clique” of classic rock kids etc.
I agree some more recent/contemporary rock bands may be good, but generally lack a depth, complexity, and certainly those enchanting whiffs of the various types of European folk souls that bands in the 60s and especially 70s emanated— whether they were consciously doing this or not (I’d say often best when not).
Cheers!
John, incisive analysis. To me, the Bill Clinton hysteria also had something to do with the emasculation of we white guys—along with our collective culture; music included. Our mothers, our schools, and our workplaces suddenly became obsessed with this non-existent sexual harassment epidemic. We were lectured on how to speak, how to move, how to act, and how intrinsically bad we were, even though we didn’t know it yet. Etc. Etc. But guess who was implicitly exempt from these new norms? Yup.
And it’s happening again, isn’t it? We’re being coached on how to speak, etc., etc. Cultural output is suffering yet again (and has been for some time now). I listen to very little American music these days. Coincidence? I think not.
‘Sexually liberated women want music they can grind to. … Those monotonous, simple drum rhythms and bass are catnip to hypersexualized young women.’
I was still laughing 20 minutes after first reading this ! Thank you.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that the radio stations in my neck of the woods stopped playing any new rock or metal after 2016. Some stations would play a mixture of modern rock and metal combined with classic rock. Now, where I live it is all classic rock. I’ve read that it is like that all over the country. As I said 2016, seems to be the cut off. Why is this? Why isn’t new rock being played and promoted? Who is making the decisions about this?
The word “satanic” in the title caught my attention, and I hope that further parts of the article go deeper into that subject. In yet another somewhat scary synchronicity, it´s right these days that I have been musing about shamanism, rhythm, and spiritistic evocation; musing about… vitalism… if Christianity sterilized us, deprived us of basic (paganic?) vitality… if we can access basic vitality by rhythm, what kind of vitality is evoked that way, if Christianity is also spiritistic evocation but of different spirits, how to assess the respective spirits… of-course I´m still not sure about any of this.
In typical libertarian fashion (I actually claim it´s european spirit of freedom) I demand freedom of choice regarding the music: as the article points out, that is expressly not given. I therefore very well fear that this is a deliberate subjugation of our european souls to satanic evocation rituals, using our psychic energies for the evocation in a veritable effort to kill our souls.
As always, for me, the problem is freedom of choice: if people freely decide for that music when offered different choices, fine. But I don´t believe that a european consciousness is eventually attracted to these expressions (for white females with negrophilia, my standard suggestion is: they have to live in the black country, can´t live in the White country, let´s see how many White females actually have negrophilia under that condition where cause and effect is in force, my prediction: zero).
The Joy of Satan has some interesting information on how true Spiritual Satanism is actually Paganism, give it a read sometime.
Robert, thanks… should make for interesting reads. The whole thing is strange and unclear to me. Christianity does feel sterilized but doesn´t it have positive effects? Also interesting how the Satanic approach seems to very much parallel Nietzsche. Have we been tricked, into being sterilized sheep and that which is really worthwhile is now maligned as “evil”? Has this trick been done by those who continue to follow Satanism in order to eliminate big parts of humanity as possible competition and make them into slaves? A lot rings interesting but of-course can´t have any final idea at this moment.
Peter, having been down this road for reasons that I can no longer even fathom, some thirty years ago, Satanism however it is defined has nothing to offer the the Right in any context.
Paganism has a clear dichotomy of good and evil according to the ethos of the particular culture. I used to refer to Satanism as ‘militant paganism’. Blather…
Christianity offered a restoration amidst the chaos and decay of Rome, being molded by what became, because of the interaction (Spenglerian pseudomorphosis) ‘the West’.
Traditionalists such as Evola and Guenon accurately saw Satanism as the negation of spirit. It is therefore not surprising that the materialistic doctrines have flowed from that, conveyed by what Evola and Guenon called the Counter-Tradition. I have attempted to accurately document this in my book The Occult and Subversive Movements.
Austin Spare stated ‘hell is a democracy’, meaning it in a ‘good’ sense. Democracy, like hell, metaphorically, is pandemonium. Satanism intrinsically means chaos; a revolt against the cosmic order. Satanists claim that this is needed to re-create balance, and break stasis. But the result is nihilism, moral relativity , and the kind of crap that permeates the modern epoch. Decadent stasis is broken by a return to origins: not an overthrow, or the eternal rebellion of the Satanic archetype.
In my misbegotten early 90s heyday, I too reacted against grunge, toward house, techno & shoegaze, all of which had a strangely asexual, “agape,” infantile, womb-like orientation or effect. I half-expected the author to blame 808 State for today’s ubiquitous 808s.
For the past 20 years my allegiances have been firmly in the rock camp, faves include the Aryan gods Bowie & Scott Walker, but also Elvis (who was perhaps something of a crypto-Jew). Spotify is a guilty pleasure, which has allowed me to discover a great number of worthy current-day White rock artists. I probably like more new rock acts than old. However, the music in the main no longer has a progressive, forward drive. There are no bold new movements, only updates & refinements of psychedelia, synth, etc. Is this just a trick of perspective due to middle-aged Gen Xdom? I would refer people to the book Retromania by Simon Reynolds, close ally of Mark Fisher (Marxist Realism, Hauntology, K-Punk).
I wrote this is in a hurry at work yesterday. Writing in a hurry again. The Fisher book is Capitalist Realism (not Marxist Realism). He and Reynolds are men of the Left — Fisher studied under Nick Land, committed suicide in 2017 — but are both very perceptive critics of pop music Fisher’s concept of “depressive hedonia” is directly applicable to trap music and its consumers.
However, Fisher and Reynolds are sadly on the opposite side of the race question. Their analysis needs to be supplemented by our categories of analysis. Fisher and Reynolds began as fans of the most modernist currents of White UK punk and electronic music, and they ended as fierce advocates of “post racial” Jungle music, grime, dubstep, and so forth. Reynolds has in recent years lost all credibility with me by his championing of, you guessed it, trap music and related forms. See this interview with Reynolds here = https://www.collectibledry.com/featured/what-is-trap-simon-reynolds-trap-music-criticism-dry-interview-classical-heretical-issue-9/
What needs to be thought through is how the “modernist” progression of pop music began as 3-way encounter between Blacks, Whites and technology in the post-war era, accelerating through Elvis, the Stones and Zeppelin, into 80s house and, by the mid-90s, jungle. Jungle was the short-lived outer limit of the creative potential of this 3-way encounter. Since then, we have seen the slow decoupling of Black and White music, the marriage could go no further. White music, by which I mean Rock music, has retreated into decadence (a decadence that I often find pleasurable). And black music has been re-barbarized.
808 State thumps, I would never!
I have to admit I am a little amused at Reynolds’ diction. He seems like he is drooling over blacks. I touched on the intersection between white and black music a little in this piece, but I do want to devote greater time to that period you’re referring to of house, techno, etc.
I personally believe these genres were “post-racial” and truly transcendent for the simple fact that it seemed to strike at the human core; when you have very different people collaborating or existing in a scene, some kind of compromise has to be brokered. In the case of early, underground club music, that compromise was facilitated by the medium of electronics, computers, sequencers et al which allowed for very broad experimentation that could, if well-executed, bear no mark of a single group of people or individual. The appeal of such a genre is all but moot today, for reasons previously mentioned. (As a personal aside, I was very upset to find my favorite underground techno digs had not survived the lockdown when venues began to reopen.)
Modern pop music, in contrast, tends to aim for a consumerist average. I imagine it is easier to write odes to box logo tees than it is to pen something that excites a basement full of kids on molly.
As far as finding new music goes, I can recommend you explore Bandcamp. I’m a little spoiled for the fact I’m still young and spry enough to dig through crates and meet weird band members at disappointing house parties and such. Surf punk is having a second moment, this time with healthy doses of shoegazing on top, glitchcore and “hyperpop” are going through a Rennaissance, and a lot of PC Music people and their associates are doing some interesting things. There’s still new stuff to explore. There’s just far less of it, and a lot of it comes from an unfortunate place of great ennui or anger.
Scott, would you make us a list on Apple Music to forward our music education? That would go a long way to advancing our musical appreciation.
The “trap” beat was something I did vaguely know of, but I didn’t know that was its name.
Now having looked it up, I see what it’s about. It sounds a bit out of time, so lots of different songs can fit over it. Waltz time (3/4), standard 4/4, 6/8 (slowed down), and so on could all fit into the trap styling (or just be edited slightly to do so, because all you have to do is delay the kick drum beat a bit. The actual “trap” beat itself is malleable).
So, given that the purpose of drums / rhythm is to keep time (except in classical music where percussion tends to be more for expression than time-keeping), it sounds a bit alien to me to hear music that is ostensibly all about rhythms and yet, the rhythms themselves are not very… rhythmic? Rap and hip hop beats sound out of time, yet all their fans talk about is “beats” and “rhythms”. In fact among young people “beat” is a synonym for “song”; “Love that beat, man!” “Put on some beats, man!”. In both places “song” would do, but they are so zogged with sex and sexual liberation all they can express themselves in are sex-references. And “beats” and “rhythms” really means “sex”. Sad, but true.
The “trap” beat also seems to kind of “swagger” a bit. The way a wannabe gangster does (and many millions of young people, both black and white, are wannabe gangsters nowadays). If I was being more harsh I would say it “sTaggers” from side-to-side, like a drunkard.
Scott, I hope you read the comments on here:
From reading your articles, I’m not sure how much affinity you have, if any, for country music. Surely, if you’re a trained musician, you can appreciate the folk and bluegrass roots of country, and the crossover appeal that rockabilly and southern rock have enjoyed.
Do you think you will ever write an article about the corruption of the country music scene?
Country is a tricky subject. I used to despise it because I had not ever heard any of the real stuff — just the radio hits that have obvious issues. I also had a hard time grokking whatever they were going on about with the rural lifestyle, which sounded absolutely nothing like my life growing up in the actual countryside. I never saw anyone tearing up dirt roads in jacked-up trucks and drinking piss water beer by the creek until I was in my late teens, and even then, such a thing seemed more like an imitation of that sort of pop culture than anything natural. There is also the fact that I’m a Northwesterner through and through, and a lot of country music isn’t “mine,” in some sense. I was never the type to fly Confederate flags or anything like that; I saw them as just euphemistic white culture, and a bit oblivious when in the hands of men who have never even set foot in the South. I always defended those who flew them, though.
I think, in many ways, that a lot of modern country is an example of a ghetto to corral whites into. None of it is any good, and a lot of contains the same brain poison that normal pop music does, but it’s got the twangs and the accents needed to appeal to normies who either are actual rednecks, or who simply fashion themselves as one. (I’m allowed to use that word because I’ve been called it.)
As I got older and wiser, I started to crate dig in the country, “Western,” bluegrass, Americana, folk, honky-tonk, etc sections and found a lot of it to be very appealing. Some of the older stuff is a bit odd to me, especially anything circa-60s which sound like reactions. Upon figuring out that there existed such an astroturfed genre label as “alt-country,” I focused my energies there, and was consistently pleasantly surprised by what I found. A lot of this music is very spiritual in a way that only comes from simple living, and in the case of the downers, from great tragedy and suffering like the sort that white Southerners tend to face due to economic depression and dispossession.
The “scene,” as it were, was and is never something I could get into. A flame of mine took me to Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth (Largest Honky Tonk in the World!) in an attempt to galvanize my nascent interest in the music, but I found the whole experience to be a bit LARPy. Oh well!
I think it would be worthwhile to cover country music at some point. It’s a complicated issue. I just wonder if I have sufficient depth of knowledge of it to really articulate something valuable. I want to avoid accidental condescension, as well.
Anyways, here’s the Death of the West, except it’s set in Oklahoma:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nggqe-L9ZQ8
My issue with country is that the rhythms, to my ear at least, are very samey(the same reason I don’t like metal) and the lyrics seem to be jokey and unserious. For example, all my exes live in Texas, etc. it’s the difference between light verse and poetry in my estimation. There are a few exceptions like Need you Now by lady Antebellum, but rare.
I think it would be worthwhile for you to explore the rot of country music as well as doing some research into its roots.
Country music is simply popularized bluegrass, and bluegrass is the Appalachian artifact of Irish folk music, which is ultimately rooted in Celtic traditions. As was noted in other comments, rock and roll as a genre was partially influenced by bluegrass, southern gospel, and country.
The one authentic aspect of country music is that it is well adapted at getting white folks together to dance in quasi-traditional styles that are, again, an artifact of Irish folk traditions. Today people 2-step and line dance. In years gone by it was clogging and square dancing.
If you look at old radio programs like Louisiana Hayride, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Hayride
and of course the Grand Ole Opry, I don’t think you can argue that in the early days of radio, there was a ton of authentic folk talent creating music that was as culturally valuable as any traditional European music.
Anyway, I do agree that by the 60s, country music had been bastardized, by the usual suspects, and turned into a ghetto for white people. But I’d also argue that on a similar trajectory as rock music…. It did maintain a degree of quality until the 90s, but then the same Africanization has been administered to the genre to appeal to millennials (millennials who have been brainwashed their whole lives by negrophilia).
I always held a strong dislike for rap, although it works/worked a bit differently in Poland. Here, in the 90’s rap/hip-hop mostly dealt with issues of post-communist transformation and all social maladies it created. Songs revolved about despair, drug addictions, rising violence, police brutality and growing insecurity in the young generation. Eventually a sub-genre of patriotic rap evolved, that turned to glorification of national heroes (mostly from the WW II period), instinctual nationalism and politics of historical memory. There is also a completely commercialized form of the most primitive, basic rap that caters to absolute simpletons, that is (depressingly) most successful nowadays.
Generally, popular music from the socialist era was on a completely different level, with creativity and inspiration unsurpassed by what passes for music today. Great artists, more important role of poetry in constructing lyrics (today mostly reamaining in the form of sung poetry), actual singing talent and so on. But since we’ve already survived the blight of techno music (which removed everything good from the electro genre), got around retrowave and its sub-genres, we shouldn’t lose hope. In the end, it is elitarism and paternalism that has to be restored in culture, in order to purge it from liberal capitalist disease.
I always attributed my affinity with the ideas we hold, or rather, the ability to even begin to entertain the notion of holding them, with the fact that Andrew Parrott’s renditions of 16th century Italian Intermedio were played around the house growing up in the twilight years of the 20th century, owing to my hippie boomer father’s diverse musical tastes. Pop culture was revolting to me precisely because I was given a sense of true beauty by the early exposure to choral proto-operatic renaissance music, which conjured up powerful visions of golden godliness and married me to the notion of Western nobility, which made it inevitable I always stand on the side of beauty and truth, giving me a notion of “degeneracy” long before I even knew what a “race” was or what “equality” meant. My distaste for pop music then radiated outward into a distaste for pop culture itself and the behavior it promoted, like drug use, drinking, and many other “customs” that were later ruining many young white men around me. I traded in “coolness” for self-preservation.
To this day I’m convinced that the presence of high art in my early upbringing inoculated me to much of the harmful, puerile, vulgar mind-viruses injected into the public Western subconsciousness, and opened the way to a purposeful, happier and cleaner life. This is why music and art are so important to this movement: they are an escape from the incessant satanic onslaught on the Western mind.
I only wish that my parents had been more cultured, disciplined, tasteful people.
Don’t get me wrong. I am proud that I come from a simple, uncomplicated background. Lots of good, solid people come from my childhood community and family. Salt of the earth. But growing up, my parents were always zonked out in front of a screen.
I’ve always been different from my family. Out of place. I’m definitely not adopted, but my soul never fit with my biology.
Nevertheless, I always had to seek my own discipline and initiative to explore things my parents weren’t capable of exposing me to. It has been a struggle between these two parts of my nature. I used to smoke, drink, chase women, and waste a lot of idle time. In the last few years I’ve cleaned all of that up. it’s made me a happier, more content man with a stronger feeling of purpose.
Excellent articles (I just read the mentioned predecessor article) I too lament the “death ” of rock. My son and I often talk about this topic.
But what about “Funk” the real thing, not the watered down garbage of a (yuck)Beyonce… but the heavy genre bending stuff like early Funkadelic (“Maggot Brain”) or the crazed jungleFunk”jazz” of Miles Davis (featuring Pete Cosey’s guitar, also heard on “Electric Mud”), and relatively current stuff by DJ Logic (featuring Vernon Reed)…
To me Funk turned into Disco which sapped out the edge and led to the current watered down offerings.
There is this clip I’ve seen of Trevor Noah (of the popular Daily Show) stating something along the lines of, “Hip-hop dominates American music. All music is hip-hop.” I remember that because—at around the same time—the Red Ice crew pointed out that a Dave Matthews Band album was, in fact, number one on the charts, yet garnered little mainstream attention.
Like the author of this post, I’m tired of it. I’m tired of the cloning of the sounds, the lingo, the attitude, and the stylings of what arguably wasn’t very worthwhile to begin with! I am very much anticipating the follow up to this article.
For the proper use of drum machines, including the 808, you have to look to industrial music like Skinny Puppy.
I love screwing with the vibe at events by putting on Throbbing Gristle.
I expect part 2 to be a focus on Rick Rubin.
Rap wasn’t on most radio stations in 80’s, it took White presenting Jews Beastie Boys (who set the way for acceptance of Gangsta Rap in 90’s, even if they were being ironic and jokey, White youth consumers never got the joke and took it as sincere, so when more authentic ghetto Negro’s came along they lapped it up) and Rock-Rap collaborations like Walk This Way with Aerosmith and Run DMC to mass appeal to White audiences…Rubin of course produced both the collab song and Beastie Boys…once the appetite was whetted, the rap explosion began, many would claim this was “the plan” but if White consumers never wanted rap, they never would have got it…culture is not as planned as many conspiratards like to think these days, rather its a mix of organic and the system figuring out what it is they are meant to subvert to serve their ends as well as make a buck…to do this they promote various things that have caught attention among mass audiences and the things promoted that stuck around seem planned/intentional, as the other things promoted never had much traction to wide audience so remained underground…how can trad-like people claim to believe in concepts like Kali Yuga and degeneration if they believe if only Whites were given healthy positive art this last century it would have been accepted?
We are seeing a healthy organic change occurring in many Whites today, the system of course doesn’t like this so we are seeing a more forced attempt to destroy us spiritually (and obviously psychically) as so much is naturally being rejected, now is the time healthy positive art will be accepted among White people, hence why its so important for pro-Whites to cool it with all the “theory” masturbation and ideologically circle jerks and actually create things, even if they are awful or mediocre, we have to begin somewhere, films began as short under 1min novelties, within decades long epic masterpieces like Griffiths ‘Birth of a Nation and Lang’s ‘Die Nibelungen’.
I mean physically but psychically does fit too.
Excellent article. You say a lot of the things I wanted to say but more eloquently.
By the way, I thought Puerto Ricans were stupid for using the reggaeton beat in almost all their songs. Then I realized that we English-speaking Americans do the same thing with the trap beat, which, as you say, makes otherwise unremarkable melodies sound really great. It’s like a drug that makes life seem better than it really is. I was like a fish in water till seeing their water made me notice our water.
As for sorts of people who enrich purveyors of pop music, consider this. Two of the pop songs I hate the most are Clean Bandit’s “Rockabye” and (((Adam Levine’s))) “Girls Like You.” I looked at the YouTube video comments for each song, and lo and behold almost every commenter is a black or Hispanic woman. Their IQ probably ranges from 80 to 90. They are probably very high on agreeableness and low on openness, both traits negatively correlated with intelligence. The most agreeable people would tend to be the most suggestible and the best to be the audience for a mass market for a song. We know that intelligent people like autonomy, but unintelligent ones don’t care about autonomy. They have a lower sense of taste and will like anything, so if you want a big market, you’ve got to cut out things in a song requiring intelligence to comprehend. Two of those things are melody and harmony, which correlate strongly with intelligence. This is why Levine doesn’t even rap but spurts out his words like a computer voice reading text. His song is totally devoid of anything the most moronic person couldn’t sense, and hence he has the biggest market and makes the most money. The trouble is that I must listen to his sonic garbage as background muzak wherever I go.
My main worry is the loss of beauty in music. Sure, a lot of electronic music can be complex, but it lacks to touch of older music. Somber beauty is very much extinct. Maybe some day we’ll bring it back to life.
But I mean, to put things as bluntly as possible, black and Hispanic women have as much of a sense of taste to be attracted to black and Hispanic men, and that explains their taste in other things like music.