Few months ago I had a conversation with two guys at my work, just hired on, and we started talking about music. One of them asked me if I ever listened to Madonna. He then opened his spotify and started to stream Like a Prayer, stating how it was a banger.
As my mind immediately reconstructed to accomodate this new reality, I explained to him how in my day, admitting I liked a Madonna song would have got the absolute hell beaten out of me by my immediate peers, and had one of our group admitted the same I would have been first in line to lay down the ass whooping. It was at that moment I realized that the idea of cultural identity based on music choice has changed so drastically that it is now unrecognizable to me.
When I was in highschool there was no conceivable world where someone could outwardly admit that they listened to both (for example) Madonna and Type-O Negative. It would be about as bad as unironically wearing a Back Street Boys t-shirt to a NIN concert or something like that; you might as well dig yourself a grave right there.
You referenced the Galapagos islands. I one heard this term used with video game development a while back. Then the person used (maybe even invented) the term "galapagosification" of development. Galapagosification is exactly what our generation had experienced with music tribalism. Now I feel like that it largely a thing of the past due to the global digital landscape.
To be honest? I think it's largely for the better in a practical sense. Trying to survive on one of those islands was brutal. And then there was a point in my highschool life where I realized that I had chosen the wrong island and realized I could never switch. God that was brutal.
Somewhere floating in the ether, just at our fingertips, is some kind of ideal where the idiocy of the past closed-mindedness can be done away, while at the same time avoiding the complete brain rot of the new tik-tok doomscroll AI-do-every-thing-for-you-to-the-point-where-you-can't-even-read "progress". But how to achieve it?
Oh, yeah. I think I was a high school freshman when I admitted to my other friends in black T-shirts that I had a soft spot for Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth." I had to backpedal on that REAL fast. "Haha no seriously guys I was just joking haha that song is so lame it's just come on I was joking haha guys."
I'm pretty sure I already mentioned this elsewhere, but a couple of years ago I saw a couple of adolescent goth girls out and about—listening to K-pop on a portable speaker in one of their bookbags and casually practicing a dance routine. Let's pretend that I said "brave new world" to myself.
Few months ago I had a conversation with two guys at my work, just hired on, and we started talking about music. One of them asked me if I ever listened to Madonna. He then opened his spotify and started to stream Like a Prayer, stating how it was a banger.
As my mind immediately reconstructed to accomodate this new reality, I explained to him how in my day, admitting I liked a Madonna song would have got the absolute hell beaten out of me by my immediate peers, and had one of our group admitted the same I would have been first in line to lay down the ass whooping. It was at that moment I realized that the idea of cultural identity based on music choice has changed so drastically that it is now unrecognizable to me.
When I was in highschool there was no conceivable world where someone could outwardly admit that they listened to both (for example) Madonna and Type-O Negative. It would be about as bad as unironically wearing a Back Street Boys t-shirt to a NIN concert or something like that; you might as well dig yourself a grave right there.
You referenced the Galapagos islands. I one heard this term used with video game development a while back. Then the person used (maybe even invented) the term "galapagosification" of development. Galapagosification is exactly what our generation had experienced with music tribalism. Now I feel like that it largely a thing of the past due to the global digital landscape.
To be honest? I think it's largely for the better in a practical sense. Trying to survive on one of those islands was brutal. And then there was a point in my highschool life where I realized that I had chosen the wrong island and realized I could never switch. God that was brutal.
Somewhere floating in the ether, just at our fingertips, is some kind of ideal where the idiocy of the past closed-mindedness can be done away, while at the same time avoiding the complete brain rot of the new tik-tok doomscroll AI-do-every-thing-for-you-to-the-point-where-you-can't-even-read "progress". But how to achieve it?
Oh, yeah. I think I was a high school freshman when I admitted to my other friends in black T-shirts that I had a soft spot for Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth." I had to backpedal on that REAL fast. "Haha no seriously guys I was just joking haha that song is so lame it's just come on I was joking haha guys."
I'm pretty sure I already mentioned this elsewhere, but a couple of years ago I saw a couple of adolescent goth girls out and about—listening to K-pop on a portable speaker in one of their bookbags and casually practicing a dance routine. Let's pretend that I said "brave new world" to myself.