So, here’s the thing. Many of you who know me even a little bit, which is to say, everyone who reads this blog, knows I’m an atheist, and to some extent a socialist - although I have stopped using that label in favor of one less loaded with negative connotations and misunderstandings (I think this week we’re calling ourselves “post-capitalists,” but the title doesn’t really matter; the point is the same, that we believe the capitalist exploitative system must be replaced with a society based on societal cooperation, human possibility, and an end to class-based (or any) exploitation, as well as the end of heirarchy and authoritarianism.) And until now, I’ve been relatively content to let what political discourse I do engage in be mostly of either the satiric or irreverent forms; I feel that it’s both a more effective and less authoritarian position from which to attack things that I find wrong, or in need of fixing.
But enough is enough. These two stories have been building up in the periphery of my news-gathering sources, and today I heard a number of them again, all in a row, and it made something in me snap. (In the interest of credit where credit is due, many of these stories came from the recently-discovered-by-me podcasts run by the Atheist Community of Austin, particularly The Non-Prophets.) So I’m going to be perfectly sincere, straightforward, and open about how I feel about them.
This is going to be a bit disorganized, and I apologize for that. See, the other thing I like about satire is that it’s relatively easy to construct a tight, working criticism of something by ridiculing it; by pointing out how funny a stupid or even dangerous idea can be if taken to the extreme, if exposed for what it really is. But I can’t do that right now, because I’m in something of a rage, and the furthest thing from my mind is laughter. I want to spit on some of the people involved in some of these stories; really, I want to do far, far worse things to them, but I’ll do my best to keep restraint.
I’ll start out with a tame story, and one I heard first, although I don’t believe it comes first chronologically. The story is of Representative Monique Davis, from the Illinois senate. This may be old news to some of you, particularly because Keith Olbermann discussed it on his “Worst Person” segment, and I’ve heard it before, but I’d like now to make a comment. Here is a quick summary for those of you not familiar with her story. Now for the response. FUCK YOU. Even leaving aside the questions of church/state separation, arguably one of the absolute best parts of the United States constitution, a document that while I have some qualms with also has some excellent content, her response betrays ignorance, bigotry, and stupidity. As Olbermann pointed out, Lincoln was a Deist who put absolutely no stock in religion for political matters, but I also honestly don’t care what his religious views were; they’re irrelevant, because the point that matters is that no religious qualification can be held for matters of public discourse, particularly views that have no basis in reality. What is infinitely more important is one of the final comments that Representative Davis made: that it is “dangerous for our children to even know that [atheism] exists.” This position is both reprehensible and an admission of failure. First of all, if the position of religion is so weak that even knowing that an alternative exists is a danger to it, then there is no justifiable reason for believing in it (This in particular is a point that Matt Dillahunty, or as I like to call him, ”God,” made rather well on one of the ACA podcasts). But infinitely more importantly is this, and this is a position that applies to a considerably wider debate: the answer is never less information, or the controlling, shaping, and deleting of information, even when that information is deemed “dangerous” by a group, person, or worldview. Information is never dangerous in a negative way; it is only dangerous to repression, to authority, to thought police and conformity (not to sound too much like a cookie-cutter lefty). Furthermore, the only appropriate response to information that has some destructive potential, or even some negative potential, is proper contextualization. It is through understanding, discussion, examination, and evaluation of information that truth, consensus, progress, and knowledge become reality; it is through information that situations, conditions, freedoms, and rights can be asserted and improved. To say, ever, that it is harmful for someone to know of something, that someone would be better off not knowing something, is wrong, disgusting, vile, reprehensible in every way. It is paternalism, it is oppression, it is thought-policing, and it is horrific. Yes, content should always be contextualized, and yes, content that is not properly understood and examined can lead to false beliefs about what is and is not acceptable (Religion, I’m talking to you here, although certainly not just you) - explaining that video game violence is pretend, explaining why the Grand Theft Auto games are heavy-handed satirical works of art aimed at a mature audience and not murder simulators for teens, explaining why exploitation is wrong - all of these things are vital to any kind of gaining of knowledge, and the gaining of knowledge is essential to any kind of progress in human society.
Next, and considerably more tragic, is the story of a girl who died because her parents refused medical treatment. This is nothing short of murder. I don’t have the lengthy response prepared the way I did with the above, because my mental response is more along the lines of a string of capitalized, italicized, bolded profanities. I will, at the very least, censor myself. YOU MURDERED YOUR DAUGHTER YOU SICK, IDIOTIC, DELUDED, DANGEROUS MONSTERS. MAKING AN IDIOTIC CHOICE THAT RESULTS IN YOUR OWN DEATH IS ONE THING, SADLY ENTIRELY WITHIN YOUR RIGHTS. KILLING SOMEONE WITH THOSE BELIEFS IS NOT.
That’s the end of my specific stories that relate to points I’d like to make. I now want to talk more generally about how I feel about the world, about epistemology, about societal interaction in general. I am an atheist. By that, I mean that I do not believe any claim that I have thus far been presented with about any God, or anything that is not based in the demonstrable, testable realm of reality that we occupy. To an extent, this is a wholly personal matter. It doesn’t need to imply anything other than my personal disbelief, which I have reasons for. Those reasons are simply that there is no evidence, testability, or demonstrability of any supernatural phenomenon that has thus far been raised; furthermore, scientific explanations are in every way simpler than any supernatural theory and are also demonstrable to as near the line of proof as is possible within science. There is no reason to believe in anything but what has been demonstrated and tested; while we cannot and likely will never be able to claim universal knowledge of the universe, its workings, or its causes, there is no reason to believe anything for which we have no evidence, nor any reason to believe that supernatural phenomena of any kind exist.
These are my personal feelings, and I don’t believe that they should be lifted from this page and universally accepted. The closest I can get to an ideal is that everyone who reads them and disagrees with them has a valid reason for doing so, understands that reason, and can and will defend it. If they fail defending it, I’d request a re-examining of their beliefs, just as my own beliefs are constantly subject to evaluation and redefinition.
I do not seek to inject my beliefs into others; I believe that beliefs should not come from anywhere until they have been thoroughly questioned, and indeed that everything should be thoroughly questioned, and whatever survives should be held up as, if not true, then the best working model, always subject to revision. This is key. Nothing should not be subject to revision; there is no truth so firm, no concept so immutable, nothing so perfect that there is no conceivable better form of it; the project of study, of human progress, and of personal belief should be to consistently criticize the current in order to form a better next. This is my fundamental position; everything I hold true can be reduced to the preceding statement: that the best course of action is determined by criticizing the current in order to form a better next.
If beliefs are personal, and must be attained through personal examination, reflection, and study, then why try to change people’s beliefs at all? Why am I writing this, since I will make no claims that my intent here is not to change some people’s beliefs, or more accurately get them to change their own? Because the world you live in, as well as the way you live in it, are shaped by your beliefs. Thus, if you hold indefensible, uncriticized, and for lack of a better term incorrect beliefs, your actions may well be indefensible, in need of critique, and indeed incorrect insofar as they lead to the betterment of anyone or anything. For example, if one believes that there is an immutable, infallible, Divine justice, one might be more lax in assuring that correct justice is meted out by society - in vulgar terms, “kill them all and let God sort it out.” If one believes that one is picked to be special, by God or some other higher power, then one might have disregard for others, in extreme cases leading to racism, bigotry, and even pogroms or genocide (dependent, of course, on other factors as well). If one believes that an afterlife is more important than this life, they might simply waste their life on guilt for crimes or sins they haven’t committed and be stuck with no life to live at all. I am in no position to say these are absolutely correct ideals, but if my analysis of the world I live in is correct (and I have more reason to believe it is correct than incorrect, since everything from demonstrable observation to constant re-evaluation suggest it to be so), then they are.
Furthermore, existence is not and fundamentally cannot be autonomous. I cannot choose which of my actions have impacts beyond my own life and which do not; some of my actions will, necessarily, impact others; indeed, virtually all of them will, essentially the only even imaginable exceptions being basic bodily functions like breathing, sleeping, or masturbating; even eating is suspect, insofar as food may be considered scarce in the global sense. No decision I make about my life as soon as I leave my room, and in some cases still within my room, is free of impacting someone else’s life, and as argued above my beliefs about the way the world works and the rules of the world I live in determine a number of those actions. It follows, then, that the beliefs of everyone else in the world inform their actions, and some of their actions will necessarily impact me. While a simplistic version of this argument could be presented as “I want everyone to agree with me, because that will make my life easier,” its intent is more complicated than that: I want everyone to hold correct beliefs, because if they do they will be more likely to carry out beneficial actions. If they are more correct than me, all the better, because then their actions have a higher chance of being beneficial; but believing that one’s beliefs are correct is meaningless unless it can be in some way demonstrated.
This is where we get into territory about why I live my life the way I do. Not in the sense described in the above paragraph, but in the sense that I feel that the most essential activities a person can be involved in are those of relations with and conversation with and an understanding of human societal relations. The rules of science and the natural world are more or less fixed; we don’t know all of them yet, but we know enough to know that the universe operates according to observable rules, combined with a certain degree of random chance and probability; understanding the world we live in, in the naturalistic sense, is a process of understanding those rules, and it is absolutely essential to the project of making existence better, alleviating suffering, and living better lives, not to mention the intrinsic value of such knowledge.
Human society, on the other hand, does not operate firmly by a set of logics or demonstrable, testable rules. It does not check a formula (speaking metaphorically - of course “nature” does not check a formula either, the formula is an abstraction used to understand the most probable occurrence of how a thing happens), and its experiments should by no means be expected to be repeatable under laboratory conditions. Human societal relations are complex, involved, and in many ways confusing things that rely on incorrect logics just as often as correct logics, are wholly determined by circumstance, and follow no concrete observable pattern. The work of a rhetorician, or political scientist, or sociologist, or soft scientist or humanities student, by whatever name, is to attempt to analyze, understand, and improve these relations, in order that life might be better. To determine what rules are in effect, to embrace the uncertainty and impossibility of codifying human social interaction and to shape and understand it such that a higher percentage of correct beliefs are held and thus a higher percentage of beneficial actions are performed. Much of this project is, of course, determining what beliefs are correct, and this is the work of the harder sciences that study the natural world, as well as the more broad-brush work of softer sciences like economics and political science. The rhetorician (and to a lesser extent the philosopher, who is perhaps to concerned with universals and objective truth) makes it his or her project to understand, spread, and argue for not only correct beliefs, but for a working and workable process by which to come across correct beliefs.
Believe it or not, this is all related. Both of the above stories could have been prevented if time was taken to spread information, to understand information, to critically evaluate both that information and the beliefs of the people involved (as well as, in the case of the murdering parents, human decency). So my atheism is one of those beliefs that I believe is correct, and which I feel I have good reason for believing, but the point of all of this goes further: don’t hold a belief which you cannot justify, and if you must, don’t let it inform your actions, particularly in cases in which it could harm another.
That’s all I have for now.
It’s been pretty easy lately to bash SCEA. The PS3 is generally pretty universally considered the worst of the next generation consoles; it has even become fashionable in some gaming circles to call the PS3 DOA. I was pretty eager to jump on this bandwagon myself, as a Wii owner, and as someone who didn’t want to shell out the money for a PS3 based on its lackluster library. But I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, and after all of it I’d like to present an argument in favor of the PS3, detailing, essentially, why I think the system actually has more promise than any of the other consoles in the seventh generation.
The easiest way to do this, it seems, is to break down the two strongest arguments about the PS3, and talk about how they are in fact arguments in its favor, not against it. I want to debunk myths about the PS3 and explicate the shortcomings that it does have.
First and foremost is the price tag. The PS3 has two retail versions: there is a basic system and a premium system (the Xbox 360 did this as well; however, the difference between the two releases is marked). The basic system (referred to by Sony as the "20GB HDD configuration") retails for $ 499, and the premium system (referred to by Sony as the "60GB HDD configuration") retails for $ 599. The system can be hard to find, but at least the premium version can be ordered online from game stores like EB, whereas the Wii is still found only through a combination of luck and waiting. There are two things to talk about here. One is the difference between the versions: whereas the Xbox 360’s basic version has no HDD (one can be purchased separately), only wired controllers (although wireless ones can be purchased for it), no Hi-Def hookup cables, and is missing a few other features (the price difference there is $ 299 vs $ 399), the difference between the PS3s really pretty much is the hard drive capacity, and 20GB is quite a bit of hard drive capacity for a video game system. The 60GB configuration also has built-in Wi-Fi, but since both consoles have 4 USB ports, getting Wi-Fi on the 20GB model isn’t difficult. While this does make the premium system seem more superfluous, it’s a good thing for the PS3 because the basic version really is worth it (whereas only suckers bought the Xbox 360’s “core” system). Next, there is the price point itself. I think it’s safe to say that one can reasonably acquire a PS3 for $ 499. This puts it at $ 100 more than a buyable Xbox 360, and at twice the price of a Wii. This is often how it is viewed (or even more so, the $ 600 price point is used because it makes for a flashier argument). However, the comparison doesn’t hold up. In terms of hardware, it has been argued that the PS3 is twice as powerful as the Xbox 360 and fifteen times more powerful than the Wii. One reason for the short supply of PS3s is that hospitals bought them up like crazy, because of the sheer number of things they were able to process at once. A lot of times, the response to this is that “graphics don’t make a game great. Graphisc just make up for a game’s other shortcomings”. However, this argument is not only wrong, it’s incomplete. It’s like saying that looks don’t matter in attraction; of course they do, they’re just not enough on their own. A game is a visual medium, and so the better it looks, the better it’s going to be. This plays in to suspension of disbelief, enjoyment, and overall playability. You’re not going to keep coming back to a game that looks horrific, even if it has an original concept or mechanic. That said, hardware isn’t just responsible for sheer graphical output. The hardware in a game system determines many things, including how many characters it can render, how much those characters can be doing at the same time, how quickly/responsively the game plays, and how smooth the feel of the game is. This is the reason that gaming PCs which are capable of putting out the same basic picture (a function of the graphics card, surprinsgly enough) range in price from about $1500 to $4000. Processor speed, RAM, all of these things determine how much fun a game is to play, and the difference between a PS3 and a Wii or Xbox 360 in these respects is marked.
The final thing I’ll say about this is that, with a PS3, you’re getting a few thousand dollars’ worth of hardware for 500 or even 600 bucks. That’s not too shabby, even before the blu-ray player is thrown in. Sure, it’s steep compared to a Wii. But a more accurate comparison is to a pretty competitive PC (essentially, a PS3 is a very competitive PC), at which point the price is a fraction of reasonable.
After this argument has been debunked or ignored, there is what in my opinion is the more relevant argument: the library. I will be the first to say that the PS3’s launch library sucked. Hard. The one decent game, Resistance: Fall of Man (which I’ve gotten a chance to play, and really is quite decent), was overshadowed by its main competitor, Microsoft’s Gears of War, a game that consistently blew critics and players out of the water (I’ve also played it, and its praise is more than merited). There was no reason to buy a PS3 at its launch, and Microsoft perfectly timed Gears’ release to shut out the one reason that anyone might have had. However, one must look at the future of Sony’s library, as well as its potential and promises, before damning it completely. Given the trajectory of Microsoft’s console development alongside Sony’s (even Nintendo doesn’t view Nintendo as a competitor to Sony, although I don’t think this is fair, particularly given the Legend of Zelda series), Gears is really more of a fluke than anything else. The Microsoft consoles are hailed, more than anything else, for the Halo series - the most derivative of all games, and that’s putting it kindly. Other than these, and ports, the Microsoft consoles don’t get much in the way of stellar games - even their highly reviewed “killer apps” fail to be anything more than virtual fodder - very little, if anything, that appears on Microsoft’s consoles can be considered to be pushing video gaming in the direction of art. Gears of War may have been an incredible game, but its appearance is also pretty much inexplicable in the Microsoft timeline. The 360’s launch, even, was arguably just as bad as the PS3’s (it didn’t even have a game on par with Resistance until Gears). It just caught less flak because it wasn’t competing with other launches.
The only data I can really have for this argument comes from either prospective games or past libraries, and I will draw on both. The original Xbox was hailed as a “shooter’s console,” something that I don’t imagine was intended as an insult, although I certainly think less of it for that view. While trying to break that image, the 360 still has had what can only be described as a mediocre library for long time now - lots and lots of games that are kinda fun to play, but nothing that can be described as incredible, and at $ 60 a pop, isn’t an incredible gaming experience a reasonable request? The PS3 had a strong start with Resistance, although a shooter, and isn’t one among a slew of launch titles enough? It certainly used to be. That aside, even, for a moment, look at Sony’s game history. If you scroll down the page to my other video game article, you will notice a top 5 list. What you may not notice right away is that four of the five are or were Sony-exclusive (Shadow of the Colossus/Ico; Grand Theft Auto series; Final Fantasy series; Silent Hill series). Shadow, Ico, and Silent Hill were even all first-party developed! Not to mention the fact that Sony has always been the company to attract the best in independent game developers, and it seems that that’s going to be somewhat true for this generation as well. Sure, Sony platforms release a lot of stinkers. They’re allowed to, because they also get almost all of the greats; few games that can be considered art are released on anything other than Playstation platforms (the others are all either on Nintendo (and this, again, is mostly limited to Zelda games and the early Final Fantasy games) or PC, both of which I own anyway, and think every serious gamer should). One look at Lair or White Knight Story will convince, I think, most non-believers that the system has a lot of promise. One look at Sony’s past and legacy will confirm it.
So yes, the console is expensive. And yes, the launch was lackluster at best. But I have renewed faith in the console after seeing promise that its tradition will continue, and sooner or later, as much as it may kill my indie cred to say it, I am going to buy a PS3.
After months and . . . well, okay, two weeks . . . of searching
Wii!
Now excuse me. I have some tennis to play.
Thanks to Doug for the title
After much debate (largely headed by doug and myself) on the subject of robotics, I’ve decided to make a post about it, about my thoughts responding to it, and what I feel the major issues are. Some good background reading can be found on this site’s loving, nurturing parent site, OOKEE -- see both the practical application of robotics, and the resulting theoretical debate spurred by it (with a little help from a McLuhan-influenced blogger).
The questions aren’t new, nor are any of the answers seen here, but as evidenced by the military’s interest, it is no longer solely an academic (or fictional) question. I plan on going through in a more cohesive and organized fashion the arguments that I provided before (and getting rid of those messy parentheticals), so bear with me, as this will likely get lengthy and repetitive (quite a few pages of text after the jump). I’m going to begin by reversing the order of the debate, because I don’t see how one can talk about the practical use of robots before defining quite what we mean by them. I turn to the most recent aspects of discussion before explaining at length why I think this issue is worth debating, but to hook you let me say that I believe and will argue that robotics will be the field that militarism, politics, Marxism, sociology, philosophy, economics, science, and indeed fiction will combine in; it is impossible to understand the past and current development of robotics, as well as the future of it, without a grasp on each and every one of these fields. As such, I think it is the single most important isolatable issue to be debating, and one that will have the most impact on the world as it develops.(Click here to read more...)
I suppose this is what you’d call fulfilling a promise I made to my loyal readership. Three weeks late.
School has begun, and while it’s considerably more work than last year, I actually respect my professors, so it’s an immeasurable improvement. I’ve also finally become active in the ISO (The International Socialist Organization), with good and bad results.
I cannot promise the coherence that I once could, but this is still going to be about something. I just haven’t decided what yet, so this ought to be interesting. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about idealism, realism, the ups and downs of being young and believing in things, and so forth.
My generation lives at an odd time. We’re not Generation X and we’re especially not “Generation Y” or “Generation Next,” but this is more because of a lack of shared identity than a disagreement with the ideals of any one of those catchy slogans. It would be wrong to say that idealism, activism, or even practical belief in things is gone - we are the generation that stood out from Generation X because we do occasionally care about things, and when we do, we do something about it. Granted, this has declined in the last few years, but it’s true nonetheless. The Anti-War movement was nearly as large in the months and weeks before the Iraq War in 2003 as it had been towards the end of the Vietnam war in the 70s, although it has now all but disappeared. We are the technical generation - all of us have access to computers, most of us can do more with them than most of you, and the proverbial future is in our proverbial hands.
More than any of this though, our generation is marked by a nostalgia for things we weren’t around to catch the first time. We were the generation of “I love the 80s” and “I love the 80s Strikes Back”. Snakes on a Plane became a fad because it starred Samuel L. Jackson - and our generation loved him for Pulp Fiction - a film that came out when people my age were seven. We’ve revived Say Anything, and parodies in general saw a rebirth with our generation. Hipster music is a throwback to either the 80s and the Talking Heads, or the 60s and Bob Dylan and the Beatles. We lack an identity, and so we come up with a manufactured, processed one.
What does all of this mean? Your guess is as good as mine. But I guess I can’t really say that without at least trying to guess, so here goes. It is dangerous and shows incredible promise. It doesn’t take much other than a clever sense of what’s due for a rebirth to appeal to our generation. It would not be hard for someone with a good sense of hipster culture to completely win over our generation, and in this way we are incredibly vulnerable. We love camp, and camp will rule us. It’s not all bad though. We didn&#t just pick at random from the depths of the culture bargain bin; our choices have been finely combed through, and we’ve taken the best - all with a grain or four of salt - and we have put in one original aspect. We’ve done our best to say something, anything, with this amalgamated culture, this recycled idealism. How successful we’ve been, no one can be sure for at least a while, but the promise is out there. We’ll do our best.
Things are on a temporary hiatus while I don’t have internet at my new apartment (I’m) making this post from a starbucks). In the mean time, however, I’d like to say that I’ll be back in a week with more socialism, anger, or just generally poorly-edited slices of furious and/or naive political thought.
Also, happy snake day.
It worries me sometimes that all of my posts as of late have been on “the state of blank today,” but this is what I find myself thinking about, and if I can’t say it here then I’d have to say it where someone would listen, and, let’s be honest, that’s not going to happen. So, without further ado (I can’t believe it’s been almost a year that I’ve had this set up and I haven’t done this yet) I present my views on the current state of music.
Genres and types aside, contemporary music has three distinct categories. These are the easy, the angsty, and the pretentious. Any type of music can fit into any of these categories, and a few types of music span the categories, although it is quite possible to place all of certain types of music within a certain category. Don’t get hung up on the names like I did; they’re there for lack of better words, and only angsty do I truly feel is accurate. What is important is the content, the flaws, and the merits (if any) of each type. Because it’s easy, and because it conveniently has me finishing with the category that I have the most to say about, we’ll do this alphabetically.
The Angsty
It has all kinds of names now, and has had all kinds of names in the past. Emo (the current forerunner), hardcore, punk, grunge, chik-rock, and if we want to throw in whiny (and oh, do we) with angsty we can do about half of indie and singer-songwriter music as well. Think anything from Alanis Morissette to Anti-Flag to the Smashing Pumpkins to Converge to Dashboard Confessional to even The Ramones or Sleater-Kinney. (Those of you that get all of those references, I’m impressed.) This has been around for years, and extends beyond music - Hot Topic fans, eat your heart out. I don’t want to write this category off - artists of promise have found themselves here, and some of them have stayed here. The category suffers from chronic flash-in-the-pan-itis, as one can only be angsty for so long before puberty ends. This is the music that the unpopular kids (art, goth, nerd, etc.) listened to in high school. It’s also the only category that has visitors from both other categories, because selling records is a lot simpler if you’re angry about something. The songs lack depth usually, and subtlety is almost unheard of; this is the realm of the metaphor (grisly, usually) and the hyperbole. It’s also fun to listen to, and if you don’t have any favorite band that belongs in this category, I’m pretty firmly convinced that you’re an alien, or at least tasteless. That said, they’re almost always embarassing, so I won’t ask you to name them. I certainly won’t be naming mine.
The Easy
If you told me that you didn’t own any albums in the Angsty category, I wouldn’t believe you. If you tell me that you don’t own any albums in the Easy category, I’ll congratulate you (though I’ll remain skeptical). This is bubblegum in all of its forms. I call it easy because it requires no unique skill to hear, to absorb, and to forget (and, admittedly sometimes, to enjoy). You don’t have to be a music listener to get a Kelly Clarkson song stuck in your head (in fact, it probably helps if you’re not) - but if you spend more than the 3 minutes that the song runs thinking about it, then you’re spending too much time. When something sells out, it goes here. This isn’t just teeny pop, however. Slayer belongs as easily in this category as the Backstreet Boys. You want to listen to something whose goal is just to deafen you? Then Easy is the category for you! 50 Cent fans aren’t free either; top 40 rap is just as much a member here as top 40 metal or pop. I would like to make it clear at this point that I’m not blanketly insulting music I haven’t really heard; first, I have heard a lot of it, and second, I’m not insulting, merely identifying. All of these musicians are extremely good at what they do - selling a product. It’s widely available and it’s intended to be catchy and short-lived. Does this make it worse than music in other categories? That depends on the criteria used to define “worse.” I merely place it here because it does not belong in either of the other categories. This is the music that the popular kids in high school listen to, because they’ve got lives to worry about, and spending time on anything other than Easy music would not, I imagine, be a high priority.
And finally, at long last, The Pretentious
This category includes a lot as well. At the moment, pretentious indie music is in its upswing, but the Velvet Underground belongs here as much as the Fiery Furnaces do. Hell, Atmosphere belongs here. Hieroglyphics belongs here. This is the underground that hasn’t given way to angst. It is the category of lyrical depth, subtlety, allusion, symbolism, and art. It is also bloated, repetitive, and often stolen from earlier artists. I want to present a fair picture of this, even though most (not all) of the music I listen to falls here. The key attack launched against the Pretentious category, apart from its obvious pretension, is that it is by and large unoriginal. Record reviews are usually comprised almost entirely of references to previous artists. The highest praise something in this category can hope to receive is that it is reminiscent of another artist that has already been deemed talented. This can vary from the internet phenomenon Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! being described as the Talking Heads for the 21st century to even newer band Wolf Parade being called a mixture of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! and the Arcade Fire. References have always been around in music - listen to David Bowie’ Hunky Dory and tell me he’s not channeling Bob Dylan. He even acknowledges it. The point remains that there are good things to be said about David Bowie beyond his ability to sound like Bob Dylan. Listening to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! is enjoyable because it’s like listening to a Talking Heads album with incredibly clever lyrics. Not to be forgotten is the “quasi-instrumental post-rock” that exemplifies the pretension here; not only is its name longer than most of the songs, but the concept of contemporary bands playing instrumental albums full of rock chords and calling them art is laughable (though, admittedly, usually enjoyable and often well done). Indie music (and the other pretentious types, although I don’t have as much experience with them) is the elitist sect of music, but it’s also some of the most enjoyable music currently being made.
There are exceptions to everything I’ve said; this is not an in-depth analysis, it’s a loose rant based on a half-baked idea that I thought to write about earlier this morning. That said, I stand by its analysis at least 90 percent of the time.
Questions? Looking for reccomendations? Let me know in the comments.
Sorry to continue on a post that is only of marginal interest to - okay, well, to all of my readership, but after what can only be described as a marathon I have just finished the Half-Life series of games and have decided that they belong on the previous list. Although shooters, a genre I never would have though would have a place on any top-rated list of mine, their focus on a compelling story, characters, and environment have created a compelling world and plot. I cannot reccomend either game highly enough. That is all.