Unrelated anecdote with a different explanation:
I had a fascinating conversation with my parents recently. They are both children of the 60s and grew up in San Francisco. We often share music just to talk about it. I was playing some heavier (dubsteppy-metal) music to them, and wanted to dig into why they didn't like it.
The reason that I like heavy music (especially at shows) is because it is very rare that I get to cut my rage loose, and let it flow. Mosh pits are the only place I can think of where this is an acceptable form of self expression. This feeling is sometimes a good gateway to making me feel like I can win (aka, be alright) when I'm feeling down.
I asked them if what I just described, and the feelings that the music engendered made intuitive emotional sense to them. Regardless of whether they agree that it's positive or negative, does that emotional drive resonate with them. And the answer was, shockingly to me, "No".
Through our conversation, we settled on a convenient narrative (with absolutely no research or sources to back it).
In the 60s and 70s, the rebellion was not against the machine, it was for betterment. They saw the moon landings, and went to concerts in Golden Gate Park that sang about love and freedom for all, and they said that there was a feeling that anything was possible. You just had to do it. And there were lots of problems, but we made progress, it just took doing.
While there is likely some rose-tinted-ness about this recollection, I found it interesting that this was not the way I grew up seeing the world. I grew up with the narrative that everything was wrong, everyone was wrong, and so fuck everything - tear it down.
A short list:
Rage Against the Machine
Eminem
System of a Down
Our convenient narrative was that when our leaders act in bad faith, the result is generations of damage (i.e. the Vietnam war), and that this is reflected in culture. Interestingly, this polarizes both ways politically. So you get a feedback loop of culture becoming more extreme to differentiate itself while serving a polarizing society.
Aside: I'm so happy to see charts with error bars!
The rebellion was very much against the machine, the establishment, the norms,etc.
It's very interesting that nowadays rebellious trends tend to feed the machine. You were spot on on your first line. Whatever captures any market and pays dividends is echoed right back, amplified by the machine (which takes the dividend). There is still great music being made, but it's harder to find (if not impossible) on mainstream channels.
According to "Please Kill Me" part of what led to the creation of punk was a sense that everything was going to hell and there might not be a tomorrow. On the metal side of things you get the same sense if you listen to early Black Sabbath (eg "Wicked World", "Hand of Doom",). There's probably other examples to be had, but I can't think of them offhand.
I grew up in the 80's and I can relate to half of what you're saying about aggressive music and moshing. What I find interesting, though, is when you say "Mosh pits are the only place I can think of where this is an acceptable form of self expression". That definately wasn't the case for me, just the opposite. The messages and sentiments I picked up on were that repression was unhealthy -better to get it all out, EST style if need be.
I find it interesting that it's somehow become more taboo to express negative emotions, anger, confrontation, etc than when I was a teenager. I might be off the mark, but from what I've noticed it seems like we're collectively becoming more repressed (emotionally and otherwise) than we were 20 or 30 years ago.
At the metal shows I've been to, it's precisely the guys trying to "cut [thier] rage loose" that you want to avoid. Moshing, like football, should be about a physical form of communal fun, not expressing anger and aggression; otherwise you get safety problems.
I mean, let's not get distracted by the acoustic guitar, a lot of protest folk music was explicitly calling for the abolition of capitalism, the end of US military dominance, etc.
Bye bye Venga boys, bye bye Dr Alban, bye bye Alexis and GoGo Girls , bye bye Mel&Kim or Jackie Rawe, we will not see you again.
Which is surprising. It reflects a change in what people consider an acceptable emotional range for pablum. It's as if airplane food started tasting like something. It's something that deserves an explanation.
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/4082568/the-theory-of-the-13-year...
My willingness to post an article on social media to share it with others is inversely proportionate to the clickbaityness of its title.
If it has a clickbait title I ain’t posting it. And this one does, so I won’t. Too bad, because the article is good.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.171...
http://jpms.ucpress.edu/content/30/4/161.abstract
I don't get the HN fussiness about clickbait titles. If there's a way to vouch for the content (and if it appears on HN, there is) then the problem goes away. Similarly, you could post "This sounds like clickbait, but it's a good article!" which neutralizes the threat and wastes nobody's time.
HN non-clickbait title:
> Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier
Original clickbait title:
> Is pop music really getting sadder and angrier?
It needlessly formulated the title as a question to intrigue people to click it.
Writing the titles in this way serves no purpose but to waste people’s time by tricking them to click through.
I refuse to partake in the further proliferation of any article that practices this style of writing titles.
Clickbait titles need to die. The only chance we have of getting rid of them is to not give them traffic. That won’t ever happen of course, but at least we have the useful policy here on HN to shield us from being manipulated by the titles when we decide what we want to read and not.
