social.noyu.me

i used to think that the uk had no cultural exports because it's the insular racism island whose total “british” cultural output consists of endless comedy series about absurd class dynamics, but now i live in scandinavia i discover they do have an export market, it's just tiny

‪i have no idea if people living in the uk know that there are europeans who know who hyacinth bucket is. but there are. you should not be flattered by this though

i don't think stuff like doctor who and sherlock really count as cultural exports in the way that i mean here, because those are in recent times an explicit attempt by the bbc to go global

i guess the idea of “british culture" or “swedish culture” or “american culture” or “japanese culture” is inherently kinda fake and insular though, and i also have very very obvious bias on this

@hikari considering our historic obsession with cultural hegemony, I have always found it deeply ironic that the most significant contributions the UK has made to music (by which I mean globally genre-defining or genre-creating, not outlier one-off acts) resulted from scenes heavily defined by their mixing of British and non-British cultures, often in underground or explicitly illegal contexts at the time (e.g. warehouse parties, pirate radio, etc.).

@gsuberland @hikari I’m not sure that’s ironic. Cultural mixing is where new ideas develop and blossom.

But I do absolutely think of a lot of Electronic music genres as specifically British, because this helps understand their evoltuion and commonalities (there are commonalities among the disparate (sub)genres of electronic music that developed in Britain that are very distinct from those that developed in America or other bits of Europe)

I also like thinking about things like this because they’re an explicit rebuke to the artificial definition of “britishness” that the tories have spent the last ~10 years attempting to promulgate.

@erincandescent @gsuberland it's a bit like the difference between folk culture and bourgeois/national culture, though all the stuff you speak of sprung up in the era of the latter

@erincandescent @gsuberland stuff like jungle has a very particular “folk”-ness to it in the hazy sense i mean. it was not a National Movement originally, it was people in a specific place who, i want to say, had immigrant backgrounds?

@hikari @gsuberland Is not all true culture “folk”? National movements for culture are inherently artificial; culture primarily goes “national” through propaganda. Often that propaganda has basis in fact, but it is generally intentionally distorted and homogonised.

I think it’s really important to ask “why did these musical styles develop in these places?” and so often the answer really comes down to the fact that London is such a culturally diverse place where a bunch of (primarilly Afro-Carribbean) immigrants had set down roots - at the time these were really starting to spring up - 1-2 generations ago.

Why did musical history take the course that it did? Because the children of those Afro-Carribbean immigrants and of families that had lived in London since time immemorial grew up together, went to the same schools, befriended each other, and traded musical influences with each other, combined with the fact that music creation suddenly started getting a whole lot more accessible and there was a social safety net sufficiently functional to allow people to experiment.

@hikari @gsuberland I guess you can condense what I’m saying down to is: When you truly investigate cultural touchstones of various cultures you discover how many of them are stolen or utterly derivative. This is basically universal; there’s very little that’s new under the sun.

So by wearing their influences on their sleeves I kind of just see the variety of music genres that sprouted around London in particular as more honest and.. more genuine.

@gsuberland @hikari one of my observations of the world of the past few years is that there's two simultaneous cultural forces that combine to erase any sense of modern cultural development

There's a conservative force, which harkens to a staid and ahistoric "traditional" "native" culture and opposes and attempts to erase anything which has developed over the last few decades, particularly anything that's a product of multiculturalism

Then there's a leftist force, which sort of believes that these products of multiculturalism are 100% down to the immigrant cultures that were involved - as if place and time were irrelevant, as if there were no other contributions to things.

I feel like both of these world views - and especially the combination of the two of them - are extremely toxic and destructive.

And your initial posts in this thread felt like they resonated with them

@hikari i do think of like Royal Blood and Skepta as british

but with like, Charli XCX? a bit "suuure but could've been from anywhere" kinda i guess