Rog wrote:You dumbasses.
I may be a dumbass, dipshit, but at least I didn't write this convoluted brain-sprained pus bilge:
Culturally speaking, we are living in postmodern times (and if you don't believe me, watch that new VH1 show that asks you to be nostalgic about LAST WEEK). To define terms, I'm referring to a culture which:
-Believes fundamentally that we've reached 'the end of history' (i.e. the end of modernism) and that there's nothing truly new under the sun
-Has a deep and self-conscious awareness of cultural history and specific cultural movements/events/trends within that history (often broken down into decades)
-Has a cultural outlook that is fundamentally irreverent, ironic, humorous (everything that modernism supposedly wasn't)
-DOES NOT make value judgements which would place categories like highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow on culture
-Believes that only in the mixing and matching of different cultural movements/events/trends from the past, without the self-imposed restrictions and divisions of highbrow/lowbrow, "good"/"bad", etc., can something "new" be created
Looking at it this way, pretty much all current rock bands are postmodern. That includes underground/indie/punk bands. I think a postmodernist would say to anybody playing rock music in 2004 that they are participating in an act of nostalgia within an essentially dead form. That's not to say that great music can't be made within it.
Sometimes I think bands like Autechre are pointing toward a way out of postmoderism (back in to modernism?). I listen to them and can't really hear any cultural signifiers of what came before. Their song titles aren't in any language (like "Finnegan's Wake" wasn't). They are using technology that didn't exist before. As a modernist, I strongly approve.
