Which do you think is cheaper to produce, agitprop or deep investigative reporting? If no one pays for news, which do you think will grow in proportion to the other?
What is passed off as "deep investigative reporting" is actually agitprop, especially when reporters interface with and are concerned with maintaining access to the national security apparatus.
Yet, at the same time, the same journalists think they're "defending democracy from darkness."
I hate that propaganda has become a thought-terminating cliche. First of all, it's not necessarily a bad thing. "Agitprop" is literally what brought the deeply isolationist Americans to finally act in World War II. Also, just because you suspect that some journalism from a publication is propaganda doesn't invalidate the usefulness of all journalism from that publication like the Washington Post's opioid database.
> "Agitprop" is literally what brought the deeply isolationist Americans to finally act in World War II.
I thought it was Pearl Harbor.
>just because you suspect that some journalism from a publication is propaganda doesn't invalidate the usefulness of all journalism
Usefulness for whom? If by useful you mean to manufacture consent to do whatever businesses and governments would have done if it weren't for the pesky public getting in their way, then yes, sure. We wouldn't have had the second Iraq war, or the first for that matter, if it weren't for the hard work of the journalists at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Japan wasn't stupid enough to rouse a sleepy giant for no reason. It's no coincidence that the majority America's western fleet was docked on tiny islands thousands of miles away from any then states. The US had also implemented an embargo and provided significant aid to the Allies through Lend Lease. If they didn't attack America during Pearl Harbor, they would attack a ship that's blockading critical oil shipments. Propaganda played a huge role in American's acceptance into these escalations [1].
> We wouldn't have had the second Iraq war
Yes, I knew you were alluding to this, which is why I brought up WWII as a counterexample. My point is that just because you think their geopolitical reporting was counterproductive doesn't change the value of their opioid coverage [2] which lead to multi-billion dollar lawsuits against CVS and Walgreens.
I understand your desire to connect the propaganda industry with the "last just cause"—83 years ago—but lying to the public is not virtuous.
Was it virtuous or justifiable for Jeffrey Gettleman at the New York Times to fabricate, out of whole cloth, stories of rape [1] to soft-shoe the genocidal policies of a foreign government? Who benefits?
Just because an author of the New York Times article made some angry tweets and some people disagree with her narratives doesn't mean that they were fabricated. That's besides the point though. If you're happy with the Intercept's reporting that gets heavily cited by the article you posted, does that mean you're happy to pay for it?
> Just because an author of the New York Times article made some angry tweets and some people disagree with her narratives doesn't mean that they were fabricated.
No, the fact that even the families of the victims say they fabricated stories about their daughters, and that they had no sources outside government propaganda mouthpiece, is what makes the stories fabricated.
Not sure that paying would make things better anyways. If everyone was paying then there would be enough revenue for the news to produce the real/biased reporting/agitprop that their customers demand.
> My point is that if a musician is good, they will earn money proportional to their success. If the argument that it's the promotion that makes them successful, then the argument is less correct today than ever before - the advent of the internet means there's no more strict radio slots etc, which is unavailable to an amateur or starting musician.
This is an unimaginative way of looking at things. For one thing, many people do still listen to the radio, where slots are still limited. Those who don't listen to the radio often listen to equivalents of the radio--Spotify or Apple Music playlists that are curated and quite likely involve the same kind of payola issues that the radio had.
It's the same structure: musicians reach their audience through a middleman that has an interest in promoting a particular group. Spotify is only a piece of this, you also have album promotion campaigns, brand tie-ins, and so on. (For example, did you know that the artist who plays the Superbowl half-time gets paid a pittance for it?)
> Even if you reset today's system - for argument's sake, we make everybody forget all previous musicians, and start from scratch - what would happen is that those musicians that are "good", measured in popularity, will garner more and more audience and popularity, leading to what looks like today's system (but just with perhaps a different person)
The whole premise of this is that there's a universal quality of "good" that you can assess for a particular musician. That's nonsense. Some people love Taylor Swift, others can't tolerate her. Some people find a Bartok string quartet sublime, others think it's just noise. There's no universality to appeal to here. At best you can create an average over the population--but that changes from time to time, place to place, demographic to demographic.
Popularity involves skill but also luck. That's why there are so many "one hit wonders": musicians who happen to be in the right place at the right time but are never able to repeat it. For every musician with a steady career, there are many of these.
> That's why my condition, if you wanted to equally distribute the profits of music making, is to segregate markets into small, non-overlapping segments. You will not be allowed to pay for or listen to music from another market segment. This way, no matter how good or popular a musician is, they only ever earn the maximal of their own (small) market. But i don't see why such a system is good, with the exception that some bad musicians gets to be the big fish in a small pond.
This is already the way genres work, with the difference that these segments are voluntarily chosen. There are people who listen to, for instance, modern classical and almost nothing else, or death metal and almost nothing else, etc.
I think a good system would be one that works like ours, but with more to cushion artists from the random contingencies of the market. A lot of this already exists--grants given to artists in areas that are deemed culturally valuable, for example. Laws placing minimum prices on music licensing for film, TV, etc. Probably there should be laws forcing Spotify to be more transparent about royalties and promotions as well.
I think his prose quality varies widely from work to work. Typically it's not great. In Atrocity Exhibition it's beyond bland, though--almost bureaucratic in its mechanical periphrases, repetitive, clinical and bizarre. I can't imagine that's not intentional. And Crash, if you can stomach it, is outright pungent. At times it reads like an airport novel, at other points it's hallucinatory. Most of the rest is written indifferently, interesting for the ideas but not the writing.
Surely a serious musician is going to want to create music that rewards attention, not music expressly built for distracted people on shitty speakers they can barely hear.
> Surely a serious musician is going to want to create music that rewards attention
Not always. Consider Robert Rich's very serious idea of "egoless" music which isn't intended to command attention but to leave space for the listener's own internal attention and creation.
In his sleep concerts listeners even fall in and out of unconsciousness, presumably experiencing some interesting dreams as well.
> music expressly built for distracted people on shitty speakers they can barely hear
An apt description for many things, from wax cylinders to AM radio to MP3 to to music played on smartphones. Which is to say: all popular music since the 1890s, "serious" or not.
Your position isn't in a good place if your argumentative strategy is to search out bad motivations in those who disagree with you, rather than laying out a positive case for the position itself.
Living in a city isn't going to be much fun if it's a crappy city, sure. You can say it's not a dump area, but I'm sorry, a city with zero museums and only two coffee shops is just not much of a place. I've lived in small college towns that did better than that.
Vancouver is a great city. I didn't live anywhere near the nice parts. I was walking distance to the 7-11 and laundromat. And the apartment was infested with cockroaches.
The bank is the best landlord I ever had.
I think that a lot of $$$$$$ IT workers forget about slumlords (or are slumlords themselves!)
I'm sorry you had a bad experience in Vancouver. But in my experience, bad and even extortionate landlords are not limited to cities--they absolutely do exist in suburban and even rural areas.
The degree to which the SAT is coachable is a subject of debate. The biggest studies have suggested that even private tutoring has an effect of less than 40 points.
Kasparov had a nice line about this in "How life imitates chess". I'm paraphrasing but it was something along the lines of "there are lots of things that cannot be tought to you which you can nontheless teach yourself".
I think that thinking processes is very much in that category, and I think that the investment in time is considerable. I think its typical to expect gradual improvement -- a constant response to training. Anecdotally, it doesn't work like that.
Boomkat is also good, different selection than Bandcamp but comparable in size (they definitely have some Japanese stuff that Bandcamp doesn't, e.g. Tzadik's Japanese music line).
That's the wrong way about thinking about it, though. Historical processes don't operate solely based on first principles, they operate according to contingency.
Take Western music. Early music is mostly vocal, and early principles of music theory evolved around what would be possible (and practical) to sing. Different people have different vocal ranges, and the constraints that puts on the music lead to certain constraints in counterpoint. Eventually instrumental music becomes more socially important, and that changes what kinds of music can be made. Mathematics progresses in such a way that new tuning systems (12 tone equal temperament, and its precursors) make it easier to modulate between keys, and more modulation (and chromaticism) becomes common.
Even things like the way the music is structured depend on social practices, they're not spontaneous. The sonata form depends on an audience that listens attentively to music so that they can perceive the way the themes are gradually transformed.
I could go on, but nearly everything in music goes this way--there are principles, but they only have a limited explanatory power, you need to get into historical contingency to really understand why things evolve the way they do.
I never said that it was necessarily a smart way to think about it. But just as we don't reach the periodic table by taking children through every process and discovery that led to uncovering a new element, it's not necessary to teach this subject (whatever we call it) as a historical process either.
I certainly agree that historical context has always been central to the way music has developed. It's not for nothing that most of Europe refers to "the church modes" rather than using a more abstract term for a set of interval rotations. But that historical context is only absolutely necessary if you want to try to understand why music evolved in the way that it did. It's not necessary if your goal is to understand the way we understand, compose and perform music today.
Of course, I'm all for more understanding of music, so I'd favor historical context every time. It's just that it's not a necessary feature for understanding where we currently are.
The analogy with chemistry doesn't work. There is only one "chemistry theory": the one that describes reality. The table of elements changes because our experimental understanding of reality improves.
There is no one true "music theory". Music theory as it is typically taught is no more than an elaborate system of nomenclature of the stylistic preferences of European music in the last three centuries. It is a cultural description of a cultural phenomenon.
To get into more specifics, when explaining music theory at an elementary level, you might say that a frequency ratio of 1:2 is called an octave and all the notes with an octave relationship to each other are considered equivalent. That is true, if you are making European-style music. Most other cultures around the world have a name for the interval called the octave, but most of them don't consider all octaves to be the same note. "octave equivalency" is fundamental to Western music, but it's not a universal law, it's a stylistic choice. To imply otherwise by claiming that your explanation of this European convention is essential to music writ large is to do a disservice to the many musical cultures around the world that don't follow that convention.
> The harmonic series is relevant, but you can't start from the harmonic series and find your way to Western classical music.
As big as fan as I am of being aware of non-western musical culture, I was commenting on the specific idea of moving from the harmonic series to a specific musical culture (the western classical one). This is why the chemistry analogy is (roughly) appropriate, because there are in fact a substantial number of (western) music theorists who consider there to be only a single western classic music theory.
I try to almost never use the words "music theory" without prefixing them with a temporal and/or geographic cultural qualifier (though I likely often fail here).
