PoliticsAsGenre
ThoughtStorms Wiki
Context: PoliticalStuff, OnGenre, MusicalStuff
It's taken me far to long to realize it, but political programmes are really just genres, aren't they?
And parties are like bands.
Now I believe that terms like LeftAndRight are meaningful because they describe real clusterings of political positions.
Transcluded from LeftAndRight
Quora Answer : Can I be neither left wing or right wing? Am I supposed to choose one side?
No one else will force you to choose one side.
Your brain will.
What we call "left-wing" and "right-wing" are just clusterings of opinions about political issues which usually go together.
If you believe some things, such as that racial prejudice are wrong, you are likely to believe others, such that prejudice against people because of sexuality or poverty is wrong. Similarly if you think that government is too interfering in your commercial transactions by demanding health and safety inspections, you probably think it's also taking too much money from you in taxes.
These clusters of ideas are what we call left-wing and right-wing.
Sometimes there are institutions that push our ideas into a certain cluster. For example, I might not be racist by inclination, but if the government decides to impose race-based restrictions on my business, and I HATE government interfering in my business, I may find myself hanging out with a bunch of racists who are complaining about the same restrictions, and find their ideas rubbing off on me.
Similarly, some events seem to cut through the "natural" clustering, and these are confusing and traumatic. For example, Brexit, in the UK, is dividing both the traditional right-wing Conservative party and the traditional left-wing Labour party.
Both sides have fissures into pro and anti Brexit sides. And these are particularly painful because they divide people who are usually allies.
At the same time, I am somewhat bewildered by how traditional groupings have been coming apart in the age of Diagonalism or whatever you want to call it. CrunchyToFarRightPipeline etc.
But if I understand political programmes as genres and parties as bands who start in a genre but potentially drift out of it. Then it all becomes clearer. Because I already think of genres as forming a kind of family tree where they give birth to multiple different and sometimes inconsistent subgenres etc.
Transcluded from PopularMusicHistory
Quora Answer : Which two music genres are completely different but have a similar origin?
Well technically, these three pieces all have their roots in the same music, about 80 to 100 years ago.
Chet Baker: Almost Blue
Rusko : Cockney Thug
Xasthur : Xasthur Within
And you can hear that they basically have the same structure. Some kind of repeating sequence of chords, with a strong rhythmic pulse, over which there's some kind of semi-improvised, free floating lead. The rhythm may change occasionally, but the pulse / mood stays fairly constant throughout.
They differ in what their rhythm is, what particular modes / scales they use. And especially in the instrumentation, tonality and "sound world".
But their structure and even purpose is similar.
These are all, effectively, miniature musical "landscapes". They paint a picture of an emotional place and invite you to explore within it. They don't particularly tell a musical "narrative". Or try to contain and show a transition between contrasting emotions. They aren't about contrast and change. They are about capturing their mood as absolutely as possible.
Surprisingly, they are all pieces of music designed to be heard within a larger context which consists of other pieces of music of similar style. So that you can fully immerse yourself within that feeling and allow it to interact with your emotional state, to face your demons, and perhaps find some kind of catharsis to internal woes.
These are all pieces of music that owe their existence to recording technology. They are as much products of recording engineering as they are of traditional music composition. They are made to be distributed on records, and listened to on records. Perhaps alone. Or in a group of aficionados.
Perhaps more surprisingly, although none of them may sound particularly easy to dance to, their common ancestry is dance music. Music intended to provide the soundtrack for parties / social gathering. Hence the prominent use of percussion and drums in all of them.
Let's trace each one back a bit ... towards their common ancestor.
Let's take the metal track back about 40 years :
Black Sabbath : Paranoid
And we'll take the ancestry of the dubstep back to about the same time
Sly and the Family Stone : Africa Talks to You
Not quite the same genre of music. But they are noticeably much more similar. And the dance aspect of both is strong.
Now go back another 15 years, and we can find a common ancestor of both metal and the funk / disco family tree which leads to dubstep :
Muddy Waters, 1955, Manish Boy :
Chet Baker was actually around, recording at that time, and he sounded like this :
To find the common origin of Baker and Muddy Waters you'll have to go further back into jazz / blues history. But they will definitely converge at some point.
You can easily imagine both Baker and Waters knowing and rating Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, for example :
Programmes that start at the same place can end far apart. Most modern politics, including most contemporary conservatism, right-libertarianism, social democracy, socialism, communism, anarchy, are almost all offshoots of liberalism forged in TheEnlightenment. They all are built by emphasizing some currents from the original liberalism, and downplaying others.
Just as dubtep, black metal and cool jazz are basically cousins sharing similar DNA but with varied emphases.
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