Biological, pre-rational desires act without respect to their causal sources. This is true with concern to food, sex, and tribalism.
People crave food irrespective of the survivalist source of their cravings. In an ironic turn of events, a mechanism which originally evolved to aid survival is now responsible for heart failure and lower sexual attractiveness.
Similarly, people use insemination blocking contraception in order that they might have more sex. Because raising children might interrupt the standard fuck party, instinctual means subvert their own evolutionary ends. The dopamine reward for sexual stimulation originally evolved as a mechanism to encourage insemination, but now that very same mechanism is encouraging people to swallow mini-abortion pills.
Just as we crave food and sex, we crave a group identity, or tribe. And just as hunger and horniness are biological and pre-rational, so is tribalism. Animals who do not the have words to understand their own hunger or horniness still feel hungry and horny. We humans might understand hunger and horniness a little bit better, but when it comes to the tribal urge, we are still capable of bestial, blind ignorance.
In the same way that most people cannot help but crave food and sex, people gravitate towards group-identity, without even understanding what they're doing. This can lead to very powerful energies being redirected in extremely silly ways, like Insane Clown Posse or Screamo-Rap.
Between the era of Napoleonic imperialism and the defeat of National Socialism, Whites were surprisingly self conscious when it came to the matter of tribalism. Now White tribalism has been identified as the original sin and Pandora's box of all misery, suffering, and inequality. Just as a monk might flog himself for lust, or an ascetic would try to purge feelings of hunger, Whites try to purge the constant influx of tribal thoughts from their minds. Most Whites, however, are not Brahmin. Therefore, this purge is merely superficial, and the urges remain, redirected around musical genres. The jocks listen to pop, the emos listen to grunge, the druggies listen to dubstep, the metalheads listen to... metal, and so on.
For other races, ethnic signalling is conscious and uncontroversial. All non-White ethnic groups have music which is definitively theirs. White rappers are at best honorary Blacks, and at worst "cultural appropriators."
This state of affairs is a total subversion of the previous American order, in which "ethnic music" was usually derided, and non-Whites were pressured into conforming to White standards.
Whereas Blacks used to emulate White dialects in order to become more mainstream, today Whites emulate Black dialects to become more mainstream.
As much as "coverkillernation" makes some good points in the video at the top of this post, I think his analysis is still too focused on the masses, and does not identify any of the movers and shakers at the top. He assumes that consumers have a larger degree of organic influence over the market than I would.
My hypothesis is that music is like language. Everyone feels some kind of familiarity with and affinity to their own native language. Some languages are said to be more beautiful than others, but languages do not spread based on their beauty or superior grammar. Rather, languages spread as a side effect of the success of their speakers.
We can speak of Italian as a beautiful language, and perhaps that will motivate some people to learn Italian. Yet most people stick to whatever language is given to them. If they learn another language, it will be out of practicality. The parallel in music is that people will like whatever they hear. Repetition breeds familiarly, and familiarity breeds fondness.
Some people will be moved to go to the opera on account of its beauty. But most people will learn to love whatever they hear most often. Human beings have an amazing tendency to acclimatize to vastly different environments, and music is no different. This tendency is ripe for control from the top-down.
Most musicians will tell you that success means getting signed on by a record label. The libertarian narrative is that record labels look only at what will be popular and be most profitable. Again, if memetics was an entirely bottom-up phenomenon, this would be true. But if memetics is vulnerable to top-down exploitation, then record labels have a large degree of wiggle room in which to work.
A certain breed of autistic misanthrope loves to complain, "How does such an such a terrible song become so popular? How can people like this drivel? Damn these sheep!" But is a song played on the radio incessantly only because it's popular? Does shit appeal to shitty people? Or is it the shitty music shoved down our throats from the top that make us shitty? In other words, does music become popular in part because of its incessancy? My hypothesis is that the causal link between frequency and enjoyment is best modelled by a positive feedback loop, rather than a linear chain.
Not only are record labels extremely powerful gate keepers in the music industry, determining what is safe for consumption and what should be pushed despite being distasteful, but an entire industry of publicists and agents push their artists in one direction or another. A good example is Taylor Swift, who went from "country singing good girl" to "dances under black butts bad girl." The transition from "Hannah Montana" to "Miley Cyrus" was not only a coincidental reflection of bottom-up trends, but also an indication of behind the scenes top-down influences.
Howard Bloom-oom-oom-oom, founder of The Howard Bloom Organization, Ltd. (once one of the largest public relations firms in the music industry) suggested to Prince and his management that he "aggressively pursue the rock and new wave audience ... Consequently, Prince's management put together a series of performances designed with racially mixed audiences in mind." (Nilsen, Per (2003) Dance Music Sex Romance: Prince: The First Decade. SAF Publishing.)
From his website: (emphases added)
"Using correlational studies, empirical surveys, ethnographic expeditions into suburban teen subcultures, and other scientific techniques, Bloom more than doubled Circus’s sales, and was credited by Rolling Stones’ Chet Flippo with founding a new genre–the heavy metal magazine. Seeking still further ways to infiltrate modernity’s mass mind, Bloom founded the biggest public relations firm in the music industry, The Howard Bloom Organization, Ltd.
Bloom worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Cougar Mellencamp, Kiss, Queen, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, Peter Gabriel, Diana Ross, Simon & Garfunkel, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run D.M.C., Simply Red, and the heads of many a media conglomerate. He was adept at spotting new subcultures, entering them, and helping their members crusade for the right to express their identity…a skill that gave him an inside role in the rise of country crossover, disco, midwestern rock, fusion jazz, New Age music, punk rock, rap, and the form of crossover black music embodied in Prince and Michael Jackson.
“More important is the impact of a communal ritual like a rock concert ...”. Bloom’s task was to first experience the exaltation, then to dissect it. “The model for this work,” he says, “cames from William James, who attempted to feel the ecstatic experiences of mystics, then to probe these experiences scientifically, a process that led to his 1902 book The Varieties of the Religious Experience.”
Bloom’s forays into power and its manipulations were also intense. “In the music and film industry everyone knew that money and career advancement were on the line. But few realized how deeply what they did affected the lives of millions, and even fewer felt the responsibility that demands. It was an amazing privilege to work as an equal with the entertainment industry’s elite, many of whom I either had to woo or thwart to help my clients reach their audience with a message of genuine value. Some executives were master strategists but used their intelligence to increase their own stature, often at a brutal cost to others. Others were far more ethical. Yet even the best-intentioned employed boardroom and backroom tactics handed down from the politics of chimpanzees. Without knowing it, they used tricks of leadership we share with social animals from lizards and lobsters to baboons and mountain apes.”
The subculture of Washington politics was, to Bloom, the most disturbing of them all. Bloom co-founded Music in Action, a national anti-censorship organization. This brought him into head-on combat with Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President and eventual presidential candidate Al Gore. Says Bloom, “Tipper and the right wing religionists who used her for their ends were masters of perceptual manipulation. (Editor: can someone say Freudian-an-an projection?) They perpetrated hoaxes of outrageous transparency, yet still managed to convince the press and public that their falsifications were true.”
Twenty pages in The Billboard Guide to Music Publicity are devoted to Bloom and to the antidote he invented, “perceptual engineering,” which he defines as “a way of finding a valid truth that the herd refuses to see, then turning the herd around and making that truth self-evident. It’s what we do in much of science–seeing the ordinary from a new perspective, then revealing what makes it tick, and in the process altering society’s views.”
If they put this much effort into music, what else are they controlling?
Woops. "Accidental." Right.
Fight the infiltrators.
Join the White side.