10 Years Ago

Darin Stevenson updated his status.

Oct 26, 2015 4:59:08 pm

“I am lethally stupid, more unfoundedly arrogant than your average suicide bomber, highly armed, well-funded, more intoxicated than is humanly survivable — and coming for you with my posse of brain-dead, rape-crazy, gun-flashing retards.” — the pop-music ‘hero’, circa 2015 I remember when the pop music heroes… were actually heroic, and called us to a standards beyond those of our culture… rather than throwing us off a developmental and relational precipice. When I was younger, we didn’t have much music that directly assaulted our intelligences, or worse, celebrated their replacement with crippled pretenders invented by purposes too malignant to entertain. Perhaps we might remember together, actively, to recognize that music was once a sacred domain of our humanity, and often produced an authentic call to actual heroism, rather than to new forms of ignorance that simply aggrandize their own descent into deadlier and uglier forms. Music needn’t be heroic; but when we see a hypnotic contagion circulating in its stead, perhaps we should trace this signal to it sources, recognize, attend, and transform them. Now.

I differentiate to some degree between art and disease. Of course, this is a faculty and sense we each experience differently. Nonetheless, it behooves us to recognize when something is fundamentally toxic, celebrates this toxicity, and replicates it endlessly in our culture and the minds of our young people. A standard that competes to lower itself endlessly isn’t a standard or art form, it’s a disease.