The point is to shock

I'm not sure how long that's been around. A very long time, of course. But in the current vein. I know you can point to the hippies as the source of everything crappy in our society today. But sometimes they were just channeling crap from the previous decade, and sometimes the crap was even older than that. In the case of shocking us, this movement was amplified by our beatniks.

But rock was still just a loud annoyance with melodies, harmonies, and guitaristrations (as opposed to orchestrations) that we didn't like right up until 1970 when we saw a lot of bands arise that did nothing but shout at their audiences and smash their guitars. I had begun moving away from rock and into classical by then. I liked the subtlety of interweaving melodies from various parts of the orchestra (not really polyphony, just subtle contrasts like the gentle run of the violas against the rest of the strings) and by 1970 my frustration was extreme. I saw my age-peers as a load of intellectually dull people who had to be hit over the head with a sledge before their minds could alert to anything.

The Hayes Commission was dead. The new Movie of the Year was "Midnight Cowboy", as vapid and worthless a movie as has ever been made, but one of the main characters viciously attacks someone onscreen (I was never quite sure whether he had murdered the man), and the other scumbag dies a slow and crappy death, so it is emotionally draining and thus it must be a great, meaningful movie. Give it an Oscar. Women's roles had transformed from people of leadership, determined resolve, noble character and goodness, and an exemplary role model to "show us your tits, bitch". Cowboy movies died, now it's all sadistic gangsters torturing their victims and car crashes with gigantic kerosene-fueled explosions.

The pictoral arts, like painting, have completely lost the notion that we can just paint a scene with a tranquil river or farmhouse with cows. Yes, see? Can you hear the moaning and groaning of modern ignorami already? "Oh, give me a break, that's so effing boring, Kinkade and all that crap." Now art is someone announcing, "I have an idea! I'm going to..." and of course the idea has to be something shocking. Throw a crucifix in urine and take a photograph of it and you can get all the fools in town to pay money to see it. But ain't that enough of a majority in any town*? "I have an idea! I'm going to become famous for draping huge sheets of fabric across the land!" and he's made a fortune. At least his cloth doesn't explode, though.

Hit me over the head or I can't get it.


*From Huck Finn, where the two flim-flam artists are plotting to make money.