Originally posted by Bruno
Perhaps that's what you mean about 80s pop culture. Lots of heavily produced stuff. Lots of money spent on image and a lot of those images were all the same. Everything on TV was similar to five other shows on TV. The way to get a hit record was to have it on the soundtrack of a big movie and then the video on MTV had bits from the movie. As the Chart Music guys have explained., it all went bad around the time of Live Aid. I don't know if it was especially inauthentic, but it certainly was derivative, lifeless, and boring. College music/alternative music was all about trying to actually feel something, even if it came off a bit maudlin or overwrought.
Certainly, the early 90s featured a lot of backlash to the perceived phoniness of the 80s. And a lot of good came out of that in music and film.
But that got old too. I recall in college feeling like the pressure to "be yourself" was crushing. There was a lot of navel-gazing and concern about "selling out," which just got really tedious very quickly.
Recall that in Reality Bites, the quintessential film about young Gen X people in the early 90s (which I was then), Winona Ryder gets mad that Ben Stiller's character who actually cares about her makes her documentary too MTV-esque so she ends up with the more "real" Ethan Hawke character who, while certainly "keeping it real" and doing what he really wants to do, is also a total asshole and treats her badly. Of course, many women I know say that's exactly what they did at that age in that time-period.
But it didn't take long for authenticity to be packaged and sold like any other artifice. We had that whole run of MTV Unplugged shows. Some of those - especially Nirvana's - were good because the songs were good. But the whole thing just dripped with authenticity-mongering, to steal Potters term (at least, I think he made that up). And, of course, that was the dawn of "reality TV" which we all know now isn't any much more grounded in "reality" than Star Trek. And then we elected it President. Fuck.
Originally posted by Bruno
Originally posted by Bruno
Originally posted by Bruno
Did you see Montage of Heck? That explains a lot.
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