State of the Discussion

Trump goes online and runs his mouth (fingers?) about make coal great again. The MSM covers his orders to keep a big coal-fired power plant in Michigan running. How do you get coverage, online or otherwise, for the other side of that story? (1) The Dept of the Interior tried to auction rights to 167M tons of coal on federal lands in Montana last week. The only bid was for $185,000 -- yes, less than a penny per ton -- and was rejected. As a result, the follow-on auction for land in Wyoming was postponed indefinitely. (2) The LA Dept of Water and Power announced they would retire their last coal-fired generation in Utah next month, as scheduled. (3) My little local power authority has days like the one shown in this figure.

Chris Hayes might be right: "I think we increasingly live in a postgaffe, even a postscandal society." Or he might be wrong.

But I say this much is true: "electability" ain't what it used to be. John Kerry was more "electable" than Howard Dean. Hillary Clinton was more "electable" than Barack Obama. Then she was more "electable" than Bernie Sanders. Was "electability" what got He, Trump nominated in 2016? Not by the pundits' definition of "electability", I think.

It encourages me that Democratic office holders have started to use (some of) George Carlin's seven words. Some Americans may still be priggish enough to hold it against them, but a lot more Americans use all seven of those words in everyday conversation.

Alas, everyday conversation is seldom about politics. Maybe it's different in "swing" states, but here in MA we libruls seldom "talk politics" with friends and neighbors who might be MAGAts. So they (and we, I suppose) only get information and hear opinions from "the media" -- mass or social, but mainly personally selected. Sticking to conversation about the weather or the local sportsball team is The American Way, I guess.

--TP

Dukes of Hazard. Lynyrd Skynyrd. The latter especially after Ronnie died and Johnny replaced him.

Those two things did more to mainstream the Confederate battle flag as good ol’ boy freedom than anything else.

Re: the Lost Cause myth. Along with that is the faux rebelliousness. I mean the guys with the confederate flag on their hat, pickup or window which they say doesn't stand for racism because it is an expression of independence, being opposed to excessive government etc. It's often a self-image thing; "I'm not a follower! I'm not conventional! I'm a free person doing things my way!" Around where I live it goes with long hair, a beard, and sometimes a meth addiction. It doesn't necessarily go with rightwing politics since some of those guys are too dysfunctional to be political. (And sometimes they are felons).

The question would seem to be: why is it Southern rural culture which is the model? Why not the Midwest? Or the Mountain West?

The South put enormous effort into creating the whole Lost Cause myth, and as part of that emphasized lots of cultural signals: the accent, the cuisine, the whole "southern hospitality" thing. Outside of some cities, the Midwest "accent" is all about not being able to tell where someone is from. The Mountain West is even more so. Southern fried chicken. BBQ. Grits. Greens. Black-eyed peas. All sorts of Cajun. Wash day beans. Buttermilk biscuits. Cornbread as a routine thing.

I was thinking the other day about that weird time when all of a sudden a subset of the national culture was into CB radio, complete with radios, handles, etc. Making excuses to contact each other just so they could say, "Ten four, good buddy!" When I was in college and working in a restaurant, I had the experience of waitressing a get-together of wannabe Burt Reynolds guys and their wives (who went by handles like "Sugar Cookie"). They stiffed me on the tips, BTW.

And a few years later, the sudden sprouting of TX accents and line-dancing.

Both were inspired by movies that glorified an image of southern living.

Of course I, too, was a local manifestation of a media-driven subculture, so I'm not claiming any kind of immunity or superiority to herd instinct. I'd like to believe that my subculture had better values and retains those values even if the outward manifestations have faded.

But this is all an aside. Yes, it appears that the "Southern Strategy" has gone national, at least in rural areas.

BTW I live in a red rural area, complete with flag festooned pickup trucks and local wackos in city government, but over six hundred people turned up for our No Kings Day event and the majority of people who drove past were supportive with honks and waves.

>And it’s very much rooted in a franchised version of a white Southern rural reality.

indeed.

and there is a similar franchised version of urban reality: every small city in the US eventually ends up with a version of things that started or were popularized in the very large cities (NYC especially, but also LA, ATL, etc). all of the hipster trends, food trends, drink trends, aesthetic trends, music, art, even ways of speaking and thinking get copied. go into any small- or medium-sized city in the US and you will find the same kinds of stores and styles, with people talking about similar things in similar ways.

it seems natural that rural culture should be similarly homgeneous.

At vrious points in my brilliant code monkey career I contemplated offering bribes to the machines, but I could never figure out what they would take as currency.

Threats usually resulted in some technological version of "Oh yeah, well watch *this*!".

For serious animism, one of my favorite memories is still Faith healing for computers:

Operations called Systems Programming because a (mainframe) disk drive was misbehaving. Walked in to the machine room and over to it. Laid my hands on top of the box.

Problem solved. Never did anything else to it. But Ops said that the problem had gone away.

Laying on of hands. Don't see how it could work on inanimate objects, so ...

Thank you JP for the article about Shinto. I have no religion but the closest thing that really resonates with me is petroglyphs. Why? Clearly animistic but there's no words. It seems to me that as soon as people start talking about spiritual matters, we take the wonder and awe out of it and substitute in stories that reflect humanness. I have the same attitude about Mass: much better in Latin so I can't understand what is being said.

f

Thank you for posting! I hope we get some tales of the weird. That draft has some typos that I forgot to correct.

I've always treated objects as if they were animate--I mean some objects, not all of them. I know they aren't but that doesn't stop me from saying "Excuse me" when I stub my toe on the coffee table, or shouting, "Not one chance, asshole!" at the computer cord that tries to trip me. When I turned my old car in for the two hundred dollar trade in value, I actually cried. It was such a betrayal, felt like I was turning an old dog in to the shelter.

I'd like to know more about the Shinto concept. I have a strong feeling for certain landscapes which includes thinking of the landscape as holy but not in a Christian way. Holy more as in a place where spirits would reside if there were any.

This first article on this page might be of interest for folks wanting more

Ai, rumba!! Allow me to digress.

Rumba in its various forms is / are kind of folkloric root and base of Cuban music. This right here is guaguanco, one of the three traditional rumba styles, and the one most commonly still performed, played here in pretty much it's traditional form.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOQvzI1A2P0

Another guaguanco, with the great Orlando "Puntilla" Rios, grand old man of the Cuban / New York rumbero community. The clave is easier to hear here, it's more even eighth notes, where the more traditional players tend to elide the difference between a duple and triple time feel. This is *rumba* clave, a little different to the "Bo Diddley" "shave and a haircut" clave - called *son* clave - shown in the reggaeton in two minutes clip.

This is one of my favorite videos in the world. When they break into the call-and-response thing at about 4:30 and the dancers get up the joy of it all is palpable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnBN_AXfkvk

Salsa is more of a popular, dance club style, mostly based out of New York. Here is the great Ruben Blades performing "Pedro Navaja", which is basically the Spanish version of "Mack the Knife". This has son clave, which you can hear pretty clearly at the beginning of the tune.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqCC-zWQfdI

Clave is the key (literally) to a really broad range of musical styles and traditions of the Spanish-speaking African diaspora. It's one of many similar rhythmic patterns found in Africa, all of which turn out to be Euclidean rhythms, which I will not get into because we'll be here all night.

I pretty much love Latin music.

Fun stuff everyone. Just to pull out a few things
I miss salsa. At least that gives you both sides of the clave.
My playing experience has been classical and 'big band' jazz (by which I mean the size of the ensemble, rather than the swing bands that people think of) so my Latin experience is pretty minimal, but I did have a section in the post about the clave's evolution to reggaeton, but it is 1) hard to explain about rhythms and 2) I'd probably screw it up. This first article on this page might be of interest for folks wanting more
https://www.cubanet.org/htdocs/CNews/y00/jun00/12e9.htm

Yonaguni, as a feminine coded island holding of Japan
I wasn't able to find any interviews with BB talking about the song and how it came about, so I imagine it was a mélange of reasons.

one could really capture an international audience and maintain a US presence all without ever having to make a single move to acknowledge the US mainstream.
I've recently been getting youtube videos titles [Indian journalist/Singaporean minister/Chinese author] destroys [Western journalist/politician/pundit]. and one of the lines that always seem to score points is the first person calmly pointing out that the West is about 15% of the world while Asia is about 60%.

This life brought to you by The Algorithm.
I wonder if there is a chicken-egg thing going on here. The trends mentioned by nous have been in popular music since the 50s, before the tech-bros had gotten their hands on the internet. I don't want to absolve them of their responsibility, but I don't want to give them too much credit for the idea, more of the shitty implementation.

I also think that these Weekend Music threads, because of my own interests, are going to lean into how so much music is blended and remixed. It's not new, classical music has a long tradition of taking folk melodies and rhythms and repackaging them, but I'm beginning to think that this is really foundational. So if that sounds boring, guest Musical weekend threads are solicited!

Similar to Mike's Math Tape, I wrote most of my dissertation while playing a mix of albums from A Beautiful Machine, which was all washed out, ambient, shoegaze-y sounding post-rock. It was noisy enough to drown out distractions, flowy enough to not get monotonous, and indistinct enough that the lyrics wouldn't interfere with whatever complex thought it was I was trying to work out in words.

https://abeautifulmachine.bandcamp.com/album/home

It was my most played music for three years and for 247 pages worth of obsession, stress, and isolation.

Hey, that's actually a really good breakdown of reggaeton. Clear and succint and accurate.

I am completely ignorant of Bad Bunny's work because (a) rap leaves me behind because I have a hearing impairment that makes it basically impossible for me to make out lyrics in recorded music, and (b) reggaeton drives me nuts - it's not just that it's repetitive, the repeating cell is so small that there is no (to my ear) breathing room.

Plus I live near a couple of large Latin communities and the way I hear reggaeton is typically being cranked from some guy's car at a volume level that makes the doors of my car vibrate from the massive bass. I want to take those guys aside and say "You're gonna be stone deaf by the time you're 40" but I'm more than sure they wouldn't care. They're having fun now, 40 is a long way off.

I miss salsa. At least that gives you both sides of the clave.

All of that said, BB seems like a very interest artist and social and cultural persona. I'm not a sports guy and will likely not watch the Super Bowl, but I'm both amused and delighted that he was the NFL's pick for the half time show.

In my wildest dreams I would never have predicted the NFL as a socially forward-looking organization. I suspect they know who their viewing audience is.

MAGAs just gonna have to learn to share the world with everybody else.

Well, I've gone from having no clue who he was to having a great deal of respect! Thank you for all the insights, LJ. That's said, I don't like the music. If there wasn't a video to watch, I think the music would be repetitious to the point of boredom or annoyance--but that's my reaction to the sound, not to BB as a person, his lyrics, or the message.