The legacy of a generation

The Muscial Legacy of this Generation will probably be expanding upon the Electronic Means of Music Generation.

We already had electronic pianos in the 70s I think, but now we have studio quality audio manipulating software in toys of all places.

The NEXT Generation better make some great music with the toys we tinker with today...

This is very true. Just to show how far we've come there, I record my own music in my dorm room (or my own room at home when I'm home) using only my laptop with Audacity and a microphone that was bundled with (of all things) Hey You Pikachu and still get crystal-clear sound there.

Dear Lord~!

Of all the possible choices, you CHOOSE PIKACHU!!!

....

Yeah, I go hide in shame now.

Oh lord.. We'll be known musically as the "No-Talented Autotuning Generation"

I love it. I'll accept bad puns if they're Pokemon related

*insert generic response about underground artists here* I will say this, in hindsight I don't think the past decade's been too bad for music. As for autotuning/vocoder usage, let me direct you to Daft Punk, for starters.

edited 10th Feb '12 12:31:49 AM by 0dd1

This. The West had its moment and we pissed it away on the wet dreams of Right-wing idealogues and neoconservative imperialist fuckwits.

As for the legacy of a generation, well, it'll be the same as every other generation in the West: nothing worth a damn.

So...there's nothing worth a damn in the eras of the '60s, the World Wars, tons of revolutions, Berlin Wall...I can go on.

I think our generation will be known for the internet. We didn't invent it, but we made it into what it is, the biggest information and communication advance in history.

We took away most of the civil rights of black people again anyhow with the War on Drugs.

World War I was a pathetic pissing match between royal families and World War II only happened because of World War I—and was only as bad as it was because the US interfered.

Most revolutions made things worse, or just kept things just as bad but in a different way.

The Berlin Wall shouldn't have existed in the first place; doing away with it isn't an accomplishment.

I'm afraid Woodstock 1999 put paid to that. Grunge cynicism won over hippie idealism in that case.

I mean, you went from Hendrix playing the national anthem in 1969 to Rage Against the Machine burning the American flag in 1999, and from Country Joe leading just under half a million young people in a satirical singalong about the pointlessness of Vietnam to Fred Durst exhorting the crowd to break stuff.

(Let it not be said that I want that to come across as a political statement or anything. People smarter than me have done that but I don't go in for that. I just think it's an intersting contrast.)

That being said, I now wonder what they'll make of our music in the coming decades. I guess the 21 album might be worthy of a footnote, at the very least.

edited 10th Feb '12 2:20:29 PM by TheGloomer

The fiends!

But as for the legacy of "our" generation, well, I think it's way too early to say. I mean, for the most part we are what, twentysomethings? There's still plenty of time to build a legacy, I think...

We also started the industrial revolution, scientific revolution, medical revolution, modern agricultural revolution etc. etc. To dismiss the Western civilization as worthless because of naive self-hatred is both foolish and dishonest. Neither was the World War I a struggle of kings but a complex conflict between a rising power (Germany) and old powers (France & Britain) coupled with several other factions vying for their own interests.

edited 10th Feb '12 2:28:54 PM by Scando

Wait, WWII was worse because the US interfered? I have never heard this before.

You can't exactly do any of those things when you're locked away for life by laws knowingly written in a way that will usually grant longer sentences to non-whites.

All of which let the plutarchs tighten their grip again after the disruption of the fall of Rome and disintegration of the feudal system. Why make the masses pledge fealty to a king when you can simply use patriotism to tie them to a nation and have many rulers, so that taking the system down is impossible?

We traded our royal overlords for capitalist overlords, and nobody even blinked.

As for World War I, yes, it is more complicated than that, but none of that validates what was ultimately a totally, utterly worthless and pointless war that wasted approximately 31 million lives for absolutely nothing.

Had the United States not entered, there likely wouldn't be a Great Depression or Nazi Germany, and instead of fighting the Nazis it would have been predominantly Britain/France/Germany vs. the Soviets and the US vs. Japan.

edited 10th Feb '12 2:30:44 PM by Flyboy

Wait, are you saying WWII was worse because the US interfered in WWI? Because it sounded like you were saying WWII was worse because the US interfered in WWII.

I think there was some confusion on that last point: is the conflict in question the First or Second World War? You're talking about the first, but the quotation you're responding to describes the second.

edited 10th Feb '12 2:33:02 PM by TheGloomer

Oh, I misread.

I'm saying that World War II was worse because the United States interfered with World War I.

It's very likely that had we not jammed our giant military cock in the face of Germany in World War I, they'd have stalemated the Entente powers and we could have avoided the Great Depression (and thus, no Nazi Germany and maybe no Fascist Italy).

edited 10th Feb '12 2:34:44 PM by Flyboy

All of which extended our lifespan, improved our health and decreased child mortality, improved our diet and production, advanced our civilization, decreased the income gap in the long run and made it possible for millions of people to exist who otherwise would never have lived.

Rulers don't have the benefit of hindsight. The participants did gain nothing worth the sacrifices but the question is: was the decision to go to war reasonable at the time?

edited 10th Feb '12 2:49:18 PM by Scando

So the plutarchs have slaves that last longer, can work harder, and produce more slaves per family. They also have more variety in the forms of bread and circuses they can use to rope all but the most resilient into quiet complacency with their bondage.

And, of course, they have a bigger market to hawk their wares.

Edit: And the income gap, even if it's smaller, is still stupidly absurd, and it's just as bad if you stop looking at it as between the rich and poor of, say, the US, and instead as the US in general versus, say, all of Africa.

Not at all.

edited 10th Feb '12 2:51:06 PM by Flyboy

What do you mean by interference anyway, since that was happening long before 1917? Giving out loans to the British and French? Selling Equipment, such as weapons and motor vehicles? Food?*

And anyway, my personal view is that World War One was the culmination of the European Enlightenment and the Renaissance, which started back in the 14th Century. It had been building up since then, after all...

edited 10th Feb '12 2:54:26 PM by Greenmantle

Primarily, the direct military intervention is what fucked everything up.

The US trade interference was unprincipled but pragmatically necessary to keep things in balance (otherwise Germany wins and things might be even worse than they were in reality). Our intervention militarily handed the Entente enough fresh, warm bodies to win outright, though, which was very, very undesirable (not that anybody knew and/or gave a damn).

I've no words for how you turn history and human society into rhetoric of slavery. Have fun with that. Look at the world every once in a while.

States exist in a world of permanent anarchy and competition between them so there are bound to be winners and losers. It is not the fault of Americans that they surpass Africa in terms of affluence nor does the morality even matter in the case. Sovereigns have no supreme authority and thus no solid judiciary system they ought to follow when dealing with each other.

You don't seem to look at the world often enough yourself.

Or your view is obstructed to the point that you don't see the world's true nature.

HA!

That's rich. You honestly think that the United States simply happened to do a better job than the nations of Africa and that's why we (or rather, a very tiny percentage of us) have most of the world's wealth?

I see I'm wasting my time talking to you, then...

Which is?

The U.S. rise to power was a reather clear phenomenon. Long story short, the institutions encouraging commerce over agriculture, vast natural resources, oceans to protect the country from large-scale invasions, fast population growth and the global peak of the Western power were all factors in the process that made the U.S. of today. As for Africa, the majority of the continent was at the phase of early agricultural societies when Europeans landed. The gap of centuries in development cannot be bridged in decades, especially when the development of Africa has been what it is after decolonization.

I'd love to hear your theory of the reasons behind the differences.

A world in which a select few benefit from the effort of the great majority.

As for why the US succeeded, cheap labor—immigrants and slaves with no rights—no credible threats within reaching distance, and no competing plutarchs vying for power as there were in Europe helped a lot.

That and all the land—and natural resources contained therein—we had to freely take from a series of less advanced and vulnerable native cultures.

As for Africa, they were not, as a generality, that much less advanced than Europe when the Europeans showed up. The Europeans, after all, could never control much more than the coasts until the late 1800s. The Europeans were simply very good at turning African cultures against one another, and then reaping the benefits as resources and slaves poured out from the interior...