When did pop culture really go bad?

[Pokemonquistador2]

Actually, subcultures are still around. The newest subculture is E-people, or Eboys and Egirls. However, it's only a internet Subculture unlike the previous ones, which says a lot about the current generation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-girls_and_e-boys

Me: Huh? Never heard of E-Boys and E-Girls. What's this subculture about? *Checks link*.

One minute later:

Me:

 

[RumblyTumbly]

You know? I was mulling this around and giving it some more thought lately and I realized another aspect to why pop culture has gotten so bad.

In decades past, the writers and creators drew from their experiences, which included World War II, The Korean War, Vietnam and all sorts of other big events and used that to inform their creation of new art. Just one example is Tolkein, which drew alot from his WWII active duty experiences to inform Lord of the Rings, one of the most famous novels of all time. Director Ishiro Honda served for Japan in WWII and his experiences led to him becoming a staunch pacifist, which in turn impacted how he brought Godzilla to the screen. George Lucas was a huge film buff and history buff and pulled from all sorts of different sources to inform Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and even his more personal project, American Graffitti. Comic writer Larry Hama used his background in Martial Arts to influence the ninja characters, Snake Eyes & Storm Shadow, in the GI Joe comics.

Today's media is being created by people who have grown up in the last 30 years. They're experiences are mostly 1) 9/11, 2) Consuming Media and 3) Plugging into the internet. Even something as simple as going outside and playing is probably something a lot of these dorks can't recreate believably because they didn't experience it themselves. And its probably also why so much media is painted with such broad strokes of "These guys are bad because their racists!" and all that other jazz...because they are isolated weirdos without much real experience themselves and their world views are not formed by experiences, but by the media they consume. Even the Trump presidency, which will be remembered as a landmark event for these weirdos, is only that because they consumed enough media to get psycho levels of invested in it.

I was really thinking about this after watching The Critical Drinker's video of The Last Jedi, specifically on Admiral Holdo. He compared the issues between Holdo and Poe in that film to Hackman and Denzel's characters in Crimson Tide, and the differences in how maturely the characters are written in both films is staggering. How could these films with similar stories and situations turn out so radically different? Well one explanation is that one film (released in 1995) was probably informed by people with real life experience in tense military situations and the other (released in the late 2010s) was written by a man child who had no concept of how military situations are to be handled.

 

[BScCollateral]

You know? I was mulling this around and giving it some more thought lately and I realized another aspect to why pop culture has gotten so bad.

I'm in agreement. I think I first heard this suggested back on Jabootu's bad movie review page,

 

[Pokemonquistador2]

You know? I was mulling this around and giving it some more thought lately and I realized another aspect to why pop culture has gotten so bad.

In decades past, the writers and creators drew from their experiences, which included World War II, The Korean War, Vietnam and all sorts of other big events and used that to inform their creation of new art. Just one example is Tolkein, which drew alot from his WWII active duty experiences to inform Lord of the Rings, one of the most famous novels of all time. Director Ishiro Honda served for Japan in WWII and his experiences led to him becoming a staunch pacifist, which in turn impacted how he brought Godzilla to the screen. George Lucas was a huge film buff and history buff and pulled from all sorts of different sources to inform Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and even his more personal project, American Graffitti. Comic writer Larry Hama used his background in Martial Arts to influence the ninja characters, Snake Eyes & Storm Shadow, in the GI Joe comics.

Today's media is being created by people who have grown up in the last 30 years. They're experiences are mostly 1) 9/11, 2) Consuming Media and 3) Plugging into the internet. Even something as simple as going outside and playing is probably something a lot of these dorks can't recreate believably because they didn't experience it themselves. And its probably also why so much media is painted with such broad strokes of "These guys are bad because their racists!" and all that other jazz...because they are isolated weirdos without much real experience themselves and their world views are not formed by experiences, but by the media they consume. Even the Trump presidency, which will be remembered as a landmark event for these weirdos, is only that because they consumed enough media to get psycho levels of invested in it.

I was really thinking about this after watching The Critical Drinker's video of The Last Jedi, specifically on Admiral Holdo. He compared the issues between Holdo and Poe in that film to Hackman and Denzel's characters in Crimson Tide, and the differences in how maturely the characters are written in both films is staggering. How could these films with similar stories and situations turn out so radically different? Well one explanation is that one film (released in 1995) was probably informed by people with real life experience in tense military situations and the other (released in the late 2010s) was written by a man child who had no concept of how military situations are to be handled.

I've timestamped the part at hackfraudmedia's Last Jedi review where he actually goes into the Army's Manual for leadership and points out just how bad a leader Holdo is:

Of course, a sheltered bugman like Rian Johnson isn't going to know how a real world military works. He's far more interested in showcasing his Mary Sue characters and all of his SW writing is done for ideological reasons. Think of a 14 year old writing her first lemon fanfic despite knowing nothing about sex apart from what she gleaned from her mother's romance novels and her sister's copy of Twilight. This was the level of expertise that Rian Johnson was writing at, only substitute war instead of sex..

 

[Quantum Diabetes]

It all went wrong with cousin Geri on the "Facts of life". Don't empower retards.

 

[Dysnomia]

Blazing Saddles is an extreme example, even something as innocuous as the 1998 film Jack Frost couldn't be made today given that every single person in the movie is white, they'd have to throw in a token black character somewhere in there now.

In fact a lot of movies used to have "all white casts" not long ago and that wasn't any sort of big deal any more than a movie that didn't was, it just depended on the movie, nobody was really thinking about it, you cast actors based on who was right for the role and talent, but now this is an age of racial quotas where you better have a minority character no matter what and if you're adapting source material that didn't have one, just race bend a character, as seen with the resent adaption of Stephen King's The Outsider.

Literally every single movie prior to the present day has some small thing that would be politically incorrect today, that's how creepily extreme and all encompassing political correctness has become.



Isn't it weird how things went full circle like that? With American culture becoming more and more edgy and then all of a sudden... regressing like never before.

We are now as tight assed in our own way as the 1950s was, heck maybe even more so, the 1950s still had Playboy magazine and rock n roll, SJWs won't tolerate a single thing that goes against their worldview.



Thank you for causing me physical pain and bringing me to the brink of mental breakdown by that 2007-2020 to 1967-1980 comparison, I mean good fucking grief, where has the time gone?

To say it feels surreal to think of 2007 being that long ago puts it lightly, but part of the reason why it doesn't feel that long ago is like you say the culture has in many ways ground to a halt.

Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption is a good example of racebending that works out very well. But seeing that article about a black woman playing Anne Boleyn is a whole other ballgame entirely.

And these days when I watch an older movie I constantly think about how they can't make that now because someone's feefees will get all hurdies. And really all you need is one small thing and the entire movie is problematic. SJWs ruined everything and the constant push to be inclusive is ruining media more and more each day.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption is a good example of racebending that works out very well. But seeing that article about a black woman playing Anne Boleyn is a whole other ballgame entirely.

And these days when I watch an older movie I constantly think about how they can't make that now because someone's feefees will get all hurdies. And really all you need is one small thing and the entire movie is problematic. SJWs ruined everything and the constant push to be inclusive is ruining media more and more each day.

SJWs really have more or less ruined the world.

Anytime I watch a movie made in the last 2 to 3 years there's woke bullshit that is heavily distracting and takes you out of the movie, nothing can just be entertainment anymore, everything has to brainwash you, even when it's a movie that is still enjoyable you're left with a bad feeling knowing what the obvious message is.

And now even when you watch an old movie you're left with a bad feeling because you can see how far things have declined, there's not really any escaping how miserable the times we live in are and it's all thanks to SJWs.

 

[RumblyTumbly]

Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption is a good example of racebending that works out very well. But seeing that article about a black woman playing Anne Boleyn is a whole other ballgame entirely.

And these days when I watch an older movie I constantly think about how they can't make that now because someone's feefees will get all hurdies. And really all you need is one small thing and the entire movie is problematic. SJWs ruined everything and the constant push to be inclusive is ruining media more and more each day.

Morgan Freeman is a perfect example of going for the best actor for the role. White or black? Doesn't matter all that much. They casted the best possible actor and it made the movie better. I'm not saying someone working on the film wasn't thinking "Hey, lets get a black guy" but no one objects to Freeman being in a movie because he's just that good.

Now? Its whoever they can get to fill the race quota. Its gross as hell.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption is a good example of racebending that works out very well. But seeing that article about a black woman playing Anne Boleyn is a whole other ballgame entirely.

And these days when I watch an older movie I constantly think about how they can't make that now because someone's feefees will get all hurdies. And really all you need is one small thing and the entire movie is problematic. SJWs ruined everything and the constant push to be inclusive is ruining media more and more each day.

SJWs really have more or less ruined the world.

Anytime I watch a movie made in the last 2 to 3 years there's woke bullshit that is heavily distracting and takes you out of the movie, nothing can just be entertainment anymore, everything has to brainwash you, even when it's a movie that is still enjoyable you're left with a bad feeling knowing what the obvious message is.

And now even when you watch an old movie you're left with a bad feeling because you can see how far things have declined, there's not really any escaping how miserable the times we live in are and it's all thanks to SJWs.

I'd say it's a mix of SJW's/Woke Left and the constant need for media to be "deep" or "lol so snarky" lest it be forever branded as "cringe", so everything has to be either pseudo-intellectual garbage or smug and "ironic" to avoid the "cringe" or "edgy" stigma.

Nobody's allowed to just enjoy things anymore without getting shrieked at or snarked at by some insufferable and pretentious pseudo-intellectual lesbian cunt or some clueless annoying woke beardo simping for her.

That Mean Girls/Something Awful cynical asshole attitude towards anything genuine or sincere of any kind helped ruin culture every bit as much as woke leftism did

Granted, the pretentious "lol so cringe" cynical goon attitude was there before the Woke Left became a thing but combine that with SJW's and that's how you get the miserable hellscape that is pop culture in 2021.

 

[Commander X]

One thing I've noticed is that recent pop-cultural entertainments are increasingly unable to act as a form of soma to dull the senses of the masses. How many times in the past year or so alone did we see the same same cycle repeat over and over: giant hype around a product, raising the hopes of consumers that this will finally scratch that itch, it comes out, completely disappoints or creates controversy and ends up being quickly discarded.

What's also interesting is how many of these products cannibalize the past and our affection for the relics of our childhood and then when consumers angrily reject their efforts, the companies that produce this drek are stunned. Part of this is the fault of the product (it's usually poorly written and/or filled with SJW nonsense), but some of the blame lies with the expectations of the consumers. When I was a kid, most of the stuff I watched was crap: 22 minute toy commercials with garbage tier writing and even worst production values, but I liked it anyway b/c I never imbued it with significance other than something to unwind with to after getting home from school. It never had to shoulder the burden of sustaining my soul in a social wasteland. I never breathlessly combed through issues of TV Guide to see when the new season of a cartoon started, nor openly wept when I saw the trailer to a movie based on a comic book and I certainly never raged when the PC game I was playing wasn't all that good. It's not that the quality has dropped (in many ways, the media of today is head and shoulders above its predecessors in quality), it's that the expectations of consumers have reached impossible levels b/c of a shattered social order and can never be satisfied no matter how good the media they consume is. Too many people in our atomized modern society aren't just looking for basic entertainment, they're looking for something that is supposed to be a transcendental experience.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I'd say it's a mix of SJW's/Woke Left and the constant need for media to be "deep" or "lol so snarky" lest it be forever branded as "cringe", so everything has to be either pseudo-intellectual garbage or smug and "ironic" to avoid the "cringe" or "edgy" stigma.

Nobody's allowed to just enjoy things anymore without getting shrieked at or snarked at by some insufferable and pretentious pseudo-intellectual lesbian cunt or some clueless annoying woke beardo simping for her.

That Mean Girls/Something Awful cynical asshole attitude towards anything genuine or sincere of any kind helped ruin culture every bit as much as woke leftism did

Granted, the pretentious "lol so cringe" cynical goon attitude was there before the Woke Left became a thing but combine that with SJW's and that's how you get the miserable hellscape that is pop culture in 2021.

Oh yeah, part of the reason we're in the state we're in is because of how fucking cynical people got in the 2000s, which I tend to look back on as "the good old days" and while there was certainly plenty that made them preferable to now, the extreme cynicism always fucking sucked.

That is what led to the "gritty reboot" trend which was sort of like a precursor to today's "woke reboot" and both are basically about taking the escapism out of something in other to avoid the mockery by cynics.

One thing I've noticed is that recent pop-cultural entertainments are increasingly unable to act as a form of soma to dull the senses of the masses. How many times in the past year or so alone did we see the same same cycle repeat over and over: giant hype around a product, raising the hopes of consumers that this will finally scratch that itch, it comes out, completely disappoints or creates controversy and ends up being quickly discarded.

What's also interesting is how many of these products cannibalize the past and our affection for the relics of our childhood and then when consumers angrily reject their efforts, the companies that produce this drek are stunned. Part of this is the fault of the product (it's usually poorly written and/or filled with SJW nonsense), but some of the blame lies with the expectations of the consumers. When I was a kid, most of the stuff I watched was crap: 22 minute toy commercials with garbage tier writing and even worst production values, but I liked it anyway b/c I never imbued it with significance other than something to unwind with to after getting home from school. It never had to shoulder the burden of sustaining my soul in a social wasteland. I never breathlessly combed through issues of TV Guide to see when the new season of a cartoon started, nor openly wept when I saw the trailer to a movie based on a comic book and I certainly never raged when the PC game I was playing wasn't all that good. It's not that the quality has dropped (in many ways, the media of today is head and shoulders above its predecessors in quality), it's that the expectations of consumers have reached impossible levels b/c of a shattered social order and can never be satisfied no matter how good the media they consume is. Too many people in our atomized modern society aren't just looking for basic entertainment, they're looking for something that is supposed to be a transcendental experience.

Indeed, it's a sad irony that we all want to recapture the experiences we had in our childhoods but part of what makes childhood what it is is you had no expectations.

When you sat down to watch a movie or play a game as a kid, you weren't trying to "recapture" something, everything was fresh and new to you so you had no biases or expectations so something was able to blow you away in a way that's a lot harder as an adult.

 

[Dark Emporer Dood]

Anytime I watch a movie made in the last 2 to 3 years there's woke bullshit that is heavily distracting and takes you out of the movie, nothing can just be entertainment anymore, everything has to brainwash you.

And now even when you watch an old movie you're left with a bad feeling because you can see how far things have declined

The thing that stands out to me is how bad modern dialogue is and sound editing. Theres nothing like seeing a multi-million dollar project use old .wav files from DOOM. Modern dialogue reads more like a social media post than something you'd say in a casual conversation.

 

[ZMOT]

It's not that the quality has dropped (in many ways, the media of today is head and shoulders above its predecessors in quality), it's that the expectations of consumers have reached impossible levels b/c of a shattered social order and can never be satisfied no matter how good the media they consume is. Too many people in our atomized modern society aren't just looking for basic entertainment, they're looking for something that is supposed to be a transcendental experience.

higher production values don't mean quality. when your writing, the thing that actually matters, is complete dogshit, of course it doesn't entertain.

everything is fucking stagnant now either due to incompetence or mandate, which is part of where the cynicism comes from - you can only say "I've already seen that before, and it was better" so many times before you start expecting shit outright, made worse by all the reboots because no one wants to take risks anymore or accidentally offend.
entertainment itself is easy, that 22 minute toy commercial can still be fun for an adult, when done properly. it doesn't need to blow your mind, all does is need to entertain, and that's where most shit fails these days.

 

[Jimjamflimflam]

The thing that stands out to me is how bad modern dialogue is and sound editing. Theres nothing like seeing a multi-million dollar project use old .wav files from DOOM. Modern dialogue reads more like a social media post than something you'd say in a casual conversation.

I know it's based on a play but recently rewatched The Odd Couple and wow was it way better then the crap put these days. The dialogue and the performance.

Really any old movie. It just sounds much more natural.

 

[Seventh Star]

I think it's an issue with rich white assholes dominating media who want to feel special or like they've done something interesting. Ergo you get your standard pandery garbage from people who don't know struggle, or different people with different beliefs. I watched one show recently that had a gay couple that just wouldn't stop kissing eachother, talking about their feelings and being overtly emotional. They never had any fun episodes or adventures unlike the main characters. There are other married characters who aren't even shown flirting, fucking, kissing, or even hugging.

It's so blatantly pandery and boring that it's almost offensive. White rich assholes from Hollywood are very disconnected from reality or how normal people behave. I blame it on your standard consumerist garbage.

 

[Ruin]

2007 is when I noticed everything seriously declining in quality pop culture wise. It may or may not have started with Runescape removing the wilderness.

 

[Slap47]

The first post was correct. Pop culture is almost always bad simply because it is designed to appeal to a mass audience. You can think back to the past and see lots of popular things being successful but if you really think about it those things were often not that popular in the context of their times. That rock and roll and disco from the '70s? No, that wasn't really that popular compared to the shitty pop of the day. Legendary movies? Usually snubbed by the Oscars and public until years later. You need to remember that millions of views was not that impressive back then in the grand scheme of things due to how centralized entertainment was.

Obviously some things break through, but it is often the niche that we remember as great. Even with something as niche aa anime the overwhelming amount of material produced is bad. If you want to feel that childlike wonder then watch new IPs. Hell, most of the stuff you watched as a kid was bad so you're just repeating the process as an adult.

 

[ZehnBoat]

Legendary movies? Usually snubbed by the Oscars and public until years later.

everyone loves the shining now but it was HATED back then
it was nominated for two razzies

 

[DDBCAE CBAADCBE]

Real talk, it was when the old Jews started leaving Hollywood. Say what you will about God’s Chosen but when they were in charge of television and movies things were better. Now it’s like trying to find a needle in a hay stack to find a flick with a few Jews in it that isn’t a Holocaust related thing.

 

[Gar For Archer]

Too many people in our atomized modern society aren't just looking for basic entertainment, they're looking for something that is supposed to be a transcendental experience.

I think you got it flipped around... what people want is mindless entertainment that still reaches a basic bar of quality and thematic depth. It's the creators that want everything to be a deep and meaningful "transcendental experience", except these Western creators have no life experiences to draw from so it's all pseudointellectual leftist drivel. Even good media that's more thematically-driven tends to bomb, at best becoming a cult classic years after the fact, because they just naturally attract a way smaller audience. Media is supposed to be a form of escapism, and it's fucking tiring having to turn your brain on when you're just trying to be entertained.