I just need to do some venting because i have been trying to get more educated lately about various forms of art throughout history and the more i read the more angry i get with the way the entire subject is treated from such a Eurocentric and frankly often outright racist perspective.
And this is not just a problem in the West, throughout the world somehow Europeans have managed to brainwash the entire rest of the world into idolizing their art, their music, their culture and putting it on some kind of pedestal as this sort of gold standard. Why the fuck do parents in Asia for instance so often send their kids to learn to play European classical music instead of the music of their own countries? Why is it that when you read about the “greatest composers of all time” they are all some pasty Euro fuckers, most of them making art primarily for the consumption of wealthy aristocrat patrons?
As if other cultures weren’t also making various forms of art for thousands of years - and many of them were no less sophisticated. (And mind you even in Europe the representation exludes the art of the lower classes, who certainly had their own music and culture that was distinct from that of the upper classes.) For once i’d like to see an African, Middle Eastern or Asian painter, writer, or composer of music traditional to their own regions get praised and elevated to the same level of respect, admiration and universal recognition as the European “classics”. Why do we constantly have to put up with this big circlejerk about how “great” some toffs in wigs were for writing music that in large part only the rich could afford to have played for them because it required an entire orchestra with an absurd amount of performers?
Of course i know the answer to these rhetorical questions, it’s because the dominant culture in any society tends to be the culture of the ruling class. I understand this but it still pisses me off how inescapable European upper class culture is. One of the tasks ahead of us when the revolution comes will have to be the dismantling of the centuries of accumulated cultural hegemony of the Euro bourgeoisie. The Soviets were right to encourage socialist realism as a radical departure with the bourgeois culture of the capitalist system. We need a global cultural revolution.
This is an excellent comment, thank you! I think there is this sort of disconnect between popular music, which is often still to this day derided as “low art” no matter how popular it is, and what is taught even to this day in institutions of higher learning as “proper music”, i.e. European classical music and the musical theory that is held up as “the correct way” to understand music, according to the harmonic rules and structures of classical music, and if something does not compare satisfactorily to those standards then it is called “undeveloped”, “simplistic” or even “primitive”. A really big deal gets made of how intellectually superior European classical music is and there are these endless circlejerks that go on for hours and hours about how complex and how smart and how “perfect” Bach and Mozart are because of this and that mathematical structure hidden in them or some particularly ingenious harmonic resolution or whatever. I mean some of it sounds great, sure, but so does a lot of way “simpler” popular music or music of other cultures. And i come from a STEM background so you’d think i’d appreciate all of this technical bullshit that they always go on about in classical music theory, but i just find it all so pretentious. Not the music itself, i have nothing against the music or the people who wrote it, but the way that it is talked about just gets on my fucking nerves.
For once i’d like to hear the same kind of praise for, say, Indian ragas, or any other non-European music form (except for Jazz which has kind of begrudgingly become accepted over the last century or so as something that the intellectual elites are allowed to fawn over in the way they do classical music - of course while trying to distance it from its African roots).