Aloha and Seasons Greetings Comrades! Pull up a chair, say hello, vent, or just stare until someone screams! This is the Weekly Discussion Thread, where grain is eaten and dreams are made or something.

Only two more weeks until 2024! Almost another year closer to the inevitable victory of communism and the working class! Venceremos!

  • ghost_of_faso2
    21·
    10 months ago

    So I was re-reading the German Ideology by Marx recently and I found his bit about ‘Mental Production’ really relevant in regards to Drill music in the UK.

    So if you take what Marx is saying, that the mental production (art) of a society is controlled by the upper class, and those who lack the means to engage in mental production will be dominated by it. He gives the example that you just need to read history to realize this is true, as the only art that gets filtered through history and that gets to survive and be representative is what the upper class allowed to be uncensored, and what the upper class deemed valuable enough to fund with money both in purchasing, artists expenses and education.

    In a modern context in the UK over 900 drill artists have been entirely banned from making music; 80% of them where never implicated in any crime what so ever, and 92% are black; the idea that drill music is an inherently violent genre of music that increases crime is a moral panic. Think about mods vs rockers, or satanic panic with metal etc; the only new element to the moral panic around drill is that it is now also racialized; it represents a sub-culture of defiance and is a truely bottom up from the underclass genre of music and as such it needs to be comidified, neuterued and the real pioneers of the genre stopped from making music so that the representation of what ‘drill’ even is can be whitewashed in history by the mainstream.

    • loathsome dongeaterAEnglish
      13·
      10 months ago

      I didn’t know about this. Looking into it, turns out police literally cited music videos as the cause behind violent attacks, a theory that was unsurprisingly supported by an ultra conservative think tank. London having a normal one. Do you have a link to any such music?

    • Munrock ☭
      11·
      10 months ago

      the only art that gets filtered through history and that gets to survive and be representative is what the upper class allowed to be uncensored,

      This is why I love the preserved graffiti in the ruins of Pompeii. They share a relatability with cave paintings that other historical art lacks.

      • Drstrange2love
        8·
        10 months ago

        That and Herculaneum, one of the best places to learn about the proletarian population of the ancient Rome empire

    • Kultronx
      10·
      10 months ago

      It’s part of the long history of the UK simultaneously ripping off black and Caribbean artists while disparaging them, it happened with Reggae, Ska, Jungle, Grime, Dubstep, Road rap, and now Drill. Drill is unique imo in that artists are not shy to talk about being a product of their environment, as decades of austerity and neoliberalism have led to increased poverty.