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Does mainstream = bad?

Litvyak

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Originality is fucking dead. Sorry, it is. There is probably not one thought, feeling, act, or expression that hasn't been done before.

Not true. This type of thinking is a harmful effect of our scattered post-modernist worldview, which is, despite of its claims, just another fairy tale in hopes of finding unity and wholeness through chaos and angst. It doesn't make any sense outside of its rules and boundaries.
Stop spinning and look around. Cultural and technological change shapes our language, which in turn shapes our mind, which opens new horizons. These changes are far more interesting, it's just that they come slowly and under the radar. Wait and see.

To answer the topic: no, definitely not. As for myself, mainstream is less likely to be enjoyable though.

The Hangover, Wedding Crashers, and 40 Year Old Virgin are some of funniest fucking movies I've seen in recent years and they were all mainstream. Amelie went pretty mainstream (more so than some of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's other films) and it is a fantastic film.

I never really got the appeal of The Hangover or 40 Year Old Virgin or Wedding crashers, they were just terrible imo. Agatha Christie too.

(I very well could be a hipster or a sick bastard, but Eat my Diarrhea was disturbingly funny, while Every Breath You Take was just boring and gooey).
 

Thalassa

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I never really got the appeal of The Hangover or 40 Year Old Virgin or Wedding crashers, they were just terrible imo. Agatha Christie too.

(I very well could be a hipster or a sick bastard, but Eat my Diarrhea was disturbingly funny, while Every Breath You Take was just boring and gooey).

It's totally subjective. The 40 Year Old Virgin and The Hangover are just absolutely, laugh-out-loud hilarious to me. "If I hear Yamo Be There One More Time, yamo kick your ass!" I love references like that, which is probably also why I like shows like South Park and Family Guy. It's just like...so real...I just relate...to being in a store, working in a corporate environment, and hearing some song over and over again. Plus I actually like Michael McDonald so I know that song. It's also why I thought the death scenes in the original Final Destination
movie were darkly humorous, with the John Denver songs playing in the background...hmmm...it's just funny, just is.

I love Agatha Christie's world. It's an escape for me. It's like I want to live in that world. Also, I like her studies of people...I think they're very realistic, though her actual "world" is more idealistic and heroic.

"Every Breath You Take" is a rather beautiful song, and I've liked it since I was a kid. I remember playing it on the jukebox in Pizza Hut when I was like seven.
 

Hazashin

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generally my tastes run more towards baroque and 19th century romantic works, but I gotta admit, Bad Romance is a good ass song! :D

I do like a good portion of mainstream music, but I hate that song and most other works of Lady Gaga's (with the exception of about half the parts of her song "Alejandro"). :ack!: >_<
 

Elfboy

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18th and 19th century romantic literature was considered scandalous, a fluff-headed waste of time, or both often in its prime...Wuthering Heights was deemed immoral when it was first published, and people presumed Jane Eyre to be the more "mature" work of the Bronte sisters until the 20th century when academics began to acknowledge its complexity and depth, and now there are divided camps on which one really is the better book amongst scholars.
I was talking about musical pieces of the time (Verdi, Rossini, Bellini..etc), I suppose "works" was a poor choice of words as it implies literary works
 

Thalassa

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I was talking about musical pieces of the time (Verdi, Rossini, Bellini..etc), I suppose "works" was a poor choice of words as it implies literary works

Well like Igor Stravinsky is considered one of the high brow classic composers, one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, but his music was poorly received in the beginning of his career. People walked out of "The Rite of Spring" and there was pretty much a riot.

I'm sure you also know that there are operas from earlier centuries that were considered scandalous, surely in much more detail than I would.
 

Elfboy

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Well like Igor Stravinsky is considered one of the high brow classic composers, one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, but his music was poorly received in the beginning of his career. People walked out of "The Rite of Spring" and there was pretty much a riot.

I'm sure you also know that there are operas from earlier centuries that were considered scandalous, surely in much more detail than I would.

I know
 

Viridian

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Here's something interesting. I'm currently reading a book by a critic named Terry Eagleton on Marxist criticism... On the subject of authorship, he says that the idea that an author is a "creator" is a myth, and that the author is a vessel for the social, cultural and political ideologies (in the Marxist sense) of his/her setting, as well as the medium s/he is confined to. The author, in this instance, is simply a producer of goods, like a fruit stand vendor.

As such, is buying a book or renting a DVD tantamount to approving of/enabling an ideology? Marx seems to have said that works of art can be divided into "reactionary" or "progressive" according to their hidden ideologies, and Eagleton says that the "ultimate" form of artistic criticism/analysis is scientific rather than aesthetic ("scientific" here meaning "pinpointing the ideologies present in a work of art and its contradictions/paradoxes"), which seems to open a whole new moral can of worms... :unsure:

...And am I using those concepts correctly?
 

Tallulah

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I find it hard sometimes to evaluate things that are current, because they're inseparable from the hype. There are some artists I like who are decidedly mainstream, but I also get sick of them simultaneously because you can't escape them and everyone's busy loving them all at once. It's easy to see what the great bands were of the 60s and 70s, because we can see who they've influenced, their staying power, their ability to still move people 30 and 40 years later, etc.

I do think a lot of music these days seems soulless and mass-produced, including almost all of contemporary country music. It sounds like pop with a twang, and there seem to be about three formulas they use for writing lyrics, that they just recycle over and over. I can't stand listening to it, and I'm always shocked that so many people love it. I feel that way about a lot of club music, too--same beat, same lyrical content, repeat, repeat, repeat. However, it's kind of always been that way; they were cranking out schlock during the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, etc. We just weren't bombarded with it if we didn't live through that era. So we're free to find it charming now. It's irrelevant whether it was mainstream or not.
 
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