Just Pick the Best Album

I've been participating in a music tournament on Twitter for some time.  It's a delightful way to debate the merits of old favorites while being exposed to plenty of "new" artists.  The community there is great and I highly recommend joining in if you are so inclined.  Me being me (outwardly civil but inwardly cantankerous), I did want to remark on one thing that's been bugging me.  That is, people will often judge music primarily based on what I can best summarize as its "legacy."  The post below is but one of many such examples, but it's a particularly illustrative one:

I have a few issues with this line of thinking:

1. Not every such argument explicitly ties the past to the present, but those that do (this one included) belie the actual state of rock in 2023.  Anchoring the legacy of past greats to the relative morass of today only makes those records look worse.  After all, failsons (and daughters) don't exactly make their parents look good.

2. While I don't deny that great artists have influence and that musical trends develop over time, arguments like this overdetermine and constrain this process to a comical degree.  Put another way, nobody today sounds all that much like either of these two artists or really anyone from the nineties rock scene.  And if that's true, this influence can't have been determinative or discrete enough to matter to such an outsized degree.

3. The idea of art as having value in its ability to affect progress (see the "led by women" comment) is silly because art is fundamentally a mirror and is not the thing itself affecting change.  And this specific plaudit further misses the point because there were plenty of other women doing that same thing contemporaneously.

4. Most importantly, these takes sacrifice the actual greatness of the work itself.  By valuing legacy above all else, this ethos doesn't outright deny the accomplishment of the work, but it does render it irrelevant.  Liz Phair (or Nirvana for that matter) becomes worthy of praise not for the act of creation but for the subsequent ability for fans to place that creation in the continuum of some larger mythology.  Ironically, my favorite "designated cheerleader" piece I've written for the tournament addresses this directly, and concludes that the absence of an obvious legacy for some of my favorite weirdos is, if anything, a feature and not a bug.  If you can create something so singular and precious that it cannot be sufficiently imitated, perhaps that is the point of art.  As I said for my favorite album of all time:

"In the end, Spiderland is the musical equivalent of an inherent contradiction.  A surface-level description of its contents would lead anyone to dismiss it out of hand, but that's only because there's nothing like it.  Because something like it could only happen if everything goes right.  And as of today, everything has gone right only once."

The Greatest Trick

For a while now, I've had a "hot take" in the chamber that the scholarship of Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum, and others exists in service of the most pernicious ideology in existence today.  To be sure, I am not equating "pernicious" with "evil" here—there are several more explicitly evil ideologies.  But the word "explicit" is the key; for all the harm various proto-fascist groups cause, at least they're very up front about it, which makes it relatively easy for common folk to identify such groups as their enemy.  Some comfort, I know.

This is not to say that judging something as "pernicious" does not also imply some level of evil; it's just that this evil is more of a hidden, second-order concern—so much so that its perpetrators may not even be consciously aware of it.  Casual minimization of the Holocaust is certainly bad, but the true "evil" is what logically flows from such an exercise.  Take this article posted today in Politico, whose argument is a direct descendent of the revisionism in question.  Claiming that we are "conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide" is both ahistorical and putrid, but dismissing condemnation of actual living Nazis as "Russian propaganda" is even worse, as it implicitly asks those who want to fight fascism to support the increasingly fascist world order.  Grim stuff.

What's even more revealing is the manner in which I found this article.  Specifically, it was shared by some clown claiming to be "fighting disinfo":

Ignoring the way in which that term has been stripped of its meaning, it was fascinating to learn that this guy's list of research partners (fantastic euphemism for funders) literally includes the US State Department:

Where this leaves me is reconsidering just how "hot" of a take my original belief was.  If the rule that Snyder et al followed brought us to this, perhaps that is just what the rule was meant to do.  If whitewashing Nazis and minimizing the Holocaust is directly supported by US hegemonic interests, what does that suggest about what else those institutions are willing to excuse, or even worse, do?  The ultimate irony of the double genocide theory is that it invents a historical genocide in order to preclude the primary thing that can meaningfully prevent real, future genocides.  Don't believe their lies.