Another phenomenon in this area worth mentioning is the loose usage of the term "psychedelic" when it comes to the music and art scene.
It has been observed that music and art cultures tend to oscillate between a highly cerebral, meditative, and conscientious worldview and a hedonistic, nihilistic one. Each side of the coin begins with a creative burst of energy and then looses vitality as the old thoughts and patterns are repeated to the point of exhaustion. Upon the perception of a given scene as disingenuous and contrived, there is cynicism followed by a minor revolution, with the ideas and values of that given revolution supplying the emotional vitality of the next cycle.
Psych rock and Funk collapse into Disco which continues into New Wave, and then Grunge comes along, to supply a rough example. Funk and grunge can be taken to be the heady, contemplative, psychedelic-inspired bookends of a long period of musical, artistic, and drug-induced pleasure-seeking. But these are just labels, and the language I am using is itself highly limited. These genres house a seemingly unlimited array of variations and subcultures, all occupying different cultural moods and drawing inspiration from countless threads across history. Within each cycle are thinkers and anti-thinkers. Hedonism can become revolutionary and contemplation can reinforce the status quo. This is only meant to be a stylized model.
Around here we seem to be stuck at the tail end of a hedonistic cycle: it is mainly dubstep out here. Mostly bass and highly simplistic structures and repetitions. The stuff I heard was mind-meltingly simple. The music was primarily meant to act as a sort of binding agent between people and their pleasures. People would dance with each other, watch various sorts of hypnotic lights, hook up with each other, etc. The music was good insofar as it got people moving and feeling and connecting. One was spared from the burden of thinking. Some of the songs had interesting textures that acted as variation, but most of it was pretty repetitive.
And I get it. One gets tired of thinking. Eventually we just want to feel good and experience each other. This is the bright side of hedonism.
I also feel like these hedonistic cultural cycles come at times of heightened political repression and an exhaustion among the revolutionary classes. Well, that repression takes its toll. People want to think again. They get tired of the endless repetition and drudgery, and even the mindless hedonism that's supposed to sweeten that up.When people start thinking again, and imagining different ways in which society could be organized, the culture takes on a different tone. And then power gets nervous. Not that grunge was that revolutionary, but anyways, I'm getting distracted.
People keep describing this scene as "psychedelic" which strikes me as strange. The true psychedelic involves being lost in labyrinths of thought, in contemplating the nature of the cosmos and in being struck with the realization of how absurd your given cemented traditional social system is (in this case consumer society). It is not just an aesthetic but a spiritual experience.
Granted, some of this dubstep stuff appropriates the psychedelic aesthetic: you hear droning notes and eastern-sounding textures coupled with the simplistic beats. The psychedelic art seems static and flat. Merely meant to dazzle rather than induce deeper cosmic feeling.
I don't wish to complain. It is good to find that people in vastly different sub cultures can borrow from others to create something new. More than anything, this is a striking illustration of language drift: of the tendency of language to diverge from its original referents. Even imagery and concepts can be decoupled from their native contexts and reappropriated somewhere else to create something new. This is dialogue.
But personally, I find myself craving deeper textures. I want more contemplation. Deeper cosmic feeling. I want integrated cultural movements seeking to address wider questions. I can't help but be completely bored with this dubstep party culture.
