Item The Beatles: Has evolutionary biology proved the Fab Four’s early work wasn’t ‘musically important’?
“I think that our estimation of the Beatles’ importance at that time, or how we think about them, has become vastly inflated,” evolutionary biologist Professor Armand Leroi from Imperial College London said.
He said the music that launched the Beatles onto the global stage — including songs like I Want To Hold Your Hand, She Loves You and Ticket To Ride — “is in fact relentlessly average”…
“When the [Rolling] Stones, the Kinks and the Who were transforming the face of popular music, Lennon and McCartney were writing ditties for prepubescent girls,” he said.
“That’s not saying they didn’t have nice tunes, it’s not to say they didn’t have nice haircuts, or that they weren’t nice boys, but in terms of driving the music ahead, they just weren’t that important.”
Relentlessly average is the kindest way of putting. Nauseatingly simplistic is better. Music from the 60s often sounds like what would happen if you electrified Shroeder’s piano from the Peanuts cartoon and crammed the output into a synthesizer programmed by a Vice President of Diversity. And so it is no surprise that calling that music good, as nearly all did, led us to the insanity and doom which is today’s pop music.
Item British Government refuses to say whether proclaiming divinity of Christ is a hate crime
The British government has refused to say whether telling people about the Christian faith could be a hate crime.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch, a UKIP peer, says when he raised a question on the issue on the House of Lords, the government failed to state clearly whether Christians cannot be prosecuted just for stating their beliefs.
“I said to the government ‘Will they confirm unequivocally that a Christian who says that Jesus is the only son of the one true God cannot be arrested for hate crime or any other offence, however much it may offend a Muslim or anyone of any other religion?'”
In response to the question, government whip Baroness Vere of Norbiton said: “My Lords, I am not going to comment on that last question from the noble Lord.” She added that the legal definition of “hate crime” has been the same for the past 10 years.
There is no surer proof of a culture’s effeminacy than it’s embrace of “hate crimes”. Of course, there are already several Biblical passages which, if aired in Britain, can cause one to be accused of hate.
Item 27% of California adolescents say they are viewed as gender nonconforming, study finds
A new UCLA study finds that 27 percent, or 796,000, of California’s youth, ages 12 to 17, report they are viewed by others as gender nonconforming at school.
The study also assessed differences in mental health among gender nonconforming youth and gender conforming youth in the state, and found no significant difference in the rates of lifetime suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts between gender nonconforming youth and their gender conforming peers. However, gender nonconforming youth were more than twice as likely to have experienced psychological distress in the past year.
“The data show that more than one in four California youth express their gender in ways that go against the dominant stereotypes,” said lead author Bianca D.M. Wilson, the Rabbi Barbara Zacky Senior Scholar of Public Policy at the Williams Institute. “However, the heightened psychological distress we see among gender nonconforming youth indicates that we must continue to educate parents, schools and communities on the mental health needs of these young people and reduce known risk factors, such as bullying and bias.”
More effeminate language, of course. But skip that and focus on the large and increasing percentages of kids who are lapsing into insanity. This was the prediction of the Reality model, which says there are only sexes. It also says there can only be two sexes. It also says some people acting in ways not conforming to their sex can be persuaded to do so by either indoctrination or through forced experience, as is the case of many (most?) men who have sex with men.
There is, now, the faddish nature of experimentation, and as with all fads, we expect this cause of the increase to fade to some steady level. But the forced experiences must only increase, however slowly. These can swell to very large numbers, unless outside pressures are brought to bear. There is no courage for those now, however.
Gays may be born or made. To increase their numbers to what the Leftists claim, more must be made. When everybody is a pervert, then nobody is, and the Leftist pedophiles and queers will then feel safe.
Unqualified as I am to comment, I will anyway. Seems to me that using squishy terms like “gender nonconforming” and then defining them as those who “express their gender in ways that go against the dominant stereotypes” leaving those “dominant stereotypes” undefined or undebated gives the language abuser the freedom to arrive at whatever outcomes pleases them. I recall once in my youth wearing trousers with non-functional buckles on the back as a fashion statement, then I stopped wearing them when they became almost ubiquitous – all the while knowing that John Wayne would have never been seen in public wearing something so silly. Did I “go against dominant stereotypes” of the male sex (damn this misuse of “gender”) by doing so? No, because any idiot in the late ’50s who tried to publish such foolishness would be laughed off the map.
He said the music that launched the Beatles onto the global stage — including songs like I Want To Hold Your Hand, She Loves You and Ticket To Ride — “is in fact relentlessly average”…
Of course; they were just teen-aged boys emulating 1950s American pop. Their early success was luck and Brian Epstein’s marketing genius. But how can an “evolutionary biologist” not recognize their progressive change from bubblegum to the symphonic brilliance of the second side of the Abbey Road album (George Martin, conducting)?
The current gender idiocy means that, instead of being allowed to just be a girl who likes trucks or a boy who likes pink, liking anything outside the most rigid stereotypes must mean you’re “non-cis.” I would guess there’s plenty of perfectly normal kids in that survey who are forced by society to worry that there is some deep existential crisis coming because they’re good at some non-stereotypical idea of what each sex is good at.
Sex is a term from biology and refers to a classification of individuals as male or female based on chromosomes.
Gender is a term from linguistics and refers to a classification of nouns as masculine, feminine or neuter based on the language.
I am not going to quibble with those that see the early years of The Beatles recording career as pleasant but not very deep. It was tight though. In the years between playing in Liverpool and Hamburg when they were an aggressively dangerous R and B outfit, and say Rubber Soul in 65, they were under the thumb of Epstien, Martin, and EMI who were selling a specific product. The Stones, if you can remove the sexual provocation (which you probably can’t) are just a damn good blues band…and not too shabby with Soul either. The Kinks often get lost because Ray Davies is really a disillusioned Tory (the Roger Scruton of Rock). Give a listen to The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society album. It is so evocative of some long lost English summer it’s virtually Edwardian.
However it was the politics of the day which shaped the music, Ray Davies and a few others notwithstanding. Say what you like about their politics their passion was real enough. Three or four generations living in the shadow of the bomb, and the relentless us against them of the Cold War. Parents who had lived through 2 world wars, a depression, the camps, and really an abundance of history from the death of Victoria to the death of the Empire. How could these 2 groups find common ground? It really was the soundtrack of social schism from the mid sixties to the last gasp of Punk.
The Simon Cowell shaped hole we find ourselves in is, in my opinion, the result of a number of things that took hold in the eighties;
A- The proliferation of gizmos like the Sony Walkman which turned rock from a collective to a private experience…no more late night bull sessions on the latest albums.
B- The decline of LPs and their replacement with the almost unlistenable tinny racket of CDs.
C- The film Spinal Tap which as brilliant as some of its satire was meant rock could not free itself from irony.
And then there is Nirvana. Not only derivative of the much better (and infinitely more disturbing) UK band Joy Division. The message that nothing matters is one from which there can be no, and there has been no, movement. Rocks Gotterdamurng.
Leroi has this http://darwintunes.org website, with evolutionary music, i.e. music written by computers using genetic programming.
The music is nog very good yet.
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Why are people here, intelligent people one assumes, concerned with music for teenagers, “second side of the Abbey Road album” or other? Music is Beethoven, J S Bach, Mozart, etc. The rest is just commerce.