This is a question I’ve been meaning to ask for a very long time.
Candidates:
- Syria (ruled by Assad of the Ba’athist party, which seems to be a form of Arab Socialism)
- Nicaragua (ruled by a Socialist party, surprised they haven’t went the China route already… but then again they’re within the close proximity of Usonia, so I guess it makes sense)
- Nepal (So many Communist Parties + Already ruled by one, it would be a huge shame if it doesn’t turn Socialist or go that route)
There are likely other countries too that has the potential to turn Socialist/Leftist, like Peru; but I don’t know much about them so I didn’t put them in there. Sorry about that. But anyway, which country do you think will be the next/Sixth AES country?
Western “art”
It’s so low effort it’s painful…
I remember fondly a composition professor at my university who “wrote” a new piece of music called Ma Mer. It was just the cello part of Debussy’s La Mer played by itself. This wasn’t plagiarism, you see, because the professor told everybody exactly what he was doing. Worse, the piece got some kind of favorable write-up in a new music review.
It was then that I realized people who disparage Shostakovich and Prokofiev as “propaganda music” are full of it.
Quite similar in a different space of music, in rap I find many people act entitled to money for their music when at BEST they are standing on the shoulders of giants/dozens of unsung heroes, and at WORST they are literally just clicking a few times.
They will use a loop made by someone else as a basis for the lead instrumentation, for the drums they will copy and paste a MIDI pattern so they don’t even have to craft their own drum patterns, they will use the same handful of safe percussion sounds, they will follow to the T the same song progression formulas fed to them by YouTube tutorials, then demand $60 for what is essentially 30 minutes of laziness that amounts to something very mediocre.
Don’t even get me started how every movie/TV show all feels just painfully “safe” and samey, I feel like a whole thread could be made for this (and maybe even already has–multiple times).
Yeah, your example and the movie industry examples are particularly annoying to me because it’s not teenagers lazily making beats on their laptop, it’s supposed champions of the culture with fancy degrees and accolades who have the nerve to still act so unknowably genius and smug when they are doing essentially just as little as the amateur teens on their laptops.