Straight white cis men grow up generally being invested with more power than any other group. The midlife crisis is a reaction to his perception of having lost some of that power (his youthful attractiveness, plus all the potential he felt he used to have, which is now slipping away from him).
Since non-white men perhaps don’t typically have that much power (at least outside of their own cultures where they may enjoy cultural dominance), maybe they don’t react with that kind of crisis when they perceive themselves aging beyond the reach of cultural dominance (or even relevance). And I’d bet that they do have midlife crises, of a sort, when they did grow up in a culture that afforded them “alpha” dominance.
What we have hear is a failure to properly communicate tone in text over the internet. An alternate version of my post could have been:
[put tongue half in cheek (but only half)] Metal sucks. And hey all you erudite classical music fans, classical music is basically just metal.
But in a way, having you come back and say, “Hey, metal doesn’t suck” is like a dream come true for me, because it’s really classical I have contempt for, not metal.
This is actually my line of thinking when I talked about “pointless virtuosity” and the music of people who have a lot of time on their hands. It’s like why philosophy departments are so male and white - because that completely divorce from reality ontological/epistemological crap they shovel is primarily of interest to people who don’t know what a real problem is and have to invent reasons to explain the bad feelings that their money can’t seem to buy them out of.
Nah, your tone came through okay, I think. My “reductive and dismissive” riposte was me being mock-offended, since I was about 85% sure you’re at least part Metalhead, and the rest of my post was mostly for the benefit of those who hear “metal” and immediately think of those chuckleheads in Dragonforce.
Oh I don’t know, women like Shannon Sullivan and black folks like George Yancy shovel a lot of great, concrete and (eh hem) effectively counterhegemonic thought about current epistemologies and ontologies.
But overall, yeah, philosophy as a field remains mostly a white-snake-swinging fest.
I suppose the fact that you expected me to be on a first name basis with Yngwie Malmsteen should have tipped me off.
But honestly I was never that into metal. Though I just checked wikipedia and it classifies Ministry as metal (Psalm 69 was the first album I ever bought). I suppose I don’t know what else they’d be.
Philosophy has a tradition that goes right back to ancient greece when geometry was part of philosophy. As soon as anything in philosophy is useful, you move it out and call it something else. I think at this point the well of usefulness is almost dry.
Reading through this I begin to wonder if we simply think of some types of music as ‘white’ as that is all we are exposed to.
As pointed out by @popobawa4u but we just never are going to notice unless we go specifically looking for it as it has a small market here.
I mean how well known was France Gall in North America until just a few years ago? It is wonderful happy 60s pop that I just adore cause it makes me happy to hear her sing but without stumbling across a Ye-Ye Girls DVD playing on the screen of a the cocktail bar MrsTobinL and I were having a date night at I would probably never have known.
Even now I bet a some of the participants in the thread don’t know of her.
Heck there is also plain ol Spanish and Mexican polka. There are all kinds of polka styles. Thank you Brave Combo for exposing me to a whole new world of happy music long long ago now.
Well, you know I don’t. If it’s from this century and it’s not by Airbourne or Flogging Molly (and it’s not Uptown Funk), then chances are I’ve never heard of it.
I grew up in New Orleans and there were always at least a few black people at any goth event, even really small events. I always had a few black goth friends living there. However Asian goths were super rare despite the large Vietnamese population in the area. I know I’ve been to dance nights without a single Asian person. Just about every Vietnamese kid I knew was either a raver or really into hip hop in High School.
One of my friends is a musician and has played with one of the local goth bands but he also does other stuff. He’s not super goth looking but he usually wears all black and favors the goth bars and clubs although he’s got wide ranging taste. He’s a bit of a music encyclopedia.
Also… Metal is big in the mid east - this book talks about hip hop and punk, too, but the guy is a metal musician in addition to being a historian of the MENA:
