The elephant in the room is that I'm bearing down on black rappers and that hip-hop is mutating meaninglessly. For a start, I don't know a lot about it and am not a musical scholar, having even given up playing guitar. I like Kanye West, but am by no means a scholar of his music.
No, I'm mainly coming down on media spivs like McCormick, who is clearly trying to lead the conversation into social mores and 'evolving' musical tastes, whatever that means.
Yes, what he means by evolution is meaningless mutation, but Coldplay are not hip-hop. McCormick is not so much critiquing music as leading the conversation into a preferred future of social conformity.
This is wrong from many different angles and, as I said in a (unpublished) letter to DT,
The 'homosocial' milieu had what might be called male faults of bad manners. But without bad manners we get a society of neutralised sex. The bad can be good because it is antagonistic and mouthy.
It's all very clear what 'they' and their spokespeople in the media want is a future where opposing factions don't exist. In that sense, it is mutating meaninglessly. But that is what 'they' call evolution.
So, it comes down to the view that evolution has to be two-pronged: in order to be meaningful it has to be hierarchical. This involves large-scale rhythms (similarities) as previously noted (see Haeckel P206.)
Their future is 'bad' because isolated and numerical: the alternate future is 'good' because highly rhythmical and having contrary and feudal factors - between groups or between men and women, or within groups.
A future with no sense of hierarchy confuses the situation beyond repair! It's telling that so many pulp futures are appallingly hierarchical, starting from A Princess of Mars. Professor Brian Cox has a coy phrase that looking into the night sky is "looking into the past", because the stars are so far away and so old (going back in time). Ironically, though, pulp futures go back in time also socially.
These factors come into play in the fairly fascinating Say Hello to Jupiter, the future fantasy derived from his stage show by Canadian burlesque musician BB Boris (poss prev.)
Boris says goodbye to 'the illusion of freedom' in his future, and instead has an empire of mutual trust that comes up against a rogue throwback (somewhat like The Mule in the Foundation Trilogy.)
At one point, Boris has to explain
"My dear Gaia!.. The sovereigns in my time are nothing like the bloodthirsty conquerors of old.. They are highly trained, extremely ethical leaders. They provide the sense of mystical cohesion and the pageantry that Homo sapiens cannot, for all his sophistication, happily live without." (page 323)
That is a bit like having your cake and eating it . The time-travelling minstrel is also aware of the vitality of psyche (spirit), and when he goes back in time to our age, his quasi-mystical trappings no longer work.
All my personal units were powered by my strapowac, that quasi-mystical bracelet worn y everyone in the Federation. But the strapowac can only function within a specific psychic environment, one where spiritual values are held in high regard. Needless to say, it was out of the question that it might be operational in a dismal, spiritually-bankrupt era such as this one.. (page 256)
It is quite easy to believe that psyche (spirit) will not work in a (democratic) society of individual freedom that is illusory (tied to the dollar and dynamics of money, or number). But the idea that one can have communal psyche without contraries and feuds is also illusory, as the conflict in the book suggests.
