GenZedong

I can't wait for xmas to be over. The commercialism sickens me. I try to put a face on but it's so soul destroying. I guess if you have kids you have a different perspective of it but as a normal adult it's just so terribly stupid. I must be a "grinch".

So I was re-reading the German Ideology by Marx recently and I found his bit about 'Mental Production' really relevant in regards to Drill music in the UK.

So if you take what Marx is saying, that the mental production (art) of a society is controlled by the upper class, and those who lack the means to engage in mental production will be dominated by it. He gives the example that you just need to read history to realize this is true, as the only art that gets filtered through history and that gets to survive and be representative is what the upper class allowed to be uncensored, and what the upper class deemed valuable enough to fund with money both in purchasing, artists expenses and education.

In a modern context in the UK over 900 drill artists have been entirely banned from making music; 80% of them where never implicated in any crime what so ever, and 92% are black; the idea that drill music is an inherently violent genre of music that increases crime is a moral panic. Think about mods vs rockers, or satanic panic with metal etc; the only new element to the moral panic around drill is that it is now also racialized; it represents a sub-culture of defiance and is a truely bottom up from the underclass genre of music and as such it needs to be comidified, neuterued and the real pioneers of the genre stopped from making music so that the representation of what 'drill' even is can be whitewashed in history by the mainstream.

merry week to Oppo ~and\ everyone\ else~

I hope you all have a nice week :D