I see this paradox in country music. Traditionalists decry “all that new stuff is pop now” yet it’s evolution is the only reason it’s not a dead genre completely. the “pop country” artists create an alive ecosystem for the “real country” artists to live in and differentiate themselves. rather than a dead ecosystem void of any impact.
It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces…Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been – and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past…Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition
I see this paradox in country music. Traditionalists decry “all that new stuff is pop now” yet it’s evolution is the only reason it’s not a dead genre completely. the “pop country” artists create an alive ecosystem for the “real country” artists to live in and differentiate themselves. rather than a dead ecosystem void of any impact.
This made me think of the following quote:
It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces…Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been – and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past…Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition
- Carse, Finite and Infinite Games