Generational Decay of Quality - Rate of Quantity Increases

UniversalWolf said:
Evidence:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/9430338/Modern-music-really-does-sound-the-same.html
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The articles contradicts itself?

It is true however that the loudness is up, and that's because they compress all the rich waveforms and reduce dynamic variety of a song, thus it becomes a loud, alas very linear version. And loudness attracts the ears attention more, because we perceive loudness as more important, but if you listen to a song or composition long enough, this novelty fades and your are left with a lesser piece. I don't really see how this supports the name of the article. More so , because of the part about more notes and chords, which is interesting, but this is all pretty sketchy, because music doesn't consist of note values alone, there is pulse, rhythm and many other things to be discussed.

Though pop was always fast food type of shit, it was, is and will be on varying levels of shitiness, but shitiness none the less.
 
So you mean to tell me all forms of entertainment and music have been so very excellent from it's becoming, up until this generation at which point it became terrible?

Or simply that the previous generation or two had better examples?

The reason you think all the old songs are the great ones, is because the shitty ones get forgotten. No one looks at old low budget B movies and hoists them onto pedestals, but the good remains popular, thus over time is filtered to a point where the best is hoisted up as an example of that periods quality.

That's where you're wrong

They are not the standard, or good representations of the overall quality, but they are the best ones, hence why they remain popular. I assure you not every one was an Armstrong or a Sinatra, and there were plenty of terrible songs and films.

Also your point about Batman is a quibble about a directors adaptation of a comic book straying from the source material, and in no way is evidence of a societal decline in entertainment.


Films, games books are all getting bigger and better, undoubtedly, there is shovel ware, absolute rubbish films and atrocious pop mass appeal music, but in 20 years time we will look back on things like The Kings Speech, Lord of the Rings, The Kaiser Cheifs, Adele, The Artist and say "back in 2013 things were so much better"
 
Threepwood said:
So you mean to tell me all forms of entertainment and music have been so very excellent from it's becoming, up until this generation at which point it became terrible?

Or simply that the previous generation or two had better examples?

The reason you think all the old songs are the great ones, is because the shitty ones get forgotten. No one looks at old low budget B movies and hoists them onto pedestals, but the good remains popular, thus over time is filtered to a point where the best is hoisted up as an example of that periods quality.

That's where you're wrong

They are not the standard, or good representations of the overall quality, but they are the best ones, hence why they remain popular. I assure you not every one was an Armstrong or a Sinatra, and there were plenty of terrible songs and films.

Also your point about Batman is a quibble about a directors adaptation of a comic book straying from the source material, and in no way is evidence of a societal decline in entertainment.


Films, games books are all getting bigger and better, undoubtedly, there is shovel ware, absolute rubbish films and atrocious pop mass appeal music, but in 20 years time we will look back on things like The Kings Speech, Lord of the Rings, The Kaiser Cheifs, Adele, The Artist and say "back in 2013 things were so much better"
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I tend to agree with Threepwood on this. There has always been crap media floating around. 2013 is no different. There are also really, really great TV Shows, Movies, Games, and Music floating in the metaphorical toilet as well. For every mindless reaility show we have a Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad. For every Justin Bieber song, we have fully orchestrated soundtracks like in Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. The trick is diving through the piles of shit to get to the good stuff.

Of course nostalgia can often paint a prettier picture than it actually was. Look at the 80's. I hate a lot (most) of the music from that era, but then you have classic games like Super Mario Bros. that came out around then, and some truly memorable movies. You take the good with the bad. Oh yeah, Pop has always been shit too. No surprise there.

If anything, the market is so over-saturated with material that it's amazing that we don't get MORE awful music, games, movies, etc....
 
TorontRayne said:
Look at the 80's. I hate a lot (most) of the music from that era, but then you have classic games like Super Mario Bros. that came out around then, and some truly memorable movies.
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After a couple weeks of finding my way to some of the best movies ever made and watching them *COUGH*notnecessarilylegally*COUGH* I found that damn near every one of them came from 1984, or within 2 years of that. Return of the Jedi, Aliens, The Terminator, The Fly, and so on. Being impressed with the sheer volume of great movies that came out within just a few months of each other in the mid 80s doesn't blind me to the fact that the 80s still disturb me, as a moment in time, however.
 
Hassknecht said:
„Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
Socrates was pretty much right, even today.
So either the cultural quality of a generation is measured on a logarithmic scale so it can steadily drop down for centuries, or it's just normal for the older generations to bitch about how everything sucks now.
Evaluating pop culture, especially music, isn't exactly valid. Pop music always sucked. There always were good things in pop, but most of it sucked.
So when people talk about the glorious year of 1969, they talk about Jimi Hendrix and not The Archies. Even though „Sugar, Sugar“ was one of the biggest hits of that year.
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Pretty much this. I just can't understand the ''It was objectively better in those days'' type of argument. Of course if you take the very best of the 70's or 80's or whatever and stack it up against the worst of today, it's not much of argument. Why don't I stack up Adele against some shitty Beatles knock-off and see where that takes us?

I mean, Shekespeare was once considered popular and low-brow. Nowadays it's the nec plus ultra of English litterature and theater. Standards change with time, big friggin deal.

That goes for everything, really. I loved Nolan's Batman films more than any other, and Skyfall/Casino Royal are my favourite Bond films, ever. I think some TV shows of today go beyond anything I've ever watched previously (Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones are great examples), I think some recent books like The Road easily rank up against grand classics (and seriously, I never liked Moby Dick or Mark Twain books, and War and Peace bored me to frickin tears). Despite a lot of the video game industry being made up of pure dorkiness, it's still nowhere near as bad as ye olde shovelware Atari days, and even in its time Fallout was exceptional in its quality, you could certainly find shit me-toos. Similarily, great games launch these days despite the Call of Duty effect. You know, opinions.

Sure, the market is more saturated today. But with tools like the Internet it's really not hard to find something good that you like today, as it will be the case in 40 years (where they will probably revere Daft Punk or something as the epitome of greatness).

So no, I do not agree with the OP's theory at all. Times change, opinions do, and then nostalgia make people remember things with rose colored glasses (so that businesses can rip them off with remakes while they feel good about themselves). Nothing to see here.
 
"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”

-Socrates

EDIT: Damnit, hassknecht already posted this exact quote . . .
I'll just see myself out as I hang my head in shame :P
 
I laugh when people say "kids nowadays are disrespectful, I wasn't like that", specially if I knew them back then.

Kids are always a bunch of shitheads, douchy kids tend to be worse than douchy adults.
 
Ilosar said:
I just can't understand the ''It was objectively better in those days'' type of argument.
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The idea that art forms from different times, decades, or eras, including the present, are all equally good is a non sequitur. Some are better and some are worse. That doesn't mean I'm not sympathetic with what you're saying, though. One of the reasons I can't stand hippies is because when I was a kid I was constantly faced with baby boomer fatheads preaching about how much better music and art was during with glory days in the late 1960s. Everyone from my generation knows what I'm talking about. The truth is, in some cases they were right; in some cases they were wrong.

The only possible way to know for sure is to expose yourself to as much material as possible, and then argue it out with other people who have done the same. You also have to keep in mind that what may be true for music may not be true for movies, painting, literature, or whatever.

As for movies, here's a partial list of the top films of 1982, taken from IMDb.com:

http://www.imdb.com/year/1982

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Blade Runner
E.T. the Extraterrestrial
The Thing
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
TRON
Gandhi
Conan the Barbarian
Poltergeist
First Blood (i.e. Rambo)
An Officer and a Gentleman
The Dark Crystal
Sophie's Choice
Tootsie
Fanny and Alexander
Firefox
The World According to Garp
The Year of Living Dangerously

There hasn't been a year as good as 1982 in a long, long time, IMO, but 1982 was also not an atypical year for the early 1980s. This is not to say that everything now is bad, or that everything then was good. I would say that in general, the 1970s and 1980s were a really great time for movies, just like the 1930s and 1940s were a really great time for movies (though for different reasons). Overall the last 15-18 years have not been a great time for movies.

Just to add to what I'm saying, let's look at a few of the top movies from 1981:

Raiders of the Lost Ark
The Evil Dead
Stripes
Das Boot
Excalibur
The Road Warrior
Escape from New York
Chariots of Fire
Scanners
On Golden Pond
Outland
Dragonslayer
Absence of Malice

One more thing to notice...few remakes and few sequels.

If anyone can find two years in a row that good since the mid-1990s, I'll be very happy.

Finally, I don't blame the youth at all. The youth are the victims, not the perpetrators. They're tomorrow's perpetrators.
 
U-Dub said:
One more thing to notice...few remakes and few sequels.
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No movies based on amusement park rides, board games, or breakfast cereal mascots either.

That's a weighty list, and pretty diverse, from Hepburn & Fonda to Cronenberg to Spicoli to Jim Henson. Ridley Scott, John Carpenter, Speilberg and Cronenberg at their peaks in the 80s spitting fire. Still had Kurosawa and Kubrik around too.

I think the change comes because of how pervasive mass media is in our lives.

Now you can watch just about anything, anytime, anywhere. The pipeline for mass market shit is much bigger now. That has to have an effect on global demand and consumption for certain kinds of media - i.e. shallow fast food movies. You've got to fill all this bandwidth and cable TV channels with something I guess. The last decade seems like a blur of pick any random combination of douches - Will Farrell, Vince Vaughn, either Wilson, Rogen, Jonah Hill, Ben Stiller, Sandler, Paul Rudd etc. etc. doing the same tired shit.

Plenty of shit in the 70s-80s, but we're talking the dawn of cable TV and home video for fuck's sake, mucxh different viewing experience and distribution - there was a huge underground/cult movement too. Exploitation flicks, midnights stoner screenings of Heavy Metal, Rocky Horror Picture Show, I don't think you'll see that kind of phenomenon anymore (not to say they were of great quality). They make exploitation movie remakes now, but all slick and corporate, defeats the whole purpose of sleaze. Tarantino kind of gets it, but he's stick in that exploitation revival rut.
 
UniversalWolf said:
If anyone can find two years in a row that good since the mid-1990s, I'll be very happy.
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This is a pretty copy/paste issue with the simple mention of "good", but I don't think it's such an easy measure of a year's worth by how MANY quality films it released. Take for example 2012, which was considered "a good year in movies" with the release of The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Avengers, all ambitiously vying for the top spot against each other. All 3 were excellent films, and the list of films that matches their quality isn't nearly as diverse nor as large as the lists you've provided. But the CONTENT was still noteworthy. Now I'm not saying that 2012 was better than 1982. Just using it as an example to make the point that I think it's not as simple to satisfy what you'd like to see, following that criteria that you implied.
 
I am not sure if you can really compare it like that, no doubts here, The Dark Knight, Avangers and Spiderman have been good probably even great movies. As far as the action goes.

But what the movies in the above list have, is artistical merit. You cant simply ignore that.

There are always ups and downs. And yes, I think the mass media can be blamed for a lot of things here. I really notice it with graphic design. The digital work has done a lot of good things here and I would not want to miss it, but it also opened graphic design and design in general to a MUCH wider audience. Literaly, eveyone with a PC can buy Photoshop now or Illustrator, heh most probably simply download it from somewhere for free and call them self a "designer", so you have a lot more self thought, lets call them graphic enthusiasts out there doing shitty design because only very few of those people are real designers or actually understand the principles behind it. On the other side it has also become easier to get in to the industry. And this is true for many areas. Not just graphic design. Back in the 50s and 60s when they started to make a real profession of design it was not something everyone would do, as it was rather difficult to get the right school. It was similar for films. I mean you could go to holywood but the list of people that had no success is very long.

Now? There is a school for literaly everything. And in many cases the hardware has become affordable even. A PC, cameras etc. getting quality equipment here in the past was literaly impossible for the normal person. So those areas have been filled with people that actually build their life around it, spending every nickel they have on the right equipment. Instead of enjoying a vacation or geting out with friends, they bought a camera, making photos or movies. It was a different kind of movie director.

I am not saying things are worse today. But you have definitely to go trough A LOT more bullshit, for the simple fact that you have more people making bullshit in jobs where they dont belong. Compare the quality of todays movie posters with those from the past, before the computer hit everything, and before photoshop took over.

I mean is "this" really better or equal to

[spoiler:afe9f86410]
poster_rambo-dvd-1.jpg
[/spoiler:afe9f86410]
This?

[spoiler:afe9f86410]
Movie-Poster-Rambo-3.jpg


first-blood.jpg
[/spoiler:afe9f86410]
 
That First Blood poster actually looks pretty hideous if you ask me. I'd rather have an actual picture.

As for the early 80's being good for movie, that's very possible. There's no denying that there are ups and downs in the quality of every industry (depending on who you ask, of course). But that's what they are; ups and downs that are still arguable. The OP is talking about an objective decline in quality which is complete BS.

I also think there are some media that are at a peak in our days. TV shows have rarely been as good as what we have nowadays (admitedly I'm not expert), some video games genres are getting better and better (RTSs being a good example methinks, as well as creative sandboxes ala Minecraft), and the last 2-3 years have been good as far as movies go.

Again, yes mass media means a lot of shit is being thrown our way, but I still hear about many good things via general Internet navigating, Facebook, friends, ect. I don't care how much crap I'm getting thrown at as long as I can filter through it to find the things I like, which I can easily do. Let people consume their brainless ''reality'' TV and Call of Duty Dogs shite, and I'm gonna enjoy what I like.
 
Except the Rambo poster makes it look like Rambo is mildly annoyed.

And on the other hand in the first blood poster he looks like he's mentally disturbed.

The first one lacks grit and personality, it simply shows rambo nonchalantly. As though of course you will love this movie because it has your beloved character in it, regardless of quality.
 
^
This, its about the emotions the poster shows or tries to communicate.

The first Rambo movie, while a CLEAR action movie is completely different to Rambo 4 which is just a gore fest. And nothing else.
 
Crni Vuk said:
^
This, its about the emotions the poster shows or tries to communicate.

The first Rambo movie, while a CLEAR action movie is completely different to Rambo 4 which is just a gore fest. And nothing else.
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The first one wasn't that much of an action movie, at least not in the „classic 80s action“ sense. Up until the end it was more of thriller, really.
The new one went back to the glory days of 2 and 3 and removed all the camp and fun and replaced it with violence, grit and more violence.
I like it.
 
I would have liked it as well, if the character was not aiming at a pancake for his idol.

I mean yeah. Rambo was always a damn flatt character, at least as far as the later movies goes. But hell. Rambo 4 pushed that further then I thought it would be possible.
 
SnapSlav said:
UniversalWolf said:
Take for example 2012, which was considered "a good year in movies" with the release of The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Avengers...
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Considered by whom? What I see is a glut of comic book movies and sequels. Some might be good and some might be bad, but it's all variations of the same thing. Not just in 2012, but every year these days. So maybe now is the Golden Age of Comic Book Movies, but that doesn't mean it's a great time for movies overall.

When I look at the IMDb list for 2012, it seems to me that movies are mirroring video games: the best ones aren't the big budget releases, but the smaller, cheaper, less-hyped ones. Time will tell.

I think the change comes because of how pervasive mass media is in our lives.
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Well, whatever the reasons may be, the fact is there are reasons why different times are good or bad for movies or any other art form. It's a combination of the artists themselves, the technology, the business system they work in, and the society itself.
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Walpknut said:
I laugh when people say "kids nowadays are disrespectful, I wasn't like that", specially if I knew them back then.

Kids are always a bunch of shitheads, douchy kids tend to be worse than douchy adults.
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I was an adorable little child. Seriously. My mother was very set on getting me done right, a little too much. My younger brother however, was when parents go "okay, we raised one, what a bother, the 2nd one gets to raise itself"

So, he learned to scream and throw tantrums to get things, etc. Everything cool we ever got, we got because he tantrumed over it. We didn't have cable tv, untill he cried. No VCR untill he cried. Nintendo? Cus he cried. My first computer - thanks to his crying.
 
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