Retro Review: Sixteen Stone

Going back and looking at Antichrist Superstar almost 30 years later was a valuable, if a bit exhausting, experience. I thought it might be fun to take another 30-year trip back, this time to a hit album coming in the wake of Nirvana, and one of the few albums my wife and I both owned as young teenagers. Bush is a band you might remember from the 90s. If it isn’t, their debut album from 1994, Sixteen Stone, might be worth a turn. Billed as a grunge band, Bush was (and is, they are back in business) a fairly straight-forward…

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Antichrist Superstar – Retro Review

Marilyn Manson’s biggest crime was being boring, at least musically, and nothing encapsulates the emptiness of the band and the eponymous figure’s music better than 1996’s “controversial” second album (on the appropriate Nothing Records label owned by recording giant Interscope) Antichrist Superstar. Amid the self-perpetuating legendarium that is 1990s music media’s promotion of Manson the actual content of the music is often forgotten. I revisited this album recently with fresh ears, having not heard anything other than the occasional radio play of “The Beautiful People” since the 1990s and I must say my initial reaction to it from way back when…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 8

Ideological Capture and its Cure Within the corporate system, counter-cultural ideological capture requires that a few conditions be met. First, the company in question must be large enough to have a bureaucracy with a highly distributed power structure. Small publishers can’t be converted because owners and presidents have too much direct knowledge of the employees and too much direct control over the final product. A large conglomerate with a strong HR department and many independently empowered units with many managers is ideal. Second, the market must have enough total conglomeration that competition is either weak or also in the process…

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Beyond Profits, The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 7

Some interesting effects occur when a company grows large and powerful or even hegemonic in a given market. You can expect it to exploit the lack of competition and raise prices for consumers, and perhaps also exploit labor with low wages if it is the sole employer in a given labor specialty or geographic location. This inverse is called a monopsony, a single-buyer situation. However, for the purposes of the arts, the corporation becomes not just an economic force but a cultural force, and that draws certain people to it as well as allows for an approach to production that…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 5 – The Corporate IP Death Cycle

The Corporate I.P. Death Cycle The decline of creative industries has given rise to what I call the “Corporate I.P. Death Cycle,” wherein corporations routinely resurrect their nostalgic franchise properties to return them to relevance and profitability. I.P., in this case, means “Intellectual Property” and composes the copyrighted works and rights to derivative works, as well as trademarks. Like real property, intellectual property is expected to generate a return in the form of rents or other products for sale. A movie or similar entertainment product is not viewed by the corporation that produced it as a work of art existing…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 4 – Cultural Ground Zero

Cultural Ground Zero If you aren’t familiar with the concept of cultural ground zero (a term I owe to authors JD Cowan and Brian Niemeier), it is the idea that the major entertainment industries reached a zenith, and after this, quality began to decrease, and all trends lost their forward momentum. The exact year is 1997, in case you were wondering, though the video game industry continued to progress for another ten years on the back of new technology and industry growth, reaching its own ground zero in 2007. For most media, 1997 was the last year consumers could reasonably…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 3

Popular Art “Popular culture” as a term is nearly a tautology; it follows that if we share a common culture, the elements that make up that shared culture are popular. In use, “pop culture” refers to the art that, in the free market, gains ascendency to the point where knowledge of it becomes part of the common culture. This idea only has meaning in contrast to other origins of culture—constructs such as “high culture,” “fine art,” “literary fiction,” and my favorite tautology, “art music.” These later ideas are defined primarily by not being popular culture and, therefore, in an unfortunate…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 2

Hyperdrive Media The model which defines the corporate period could not function without two important factors. First, the model requires the ability to legally collectivize resources and use them as if they belonged to a single person. This is the concept of the corporation, with “corporate” meaning body, as in the company acts like a person and can own property like a person without being “a” person. The other critical ingredient is mass media, which allows the distribution of a media product to large numbers of people while maintaining a low cost to the end consumer. The technological revolutions of…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 1

The origins of corporate art If you’ve ever taken an art history or music history course, or surveys of architecture or literature, it’s likely you have seen various styles and trends in the arts cordoned off into various “periods” beginning and ending at certain dates. For instance in music the Classical period is generally said to begin in 1750 (the death of Bach and the end of the Baroque) and end in the early 19th century, about 1820, at which time the Romantic period begins. Today, I’d like to introduce a recently ended artistic period: The Corporate Period. But before…

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On the Water of Awakening and Odysseys

In 2017, I published my first straight fantasy book, The Water of Awakening. Some people loved it; some hated it. Either opinion is fine because I made the book exactly the way I wanted to make it. For 2017 (or 2023, as I write this) it’s something outside of the typical modern approach to fantasy. I wanted to do something really different from what I saw repeated in the same overlong fantasy books from the prior 20 years. I wanted to avoid a romance B-story, a subplot I had become exceedingly bored with (though I used one in my next…

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