which phenomenally popular american entertainment institution would you most like to see come to a sudden end by 2023

--Carly Rae Jeppers

Never heard of those four (thank god) and I only recognize bts

i can definitely understand missing the mass culture aspect, certainly something i was never around for

"there's too much to keep up with" is true but i don't really feel like it's a problem

music obsessives not keeping up with what's new & popular as they get older surely isn't anything though certainly it's even easier to be in your own out-of-touch bubble now than before

xps to whiney: the funny thing is that you listen to more music than i do and likely know more about music than i do so it's strange to me that you find a roving ear a "losers game". I am pretty sure that's just self loathing.

forks you are a born content absorber

Ha, yeah, how is this possible?

i “keep up” but devote more and more time to my own personal deep listening projects and never write about new music anymore wonder why

xp multiple ply

For me, MCU is a far bigger blight than any of these others, and I like a lot of the movies! It's just that it crowds out everything else to such a degree that most cinema is rapidly dying off.

Though Whiney did listen through the whole John Zorn catalog, so that's no small potatoes.

BTS only makes me think of the BTK serial killer. Get a new name guys!

I don't think the fracturing of the monoculture can be attributed to streaming, though; it started in the Soundscan era, when we first learned what records people were actually buying. Pantera fans generally didn't give a shit about Garth Brooks, and vice versa, but both hit #1.

Personally, I hate generalist music criticism — glib fuckers pretending they know something about everything. I'm glad to see that kind of thing dying out. It's much better to have a galaxy of specialists out there. If I want to really learn something about electronic music, there are three or four writers I know I can read. If I want to really learn something about metal, same deal. If I want to learn something about country...well, that will never happen, but you get the idea.

Voted NFL. It is not the one that creates the most harm (that would be social media.) Like social media, the harms it imposes (not just to NFL players but to many, many more younger people who aspire to the NFL or just love playing football in a way that NFL as popular entertainment institution inspires and encourages) are combined with goods (people like and enjoy and draw authentic meaning from following football teams over the years and decades.) But I think the good that the NFL offers is more easily substituted for than the good that social media offers. Obviously there is room for disagreement here but I think NBA, MLB, etc. can largely fill in the psychic gap that would be left if football were no more. I'm a baseball guy and yes it would be keenly sad for me if baseball went away but I truly believe that my other sports fandoms would expand to fill the empty space in a modest amount of time.

BTS only makes me think of the BTK serial killer. Get a new name guys!

― Typo? Negative! (Boring, Maryland), Sunday, October 17, 2021 12:47 AM (seventeen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm glad someone finally said it

As a lifelong Miami Dolphins fan I’m leaning towards NFL

MCU probably annoys me the most out of these but the idea of social media going away actually feels EXCITING in an almost sci-fi way, like, it's honestly difficult to imagine what life would be like even tho I lived through several decades of it. And without it I mostly wouldn't have to listen to what MCU fans have to say so all I'd have to do would be not go to the fucking movies and I'd be golden.

The success of the MCU is such a poisoned well. I wish I could just enjoy some fun superhero trash without every dummy in the world feeling the need to have An Opinion about it (apologies to dummies itt).

Social media obviously the worst thing to happen to humanity in some time, not really even a contest. Maybe less so if it had been introduced at some point in the far future where the surviving humans' brains had evolved sufficiently to handle it without it turning them into frothing hate mongers who would gleefully immolate their entire family just to own someone who disagrees with them.

Write-in for SNL. Pass away peacefully in your sleep, please, it is time now.

I'm a fully convicted professional sports abolitionist, but even I was briefly tempted by the Marvel option.

i'm not sure SNL is really a phenomenally popular american entertainment institution, even in comparison to broadway

How is it still alive then, how

time slot no one cares about

snl is extremely popular (5+ million linear viewers per week on a weekend night plus 1.5+ billion youtube views on sketches from last season) and i’ll add a write-in to that pile.

i'm not saying it's not popular, i'm saying in comparison to Marvel or NFL and Netflix and Facebook it's not at the same weight
you could argue that SNL is as/more popular as the true crime podcast genre but that's another poll

SNL is a true crime

The success of the MCU is such a poisoned well. I wish I could just enjoy some fun superhero trash without every dummy in the world feeling the need to have An Opinion about it (apologies to dummies itt).

This is my take as well, the movies are mostly fine and I like watching them. Let's all just stop talking about them so much. Ideally we reduce the discussion to me and my son discussing them for 10 minutes every time we watch a new movie or episode.

dont really care about the mcu but i would vote for disney as a whole

i'm not saying it's not popular, i'm saying in comparison to Marvel or NFL and Netflix and Facebook it's not at the same weight

I think that opinion is complete and total nonsense given the absolute glut of SNL alumni across popular media since its inception, including:

Jimmy Fallon
Will Ferrell
Adam Sandler
Robert Downey, Jr
Aidy Bryant
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Tina Fey
Amy Poehler
Andy Samberg
Jason Sudeikis
Seth Meyers
Kristin Wiig
Kate McKinnon
Kenan Thompson
Pete Davidson
Sarah Silverman
Ben Stiller
Fred Armisen
Tim Robinson
Nasim Pedrad
Jenny Slate
Cecily Strong
Molly Shannon
Will Forte
Chris Rock
Chris Parnell
Bill Murray
Jane Curtin
Mike Myers
Vanessa Bayer
Janeane Garofalo
Ana Gasteyer
Leslie Jones
Eddie Murphy
John Belushi
Dan Ackroyd
Al Franken
Gilbert Gottfried
Chris Elliott
Joan Cusack
Chevy Chase
Jim Belushi
Gilda Radner
Randy Quaid
Dennis Miller
Jay Mohr
Kevin Nealon
Rob Schneider
Chris Farley
David Spade
Rob Riggle
Christine Ebersole

And that's not including ringers like Christopher Guest, Mark McKinney, Billy Crystal, or Martin Short

In order to stop talking about MCU, we would need to shut down all social media plus Disney's marketing department. So yeah, sounds good, let's do it.

I mean I get why everyone has an opinion about the MCU and I get the criticism (particularly in terms of its negative impact upon the medium), I just wish that when they finally got around to making a superhero franchise I actually like that it had only wound up being just successful enough to perpetuate itself without becoming so ubiquitous as to prompt a hot take from every disinterested party under the sun.

here's the thing about social media going away - I wish only 'parts' would go away.

The parts I wish would stay:

-being able to keep in touch with people who live out of state/say hello
-being able to keep tabs on family
-being able to post statuses on what you're doing that nobody can respond to

the parts I wish would go away:

-Messenger, so I don't have people msging me all day and acting funny if they don't get an immediate reply (which never happened w/ texting for me)

-Political GIF memes

-all of the toxicity

-the ability for two friends who don't know each other to tell each other joining a political thread, then saying they hope the other dies in a car accident

so in conclusion I changed my mind, get rid of social media

I thought the first Avengers movie was one of the most overhyped movies ever made, it was like 2 1/2 hours of a strobe light going off in your face. admittedly the other ones I've seen have been pretty good

that said both MCU and the modern radio scene kinda suffer from the same bullshit where making a hit involves pooling together as many famous people as possible. when you put on pop radio everything is like Adam Levine ft. Cardi B ft. BTS & Nicki Minaj or whatever. every Katy Perry video now has like cameos from Rebecca Black or some other niche celebrity. which leads to stuff like Ready Player One & Free Guy getting greenlit and making tons of money and now that's all pop culture is

I think that opinion is complete and total nonsense

endless guest spots in pop music is indeed another thing I'd like to see go away

presenting a list of people who've been on SNL and saying that everything they've ever done thereafter is an extension of SNL is like saying that stan lee created the Marvel Cinematic Universe

I don't think you understand the way people categorize things

snl does blanket culture beyond the show itself, i’m sympathetic to djp’s point

it is also popular way out of proportion with its quality. i at least *understand* why these other things are popular

Like although I loved it for most of my life, I readily acknowledge that SNL has always been bad. But every time I see some random clip from its current incarnation, it is a level of bad that easily outdoes the general level of badness in the past. I'll accept that some degree of its perceived badness is because I am now an old with the perspective and opinions of an old, but that surely can't account for all of the badness.

i at least *understand* why these other things are popular

SNL's popularity doesn't strike me as much of a mystery? People like celebrities and they like being able to talk about stuff w/ their work colleagues. It doesn't really have to go any deeper than that.

sketches are also easier and quicker to digest, it's easy to pull up your phone and show your friend a 5 minute sketch they haven't seen then to force them to watch a 30 minute show or 2 hour movie.

every thread ultimately turning into a discussion about SNL is some sort of manifestation of godwin's law

SNL, Not See teevee

poster dressed as ned raggett in cold open to thread live! from new answers!

people loving to watch torturously unfunny comedy shows is a mystery to me every time

in the MCU, dr strange scans an incomprehensibly large number of possible futures for music consumption, desperately searching for timelines that restrain Hot Hot Heat to obscurity -- there's only one.

Need a choice for "all of the above" but nuke the NFL once and for all.

It's really easy for me to ignore all of these completely except social media and streaming music, and streaming music adds value to my life. I guess social media occasionally does too but also a lot of misery for that little bit of value.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Well I guess I know how Elon voted

This is very much the NFL or social media

Missing out on megachurches here.

I still wish to write-in cable news.