Music Criticism in Video Form

Well this is the Fantano thread

the dude out here defending RYM and Rick and Morty, watching The Orville, posting all over Zappa and TBMG and Magic the Gathering and Norm MacDonald threads, writing treatises on vaporwave... you may want to take a look at the people in your immediate circle there, dogg

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Friday, October 6, 2017 11:19 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why do these threads all turn into your hipster studies posts

sorry just got to this post:

Stop blaming your sub-tribal affiliations for your across-the-board shittiness.

― Marcus Hiles Remains Steadfast About Planting Trees.jpg (DJP), Friday, October 6, 2017 11:42 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sums it up

this is the fantano thread and these stupid asides about adult swim are reasonably germane. unless you actually think that whiney is saying "only nerds who watch rick and morty are racist" what is your objection?

isn't his entire thing stating outright that most people are inconvenient and it's fine to dispose of them because you are biologically superior

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Friday, October 6, 2017 12:04 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you remind me more of alt right posters than the show does

this is the fantano thread and these stupid asides about adult swim are reasonably germane. unless you actually think that whiney is saying "only nerds who watch rick and morty are racist" what is your objection?

― -_- (jim in vancouver), Friday, October 6, 2017 1:45 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he literally said that if you've seen more than one episode you're basically alt right, its a stupid argument

Also something something Norm Macdonald

I do feel like South Park normalized anti-semitic humor to a generation of redneck kids who didn't actually know that many jewish people, so they didn't see what the big deal was. Cartman might not be the hero, but he was the kid that got all the best jokes in the early seasons and was easily the most popular character. Expose that generation of kids accustomed to anti-semitic humor with people who use anti-semitic humor as an entryway into actual anti-semitic ideas and you have a fertile ground for the alt-right we see today.

Obviously there are other factors, but South Park helped lay the foundation for this particular prong of the alt-right.

i think south park ideologically is a much more fucked up show than rick & morty although both attract idiot fans

great thread

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Friday, October 6, 2017 12:56 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

rick & morty is show about, like, emotionally abusive family dynamics, fantastical worlds & tightly constructed plot mechanisms. i dont think its ideologically pure or something but its ideology is more complex than is represented by its fans overidentifying w the main character

I do feel like South Park normalized anti-semitic humor to a generation of redneck kids who didn't actually know that many jewish people, so they didn't see what the big deal was. Cartman might not be the hero, but he was the kid that got all the best jokes in the early seasons and was easily the most popular character. Expose that generation of kids accustomed to anti-semitic humor with people who use anti-semitic humor as an entryway into actual anti-semitic ideas and you have a fertile ground for the alt-right we see today.

― brontosaur

wait, there was a time when anti-semitic humor was considered abnormal among rednecks?

ahh the redneck scapegoat

I grew up in a small redneck town. There were two jewish kids in the whole school. I never heard any one make any jewish jokes at all. Then South Park comes out, and its just part of the lexicon.

I grew up in a small-to-medium-size town and my grandmother seriously considered changing her last name because of anti-semitism, so you might want to consider your sample there

the bootleg VHS going around at my school of one of the first Christmas specials felt like it came from the same place as one of David Allan Coe's racist underground albums. the jewish jokes got the biggest laughs when it was watched in the dorm lounge.

Whiney is right that the alt right grew out of nerd subcultures, specifically. There's something there. Even though the alt right is just one manifestation of bigotry in America it's the one we're discussing here, that Fantano tried to court just like Milo Yiannapolous. (Fantano was being sneakier I guess, and wasn't financed by the Mercers.)

It's wrong that to say all nerd media is infected with reactionary ideas but that world IS a battleground. It's not just incidental that so many women are harrassed when the centure into those spaces, specifically.

(to clarify, this would have been during the 1980s, when she and my parents moved there)

*venture

I grew up in a town that didn't have a single towlie

Ok, maybe South Park has nothing to with anti-semitism and didn't influence a generation of kids. Sure. I'm just a data point after all. All I know is other races were definitely casually on the table for derision and slurs in a super casual way, and that Jewish people were never (or rarely) part of that equation until South Park came around.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccco4ASA1EI

All I know is other races were definitely casually on the table for derision and slurs in a super casual way, and that Jewish people were never (or rarely) part of that equation until South Park came around.

so there's something I've got to tell you about history

South Park is a disaster for the moral development of kids everywhere. It def normalized "edgy" racist and antisemitic jokes in my hometown, in the wild foothills of Middlesex County, New Jersey.

That sentence wasn't meant to apply to the entire world. Just my peer group growing up. If that wasn't clear, I apologize. If you want to defend South Park, by all mean be my guest.

mean=means, obv.

so there's something I've got to tell you about history

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Friday, October 6, 2017 1:15 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao

The alt-right existed before Gamergate. It didn't call itself "alt-right" but it was there. I grew up in a Twin Cities exurb in the 80s and it was all around me the entire time, from the kids who would attempt to put me back in my place by calling me a nigger, spook or jungle bunny to the Pink Floyd fans who thought the mental breakdown in The Wall was a spiritual awakening meant to be emulated to the country music fans who called rap "jungle music" to the people who thought Minneapolis was a den of crime because a few black people lived there to all of the people resentful of the casino on the reservation south of town. It was the exact same bullshit, only instead of expressed via a cartoon frog it was passed around in notes and through championing certain musical acts, often regardless of whether the acts in question would have condoned being a conduit for that type of messaging (Iron Maiden leaps instantly to mind).

The way the war is being waged is different because the weapons have changed but it is the exact same thing the country has been dealing with since before any of us were born.

I was 9 or 10 when South Park came out. I was also the only Jew in my class. I can echo brontosaurus comments verbatim.

It's wrong that to say all nerd media is infected with reactionary ideas but that world IS a battleground. It's not just incidental that so many women are harrassed when the centure into those spaces, specifically.

― Treeship

goddamn right it is a battleground. plenty of geek ladies, cis and trans, fighting to be heard.

can we change thread title to "the goddamn white supremacist fucks"

i don't let my kids watch south park. or the family guy. weirdly enough. they probably do when i'm not around though. they are the two shows i never want to hear in the house.

i don't have a ton of rules. in general. i did yell at rufus once when he was practicing "tears in heaven" after a guitar lesson. i told him no clapton.

doin it right

speaking of which, here's a little nightmare fuel I encountered last night:

You’re welcome https://t.co/wZgLhASeVV

— Pizza McRib (@PizzaMcrib) October 6, 2017

Doubtless it's garbage but

🔔🔔 T H E F A D E R R E S P O N S E 🔔🔔https://t.co/kXEaCeNdJC pic.twitter.com/cXy3V7K1wG

— thee anthony fantano (@theneedledrop) October 7, 2017

lmao 21 minutes

what's with the finger, is there crying

23 seconds, i can't do this to myself

saw enough to know that he's a fucking lying piece of shit who's going to keep doubling down on his lies because the people who follow him are idiots

he's pretty convincing in that video

He brushes over the videos with Sargon of Akkad and Amazing Atheist (lol), claiming that neither is alt-right because neither self-identifies as alt-right. That assumes overly precise definitions, as though there's no connection between Gamergate/anti-feminism and the alt-right. The clips of the interview with Sam Hyde add slightly more context, but Fantano's supposed resistance to the Lena Dunham rant was mild at best. If he was that offended, he could always have not posted the interview.

I'm lost on most of the meme humour stuff. It's painful hearing him explain his unfunny videos.

one would think the first reason not to watch anything this guy does is that he's insufferably uninteresting after like a minute and a half but good on y'all for digging deeper i guess

He brushes over the videos with Sargon of Akkad and Amazing Atheist (lol), claiming that neither is alt-right because neither self-identifies as alt-right. That assumes overly precise definitions, as though there's no connection between Gamergate/anti-feminism and the alt-right. The clips of the interview with Sam Hyde add slightly more context, but Fantano's supposed resistance to the Lena Dunham rant was mild at best. If he was that offended, he could always have not posted the interview.

I'm lost on most of the meme humour stuff. It's painful hearing him explain his unfunny videos.

Well, what does alt-right mean? The way it was defined on the alt-right thread was

They're an alternative to US right wing consensus - instead of being pro free markets, pro Christian morality or pro strong defense they are just pro white nationalism.

I was informed there that e.g. Breitbart and Trump are not really alt-right, that it does have a more precise meaning. When I was reading the Fader piece, I was sort of waiting for the reveal that Fantano had a publication credit in Alternative Right or plugged Christopher Cantwell on Youtube or was selling "Blood and Soil" T-shirts or something.

That said, after watching his defence, I tried watching one of the original controversial videos and didn't get that far, for this reason:

I'm lost on most of the meme humour stuff.

The "alt right" is an amorphous term. It seems like right now only white nationalists embrace it but colloquially it is used to deacribe the whole reactionary online sphere, where people are not so interested in conservatism as a political or moreal philosophy but really interested in identity issues.

The buzzfeed article showed that Breitbart, at least, courted overt white nationalists and drew on their rhetoric, tweaking it only mildly in order to hold onto the members of their audience who weren't ready to go as far as calling for an "ethno state." But the themes are the same with all these people. White people are being "replaced." This demographic trend is a liberal plot. Feminism has undermined the stability of society and oppressed men in the process. Another liberal plot is destroying freedom of speech so ordinary/white Americans can't fight back. Etc.

A lot of the toxic nihilism of the meme humor comes from this overall place of hostility for "liberal" America and its norms and pieties. It's deeply antisocial. I feel like the producers of this kind of content are hazy on what kind of world they'd like instead but they definitely feel that, as (mostly) white men, they've been thwarted from claiming their inheritance or something. It's very adolescent but also really dangerous. She gets a bad rap around here but Angela Nagle's book on the alt-right, Kill All Normies, is really good at peeling back the psychology of these new white supremacists.

Anyway, Fantano was obviously trying to become a part of this world in order to drive "engagement" on his channel. Whatever is in his heart, he was playing with fire and it's good he was burned. The only acceptable attitude toward the alt right is contempt. They're not cheerfuly irreverent South Park nihilists or something, they're a hate movement that sometimes hides behind "comedy."

Uhhhhh I heard enough from friends telling me to stay away from that Nagle book but if it got Treeship talking about "the toxic nihilism of meme culture" then it kind of sounds like my shit