"oh noes bourgeois!"

[muckefuck]

SSC: It always irked me that That One Blog named Vampire Weekend "the whitest band ever", but I was never really able to put my finger on exactly why. Fortunately, Nitsuh Abebe is way smarter than me when it comes to analysing stuff like this. This entry of his on how bourgeois one-upmanship constantly overwhelms the proper aims of music criticism is about as far from "You don't like my favourite band so you suck" whining as you could possibly imagine.

(Ganked from moominmolly.)

Comments

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

Not only was that an excellent piece of meta-criticism, it led to a few delightful minutes while I tried to imagine anyone criticizing a roleplaying game designer for being "too white."

[snousle.livejournal.com]

LOL. Good article. It is hard to avoid being enmeshed in The Game unwittingly, but what got me over it was the web site Things White People Like. I read it, and thought, dang, that is spot on, I love all those things. From that point forward I decided to embrace bourgeois values without apology. Well, most of them, anyway. ;-)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm still working on that. I've come to accept that my intellectual pretensions and superficial black-sheepiness can't conceal a core that is shot through with bourgeosity. But I still haven't progressed from that realisation to wholehearted embracement.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

I've come to believe that the thing which most fundamentally characterizes the bourgeois mindset is "planning". All kinds of attitudes, not all of them particularly wonderful, evolve from that one value. If you are a person who believes in a vision of your personal future and actively works to secure that vision, then you are almost inescapably bourgeois. Poor people don't enjoy that confidence, for innumerable practical reasons, while very wealthy people can take it for granted. Only those in the middle have reason to be concerned and engaged with it.

There are real pleasures to be had in not being concerned with the future. But that's not me, and I can't pretend otherwise!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Interesting. When I challenged myself to come up with same, the quality I focussed on was "restraint". (Can't find that LJ entry now, unfortunately.) But I suppose there's a clear relationship between the two: If you can't restrain your immediate desires, how will you ever be able to plan for anything?

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

You know, I was also thinking of Stuff White People Like. I treated it as a quiz and discovered that I'm about 55-60% white. Some of those items, I didn't even know what they were! Dock 2 points off my white hide for each of those.

[his-regard.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, Nitsuh Abebe is way smarter than me when it comes to analysing stuff like this.

Well, you know the old mystery writers' saw: intelligence s a factor of time. Keep reading and working at it long enough, and eventually you'll figure out how not to be a bigot.