The Grammys Represent the Decadence of Our Culture
I did not watch the Grammys this year, and chances are that you did not either. According to media reports, the estimated audience of the awards plummeted by more than 50% compared to last year. This is a trend that has been occurring across most other yearly award ceremonies (such as the Oscars or the Emmys) that held, not so long ago, a decent amount of prestige among the general public. Despite the apathy shown by viewers, this year’s Grammy awards did not fail in creating news to feed into the cycle.
Most notably of all was the performance by artists Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion of their hit song WAP. (If you do not know what that stands for, Google at your own peril. Warning: it is very profane.) There is good reason why this performance caused a good deal of controversy and, moreover, of why it is representative of the decline of American culture as a whole.
The Grammys have always enjoyed a certain degree of prestige. Those were the awards given to artists by the Recording Academy as a recognition of excellence in the musical field in the same way the Oscars do for movies. However, no matter how much prestige the academy might have in the bank after all its history, they can only follow the whims of society at large. That is how we end up with WAP, a song (if we can call it that) which’s thesis can be reduced to its closing line, “There’s some whores in this house.” Once that premise is set, one can clearly imagine what a live performance could look like.
After watching the performance, one could present a plethora of adjectives to describe it. Crass, crude, vulgar, uncomfortable might be some that quickly come to mind, but there is something more to it. There should have been a shock factor to watching these two so-called artists debase themselves for the entertainment of no one. However, it was not the overtly sexualized dancing and sex-act-simulation that were shocking; it was the fact that I was not shocked by those obscene acts. One cannot avoid feeling a bit of secondhand embarrassment for the two women, as their act severely lacks from the one component the were banking on to get the viewer’s attention: physical attraction.
It would be hard to present a clearer representation of the decline of American culture than this. A shadow of its former past that took the world by storm with great movies from Citizen Kane to The Godfather, or musicians such as Frank Sinatra or Louis Armstrong. Today, culture has been degraded, refined, and packaged for consumption in a way that strips all nuance and richness from it.
It has become lazy, and reliant on the awesome technology we have developed. For example, almost every hit song since the 80s follows the same four-chord scheme. And when was the last time you watched a movie where the thing that impressed you the most were not the special effects? We have stripped the human element from our creative process, and thus debased our cultural output by the same margin. The consequence is an overtly sexual (pornographic even) song about female genitalia that is not even attractive, even to the person who would watch such a performance for that reason.
Music is one of the most influencing forms of art within each culture. For this reason, music can act as a very clear window into the aspirational values of the people who consume it. Listening over and over to a song can be a source of great motivation for anyone. That is what makes is such a powerful mean. What does it say then when one of the most listened to songs of our time encourages young women to prostitute themselves by using their bodies to obtain material gains from men? Furthermore, this is paradoxically called “empowering,” thus; doubling down on the degree of acceptance of degradation. I am not being hyperbolic; the lyrics are there as well as the reviews.
Our culture is suffering from an abject lack of quality, and it is bleeding into future generations. Conservatives have been naturally apathetic to cultural issues for decades - justified by the wrong notion that culture lacks objective significance. It is time to take a renewed stance towards it. It is time for us to appreciate beauty where it truly exists, create it, and support it.
By David Jorge, Cuban Expat. David is a nutritional consultant at and co-founder of Hope Initiative Consulting, LLC. David has earned his B.A. in psychology and is interested in cultural analysis, politics, psychology, and philosophy.
