7 ms·

Our culture has two types of forgetting

90 points by dnetesn 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ronilan 8y ago
If “Imagine” and other caltural icons are decaying, then “Forrest Gump” should display exponential decay. Enjoy if you still “get it”. It’s a “classic”: https://youtu.be/rLDy4Glw9cY https://youtu.be/rLDy4Glw9cY
- ascar 8y ago
  Forrest Gump is one of my favorite movies. I'm from Germany, not the US and the first time I watched it as a teen I only got the obvious references. Each time I rewatched it, I found more and more references to US history, which just made the movie even better for me.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    I will give it credit for the historical references, but it really is a circle jerk to baby boomers. Thankfully they didn't film Forrest going to space that was in the book .
- rusk 8y ago
  Looking at that clip, it's remarkable that Forest Gump isn't just a nostalgia flick but a special effects tour de force... there's very definitely some showboating going on at the start with Lennon ducking in and around Forest. Perhaps the trained eye can discern subtle lighting glitches that give the game away but in the 90s this was mind-blowing.
  - lowercased 8y ago
    the video was great - still seems to hold up ok, maybe because it was showing something which already looked dated at the time. the voicework got me - even just a few words in a wrong accent bugs me with beatles stuff :)
oska 8y ago
I know this is a shallow remark and the song was only used as an example but the forgetting of Imagine can not happen fast enough, in my opinion. It cheered me to know that there are people unfamiliar with it. Which I guess speaks to the benefits of forgetting.
- Ma8ee 8y ago
  Why?
  - kochikame 8y ago
    It's widely considered to be lyrically facile, musically boring and one of the prime examples of John Lennon's late-career hippy excesses
    - zwkrt 8y ago
      Widely considered by who? I've never heard of this consensus before
      - azeotropic 8y ago
        The fact that Hidalgo's student mistook Imagine for a Coldplay song is pretty damning evidence.
      - kochikame 8y ago
        https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2012/12/06/imagine-jim-borghesani https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2012/12/06/imagine-jim-borg... I mean, some people like it and some people even love it, but lots of people also think it's bloody awful, and awful on many different levels too.
        jerf 8y ago
        I like it OK as a song. It's not spectacular, but it's adequate, and "adequate" is a modestly high bar from me. It wouldn't stand up to being elaborated on much more than it is, but there's a place for such simplicity. However, philosophically, the lyrics of the song boils down to "What if we could all just get along?", which is an even weaker message than "Why can't we all just get along?", which is already a sentiment so childish that I never deploy it as anything other than an example of something so hopelessly naive that it can't be taken seriously by any adult.
bkohlmann 8y ago
I'm impressed by the numerous times the person being interviewed says "I don't know." Refreshing and reflects and intellectual humility that allows folks like him to uncover unique perspectives.
weinzierl 8y ago
> We forget Elvis because the Beatles came up [..] This is how everyone perceives it, but is it true? The Beatles were active from 1960 until their break-up in 1970 while Elvis worked from 1953 until his death in 1977. His international hit "In the Ghetto" was released in 1969, a time when the Beatles were already divided and their break-up was imminent. In reality the Beatles and Elvis were very much contemporaries. And as an aside: It always amused me that Tarentino got that right in the "Beatles people vs Elvis people" scene. Beatles and Stones are compared all the time because they are perceived to be from the same generation. Except for the Tarentino scene I have never heard a comparison like that between the Beatles and Elvis - it is always just Elvis before, Beatles after.
- lqet 8y ago
  In case you were wondering, this is from a deleted scene in Pulp Fiction: > Mia Wallace: "There are only two kinds of people in the world, Beatles people and Elvis people. Now Beatles people can like Elvis and Elvis people can like the Beatles, but nobody likes them both equally. Somewhere you have to make a choice. And that choice, tells you who you are."
- jeremyjh 8y ago
  The Beatles absolutely replaced Elvis as "The Biggest Thing in America" in the early 60s. Yes he had successes and large shows after that, but there is also something that he lost while he was making all those stupid movies.
  - krapp 8y ago
    Elvis lost relevance with youth culture, gained weight and became a parody of himself. He was a one-trick pony (a white artist making the style of black music acceptable for a primarily white audience in a segregationist culture,) but inevitably rock as a genre and American culture as a whole evolved beyond his capabilities. The Beatles, meanwhile, were constantly evolving and their style changed with the times, so they were able to stick around a bit longer.
  - lowercased 8y ago
Raphael 8y ago
"Imagine" was performed at the 2012 Olympic closing ceremony, so at least 10% of people on Earth this decade have heard it, whether they remember or not.
ForHackernews 8y ago
A few years back, there was an interesting Chuck Klosterman article about cultural memory: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/which-rock-star-will-historians-of-the-future-remember.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/which-rock-star-... > I imagine a college classroom in 300 years, in which a hip instructor is leading a tutorial filled with students. These students relate to rock music with no more fluency than they do the music of Mesopotamia: It’s a style they’ve learned to recognize, but just barely (and only because they’ve taken this specific class). Nobody in the room can name more than two rock songs, except the professor. He explains the sonic structure of rock, its origins, the way it served as cultural currency and how it shaped and defined three generations of a global superpower. He shows the class a photo, or perhaps a hologram, of an artist who has been intentionally selected to epitomize the entire concept. For these future students, that singular image defines what rock was. > So what’s the image?
the6threplicant 8y ago
I call it the cultural event horizon.
skookumchuck 8y ago
> What happened is the people who collected Elvis memorabilia started to die. Their families were stuck with all of this Elvis stuff and trying to sell it. But all of the people who were buyers were also dying. I see this happening with collector cars, too. The interest in Model T's has really dissipated, and the muscle cars are starting to fade, too.
- devereaux 8y ago
  The market price of classic muscle cars is everything but fading.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    There's little interest in them with young people. It's all old people now.
    - devereaux 8y ago
      The fast and furious franchise was all about old people, and mostly watched by old people I guess?
      - skookumchuck 8y ago
        In the first one, the only muscle car appeared briefly and then was promptly destroyed. The cars used in it were much newer. I didn't watch the later ones.
pionerkotik 8y ago
I still think that Coldplay is going to be forgotten way faster than Lennon though.
Leszek 8y ago
This reminds me a lot of the following xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/1262/ https://xkcd.com/1262/
newsgremlin 8y ago
>I don’t think we’re amusing ourselves to death. I’m not like that much of a pessimist. I do think life is also about enjoying the ride, not just about doing important things. >And new mediums like TikTok, a kind of Twitter for videos, are great for creative expression. People are doing amazing little performance skits on TikTok. Tiktok I see is just another trend, like Vines, Yikyak, possibly even Snapchat in the near future. There are already plenty of platforms for creative expression, the problem is that young people cannot afford to express themselves, whether it's the digital paper trail that comes back to haunt them, being buried beneath other 'shock' and clickbait content, and the real-life pressures and expectations. You don't see any social or political commentary on these platforms unless it's the latest "beef" between internet personalities. This is all for our amusement and docile nature.
- onorton 8y ago
  >Yikyak Funny, I had completely forgotten about it until you mentioned it even though it was popular at my university. In relation to trends, TikTok itself only became popular in the West when it merged with musical.ly, a very similar app. Those annoying YouTube ads for TikTok you might see replaced musical.ly ads. I remember wondering if they were the same product rebranded.

90 points by dnetesn 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

If “Imagine” and other caltural icons are decaying, then “Forrest Gump” should display exponential decay. Enjoy if you still “get it”. It’s a “classic”: https://youtu.be/rLDy4Glw9cY https://youtu.be/rLDy4Glw9cY

ascar 8y ago
Forrest Gump is one of my favorite movies. I'm from Germany, not the US and the first time I watched it as a teen I only got the obvious references. Each time I rewatched it, I found more and more references to US history, which just made the movie even better for me.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  I will give it credit for the historical references, but it really is a circle jerk to baby boomers. Thankfully they didn't film Forrest going to space that was in the book .
rusk 8y ago
Looking at that clip, it's remarkable that Forest Gump isn't just a nostalgia flick but a special effects tour de force... there's very definitely some showboating going on at the start with Lennon ducking in and around Forest. Perhaps the trained eye can discern subtle lighting glitches that give the game away but in the 90s this was mind-blowing.
- lowercased 8y ago
  the video was great - still seems to hold up ok, maybe because it was showing something which already looked dated at the time. the voicework got me - even just a few words in a wrong accent bugs me with beatles stuff :)

oska 8y ago

I know this is a shallow remark and the song was only used as an example but the forgetting of Imagine can not happen fast enough, in my opinion. It cheered me to know that there are people unfamiliar with it. Which I guess speaks to the benefits of forgetting.

Ma8ee 8y ago
Why?
- kochikame 8y ago
  It's widely considered to be lyrically facile, musically boring and one of the prime examples of John Lennon's late-career hippy excesses
  - zwkrt 8y ago
    Widely considered by who? I've never heard of this consensus before
    - azeotropic 8y ago
      The fact that Hidalgo's student mistook Imagine for a Coldplay song is pretty damning evidence.
    - kochikame 8y ago
      https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2012/12/06/imagine-jim-borghesani https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2012/12/06/imagine-jim-borg... I mean, some people like it and some people even love it, but lots of people also think it's bloody awful, and awful on many different levels too.
      - jerf 8y ago
        I like it OK as a song. It's not spectacular, but it's adequate, and "adequate" is a modestly high bar from me. It wouldn't stand up to being elaborated on much more than it is, but there's a place for such simplicity. However, philosophically, the lyrics of the song boils down to "What if we could all just get along?", which is an even weaker message than "Why can't we all just get along?", which is already a sentiment so childish that I never deploy it as anything other than an example of something so hopelessly naive that it can't be taken seriously by any adult.

bkohlmann 8y ago

I'm impressed by the numerous times the person being interviewed says "I don't know." Refreshing and reflects and intellectual humility that allows folks like him to uncover unique perspectives.

weinzierl 8y ago

> We forget Elvis because the Beatles came up [..] This is how everyone perceives it, but is it true? The Beatles were active from 1960 until their break-up in 1970 while Elvis worked from 1953 until his death in 1977. His international hit "In the Ghetto" was released in 1969, a time when the Beatles were already divided and their break-up was imminent. In reality the Beatles and Elvis were very much contemporaries. And as an aside: It always amused me that Tarentino got that right in the "Beatles people vs Elvis people" scene. Beatles and Stones are compared all the time because they are perceived to be from the same generation. Except for the Tarentino scene I have never heard a comparison like that between the Beatles and Elvis - it is always just Elvis before, Beatles after.

lqet 8y ago
In case you were wondering, this is from a deleted scene in Pulp Fiction: > Mia Wallace: "There are only two kinds of people in the world, Beatles people and Elvis people. Now Beatles people can like Elvis and Elvis people can like the Beatles, but nobody likes them both equally. Somewhere you have to make a choice. And that choice, tells you who you are."
jeremyjh 8y ago
The Beatles absolutely replaced Elvis as "The Biggest Thing in America" in the early 60s. Yes he had successes and large shows after that, but there is also something that he lost while he was making all those stupid movies.
- krapp 8y ago
  Elvis lost relevance with youth culture, gained weight and became a parody of himself. He was a one-trick pony (a white artist making the style of black music acceptable for a primarily white audience in a segregationist culture,) but inevitably rock as a genre and American culture as a whole evolved beyond his capabilities. The Beatles, meanwhile, were constantly evolving and their style changed with the times, so they were able to stick around a bit longer.
- lowercased 8y ago

Raphael 8y ago

"Imagine" was performed at the 2012 Olympic closing ceremony, so at least 10% of people on Earth this decade have heard it, whether they remember or not.

ForHackernews 8y ago

A few years back, there was an interesting Chuck Klosterman article about cultural memory: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/which-rock-star-will-historians-of-the-future-remember.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/which-rock-star-... > I imagine a college classroom in 300 years, in which a hip instructor is leading a tutorial filled with students. These students relate to rock music with no more fluency than they do the music of Mesopotamia: It’s a style they’ve learned to recognize, but just barely (and only because they’ve taken this specific class). Nobody in the room can name more than two rock songs, except the professor. He explains the sonic structure of rock, its origins, the way it served as cultural currency and how it shaped and defined three generations of a global superpower. He shows the class a photo, or perhaps a hologram, of an artist who has been intentionally selected to epitomize the entire concept. For these future students, that singular image defines what rock was. > So what’s the image?

the6threplicant 8y ago

I call it the cultural event horizon.

skookumchuck 8y ago

> What happened is the people who collected Elvis memorabilia started to die. Their families were stuck with all of this Elvis stuff and trying to sell it. But all of the people who were buyers were also dying. I see this happening with collector cars, too. The interest in Model T's has really dissipated, and the muscle cars are starting to fade, too.

devereaux 8y ago
The market price of classic muscle cars is everything but fading.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  There's little interest in them with young people. It's all old people now.
  - devereaux 8y ago
    The fast and furious franchise was all about old people, and mostly watched by old people I guess?
    - skookumchuck 8y ago
      In the first one, the only muscle car appeared briefly and then was promptly destroyed. The cars used in it were much newer. I didn't watch the later ones.

pionerkotik 8y ago

I still think that Coldplay is going to be forgotten way faster than Lennon though.

Leszek 8y ago

This reminds me a lot of the following xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/1262/ https://xkcd.com/1262/

newsgremlin 8y ago

>I don’t think we’re amusing ourselves to death. I’m not like that much of a pessimist. I do think life is also about enjoying the ride, not just about doing important things. >And new mediums like TikTok, a kind of Twitter for videos, are great for creative expression. People are doing amazing little performance skits on TikTok. Tiktok I see is just another trend, like Vines, Yikyak, possibly even Snapchat in the near future. There are already plenty of platforms for creative expression, the problem is that young people cannot afford to express themselves, whether it's the digital paper trail that comes back to haunt them, being buried beneath other 'shock' and clickbait content, and the real-life pressures and expectations. You don't see any social or political commentary on these platforms unless it's the latest "beef" between internet personalities. This is all for our amusement and docile nature.

onorton 8y ago
>Yikyak Funny, I had completely forgotten about it until you mentioned it even though it was popular at my university. In relation to trends, TikTok itself only became popular in the West when it merged with musical.ly, a very similar app. Those annoying YouTube ads for TikTok you might see replaced musical.ly ads. I remember wondering if they were the same product rebranded.