This is in response to anybody who thinks Christina Aguilera is "powerfully emotional".
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Originally Posted by Amusing Ourselves To Death
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
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Pre-packaged pop crap is exactly what Huxley was forseeing with his "feelies" in
Brave New World. Digesting Christina Aguilera and whomever else is akin to eating nothing but candy...without the nauseating side-effects (for most of us, anyway).
You can't pull the relativist card and say "it's okay because
I like it". Since time immemorial people have been guided away from things they shouldn't do but want to anyway. Listening to crappy music (and other crap art forms like most of the movies and TV shows we have today) should be one of these things, but it's not. People get all uppity and think their decisions are being made for them and it's infringing on their rights.
Guess what: your decisions ARE being made for you, and unfortunately for the rest of us who actually care about integrity in our media, they're the wrong ones. YOU aren't in control of what pop starlet is infecting the airwaves. Sony or BMG or whomever buy loads of airspace on syndicated radio channels, posters in music stores, and the echo chamber "music" channels (MTV and MM) pick up on it to drive their advertising sales. It's a great big machination that ends up with unwitting Joe owning the Christina Aguilera CD and thinking it's "powerfully emotional".