#soc

He suddenly began to look wretched, much as I had seen him look as a schoolboy: lonely: awkward: unpopular: odd; no longer the self-confident businessman into which he had grown. His face now brought back the days when one used to watch him plodding off through the drizzle to undertake the long, solitary runs across the dismal fields beyond the sewage farms: runs which were to train him for teams in which he was never included. ↗

— Anthony Powell

#socially-inept #unpopularity #music

As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again. ↗

— David Byrne

#social-commentary #music

As with outlaw figures, in diverse musical and oral cultures throughout the world- Mexican corridos and Egyptian shaabi music, for example- Hip Hop's irreverence toward dominant values and noncompliance with the status quo creates alternative, counterhegemonic spaces. ↗

— H. Samy Alim

#hip-hop #race #sociology #music

It ain’t about keeping real, it’s about keeping it right. ↗

— Jeff Chain in "Can't Stop Won't Stop A History of the Hip-Hop Generation "

#music #society-thinking #music

If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work ↗

— Jeff Chain in "Can't Stop Won't Stop A History of the Hip-Hop Generation "

#music #society-thinking #music

Hip Hop Generation “captures the collective hopes and nightmares, ambitions and failures of those who would otherwise be described as “post-this” or “post-that.” ↗

— Jeff Chain in "Can't Stop Won't Stop A History of the Hip-Hop Generation "

#hip-hop #music #society #society-thinking #music

Poets sing our human music for us. ↗

— Carol Ann Duffy

#poet-laureate #poetry #poets #song #music

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place. ↗

— Edward W. Said

#human-society #interpretation #knowledge #nature

Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it. ↗

— Michel Faber

#society #nature

Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life. Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#beauty #body-image #consumer #cosmetic-surgery #cosmetics