"Hello From the Same Side"

"Trump creates an environment where his fans feel affirmed and unchallenged in their intuitive sense of the world. Having the world reflect your intuitive sense with dissonance-free immediacy is the height of privilege. This is what Trump’s white (able-bodied, English-speaking…) fans are accustomed to, and one way his performances reaffirm both their whiteness and white supremacy. As a political figure, he appears completely uninterested in facts or evidence. As Dylan Matthews suggests on Vox, whereas most politicians massage facts into the form they find most appealing, Trump just makes stuff up, stuff that’s easy to disprove with empirical evidence. For him, the point isn’t to be correct or make a rational argument (he’s no Habermasian) to get people to agree with his ideas, but to perform feelings that (some, mostly white) people identify with. He’s not interested in getting people to agree with the propositional content of his claims, but with the implicit knowledges, emotions, habits, and intuitions—what philosophers call an “interpretive horizon”—that make factually incoherent claims appear coherent. And in Trump’s case, it’s white supremacy that makes his empirically false claims feel true.

“Hello” also eschews appeals to knowledge in favor of immediate, friction-less emotional and intuitive identification. Its production and performance is so musically conservative that you don’t have to know a lot about recent trends in pop music to connect to the song and feel like part of its interpretive universe. Its closest chart competition, Bieber’s “Sorry,” is a hit because it synthesizes current trends, like a trap “skrrrrrt!” or tropical house-inspired melodies and beats. But these ideas might alienate listeners who don’t keep up with pop’s rabid assimilation of new sounds from (generally black, queer) subcultures. Over the last 40 years, as hip hop, disco, house, drum & bass, dubstep, and plenty of other black genres were appropriated by the white mainstream, their rhythmic innovations have been incorporated into pop percussion styles: we hear this in Bieber’s three new singles. “Hello”‘s composition avoids using any ideas or techniques that entered pop’s toolkit since the invention of punk, hip hop, and disco in the late 70s (its one musical reference is to “California Dreaming,” from 1965). It would have made as much sense to US and UK pop audiences in 1975 as it does in 2015...

In both Trump’s and “Hello”’s case, fans experience an apparently immediate emotional identification with a performance, and assume that everyone does, or at least should, do the same, because everyone ought to share this white interpretive horizon."

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/hello-from-the-same-side/

Um, I so enjoyed these interpretations and connections and the way the author is writing about culture and society using lots of lenses and tools. I love learning this idea the "interpretive horizon". That's so useful.

Maybe part of millenialism is seeing no border between pop culture and politics; being able to step into the crash of "high" and "low" culture.

(Credit to JR, I think)

Related: Whiteness is proxy for being American

FB: sorrynotsorry this is amazing "

I’m not arguing anything about Adele herself, nor about all possible interpretations of “Hello,” but about a liberal one that dominates media coverage of the song. This particular strain of “Hello” fandom is about the pleasure in sharing a common interpretive horizon, a common underlying set of habits, intuitions, and bodily orientations to the world. This is also the crux of Trump fandom."