Latest news with #culturaldecline
BBC News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Sinews music video highlights plight of lost music venues
An Oxford rock band have highlighted the diminishing number of live music venues in the UK in their latest Sinews are promoting their new single I Disappear with a video which includes clips in which they ask other musicians what former grassroots venues they and guitarist Rich Bell described the closing down of venues as an "epidemic" which was "laying waste to our cultural landscape, but those spaces live on in our memories".Oxford - which has given prominence to bands such as Ride, Radiohead, Supergrass, Foals, and Glass Animals, has itself seen a number of venues close in recent years, including The Cellar and The Wheatsheaf. According to the Music Venue Trust's latest annual report, 2024 saw the number of venues across the UK reduce from 835 to called this a "significant improvement on the rate of decline" on the previous year when 125 closed down, but that 43.8% of venues reported a loss. Mr Bell said: "The song's about feeling invisible, and overlooked, and trying to say I'm here, I exist, I take up physical space."He added: "I put lots of shows on in Oxford and that's been gutted of great venues like The Wheatsheaf, The Cellar, Fusion Arts, and The Port Mahon in just the last couple of years really. "Those spaces are gone, but the memories of shows I saw there are still really vivid for me, so I thought it would be nice to find out about others' memories of great lost venues."Up-and-coming acts featured in the video include The None, Objections, Dancer, and Ritual Error. Proceeds from the single are going towards YWMP, a music educational charity that is setting up a new venue in Little Clarendon Street."It feels good that in a small way this will be helping create new space," Mr Bell released their debut EP Reanimated last year, and followed it up with Choreography in music magazine has described the post-hardcore band, whose influences include Fugazi, Drive Like Jehu, Helmet, and Mclusky, as finding the "sweet spot between thoughtful intricacy and musical violence".The band will launch the single with a headline show at The Library in Oxford later. Mr Bell also runs Oxford label and gig promoter Divine Schism with Aiden 2023 they were able to raise £5,000 in just 12 hours from local well-wishers after their PA system and other equipment was stolen. You can follow BBC Oxfordshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How Literature Lost Its Mojo
I'm old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counter-reviews and arguments about the reviews. It's not just my nostalgia that's inventing this. In the mid- to late 20th century, literary fiction attracted huge audiences. If you look at the Publisher's Weekly list of best-selling novels of 1962, you find Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and J.D. Salinger. The next year you find Mary McCarthy and John O'Hara. From a recent Substack essay called 'The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction' by Owen Yingling, I learned that E.L. Doctorow's 'Ragtime' was the best-selling book of 1974, Roth's 'Portnoy's Complaint' was the best-selling book of 1969, Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita' was No. 3 in 1958, and Boris Pasternak's 'Doctor Zhivago' was No. 1. Today it's largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction. The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying people for decades, and the number of people who even claim to read literature has been declining steadily since 1982. Yingling reports that no work of literary fiction has been on the Publisher's Weekly yearly top 10 best-selling list since 2001. I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today's F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace? I'm not saying novels are worse now (I wouldn't know how to measure such a thing). I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanizing effect on our culture. There used to be a sense, inherited from the Romantic era, that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are. As the sociologist C. Wright Mills once put it, 'The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things.' As a result of this assumption, novelists were accorded lavish attention as late as the 1980s, and some became astoundingly famous: Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote. Literary talk was so central that even some critics got famous: Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin and before them Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. There were vastly more book review outlets, in newspapers across the country and in influential magazines like The New Republic. Why has literature become less central to American life? The most obvious culprit is the internet. It has destroyed everybody's attention spans. I find this somewhat persuasive but not mostly so. As Yingling points out, the decline in literary fiction began in the 1980s and 1990s, before the internet was dominant. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
