Update: Unculture is no longer an active publication. Thank you to everyone who read our work.
07/11/19
Once you reach a certain age, the past begins to have a special kind of allure. The world you knew slowly fades away, and things you took for granted about it reveal themselves on their way out the door. The music, the tastes, the conversations all change with the times, and if that wasn’t enough, the people do too. Trying to hold on to it is futile, and the essential question of growing up is when to let go. It’s also hard to let go, and before you can, you have to mourn for your childhood, as Don Draper put it.
But once you do, before long, you can start to appreciate the present. That’s what this site is all about. There will be retrospectives, to be sure, but mostly we’ll be doing our best to try and parse the things happening now, with all of their capacity to move and shake the zeitgeist. And the zeitgest is certainly moving and shaking. Literally moving, in the case of the NBA. By my count, 8 of the league’s top 20 players will be on a different team to start next season than the one they finished the last with. There’s no confidence in the power of continuity, and total devotion to the virtue of starting over. The risk of wallowing in mediocrity is too great, too intimidating. We’re molecules in a pot of boiling water, just bubbling with nervous energy.
Music is in flux too. You can hear it in hip hop especially, where the direction of the genre has never been more unclear. The top tier of artists are opting for minimalism and ethereal verses, a musical knock-on effect of entropy in the system. New artists releasing on Soundcloud found a distinctive style, driven by the budget constraints of being an artist without training or equipment or anything but a call from somewhere to make music for others to hear. Earl Sweatshirt’s recent release Some Rap Songs captures this ethos, with hypnotic loops and streams-of-consciousness verses on tracks like Cold Summers and Red Water. Also following this trend is Madlib and Freddie Gibbs’ new project Bandana, an early contender for Album of the Year.
Maybe it’s the power of the presidency, but America as a whole feels like it’s blown up since 2016. That also coincides with my generation’s transitions into adulthood, so it could be that we see it as more of a tectonic rumble because of the background noise of our lives. But that isn’t sufficient to explain away the turmoil. Presidential candidates running for 2020 can feel it too. Pete Buttigieg, the would-be voice of millennials in the race, spoke about it in his announcement speech, calling it “one of those rare moments between whole eras in the life of our nation”. The question then becomes what the impending era means for the things we want to write about on this website.
Which brings us to the name. One trend that has been apparent for a while is the dissolution of our national culture. Now, there’s arguments that can be made that America never really did have a truly national culture, as a country of immigrants and slaves, but to the extent that it did, that facade is quickly crumbling. Even if the next era is one of a renewed spirit of unity, it will be a dispersed solidarity, built from the bottom up.
We’re moving, in other words, into an unculture, a state of anarchy in art, music, sports, politics, and work in which all paths forward and backward are in play. The gatekeepers have abandoned their post. The inmates are running the asylum. We named this blog after this new reality because it seems to affect just about everything we plan to write about here.
At Unculture, we’re going to do our best to try and write our way out of our utter confusion about these things. It’s a time when not only the gatekeepers but the gates themselves are starting to fade, which is actually a nice development for a group of college students with no credentials trying to put their voice out into the world. As college students with no credentials, however, I can’t promise that our work here will be exhaustive or authoritative. What I can promise is that it will have a voice, a perspective, ideally a fresh one, that engages our readers on the level. It takes courage to avoid waffling and actually try and say something honest and new, but the alternative, being boring, is a far worse fate.
I’ve tried to start things before, to varying degrees of success. I’ve spent the time to learn from those mistakes, and each new venture lives to see a few more days than the last. Why try again with such a daunting mission statement, though? As I’ve said, all I want to avoid is something unimaginative. It may seem foolish to make the facile my enemy. And if it is, you’ll get to find out in short order. The prospect of Unculture crashing and burning doesn’t scare me, though. What scares me is not trying, showing a lack of ambition, and stagnating. There’s no point in investing my short time on this Earth in this site if I’m not prepared to risk it dying an early death for the potential of creating something special.
If you’re interested in finding out whether we succeed, the subscribe button is below. We’d love for you to join us on this journey.
Welcome, and thank you for reading.
Sincerely,
Carter
Editor-in-chief
