Cultural paradigms replace previous aesthetics entirely when they shift

Evidence

A key issue was that there hadn’t been a true paradigm shift since the sixties. The term paradigm, despite rampant overuse in marketing copy and mocked as meaningless jargon by The Simpsons, describes a specific phenomenon in social science: the macro-values that set the logic of our choices and aesthetics. When a new paradigm emerges, the previous established styles lose all their value. Before World War II, America was in a jazz paradigm. The rise of Elvis and the Beatles in the 1950s and 1960s didn’t just introduce new tastes; it rendered decades of jazz passé among teens. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 382

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘paradigm’ in the social-science sense Marx relies on, and anchors the jazz-to-rock example as the last true paradigm shift.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is the jazz paradigm claim accurate, or does it flatten a more gradual transition where jazz persisted in adult/black audiences?
• XREF: connects to: Art-historical period concepts fail because cultural change has no real beginnings or endings — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 662; In fifteen years the dominant cultural metaphor shifted from resisting face-as-barcode to accepting it. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 466; Post-2008 culture remains dominated by pre-crash aesthetic forms — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1595 (+1 more)