Post-punk saw entertainment culture’s claim to be apolitical as deeply ideological.
Evidence
One of the most urgent tasks for any political music was to expose the pacifying mechanisms that were already secreted in popular culture — nowhere more obviously than in the cheap dreams of love songs, which groups such as Gang of Four and the Slits deconstructed in tracks such as “Anthrax” and “Love und Romance”. In a world in which people increasingly felt as if they lived inside advertisements — where, as Gang of Four put it, at home they felt like tourists — there was nothing more ideological than culture’s claim to be entertainment. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1277
Categorization
- XREF: This is Fisher’s central capitalist-realism claim — entertainment as ideology — echoing his long-running k-punk arguments about the evacuation of the political. — connects to: Post-punk’s critical stance is not repressed but made unthinkable by late capitalist pop culture. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1006; Post-punk treated culture as inherently political beyond parliamentary politics. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1276; Entertainment’s claim to be harmless is itself the deepest ideology — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1277 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Entertainment’s claim to be harmless is itself the deepest ideology
#corroborates(0.92) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1277 - Genre form refracts rather than directly reflects political ideology
#expands(0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 321 - Affirmation culture degrades recognitive politics into feel-seen consumerism.
#complicates(0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 102