The Death of Uncool - Shuffle Task

In order to back up Eno's theory that "People become increasingly confortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of courses- cherry picking whatever makes sense to them" I shuffled through my music playlist to see how many different types of music came up. these are the results;

1. Kanye West - Gorgeous
2. Mac Miller - Don't mind if i do
3. Boyz II Men - Thank You
4. KiD CuDi - Mojo So Dope
5. J. Cole - Never Told
6. Paul Mccartney - Wonderful Christmastime 
7. Bob Marley - One Love 
8. Don Mclean - American Pie
9. J. Cole - Work Out
10. Kasabian - Velociraptor!
11. Coldplay - Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall
12. Jay-Z - Renegade
13. The Fratellis - Chelsea Dagger 
14. Kasabian - Goodbye Kiss
15. Razorlight - America
16. John Legend - Ordinary People
17. Eminem - Run Rabbit Run
18. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Scar Tissue
19. Boyz II Men - In The Still Of The Night
20. Nas - NY State Of Mind

This test more than proved Eno's theory to be correct. If i was born in the 70's it would be very common for me to enjoy just one type of music, whether that be Rock or Disco- these days people have a much wider taste for music, as can be seen with my Shuffle results.

My results show that i enjoy a variety of music, as there are several genre's contained within the 20 such as;
R&B (Boyz II Men, John Legend)
Hip-hop/Rap (J. Cole, Mac Miller, KiD CuDi, Jay-Z etc)
Rock (Kasabian, Red Hot Chili Peppers)
Pop (Coldplay)

Another point that Eno makes is that each genre now has various sub-categories (he uses his personal experiences of walking into a record store as an example.) This can also be proved within my Shuffle results, as Kasabian and Red Hot Chili Peppers are different types of rock.

The Death of Uncool

Brian Eno — 25th November 2009

It’s odd to think back on the time—not so long ago—when there were distinct stylistic trends, such as “this season’s colour” or “abstract expressionism” or “psychedelic music.” It seems we don’t think like that any more. There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance.

As an example, go into a record shop and look at the dividers used to separate music into different categories. There used to be about a dozen: rock, jazz, ethnic, and so on. Now there are almost as many dividers as there are records, and they keep proliferating. The category I had a hand in starting—ambient music—has split into a host of subcategories called things like “black ambient,” “ambient dub,” “ambient industrial,” “organic ambient” and 20 others last time I looked. A similar bifurcation has been happening in every other living musical genre (except for “classical” which remains, so far, simply “classical”), and it’s going on in painting, sculpture, cinema and dance.

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.

This Article was published in the December edition of Prospect Magazine