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It's become evident that despite the best efforts of BBC 4, left-wing council initiatives and Danny Dyer's Twitter feed, we aren't going to get a mass festival of appreciation for the works of Pinter or Puccini again. Unless a show's got ABBA songs or Amanda Holden in it, culture of the stage has once again become the preserve of the middle classes. Maybe it always was.However, when exactly did they start letting people leave rave flyers on the counter in Habitat? When did the professional vibe killers become the first names on the guestlist?Every cultural event that doesn't take place on your laptop monitor seems to come encased in a spontaneity-proof layer of bureaucratic bullshit these days, and it's killing our culture. Who's to blame? Well, you can start with Clear Channel, Cineworld, Calvin Harris, flash mobs, South African ex-pats who take picnic blankets to open air cinemas and anybody who's ever filmed anything on a smartphone at a gig.
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It’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché that won’t die, because generation after generation still find themselves sucked in by that Boogie Nights montage scene. Cocaine is the absolute destroyer of subtlety, intelligence and innocence in culture and in life. Sure, there’s been great art created on and influenced by gak, but has any great art been created in the midst of a real coke blizzard? Scorsese was dabbling when he made Taxi Driver, but as soon as he got beard deep, he gave us New York, New York.Cocaine is what made everybody you love turn shit(ter). It made them bloated, paranoid and bankrupt; morally, financially and emotionally. It's what transformed Example from an embarrassing rapper from Fulham into a mascot for pointless excess. You’d think there’d be enough lessons learned from the mistakes of the past. You'd think that all those Behind The Music specials and Carl Barat solo albums would put people off, but every generation of partygoers still fall for its horribly basic, Groucho Club idea of cool.
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Vanity is nothing new. From Cleopatra to Courtney Stodden, Casanova to Scott Disick, humans have always been peacocks, determined to let the rest of the pigeons know just where we rank in the fuck chain. What's new in 2012, however, is the strange insularity of young vanity – the boys and girls frozen in a permanent pout who treat their "mobile uploads" album with the same reverence previous generations reserved for holiday snaps from the Copacabana. Of course, there's something inherently human about slapping on that extra layer of foundation or carefully teasing that faux-hawk into its preferred state, but when it's so self-involved – so oddly sexless – it starts to becomes a little bit troublesome.It's not hard to imagine teen Twitter jock and online vanity-game Oppenheimer Olly Riley never actually leaving his house. He and the thousands like him are doing solitary in their own lives, constantly stroking their cheekbones, angling their jawlines, photographing their own faces until they're disturbingly intimate with them. Almost as if to prove to their future selves that they once owned such a face.
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You know what's a lot healthier than taking an objective look at a book or a film and learning to understand it on its own merits? Fucking hating it. Somewhere along the line, we stopped hating things. Gone are the days when liking guitar music that wasn't Oasis could find you on the wrong end of a bus-stop beating, when suggesting The English Patient is overrated would get you thrown out of a dinner party. Nobody seems to care that much any more.This isn't because we've all been brow-beaten into collective objectivity by the Comment Is Free crowd, it's because most our of era's cultural output is actively seeking consensus popularity. Everybody seems so afraid of being misunderstood or disliked these days. Our pop stars are people who say things like, "I'm into a bit of everything, really," and Paul Rudd has gone from being a guy who plays somebody's boyfriend in a Jennifer Aniston movie to the beta-male Bogart.
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Once upon a time, fashion was about dressing as uncomfortably as possible, and it was amazing. From damp, stiff, Teddy Boy leather jackets right up to the pointless white gloves ravers used to wear, that's what fashion is: having the balls to wear something that other people wouldn't, thus making it look cool.Alas, in 2012, everyone seems determined to dress like they've been shopping at a department store bedding section rather than a Mazda garage's upholstery cupboard. Onesies, Uggs, those hats that look like they've been ripped off a makeshift hippie catapult – these are merely clothing equivalents of Katherine Heigl films and Cafe Del Mar albums. They don't prove that people are comfortable in their own existences, they prove that they're lazy and they've run out of ideas. What are we doing? Have we given up? If not, why are we trying to make the world look like some kind of global slumber party?
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