Dave Greene & Culture Criticism

Some thoughts on his latest episode on Slopification

Dave Green has been one of my favorite figures in the online right sphere. Since I first came across his early video essays back almost a decade ago, I’ve been a fan of his work and a loyal listener. If you aren’t familiar with his work, I recommend going to his youtube channel, The Distributionist, and making your way through his playlists. Dave does a great job of explaining right wing concepts that our outside the acceptable normal sphere, eloquently and intellectually. During the dark times of COVID, when I spent weeks trapped in hotel rooms quarantining so I could travel I would stream his videos on the hotel televisions for hours in between my own reading and writing.

I preface this piece with the above because I want to make sure that everyone understands that I think Dave is great and just like I’ve done for the past decade I will continue to listen to his work as soon as it drops on the tubes. But, because I am a literary writer, and culture and art podcaster today I will criticize certain elements of Dave’s latest episode, “The Slop and the Signified.” Dave is one of or maybe the best thinkers and political critics on the online right. A great political critic but unfortunately a poor cultural critic, which drives home the point that the new independent right suffers from a significant deficit of cultural and artistic understanding, one that needs to be filled before it once again becomes the Trojan Horse used by the left to bring us to our knees in the way prior right-wing movements were destroyed.

So, I’m going to lay out my thoughts on a few points of contention and disagreement I have with Dave’s opinions in his latest livestream. I will reiterate right now that this is done in the spirit of conversation and gentlemanly debate and I pray that it is taken in this mode by readers and listeners alike. I also want to point out that the first part of the livestream is on point, and Dave’s political commentary is excellent, and I have no disagreements with it.

Slopification

Dave believes that one of the main problems of our contemporary culture is slopification, the decline in intellectual and spiritual quality of our artistic work, specifically pop culture. In his episode he uses Star Wars and the decline in artistic and spiritual quality between the original series, the prequels, and the latest Disney iterations. His observations are correct that there is a disease, but the problem is that the disease itself is misdiagnosed, and the etiology is misunderstood.

What our culture suffers from is not primarily slopification but infantilization. The original Star Wars were good, not because they dealt with deep themes and mythology, but because they presented those themes in a way intended for an audience of pre-teen boys. Star Wars was for children. It was not intended to be a work of art and intellectual thought dissected, analyzed, objectified, and made into a personal identity for adult men pushing fifty and beyond.

Cultures use stories and music as a tool towards intellectual and spiritual growth. A child is introduced to the bedrocks of our belief systems through fairytales and lullaby’s that present complex ideas in conceptual forms suitable for developing minds. The young mind will take the stories of dragons and knights and the simple melodies sung by his mother and build upon them the foundation to understand the work of Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky, after all Swan Lake is built upon the foundations of German and Russian fairytales. When parents feed their young children solid food for the first time it’s always simple, peas, carrots, mashed potatoes. You don’t give shrimp cocktail, filet mignon, and sushi to your toddler, because the pallet is not yet developed, the child cannot appreciate the complexity required for certain taste. Art, literature, film, and other cultural products are the spiritual food we live on, but just like food there’s a ladder of complexity and cultural taste just like a sophisticated pallet must be trained and cultivated in an incremental fashion.

We as a culture used to understand this intuitively. Look back at the earlier age of Hollywood, the age of the Western. During that era American film was dominated by cowboy films. Films that were for the most part intended for a young pre-teen and teenager audience and presented semi-mythological concepts to that audience wrapped in idealized and simplistic Americana. Those boys grew up, went on to fight and die in the Jungles of Vietnam, witnessed the political violence and social upheaval of the 60’s, and came home to a different America. The simplistic Howdy Dudey morality of the Westerns no longer intellectually or spiritually spoke to them and The New Hollywood stepped in and grew up with them, giving us films like Taxi Driver, The Graduate, Chinatown, Night of the Living Dead, and many others. This growth, this development is mirrored in the musical trends of the second half of the 20th century where we see the folk hippie era replaced by rock and roll that was rejected by the disillusioned punk and post-punk movement. Culture is supposed to grow, to change, to reflect the feelings and beliefs of the individuals creating it.

Sometime, in my opinion I place this in the first decade of the 21’st century, our culture became developmentally disabled. Instead of growing with us it became infantilized and intended to trap us in a static maze of consumerism. Culture stopped being a reflection of the individual, instead the individual became a reflection of the culture, wearing the regalia of past creation in the same way an undead lich wears his worm-eaten robes. We went from being guys who thought Star Wars was cool to Star Wars fans, or gamers, or Anime people, using material objects to simplify and define our personalities. We as a culture became trapped in a perpetual pseudo-teenage identity because most of us lacked the guides, the Gandalfs, to lead us through and out of the forest and into the terrifying but honest land of adulthood. Because of that when we grew up and went on to create our own art, we lacked the spiritual skill to do anything but create ever diminishing pastiche because we lacked the complex language of true cultural maturity.

Dave is right, we live in a world of degenerating slop, but that slop is a symptom of the spiritual hole left in us due to a cultural infantilism, a stop in our developmental cultural and spiritual growth. It is our duty to identify this disease and bridge the chasm as we approach the middle of this century.

Painting Miniatures, Videogames, Roleplaying

Dave laments a feeling of worthlessness he experienced last time he painted a 40k mini. Yeah dude, it’s normal, trust me, I feel the same way. You don’t enjoy it as much, you don’t get as much from it because it’s no longer for you. You’re a forty something husband and father and while the joy of playing with toys will never diminish in your memory the reality is that the time for that has passed, in the same way the joy of the Shire could never be felt by Frodo when he returned. One must find hobbies and work that is appropriate to our own spiritual and intellectual growth otherwise you become a consumerist addict who slurps up every roleplay product, videogame, cartoon, yet remains unsatiated because the work never lives up to the joy felt in childhood. The simple blissful joy we took in our toys as children is a gift from God, unfortunately our sinful nature that has cursed us with aging and death diminishes it and dims the simple light we once basked in as children.

There is no going back. Right now, in my closet I have a teddy bear. My long deceased father bought it for me on the way to the hospital on the day I was born. The bear, Ursulets is his name, is forty-two years old. Every time I pick him up, my eyes well up with tears at the memories of my father, grandfathers, and joy I lived through, he will always be with me, and besides some wear and tear he’s about the same after all this years. Me on the other hand, I’m not, I’m now a man, a husband, a father, and I sadly know that we can never have the relationship we had when I was a child. This doesn’t mean I don’t love it. Trust me I do, and I tenderly place him, safe in the closet where he belongs.

This is normal. There is no going back, only forward, towards the grave and God willing eternal salvation. I will never re-live the amazing games of Dungeons & Dragons games with Zach and Philip, and my brother. I will never experience my first concert, or the amazing feeling of getting my license and driving through the Hollywood hills at two in the morning, blasting music, and avoiding cop cars. I will never experience my first kiss, or the first time I saw my wife, and it’s ok, it’s human, it’s life. Trying to hold on to things of the past is folly, and our culture is destroying itself attempting this impossibility.

But you know what Dave, there is something we have, and something you yourself will get to experience soon. Children. My daughter is now almost seven. A few weeks ago, we played Dungeons & Dragons, she made a Ranger, and we had a blast. That game was the best I’ve played in years. Was it great, no, not really, but it wasn’t for me, it was for her. The joy I got didn’t come from me, my eyes are too riddled with the cataracts of age, but I felt the warmth of the light just by being with her. Everything is new again through the eyes of your children, and it is our duty to make sure that we leave things for them instead of turning everything into consumer slop for angry youtubers.

I first felt this in 1999 when the Phantom Menace came out. I was in high school, just started driving. There was so much hype around Star Wars, something I never really cared too much about beyond enjoying the movies and the old SNES videogames and the TIE Fighter PC simulator. That year, my youngest brother was still in elementary school, and I decided to take him to see Phantom Menace. We got ourselves some Taco Bell, really for those Star Wars pogs they had during the premiere and went to the theater with a bunch of my friends. The movie was ass. Completely trash, sorry friends, it was horrible. But my little brother loved it. Thought it was amazing and went through a phase where all he did was play the X-Wing videogame and read Star Wars comics. He did that because the movie was for him, not for me, and that’s ok, it’s supposed to be that way. The Phantom Menace was the last Star Wars movie I’ve ever watched, I knew that going forward there would be nothing for me. I did get dragged to Revenge of the Sith by a girlfriend, but I fell asleep and can’t remember a damn thing about it.

Music

The above story ties into my next point, some things don’t speak to us because they are not intended to be for us. Which makes Dave’s commentary on music my biggest point of contention. Just because you don’t like or understand a cultural piece doesn’t mean it lacks cultural and spiritual meaning for others, and Dave, and many others around my age are mistaken about the value of contemporary music.

I’m a music guy, playing guitar, concerts, clubs, discovering bands, collecting records, was the defining cultural experience for me growing up. When I put down the dice and the controller in middle school, I picked up the electric axe and haunted the halls of indy record stores. I’m the same age as Dave, give or take a few years, but I never loved the music of the 90’s. The Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana never spoke to me in the same way the post-punk and new wave bands of the previous generations did. In the era of Sublime and Nine Inch Nails I drove out of my way to find music stores that sold The Ramones, Joy Division, Nick Cave, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Sisters of Mercy, and other bands form that era before the grunge explosion. Music is a very individual and personal art form, sometimes it speaks to you on a personal level, other times you hear it, enjoy it, but get nothing out of it. It is also one art form, at least in its popular modern form, that benefits the most from youth, specifically youth transitioning into adulthood. There’s nothing in the world that can make me relieve those nights when the shitty punk band slammed the first chords, I tightened the laces on my Doc’s, flexed into my shitty homemade studded jacket, and jumped into the pit.

Due to my line of work I’m fortunate to spend a lot of time with young adults, most of them in their early 20’s, and because of this I take umbrage with the criticism of today’s contemporary music. First of all, contemporary pop might be the best it has been in decades. Artists like Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan are superior in almost every way shape and form to the popular slop we had in our twenties. Chappell Roan musically, stylistically, and artistically superior to the Britney Spears and Cristina Aguilerra slop from our high school era.

But what’s important to note is that Eilish, Roan, and many other musicians from this era are young, mostly in their early 20’s, and aren’t writing music for us. To dismiss it as lacking depth is just ridiculous. Chappell Roan who in retrospective I believe put out the best album of 2024 is fantastic, but beyond that I understand what she is saying even if the message is not intended for me, a forty-one-year-old man. Chappell Roan’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” is a near perfect pop album, and an insightfully deep dive into the mind of a generation of girls disillusioned by mainstream Hollywood, the music business, fame, dating, sexuality, contemporary life, and technology. Her musical chops are evident in how she can move between songs that sound right out of the 80’s to cheerleading anthem in-jokes, cabaret ballads, and contemporary club music, all wrapped in a very interesting drag queen persona, that is a commentary on the fact that a female has to pretend to be a man pretending to be a woman in order to be herself artistically in our contemporary culture. Her debut album is more interesting, intellectual, and meaningful than most of Madonna’s entire career.

For brevities sake, I will link to my review of Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft over at Telios Music, but I will say that she’s exactly the kind of artist that makes me hopeful for the future of music, with her DYI vibe, and rejection of contemporary consumer culture. Besides the two women above, there is an explosion of fantastic music, music that I think is better than anything that came out in my generation, Bridget Calls Me Baby, Orvile Peck, The Last Dinner Party, Hamish Hawk, not to mention Lana Del Ray¹ and many others.

I guess I find it stodgy to accuse the fans of Tailor Swift of not getting an intellectual or spiritual connection to her music. It’s nonsense. Swift speaks to a generation of American girls that grew up in our cultural desert, a generation that was damaged by the overt sexuality and perversions of the 90’s therefore hid behind the strong girl image given forth by Swift. For all her ills, all her saccharine sweetness, Taylor was groomed into music during the age of Harvey Weinsteins, fought back, and fucking won. This fact alone makes me a fan.

Andy Warhol

…in the case of Andy Warhol saying nothing.

Dave, Andy Warhol said everything, he predicted the cultural landscape of the 20’th century. We live in Andy’s world, a world of consumer slop and 15 minutes of Hawk Tuah fame. Andy Warhol was artistically prophetic. Every bit of slop, pop film, action figures, and advertising nightmare we live through today was criticized before it materialized by Warhol. It’s fitting that Andy was a child of Pittsburg, a city that died in the 20th century and is now struggling to find itself.

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In closing, I hope that this piece is taken on my word as intended, a work of discourse and not as a personal attack on

Dave Greene

, who I hold in nothing but the highest regard and urge all my readers and listeners to familiarize themselves with his fantastic body of work. I think this sort of discourse on cultural and artistic topics is much more interesting and useful than the endless political ambulance chasing that so many of us find ourselves trapped in, so I want to thank Dave for talking about these interesting issues, and I hope that we all continue to engage with both the classics and the contemporary works of culture. A world without art is just a bugman holocaust.

1. Lana belongs to us, she’s my age, and is artistically and aesthetically spot on for my generation.