Below is my latest culture briefing. Today’s main theme is disruption. I’m seeing it everywhere—even on the dinner table. If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).The best restaurants now create ‘disruptive’ experiences for diners.How do you get ranked as a top 50 restaurant? According to food critic Pete Wells, the secret is turning the meal into an “endurance test.” Instead of fine dining, you get “theatrical spectacles” and “monuments to ego.” He reviews the latest edition of the “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” and asks if you can still call them restaurants anymore. He offers the example of Gaggan in Bangkok—ranked number nine in the world:
Wells shares other disruptive examples from various top 50 restaurants—where worms, brains, skulls, ants, and other extreme ingredients enhance your gustatory experience.
Fans of avant-garde art will recognize all this—it’s been happening in lofts and galleries for a long time. You win awards and grants by embracing the strange and unsavory. Now food has arrived at its avant-garde moment. But is all this too much to digest? We may soon learn how much disruptive dining upscale restaurant patrons can stomach. All live TV is now in decline.Cable TV subscriptions have collapsed in recent years—plummeting 27% in the US since 2016. But now all the other ways of accessing live TV are also declining. Every major provider is reporting negative numbers, not just cable and satellite. Even digital TV streaming is shrinking. YouTube TV lost 150,000 subscribers in the first quarter—its first decline ever. Google’s streaming TV service also lost 150,000 subscribers. We now must abandon the idea that TV watchers will just shift from cable to digital. That’s not happening. You might think that non-live streaming services will pick up these lost viewers, but many of those platforms are also struggling. The real story here is—as I pointed out in my “State of the Culture” article—is that addictive scrolling on phones is displacing everything. Mark my words: We are still in the early stages of the dopamine distraction culture, and it’s going to get much, much worse. Will complex popular music make a comeback?All trends eventually reverse, but this one has been going on my entire adult life. Commercial music keeps getting simpler and simpler. You can see the end result on the Billboard chart, if you dare look. Four chord vamps repeat endlessly. Melodies lose their chromaticism, and even bent notes are as rare as working phone booths. Syncopation disappears, and everything sounds like it is programmed dead center in the middle of the beat. Lyrics get simpler and more repetitive. But every once in a while, there’s a glimmer of hope that the trend is reversing back to something deeper and more maximalist. That’s why this new song has caught a number of people’s attention. I first learned about it via Rick Beato—just a short while after I suggested in my interview with him that maximalist pop would inevitably come back. But others are now noticing.
Yes, you’re counting meters in seven here. And the grooves are way too complicated for amateurs to play. But the song sounds fresh and natural—and (finally) different from the monolithic formula. Why isn’t there more commercial music like this? That’s the kind of disruption I want to hear. But maybe this is a gift coming in our future. Activists want political change, but focus on defacing cultural targets—their latest victims are Stonehenge and Taylor Swift.Can you really influence politics by throwing soup at famous paintings?... Keep reading with a 7-day free trialSubscribe to The Honest Broker to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives. A subscription gets you:
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