Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ilana Mercer's Feb. 23 WorldNetDaily column is headlined "Beethoven & Bach ARE the West, not Cardi B, Kanye, Rihanna." While she didn't explicitly make a point of it in the column itself, it's worth noting that the three musical artists she deemed not "the West" are black -- not surprising for a writer who's very much white nationalist-adjacent. Ultimately, the column is one long while about how she doesn't like popular music:
Symbolically, the decaying Empire unveiled some of its most putrefying, pornographic cultural products in the week in which Burt Bacharach, composer of sublime pop music, departed to the heavens. The beastly bacchanalia unfolded at the 2023 Grammys and the Super Bowel (sic) halftime hump-along, showcasing zero skill, zero imagination, zero talent and zero beauty. Those vaguely familiar with my prose recognize that I'm being charitable.
[...]
The only substantive conservative case to make over the Grammys is that it signifies the complete loss of immutable artistic standards. For while artistic taste is subjective and personal; artistic standards are everywhere and always objective.
Nobody looking at, and listening to, the 2023 Grammys should dare talk about beauty – of melody or movement – harmony (as in consonance and counterpoint), chord progression and a facility with musical instruments, for these were nowhere apparent. Better melodic progression is to be found in "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" and "Three Blind Mice."
Nobody watching these erogenous-zone centered extravaganzas, for which the celebrity Idiocracy clapped like clapped-out whores, should dare conclude anything but this:
The Grammys were about the end of art – about the loss of all meritocratic, objective standards in art.
The true meaning of the West is not to be found in the staged acts of ugly exhibitionists and filthy pornographers who bedeck our cultural and sporting events, the likes of loud, lousy Lizzo, a mountain of meritless flesh, and Sam Smith Sicko – demented degenerates who are all engaged in publicly tolerated indecent exposure and tuneless yelping, that not even the Auto-tune magic software, the "holy grail of recording" technology, can correct.
[...]
Beethoven is the West. It's men like Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Debussy, César Franck, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky (a Russian homosexual, whose manly music could never be queered), Elgar, Fauré and more – they embody the West. They and the many young performers furthering their work, the work of the Lord, are examples of the best of the West.
"Ode to Joy," inspired by Friedrich Schiller's eponymous poem, is but the soundbite in Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. Sublime as it is, "Ode to Joy" is the popular tune in a more magnificent whole.
One should not seek out exclusively the Ode of the symphony's finale – the fourth movement – without assimilating the typically ballsy build-up by Beethoven throughout the preceding Allegro (first movement), scherzo (second movement) and Adagio (third).
MUSIC IS MAN. These men, to be precise.
[...]
And that's the West, too. Alas, it has become anathema in Neurotic Nation USA to be stoic and heroic like Beethoven. I shall close with guidance neither fuzzy nor diffuse: Honor Western civilization, not Kanye West: Do it up, parents.
Note that all of the classical composers she names are white, and that of all the musicians whose work she despises, all but one (Sam Smith) are black.
This follows the recent trend of WND writers (and others) who have declared their unhappiness with modern art.
