The Musical Theft: How Cultural Degradation Serves Technocratic Control

Cultural Engineering or a Conspiracy

The inspiration for this post comes, as quite often here on my blog, from Rick Beato and his YouTube channel. Recently he was live discussing his evaluation of the Spotify Top 10 songs. The title of the video is self-explanatory The Death of Memorable Songs. What he speaks about in the video is songs and music. Those produced in these times, just don’t seem to have quality we used to appreciate up to quite recent times. As Rick put it ‘current top ten songs are not having any surprise worth waiting for’. And I would add – these songs just don’t have much of a melody. Those are not songs someone would whistle in the garden, when they are having a good day. That’s why my kids don’t listen to current Top Charts songs, but love music from the 70’s and 80’s. 

Rick’s commentary, at moments almost apologetic for not being able to find musical value in those high charted songs, got me thinking – this situation where the current popular music finds itself, goes on for too long for being just a fluke. This seems to be a result of a coordinated effort, where some financial profit couldn’t be the only reason. So I started digging into this a bit more, and following is my analysis, not only from a musicological perspective.

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Music stands as perhaps humanity’s most profound evolutionary achievement, fundamentally shaping our species’ development for over 60,000 years. Archaeological evidence (flutes made from animal bones) reveals that our ancestors prioritized musical instrument creation alongside essential survival tools, suggesting music’s role transcended mere entertainment. Ethnomusicological research demonstrates that every human culture, without exception, has developed sophisticated musical systems that serve crucial social, spiritual, and cognitive functions.

From ancient Greek theories of musical modes affecting human character to medieval understanding of music as mathematical perfection reflecting divine order, traditional civilizations recognized music’s transformative power. The great composers – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Chopin, Mahler, or Strauss – weren’t merely entertainers but cultural architects whose works encoded philosophical, mathematical, and spiritual principles that elevated human consciousness across generations.

This historical foundation makes contemporary musical degradation particularly alarming. A 1960s New York music teacher captured music’s civilizational importance: “Music is Science, Mathematical, a Foreign Language, History, Physical Education… but most of all, Music is Art. That is why we teach music… so you will be human, so you will recognize beauty, so you will be closer to an infinite beyond this world.” This vision of music as fundamental human development now seems to face systematic destruction.

The thesis of this analysis is stark: the deliberate degradation of musical culture serves as preparation for technocratic control over human populations. What appears as natural cultural evolution reveals itself, upon closer examination, as engineered manipulation designed to create cognitively diminished, socially fragmented, and aesthetically numbed populations ready for technological management by a techno-aristocratic elite. And I don’t look at this from a partisanship perspsective of neither the left, nor the right. 

Phase One: The Corporate Seizure (1980s-2000s)

The first phase of musical theft began with corporate consolidation. By the 1990s, six major corporations controlled 90% of global music distribution. (And I should know as I used to work for one of them exactly at that time!) This concentration enabled unprecedented standardization of musical content. Where American regional music scenes once flourished – Detroit’s Motown, Nashville’s country, Seattle’s grunge, homogenized products emerged from boardroom calculations rather than authentic cultural expression.

The rise of focus-group composition exemplifies this shift. Songs began following algorithmic formulas: verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structures timed to radio programming needs. Harmonic complexity disappeared in favor of three-chord progressions. Melodic ranges narrowed to accommodate vocal limitations of manufactured performers. The result was music designed for passive consumption rather than active engagement.

This standardization destroyed regional musical diversity worldwide. Ireland’s traditional sean-nós singing gave way to generic Celtic-branded products. Brazil’s regional styles – forró from the northeast, samba from Rio, bossa nova from the urban intelligentsia, were homogenized into sanitized “world music.” France’s chanson tradition, with its sophisticated wordplay and melodic complexity, disappeared under Anglo-American pop dominance. Germany’s rich folk traditions and Austria’s classical heritage were marginalized in favor of imported commercial formulas. Even non-Western traditions suffered: India’s classical ragas were simplified for Western consumption, while African polyrhythmic complexity was reduced to basic drum loops for hip-hop production.

Consider the transformation of country music in America alongside similar processes globally. Traditional country featured complex narratives, sophisticated instrumentation, and regional dialects that preserved cultural memory. Corporate country eliminated these elements, producing sanitized products that maintained surface aesthetics while destroying substantive content. This pattern repeated worldwide: British folk became manufactured “Celtic mysticism,” Italian regional songs became generic “Mediterranean” mood music, and Mexican regional styles were compressed into simplified “Latin” categories for global marketing.

This commercialization served dual purposes: immediate profit maximization and long-term cultural conditioning. Populations accustomed to simplified musical structures developed simplified cognitive patterns, creating consumers rather than creators, passive recipients rather than active participants.

Phase Two: The Deliberate Degradation (2000s-2020s)

The second phase involved active promotion of culturally destructive musical forms. Hip-hop’s transformation from authentic urban expression into corporate weapon illustrates this process. Early hip-hop emerged from genuine community conditions, featuring sophisticated wordplay, social commentary, and innovative sampling techniques. However, corporate interests deliberately promoted its most destructive elements while suppressing constructive aspects.

Record labels systematically elevated artists promoting violence, drug use, materialism, and social fragmentation while marginalizing those offering positive messages. The contrast is striking: conscious rap artists like KRS-One or Dead Prez received minimal promotion while destructive acts received massive marketing campaigns. This couldn’t be market-driven selection but conscious cultural engineering.

Simultaneously, even contemporary classical music abandoned its civilizational role. Where traditional classical music encoded mathematical principles, emotional sophistication, and spiritual transcendence, modernist composition embraced deliberate ugliness and intellectual obscurity. Atonality, prepared pianos, and chance operations created “music” designed to alienate rather than elevate audiences. This served to destroy classical music’s cultural transmission mechanisms while creating elite academic circles divorced from public engagement.

The progressive establishment’s role became crucial during this phase. Cultural institutions like universities, foundations, media outlets,  actively promoted aesthetic degradation as “authentic,” “diverse,” or “democratizing.” Critics questioning musical quality faced accusations of racism, elitism, or cultural imperialism. This ideological framework prevented resistance to obvious cultural decline.

The COVID Acceleration: Isolating Musical Humanity

The COVID-19 response accelerated musical degradation through systematic isolation of communal music-making. Church choirs, school bands, community orchestras, and local music venues faced unprecedented restrictions while corporate music streaming experienced explosive growth. Live music – the foundation of human musical experience – was declared “non-essential” while digital consumption became mandatory. Milions of children who entered the education system in those time, have been suffering from that ever since. I have experienced this with my own children – and it was playing music instruments and singing, that helped a lot!

This isolation served multiple functions for the emerging technocratic order. First, it normalized artificial musical experiences over human interaction. Second, it created dependence on algorithmic curation rather than personal musical exploration. Third, it eliminated the social bonding that communal music-making provides, creating atomized individuals susceptible to external control.

Streaming algorithms further manipulated musical consumption through behavioral modification techniques. Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” and similar systems don’t merely recommend music – they shape musical preferences through psychological conditioning. Users gradually lose capacity for musical exploration, accepting algorithmic selections as personal choice while experiencing subtle mood regulation through carefully curated soundtracks.

The Technocratic End Game: Music as Control Mechanism

The ultimate goal becomes clear when examining current technological developments alongside political proposals. AI music generation now produces competent compositions in seconds, threatening to eliminate human musical creation entirely. Meanwhile, political leaders promote “15-minute cities” where cultural consumption occurs within controlled digital environments rather than organic community spaces.

This convergence isn’t coincidental. The techno-aristocratic vision requires populations that accept artificial experiences as equivalent to human creativity. Music serves as the crucial conditioning mechanism because of its profound neurological effects. Populations conditioned to accept AI-generated “music” will similarly accept AI-generated news, entertainment, and eventually governance.

The health implications are particularly sinister. Active music-making provides documented benefits: improved cognitive function, enhanced emotional regulation, less loneliness, stronger social bonds, and reduced anxiety and depression. These benefits derive from music’s unique combination of intellectual challenge, physical coordination, and social cooperation. AI music consumption eliminates these therapeutic elements, creating populations dependent on external mood regulation rather than internal resilience – just look at Apple Music’s new ‘Find Your Mood’ section.

The Benefits to Elite Control: A Bipolar World Order

This musical degradation might serve distinct but competing technocratic power centers, primarily the American progressive establishment and the Chinese Communist Party apparatus. Each represents a different model of technological control through cultural manipulation, creating a bipolar struggle for global dominance through consciousness shaping.

The American model operates through corporate-progressive fusion, where Silicon Valley tech giants, entertainment conglomerates, and academic institutions coordinate cultural engineering. Companies like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube don’t merely distribute music – they actively shape global musical consciousness through algorithmic curation. This system promotes individual atomization while maintaining the illusion of personal choice. Americans consume AI-curated playlists believing they reflect personal preferences, while actually receiving behavioral modification programming designed to create compliant, consumer-oriented populations.

The Chinese model operates through direct state control of cultural production and consumption. The CCP’s social credit system explicitly links cultural consumption to citizen compliance, while platforms like TikTok serve as sophisticated psychological warfare tools against Western populations. Chinese-controlled algorithms deliberately promote the most destructive Western musical content – violence, sexual degradation, social fragmentation, while maintaining stricter cultural standards domestically. This represents asymmetric cultural warfare: destroying competitor populations through their own entertainment systems.

Both systems benefit from musically impoverished global populations in different ways. The American progressive elite maintains control through manufactured cultural fragmentation – identity-based music consumption that prevents broad social solidarity while creating predictable tribal loyalties (Swifties anyone?). The Chinese system benefits from Western cultural degradation while building domestic social cohesion through controlled cultural expression.

This bipolar competition intensifies the assault on traditional musical culture. Neither system supports, even tolerates organic, community-based musical traditions, because that could serve as foundations for political resistance. Both require populations dependent on technological mediation rather than capable of autonomous cultural creation. The resulting clash may determine whether future human musical experience serves American-style managed individualism or Chinese-style collective control.

However, both models share a fundamental characteristic: rule by technocratic elites who maintain access to genuine musical culture through private institutions, exclusive venues, and educational systems unavailable to the masses. This creates a two-tier global society where culturally sophisticated ruling classes manage musically impoverished underclasses suitable only for manipulation and control.

Resistance and the Path Forward: Reclaiming Individual Musical Voice

Understanding, that music is being weaponized to foster passivity and disangagement – this systematic assault on musical culture reveals the necessity of conscious resistance, beginning with the most fundamental human musical act: producing sound with one’s own voice. The battle for human consciousness through music must start at the individual level, with the simple but profound ability to create musical tones through singing, whistling, humming, drumming, or playing instruments. This represents the irreducible core of human musical expression that no algorithm can replicate or control.

The crisis runs deeper than institutional musical education – it extends to the basic human confidence to make music at all. Generations raised on perfectionist commercial standards have become afraid of their own voices. Adults who readily consume endless streams of professional recordings hesitate to sing a lullaby to their children or hum a traditional song from their own heritage. This psychological intimidation serves the technocratic agenda by creating populations that see music as something others do for them rather than something they do themselves.

Reclaiming individual musical voice requires deliberate cultivation of what ethnomusicologists call “musicking” – the active human engagement with musical sound production regardless of formal training or technical proficiency. This begins with simple acts: parents singing traditional lullabies despite imperfect voices, families sharing folk songs from their cultural heritage, individuals whistling melodies while walking instead of wearing earbuds, people humming during daily activities rather than consuming algorithmic soundtracks.

Traditional songs carry particular power because they encode cultural memory in melodic and rhythmic patterns that survive across generations through human transmission. When a grandmother teaches a grandchild a song she learned from her own grandmother, she transmits not merely notes and words but cognitive patterns, emotional frameworks, and cultural continuity that no digital system can replicate. These songs often feature the mathematical relationships and harmonic structures that promote cognitive development – natural pedagogical tools refined through centuries of human musical evolution.

The therapeutic benefits of personal musical production cannot be overstated. Singing engages the vagus nerve, reducing stress and promoting emotional regulation through physiological mechanisms. Playing instruments develops fine motor skills, coordination, and bilateral brain integration. Group musical activities create social bonding through synchronized breathing, rhythmic entrainment, and shared creative accomplishment. These benefits emerge only through active participation, not passive consumption.

Communities must prioritize rebuilding local musical institutions independent of corporate or governmental control. This means house concerts instead of commercial venues, neighborhood singing groups instead of algorithmic playlists, family musical traditions instead of streaming services. Churches, schools, and community centers must resist the pressure to replace human musical leadership with technological substitutes.

Parents face a particular challenge: how can they encourage musical education in their children when they themselves lack confidence in their own musical abilities? The answer lies in modeling musical courage rather than musical perfection. Children need to see adults engaging with music as a natural human activity – singing while cooking, humming while working, attempting instruments without embarrassment about technical limitations. The message must be that music belongs to all humans, not just trained professionals.

This requires conscious rejection of the perfectionist standards that commercial music has imposed. Traditional musical cultures valued participation over perfection, community over individual achievement, cultural transmission over innovation. Returning to these values means accepting that a mother’s lullaby, however technically imperfect, carries more human value than any AI-generated composition.

The path forward demands recognition that every human voice, every attempt at musical expression, represents an act of resistance against technological control. When individuals choose to create rather than consume, to participate rather than observe, to transmit rather than receive, they reclaim the fundamental human capacity that distinguishes consciousness from programming.

The battle for musical culture is ultimately the battle for human consciousness. Those who control the soundtrack control the society. Reclaiming music means reclaiming humanity from the technocratic machinery designed to replace it. The choice before us is clear: genuine musical engagement or digital serfdom. The time for conscious resistance is now, before the final notes of human musical civilization fade into algorithmic silence.

Picture by Gemini AI