* Dégringolade: French; a quick deterioration or breakdown, as of a situation or circumstance.
Maybe degringolade is the wrong word for the current condition of western civilization. Civilizational deterioration is generally gradual, inching along decade by decade, generation by generation. Or, conversely, it’s the right word. Over the span of just two or three generations, we have experienced a deterioration of rational thought and subsequent creativity that has filtered into the arts and beyond. We get to revisit massive failures with the arts being the canary in the coal mine.
Taylor Swift, the new Supremes (Motown, Barry Gordy, Hollan-Dozier-Holland, etc.)? Elsewhere, Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayoral candidate – more than a mere socialist, a Marxist – has a realistic chance to inflict a form of Leninism on America’s cardinal city. How’s that possible when we have the immediate examples of Venezuela, Cuba, and nearly the entire 20th century for dire warnings? Are we that ignorant? This capacity for belief in the unbelievable reaches everywhere, on social media, our newsrooms, Hollywood, into sizeable chunks of our most recent generations.
I’m reminded of Victor Davis Hanson’s observation on the young’s infatuation with Mamdani (9/15/2025):
“Some of [the Mamdani enthusiasm], of course, is ignorance, but what [Mamdani] was trying to say is that people who cannot afford a home, they cannot afford energy, they cannot afford gasoline, they can’t afford to buy a car, they prolong their adolescence. They do not get married, or they’ve been indoctrinated in college that the nuclear family is toxic, or they don’t understand the beauty of child raising or raising children. And in a larger sense, these personal decisions they’re making are not only making them unhappy, but they’re hurting the country.” (see #1)
The accused Killer of Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson, clearly had a wonderful childhood and upbringing. Then it appears that he spiraled into the abyss of the deep dark web, found thrills in the sexually exotic, and absorbed the philosophical fantasies dwelling there. Out came a killer.
Music is negatively impacted. We pat ourselves on the back for our brilliance in inventing the digital world and its application to everything. Cars are swamped in chips making them more fuel efficient and reducing emissions, and nearly unserviceable. They are throw-away cars, built to survive up to the end of the lease or warranty, and designed around political mandates. Modern music also has a throw-away quality, forgettable, not endearing.
The young’s rediscovery of the old stuff, from Glenn Miller to Frank Sinatra to the 60s and 70s, is mesmerizing to them, treated like the discovery of a long-buried Ovid manuscript at Pompeii. The music was more human from creation to instrumentation and vocals to recording engineer, a quality missing from our modern synthesized creations. Digitization is omnipresent today, the human element reduced in artificial vocals, instruments, and even penetrating its creation in advanced software, AI. A mediocre sameness overwhelms, reminding us that machines will only be great at repetition. And that includes the lyrics. “Self-learning” software is a more complicated way of producing the same thing over and over again.
The music is like the cars, bland and not endearing. Compare most anything today with, let’s say, “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys. I understand that my breadth of exposure to today’s music might be more limited than yours; yet, the sheer volume and range of music before the full onset of digitization is unmistakable. And, in my view, it was better, generational bias or no.
Watch Brian Wilson in the recording studio with session musicians like the Wrecking Crew putting together “God Only Knows”. Then, listen to the finished product in the video below it. And below that, listen to Glenn Miller’s transition from “Moonlight Serenade” to “I know Why” in the reply field under it.
Degringolade from then to today? Could be.
Brian Wilson in the recording studio:
“God Only Kows”, The Beach Boys, the final product:
Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade”/”I know Why”:
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Charlie Kirk’s Challenge to a Generation Will Be His Legacy”, Victor Davis Hanson, The Daily Signal. 9/15/2025, at https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/09/15/charlie-kirks-challenge-to-a-generation-will-be-his-legacy/.