Cultural Repetition Quotes

Culture is just a shambling zombie that repeats what it did in life; bits of it drop off, and it doesn't appear to notice.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

I'm proud to be an American, no matter what. But Amercian culture is stale, you know wha I'm saying ? We keep regurgitating the same sh*t. And it ain't exciting. I seen it from when I was a kid watching the whole sh*t. The sh*t was exciting to me.

Every decade has its ABBA; that's the proof that pop will always be around.

Each generation thinks it invented sex; each generation is totally mistaken. Anything along that line today was commonplace both in Pompeii and in Victorian England; the differences lie only in the degree of coverup - if any.

Isn't it our job to be appalled by our parents? Isn't it every generation's duty to be dismayed by the previous generation? And to assert that we are different - only to discover later that we are distressingly the same?

The ways in which I was obsessed with Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp 20 years ago is completely replicated by my daughters' and my crush on Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman now.

Isn't nearly every Hindi film a rehash of some movie or the other?

It's like the mod thing is happening again.

Nothing goes full-circle with music.

Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity.

Today I believe that man cannot escape his destiny to create whatever it is we make - jazz, a wooden spoon, or graffiti on the wall. All of these are expressions of man's creativity, proof that man has not yet been destroyed by technology. But are we making things for the people of our epoch or repeating what has been done before? And finally, is the question itself important? We must ask ourselves that. The most important thing is always to doubt the importance of the question.

The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.

The one thing that I've learned is that people don't change. Each new generation has the same stuff that the last one did. It's one of those things where jazz kind of works in five-year cycles.

You have two kinds of shows on Broadway - revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is - a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture.