Dank is entirely subjective, and even if we were born in the same "back then", our danks can be completely incompatible. There isn't an agenda, it is just another extension of capitalism and profitability.
It's not, unfortunately. I was positing, would it read as misogynistic (I can see why you read it that way) if instead it had been a punk artist who was also a woman? Because then at least it would be women paired up against women with a similar message.
But I also agree with the likes of Theodor Adorno in that capitalist modes of production have been influencing the art of music negatively for a hundred years or more. (As such, punk hasn't been safe from such capitalist influence, for example)
In other words, I agree with the sentiment that capitalism is making music less dangerous and anodyne, but I also see how this meme is formatted in a way that can be read as misogynistic.
Edit: Or you could switch the bottom pics out for stuff like the bands The 1975 or Imagine Dragons. There's definitely some real shitty all-dude bands.
I'm sorry that was a bit glib of me, allow me to elaborate.
I'm of the opinion that basically any version of this meme that is not misogynistic would not be recognized as a meme by a modern audience.
First of all, the meme does not exist in isolation, it remixes images, ideas, esthetics already in the meme ecosystem. The bare-chested black and white image is a clear callback to the chad and old school cool archetypes, both quintessentially masculine. In fact, I'm not sure there is an image that you could present to modern meme audiences that stars a women and would immediately say "uncompromising cool artist - gender neutral". That is in and of itself in indicator or pervasive misogyny, but that's not surprising because the misogyny is often overt.
Which is my second point. The "black and white bare chested man cool, women and twinks and gender-nonconforming people not cool" is not an accident of the image choice, it's a feature. A lot of standard meme templates are just vectors to enforce the norms of patriarchy by shitting on "soy boys" and "simps" and other men deemed unworthy. The misogyny is baked into the format.
The third issue is that nostalgia memes are inherently misogynistic, even by meme standards. They aspire to RETVRN to the (often imagined) good old days when men were men and horses were horses and patriarchs traded women among themselves like cattle.
The medium is a message, and this medium really fights you when you try to transmit the gender neutral version of this message.
That said, I'd love to see a version of this meme with Bikini Kill as the top picture and commercial manly men losers as the bottom row. I just don't think meme audiences would get it.
