the postmodern analysts are basically correct. people mistakenly view them as saying “this is good” rather than “this is how things are”. i think taking this approach allows you to see how true a lot of their posits are today - some being like, fifty-plus years old now, and how much you can apply them to the arts. even doing this in simple ways can lead to complex interesting results. lyotard said postmodernism is skepticism of meta-narratives. people have a kind of allergy to meta-narratives at this time. a meta-narrative is just an overarching narrative, which, like an umbrella, contains something, often smaller narratives: for him, this was knowledge itself - from isolated bits of data to entire academic fields. he wrote this in a report that was called something like, “the present state of knowledge” - i believe a government (quebec?) commissioned this report from him, about that exact topic. what is the state of information and knowledge at this time? answer: skepticism of overarching large sweeping narratives. that’s a useful definition for postmodernism, and you can even see it in a field like… comics online. that’s one of my fields. even though it’s far removed from academia, the same rules apply. comics online used to follow specific characters in a specific time and place. that’s a simple way of saying they used to have a meta-narrative. the meta-narrative for a comic online might be “here’s two guys, they live in saint paul, they’re punks, they get up to adventures”. there would be narratives under this and you could take the strips as one off slices, but it was all contained in that meta-narrative. whether each member of the audience was aware of this or not, it came through in the images. images of specific people in specific places. comics online are not like this anymore - they generally use generic stand-in characters who represent anyone, or no one in particular. most don’t have a set location like “detroit, michigan”, or a main character named “aaron” who likes coffee and techno music and has a girlfriend named alice - the main person is generally just “a person”, representing anyone to various degrees (not saying this is good or bad). this makes the comics about … you, or about anyone. they’re no longer objective (looking at two guys in a cafe in brooklyn from the outside), they’re subjective: about your subjective internal experience as an individual. you can observe this yourself. stepping outside my domain, i suspect - though i have no experience in this field - this is one reason why movies are always sequels now. on some level, a movie can’t really make the transition i just described. at least, it’s difficult to imagine. you’re always looking at a guy with specific characteristics in a specific place. but due to the skepticism of meta-narratives, it’s hard to introduce new ones. so, you can use a meta-narrative people already know (in this way, it also becomes about them, and their subjective experience of the narrative). you can take any of these tools and really run with them. you can apply it to music: “genre” is really an art meta-narrative. it’s an overarching narrative that contains the art itself. you pick up a punk album, that album exists in the meta-narrative of “punk”. but, people have an allergy to meta-narratives now. so, music tends towards not being confined by a genre. it doesn’t want to be part of a meta-narrative, because, like we started with, people are skeptical of them: they come off as cliche, trite, a put on, trying too hard, cringe, or anything else you hear about art (in any form) today that isn’t actively seeking to be difficult to classify.