Personally, I think that 90% of all popular culture is crap. I think that the contemporary popular preference is remarkably debased, that its hallmarks are "consumerism, passivity, crassness, and mediocrity".
But in all likelihood you think that 90% of all popular culture is crap too, and we're just disputing matters of taste.
I'm not trying to dispute matters of taste here -- I'm not complaining (here) about what the system produces, I'm complaining about the way our system produces it.
I don't think "popular culture" qua popular culture is the crux of the problem. The word "culture", unmodified by adjectives, means "popular culture". The people who made Folsom points and the Willendorf Venus obviously had a culture.
But since the Industrial Revolution we've seen the spread of a phenomenon I regard as insidious, what I'm calling "broadcast culture". In preindustrial times local people generated their own popular culture (with reference to their perceptions of the aristocracy, to be sure -- the provinces imitated Paris and Rome as best they could) -- but in general people were at least as much producers of culture as consumers. Until the 20th century it was quite possible to identify the mileau of most Europeans down to the province level by idiosyncracies of speech and dress.
But since the spread of mass media, "culture" is to a large extent generated by a very small percentage of the population, and consumed and imitated by the rest.
(I want to distinguish my "broadcast culture" from haute culture. Haute culture is produced and consumed by a self-defined elite -- people who are set apart from the workaday world, often by greater wealth but always by inclination.
Broadcast culture is specifically produced for general, even lowest-common-denominator, consumption.)
"... in Huxley's vision (Brave New World), no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one."
Amusing Ourselves to Death :
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman
page vii
Very highly recommended!
(And see also Postman's great comments
on television.)
"I'm watching VH1's Presidential Pop Culture Quiz right now and they just asked (2004 candidate for U.S. President) Wesley Clark the following questions: What boy band was Justin Timberlake in? What is "bling-bling"? What is Eminem's real name? Who wrote the Harry Potter books?
Unlike Joe Liberman, Clark didn't get any of those questions right (He actually thought Justin Timberlake was a member of the Beach Boys). ...
Tonight he's dropped out of the race."
"Leadbelly * once said Washington DC was a bourgeois town, but that's not what we encountered there Tuesday night. The scene was unbelievable. Just before our talk, the hall was filled with blaring rock and roll and 1100 people batting three dozen beach balls back and forth around the auditorium. It was great. It was insane."
-- Frankly, this sounds pretty darn bourgeois to me! Sounds like a
Republican National Convention.
.
*
(Presumably this Leadbelly.)
"Marketers do "research" by watching what the kids are wearing, then they sell those ideas back to them at 1000% markup. As ever, the real creativity emerges bottom up. but the marketing and sales are top down."
"... therapists are seeing countless cases of Sudden-Reality Shock Syndrome (SRSS), a disorder affecting those suddenly and violently re-grounded in the real world."
"From where I sit, the future lies not in mass production, mass merchandising, mass markets, mass media or mass culture.
The future business of businesses that have a future will be about subtle differences, not wholesale conformity; about diversity, not homogeneity; about breaking rules, not enforcing them; about pushing the envelope, not punching the clock; about engagement, not protection; about doing it first, not doing it "right"; about making it better, not making it perfect; about telling the truth, not spinning bigger lies; about turning people on, not "packaging" them; and perhaps above all, about building convivial communities and knowledge ecologies online, not leveraging demographic sectors there."
"I think the wave of spam that washes over our email inboxes every day is what the mass market has learned from mass marketing over the last 70 years. Used to be only the Procter & Gambles of the world could do it. Now anybody can, for almost no money at all. The result is a kind of denial of civilization attack -- just like we've been getting on TV and radio since grandma was a kid."
"The producer of the series, Garry Marshall, states that he initially proposed the title Mork Chronicles. That title was intended to convey an emphasis on an enlightened alien reporting and commenting on our way of life. Marshall reports that a network executive rejected that title on the grounds that the viewing public would not know the meaning of "chronicles". Instead the network executive asked for a "polar bear" title - a title simple enough to remember so that people can name pets or animals in the zoo after it. This is a revealing instance of the way in which mimesis becomes a predominant modality of television viewing. The network executive rejected a title that called for minimal reasoning based on conceptualization in favor of a title format designed to maximize recall. The network executive thus engaged in a hegemony-producing practice: heeding the imperatives of profit and audience maximization, he moved to sacrifice conceptualization in the interest of the efficiency of repetition and recall."
"The headline in Wednesday's paper shot me full of cold, jangly fear: 'TV can't supply enough stars'. ...
How did this happen? When I was growing up, the world seemed awash in stars....
Awful. Just awful. I am convinced that these shows actually liquefied useful portions of my brain..."
(Of course, come to think of it, "grotesque" is exactly the word:
"Characterized by ludicrous or incongruous distortion, as of appearance or manner. Outlandish or bizarre, as in character or appearance. See synonyms at fantastic. Of, relating to, or being the grotesque style in art or a work executed in this style."
American Heritage Dictionary
-- see also grotty:
"Chiefly British Slang
Very unpleasant; miserable.
ETYMOLOGY: Alteration of grotesque."
- A page on this site on / Celebrity and Villainy /
"Celebrity involves disconnected veneration, adoration and other forms of subordination to elevated status. We've made an industry of it, and that industry has caused massive economic distortions that cannot help but collapse ....
(Add to that most governments, schools and other institutions that thrive to any degree on our inability or unwillingness to inform ourselves.) ...
The entertainment industry is fundamentally about making stars. In spite of its name, it is not about entertaining people, except as an effect of the star system, which is really about entertaining mass quantities of people. SMM ("star making machinery") manufactures, packages and delivers celebrity as a product. It works to cause appetites for it, and to deliver mass quantities of stuff made appealing by it, for as long as any variety of it might last. And since celebrity is perishable, the machinery keeps doing it over and over and over again."
"Most people, as Sir Thomas Beecham once said of British audiences, 'don't like music; they just like the noise it makes'. "
"These two books by young female journalists offer a depressing view of modern sexual mores in which it is increasingly acceptable for men to sit in front of their computers ... in lieu of having relationships with actual women, and in which women are desperately trying to please these guys by looking as much like (adult materials) stars as plastic surgery and skimpy clothing will allow. ..."The frat party of pop culture." Great phrase, that.
Ariel Levy's book on "raunch culture" also looks at the coarsening of society but focuses on the behavior of women rather than men. ... 'A tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular.' ... Levy warns that women have essentially given in and joined 'the frat party of pop culture.'
The notion that being raunchy is about being progressive is hogwash, Levy writes. It's just about being brainwashed by a skillful and profitable industry that has been promoting a very narrowly defined, teenage boy's vision of female beauty and behavior. For example, between 1992 and 2004, the number of breast-augmentation procedures in America increased more than 700 percent, she writes. ...
Levy's thesis was pretty much summed up by Erica Jong when Levy interviewed Jong on the 30th anniversary of the publication of her sexy novel Fear of Flying. 'Let's not kid ourselves that this is liberation,' Jong warned. 'The women who buy the idea that (being exhibitionistic) is power -- I mean, I'm for all that stuff -- but let's not get so into the [body parts] that we don't notice how far we haven't come. Let's not confuse that with real power. I don't like to see women fooled.'"