Sunday Morning! (Part One) Boredom and Bloat

Writing recently in the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg asks why is pop culture so “boring” now. Hollywood movies, television shows, albums, mass publishing books- it’s all boring, boring, boring! Or, at least, it’s not likely to move the culture forward in any great way. Goldberg rejects Christian Lorentzen’s thesis that the “risk aversion of cultural conglomerates” and the “primacy of marketing” are the reason “why there’s not more interesting indie stuff bubbling up.” Instead, Goldberg promotes W. David Marx’s theory that status is no longer tied to artistic sophistication and having niche tastes. In the age of the Internet, there’s no real culture cache in seeking out the weird, obscure, or transgressive- “challenging” art, in other words:

When the value of cultural capital is debased, writes Marx, it makes “popularity and economic capital even more central in marking status.” As a result, he says, there’s “less incentive for individuals to both create and celebrate culture with high symbolic complexity.”

It’s pretty easy to criticize middle-aged pundits who say pop culture ain’t what it used to be (“culture’s not boring; you’re boring!“). My girlfriend noted: “Life’s hard enough! People don’t need to be nagged for not spending their free time looking for art to ‘challenge’ them!” And, to my mind, it’s really hard to think of a time when mass culture wasn’t a little boring. No, Cyndi Lauper and U2 didn’t forever change the way I thought of music, and I don’t think I would have sought out the musicians that actually did were I not bored as a teenager. Mass media companies were always run by number-crunchers, although in retrospect, putting tech dudes in charge of disseminating art and culture was probably a lousy idea.

At any rate, what I’m struck by (more than some vague “boredom”) is how narrow the focus of so much art has become. We’re born naked and afraid and clueless, without a firm guide to being human, and that, to my mind, is what art should be: a record of what it’s like to be alive as the species we are that illuminates our common experience. But, if you were to write down every thought, feeling, and experience you had for, say, a month, you would amass a huge catalogue of moments that are common to humanity; but which only a very narrow range are even touched on by most art- and an even smaller range than that by pop art. Much of the sheer fact of what it is to be human- the strangeness and fleeting beauty of it all- goes totally unrecorded. That haunts me.

Which, finally, is I think the reason I tend to focus on small press books here (and, now, for BUST Magazine as well): I find they tend to be weirder and take a lot more chances. The themes aren’t announced quite so thunderingly. There has been a lot of attention paid recently to the bloat and cluelessness of the behemoth publishing houses and much of it reminds me of the Legend of Punk Rock I grew up hearing in the music scene. Ahem! So, by the late 70s, the major record labels had become bloated and out of touch with the needs of music fans. Realizing they had little chance of getting on major labels in the first place, many bands started their own independent music labels, and so they revolutionized the industry. 

Now, the Legend of Punk Rock is a bit exaggerated. But, it seems to me that the large publishing houses (and streaming services, etc.) have reached the point that the record industry was at when they were shoving the Eagles down everyone’s throats in the mid-70s. Happily, there is still plenty of weird and wild art out there, but if you’re going to find it, you’ll have to dig for it.

Speaking of bloat… I haven’t gotten to the book in question for this week: “Music is Over” by Ben Arzate! So, rather than write a sprawling epic this week, I’ll try a two-parter (another symbol of 70s record label excess: the double-album!).