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!).
In many ways, we are drowning in culture and monoculture. It is strange. Netflix has become a prime importer of foreign TV which would have been inaccessible for the most part in the recent past. Disney is a huge cultural-entertainment complex hegemon.
I read Goldberg’s article found it made sense. It also took me into a rabbit hole last Sunday on the Dimes Square scene including Taylor Lorenz declaring it a non-scene and some extremely long and bitter rants by a guy named Mike Crumplar.
https://mcrumps.substack.com/p/my-own-dimes-square-fascist-humiliation
In terms of cultural cache, I do think it used to be more valuable but only in certain times and places. My parents were middle-class second-generation Jewish-Americans who grew up and spent in their early 20s in and around NYC. My mom remembered going to free classes at the Met and some early performances at LaMaMa. She was taken on a high school trip to see Leonard Bernstein rehearse the New York Philharmonic right before the opening of Lincoln Center. I was raised with the old-school view that it is important to have cultural tastes and interests beyond merely studying something that will earn you a good middle-class or above life.
But there was a sea-change against this view sometime during my life and it is seen as a luxury now. There was a time when studying business was considered what your not so bright distant cousin did in university. Now the most common major is business. There is also the fact that we are a fractured culture. Two people can have cultivated and obscure cultural-artistic niches and still see each other as lame based on those interests or possibly from different orbits.
The Dimes Square scene is hard to make out. You have a bunch of 20 and 30-somethings hanging out in a small part of Manhattan. Many of these people want to be writers. Some seem to be of the “do you have a day job?” class. Others seem to be part of or flirt with the arch-reactionary Catholic rad trad subset because it allegedly offends the bien pensant thinking from the older sibling progressives in Brooklyn. Well, they are as arch-reactionary as you can be while still liking to do lots of coke and drinking.
The young playwright of this moment is called Matthew Gasda. He grew up completely middle-class in Bethlehem, PA and studied at Syracuse.* He made it to NY right after graduating from college and then spent a decade working as a teacher and tutor while writing plays in obscurity and self-production. Somehow (and the articles never makes it clear how), he establishes some friendships with the children of famous authors and his loft-produced play gets coverage in the Times. In this, you have Crumplar who styles himself as an ideological foe to the maybe or maybe not reactionaries of Dimes Square but is also clearly jealous as hell of all the coverage the scene gets and wants to be profiled in the New York Times and Vulture too.
Meanwhile, as Taylor Lorenz observed on twitter, Dimes Square and its dissenters are just 2000 people that the overwhelming bulk of humanity has never heard about.Report
I have to admit that I need to read up on Dimes Square because I don’t really know what it is. I know the neighborhood in question because we go to the Metrograph a lot and it’s not far from there. And my girlfriend definitely has opinions on Dimes Square. But, honestly, I just read the one NYT article on the Culture Christians cosplaying with the rosary by Matt Schmitz’s wife and had to take a shower afterwards.Report
Wait… what?Report
I’ll let y’all read and decide:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/opinion/nyc-catholicism-dimes-square-religion.html?unlocked_article_code=LsrlkU4Rne3fvzlvr1nm5_3SwJssepvplcwa-mJn8EB2Nzr4xcdGV7cMMvqfJESlkgUfHPEhrlySKIemPAlz6cLkNWHKpGnOBbIXw8lne6wGDiFyJg8eaAeaXdO4S_ARYTVXq3vTeQt4XMrqaSI_T9EW1q3-5tCXcEtwOitSjN0UdUeOPve2GNQ6_eTLHuXs_adci-ACktCUnqxDz9SVtEjOAwRwAFkX442O0pb_Ci0jPh0by0ceCqWOWoOs8vLzUO7r374E4mouNwuAbViAAOmqYKMKw7g_1nGIzKOTkzA0YX_VcCy4qyqovpLvL0O5stwvYld7qChmtP6036SafLgME1Va_OmTCHMc-JZ5uA&smid=share-urlReport
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-dimes-square-became-the-new-york-neighborhood-we-love-to-hate
“Much ink has been spilled in speculation about the political predilections of the Dimes Square set—is the scene indeed a hotbed of fascist intent, or is it a psychic space clamoring with the confused flounderings of “anti-woke artists,” who are merely naive? What it’s not is a leftist paradise—it’s a grunge mall.
“The Dimes Square scene is small, but its ascent highlights a culture-wide shift,” Julia Yost wrote in the New York Times on Tuesday. Taylor Lorenz, a tech columnist at The Washington Post, doesn’t agree.
“It’s the exact opposite,” Lorenz tweeted. “This entire ‘scene’ is composed of maybe 2,000 people with *zero broader cultural relevance* and the media needs to stop falling for it.”
Clearly, something that used to be organically interesting and vivid is being endlessly unpacked, parsed, exalted, and mocked to the point of collapse.
Maybe this is good. Maybe we need a new scene. Maybe we need a fresh crop of major players and we need to find a new cluster of dimly-lit bistros in which to hang out and hook up.
“Dimes Square represents the broken promises of modernity,” writer and organizer Matthew Miles Goodrich told The Daily Beast. “Its denizens flout a decadent, suffocating culture. The vibe shift cometh.”Report
2000 is in the important number. The counter-cultural and avant-guard were always small and limited scenes but it felt that they could have a bigger cultural impact than their numbers warranted. Maybe this was always an illusion but it seemed to have more force in the past. These days, not only does that not seem to be the case but large numbers of the masses across the political spectrum are intent on making sure that the counter-culture knows that they are small group nobody cases about. The illusion is gone.Report
To me the question is less does it exist and more does it do or accomplish anything. Besides the silliness what I found missing was any accounting of creations of note. To riff a bit off your comments below, culture and society may have once been such that mere existence of nonconforming people could be subversive and noteworthy. I don’t think we live in that world (or at least country) anymore. To be important at some point you have to make something.Report
Dimes Square? WTF is that? I live in NYC (OK, Da Bronx, in a neighborhood some local entrepreneurs think may become the next Williamsburg) and had never heard of it. I had to Google it and after I learned what there was to know, or, since hardly anybody knows anything, what was being said about it, I’d like those minutes of my life back.Report
Same. I live in NJ and work in the West Village and was confused about why Saul spelled Times Square wrong and why everything he said about it was wrong.
When you Google something and every article framed as, “Is XYZ a big deal?” and they all just refer to each other… the answer is clearly… no… it is not a big deal.Report
No, it’s only interesting that certain legacy newspaper writers have reached the bottom of the barrel for things to cover. It’s also a very tiny space geographically, which suggests we’ll eventually get a cultural history of one bathroom in one bar and how it “changed everything.”Report
I had not heard of it until this post and know very little of NYC generally, having only been a few times as a tourist and to visit a friend who lived there briefly.Report
Veronica got at what I thought was a very insightful point when we were talking 90s music here:
https://ordinary-times.com/2022/04/05/grunge-was-the-90s-music-palate-cleanser-not-its-highlight/
I have come to think that one of the interesting, unintentional consequences of the death of the cultural gatekeepers has been the disintegration of the counter-culture. While I don’t mourn the loss of a handful of record labels as arbiters of what is and isn’t suited for popular consumption I do maybe think we lost something with the odd little backdoors and cracks in the facade that fed bigger, more unified subcultures of music and art.Report
Stupid wordpress ate my comment. The thing about a lot of indie music is that it sounds just like the stuff that came out in the 1990s and early aughts. This is a video from a band called Horsegirl. I like it. All the women in this band were born after I graduated from college or close to it. If you transported them back to the 1990s or 2000s, they would be right at home including their clothing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBuOJF_rX40
This is what people mean when they talk about culture being stuck.Report
Wow. Both of those bands have clearly mastered what they’re going for but I hear what you’re saying. It sounds stuck in time.Report
Yeah, jesus, that video says it was posted in March of this year, but in my mind I can hear the Beavis and Butthead commentary.Report
It’s rock and roll music, gents. The last truly new movement in that genre was grunge, and that happened 30 years ago. There’s only so much room for innovation.Report
Originality is awesome when you can find it but I’ve come to also appreciate craft. I’ve been on a kick with the guys in the below link. Even if they aren’t breaking new ground they know how to rock.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jF0KwmS8KTAReport
Heh. It’s the Take Five of metal.Report
I think this is true, but it’s not the full picture. There haven’t been any coherent new movements since grunge within rock’n’roll (that’s all happening in electronic music, and to a lesser extent, hip hop now), but there has been a bunch of “experimental” rock that is more or less influential on artists who are doing 60s-90s rock music with contemporary twists. The problem with “experimental” music is that, by definition, it doesn’t lend itself well to coherent movements, even if it can lead to the start of new ones.
A good dissertation topic might be on the question of why experimental rock isn’t producing new movements these days. Is it something about how we access music? Is it something about the sheer amount of music we have access to? I dunno.
Also, I have hope that we’ll get new movements in the future. Jazz, another genre of western music that had become somewhat stagnant (though there were always a few artists doing innovative, or experimental things), is experiencing a sort of renaissance as young people (especially in England, for some reason) begin to put together jazz, hip hop, rock, and electronic music.Report
Here is another new indie band that sounds like they could have been around when I was in college twenty years ago and more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZWxWsEiGBQReport
I think the actual answer might be a combination of W. David Marx’s status no longer being tied to cultural sophistication and Lorentzen’s the cultural conservatism of conglomerates. Like my brother pointed out, status as not always tied with cultural sophistication. For a big part of American history, the elites loathed the avant-guard and cultural sophistication. They could be rather philistine during the late 19th and early 20th century. It was only during a brief period from the 1920s to the 1980s, give or take a decade, that having cultural sophistication and liking the avant-guard in art conveyed status. It was also during this time period where the cultural entrepreneurs believed they had some duty to force this upon the masses whether they liked it or not. David Sarnoff, founder of NBC, and John Reith of the BBC were very much big believers in making people eat their cultural vegetables.
Sometime around the 1990s, give or take, the link between status and cultural sophistication became delinked for various reasons. At the same time, media conglomerates also lost the vestiges of the eat your vegetables philosophy. A lot of this was because cable, satellite, and eventually streaming ensured that there was no time when the media companies could do this. The rise of slob populism was also a contributing factor. Now the media conglomerates only want tried and true things that made money. So the delinking of status and cultural sophistication led to the cultural conservatism of the media conglomerates.
I’m also wondering if expanding social liberalism, despite certain setbacks, plays a role in this. A lot of the avant-guard was done by mainstream society forcing say LGBT people and other minorities into the peripheries of society. They created sub-cultures and these sub-cultures led to some great artistic culture. Without the official need for sub-cultures to provide protection, you don’t have the need or necessities for adventurous culture because the mainstream is more open.Report
Going further with my last paragraph, a lot of the great cultural advancements occurred when social conservatism and conventional morality were really more widespread and you had this big cross class group that you could shock relatively easily. Since it is much harder to shock people now, especially from a liberal-left perspective, then it becomes harder to have this avant guard culture and really arguing what makes your artistically and culturally sophisticated. People are going to roll their eyes at your niche tastes rather than finding them revolting or scandalous. One reason why so many would be avant-guard people are attracted to things like trad Catholicism Is that is how you get the shock in the days of “In this house we believe.”Report
Pop culture is “boring now” for the same reason that comedy got boring in 2008.Report