by Joe Miller,
Director of Development
In 2022, Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” and Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” hit the US top 40. The songs were originally released in 1985 and 1986, respectively. Their resurgence was powered by their appearance in Stranger Things, the Netflix hit that is one long homage to nerdy teens in the mid-1980s.
Nostalgia powers a lot of popular culture these days.
Music critic Ted Gioia points out that new music accounts for only about one in four tracks that are streamed. Comic sales are still fueled by the characters who were popular in the 1970s. The highest-grossing Broadway shows in 2023 originated in the 20th century. And 83% of movie revenue now comes from franchise films.
This recycling of pop culture led music critic Spencer Kornhaber to ask in the June edition of The Atlantic: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture?
Maybe the reason kids are listening to Kate Bush and Metallica and watching shows about nerd culture in the 1980s is that new stuff just isn’t very good.
Cultural critic David Marx (not related to Karl) argues that pop culture feels stagnant because it has become less artistic.
Marx says that before the 21st century, critics drew a distinction between art and entertainment.
Both are creative endeavors. But art, Marx says, involved “creative alterations of established conventions within an aesthetic context that provide new stimulus, and… force the audience… to perceive stimulus in new ways.”
Things at the art-end of the spectrum were labeled “high culture” or “highbrow.” Things on the other end were called “low culture” or “lowbrow.”
Somewhere around 2000, critics began to realize that calling the kinds of things that ordinary people enjoy “low culture” is kind of insulting.
They began to embrace the idea – which goes by the catchy name of poptimism – that there is no high culture and low culture. It’s all just culture.
I’m sympathetic to the impulses behind poptimism. We can learn a lot about a society by studying its popular culture. Plus, entertainment is a good thing.
At the same time, there’s something important in the distinction between art and entertainment.
Bon Jovi was everywhere in my youth. Today, there’s a good chance that I’ll turn the volume up and sing along to at least one Bon Jovi track over the course of a long drive. But if you asked me to hum a particular Bon Jovi song right now, I’d probably mix them up, because, let’s face it, their songs all kinda sound the same.
At the same time Bon Jovi was selling out stadiums, R.E.M. was playing college campuses with experimental music that laid the foundations for what would become alternative rock.
If popularity is what matters, then Bon Jovi is far more important to 1980s music than R.E.M.
I’m not sure I’d want to try to make that argument.
Once you reject the idea that experimentation is a necessary condition for artistry, you end up twisting yourself into knots trying to explain why things are important. Here’s Kornhaber (a proponent of poptimism) on Taylor Swift:
“Taylor Swift [has] been pioneering a futuristic form of storytelling: every verse and every public utterance links together an intricate web of ‘lore,’ which brings fans together for puzzle-solving and reinterpretation.”
I’ll admit that I’m not a Swiftie. But I feel fairly confident that no one listens to Swift because of her “intricate web of ‘lore’.”
Swift writes catchy songs. Or, as Marx puts the point, “people know when a song is just a jam and not a radical piece of transformative art.”
Entertainment is rarely innovative. Entertainment needs to appeal to lots of people. Innovation tends to be divisive. The surest route to mass appeal is to give people exactly what they expect.
There’s nothing wrong with that. We run into trouble only when we start to judge the health of popular culture by way of the most popular things. At that point, we are, as Marx says, judging “the health of culture on its least artistic output.”
For example, we remember 1999 as a great year for movies because of things like Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix, The Green Mile, Being John Malkovitch, Office Space, The Insider and The Blair Witch Project.
But the actual top grossing movie of 1999 was the dreadful Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace. Others in the top 20 include James Bond, Austin Powers and Toy Story sequels, two book adaptations (Tarzan and Sleepy Hollow), two television remakes (Inspector Gadget and Wild, Wild West) and one of those largely interchangeable Adam Sandler films.
If we judged 1999 by today’s critical standards, it’s not really very memorable at all.
