In The Long Run, Our Culture Has Good Taste

The continuing fascination with Britney Spears’ apparent meltdown. The success of pop songs like “My Humps” or “The Thong Song” (just to pick two from the past decade) or of movies like Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo or Alvin and the Chipmunks (over $200 million at the domestic box office and counting).

There are also examples of pop culture in its various forms that are clearly (or at least debatably) high quality and that are popular. I’d never suggest that popularity is a sign of bad art (or bad or faddish scholarship), but at the same time, no one could accuse contemporary North American culture of having impeccably good taste. (I’ll leave aside for the moment issues of whether cultures can have taste – I’m really talking about the aggregate taste of millions of North American individuals. I’d also note that North America is by no means alone in having a fondness for a mixed bag of profound faire alongside tacky, or even godawful ephemera.)

People often have the impression that pop culture and the arts used to be better. This impression comes from the fact that in the long term, we actually have good taste, and this skews our memory of the past.

In contemporary society, whether you want to call it the society of late capitalism, the postmodern era, or something else, novelty is relentlessly marketed to all of us as consumers of popular culture and commodities generally. (And I think this basic argument applies as much outside North America as to North America.) Most of the novel things have very short shelf lives, momentarily amusing us or catching our eye, until something else does.

Objects of creative expression (and I would include scholarly expression as much as art here) that maintain the interest of many for very long, though highly various, tend to have objective qualities that reward repeated reflection and rumination (i.e. they’re actually at least somewhat profound) and that are not overly determined by the moment of their creation, allowing them to communicate across temporal contexts.

The art objects and scholarship that we continue to go back to over long periods of time are generally first rate stuff (though I’d leave room for exceptions – and it’s crucial to note that I’m not arguing that over time all instances of good art or scholarship come to be appreciated for what they are, but simply that creative expression that is appreciated over long periods of time is generally worthy of the appreciation).

We can have the impression that movies were better in the 1930s or 1940s because we mainly continue to watch and remember Casablanca or Citizen Kane, and compare them to the full range of good and schlocky movies being made today, forgetting about equally schlocky early movies like Gold Diggers of 1935 or Earthworm Tractors. We remember Frank Sinatra, but most don’t know, or have forgotten, a novelty song he sang with a singing dog, and most who do know about that have probably never actually heard it.

Art Music and Popular Music

Recently, in writing of Leonard Bernstein, I mentioned Bernstein as a composer who bridged an admittedly arbitrary (but sociologically real) divide between “high art” music and “popular” music.

Bernstein was not the first or only composer to do this. On further reflection I realized that there at least three types of ways in which different composers have bridged or blended the “high” and the “popular.”

One important side issue is that there are at least two different ways of conceptualizing the popular, the popular in the sense of folk culture and music or in the sense of modern “pop culture” or “mass culture.” While this can be an important distinction, as I said, here it is a side issue. Whether thinking about folk or pop music, these musics can be incorporated or combined with art music in a number of ways.

First, some composers have drawn on popular music as source material for the production of art music. In some cases, this takes the relatively straightforward form of simply arranging or orchestrating folk or pop songs, such as with Berio’s “Folk Songs” or the arrangements and orchestrations of Duke Ellington songs by Luther Henderson, as performed by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on the album Classic Ellington. In other cases, the melodic and other content of folk or pop material might be thoroughly varied and transformed to produce art music with less clear (though not to say unclear) connection to the popular source material, e.g. some of Bartok’s use of Hungarian folk music, or the use of folk melodies in Dvorak’s Symphony #9 “From the New World.” Of course, the use of one sort of music as source material for another sort of music is a two-way street. Think of Malcolm McLaren’s “Madame Butterfly,” Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven,” or David Shire’s “Night on Disco Mountain” (the latter two from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack).

Second, some composers have also drawn on popular music as source material but in ways that present popular music in recognizable form but in collage with other material. Charles Ives was an early master of such music. For example, in “Central Park in the Dark,” written as a sort of musical evocation of a place, recognizable bits of popular tunes occasionally enter and fade upon the theme of the piece, just as one might catch momentary passages of music coming from neighboring saloons while on a stroll through the park in the early 20th century. (There’s one musical moment in particular where, through the indelible influences of other elements of pop culture, the recognizable strain of an early 20th century pop tune inevitably evokes for me the thought of the singing frog from the old, but later, Warner Brothers cartoons, “Hello, my baby, hello, my darling, hello, my ragtime gal…”) Some of contemporary composer Osvaldo Golijov’s music works in a similar vein, e.g. the use of Latin American folk music in his “St. Mark Passion.”

Third, some composers draw on popular and art music traditions (rather than particular pieces as source material) simultaneously to produce music that is ambiguously new popular music and new art music. This is where much of Bernstein’s work fits, most famously West Side Story (though I tend to think of his Mass in the prior category). Another example would be Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. (Today, though still popular in the sense that large numbers of people still enjoy them, the genres of Broadway-style showtunes and jazz are no longer typically thought of as “pop music,” and they tend to always occupy an ambiguous position between art and popular music. What Bernstein and Gershwin succeeded in doing that was a bit different was creating new music that was simultaneously taken seriously [even if not by everyone] as opera and/or art music and as popular music, as opposed to participating in a genre that today resides fuzzily between popular and art music.)

Generation Gaps, Popular Music, and Affluence

In my previous two posts ("Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop" and "Miles Davis' Ferrari, or Popularity and Art") I argued that one of the important factors in the waning popularity of jazz, especially big band swing, beginning in the mid-1940s was a generation gap. The popularity of swing had been related to its role as dance music, appealing to and depending upon a young audience’s attendance at dance halls. Swing had been the popular dance music of the 1930s and early 1940s, but by the mid-1940s, the music was associated with those who had been young and sounded out of date to the youth of the time, and it began to give way to new forms of dance music.

(I’m not suggesting this was the only factor. Big bands were expensive to maintain, being comprised by definition of many musicians. They required large attendance at dance halls to be maintained. When the oil and automobile industries began buying up and dismantling many of the private trolley companies in a variety of American cities in the mid- to late 1940s, one effect was to make it harder for youth to attend dance halls in the same numbers – favoring smaller ensembles that were more cheaply maintained.)

Swing waned in favor of the new rhythm and blues music, which in turn gave way to rock and roll in the 1950s. The name “rock and roll” might have stuck around, but styles waxed and waned, with the intense popularity among 1950s youth of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and even Elvis giving way to Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and James Brown (just to name three intensely popular acts associated with somewhat different varieties of 1960s popular music).

But then something different happened. Most popular acts of the 1960s saw their popularity wane and disappear eventually as with previous acts, but the most popular acts of the 1960s never lost their audiences. The youth of the 1960s continued to enjoy popular music beyond their youth as most individuals of previous generations had not (i.e. popular music became seen as something more than a frivolity for kids to listen to). Further, over time acts like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, or James Brown became dissociated from a specific generational cohort in the sense that later generations of youth have continued to discover and maintain the popularity of such acts to a much greater extent than with previous popular music.

There is a similar but distinct phenomenon in visual popular culture. Certain films, images, and styles (from the 1950s on) have become stylized as tropes of “youth” and/or “rebellion” – the images of Rebel without a Cause or The Wild One, Che Guevara tee-shirts, Mohawk haircuts or dyed hair, the “Goth” look, piercings, etc. These are modularized visual tropes that any youth can use to make a visual statement about their individuality that will be understood by nearly everyone precisely because modular and not individual. They are also tropes typically picked up and later mostly dropped.

This is different from what has happened with popular music since the 1960s, when popular music is associated with youth, but as a sort of sign and symptom of youth that isn’t dropped and isn’t expected to be. Further, popular music styles have continued to change, as in earlier decades, but each style adds to a repertoire rather than replacing the previous popular style. 1960s popular music co-exists with 1970s “classic rock” (which as far as I can tell never experienced a dip in popularity – with many acts getting as much or more radio play as during the 1970s) with 1980s New Wave (and many contemporary “alternative” bands sounding virtually identical to New Wave bands).

What made the popular music of the 1960s and later different from what came before? Better, what made youth, at least in the industrialized world, different beginning in the 1960s?

Much has been written of the “Baby Boomers” who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s as the “Me” generation. In the May 26, 2007 issue of The Economist (p. 33), the anonymous columnist “Lexington” presents an interesting perspective on the issue in a discussion of Brink Lindsey’s book The Age of Abundance. Lexington writes:

“The industrial revolution in America was driven by a bourgeois Protestant ethic that celebrated work and frowned on self-indulgence. Those who invested their pay earned respect as well as compound interest; those who wasted it on whiskey and cards forwent both. But over the years, thrift combined with technology and capitalism produced such vast returns that thrift went out of fashion. The 1960s saw the coming-of-age of the first generation whose members had never known scarcity, and therefore did not fear it. Spurning their parents’ self-restraint, the baby-boomers rebelled against every form of authority and sampled every form of fun.”

This is a highly partial account to be sure. Before the mid-20th century, many who did their best to be thrifty earned neither respect nor compound interest, and many coming of age in the 1960s were well aware of scarcity. What Lindsey and Lexington are speaking of, then, is a largely middle-class phenomenon, but nonetheless real and important for that. What Post-War affluence led to for the middle-classes at least was not the elimination of the distinction between work and play, but a change in the relationship. Play was no longer a temporal stage, something that one mainly engaged in as a child before transitioning into adulthood and work and responsibility. Instead, one could thoroughly engage in play while being and becoming an adult. With the distinctions between work and play or between responsibility and play no longer tied to temporal stages of life, the line between youth and adulthood was blurred as well, leading to the marketing of continual youth (and the marketing of elements of popular culture associated with “youth” to youths born decades after the fact because of the dissociation of the tropes of “youth” from the particular sets of youth originally associated with them.)