Pop Culture and Literary Merit

Like millions of others, I love to listen to as well as to play rock and other popular music genres. In the world we live in, life without pop music and other forms of pop culture would not only be less enjoyable, but also unimaginable. Pop culture is woven into nearly every facet of our being: our dress, our manners, our eating habits, the way we speak and write. Some people have been able to avoid the influence of pop culture, but their numbers are dwindling. At this stage, it would take an act of self-imposed isolation to escape it fully.

You would have to go against the entire grain of our society, avoiding virtually all newspapers and magazines and even many kinds of books, eschewing the electronic and computer-driven devices that now do so much to fill the quotidian existence of the average person, and of course, allowing yourself to hear very little music except for Western classical and perhaps some kinds of world music. Public schooling would be out of the question for your children, because the watered-down curriculum of even many (though there are a few exceptions) of the best public schools may be attributed in part to the preeminence of mass popular culture (education is nowadays unquestionably influenced by it); you would have to find a rarified private or boarding school that dared to adhere to rigorous standards of classical scholarship (Home schooling? As for me, I am not disciplined enough to provide the rigorous indoctrination that would be needed to counter the long reach of pop culture). Your social life would be highly restricted, if you could indeed have any at all, as all of your current friends and family would still participate in the popular culture and consume its products more or less unhesitatingly.

Over the years (but interestingly, much less so in recent times), cultural critics have inveighed, rather in vain, against the perniciousness of rock, movies, and other mass entertainment. I have neither the educational background nor the inclination to follow their efforts. To me there is something else of interest: the curious cultural leveling that pop culture has brought on. Pop culture excludes no one and wants to include everyone. Scions of Europe's royal houses listen to some of the same music as inner-city as well as suburban Americans (of all races), using the same music storage devices. While the visual arts are still largely practiced, curated, and appreciated by elites, these have also been successfully marketed to a mass audience. The subject matter, materials, and media of the visual arts, while they may be used still in order to shock from time to time, are often taken from everyday objects and people, and can be found in dumps, grocery and hardware stores, comic books, and other places that were at one time thought to be lacking in artistic potential. Pop culture has inculcated the idea that the mundane, the overlooked object may also be art, and does not necessarily have to be substantially altered to become an artwork, only "recontextualized" (this is not meant to be a blanket description of contemporary art; still less is it intended as a dismissal -- but I believe I am giving a fair description of some of its tendencies).

Pop music may have been the most significant change agent of all the 'media' that make up the mass culture that has arisen during the last 60 years or so. The idea of 'popular music' of course goes back well before World War II (into the 19th century), but no one needs to be told that it realized its promise as an all-inclusive, taste-shaping entity more recently than that.

As much as I love so much of this music, I have always found there are those who believe in it and revere it more than I ever could. Because it changed youth culture, though also the way we approach living in general, we have ascribed to it virtues, some of them deserved, others not. We have said that some of our pop music has literary merit. Some of our rock stars have been compared to Eliot and other poets. This is a mistaken notion, but even worse, I am certain it is a deluded one. Though I am always regretting the gaps in my education (resulting not from a lack of investment in it but from the era in which I went to school and university), I do know enough to say that great literature and great pop culture (believe it or not, I think there is a great deal of the latter) are experienced in ways that are fundamentally divergent. Please do not think I am making that tiresome and untenable distinction between 'high' and 'low' art. I am only claiming that the experience of reading "Le Rouge et Le Noir", "The Golden Bowl" and the like is not better or worse than listening to a Beatles record, or even a Dylan record, but that it provides very different sensations, ones that nourish the being and not just gratify it. I enjoy the titillation of a great pop record or film almost as much as anyone, but would wish for more time and space for the stillness and contemplation -- most of all, the precision of feeling -- that I experience with literature.


Because pop culture is so dominant, I think we have made a kind of virtue of necessity by saying a great film is equal in importance to a great book, a piece of contemporary art must have the significance attributed to it that we have also given to painters of 100-600 years ago; and most egregiously, that some writers of today are the Fieldings, James, Balzacs or even just the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds of our time. Leaving aside that we have arrogated to ourselves the right of determining whether a literary work will be of lasting significance (this ability has eluded every generation preceding our own), we have an unhealthy interest in the lives of authors that has nothing to do with their writing, but that we use to evaluate them: their background, personal history, personal and political opinions. Even worse, we expect authors (and they comply eagerly) to speak to us, as it were, in a familiar manner, on subjects that we would also find familiar. In doing this, I find that they reveal little, for however much they may satisfy our need to see ourselves reflected. And as much as I am frustrated by the labored cleverness, the unasked-for conversationality of contemporary novelists, what I find most perplexing is the limited scope and ambitions of their books, as if they were afraid to leave us in the rear.


In contemporary literature, we find many references to the mass culture ("Gary's hopes of extracting quick megabucks were withering in the absence of online hype." [quoted from a critically acclaimed recent novel -- italics mine]), but also a flashy imprecision and reliance on cliche that is probably influenced by advertising (the worn-out expression, 'withering hopes' has lost all connection to the original meaning of the metaphor; the author just means 'perishing' or 'extinguished'; but the word 'withering' at one time provided an evocative image of a certain kind of long-term demise. 'Extracting' is another metaphor that has lost all its original association; the word 'getting' would have provided just as much meaning in this setting.)


The moralist's view that pop culture is merely harmful is no longer a constructive argument, if it ever was. But it is worthwhile to say that our wish to have art that is familiar, accessible -- that does not aspire to be 'omniscient', 'oracular' or otherwise 'super'-human, probably has come from pop culture's influence on our tastes. We should not let our reflexive anti-elitism prevent us from sorting out the elements of pop culture that have done real harm to our perception. There is no inherent contradiction in this task, and possibly some benefit.