You can sing the word "Monoculture" to the chorus of "Womanizer"

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

http://idolator.com/5091067/bye-bye-bye-what-weve-learned-from-pops-trl-era

Comments

[koganbot]

The consequence for pop, it seems to me, is a loss of togetherness

Whether this is true or not, it has been a theme in music criticism since about 1968.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes i was thinking the same -- the assumption of the "loss of the shared centre" as a recurrent popcult fear

[koganbot]

It's surely because the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

what rough mix, its hour come round at last,
slouches towards ILM to be born?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yup, which suggests several other possibilities:

- There once was a monoculture, but it's been in steady-ish decline since the mid 1960s AT LEAST. (Greil Marcus, in one of the essays collected in Double Trouble, suggests the monoculture is/was a willed 50s invention, a necessary windbreak after the shattering first half of the century)

- The monoculture is something we cognitively invent by a process of sorting through memories, and thus only perceive as a thing that's passed. i.e. there never was a monoculture.

- (The dialectic of i and ii) There are successive monocultural phases or events amidst a general fragmentation. These are easier to detect with hindsight (because they are driven by different media channels each time), and aren't *really* monocultural in that it's particular niches or cultural forms enjoying a kind of attention share bubble.

Also worth nothing that "monoculture" is going to look different from an American and non-American perspective, as for a lot of the last 50-60 years it's meant "what America exports" over here.

[koganbot]

Well, what might be "monocultural" about Britney is that people who barely knew anything about her were still willing to define themselves against each other. I remember a man whose writer's group I was about to join telling me that Britney represented the emptiness of culture, and he hastened to add that he'd never actually heard her music. And in '01 or so the major Denver art's festival touted itself in its promotional literature and banner as being an alternative to Britney Spears.

Which of course means the monoculture is not dead!

[koganbot]

One reason I don't trust Andrew Sullivan is that he considers Britney and Paris to be cultural detritus (in comparison to Obama, who'd basically been abandoned by his parents and through application and intelligence worked his way up to heading the law review at Harvard etc.).

[koganbot]

The word "detritus" being telling in this context, since it literally means debris, fragments, loose particles, and derives from the Latin term for "wearing away."

[koganbot]

And of course if you think of Fifties TV as the original "monoculture," Elvis was the guy who fragmented that, or at least signaled the fragmentation that already existed, since he was allowed on TV but with restrictions, implying that on TV he was an alien presence that TV had to carry but wouldn't endorse. The rise of TV actually aided the rise of rock 'n' roll from 1950 or so, since TV became the dominant medium for narrative series, displacing radio, so radio shifted almost exclusively to music, and it was seized by the teenage* netherworld** (which appropriated for itself the r&b of adult blacks, which of course made a lie of the idea of a monoculture quite obvious).

*Or should I say "teen-age."

**The "teenage netherworld" is Tom Wolfe's term from "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" in '63 or so, about the custom car culture. Of course, Wolfe specialized in writing about cultural forms that were popular but under the radar.