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]

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.