IF YOUâRE NOT GETTING UNFOLLOWED, YOUâRE NOT SAYING ANYTHING
The Golden Age of Popular Culture 1954-2001
Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order, and the best oneâs start in medias res. In an age when popularity is everything, to be unfollowed is against the current. To say a true and beautiful thing and someone hit that unfollow button is the most counter-culture you can be right now. The unfollow button is now the counter-culture symbol.
This isnât an overview of a whoâs who of pop culture, thereâs a hundred extra names I could have included, but what causes and changes the energy in pop culture. I originally tried to make this in to a documentary film out of archive footage but it makes so many comparative references that it just looked like a scene from A Clockwork Orange.
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This was written the week in April immediately after finishing the first draft of my latest book, and was written to Nick Knight
At the beginning of the 20th Century Paris was the capital of culture, by the end it was New York City. The First World War had scattered artists from Paris around Europe and America. Although the entire history of the 20th Century can be retold by no other single city than Berlin, the history of popular culture belonged to Britain and America. The foundations for a new musical culture was being set by black artists Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard to name just a few. The music of jazz and blues popularised during the 1920s and 1930s made popular through dizzying live performances and was being distributed to new generationâs ears through radio. Radio meant listeners got a collision of country, jazz, swing, and blues, and black and white music together. Yet the traditional social mores were still apparent in the family and society, and crooning was still the preferred music on the mainstream audience. But that was all about to change. On December 10th 1953, the first colour television sets went on sale just in time for Christmas. On March 1st 1954 the United States of America deployed Castle Bravo nuclear test that exploded 2.5 times larger than expected. Twenty-three men on a fishing vessels were contaminated by the fallout. Unevacuated islanders suffered radiation sickness. That same year on July 19th 1954 Elvis Presley released his first single âThatâs Alright.â People sat around a colour television set, watching the nuclear explosion, to the sounds of Elvis Presley. Suddenly this was a new world.
1957 Jack Kerouac publishes On The Road and reads a newspaper after its publication and gets to say those famous lines of Lord Byron "I woke up and I was famous." Ideas of reckless freedom from the conformism of the city sweeps across America.
1961 Bob Dylan gives his first live radio performance in New York and releases his self-titled debut the following year. 1964 The Beatles perform their first live show. And ever since young boys began to grow their hair long, the idea of counter culture was testing what people could handle and finding those limits. In the 60s boys grew their hair long, in the 70s girls shaved their hair off.
1965 Bob Dylan performs at Newport Folk Festival where he shuns his acoustic guitar and goes electric, but not to an electrified audience expecting a folk guitar, and their voices can be heard booing whilst he plays. That same year Dylan earns a hit song with Like A Rolling Stone. 1965 some other Rolling Stones go to Number 1 with I Cant Get No Satisfaction, whilst raising the awareness of the contribution that black music had made to rock and roll. 1967 the Velvet Underground and The Doors both release their self-titled albums.
In 1967 a new era of Hollywood appeared with the release of Bonnie and Clyde and New Hollywood was born.
In the 60s everything was experimental. No one really knew what they were doing it, they just believed in it and got on with it. But thereâs no hiding the importance that drugs would always have on the impact of popular culture. From the LSD of the 1960s, to the heroin of the 1970s, to the cocaine of the 1980s, to the ecstasy of the 1990s, and marijuana throughout the whole thing.
In the 70s, a real business method for rock music took shape. In Britain the punk scene exploded, but it didnât take off in America until much later and without the raw aggression of British punk. Punk was an raw anxiety right in to music giving a voice to the working class. The rock and roll of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, David Bowie, everyone came out of art school. Although the music carried the ethos of the 60s, rock music had become big money. It was the era of tour buses, private jets and big wooden studios. Every aspect of rock was phallic. Eventually even punk bands were playing sell out arenaâs singing about poverty. Concerts were huge and elaborate like theatrical shows. The shows were as big as the money.
When John Lennon was shot by a fan in 1981 the whole spirit of the 60s and 70s died. The practices of the 70s split in to two directions between âthe bigger the betterâ side of the 70s and the down to earth political and social voice of the 70s. The mainstream was where the money was. Greed was good, the bigger is better ethos landed on heavy metal, pop, and glam rock. Brands paid artists huge money to sell their products. In the 60s and 70s radio existed simply to advertise records. The unification of advertising and art came out of the 80s, when brands sponsored artists like Madonna, Michael Jackson, and George Michael. Now suddenly you've got the Rolling Stones advertising for Budweiser because the kids who listened to them in the 70s are grown up and buying beer. Radio began to play only radio friendly music. In cinema, the 80s was the decade of the blockbuster movie, beginning with Jaws and the pop movie soundtrack where pop music was used instead of an original score for the film.
Of course not forgetting through his time, the creation of MTV in 1981. At first they had only 66 music videos, 22 of which were Rod Stewart. The major label bands were experimenting with music video, at first crude experiments of live performances, wherever they werenât they were surreal and dadaist. Duran Duran began making more feature film like videos. In an interview in 1983 David Bowie rightly accused MTV of not playing black artists. After fighting for MTV play a young black artist got a video on for a song called Billie Jean. Michael Jackson later changed the whole idea of music video with his video for Thriller. Not only did this bring the ensemble dance with the pop star principle dancer in to a major part of music video but also narrative video that exploded in to the 1990s famously with Madonna Like A Prayer, Meat Loaf I Would Do Anything For Love, Aerosmith Janie's Got A Gun, Puff Daddyâs Victory among many others. On the underground the down to earth reality lived on in new wave, post punk, hardcore, hip-hop and the stripped down folk of R.E.M. By the mid-80s the culture was gaining a global conscience, AIDS was public concern, poverty and education of Africa. Live Aid became a political collaboration with music concert and songs to raise awareness and charitable finance. Whilst at the same time the underground artists that radio werenât playing were getting air time with videos on MTV. From this they were selling records competitive to radio played major label artists and making it to the number one spot. By the end of the 80s the underground bands were bought up by major labels.
In 1989 The Berlin Wall was demolished, the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the British labour government and American democrats come in to power and a new sense of freedom and individual personal power came over the culture. George Michael released Freedom in 1990. The 1990s was to became a homogenising of all of the past in to one. The indivisibility between art and advertising. Commercials and music videos looked like feature films and CDs were released in packaging like antiquarian books, rock posters like vintage art nouveau memorabilia. A music with the power and ecstasy of the 70s and 80s undercurrent fused with the club culture that took the world. Every form of music had its place side by side at once. There was no single overbearing genre. Each one applauding the other. Rock had dance beats, dance had classical, hip hop had rock. By the end of the decade every genre was fusing with other genres that journalists would find it hard to pigeon hole anyone.
In to the 90s art and advertisement was seemingly indivisible. Budding film directors getting their starts in career doing music videos and commercials. Music videos and commercials were indivisible from feature films and appreciated like works of art in themselves. Films and adverts featured pop music. Pop music video made by film and commercial directors. This continued to be apparent right up today when a musician does a photoshoot they now expect it (and we expect it) to look like a fashion billboard. The indivisibility between artist and advertising was very 90s.
But at the same time, the news began to blame popular culture as an explanation of a perceived break down in society. No change in laws of gun control but Marilyn Manson gets blamed for influencing the Columbine high school shooting despite that millions of other people also listened to the same records without taking any similar action. Tarantino was also used to blame for violence in society, despite that he argued that Japanese cinema is the most violent cinema and yet the most peaceful society. And throughout a nearly thirty year career was given that same question. Itâs evident that Tarantino makes some of the least violent action films. For instance, in a Hollywood action film it's not uncommon that the hero will burst into a room and murder hundreds of men single handedly. And the director will make it seem like this is a very good thing and that the hero is amazing for doing it. In the course of killing a hundred people the hero might get a scratch and it will seem like an equal act of retaliation. At least in a Tarantino film when someone dies it matters. And we have a new feeling about the character for having killed someone. We have a sort of moral reflection about them. Not only that, we're also made aware of the consequence of it, and we don't necessarily feel satisfied by it because we invest ourselves in to all of Tarantino's characters as there's no real bad guy. It's not this bland Good versus Evil story where so long as it's been imprinted in our mind that they're Evil it's justifiable that they've killed someone. There's never an evil character, someone who acts contemptuously perhaps, but not evil. If there's a bad guy we like - well that's on us. Itâs a story construction perhaps borrowed from Eastern story-telling. The difference is we actually care when someone dies in a Tarantino films because even the bad guys are good guys to us. If it feels more violent its because, unlike mainstream Hollywood, we realise and feel that violence is violent. We see the consequences of violence, which is something Akira Kurasowka is also very notable for. And whatâs more Tarantino makes use of music during violence that makes us aware that we are watching a movie which distances from emotional participation in violence that film scoring creates, which turns violent drama in to music so that we feel the violence.
The 1980s was a kind of mezzanine between the 70s and 90s. The 1970s perhaps produced the great artists of the popular culture, bringing the intelligence and the avant-garde from the art world in to popular culture as artists. But the 1990s was the triumph of popular culture itself - when it was no longer counter-culture, but culture itself. Blurring the lines from the mainstream industrial dance rock music of the early 90s to William Orbit producing some of the best rock and pop records from Blur to Madonna. And in 1998 Bjorkâs Homogenic fusing classical music with club beats in a ways that didnât feel overlayed like samples or antagonistic but as if out of the same soul, that there was no difference between the origin of these kinds of music. And the fact that electronic music originally came out of classical musicians says it all. Whilst at the same time resembling music that was pre-Classical that was full of instrumental percussion and dance. In the end itâs all just music. Everything was colliding with each other beautifully.
What was so exciting about 1999-2001 was that in the best of it there was beginning to be no major difference between pop culture and high art. An age when Aphex Twin was playing clubs, airing controversial videos on MTV, whilst also performing with renowned composers like Philip Glass, and having classical symphony orchestras reinterpret his work. The 21st century had two ways to go. Either there was no difference between high art and pop culture or there was no difference between advertising and pop culture. Whilst artists from the 1960s became revered as founding fathers, artists from the 1970s became relevant again, and those artists who survived the 1980s only got better in the 90s. But that was all about to change.
The events of the 1989 and 1990s made people feel they were stronger, freer, above their problems and situations. The ecstasy of the 1990s, its idea of a new birth of freedom couldn't continue to wave its flag in the wake of something as dreadful and devastating as what was about to happen. And if it had done so, it would have been a great insult. Pop culture couldnât go on in the same way after that. Although it may be exactly what people needed to lift their spirits, it wasnât the time, and it wasnât in our hearts. It needed time to respect those lost, and those thousands of families that had lost loved ones. And the West was looking at a new uncertain future.
On September 11th 2001, the Twin Towers in New York City were hit by two hijacked airplanes. Nearly 3,000 people died. No sound of music. People around the world watched the planes explode in to the buildings on colour television sets in horror and silence. The once tone of individual power over circumstances, a rockstar attitude to life, was shattered. The world was a living reality, itself as chaotic as the pop culture.
People became increasingly wary and confused by the world around them. The overwhelming amount of information pouring out the news of devastation every day made young people feel lost, powerless and hopeless in a chaotic world. Since 2001, people felt increasingly overwhelmed by the world. And the information overload made people feel subdued by an inevitability of disasters, by its events and messages. And arose a state of mind that held a perspective of the world which placed them once more beneath their world. And a feeling of powerlessness creeped in again. If there's one thing that has devastating effect on culture it's war. So why didn't the Vietnam war have the same effect on pop culture that the First World War had on Paris and the Iraq War had on New York? Simple: it didn't take place on home turf. War changes the tone in the streets, the homes, the work place of people. And a bleak silence took hold after 2001.
Even things down to the Eastern influences faded out. The Hong Kong film influence, the influence of Hinduism, Buddhism that influenced films and music disappears because of a refocused attention to traditional Western Abrahamic faiths. Now the conflict between the Abrahamic faiths preoccuupies culture. In a large sense it was a return to the 1950s with a 21st century face.
The era that we live in now is a world that seemingly moves so quickly we live in a world that we don't understand. As the costume of the age changes there is a sense of alienation from oneâs own life. We also have is a generation of people growing up where this speed of change is so normal, they demand change. They get bored with stability, they're constantly needing the next. A restless culture used to a culture on demand. Therefore they have little patience for substance, everything is about the transient appeal, the beauty of something in the moment, and whatever is appealing. Culture has as much appeal as a single moment of their lives, a day of their lives, a year of their lives. There is no actual culture which defines the times, any more than a day or a year which defines a life.
The culture began to reflect it in its bleak and vacuous nature. Rock music became sad. The wave of emo music, post-rock, indie became quiet, solemn and depressed, and its found a voice across the melancholic streams on Tumblr. The minimalism design and architecture to the popularity of music of Fennesz, Alva Noto, and Tim Hecker who borrowed from 70s minimalism of Brian Eno, William Basinski, Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Tim Heckerâs (2001) The Work Of Art In The Age Of Cultural Over Production was almost the real sound of that time set back from everything that was going on, as if you were able to watch it all from a distance on fast forward. Itâs hard to believe that's the direction music took considering that Bjork just released Vespertine and Radiohead just released Kid A. The most successful American alternative rock band of the 1990s, The Smashing Pumpkins, after they broke up in 2001 sent 5 copies of an unreleased vinyl to 5 fans they knew had the ability to copy the vinyl and share it around the internet. This was Machina II, which still today feels like the furthest idea of a sound that a rock band pushed the "rock sound."
On the mainstream the 2000s was the commerciality of the 90s. If the 90s was alcohol, the 2000s was the soft drink version. Napster arrived. Apple undercut all competitors by selling music for 99 cents, labels now needing revenue from live acts, simple three piece bands, pop up bands with a quick turnaround, bands dropped from contracts before theyâve even released albums. It became a turnstile industry. Labels were losing money and wanted bands that were simple that could pop up do a show and move on to the next. The more shows the better to score any revenue to recuperate losses from file sharing audiences. Music was now about the live act again. File sharing continued and labels and studios lost more money. They began to take audiences to court over file sharing. The Arctic Monkeys after having amassed a large number of followers on MySpace was the first time I heard of a band being signed for their internet following. Bands from emo to indie like Interpol and The Strokes dressing like "suits" (in the same way that Nirvana spoofed in a famous photoshoot) whilst echoing 60s Beatles and 80s bands like Madness. Perhaps they wore suits because they just left work and jumped on stage, and their audience just work and turned up to a gig, and it was a way of being relatable to their audience. But culture is an escape from work, and cultural icons have always tried to restyle the conformism of fashion's traditions. As the industry wore suits, for a rock band to dress in suits was like dressing as the enemy - those that curtailed artistic creativity. The idea of being an artist in part so you didnât have a job where you have to wear a suit. Razorlight and The Libertines in the army officer regalia like the 70s bands. But the underground in the 2000s was full of ideas. It was all about production. Supergroups like Fantomas who made Suspended Animation in 2005 which remains a largely unheard masterpiece. There were also groups like Dalek and Death Grips in California that were making the kind of hip-hop Kanye did with (2013) Yeezus as early as 2004. Particularly in Dalekâs record called Absence on Californiaâs Ipecac label, and Death Gripâs album Exmilitary. Iâd see Dalek play to crowds of maybe 200 people at most in preeminant clubs in the North of England. We'd talk and Iâd ask them to do remixes of my poetry but I couldn't afford it. They did collaborations with 70s prog rockers Faust. Out of the file sharing wave, kids with laptops were posting music through Myspace, Bandcamp and Soundcloud, playing in basement clubs in the city with a laptop to about 100 people. Journalists were calling them bedroom-producers and bedroom-musicians. Platforms arose like Majestic Casual, a youtube Channel set up in 2011 in Berlin to share music laptop kids were making, which exploded in 2012 to the point that the Youtube channel released an album in 2015. It showed that a platform really has a voice. To trust in the content, but allow the liberty for its metamorphosis, but there was the feeling of a collective spirit behind it that you're a part of and that everyone understands when you talk about it. Then major artists by the mid -2010s began to recruit laptop artists for production - some like Tourist winning a Grammy award. Once new music streaming services arrived it meant that labels and platforms could generate income from streaming and the platforms collect advertising on streams.
Of course the end of advertising is to make money, its largely been entwined with music artists came from the 1980s when big brands began to give artists endorsement deals. As in the 1990s when there was no difference between advertisement and art. a car advert or a music video was as artistic as a feature film. Culture is now purely advertising. Now companies will collect and sell your data to other companies so they can send you advertisements tailored for you.
The old counter-culture and so-called subculture was now mass produced. It proved even counter-culture could be carbon copied, could be a cookie cutter culture. Even for the well-dressed well-bred became popular as they appealed to common aspirations and anxieties: to be rich.
Similar to the 80s the rich are getting richer and the poor are losing homes, unemployment rate rose higher, public money spent on war instead of the public, pensions not getting paid and the population age rising, a time when we feel that technology changes the world more than politics, resigned in to the current of technological progress, a people who are jumping through hoops to join âthe next big thing,â who are trainspotting life away because they can't keep up with it, afraid of the future with no interest in the past, no grasp of the world with no feeling of identity within it, and loss of meaning in life. Voices that get lost and forgotten on the stream
Everybody felt lost, and like the 1960s, was making it up as they go along, protesting the same rights movements, to crack the tarmac street and disrupt the old conformist views, to break the twitter stream and break the internet. In the 1960s and 1970s the voiceless had a centralised voice to express their anxieties. Now in an era of user generated content and social media we can all have a voice and we see that these deep and burning anxieties are general anxieties that we all go through. The task however is overcoming them not simply expressing them. And that's the rarer and less relatable thing, but nevertheless, the right and better thing.
After the financial crisis young people had less disposable income, and during a time when everyone steals music. Pop culture has always thrived on young people having disposable income; being able to buy records, go to gigs, buy clothes, books, and even drugs included. I canât imagine how life feels for young people growing up who were born after 2000. For me the 21st Century is just a part of my life. For a lot of kids itâs all they know and I think we deserve to give them a culture they really benefit from. We are waiting for the world to come up with crap so we can buy it. Because we want something else and we expect the world we live in to be significantly different in ten years time. Products that have very little necessity to your life but they sell it by saying soon every household in the world will have one of these products. They used to sell it by telling you you wont impress a date without one. But disposable products that each are designed to quickly need replacing. An age when the present was disposable for the next moment. A disillusioned generation in a disposable world of disposable teens. Perhaps believing the only escape is to be rich and buy everything that life demands because you always have to buy the next new thing or get left behind. Hiding from the world like bad weather waiting for it to pass along.
Kids used to be kids and live for the day and not worry about tomorrow and now they're asking what's going to happen to the world. Kids are being told what theyâre future is like, and theyâre scared of their uncertain futures, and so they listen. The world is changing so rapidly that people are making absurd hypothesis about the future because they have as much absurd understanding of the past. Thereâs no truth in forecasts of the future if thereâs no grasp on the present. If history shows anything is that technological, political, social phenomena always throws predictions out of the window. I want to tell kids not to be afraid of their future. Kids feel overwhelmed and powerless to their future so they fall in to place believing that it gives them stability and control. Young people have indescribable pressure. Young people are scared of the future and feel so powerless to the current of change in the world, and yet all the demand from the world is more change, as though the world were on rotation and they're just calling out ânext!â
Advertising controlled magazines supposed to give us an eye to the world and understand it better but the overload of headline click bait makes everyone more jaded and confused about it. How many headlines magazines saying âHow____ is changing the way we see _____â just perpetuates the whole âNEXT!â culture. Anyone who releases something in to culture needs to put a Best Before End label on it.
The only way that media seems to have an authoritative edge on a user generated culture is by having the voice of the next bit of information. Media is now simply trying to be the first one to tell you whatâs next. Instead of building on the substance of present, just handing it over for whatâs next. A stream culture will never be better than a platform. Streams will always produce disposable content. I know some people who want their magazines to be archival platforms that last and people keep like coffee tables books, but magazines are serial publications and in their nature self-disposable. Superseded by their next issue. Similar to a newspaper but a magazine can at least document a period of time through a very personal lens which may at a later date become archival if it was poignant to the era.
Everything had become the appearance of difference. The âalternativeâ kids were really two thirds of society were found commonly everywhere. An attainable difference. What was needed was a platform that recognised the genuinely exceptional. Unique and hard to reach talent. That was lead by creativity and intelligence that championed exceptional and rare talent.
It's strange that given the opportunity of unmediated self-expression, we've somehow managed to make the most inauthentic culture, representing ourselves and lives ingenuinely for as many people as possible for likes and popularity. Complete priviledge of user generated content and we fill the internet with cat videos. âSometimes itâs hard to know how well youâre doing when someone puts up a cat video and it gets a millions views too,â FKA twigs. Between England and America, countries with the greatest resume of modern popular culture artists in the world, yet we make game shows to find new music artists. Reality TV stars showing you can make a career out of just being a person.
We have a culture that can express freely without any middlemen. Whatâs missing is the expression of overcoming the explicit description of how we're feeling - we have too many confessions of complaints and not enough arguments for solutions. The heads above water. An attitude of dealing with the reality of those problems not only expressing them.
Our online profiles are our own personal TV networks. of which brands pay our TV network for advertisement. Instagram isn't a photoalbum or a portfolio, it's a billboard. In a real sense we are all just billboards on instagram posting images that look no different to fashion billboards, or food photography you expect to see in a magazine. âThe camera makes us all tourists of our own lives,â Susan Sontag. A diaristic culture that reports incessantly on itself through vlogging, blogging, instagram/snapchat stories, and twitter. Building brands of ourselves like soda pop. We have turned into Wharhol's Canned Soup. People are retail items. As unique as an ISBN number. We live in a culture of billboards of aggressive self-promotion, selling our identities like energy drinks and cigarettes. I am Coca-Cola, I am Diet Pepsi, I am Persil Automatic, I am Nike. Buy in to Brand Me. The currency is popularity. Our only platforms are our lives. We become our own TV networks. Success is measured by numbers, money and data. Not on the impact on human conscience, ideas, and feeling, culture. Everything is numbers. Even the news driven by click bait headlines. Culture as pure advertisement. Using these things to advertise our 'brand selves.' Instead of being vehicles for self-expression its become vehicles to hide behind. To be inauthentic and hide most of ourselves and only project what we select to. Not reflecting how we feel but we use it to conceal how we feel because we're so afraid to be judged for how and what we are that we make an inauthentic projected impression of ourselves.
Everyoneâs lives are just an advertisement brochure for lifestyle, marketing oneself like a billboard. We quote ourselves on twitter. Commenting on our Facebook lives like museum artefacts and gallery info boxes. We create documentaries of our lives as vloggers and instagram comedy sketches. Screaming for an identity. In the biggest social connectivity culture has had we become isolated behind phones and computer screens. As global literacy actually increasing and with access to the biggest library in the history of the world, accessible to anyone with a smartphone, we nevertheless become more stupid, because weâd rather spend time seeing what Selena Gomez wore on the red carpet and work on our dubsmash. We have the tools, its just how you use them. And interesting things always arise when using things other than the way they were originally intended to be used.
The 60s-90s had generally been a voice of common unrest. In a sense the culture of common anxieties, the demanding impermanence, the ethos of âmaking breaks with the pastâ, created Brexit and Trump as much as the protests that followed. But expression of democratic anxiety alone isnât enough without democratic understanding and intelligence of those anxieties.
A democracy that simply expresses anxieties is not a democracy itâs a reverse-tyranny. The anxieties towards immigration that caused people to vote Brexit or Trump. They might hear two sides, but they only have to engage with one side: their own side, from their friends and whatever sources they subscribe to. It revealed a huge unspoken anxiety. Without having better understanding of those anxieties and overcoming them. The minority vote didnât matter. The minority is now the counter-culture. Popularity failed. The individual unrest was now under threat. A less than zero culture ruled, whilst plus one's were ostracised. The crowd wanted to see themselves and culture had become a house of mirrors. Brexit and Trump was a revealed appearance of anxiety, naturally therefore, once voted became regret. The anxiety was satisfied in the vote, but not in the result. Our ages shows everybody has the same anxieties, the current on social media testifies it, but some people know how to deal with and overcome them through seeking intelligent perspective and a broader understanding.
The former punk magazines that represented the counter-culture and the unrest of the unvoiced were now in a user generated era of only the voice of common anxieties and unrest but unserviceable for individual unrest and understanding. Counter-culture became general, and culture was generic counter-culture. Themselves only an inevitable mass voice by assembling the voiceless to the general, all too general public. Even counter-culture became the norm, to which the individual now rebelled. There was only one way and everybody just followed the leader. Special was defined by unmerited accomplishment: Youthful beauty, inherited financial wealth, birth in to high class, bestowed material wealth, race and gender. This was approved by the crowd for its common and general aspiration. The generations that created the culture then proceed to call the generation that uses them ânarcissistsâ and âsociopaths.â The act of using them in the way we do does reinforce certain personality traits but itâs not their fault. The popularity of anything in the culture signalled the appeal and protest of general society. Whatever appealed to the basest interest and its usual suspects, not what challenged and pushed us above ourselves. Progress in such a culture was impossible. The minority was now an single individual up against both conservatism, counter-culture, and corporate censorship. Counter-culture was the current, and media and corporations were eager for people to get on the next wave.
Not what stood out and changed direction, no views that you didnât want to see on your timeline stream, no images the apps would ban you for, no views people would unfollow you for, no posts that broke the stream, everything had to flow in to the other. It was possible to be different if that meant unspoken commonness, unvoiced but any uncommon elevated opinion, that really singled a person out as an individual was distasteful. The crowd ruled. And ironically individual expression only demonstrated the voice and power of the many over the one. The less you stood out and the commonly approved your expression, the wider it appealed the better it was, the more popular you became. But the stream not only flowed as one. Â There were the unfollowed, the unashamed views, views that were on their own stream. That didnât link to other things but was its own timeline, its own need that existed in different frame of time and desire, that was able to break that current like a damming tree that fell in to the river.
When I was a kid, I didnât know what I wanted to be. I just got to be a kid. I got time to understand the world and learn why to love it, therefore learn how to be able to make a real contribution to it. I got to admire the world and not be afraid of it and confused by it. I didnât grow up always being told what my future would be like. Except for Y2K and look how that turned out. You can only contribute to what you love. I feel sorry for these kids always being told how the world is. But if history proves anything itâs that technological, political, social phenomena throws all predictions out of the window. Economists trying to sell you products by telling you what the future is going to be like, political agenda of overwhelming you so you feel further powerless. Donât be afraid of your future. I was watching television growing up and would see programs from the 1950s to the 1990s. Now despite the fact that its TV on demand it seems we just get new television. But it was beneficial to see other periods of culture. The surreal and existential from The Twilight Zone, to Twin Peaks and the X-Files. Surreal satires that were social commentaries on reality through popular entertainment such as The Simpsons and comedians of the time who criticised with laughter. Middle and lower class comedy show, upper class mystery detective shows, The television talk show, well scripted human touch of drama for young people. The format of culture doesn't suit popular culture for the framework and the architecture of it. The #tbt and #regram is a user generated interception of the stream. #Latergram as almost an apology for it not being so chronological. Culture thatâs experienced purely chronologically is like words in a conversation getting lost in the seconds of the past. Revisiting things often help to uphold the spirit of things. Re-Runs don't appear on stream sites. Instead of re-runs its whole re-productions. The 21st century rehashes older movies, television shows, foreign films already released, and book adaptations, and as the British comic book writer Alan Moore said "Hollywood hasn't had a new idea in twenty years." Televisions direct imitations of popular earlier shows. Scripted television shows replaced with reality television. Although popular reality TV started with the Real World in the 90s. It got a new purpose in The Simple Life, Meet the Osbornes, Big Brother, The Newly Weds, The Hills, to the Kardashians, and all the Made in Chelsea variants. Game shows permeated the 90s famously made a joke of in the Rage Against The Machine music video for Sleep Now In The Fire. The more money mentality of the 80s came right back.
There's a story of Johnny Depp when he was starring in 21 Jump Street that he saw a billboard with his face on it. And he and a friend stopped the car, climbed up and began to deface the image and paint over it. A security guard appeared and told them to get lost. Depp's friend said to the guard look itâs his face. And the guard looked and Johnny and looked at the billboard and said "alright, but hurry up." What could be more the antithesis of the selfie age. Â
Everyone begins to look the same on instagram, and similarly the strict dress code of clubs ruined the club scene. The whole explosion of clubs was that it was this collision of different cultures and costumes colliding together creating something new. People who may not ordinarily outside of clubs intermingle with each other. This doesnât work if you go in to a club and everyoneâs dressing the same and so probably comes from the same demographic background.
Is this the inevitable fate of pop culture? Is this an error or is this the apotheosis of pop culture? The 80s cyberpunk that envisioned advertising everywhere, came true, only its not on every thing, its in everyone. Art and advertising so far that now art and the artist is just advertising. So far that even music itself is made to sound like the character the artist wants to project of themselves. Just as an advertisement will put music over the advert of their product to characterise it as fun. Advertising meant that just as music had been used to characterise products, musicians use music to promote the character of the product of themselves. Becoming actors of music. Selling themselves through music as brands and products, the music serving only to characterise the artist like an advertisement. A musician making the music of the song sound characteristic of the image they wanted to project, badass in this song, have a broken heart in this one. The point in the past was that music sounded contradictory to the feeling so that you overcome the feeling. U2âs Sunday Bloody Sunday sounds fun but itâs about the Bloody Sunday incident in Derry. 80s Hip Hop used music much the same. This is Wagnerian music now, it's music of cinema, when a piece of music appears that shows us how the person is feeling. We are just our own little TV networks beaming out our own content. We even have apps that will deploy it at regular scheduled moments. Now in a user generated content, we get to decided what we follow and what we don't. Steve Albini, the record producer of Nirvana and R.E.M, said the great thing about our time was that it killed the radio, now nobody has to listen to music they donât want to. What we don't want to see on our feed is what we unfollow. We don't have the opportunity to make people uncomfortable to shake up their comfortable little life with a new and beautiful truth that is often disturbing or to make topsy turvy the formality of normal and expecting living because whatever you don't want to see you can switch off. In a culture where there can be no bad taste, there will only be bad taste. Because everyone will only have one kind of taste, their own. Taste which makes them comfortable, and taste which sells products. A good culture is full of variety not idealised perfection, it embraces both the ordinary and out of ordinary, so culture is influenced by lots of different directions that it may ordinarily reject. Not only that but it also helps us understand things different from ourselves. A culture that is purely what it wants, becomes antagonistic to anything it does not want.
The antagonists of culture are the people who get unfollowed. They're the one's who are the electricity between the points. They're the ones that are making people uncomfortable. If you're not getting unfollowed, you're not saying anything. Young people are getting social disorders from feeling they need to be liked, followed, popular, and companies are insisting that they do it so they have an audience reach. And it's very useful, but it's not right. If culture doesnât overlap you only get what you want. As Glen Lutchford said that our time does not facilitate for good photography.
Stream feeds as the equivalent to channel surfing. Passive trend nostalgia as you scroll idly through instagram like children counting blue cars from the back seat on a motorway. The 21st century is an incredibly exciting period but its a culture that is so scattered and the means to express it so disposable.
The follow button has created new censorship. A censorship of conscience. Anything that collides with our conscience is unfollowed. We have a bureaucratic culture of good conscience. Creating lanes and channels separated and segmented. Daniel Day-Lewis said of Martin Scorsese in a real must-watch interview on Movies 101 âMarty is a master, and I don't use that word lightly there are very few of them and he's one of them. And God knows why he remains unrecognised in this countryâ to which the interviewer responded "what are you talking about? Marty is revered here" and Daniel replied "well he's revered by everyone who reveres him."
Cinema switched from the reluctant hero who found they had to help because they had the qualities to help, in to wall to wall superhero. Films of born or self-created heroes of super human capabilities that found a duty to save the world that had such a dystopian problem that nothing other than a superhero could save it. The reluctant every day hero gave the view that one could have a job to do that wasnât just their job. That they had an inner personal qualities that could really make a contribution and impact on their world. The man who assembles the worst sports team imaginable from a bunch of raggamuffins and then goes on to win the league because of their team spirit. A whole theme of defying the odds. Not just the superhero who shows up and says ânever fear, faceless working people, this is a job for an implausibly superior superbeing.â
I was listening to an interview with Tarantino before he made Resevoir Dogs. He'd already written True Romance and Natural Born Killers. But he couldn't get past the readers, it was only when someone high up in the studio read his work that things moved ahead. Business relies on predicted certainty. If you send an uncertain script, demo, book to an administrative level, it's received by someone who is uncertain of their future in that company and wants to look good to their boss. It's uncertainty meets uncertainty, two negatives together. But if an established success gets work infront of that reader they'll pass it forward because it makes them look good to their boss and attaches themselves to something already successful. If you're an unknown you go to the top, that person is already established, worried about seeming old fashioned and eager to attach themselves to something new and fresh, so they get heard. It's not the priority of low level administration to see the difference between good and bad work, but certain and uncertain work. That's always going to have a problem for creating new excitement in culture. Whatever is uncertain is risky, but that's why it's exciting. It's uncertain because it's taken a step forward. The company isn't going to risk the rest of their roster which they draw revenue from, for the sake of one new thing, which might reduce a buying audience elsewhere. The time and money to build a new audience is not going to be appealing to a company. The internet should be able to cut that out and go directly to your audience. The only obstacle is the censorship of the good conscience of culture, a culture which itself doesn't want anything that it's not used to. Now no one has to handle anything they can't. They can cop out. A new censorship arrives. It doesn't matter how independent the source is. The audience becomes the BBFC. In the 90s you had Marilyn Manson and boy bands on the same channel and both revered by the station and the audience of popular culture. What we have now is lanes of culture. Disturbing images aren't disturbing to people who like disturbing images. Cutesy images are not disturbing to people who like cutesy images.
Whether anyone likes to admit it or not, pornography is and has always been a part of popular culture. It's been a part of the background since the 1960s but if there's anywhere in popular culture where sex is dealt with without beyond the censorship of taboo it's pornography. Everywhere sex is conveyed still with the Christian taboo. It holds the only place in culture where itâs presented without taboo or moral censorship. In almost all other places its positioned as though sexual activity were a bad thing, a secretive shameful act, that one ought to turn oneâs instincts away from. Outside of pornography, it's perhaps only now in the instagram age of female nipple censorship despite its censorship being okay with derogatory images of women in submissive poses leered over by chauvinistic men, and being fine with the male nipple, that popular culture has given sex a perfectly human and normal status. After all every human on Earth was made through sex, and it's something common enough that we are all doing it. It's confusing when it's used provocatively when it's as common as eating and breathing. The more you portray it as taboo the more it feels taboo. The pornographic accessibility has broken that taboo down. Like some ancient Greek lewd comedy, a sexual sit-com, no more sex depicted through the lens of Christian taboo but through the lens of all good and healthy cheerfulness. But where it's used as even for headline click bait, it's odd to me that it gets the reaction it does. It's as if sex is some secret that only a few people know about. Sex is something we do like driving a car, or buying groceries, it's a part of our lives. And although pornography isn't the same sex you have with your partner, it's where kids are now learning about sex before having it - for better or worse. The mere use of it as a selling point suggests that its still taboo. Iâve never quite understood the selling point, since it doesnât involve the actual act of sex. Porn is a kind of joke theatre. Sex is of course an altogether different thing. Pornography discharges the libido and apostrophies sexual urges. Sex gratifies them, and is transgressive, by affirming the natural instincts. Whereas porn is something to laugh at, at life with all cheerfulness, or it would be reductive. Sex on the otherhand is affirming of life-driving instincts. You canât confuse the two, but there should be a place within culture for it because its such an important part of life it shouldnât be treated with taboo. It has always been a part of popular culture, not because pop culture revolves around sex, but because it revolves around high libido, which can express itself also in energy of creativity.
One feminist ability via instagram. is that it allows women to show how they like to look and feel sexy as opposed to how a man likes to perceive women sexy. The selfie has created that at least.
We have a culture where not only do we get what we want all the time, its a culture where wherever we see what we don't want, we get to eliminate it. Our culture creates segregation because we can curate everything. But good culture is variety. We end up creating a stream where there are no interruptions. We only have a culture which pleases us. Even to those who have a sadistic pleasure of cyber bullying. Cyber bullies would never say these things to their faces. They enjoy it because they're unreachable. They can be cruel and hurtful without ever fearing any repercussion. They can make someone feel horrible and then go and eat a sandwich.
We are all curators of our own content. To say instagram is terrible is a misnomer, as itâs self curated, it's that they're following content they don't like. But given a user generated medium like Instagram and we invent the most inauthentic place. Advertising and pop culture have always gone hand in hand. As advertising evolved pop culture evolved and vice versa.
The culture isnât bad, culture can never really be bad, thereâs always some good in it. Itâs just the framework of the architecture with which we uphold it which allows us to experience it. Pop-culture at its best was always an experiment, always stepping near to avant-garde without ever stepping in to it. To be able to look at the entire bulk of pop-culture is an advantage. To be able to see it as one entire Golden Age. As one giant experiment that perhaps eventually became too formulaic and rationally devised. Too commercial that it became commercials.
Michael Jackson had been doing the âvisual albumâ in the 90s for his Dangerous Album releasing nine short films for the record. The 80s were doing "visual singles" all the time. Pink Floyd made The Wall movie in 70s, and The Beatles maybe first experimented with that in A Hard Days Night. Plus it wasn't unpopular to do because the big 80s blockbuster movies were using pop soundtracks to their films, so when you saw a film you heard pop and rock bands, compared to 21st Century film which has returned back to the film score, with obvious exceptions such as directors like Sofia Coppola. Before Beyonce's visual album the end of 2013, FKAtwigs had self-directed four videos to her four tracks of her self-released EP1 in 2012.
Illustrators like Derek Hess who has done amazing work in the 1990s was doing amazing work in the 2000s and rock poster art was still thriving on the underground circuit. I was a big fan of his and he gave me some good advice âDonât forget, James, wherever you go, you go with you.â There was an lo-fi 8-bit wave with Crystal Castles, Postal Service, and Nuuro (eventually to become Arca). The Dresden Dolls having still the best feminist song of the century with The Perfect Fit. So much that was exciting but it was under the radar. Directors like Floria Sigismondi who made beautiful odd videos for everyone from Christina Aguilera, to Sigur Ros, to The White Stripes, to David Bowie.
1960s surf rock come back with bands like Beach House and Best Coast fused with Velvet Underground and My Bloody Valentine drones. Lana Del Rey as a kind orange peel of the whole thing, an aesthetic homage to the Golden Age, taking a slice from everywhere. Very significant issues like Black Lives Matter, Feminism, sexuality equality, and other issues which resemble the 1960s that felt to have underscored the era than defined it.
A significant 21st century platform as a festival was Alex Poot's creation and artistic direction of Manchester International Festival between 2007-2015 where pop culture and high-art was still intermixing, was still full of fire and experiment, and where everything is a premier and a project outside of the artistâs usual way of working. And it was in my hometown and I would volunteer with it working with Bjork, Wayne McGregor, Anhoni, Robert Wilson and other artists making incredible work in my city.
One artist who since the 1960s has been marrying surrealism, high art and pop culture is theatre director Robert Wilson. From Einstein on the Beach in 1976, to his collaborations with William Burroughs and Tom Waits in 1990, to Timerock with Lou Reed in 1997, to the unrealised collaboration with David Bowie for 2000, to the The Life & Death of Marina Abramovich in 2011, (which I myself participated in working with) and much more beyond and in between with adaptations of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Monteverdi, Euripides. Wilson also collaborated with Lady Gaga for live VMA performance in 2013. What pop culture icon has done more for fashion in the 21st Century than Lady Gaga. Kanye West and Lady Gaga are probably the only major artists that arose after the 90s that are continuing the ethos of 90s pop culture and yet still very much part of the 21st century aftermath. Whatâs more of a brand than Kanye West or Lady Gaga. Who more cares about the art of music video, the staging of live performance, music packaging, disdains the status âcelebrityâ, uses interviews and performance to comment on world, fuses high art with pop culture, not playing it safe instead testing their limitations, loves being distasteful in the mouth of media, and whoâs work is unafraid to verge on the surreal than Kanye West. Yet that Kanye made the Wolves music video a Balmain campaign is both completely 90s and completely 21st Century that it is far more a commercial than a music video that it is actually an advertisement. Artist, art and advertising now utterly indivisible. Thereâs a quote from Nietzsche ânothing popular was ever great.â No one of Kanye Westâs first singles from an album did particularly well. It always takes a while. Great culture doesnât give you the same taste you have in your mouth, so it takes a while to get used to it. Great culture is like medicine, itâs good for you but it kinda tastes bad. Advertising tried to speed that up by giving us bubble gum flavoured medicine. Eventually itâs just bubble gum, and that sugarâs gonna rot your teeth.
I feel 2007-2017 is an era of itself. The world moves too fast to be out in neat little organised decades anymore. The minimalism of fashion photography and interior design to the stylised and peculiar. From the birth of Youtube, Twitter, Facebook to billion dollar companies which many business rely upon. From small phones to big phones. From the first iTunes to Apple Music. 2007 Radiohead used the internet for a pay what you want plan within the file sharing era to Frank Ocean releasing an album directly through Apple Music. And the transition to acceptance of gay marriage and sexual diversity in hip-hop. The Obama era to Trump. The Financial Crisis to Brexit. And many other examples that it was itself a little ten year pocket. But things arenât making the impact that they can have because theyâre scattered around millions of mini-networks and over disposable streams, or appearing on platforms for click bait headlines, but which doesnât allow for memorable creative impact. Sometimes I think even the ability to voice so easily means that the burning desire to say something gets diffused before it reaches the art. As great as it is, there was something about that the artwork was the opportunity to say something that meant it was just full of so much more. But if you get so much out on Twitter first the work doesnât get stuffed with the message. Everything seems to just drift from one thing to next, nothing puts on the brakes or changes gear. Once it happens on a stream its over - on to the next thing with a resigned âI canât believe youâre still talking about that - that was so March 24th.â
There is another precursor outside of the music, politics, and recovery after the economic depression: the art and literary world. Popculture makes countless references to Tracey Emin in the 2000s, Daimien Hirst in the 1990s, Jean-Michael Basquiat in the 1980s, Andy Wharhol in the 1970s, the investment that the American CIA put in to art is significant. Expressionism was also a means the United States saw to show to the world it's ideals of freedom, that even art could be this free. The American government saw it was another way to show Soviet territory that America was a kind of paradise, and the way forward, beyond and away from rigidity of their Constructivists.
The 60s and 70s were hugely intellectually inspired periods by writers and theories of art that they delved in to beyond the turn of the 20th century. The creativity of literature in the very tail end of modernists, and 19th century philosophers and writers like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche had significant influences on artists such as David Bowie and Iggy Pop, as well as artists like Duchamp and Picasso. German expressionist theatre had been changing both stage and film to create how a scene felt, not literally was, how it reflected the inner state of mind. But if there's a movement that seemed to have faded out and yet can be found in many ways across the whole scope of popular culture's Golden Age, it was the art movement of Surrealism.
In some sense Surrealism is the beginning of the popular culture artist. The use of the concepts of "subconscious" was more a necessary concept for a changing of the guards, from modernist culture to pop culture, rather than a concept in reality. The unconscious was the suspicion of the truth behind modern soberism from the 17th - 20th century. And it was really what gave way to the 60s to be the event that it was at all. Andre Breton and the Parisian artistic intellectual culture scattered around Europe, kind of created what became pop culture as much as the music coming up out of the United States. It seemed to disappear quietly, but Surrealism dipped it's toe in to everything that was popular culture. The whole of the Golden Age in a way was kind of an experiment, which is what made it what it was. It didn't have a plan, and the more it had a plan, the more formalised, the more rational and sober, the more suited for certain business, the less interesting and the less energy it had. Popculture was always an avant-garde movement, at its worst, a hell of a fun ride, connecting with people not on a general level but on a universal level of big questions that preoccupy us all.
The surrealism that began with Andre Breton in 1924 in Paris, only it's not a representation of the unconscious mind but that dreams are a way that we face the concerns in our lives through mythical re-represenation. When we dream, we are focusing on the concerns in our own lives, imagined in a way that we can witness them, as themselves, beautiful works of art, existing in the imagination. Activated in dreams. And that great art whether high or popular is essentially doing the same thing.
There are those bad artists that enjoy pain and those bad audiences, and those good artists that overcome it. We want to depict ourselves as art to see ourselves. We can see ourselves better often in art than in rational explanation. Look at the Roman sculpture of LaocoĂśn and his sons being eaten alive by giant snakes. The story was the subject of a lost tragic play by Sophocles.
If there's anything exemplified in the LaocoĂśn sculpture its strength within that ordeal. And the Romans would have known the story and known he doesnât make it out alive. So its not an image of victory but tragedy. But what you see is strength in a beautiful artwork. Although itâs follows none of the Archaic Greek sculptural principles during the tragic period, what is more Roman than strength in ordeal. It does this by a fictional image crafted with the precision of reality, cloaking reality with myth - which is not at all unlike the surrealists. Much of what we think of Classical art is that itâs about rationality which is a misunderstanding. Most of the work are unreal images, taken from myth, envisioned with the same precision of reality. Weâre told that classical art is about rationalism, but in a way itâs just as irrational as surrealism whenever itâs myth. It might even be perfect surrealism. Tragic art is ugly beautiful. It's recognising the terrible truths of the nature of life and the terrible crisis, but painting it with beauty so we can endure it. That was the same genius of Shakespeare, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Homer. There's no happy ending in these masques of tragedy. Yet we come away from Shakespeare not filled with gloom but full of exhilaration. Thereâs more similiarity between our pop culture and ancient and Renaissance art than in Neoclassicalism and modernism, which was far too rational and sober to create surrealism or tragic myth. There's no rosey-eyed glasses of romanticism, the truth is ugly, nevertheless, life is beautiful. Didnât Alexander McQueen say the same thing that he was attracted to the grotesque and wanted to show that something could be messy but also elegant. And how many of the fashion shows with Simon and Joseph Bennett were envisioned out of a dream vision. In fact it was beautifully expressed by the name given to his exhibition âSavage Beauty.â
Those who think that figurative art has no intelligent substances compared to conceptual art, well the difference was they artists like the Greek sculptures saw no difference between intellectual pursuit and superficial aesthetics. The famous Discuss Thrower for example is not only a great figurative sculpture but embodies the philosophy of the balance of opposites. The taut arm at the back the limp arm at the front, the bent leg and relaxed leg, the curled under toes and curled back toes, the shape of the arm is as a bow and the legs like a taut bow string. The intellect was concealed within aesthetics. They Greeks knew the intoxicating effect of aesthetics just as our so-called superficial culture does today. But they saw it as a path to access intelligence and wisdom - in a similar way to how some people believe is accessible through drugs, they saw that through art.
Conceptual art is that one canât see life with any clarity so the artist sees it through impressions, distortions, and concepts. Lies because he does not know how to see the truth.
Conceptual artists donât want to believe or accept that art is fundamentally superficial. Not to use that word in a demeaning sense. Painting, sculpture, visual art is aesthetic. Bottecelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello and Giotto were all superficial artists in a profound way. All ideas were prior to the presence of pure aesthetics of the object. The craftsmanship of the work, the dreamed up imagination of the work, the meaning and significance of the work, all resulting in the visual image they manifested. This isnât much different even than the surrealists of the twentieth century, who wanted to access the subconscious mind and paint dreams. The reason surrealists images are more warped and strange is only a difference of the lack of myth - and perhaps a clarity of their own imagination. Greek, Roman and Renaissance art is perhaps perfect surrealism. Myth. But conceptual artists felt that they wanted to make a case for the ideas in art, so they wanted ideas to take precedence. They placed ideas before aesthetics. They thought in doing so they were making what was superficial now deep. but itâs not even shallow.
Everything after Duchamp was a failure. You walk in to a plastic essay. Conceptual art is a plastic essay. Iâm probably not the only one whoâs tired of walking in to these plastic essays. The superficial aspect of art - its pure aesthetics - is the rush and awe of art. Perhaps an artists does not get the effect from the viewer he wants, and disdains not his craftsmanship but the medium for failing him. He wanted to convey ideas. Then he should write an essay. Â And how many times now we walk in to art exhibitions and have to read so much, essay after essay, often they even hand them out, so that we understand this plant pot on a white stool in the middle of the room and other ridiculous art. What is now called Classical art is not about rational thinking and proportions and that modern art is about irrationality. Nonesense, and mere pandering to modern artâs desire to find its shallowness deep. Great art is superficial. Great culture is superficial. Aesthetics takes precedent. The so-called Classical artists were manifesting dreams out of myth with the clarity and measured proportions of real life - yet the basis of which were the most irrational things, dreams. And the only place ideas had was in the purpose of the work and the craftsmanship of its execution. Itâs only in the modern period that artists failed to understand the profoundness of that superficiality, or that they failed their own work to place profoundness in it, or that it lacked an audience to find profoundness in it. In any case, conceptual art and its children were all failures of art, who in trying to become deep were not even shallow. Whoever doesnât like modern art, who take no pleasure in it, who hates the idea that you have to now appreciate and understand art, has every right to. They are themselves much deeper and smarter than these artists. On the one hand art is superficial and pure aesthetics the more perfect it is, on the other hand it is born out of myth the more perfect it is. Â Art that tries to be intelligent and deep is not even shallow.
The unconventional. These are the people who see themselves in the ugly beautiful. The different but strong not weak. Unconventionally beautiful and intelligent, as opposed to vacuous and obvious beauty. For instance, Isamaya Frenchâs work is neither diaristic nor advertising, she's satiric, comic, and condescending to the commonalities of the age. She uses them to speak. Itâs something that is more frequently coming out of the stylists now.
The history of art is just a variety of communication. âMy work is always about communicatingâ Laurie Anderson. For instance, in a contemporary sculpture that has a man with an oversized arm or its designed to have bits missing, the basis of that work is still in the rational reality of a man that is then distorted. Surreal and ancient art were both from the basis of dream visions. And yet who would ever say that the 1990s was on the verge of the Renaissance? But in the history of culture, the only chunk of culture that was ever really out of place was the 1600s to the 1900s. The rest fits together quite nicely. Neoclassical architecture only superficially tried to imitate classical architecture but less so than Corbusier. Much of it was really facade. Opera that only superficially tried to imitate Greek Tragedy but less so than Robert Wilsonâs artpop opera. The Greeks wouldnât have understood Opera and laughed at Shakespeare. Iâm sure Baz Lurhmanâs Romeo and Juliet, and Lawrence Olivierâs Hamlet, were more thrilling than a Victorian theatre experience. Thereâs no way than any high culture was ever made without an ecstasy in to high spirits and intoxication and thatâs exactly what pop culture gave us. You canât passively make Shakespeare. Hamlet at the crisis under some universal spotlight, what is that but the rockstar on stage, the tragic anti-hero. Pop cultureâs media has always been vocal about breaking with the past but the culture itself has always been about making connections. Connections between diverse and seemingly estranged things.
From radio, to television, to festivals, to MTV, what drives popular culture is collisions of otherwise divergent forms. Every era of popular culture was segmented by its political, social, technological, economic shifts, and within that there had to be a stage, with which to voice and express how it felt to live within that. All popular culture is really made on the stage, whether a theatre, screen, concert, or channel. There is always a platform. Culture needs what itâs always needed: platforms. Whether that is festivals or channels. Not lanes, not steams, and not idealisations of perfection - so that any young girl with a thin waist, big bust, peachy butt, and a toothpaste commercial smile can make a career out of instagram. But the stage to allow for the metamorphosis of cultural variety on that stage. Periods of culture are like cocoons, concentrated periods of intensity that nevertheless undergo metamorphosis. Divided and defined by their technological, social, economic and political shifts. It canât be divided so neat and tidy as the decades of the Gregorian calender. Life isnât so convenient as that.
Look at some of the most defining videos of the era - Rihanna, Sia, Beyonce - have been people singing through pain. Look how many more women are making better videos than men. But they look how badass, and full of strength. Not as a glamorisation of the terrible, but as a lens through which we can handle the truth of reality so we donât ignore it.
Literature is more the complimentary counterpart of music, itâs never very good if it aims to do just the same thing. The 1960s through the 2000s wanted to do with literature (rather than for literature) what punk did for music. Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs, Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis, etc Controversial literature and poetry that is full of swear words and draws illicit lewd content doesnât do the job because it is just another appearance of the world. Huge exterior lives of characters with horrible interiors. Itâs just another moral appearance of the world. Horrible things happen but itâs not our reality. Horrible things make up a lot life, but itâs getting past the appearance of the horrible in to the universality of lifeâs pain. And I donât see why Iâd spend time writing about the specific people I spend time trying to avoid in actual life. Okay, greedy self-absorbed economists are not the nicest of people and drugs donât equate well being - we get that. Literature that lasts is literature that gets in to the heart of us no matter what the costume of the world is. Itâs about being able to say the truth without unbearable explicitness because youâll end up glamorising the truth incidentally. To get someone to sit through two hours of a film about a horrible thing you have to make it look good and entertaining, and therefore you glamorise the very thing youâre trying to discredit. The Great Gatsby is one example of a commonly misunderstood one. Fitzgerald wrote it to be cynical about the growing material decadence of America and yet what we remember is wanting to attend Gatsbyâs wonderfully extravagant parties. Outside of the Surrealist poets, the major influence to surreal literature that took that direction would be Marquez' One Years of Solitude, Lorca's When Five Years Pass, Pirandello's Five Actors Looking For A Director, and Kafka's Metamorphosis. With science fiction also contributing. But writers like Ovid and Homer are no less surrealists. In literature we're much still in the age of American pulp fiction, the English fantasy fable, and the modern social realist novel. The surrealist novel is yet to be a part of culture.
Nick Knight once said in an interview from a McQueen shoot with antlers protruding from the models shoulders, that when people criticised it he said "why can people accept images in horror movies but have a problem with it in photography. Film is twenty-four frames per second, this is just one frame." In a horror film people find it agreeable to find terrifying images terrifying, but Nick Knight's images are beautiful. And those people found it disagreeable to their own conscience to find antler's protruding out of someone's shoulders beautiful. Nick Knightâs work makes everyone who feels, looks, are, and may be judged differently feel OK and feel beautiful. We all feel our own pain and lifeâs beauty at the same time.
From everything from David Bowie to Alexander McQueen there is the ability to dream and take something messy and make it elegant, to take the possibly ugly and make it absolutely beautiful. I see that same thing in SHOWstudio and I think England has always been very good at that. I think Shakespeare was very good at that. But also Andre Breton and the Surrealists, those of Lorca and Dali also, were doing the same, theatre directors like Robert Wilson, and music video generally verged on the surreal. And I see SHOWstudio as a great continuation of all that energy. If there was anything post 2001 that kept that energy and creativity it was fashion. If there is anything since 2001, that is a platform that is curating culture it is SHOWstudio. SHOWstudio still exists in a world of dreams, whilst other platforms that look similiar are putting it in reality. It is still just photography with them, SHOWstudio seems to be image making. Not only does SHOWstudio feel like what I loved about my MTV in terms of cultural electricity, but also what I love about the all the artists whether literary or visual of the twentieth century.
Whether surrealism or myth it is an art as a way of being able to say the truth without having to directly look at the truth. A way to handle the truth at a safe distance. It makes it creative instead of scientific. It makes it creative, instead of explicit. The 90s revelled in such dissonance. Yet good conscience culture follows the trend of whatever else in in vogue. Unfollowed is dissonance in culture. Despite all the technology in the world, our time is very much the 1950s and 1980s combined, which carried such a different cultural ethos from the 60s, 70s, underground 80s, and 90s. Because despite all its innovations, technology doesnât change people. And pop culture is kind of a tussle between the two, where they married briefly in the 70s and 90s. Which is perhaps why surrealism is again so relevant.
The 80s was so visual that the 90s was kind of a return to what people felt like, but what they felt like within the 80s visual world. The 90s had so many satirical comedies. We knew ourselves again. We began to understand the world and talk about how it felt to be in that world, to ask big questions again, and dealt with those issues on television. If filmmakers like Alejandro Jaradowski and the opening of Fellini's 8 1/2 as more art house cinema, then in popular cinema Stanley Kubrick was the most symbolist and surrealist filmmaker during the century. "The most important parts of a film are the mysterious parts - beyond the reach of reason and language" Stanley Kubrick. Like every great piece of visual cinema it mixed symbolism and surrealism with an existential concern. Even1990s television in The X-Files, what made it so relatable was the slogan The Truth Is Out There. To search for the truth in a world that was so far removed from truth. We could all relate to that. Every copy of that show that was just about aliens and the supernatural no one could connect with.
Isamaya Ffrench, Nick knight, Harley Weir, FKAtwigs, SHOWstudio in general (not to mention, though I mean them, Rei Nadal, Marie Schuller, Ruth Hogben, Pavel Brenner, Vincent Haycock, Tabitha Denholm to name only a very few), and fashion designers too numerous to mention - not that it defines the time, but thereâs options to see a energy of a culture that there wasnât before. A culture that seems more surreal that is also more intelligent. And a new visual culture through instagram has opened up a new surrealism, a satirical and cynical take on ourselves and on censorship itself. Not out of expressing and appeasing an anxiety but out of an intellectual understanding of the world around us and our own behaviour within it. Out of the decades of political, social, and economic reality, it became almost too much to bare with. Now weâre turning more to satire and surrealism to be able to handle facing reality. Out of a necessity to handle the truth with high spirits.
Too much explicit realism is making us all low spirited. People want to feel they have power over their own problems and power over their own life. The feeling that they can overcome the problems in their lives, face life. to have power over their obstacles. A part of that is to see the world clearer; to be engaged with inspiring people who make them feel they have power over their life; the feeling that life is bearable, endurable, and enjoyable; the feeling that they are okay and great. Fundamentally the feeling of power over their life even in the irrationality and chaos of the modern world. And take comfort in the uncertainty. âUncertainty excites me, baby, who knows whatâs going to happen, lottery or a car crash, or join a cultâ sings a lyric from Bjork. The 14th Century Japanese writer Yoshida Kenko had remarked similar words in saying âthe most precious thing in life is uncertainty.â
Literature helps us momentarily stop and make sense of everything and to assume the identity of that which can make sense. Literature is form within the chaos. Music is chaos out of the form. Music break apart and literature puts together in a new way. Great writers donât describe the time they live in, great writers elevate the attitude of the time they live in. They help people see the time and give expression to the spirit and feeling of the age. And itâs only long afterwards that the culture holds up their work as the way it wishes to remember it. A generation of writers who said what they see. Writers as Seers, as Thoreau had used the word.
The Golden Age of popular culture is over. Now popular culture is no longer culture, itâs just popular. Whilst Kinfolk-culture would appear as a reinstatement of that 1950s traditional values, the rockstar mentality and the surrealist aesthetic lives on from the Golden Age of popular culture. The electricity in culture now is who is being unfollowed. And whoever walks unfollowed, walks their own path. Maybe the better way to describe the next phase will be âunpopular culture.â So unfollow me, unsubscribe, and unlike me.
