cultural studies
September 08, 2006
Pop Culture 2.0?
It's the end of an era. Two of the most influential figures in American pop culture were fired this week: Tom Freston and Robert Christgau. Freston, who was head of Viacom's cable networks, was one of the key executives behind the rise of MTV. Christgau is the self-proclaimed "Dean of American Rock Critics," the writer who redefined the rock canon away from the populism of the mainstream music press, and toward what he sometimes called "semipopular music."
Freston got canned after the MTV Music Video Awards continued their ratings freefall this year, while MTV's web offerrings got their clocks cleaned by "Web 2.0" social networking juggernauts MySpace and YouTube. Christgau got axed after the Village Voice was sold to an alternaweekly chain desperately trying to compete with craigslist's free classified ads.
The old frameworks for making sense of pop culture are starting to collapse. Pop's presumed market of scarcity - only a handful of songs can make it to heavy rotation, only a handful of artists can become stars - is being overwhelmed by an information explosion. On MySpace, thousands of local band listings sit side by side with Paris Hilton promotions - and Paris needs the locals more than they need her. No one indie band has the reach of a pop star, but it's the community they've built that brings eyeballs to Paris's page. Meanwhile, viewers are tuning out TV channels and becoming their own programmers on YouTube.
The demassification of American popular culture continues. Every year, the big networks lose ground to cable, while the big cable channels lose ground to the profusion of newer digital channels. The big record labels' sales shrink, while the global jukebox becomes available on all-you-can-download subscription services like Rhapsody. Radio listeners abandon terrestrial's shrunken playlists for Sirius and XM. "The Long Tail" grows ever longer.
Which explains not only Freston's departure, but perhaps Christgau's, too. When the mainstream dissolves, how do we define the margins? If there's no longer such a thing as pop, how can there still be punk?
Christgau himself was never an indie snob - he's always had the open-earedness to praise a big star like Garth Brooks if he thought the music earned it. And I'm sure he'll land on his feet - some smart publication should grab him for some instant hipster credibility. Freston, I'm not so sure about, although I'm confident his parachute was much more golden than Christgau's. But the real question is what comes next.
Pop Culture 2.0 no longer needs a lowest common denominator. Traditional media companies are always out to score a blockbuster, because it's so much more efficient to sell one product to one million customers, rather than a thousnd products to a thousand customers each. But to MySpace, it's all the same. They make their money off ads, and a million pageviews is a million pageviews, no matter how they're sliced up. In fact, better they be a thousand different pages with a thousand viewers each - all the more room for growth. Finally, the economics are on the side of cultural diversity.
That doesn't mean they'll stay that way. I'm sure that Fox, which bought MySpace, would love to see it simply replace MTV as pop's top tastemaker. But I doubt we'll ever again see the kind of teen monoculture I lived through in the 1980s. There's just too much cool stuff out there to listen to. Christgau's the one who taught me that. And now everybody's figuring it out.
Posted by tedf at 01:21 AM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2005
LostWorlds.org
One of my M.A. students, Gary Daniels, successfully defended his thesis today. He's the first person in the department to create a multimedia thesis project. It's a website documenting the sites of prehistoric Native American civilizations in Georgia and Florida. It includes short documentary films featuring interviews with archeologists and other experts, Quicktime VR panoramas of the sites, and 3D animations simulating the sites as they might have originally appeared. It's an ambitious and impressive undertaking. You can check out the site here. And if you're interested in visiting public Indian sites, you can check out this map of sites in Georgia, and this map of sites in Florida. For those of you in Atlanta, the Etowa mounds in Cartersville, GA are a fascinating day trip.
Posted by tedf at 01:25 AM | Comments (0)
April 05, 2005
Guest Entry: BMN on Wrestling Lingo Applied to Life and Academia
BMN's response to my post on wrestling lingo really deserved to be an entry to itself, so here it is:
Me and my brother basically popularized using wrestling terminology to describe our entire lives amongst our group of friends. To the point now that many non-wrestling fan friends of his use the terms all the time having no idea where they came from. Other helpful terms in wrestling that can be applied to real life,"shoot" and "work" - "shoot" refers to a series of actual events that "aren't part of the storyline." (e.g. Bruiser Brody "shot" on Lex Luger by not letting any of his moves hurt and thus Luger got the hell out of there and the match didn't end as planned). "Work" refers to the storyline sometimes (as in, "it's all part of the work") but also as a verb to describe people who are TRYING to convince you that something is "not part of the script" even though it really is (e.g., Dallas Page and Buff Bagwell tried to work the wrestlers backstage into thinking they hated each other in real life but it was all to strengthen their onscreen feud).
(as used in real life) - "That couple's argument might seem like a shoot but they were just working the hosts because they wanted a reason to leave early."
(as used in academia) - "They aren't shooting with the job interviews, it's all just a work to legitimize the hiring of the inside candidate."
***
"Mark out" or "pop" - read above term about "Mark." Describes a specific event in a match that gets a major reaction (e.g's "the crowd marked out for Steve Austin's return" or "the three tables fall got the crowd to pop big time")
(as used in real life) - "Steve showed up at my party unexpected. I popped!"
(as used in academia) - "I marked out for Rob Drew's paper on Starbucks mix CDs."
***
"Booker": person in charge of storylines (i.e. head writer)
(as used in real life) - "Pat is booking the road hockey tournament"
(as used in academia) - "Maryann Meyers is booking proseminar this year."
***
"On the fly booking" - meaning to not plan too far ahead of time in order to keep the audience on its toes (usually to fool the "smarts"). Eric Bischoff used it to put WCW on top, booking entire shows only ten minutes ahead of time (but it ulimately led to disorganized chaos that helped bring WCW down).
(as used in real life) - "Hey Pat, don't leave the house yet, the road hockey tournament has just been moved to Ranni St." "On the fly booking!!"
(as used in academia) - not assigning readings until the very end of each class in order to remain "topical" and/or "au courant" would be a case of "on the fly booking."
***
"Getting over" - means that you are getting the reaction that you want from the audience in spades (the Rock really wasn't getting over initially but then got over so huge, he became one of the biggest stars in the business)
(as used in real life) - Brent's karaoke routine really got over with the crowd
(as used in academia) - if my paper is the best received on the panel, then I "got over" the best with the audience
***
"Heat" - Can be used in two fashions, "babyface heat" (strong crowd reaction for a good guy) or "heel heat" (strong crowd reaction for a bad guy).
(as used in real life) - Mick's got real heel heat on him right now for not showing up to the party.
(as used in academia) - if someone writes a book that seems more self-serving than theoretically promising, then they could receive major heel heat from the academic community
***
"Angle" - An event or series of events that is usually a confrontation between two or more wrestlers that intensifies a feud.
(as used in real life) - if someone makes a change in their life that's radical and gets a reaction (e.g. "Bryce just got accepted by Georgia State and is going to Atlanta in two months" :-p) then someone may react by saying "what an angle!"
(as used in academia) - an intense confrontation at a panel might be seen to further a "feud" between two discourses and thus is a good "angle." E.g. "That Appadurai-Harvey debate was a great angle! I'm really interested in where the flows vs. structure storyline is going."
***
"Comedy spot" - a series of events put in a match more for a laugh than to be taken seriously. Can be used in a flattering sense to describe a wrestler's humorous personality ("Eugene is effective in comedy spots") or a not-so-flattering sense to describe how a wrestler's style has gotten so corny and/or repetitive as to be laughable ("Ric Flair is a legend whose schtick been reduced to comedy spots")
(as used in real life) - "I put a comedy spot into my karaoke performance that got over huge."
(as used in academia) - "Arguments about false consciousness were once taken seriously but now run the risk of being reduced to comedy spots about what dupes we all are."
***
"put someone over" - Used commonly to refer to losing to someone but more subtly used to describe the act of making the other performer look good. E.g., HHH lost the match but didn't sell most of his opponents moves so he didn't really put him over. Also can describe a series of events (e.g. Goldberg's winning streak was designed to put him over as a monster).
(as used in real life) - "Hopefully you'll be able to go out with Suzie. I really put you over in the conversation I had with her."
(as used in academia) - "I used these three professors for my letters of recommendation because they're the best at putting me over" or "if you want to get in that journal, you really need to put over the editors in your paper."
***
"Turn" - to go from babyface to heel or vice-versa
(as used in real life) - "He turned heel on his girlfriend by cheating on her."
(as used in academia) - "She turned heel at the NCA convention by putting over the ICA instead."
***
"Workrate" - describes how well someone can make a match flow. E.g. Hulk Hogan was a popular character but his workrate sucked (i.e. he didn't do much to make a match look good).
(as used in real life) - I'm sorry......I'm not willing to post sex talk on a website :-P
(as used in academia) - Probably used to describe people who have become the "go to" people for quotes in the media but haven't really contributed any actual ideas to the discipline. "So and so is really over with the media but their workrate is terrible."
***
"Swerve" - to book an angle/storyline one way when it appears to be going another e.g., the fans in 1998 thought the Survivor Series would set up the Rock as the top good guy but the company swerved them and turned him heel
(as used in real life) - "We thought he was going to other bar but he showed up here instead, what a swerve!"
(as used in academia) - "Everyone thought the inside candidate was going to get the job but they hired outside the department. What a swerve!"
***
"Screwjob" - A finish with a controversial ending, often upsetting and/or disappointing the fans.
(as used in real life) - "The party turned out to be a real screwjob; they said there'd be an open bar but there was hardly any booze and they kicked everyone out before one."
(as used in academia) - "The conference was a screwjob; half of the promised presentations never happened."
***
"selling" - Making someone else's moves look good, writhing in agony when you are "hit" with something. The better the sell, the better the move looks.
(as used in real life) - "He's not selling the breakup in public because he doesn't want her to know how hurt he is."
(as used in academia) - "The chair of the department sold the challenge to his theory as the ultimate indignity."
There you have it, wrestling's "carny lingo" and how it make YOU articulate life and academics in an entirely different way. (Other examples are welcome!)
BMN
Posted by tedf at 11:03 PM | Comments (2)
Cool Wrestling Lingo Applied to Music and Critical Theory
From the wrestling blog:
[There are three kinds of wrestling fans:]mark - someone who believes it’s all real
smart - someone who knows the inside information, or thinks they do, and is too smart for his own good
smark - a "smart mark” - someone who knows insider stuff, but is still a mark at heart
I really love these hermeneutic categories - they perfectly capture something about the experience of postmodern culture. Beck, for example, is great when he's a smark, but annoying when he's just a smart. Whether you enjoy the Pet Shop Boys or not depends on whether you consider them smarks or just smarts. And watching MTV loses is pleasure when it becomes impossible to remain smarky about it, and you end up just being a smart.
I remain a mark for Hall & Oates, Debbie Gibson, and Superman. I used to be a mark for the Yankees, but that's fading, and I'm not sure I'm even a smark for them anymore. And the world of academic critical theory is full of marks who think they're smarts (Foucault obsessives, Derrida fantatics), and would be better off embracing their smarkiness (like the publisher of Judy!, that great Judith Butler fanzine of the early 1990s).
Posted by tedf at 04:19 AM | Comments (3)
March 24, 2005
High Culture Jamming
Kottke.org links to an awesome story about a British artist who snuck into four New York galleries and hung his own paintings. The MOMA piece survived for three days, and two of the other ones are still hanging.
This strikes me as a great spin on the whole Duchamp tradition of hanging a urinal on a gallery wall and calling it art. When a famous artist does that, it's really just a celebration of his own authority to declare what counts as art. This is a much more legitimately subversive jesture. I hope one of the museums has the sense of humor - and guts - to keep the piece up, or even buy it.
Stealing gallery space (kottke.org)
Posted by tedf at 10:30 PM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2005
My Current Project: Rethinking Myth
The Pick Ted's Hair contest continues here. In the meantime, I feel I should elevate the tone of this blog a smidge by talking a little about my current research project.
Basically, what I'm trying to do is rethink the idea of popular culture as myth. This is a subject that was explored by some academic writing in the 1970s, but was largely dropped for other, hipper formulations. However, I think it's still a compelling framework, for several reasons:
- Myth may not be a hot topic among film academics, but it's very influential among screenwriters, who take Campbell's The Hero's Journey as a template for storytelling.
- Campbell also has a huge cult among new agers and other spiritual seekers. Myth may be a framework for talking about both ideology and spirituality at the same time.
- While psychoanalytic film theory may seem to be at a dead end, turning from Freud to Jung offers new approaches to thinking about the intersection of culture and subjectivity. Certainly, the universe of Hollywood is populated by archetypes - heroes, shadows, wise men, tricksters. Jung may offer a vocabulary to make sense of these figures, and chart their differences.
- Myth also offers a way to think about participatory fan culture. Hollywood provides the mythos, fans rework the stories, just as the Greek playwrights reworked the familiar stories of their age.
- In a globalized world, the ubiquity of Hollywood stories raises questions about the universality of myth. Campbell argued that what he called "the monomyth" is universal. Jung likewise argued that there's a "collective unconscious" we all share. Does this help explain the worldwide appeal of stories like Star Wars? Certainly, Campbell's and Jung's universalism is unfasionable in anti-essentialist academia right now. Universalism can often mean casual generalization of ethnocentrism. But in a world that needs to imagine a community bigger than the nation, isn't there a place for recognizing the ties that bind us all together? Can't a more subtle, open universalism be a kind of cosmopolitanism?
I taught a class about some of these ideas last fall, Narrative, Myth and Ideology. This fall, I'll be teaching an undergraduate class on some of the same ideas, The Hero's Journey. I'm working on the syllabus for that one right now. I'm also reading up on Jung, who I'm liking even more than I expected to. I recommend Introducing Jung
and Jung: A Very Short Introduction.
So far, I've written one essay as a first hack at some of these ideas: Star Wars and the Dialectics of Myth. If you have a chance, please do check it out and post your comments.
Writing my first book was often a lonely experience. I'm hoping that this time around, I can work out a lot of my ideas here, online.
Posted by tedf at 03:09 AM | Comments (2)
March 18, 2005
Jonathan Sterne on "Torture Chic"
A former editor of Bad Subjects, the great leftist pop culture zine, has just begun serving a prison sentence for protesting in front of the School of the Americas. Co-editor Jonathan Sterne writes about the distressingly casual acceptance of torture in American TV in this thoughtful editorial:
Posted by tedf at 01:24 AM | Comments (0)