PART II
7
The Collapse of Popular Culture
The distance and direction popular culture has travelled in less than one lifetime is shown by the contrast between best-selling records. A performer of the 1930s hit “The Way You Look Tonight” sang these words to romantic music:
Oh, but you’re lovely,/With your smile so warm,/And your cheek so soft,/There is nothing for me but to love you, /Just the way you look tonight.
In our time, Snoop Doggy Dogg’s song “Horny” proclaims to “music” without melody:
I called you up for some sexual healing. /I’m callin’ again so let me come get it./Bring the lotion so I can rub you. /Assume the position so I can f… you.
Then there is Nine Inch Nails’ song, “Big Man with a Gun.” Even the expurgated version published by the Washington Post gives some idea of how rapidly popular culture is sinking into barbarism:
I am a big man (yes I am). And I have a big gun. Got me a big old [expletive] and I, I like to have fun. Held against your forehead, I’ll make you suck it. Maybe I’ll put a hole in your head…. I can reduce it if you want. I can devour. I’m hard as [expletive] steel and I’ve got the power…. Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. I’m going to come all over you…. me and my [expletive] gun, me and my [expletive] gun.
The obscenity of thought and word is staggering, but also notable is the deliberate rejection of any attempt to achieve artistic distinction or even mediocrity. The music is generally little more than noise with a beat, the singing is an unmelodic chant, the lyrics often range from the perverse to the mercifully unintelligible. It is difficult to convey just how debased rap is. Not even printing the words adequately expresses that. There have, however, been some noteworthy attempts to get the point across. The music industry, Michael Bywater writes as part of an extended piece of masterful vituperation, “has somehow reduced humanity’s greatest achievement—a near-universal language of pure transcendence—into a knuckle-dragging sub-pidgin of grunts and snarls, capable of fully expressing only the more pointless forms of violence and the more brutal forms of sex.” He contrasts this with the remarkably subtle and emotionally precise popular music of only a few decades ago: “If Bach is the sound of God thinking, then perhaps Gershwin is, at least, the sound of St. Anthony of Padua whistling as he works.”1
The difference between the music produced by Tin Pan Alley and rap is so stark that it is misleading to call them both music. Rock and rap are utterly impoverished by comparison with swing or jazz or any pre-World War II music, impoverished emotionally, aesthetically, and intellectually. Rap is simply unable to express tenderness, gentleness, or love. Neither rock nor rap can begin to approach the complicated melodies of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, or Cole Porter. Nor do their lyrics display any of the wit of Ira Gershwin, Porter, Fats Waller, or Johnny Mercer. The bands that play this music lack even a trace of the musicianship of the bands led by Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and many others of that era.
Rap songs like “Horny” and “Big Man with a Gun” are not, as one might hope, culturally marginal; they produce best selling records. Nor is this “black music.” Some of the worst rappers are white, and by far the largest number of records are sold to white suburban adolescents. What is one to make of these facts? One obvious answer has been mentioned: bored, affluent people in a society that no longer possesses the disciplinary tools of shame and stigma will indulge the most primitive human emotions. Sex, violence, and domination qualify.
Beyond that, it is possible to think these songs reflect a generalized rage, particularly rage against social authority. That seems to be the theme, expressed in obscene language and mixed with the celebration of violence in records like Ice-T’s “Cop Killers.” There is continuity with the Sixties hatred of authority and in particular of the police, expressed in the phrase “Off the pigs.” That may also explain the fury directed at women in this music. In that part of the black community where men are absent from the home, women are often figures of considerable power. White adolescents, with similar rebellious impulses, may resent the authority figures of mothers and female teachers, and the domineering whining feminists. The songs can be heard as paeans of revenge. No doubt the young have always chafed under authority; the difference now is that obscene assaults on authority have become culturally acceptable.
In keeping with the progress of liberalism, popular entertainment generally—and the worst of it in particular—celebrates the unconstrained self, and savages those who would constrain. People who consume these diversions are, it would appear, fascinated with self, which must be autonomous to be authentic. Protests and threatened boycotts caused Calvin Klein to cancel his semipornographic ad campaign showing teenagers in sexually provocative poses—a girl of 13 or 14 for instance, on her back, skirt lifted to show her panties. Columnist John Leo of US. News & World Report called the ads “decadent.” But a spokesman for Klein said that the ads were perfect for today’s independent generation: “people who do only what they want to do.” That is a good working definition of decadence. It is also the definition John Stuart Mill gave of liberty. Would that he could see where it led.
There are words to describe the Klein attitude. One, obviously, is narcissism; the other is nihilism. One who is absorbed in himself and his sensations, believing in few or no moral or religious principles, in nothing transcendental, is a nihilist. A culture that preaches narcissistic nihilism is asking for trouble.
Klein’s sleaze set off an uproar primarily because it was impossible to avoid; the ad thrust the offensive pictiures in our faces. Even those of us who try to avoid the more repellant aspects of popular culture know about it through a sort of peripheral vision. The rap beat blasts out of the car waiting beside you at a red light; blatant sexuality, often of a perverse nature, assualts the reader in magazine advertisements; carnage is promised in newspaper motion picture advertisments. Popular entertainment sells sex, pornography, violence, vulgarity, attacks on traditional forms of authority, and outright perversion more copiously and more insistently than ever before in our history. It is no answer to point out that much of popular culture is harmless or even benign. The culture has changed, is changing, and the change is for the worse. The worst is the leading edge.
The fixation on self first became obvious with rock ‘n’ roll, which evolved into “hard” rock. “The extrovert, the hedonist, the madman, the criminal, the suicide, or the exhibitionist can rise to heroic stature in rock for the same reasons that Byron or Raskolnikov became Romantic heroes—profligacy and murder are expressions of an emotional intensity that defies the limits imposed by nature and society.“2 Now we have moved on to rap, which is even less constrained. Its performers don’t just sing about criminals; some of them are criminals. Which does not seem to diminish their popularity.
What we hear in rap is paralleled elsewhere in popular culture in varying degrees. That the movies feature sex, violence, and vile language is not news. Car chases ending in flaming crashes, the machine gunning of masses of people, explosions of helicopters, the liberal production of corpses, language previously not heard even in semipolite society, these are now standard fare. It is no doubt true that Hollywood is appealing to profitable adolescent audiences, which appear to think that dismemberments and obscenities are an excellent evening’s entertainment. But there is probably more to these developments than that. Many in Hollywood insist upon a liberal lacing of foul language in their films because they regard brutality and obscenity as signs of “authenticity,” the polemical idea whose nature, Trilling told us, is to deal aggressively with traditional aesthetic opinion and then with traditional social and political opinion.
Television, not surprisingly, displays the same traits as the movies and music, though because it is viewed by families in the home, not to the same degree. Television viewing still resembles a bit the days when the family sat around the radio console, and that places a few restrictions on the medium. Still, things have changed
here, too. Language is increasingly vulgar. A major study of changes in program content over the life of television finds, as might have been expected of a medium that has recently come under the influence of the Sixties generation, that “[B]eginning from a relatively apolitical and traditional perspective on the social order, TV has meandered and lurched uncertainly along paths forged by the politics of the populist Left.“3 That has dictated changes in the way sex, social and cultural authority, and the personifications of good and evil are presented. Recreational sex, for example, is pervasive and is presented as acceptable about six times as often as it is rejected. Homosexuals and prostitutes are shown as social victims. Television takes a neutral attitude towards adultery, prostitution, and pornography. It “warns against the dangers of imposing the majority’s restrictive sexual morality on these practices. The villains in TV’s moralist plays are not deviants and libertines but Puritans and prudes.“4 The moral relativism of the Sixties is now television’s public morality.
Though it cannot begin to match rap, TV undermines authority in gentler ways. Families are relatively egalitarian; at work, subordinates ridicule their bosses and usually prevail over them. Businessmen are depicted negatively: they were three times more likely to commit crimes and five times as likely to be motivated by pure greed as people in most other occupations. Politicians fare no better. The military suffered a great fall in prestige beginning in the Sixties. Law enforcement officials are now shown as corrupt and as likely to commit crimes as anyone else, but criminals are portrayed sympathetically. This has begun to change. Police and prosecutors are now more often seen as heroes, which, it has been suggested, may be due to the widespread and justified fear of crime in this society.
Perhaps popular culture is inevitably vulgar but today’s is more vulgar than at any time in the past. Sex in sitcoms, previously pervasive, has recently exploded. A Super Bowl halftime show staged an elaborate sequence in which the central feature was Michael Jackson writhing and clutching his private parts for the edification of family audiences. But the television talk shows are perhaps the most astonishing. There are about twenty-five hosts competing for audiences and they generate about a hundred hours of programs weekly. I learned from a Montel Williams show about the institution of shore parties: people take vacations, engage in as much random sex as possible, and keep the score on a paper fastened to the refrigerator door. There was a show on women who marry their rapists and another about mothers and daughters having affairs with the same man. “In one Richard Bey outing last week,” wrote Walter Goodman, “I met Karen, who admitted that she had offered her husband to Donna as a sleeping companion; Carolyn, who said her brother had slept with her boyfriend, and Geena, who said she had slept with an old friend’s fiancé …. Geena presented her old friend with a birthday cake on stage before confessing to her, and got the cake back in her face. The audience whooped.“5
The question is asked, where do the shows find people willing to appear and reveal their most tawdry intimacies.6 A better question might be, where do the networks find an estimated audience of 50 million people per week who want to watch such things as a 13-year-old boy bragging about having sex with twenty-six women and then being confronted on camera by his mother. But this is merely blatant vulgarity. There is worse.
Television becomes the equivalent of rap and movies on Music Television Videos and some of the pay channels. MTV is the more pernicious because it is usually part of the basic package that subscribers get automatically. They pay nothing extra and, unless the parents are vigilant, children will watch it. A rap song, for example, is accompanied by a video that may or may not illustrate the words of the song. Images often follow one another at breakneck speed, images of guns, killings, police baiting, and sex. Like the movies, MTV is all the more dangerous because it is brilliantly produced.
One evening at a hotel in New York I flipped around the television channels. Suddenly there on the public access channel was a voluptuous young woman, naked, her body oiled, writhing on the floor while fondling herself intimately. Meanwhile, a man’s voice and a print on the screen informed the viewer of the telephone number and limousine service that would acquaint him with young women of similar charms and proclivities. I watched for some time—riveted by the sociological significance of it all. Shortly after that, men only slightly less nude advertised homosexual prostitutes.
Art, by adopting many of the techniques and much of the content of popular entertainment, is becoming popular entertainment. And popular art, paintings of tomato cans, is taken as high art. James Gardner notes the incongruity that art has never been more admired, more adulated, than it is now, that it draws larger crowds and attracts more money than ever before, and yet the art itself is impoverished.7 Here, as in popular music and television entertainment, it is not that there is no genuinely serious art at all; it is that there is so much that is meaningless, uninspired, untalented, or perverse. Perhaps the Sixties brought in a fascination with the perverted, but lack of meaning was evident well before that decade. In a prestigious New York museum in the early 1950s, a piece of black burlap nailed to a board was presented as art. In a London museum, I thought I had come upon leftovers from a carpet laying: strips of brown felt in a heap in the middle of the room. Then I saw that the pile had a title. I asked a sculptor on the Yale faculty what his sculpture, which looked like a half-melted tree stump, represented. He said quite seriously: “Whatever you want it to be.” Yale was willing to support a man whose idea of art was a three-dimensional Rorschach test. It is thus no cause for surprise that our great universities now offer courses on comic books.
These may be taken as manifestations of an individualism barren of substance, expressions of selves that are empty. But what are we to make of art that is both popular and perverted? For instance: a plastic puddle of vomit; piles of papier-mâché excrement; jars of the artist’s actual excrement; a painting entitled Shit Faith in which “crudely drawn excrement emerges from four abutting anuses.“8 We are informed that a “reinvigorated London art scene…. began to be the envy of the contemporary art world in the late 1980s” with such offerings as a dead fourteen-foot shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde, a portrait bust of the artist in his own frozen blood, and “Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With: 1963-1993,” which is a small tent “whose interior is lovingly appliqued with the names of [her] past loves and bedmates.”9 The object as always, one supposes, is to shock the bourgeoisie, but the bourgeoisie eagerly buy it. As we will see shortly, fascination with such materials as urine and excrement seems to be characteristic of today’s bourgeoisie, if that is any longer the proper term for such people.
The hostility to traditional culture was manifest in the arts long before the Sixties. “Anyone who thinks that fatuousness, nonsense, and obscenity in the arts are wholly recent, NEA-sponsored affairs,” Roger Kimball, managing editor of The New Criterion, writes, “should look back for a moment at some of the numerous avant-garde movements that captured headlines in Europe from the turn of the century through the 1920s.“10 Reviewing a book that praised the Dadaist movement for subverting the values of bourgeois society, Kimball remarks: “Consistent with its attack on ‘bourgeois values’ (e.g., order, reason, honesty, propriety) is its fascination with violence, the scatological, and the obscene. This it shares with its close cousin, surrealism.“11 While this is undoubtedly true—Gardner says that art began to direct its anger at the bourgeois state in the last quarter of the eighteenth century—it does appear that the proportion of art that assaults bourgeois values is far higher today than in the days of Dadaism and surrealism. When the object is to attack bourgeois culture by delivering shocks to its standards, and when that culture keeps revising its standards by assimilating each new outrage, it is necessary to keep upping the ante by being ever more shocking. It seems clear, however, that large sections of the bourgeoisie, like drug-resistant bacteria, are approaching a state of being unshockable.
There is resistance in the public to the downw
ard spiral we are riding. But it was not until the critic John Leo called Time Warner “our leading cultural polluter“12 that the process of galvanizing public opinion really got under way. Senator Robert Dole found political capital in denouncing the more outrageous motion pictures and forms of rap music. But the most instructive episode was the behavior of the management of Time Warner when C. DeLores Tucker, a Democrat and head of the National Political Congress of Black Women, and William Bennett, former secretary of education and drug czar, met with the top Time Warner executives to protest the filth they were putting on the market. Tucker passed copies of the lyrics of Nine Inch Nails’ “Big Man with a Gun” to the Time Warner executives and asked them to read the words aloud. None of them would. One of the Tucker-Bennett party did read out the words and asked if the executives found the lyrics offensive. The discussion included such modern liberal gems from Time Warner as “Art is difficult to interpret,” “What is art?,” and “Who decides what is pornography and what isn’t?” The answers are simple: to the first question: “Big Man with a Gun” is as easy to interpret as an obscenity scrawled in a public lavatory; to the second: whatever art may be, this isn’t it; and to the third: the public acting through its designated representatives can decide.
The executives talked about finding the “root causes” of crime and violence. That is the standard liberal diversion when anybody suggests doing something serious about an obvious problem. They said Tucker and Bennett were talking about symptoms. Of course, because it is the symptoms and not the root causes that kill, physicians treat the symptoms. My favorite Time Warner response was: “Elvis was more controversial in his day than some rap lyrics are today.“13 That is less a justification of today’s music than a measure of how far our culture has fallen. The very fact that we have gone from Elvis to Snoop Doggy Dogg is the heart of the case for censorship.
Slouching Towards Gomorrah Page 15