The death of mass culture

[PSPS]

The death of mass culture

We have become a vast wasteland

Randall Denley, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Sunday, February 17, 2008

What happened to mass culture? It seems to have died without anyone even noticing. You will no doubt remember when there were songs, television shows, movies and books that most everyone had heard of. These shared cultural reference points helped us communicate by doing things like citing an incident from Seinfeld to illustrate a point. Or Shakespeare, if you are more cultured.

Well, that's disappearing fast and we're all the poorer for it. I blame changes in technology, the stunning lack of talent of so many of today's "artists" and cultural industries that have forgotten how to connect with customers.

Let's start with the lack of talent. The top selling album in the U.S. last year was Josh Groban's Christmas CD. No. 2 was the soundtrack from High School Musical 2, followed by the Eagles album that was released through Wal-Mart. Rock poseur Chris Daughtry and Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus were close behind. Only Groban's album exceeded three million in sales.

In Canada in December, the top-selling album was Mariah Carey's latest, which sold 300,000. Superstar Céline Dion hit the one-million mark earlier in the year, but that's still less than three per cent of the population.


More at: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=0c32ecb8-abbc-41ac-b95b-dda6920d0d01&p=1

[pingzing58]

1. I like some Hip Hop. You did not include the idiom in your analysis.

Probably because that is where the money is going. To educate my neices and nephews, I make fun by coming up with alternative lyrics to the repetative "mumbo-jumbo" (I know I'm using a derrogatory remark but it's in the English language) and to be fair I will say; or, "hocus-pocus" (derived from the Roman Catholic Mass in Latin 'Hoc est corpus meum') of idiotic lyrics alluding mostly to sexual activity in Hip Hop lyrics. I thank God that 'gangsta' rap has been kind of cleaned up. While you lament that High School Musical does not sell as much, I'm happy to teach vocalization to my neices sings: "It's hard to believe that you were always there beside me...." I'll take the syrup to any Snoop Dog rap (for the lyrics) any day: although he's good dad who couches his boys in football and contributes a lot to his community.

[tuvor]

2. "When *I* was a boy...

...we only had ONE TV in the whole town. And it only got one channel. And it was nuthin' but STATIC! And we'd gather around it every Friday evening, making up our own stories, drinking cocoa straight from the packet, and eating unpopped popcorn kernels because we couldn't afford butter. But that's the way it was and we LIKED IT!"

[Berry Cool]

3. Yeah, what's with these kids today and all their longhaired music?

And all their long hair, for that matter? Why, you can't tell the boys from the girls!

[Chovexani]

4. Wrong, wrong, and also wrong.

The problem is NOT a lack of talent, by any means. There is just as much talent out there in various areas as there's ever been. The problem is that the mass media conglomerates have decided that talent is not what one needs to be a success. It's about who has the right look to appeal to the right demographic in order to push product, whether it's CDs or blue jeans. Mass music has not been about art for a very long time, it's been about selling yourself. There are gobs and gobs of talented people who will never be successful by mainstream standards because they don't have the right look for MTV.

The fact that he bemoans that we no longer have an Elvis--whose only real talent was stealing from black musicians and making their "scandalous" work palatable to white audiences--shows me how little credibility he has on this topic.

Oh, and let's get into TV shows. Again, the problem is not a lack of creativity or talent, the problem is that the suits in charge need hits. A show like Seinfeld would never make it in today's network TV landscape, and it's not because no one would watch it--it's because TPTB would never give it a chance to find an audience. Shows aren't nurtured properly anymore. There has always been the Brilliant But Canceled phenomenon (for those of you who remember the Trio network), but it's far worse now. Network suits are trying to compete with cable, the Internet, and other entertainment mediums. If something doesn't immediately take off, it gets canned. Note that I say network suits because cable doesn't generally have the same issues. If you want big cultural tv phenoms of recent years, they don't get much bigger than the Sopranos. People who didn't even get HBO quoted from that show. South Park, the Simpsons of a new generation (note that I'm not comparing the two in terms of how good they are, just in terms of cultural impact). Family Guy is well on its way.

And then he tries to say no one's buying books, which I might give him, except that he then uses, of all things, Harry Potter to prove his point. Because, you know, there weren't stories all over the news of people lining up outside booksellers the night before to buy them. Sure, the movies have made more money, but JKR has more money than God and the Queen of England and a good chunk of that came from book sales. Ask Scholastic.

This guy's a moron and his analysis is made of lose and fail.