Talking about the long-lost monoculture is a rigged game, because media used to be a relatively modest beast controlled by a select few gatekeepers. If you want evidence that “everybody” loved “Thriller,” you can point to Billboard, Rolling Stone and MTV and not see any dissenting opinions — not because they weren’t there, but because those voices didn’t have access to media with any reach beyond a select cadre of in-the-know aesthetes. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’’ll find “Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing,” a song that has nothing to do with Jackson other than the snarky title, from the Minutemen’s 1984 punk classic “Double Nickels on the Dime” — a record that, in certain circles, another kind of “everybody” likes.
I thought about the monoculture last week while surveying the media coverage of Steve Jobs’ death from pancreatic cancer. Much of the media veered into straight-up hagiography as it lionized the Apple CEO — grief over celebrity deaths remains our most potent form of monoculture — but there was a significant minority of publications and websites that sought to put the tragic early demise of a fabulously wealthy manufacturer of high-status tech products in a less deified perspective. In a different time, coverage of the Jobs story would have been monochromatic, handed down from daily newspapers and the television evening news; today, we’re afforded a broad range of commentary — some insightful, some maddening, all equally accessible.
We all know deep down that this is a good thing, right? The old media structure presented an oversimplified view of our world that people at the time rebelled against. (Hence the proliferation of “underground” culture standing in opposition to the mainstream. Today, all culture is aboveground.) Our monoculture was an illusion created by a flawed, closed-circuit system; even though we ought to know better, we’re still buying into that illusion, because we sometimes feel overwhelmed by our choices and lack of consensus. We think back to the things we used to love, and how it seemed that the whole world — or at least people we knew personally — loved the same thing. Maybe it wasn’t better then, but it seemed simpler, and for now that’s good enough.
But yearning for monoculture is like wishing that men still wore hats in public: Guys back in the ’50s might have looked handsome, but beneath that uniformly tidy facade were dudes who drank too much and didn’t respect women. Our world has always been a complex mass of contradictions; it’s just that we’ve finally turned on the lights and seen all the ants scatter.
What’s really incredible about monoculture nostalgia is thinking it ever applied to music. Anyone who has spent time in a high-school hallway knows that music is used to separate youth culture, not bring it together. More than any other popular art form, music is a vehicle for self-expression for the audience; there are so many genres, and sub-genres tucked inside genres, that picking your favorite is a way of choosing the kind of person you want to be, and (more important) who you don’t want to be. Punk, metal, rap, country — they all come with unique clothing styles, slang, postures and ideologies ideal for young people looking for different personalities to try on, or react against.
“Now the music divides us into tribes/ you choose your side, I’ll choose my side,” sings Win Butler of Arcade Fire on 2010’s “Suburban War,” a song about growing up outside of Houston in the early ’90s, the time right before the Internet came along and supposedly fragmented our blessed monoculture. But if great popular albums from the period like “Nevermind” and “The Chronic” were important at all, it’s that they showed a whole lot of people that there was really great music being made below the radar of the mainstream. The scenes those records came out of — the indie rock and rap music of the ’80s — didn’t get played on the radio; as a result, kids like me had no idea this music even existed until Nirvana and Dr. Dre showed up on MTV. When they did, I didn’t think, “Wow, it’s great that the masses finally get to hear this music.” I thought, “What in the hell else are they keeping from me?”
I thought about the monoculture last week while surveying the media coverage of Steve Jobs’ death from pancreatic cancer. Much of the media veered into straight-up hagiography as it lionized the Apple CEO — grief over celebrity deaths remains our most potent form of monoculture — but there was a significant minority of publications and websites that sought to put the tragic early demise of a fabulously wealthy manufacturer of high-status tech products in a less deified perspective. In a different time, coverage of the Jobs story would have been monochromatic, handed down from daily newspapers and the television evening news; today, we’re afforded a broad range of commentary — some insightful, some maddening, all equally accessible.
We all know deep down that this is a good thing, right? The old media structure presented an oversimplified view of our world that people at the time rebelled against. (Hence the proliferation of “underground” culture standing in opposition to the mainstream. Today, all culture is aboveground.) Our monoculture was an illusion created by a flawed, closed-circuit system; even though we ought to know better, we’re still buying into that illusion, because we sometimes feel overwhelmed by our choices and lack of consensus. We think back to the things we used to love, and how it seemed that the whole world — or at least people we knew personally — loved the same thing. Maybe it wasn’t better then, but it seemed simpler, and for now that’s good enough.
But yearning for monoculture is like wishing that men still wore hats in public: Guys back in the ’50s might have looked handsome, but beneath that uniformly tidy facade were dudes who drank too much and didn’t respect women. Our world has always been a complex mass of contradictions; it’s just that we’ve finally turned on the lights and seen all the ants scatter.
What’s really incredible about monoculture nostalgia is thinking it ever applied to music. Anyone who has spent time in a high-school hallway knows that music is used to separate youth culture, not bring it together. More than any other popular art form, music is a vehicle for self-expression for the audience; there are so many genres, and sub-genres tucked inside genres, that picking your favorite is a way of choosing the kind of person you want to be, and (more important) who you don’t want to be. Punk, metal, rap, country — they all come with unique clothing styles, slang, postures and ideologies ideal for young people looking for different personalities to try on, or react against.
“Now the music divides us into tribes/ you choose your side, I’ll choose my side,” sings Win Butler of Arcade Fire on 2010’s “Suburban War,” a song about growing up outside of Houston in the early ’90s, the time right before the Internet came along and supposedly fragmented our blessed monoculture. But if great popular albums from the period like “Nevermind” and “The Chronic” were important at all, it’s that they showed a whole lot of people that there was really great music being made below the radar of the mainstream. The scenes those records came out of — the indie rock and rap music of the ’80s — didn’t get played on the radio; as a result, kids like me had no idea this music even existed until Nirvana and Dr. Dre showed up on MTV. When they did, I didn’t think, “Wow, it’s great that the masses finally get to hear this music.” I thought, “What in the hell else are they keeping from me?”
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