I didn't expect this to be so long and thought-provoking so I have to come back later to finish reading. This is a topic I thoroughly enjoy. A couple of thoughts:
1. When we lived in the Seattle area more than ten years ago MoPop was the Experience Music Project. We just went back about a year and a half ago and that is when I discovered the name changed. They did keep some of the same displays, especially for the grunge scene which began in Seattle, but they certainly evolved to include a lot more than they used to. It is ironic that there is a museum for pop culture since pop culture is always evolving. Will they preserve as a museum does or continually make updates and changes, I wonder?
2. Last year I read Love What Lasts by Joshua Gibbs which is in a similar vein; though your substack probably goes deeper. Old books, old architecture, old art... so much more care went into them. A man might work his whole life to construct a building that he would not see completed and yet feel like he made a valuable contribution. Now we are always busy doing things and we produce so much that none of it matters and then our lives feel empty.
I assumed many of the exhibits changed...they have to, or it's a massive exercise in irony! I will say, it was a very cool place. I enjoy the artifacts. I don't enjoy the lectures on every wall.
I will have to think a lot about what you said. This is the type of topic that I come back to over and over again as it relates to cultural influence. The direction of high culture is of great interest to me, but the connection of the high and lower cultures, pop music, folk music also holds my attention. Cultural shifts are fascinating in the way they manifest themselves in higher culture as well as lower culture, but as you said higher culture tends to be more timeless. There was a day when high culture impacted pop culture, but that pretty much broke apart in the beginning of the 20th century.
It's a fascinating subject to me. Have you ever read "Notes Towards the Definition of Culture" by TS Eliot or basically anything by Sir Roger Scruton? Both of these men have been tremendously helpful to me in thinking about culture. I often try to classify things and determine what type of culture they are, and it's interesting how often it can be difficult to categorize. For example, is Jazz folk culture? It's not really pop culture (although it was featured prominently in the museum). There's some crossover for sure. I think Duke Ellington and Count Basie are probably closer to high culture, whereas bebop probably intersects between folk and pop; however, I think it is an art form that many people don't immediately appreciate and need direction to understand before they will ever really love it. I guess we could say Mozart was pop culture in his day to some extent, but you're absolutely right that high culture influenced pop culture far more than it does now. Every now and then, I hear a pop song with a cut from a classical piece, but for the most part, they live in two different worlds. It's even more obvious in the visual arts (paintings, sculptures, etc.) than music, I think.
I thought I noted some Roger Scruton in your post. A number of years ago I was going to go teach a class on culture with somebody from English and someone I think from history. I was very excited about it. The principal of the time had us watch a number of Scruton videos, which I devoured. I agree with his general principles though I don’t always agree in his application. Your Mozart comment about pop culture or high culture I think sums up the difficulty. I don’t know that all music can definitely be put into either one category or the other. Sometimes they straddle categories. But for the purpose of abstract discussion or argument, I think it is helpful probably to find them in one particular category.
I did want to ask you how you would define pop culture when do you think it really established itself or has it always been there to some degree or another? How would you differentiate it then from folk music?
Amazing question...prepare for a long answer! I'd love to hear your thoughts, too.
I understand pop culture as industrial culture, meaning it requires mass production and mass distribution to exist. So, for example, a ballad sung in a village is not pop culture even if everyone loves it. But if you take that same ballad, record it, market it nationally, and sell it to people who share no community with its creator, it's pop culture, even if it sounds identical. The distinction is not in the content or the feeling it produces, but in the mechanism of production and the relationship between creator and audience.
The mechanism matters because it changes what the culture is optimizing for. Folk culture optimizes for communal resonance within a particular people. High culture optimizes for excellence judged against inherited standards. Pop culture optimizes for units sold across the largest possible audience, which means it systematically removes anything that might limit appeal, such as local specificity, difficulty, the demand for formed taste, and references that require specialized knowledge. The folk culture that I experience in Nigeria, for example, is beautiful and unique, but without the Nigerian context, it would not resonate beyond the communities that produce it. In fact, it's even more specific to tribes and regions, so that even within the same nation, it would not carry the same appeal. But Nigerians do enjoy American pop culture and high culture. The result then is that pop culture is a product engineered for frictionless consumption by people who share nothing except the capacity to consume it.
When it emerged is a more difficult question, I think. This is probably where there is the most disagreement amongst historians because it's difficult to pin down, but I think, in general, it has to be determined by three conditions: industrial production, mass distribution, and a large enough literate or semi-literate audience with disposable income and leisure time. If those are the conditions, we don't really see it en masse until the mid-nineteenth century. The penny press in the 1830s and 40s is probably the first genuine pop culture institution, cheap newspapers produced on steam-powered presses and sold to urban workers who had just enough literacy and just enough free time to read them. Then there were dime novels in the 1860s, and vaudeville and the music hall at about the same time. The invention of the phonograph really kicked things off, and then by the twentieth century, with radio, film, and television, it was nearly universal in the West. By the 2000s, distribution costs were minimal, particularly by the 2010s, so pop culture really became THE culture after that.
I think the line between folk/pop can get blurry, and that blurriness tends to be the line people use to defend pop culture by pointing to the virtues of folk culture. I understand folk culture as that which is transmitted within a community that shares memory, place, and identity. It changes slowly because the community changes slowly, and the changes are organic, driven by the community's own experience. It does not require a stranger's approval to survive. A folk song exists as long as the community sings it, regardless of whether anyone outside that community has heard it. Pop culture is transmitted through markets to strangers. It has no community of origin in any meaningful sense. The creator and the consumer share nothing except the transaction. This is why pop culture can seem like folk culture when it's done well, because it mimics the emotional register of rootedness and communal belonging. It is producing that feeling industrially for people who are not actually rooted or belonging anywhere together.
I think guys like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan are interesting case studies. They took genuine folk music and transmitted it through the pop industry to an audience that had no organic connection to it. The songs retained their emotional content but lost their original function of expressing and reinforcing the identity of a specific community. They became products that made urban college students feel connected to something they had never actually been part of. Whether that is good, bad, or complicated is an interesting discussion.
As for coffee, I have some time freeing up very soon, I will text you. I look forward to it!
Wow, there’s a lot in that response that gives me pause to think and questions to ask. For instance, it seems that high culture and folk culture have more in common than what is dominant today. The way I measure the change in appreciation of cultures is from a high culture perspective. I look at composers like Wagner and Strauss and what happens at the end of the 19th century with atonality and tone rows. The tone row in particular, though it definitely has a pattern, sounds very random which to me goes along with the philosophy, emerging through people like Satre and Camus. Looking forward to your text.
I didn't expect this to be so long and thought-provoking so I have to come back later to finish reading. This is a topic I thoroughly enjoy. A couple of thoughts:
1. When we lived in the Seattle area more than ten years ago MoPop was the Experience Music Project. We just went back about a year and a half ago and that is when I discovered the name changed. They did keep some of the same displays, especially for the grunge scene which began in Seattle, but they certainly evolved to include a lot more than they used to. It is ironic that there is a museum for pop culture since pop culture is always evolving. Will they preserve as a museum does or continually make updates and changes, I wonder?
2. Last year I read Love What Lasts by Joshua Gibbs which is in a similar vein; though your substack probably goes deeper. Old books, old architecture, old art... so much more care went into them. A man might work his whole life to construct a building that he would not see completed and yet feel like he made a valuable contribution. Now we are always busy doing things and we produce so much that none of it matters and then our lives feel empty.
I assumed many of the exhibits changed...they have to, or it's a massive exercise in irony! I will say, it was a very cool place. I enjoy the artifacts. I don't enjoy the lectures on every wall.
I will have to think a lot about what you said. This is the type of topic that I come back to over and over again as it relates to cultural influence. The direction of high culture is of great interest to me, but the connection of the high and lower cultures, pop music, folk music also holds my attention. Cultural shifts are fascinating in the way they manifest themselves in higher culture as well as lower culture, but as you said higher culture tends to be more timeless. There was a day when high culture impacted pop culture, but that pretty much broke apart in the beginning of the 20th century.
It's a fascinating subject to me. Have you ever read "Notes Towards the Definition of Culture" by TS Eliot or basically anything by Sir Roger Scruton? Both of these men have been tremendously helpful to me in thinking about culture. I often try to classify things and determine what type of culture they are, and it's interesting how often it can be difficult to categorize. For example, is Jazz folk culture? It's not really pop culture (although it was featured prominently in the museum). There's some crossover for sure. I think Duke Ellington and Count Basie are probably closer to high culture, whereas bebop probably intersects between folk and pop; however, I think it is an art form that many people don't immediately appreciate and need direction to understand before they will ever really love it. I guess we could say Mozart was pop culture in his day to some extent, but you're absolutely right that high culture influenced pop culture far more than it does now. Every now and then, I hear a pop song with a cut from a classical piece, but for the most part, they live in two different worlds. It's even more obvious in the visual arts (paintings, sculptures, etc.) than music, I think.
I thought I noted some Roger Scruton in your post. A number of years ago I was going to go teach a class on culture with somebody from English and someone I think from history. I was very excited about it. The principal of the time had us watch a number of Scruton videos, which I devoured. I agree with his general principles though I don’t always agree in his application. Your Mozart comment about pop culture or high culture I think sums up the difficulty. I don’t know that all music can definitely be put into either one category or the other. Sometimes they straddle categories. But for the purpose of abstract discussion or argument, I think it is helpful probably to find them in one particular category.
I did want to ask you how you would define pop culture when do you think it really established itself or has it always been there to some degree or another? How would you differentiate it then from folk music?
Let me know when you’re free for coffee.
Amazing question...prepare for a long answer! I'd love to hear your thoughts, too.
I understand pop culture as industrial culture, meaning it requires mass production and mass distribution to exist. So, for example, a ballad sung in a village is not pop culture even if everyone loves it. But if you take that same ballad, record it, market it nationally, and sell it to people who share no community with its creator, it's pop culture, even if it sounds identical. The distinction is not in the content or the feeling it produces, but in the mechanism of production and the relationship between creator and audience.
The mechanism matters because it changes what the culture is optimizing for. Folk culture optimizes for communal resonance within a particular people. High culture optimizes for excellence judged against inherited standards. Pop culture optimizes for units sold across the largest possible audience, which means it systematically removes anything that might limit appeal, such as local specificity, difficulty, the demand for formed taste, and references that require specialized knowledge. The folk culture that I experience in Nigeria, for example, is beautiful and unique, but without the Nigerian context, it would not resonate beyond the communities that produce it. In fact, it's even more specific to tribes and regions, so that even within the same nation, it would not carry the same appeal. But Nigerians do enjoy American pop culture and high culture. The result then is that pop culture is a product engineered for frictionless consumption by people who share nothing except the capacity to consume it.
When it emerged is a more difficult question, I think. This is probably where there is the most disagreement amongst historians because it's difficult to pin down, but I think, in general, it has to be determined by three conditions: industrial production, mass distribution, and a large enough literate or semi-literate audience with disposable income and leisure time. If those are the conditions, we don't really see it en masse until the mid-nineteenth century. The penny press in the 1830s and 40s is probably the first genuine pop culture institution, cheap newspapers produced on steam-powered presses and sold to urban workers who had just enough literacy and just enough free time to read them. Then there were dime novels in the 1860s, and vaudeville and the music hall at about the same time. The invention of the phonograph really kicked things off, and then by the twentieth century, with radio, film, and television, it was nearly universal in the West. By the 2000s, distribution costs were minimal, particularly by the 2010s, so pop culture really became THE culture after that.
I think the line between folk/pop can get blurry, and that blurriness tends to be the line people use to defend pop culture by pointing to the virtues of folk culture. I understand folk culture as that which is transmitted within a community that shares memory, place, and identity. It changes slowly because the community changes slowly, and the changes are organic, driven by the community's own experience. It does not require a stranger's approval to survive. A folk song exists as long as the community sings it, regardless of whether anyone outside that community has heard it. Pop culture is transmitted through markets to strangers. It has no community of origin in any meaningful sense. The creator and the consumer share nothing except the transaction. This is why pop culture can seem like folk culture when it's done well, because it mimics the emotional register of rootedness and communal belonging. It is producing that feeling industrially for people who are not actually rooted or belonging anywhere together.
I think guys like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan are interesting case studies. They took genuine folk music and transmitted it through the pop industry to an audience that had no organic connection to it. The songs retained their emotional content but lost their original function of expressing and reinforcing the identity of a specific community. They became products that made urban college students feel connected to something they had never actually been part of. Whether that is good, bad, or complicated is an interesting discussion.
As for coffee, I have some time freeing up very soon, I will text you. I look forward to it!
Wow, there’s a lot in that response that gives me pause to think and questions to ask. For instance, it seems that high culture and folk culture have more in common than what is dominant today. The way I measure the change in appreciation of cultures is from a high culture perspective. I look at composers like Wagner and Strauss and what happens at the end of the 19th century with atonality and tone rows. The tone row in particular, though it definitely has a pattern, sounds very random which to me goes along with the philosophy, emerging through people like Satre and Camus. Looking forward to your text.
I’m reading the Elliot now (because of you). Thank you.
Excited to hear your thoughts.