One of the obvious reasons to write about pop (or any other kind of) culture is the belief that you can somehow change it. Maybe you can nudge it in a certain direction or, by sheer force of your impeccable taste and powerful prose, convince every living human being to drop what they’re doing and listen (I mean really listen this time) to a certain artist or album.
This is, of course, ridiculous. Nobody will ever hear the Stones’ “Torn And Frayed” or Uncle Tupelo’s “High Water” or the Vulgar Boatmen’s “You Don’t Love Me Yet” precisely the way I hear them. I can type from now until the Cows reunite and it won’t matter. You’ll hear and like what you want, I’ll hear and like what I want, and as long as we can occasionally nod our heads knowingly in time with the same song, things are cool. And music and art and books and movies will evolve as they will, no matter how many words are wasted yearning for the good old days.
What, the alert reader asks, happened to this doofus? Aren’t those so-called, probably nonexistent good old days—when every band had a cool name, two guitars, bass and drums and excellent T-shirts for sale at a reasonable price—the entire raison d’etre for this so-called, probably nonexistent place we call The Back Page? What changed?
Simple answer: science.
It’s true. I learned some freaking science, and it changed everything for me. More precisely, I learned some interesting science a while ago and connected it to the subject at hand very recently during the height of a four-day, no-sleep experience, the less said about which, the better. It just kind of hit me.
Culture follows the laws of the universe as we currently understand them. We can no more go back to a time when savvy label chiefs found and signed great bands and recorded them to vinyl LPs than we can go back to the eons when the universe was about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Shit moves in one direction, and that direction is outward.
It would be risky for me to get into a lengthy discussion on the physics of the universe, for two reasons. One, it might bore you enough to send you leafing back through the reviews in reverse order. Two, and even more important, I know almost nothing about the physics of the universe. I’d probably just invite lots of letters from astronomy majors telling me what a doofus I am, and frankly, I’m already in Dutch with those guys. (Long story involving a kite, some kerosene and the Palomar Observatory; buy me a beer sometime and I’ll explain.)
Simple version: There was a tiny dot containing all the matter in the universe. There was what alliteration-adoring atomic scientists called a Big Bang, which sent all that matter shooting outward at incredible rates of speed. Stars and galaxies and planets and black holes and Thom Yorke and quarks and quasars were formed.
Now the scary part: We’re still moving. The universe is still spreading outward, rushing toward some unknowable place. Maybe it bends back in on itself. Maybe it snaps back like a damn rubber band and we all wind up cramped back up in that tiny dot. (Another good argument for wearing deodorant every day.) Maybe it just stretches so thin that it all finally breaks apart, drifts away and disappears. That would suck, but scientists who study this stuff say it may happen as soon as next Thursday at around 2 p.m.
OK, now that we have a firm grasp on how the universe works, you can see how it connects to my new theory about culture. Once there was very little of it, then there was a fair amount of very dense material, and now it’s flung so far outward that it’s almost impossible to keep track of anymore.
You want an example. Fine. Let’s start with music. It began with primitive man banging sticks on rocks to make a pleasing rhythm. Gradually, other instruments were invented. We know they played lutes and such in the days of ancient Greece. Then, for roughly 1,500 years, all Western music was about God and Jesus. Something like five Viennese guys wrote symphonies and wore powdered wigs. There were one or two well-known composers at a time for a couple hundred years. Come the 20th century, there started to be genres of music: jazz, folk, country, bluegrass, gospel, then rock ’n’ roll and later hip hop.
In the 1940s, there were maybe a half-dozen popular recording artists of real note. In the ’50s and ’60s, that blew up exponentially into dozens and hundreds. And so on. Once there were a handful of big record companies dictating what you heard, then there were dozens, then hundreds of independent labels. Now we’re nearing the point where there will be no labels, just Web sites and MySpace pages and roughly 17.4 million artists performing in almost the same number of genres, sub-genres and genre mashups. There are now more bands with the word “wolf” in their name than there were bands in 1974.
The same trends apply in other arts. The reason we study The Iliad today is that Homer was the only guy writing books back then. Shakespeare was big not just because he could flat-out bring it, iambic pentameter-wise, but because he didn’t have a lot of competition. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain ran into each other at a lot of writer’s workshops, because they were the only writers. Hemingway and Fitzgerald and who? Steinbeck, maybe. Walk into a Barnes & Noble now. There are more women writers with three names than there were writers in 1930.
Painting? There were the Old Masters. There were the Impressionists and post-Impressionists and Cubists and so on. And now what? There are more talented, brilliant painters out there than ever before. It’s just that no one outside of a few collectors in New York or London have ever heard of them.
In a relatively short period of time, television has demonstrated this theory better than any other medium. From a few grainy, black-and-white broadcasts to three major networks to color to cable to digital cable to 15,000 options to watch at any given time, you can see the theory in action. There are now more CSI shows than there were networks in 1960.
With the spreading outward and speeding up of things, you get a serious thinning out. Not so much in terms of talent, although it often feels that way, but certainly of impact and status. Is it even possible for someone to write the Great American Novel now? Who could paint a masterpiece that changed anything outside of the artist’s immediate family? Can a TV series ever again impact society the way All In The Family did in the ’70s?
There are probably more good bands, more fine writers, more creative TV people, more immensely talented painters than ever before in history. New technology has allowed us to discover artists from all around the world. They’re out there. They’re doing great work. And it’s all just drifting off toward the void.
The further back you go, the closer to the rich, dense beginning of it all, the stars shine brighter and longer. Some of us feel the magnetic pull of those denser, richer stars. Some of us feel a little confused in the asteroid field that is current pop culture. That’s the nature of the universe. The future isn’t for us, which is fine. Because it’s gonna suck, big time.
—Phil Sheridan
