MONOCULTURE
Don’t buy into the thinking that the Super Bowl is America’s last great unifying cultural moment. It’s just another minority group enjoying a shared ritual.
Before football consumes us, let’s have a conversation about Elvis Presley for a moment.
August brings the 40th anniversary of his unfortunate death, which still stands as the most culture-rattling passing of any musician in American history. I typically prefer to think of Elvis from his youthful days through the “’68 Comeback Special,” stopping well short of the jumpsuit years. But even as his skills as an entertainer waned, Presley remained a formidable cultural figure. Then he was gone, and people were sad. But how many people? Well, the late rock critic Lester Bangs famously wrote on the occasion of Elvis’ death, “We will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.” A fuller excerpt of what Bangs wrote bears mention momentarily.
But the sentence also begs for isolated assessment. Bangs certainly captured a feeling of mass mourning for a departed music icon, but in doing so he also revealed the limited means by which American popular culture was created, distributed, discussed and remembered in 1977. This idea — involving an assumed “we” and speculation about that “we” in the future — was presented from a specific perspective of a white man of a certain age with a particular fondness for rock ’n’ roll.
No wonder, then, a dozen years later Public Enemy’s Chuck D would rap that Elvis “never meant (expletive) to me.”
Chuck would later speak to Newsday about Elvis. He didn’t walk back the lyric as much as he redirected his ire from Elvis to the arbiters of American culture:
“My whole thing was the one-sidedness — like, Elvis’ icon status in America made it like nobody else counted. My heroes came from someone else. My heroes came before him. My heroes were probably his heroes.”
Just because Elvis was the biggest star of his age doesn’t mean he represented some majority of a mongrel culture in 1977. Even my grandfather, a Mississippi native capable of insensitive racial commentary, preferred Harry Belafonte to Elvis.
Means of creating, distributing, discussing and remembering culture have spread like pollen in the years since Elvis’ death. I don’t know that they’ve created greater divides as much as they’ve presented a more realistic vision of our Technicolor culture.
By the old metrics, pieces of music and TV and film don’t measure up to their predecessors from years earlier. Think of it this way: Four decades ago, TV was measured by data representing households with a single TV. Today, my daughter carries a TV in her pocket.
A smart New York Times piece recently compared the differences in response between the 1975 sitcom “One Day at a Time” and its 2017 reboot. It compared the difference in cultural ubiquity between the two: The original had a viewership greater than 15 million, whereas the new version is on Netflix, which doesn’t report viewers. One conclusion in the piece suggested these differences in consumption create cultural echo chambers. We all become niche viewers.
More likely we were always niche viewers, just without a menu that allowed niche viewing. TV limited to three networks simply cannot represent a varied population. And for what it’s worth, that population is more than 100 million people larger than it was when “One Day at a Time” premiered.
For years, we were boxed in by technological limitations. Now we’re enduring decades of growing pains in a fairly short amount of time.
Maybe Sunday’s Super Bowl is one of the last of the great uniters, a cultural moment that reaches across demographics and through echo chambers. But even then, my own echo chamber is full of people who find the game brutish and boring, a nearly faceless sequence of meetings and collisions — two things that interest me none.
The game has drawn roughly 112 million viewers the past year or two, which is a very large portion of the population. It’s also technically a minority. More Americans prefer not to watch the Super Bowl than prefer to watch it. Still, it passes for a cultural mandate.
The actual game brings in 70,000 to 80,000 attendees to whatever stadium is hosting it, which is a pittance compared to the draw for the Daytona 500 (nearly a quarter million), though Daytona’s viewership is about one-tenth of the Super Bowl’s.
Do you measure the depth of affinity by a remote? Or a tank of gasoline?
Last year’s elections should have yielded a majority turnout because that’s the whole point of a democracy. But only 129 million people voted from a population of 324 million.
Perhaps I’m splitting hairs suggesting groups in the hundreds of millions are a minority, but doing so reminds there is no consensus. We align by our tastes and values, and they’re likely to be compatible with some, incompatible with others and entirely outside the sphere of interest of most.
And our number grows. Every 17 seconds, our population enjoys a net gain of one person. Or maybe “enjoys” is the wrong word.
With greater lines of communication, our communication has only suffered.
I said I’d get back to Bangs. The music critic’s same essay about Elvis and cultural agreement included an almost prescient passage that led to Bangs’ declaration. It read:
“If love is truly going out of fashion, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other’s objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s.”
Bangs died in 1982. For better or worse — probably worse — he missed solipsism’s further entrenchment in American culture.
We so rarely see clarification such as Chuck D’s about Elvis — a fiery statement given a thoughtful explanation. More often, the initial stimulus prompts immediate battle lines without further negotiation.
Those discussions do create echo chambers.
But this debate is more than just availability of platforms. It’s about how we listen and interact. Five years ago, a well-written essay in Salon mourned the demise of the monoculture — those flashpoint moments such as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” or J.R. getting shot on “Dallas” that felt like they united a larger portion of culture.
Today those moments feel greater in frequency but lesser in their reach.
I feel no nostalgia pangs for the monoculture. It felt to me like a misrepresentation of our real culture, which is a junkyard of contradictions about what is treasure and what is garbage.
It bears mention that the term “monoculture” is agricultural in origin, referring to the cultivation of a single crop in an area. This being America, financial benefits were quickly identified in nurturing single crops in ever-expanding areas. There’s risk, too, should the crop fail.
But is that a proper metaphor for how our culture should be represented artistically? With so many options available, why not see more of the country?
Were you aware Houma, La., hosts an annual werewolf festival and parade? I wasn’t until I drove through last fall, on a windy route home from New Orleans — a far better way to see this country than the interstate. The pre-election posters in yards suggested a culture that voted differently than I did. The Rougarou Fest suggested that nestled amid those differences were common interests.
If our numerous subcultures are treated with something resembling respect or, at worst, indifference rather than dismissal, they don’t have to be echo chambers. I don’t know what to call them. Clouds? Venn circles?
Nurtured indifference is better than contemptuous indifference, I suppose. But wouldn’t indifference be easier to defend if it were earned rather than assumed?
I think I have more in common with an average football fan than not — family, job, anxieties, comforts. But these elements are the gristle of culture, just applied by different people to different ends — whether it’s a guy with a paint brush, a microphone or a football helmet.
So I don’t think the Super Bowl is the last unifying cultural event in America. It’s just a larger minority group enjoying a shared ritual.