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A Civic Rap
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The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought help to forget.—Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Tired of trials and tribulationsIt seems like life is HellDreams the only way of escapin’to worlds that's beyond imaginationI know a place, I could take you there, through elevation—Inspectah Deck, “Elevation” (from the album Uncontrolled Substance)
American popular culture has never been quite so popular. In the early 1990s I
visited Europe from California; more than a few Englishwomen were disappointed that I didn’t resemble anyone from the cast of Baywatch, while Germans lamented head-lifeguard David Hasselhoff’s fame as a singer. Several years later, in Japan, a barber from Tokyo, a saleswoman from Nagoya, and a Kyushu conductor were fascinated by the film star Charlie Sheen. More recently, X2 opened in Paris to a zealous marketing campaign tailored to the second coming of a band of marginalized mutant superheroes. Film grosses are incomplete without substantial international tallies and promotional revenue; from Edinburgh to Hiroshima, you can buy a Big Mac; MTV airs from Delhi to Oxford.
None of this is terribly new. Actually, much of it is dated. Baywatch lost its
original luster prior to cancellation, banished from the beaches near Hollywood to remote Hawaii. Sheen has survived drug rehabilitation, a prostitution scandal, several mediocre film roles, and marriage. The X-Men sequel quickly gave way to the Matrix sequel, the Fast and the Furious sequel, the Charlie’s Angels sequel, t he Legally Blonde sequel, the Terminator sequel, and the Bad Boys sequel. And, as José Bové has discovered, McDonalds (like music video television) is here to stay.
Still, culture—particularly popular culture—faces the wrath of conservative and
liberal critics alike, both of whom bemoan the loss of (respectively) traditional and progressive values. Mainstream media outlets use television, print and radio airwaves to decry the sensational content of music and film. Yet consumers flock to theaters and record stores in increasing numbers. If popular culture is growing in visibility and influence, its worldwide expansion has come in spite of serious censure.
Critics with such vastly different temperaments as Nietzsche, Arendt, Adorno and
Horkheimer saw the evolution of popular art as one of essential decline, a spiral which ends much like history did for Rousseau: in abject inauthenticity. More recently, James Miller has argued that popular music is both chimerical and paradoxical.
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The ruse is that
radical, disenfranchised, countercultural and idealistic visions are appropriated by corporations and marketed to receptive consumers. Under this formula, the more lurid, the more abrasive, the more expressive the product, the better. The paradox is that “non-
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1
The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and
elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the
resignation which it ought help to forget.
—Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Tired of trials and tribulations
It seems like life is Hell
Dreams the only way of escapin’
to worlds that's beyond imagination
I know a place, I could take you there, through elevation
—Inspectah Deck, “Elevation” (from the album Uncontrolled Substance)
American popular culture has never been quite so popular. In the early 1990s I
visited Europe from California; more than a few Englishwomen were disappointed that I
didn’t resemble anyone from the cast of Baywatch, while Germans lamented head-
lifeguard David Hasselhoff’s fame as a singer. Several years later, in Japan, a barber
from Tokyo, a saleswoman from Nagoya, and a Kyushu conductor were fascinated by the
film star Charlie Sheen. More recently, X2 opened in Paris to a zealous marketing
campaign tailored to the second coming of a band of marginalized mutant superheroes.
Film grosses are incomplete without substantial international tallies and promotional
revenue; from Edinburgh to Hiroshima, you can buy a Big Mac; MTV airs from Delhi to
Oxford.
None of this is terribly new. Actually, much of it is dated. Baywatch lost its
original luster prior to cancellation, banished from the beaches near Hollywood to remote
Hawaii. Sheen has survived drug rehabilitation, a prostitution scandal, several mediocre
film roles, and marriage. The X-Men sequel quickly gave way to the Matrix sequel, the
Fast and the Furious sequel, the Charlie’s Angels sequel, t he Legally Blonde sequel, the
Terminator sequel, and the Bad Boys sequel. And, as José Bové has discovered,
McDonalds (like music video television) is here to stay.
Still, culture—particularly popular culture—faces the wrath of conservative and
liberal critics alike, both of whom bemoan the loss of (respectively) traditional and
progressive values. Mainstream media outlets use television, print and radio airwaves to
decry the sensational content of music and film. Yet consumers flock to theaters and
record stores in increasing numbers. If popular culture is growing in visibility and
influence, its worldwide expansion has come in spite of serious censure.
Critics with such vastly different temperaments as Nietzsche, Arendt, Adorno and
Horkheimer saw the evolution of popular art as one of essential decline, a spiral which
ends much like history did for Rousseau: in abject inauthenticity. More recently, James
Miller has argued that popular music is both chimerical and paradoxical.
1
The ruse is that
radical, disenfranchised, countercultural and idealistic visions are appropriated by
corporations and marketed to receptive consumers. Under this formula, the more lurid,
the more abrasive, the more expressive the product, the better. The paradox is that “non-
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