April 16, 2004

Corporate Culture Clash: Elitism, Popularity and Rock 'n' Roll

hen I was the chief rock critic of The New York Times in the 1970's, I used to say that rock critics were the most extreme elitists I knew. I meant it as a compliment, up to a point. Rock critics, at least two of whom are still among my closest friends, were smart about music, vivid writers, serious thinkers and in touch with the larger world beyond music. The pattern holds true for a lot of the younger writers about pop music, film and even television whom I have encountered since.

Elitism has its dangers, or at least its amusing paradoxes, for a pop-culture critic. Sometimes you can wander so far into the byways of your own peculiar passion — small-town indie rock bands or lesser-known Japanese anime directors or obscure 1970's TV sitcoms that never made it past the pilot — that you forget that popular culture is, by definition, supposed to be popular. But who defines what is popular? Sales charts, more or less rigged, measuring those artists with access to the giant distribution machine controlled by large corporations, that's who.

Nothing is more contentious among pop-culture critics than the role of corporations in the dissemination of that culture. Terrifyingly evil or merely monstrous seems about the range of the discussion. The subtitle of Lawrence Lessig's new book tells it all: "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity."

For some critics (and philistine editors and publishers and record-company executives and studio bosses) there is no issue here. Pop culture is not necessarily interesting in itself: it's merely an index of the state of the broader social culture, or a way to sell newspapers or CD's or commercials. The trouble with that mercantile mindset is that the popular arena is indeed the source of some of the best art out there, and artistic excellence calls forth smart criticism. Even elitist criticism — the kind produced by critics who love popular art but scorn the populace as a bunch of Menckenesque rubes easily manipulated by commercial interests.

A disdain for corporations is not new. They have traditionally been regarded with suspicion by leftist intellectuals, a subset that includes most pop-culture critics, academic and journalistic. Theodor Adorno, that dour German intellectual whose centennial his admirers recently celebrated, complained bitterly about what he called "the culture industry." The theory was that anything promoted heavily could become popular, which is transparently false.

Lovers of folkie protest music in the 1930's despised commercial entertainment, and the residue from that prejudice led to their bitterness when Bob Dylan "went electric" by switching to amplified instruments at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. For them, rock 'n' roll epitomized triviality as business, so that Mr. Dylan, previously regarded (and so billed, by himself) as Woody Guthrie's successor, had defiantly thumbed his nose at all those who had made his career.

The booers and hissers at Newport might have realized that it was Mr. Dylan who made Mr. Dylan's career, not them, and in choosing to broaden his artistic palette into rock 'n' roll he was making more genuine folk music than the earnest strummers of acoustic guitars.

To get his music out to a mass audience, however, Mr. Dylan needed corporations who dealt on a mass level. Looking back, we can see the 1960's as a kind of golden bubble in the relationship between big business and artists. You could really believe, back then, that corporations, like American society itself, were being transformed by youthful idealism. Certainly a lot of good music was distributed by corporate record labels and their enlightened leaders. A new wave of young film directors seemed poised to revolutionize Hollywood, and a curious mixture of socially conscious and brightly amusing television shows defined the medium in its first two decades.

As it happened, no matter what their fashionable trappings, corporate executives did not deep down mutate into bearded, bead-wearing hippies. Greed proceeded apace, as did the mergers that Mr. Lessig protests. Big corporations got even bigger. Today the chairman of the entertainment division at ABC is under fire, not because he had an excessive aspiration for quality but because the reality shows he championed, like "Are You Hot?" and "All American Girl," have failed. Donald Trump rules the airwaves, or (to de-hype him) has scored a healthy success, with "The Apprentice." Sic transit the gloria of American popular culture.

R.I.P.? Not quite yet. The faith of those pop-culture critics who got their start in the 60's and believed that artists could reach the public through corporate channels was not totally naïve; there's life in the corporate/artistic nexus. But it remains a constant series of small battles, involving more or less intelligent, more or less sympathetic individuals, not grandiose leftist theories of the evils of capitalism or neocon theories of its inherent moral superiority.

Good CD's and movies and television shows still do get made, along with the inevitable avalanche of vulgarity. Somehow a few musicians and directors and producers manage to fight their way through layers of corporate bureaucracy and mendacity and produce outstanding work that gets distributed to the broader public by the very corporations it's so easy to excoriate.

Elitist pop-culture critics must, in the end, be mindful of what large numbers of people actually see and read and listen to. Because the underlying mythology of pop culture is still the idea that the approval of large numbers of people validates that culture and the society that produces it. If something is truly loved by millions of people, it has touched those people, has tapped into some stream of universality that indicates a life force attenuated in more elitist art.

A recent study reports that audiences watching a movie will register similar brain-wave patterns. Pessimists might see this as proof of pop culture as brain control. Optimists would regard it as a key to artistic universality.

No single work of art can appeal to everyone. But when a movie like "Titanic" is seen all over the world, it suggests that its director, James Cameron, has reached down to artistic bedrock. Or when people throughout the United States, watching at home on their isolated television screens, are riveted by the final episode of "Sex and the City," that helps bind us together.

This country's great gift to world culture has been its popular arts. Partly because such art offers this kind of bonding experience — corporately distributed popular culture as intimations of community — and partly because the art at its best is so good, on the strictest elitist criteria.

So critics (a term, in this age of the Internet, that means most anyone passionately interested in the arts) have to tread carefully, trying to balance their own taste with a recognition of popular taste and an appreciation of the role that corporations can play in forging communal bonds. It's not always easy to sort out the strands. But that very complexity is one of the things, besides the art itself, that makes loving it so enlivening.