Why being a pop culture snob ain't what it used to be (SWWC vol 4, issue 14)
Hello!
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One of my favorite essays from 2018 was "The Movie Assassin," in which writer Sarah Miller perfectly captured the last gasps of pre-Internet cultural snottiness by unpacking her tenure as a film critic at a Philadelphia alt-weekly newspaper. The essay itself is ostensibly about what it means to write with integrity versus what happens when you sell out, but suffused through it all is a real and vivid snapshot of the last days of pop's gatekeeper culture.
Here's what I mean by gatekeeper culture: It was entertainment media which told its readers what was worth paying attention to and why. The writers and the publications they wrote for assumed an authority based on access, scarcity, and meritocracy: Since access to these bylines was scarce, those who had it must somehow have some basis for having it, and therefore they were somehow qualified to tell the rest of us slobbos what was what. Even independent weeklies operated this way: If you earned your byline (through hustle or connections or the occasional flash of talent), you had the right to tell people what was what.
Pre-Internet, gatekeeper culture was a real thing, both in media and fandom. I can remember going to comic book stores and covering comic conventions (I pitched my coverage for an alt-weekly, natch) where expertise was attached to people who had put in time, money and distance into amassing their toys, developing their opinions, and parlaying that into a sort of presumed authority. It really was based on putting in your time.
(And yes, fandom gatekeeping is a still a plague unto the culture. But there's some awareness now, which is a real improvement.)
The Web changed the idea that avidity could only be measured in time. I remember getting an inkling in the mid-90s when I ran across Gaffaweb, an online community devoted to Kate Bush and her creative output. I was clicking through the pages, thinking, "This is the kind of stuff that music snobs usually make you suffer through for weeks." My second inkling was when Mile High Comics began selling back stock online and I was able to pick up issues 51-75 of The Books of Magic, something that would have previously required me to keep a running list of missing issues and obsessively check in with comic stores to complete.
How we engage with pop culture -- from casual consumption to obsessive fandom -- has really changed, and both alternative and mainstream media have had to scramble to figure out how to remain relevant in a post-gatekeeper world. One could even argue that the real value for culture writers now is their ability to provide context. We live in a media environment where algorithms get "You might also like ..." hilariously wrong and abundance can overwhelm someone who is new to a genre or artist. We are awash in uncontextualized information and developing frameworks of meaning around it can be exhausting. Helping someone understand an artist or work within a larger context is a way to help someone understand why that specific artist or thing matters.
This is why I read "Where Have All the Music Magazines Gone?" and just loved it, both for how it illustrated the attitudes of old-line music writers and the dawning awareness that today's pop culture and media landscapes don't require scarcity or gatekeepers. They require a mutual understanding of context between writer and reader. The key word is understanding.
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P.S. There's the notion that the foodie revolution has turned cuisine into the new rock and roll, in terms of both expertise and gatekeeping as prerequisites to coolness. The WaPo advanced this theory in 2012 with:
Today’s gastronomical adventures provide the thrills that rock-and-roll used to. New restaurants appeal to our sense of discovery. Our diets can reflect our identities, our politics.
The late Anthony Bourdain expressed this in 2014:
“It is powerful,” he says. “What it does have something in common at its best with rock ’n’ roll, with great rock ’n’ roll: There’s a sense that somebody’s talking to you. You used to get an old 331⁄3, you’d listen to the music and if it moved you, then you’d go, ‘Wow!’ What else were they trying to say to you? And you’d pore over the cover and the back liner and say, ‘I want more. Someone’s talking to me and I want to make sure I understand.’”
And naturally, there's some crossover -- see also rock producer Steve Albini's reinvention as an extremely opinionated gourmand.
I don't see the point in deeming some foods cool or not -- but I do think that it's valuable to remember that all taste is deeply subjective.
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Your pop culture recommendation of the day: Speaking of music and pop culture, I recently learned about The B-Sides, a newsletter where readers get a pop culture playlist themed around current events. As B-Sides proprieter Hannah Zoe writes:
The B-Sides is a pop music + politics appreciation project. It’s where celeb gossip meets new music meets the resistance. Every 3 weeks you get a 10-song playlist of underrated pop songs and some context about the songs and artists. See past playlists/letters here. Subscribe here.
Two other recommendations I have, loosely tied into the topic of today's newsletter: To revisit a time when alt-weeklies ruled snotty pop culture circles, you could do worse than reading Connie Willis's zippy little Bellwether (about a trend researcher who relied on alt-weekly ads to gauge trend popularity) or watching Desperately Seeking Susan, where alt-weekly ads propel the entire plot. (Streaming information here.)
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