Is Culture Stuck?

[MUSIC] A funny thing happened to be a couple of months ago. I was in the car with one of my children, she's 10 years old. And she started out of the blue, not off the radio or anything, singing a song that I did not know she knew. [MUSIC] My daughter was not born when the song "Milk Shake" by Kaleast was first released in 2003 and became an inescapable top 10 hit. But of course, I was. So I started to sing along. [MUSIC] And when I started to sing, my daughter looked at me in true surprise. She could not believe that I knew this song. The song that as far as she was concerned was a new song for young people, not an old song, for old people like her mother. Turns out she knew "Milk Shake" because it had been used in a gap at being danced to by the girl group Katzai. The commercial spiked streams of the song and kicked off a viral dance challenge that had reached fifth graders across the world. I've thought about this moment frequently since it happened. I listened to a lot of my parents' music as a kid and I liked a lot of it. But I don't think I once mistook their music for my music, for contemporary music, for music, for young people. And that's because for much of the 20th century, every generation's music was very obviously different than what came before. In 1947, the kids and adults alike were listening to this. When I go to sleep, I never count she, I count all the charms about Linda. But by 1967, when those kids had grown up, their kids were listening to this. "Good sense, and a sense, group of that kind, they drink a man of things like a river." And then the next set of kids in 1977, to this. And by 1987, it was this. And by 1997, it was this. Every era was radically different from what preceded it. And this isn't just about music. Movies, art, clothes, it all changed. And then we crossed over into the 21st century and something happened. There have, of course, been trends and subgenres over the past 25 years to say nothing of massive technological transformations. But culture itself. It hasn't been so different. And a song from 2003 about metaphorical milkshakes could sound brand new to my daughter. There are lots of people ringing their hands about this, saying something has gone wrong. A sameness has descended. New movies are based on old intellectual property, characters and stories from decades past that are still popular. TV shows are also based on old IP, or there's some barely new spin on true crime or reality competition, or a doctor show. Fashion trends are cycling so fast anything could be in. And then there is music. The artist commanding the most money are rockers from past decades licensing their back catalogs. And if you want to hit, you don't have to dig deep to find some perfect sample. You can just take the hook of a pre-existing hit. It's not even that old. That's how 2006's Young folks by Peter Bjorn and John became this from the soundtrack of the sequel Top Gun Maverick. It's like we're in a kind of forever present where nothing feels quite new, but nothing feels quite dated either. What's going on? This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. It's a weird time for culture. There's more of it than ever before. It's more accessible than ever before. But I find myself often just reaching for that which is. available. Whatever's on my phone, or my Spotify, or Netflix. This is stuff that I sometimes find funny and interesting and comforting, but I just as often find mindless and forgettable or worse. It's in this context that I have been fascinated by an ongoing debate about whether our culture has grown stagnant. The argument is that culture used to move and change and challenge us at a rate that it is just ceased to. But now it's basically playing the same song over and over again. It's an argument that suggests, in other words, that not challenging oneself artistically speaking might not just be a personal failing of mine, but a structural and collective one. And I wanted to talk this argument through. So today, on Dakota Ring, is culture stuck? [Music] So like I said, I've been paying a lot of attention to this debate about whether culture is spinning its wheels. And there is one writer in particular who thinks, yeah, pretty much. The whole point of art used to be to challenge the way you see the world so much that it expands the way you can see and value the world. The author and culture critic, W. David Marx, believes something has gone awry. And so when you look at, can I be entertained on a daily basis through what I see on social media, memes, maybe a good TV show once in a while? No question at all. The 21st century delivers. But is our capacity for enjoyment expanding? Are we seeing the world in different ways? Are we being given a sense of wonder from culture the way that we used to? David thinks, no. At the end of last year, he published a book called "Blank Space" that makes the argument that there is a blank space in the 21st century where cultural innovation should be. I don't agree with David about everything, but I find his thinking productively polemical. I love a strong opinion and I wanted to talk through his and what he sees happening with culture, why, and what we might do about it. I just want to start by defining our terms here. We're all coming off the survey year end list frenzy when you are kind of confronted with how much culture there is that's good. So when you say that the 21st century is "Blank Space" for culture, what on earth are you talking about? Yeah, I mean, so if you think about culture and it's brought a sense of just the way we live, obviously the way we live has changed and there's a lot of interesting things going on. If you look at it and share pop cultural terms, are there interesting things going on in pop culture? No question at all. And so to say that culture is stagnating is more of a point about our expectations for cultural change and the rate of cultural change and the depth of cultural change. When you go back and look at the 60s and 70s and 80s, you can chart the difference between these eras by the way people dress and the way that song sound and the way that films look. And so you get this sense that the culture is just creating and adding to the canon that we have this canon of amazing cultural experiences and it's constantly adding to it. So when you get to the 21st century, the question is culture changing, of course, is changing. But it's changing at a rate and a depth that feels disappointing to a lot of people and we're spending a lot of our time going back to the works and the styles of those previous decades because they feel actually more authentic and more valuable than the work that's being created now. And so when you start repeating yourselves, you start worrying about our humans, okay, have we kind of maxed out everything we can do? Like what is a good example of how it used to work? The Beatles are the most canonical example and maybe the most obvious if you look at the Beatles career, they start in the early 60s doing a ripoff of American R&B music. And then within a couple years they had added in all these new influences and by Sergeant Peppers in 1967. So you know, basically five years after their major debut, they are making a wild psychedelic concept album that brings in references to musical and 1920s brass, experimental tape loops. All these different things and bringing it together and trying to maximize what an album could be. And then immediately because they were ripped off so much went then to Roots Music. And that all happened in this tiny, tiny span of time. And so if you look at the music charts, you'll notice that every stylistic convention follows from what the Beatles are doing and so everything kind of sounds different. And then also if you just look at the 70s or 80s, the 80s feels nothing like the 70s, the late 80s feels nothing like the early 80s. So those time periods just have their own sound and feel on a way. the 21st century, I think by the 2010s, everyone started noticing that things are just not changing at the same rate. So the title of your book is "Blank Space," which is both a reference to, of course, this sort of like, "Blank Space" in the culture, but it is also cheekily a very popular Taylor Swift song. I mean, how do you see her figuring in to sort all the themes and stuff we've been talking about? I think Taylor Swift is representative of this in that she is very, very popular now. She's maybe the most important American musical artist. If you go back to the late 2000s, she was one of the most important artists, and she has maintained that in a way that I think artists in the 20th century weren't able to. But more interestingly, I think Taylor Swift this year alone has had two books written about her, one of which is about her as a poetic genius, one is about her as a business genius, and they both define her genius as being able to create things that her audience wants. Rather than I think what the old definition of genius used to be, which is to create something that the world has never seen that needs translation and it feels difficult, and people don't immediately understand it, but it spawns all this new activity that's trying to go and take those ideas and do new things with it. Taylor Swift is always at the end of an innovation cycle. She's always using sounds and chord progressions that other people have used and already succeeded with. And so if Frel does happy and that's a hit, she does shake it off and takes the kind of same sounds. That's obviously been very successful for her, but I think it's also the strategy of a lot of cultural creators in the 21st century and the strategy that really defines culture at the moment, not the way that we define culture in the 20th century was looking at people who were always doing new things. Why do we have such a thing about fetishizing the 20th century? Like what if the 20th century was the anomaly? What if we have this idea of progress and it's fake and it happened for a while and it's over now? For many centuries, the idea was that there was a perfect way of doing things and you really shouldn't change the culture that no one is supposed to bend from it. And what really happened in the 20th century because of avant-garde art, but then also things like subcultures and countercultures, there became a sense that youth culture and artists were sweeping in all these changes to the culture. There's been a lot of publicity lately, but one reason or another about the attitudes of the younger generation, almost as if they are a race apart and it appears that some of them would like to be. And so you get this sense of 20th century culture where I'm going to find some new way to make art that's going to completely devalue the previous ways of making art and it's going to expand what art can do. It's not simply that there's something new, but the new thing makes the old thing uncool. When Elvis and then the Beatles showed up with rock and roll, then jazz music was just out. Jazz was uncool. The Beatles didn't listen to jazz, they didn't reference jazz. Young people weren't listening and dancing to jazz anymore. Hip hop very much was that same model where you had a subcultural group of people who said we don't like what's going on. Culture, we're going to make our own culture from the margins of society. Immediately gets valued by downtown New York for being so rebellious and outsider, then moves on to MTV, spreads. Every teenager around the United States suddenly thinks wow, hip hop is so much cooler than rock. By the 90s it really takes over. Youth aesthetics. And then you get to the 21st century. Rock is really dead and hip hop takes over as the dominant form. So your question of why do we care about so much in the 20th century is because our expectations of cultural change were set in this period and it was exciting. All these things feel new and they feel yours as young people. And so again, that's our expectation is that we have these new art forms that become a place for humans to show their potential and do expand on the human spirit. Right. I mean the thing is though that we don't always know right away. Right? Like in a particular moment there's always things, there have always been things that we don't recognize and it only comes with time that we see how original and important they were. And conversely there are always and have always been things that are extraordinarily popular that don't age that well, that we basically like don't rate soon after they're popular. Like I'm thinking in your book you talk about Tony Orlando. Yes, who I think had a number one hit and nobody listens to at all anymore and you don't even hear reference very often. I mean you can trust that with Kraftwerk, the German electronic group, who were a minor group in the 1970s but has become one of the most important musical artists of the 20th century because they more or less bred the thing that became electronic music. Culture is always a narrative that we're changing and what is popular is not necessarily the most representative part of that time period. So when we think about the 70s, we don't think about Tony Orlando even though that's the way people in the 70s probably thought about the 70s. And so some of the question about the 21st century is, is this just a narrative problem, which is if we're saying culture is doomed because Smurfs 2 is a hit movie. But we're just not paying attention to whatever the small movie that inspires people in 20 years is. Exactly. So what we really should be doing is over indexing the cultural invention that people are doing that will go on to be influential as the story of our times. And so some of what is going on is not just that the wrong things are popular, it's just that we're talking and we're building our cultural narrative around popular things rather than the things that are the most potentially innovative. Although what you're saying is this is a thing that unfolds through time. And like from that moment, you wouldn't have been able to protect like no one's going to care about Tony Orlando. And lots of people are going to think they have to listen to Crosst work. You know, like you wouldn't have known that. You would know that. You would know that if you read music critics. Because music critics said Tony Orlando is beneath contempt. And what you should be listening to is what Brian Eno's doing with David Bowie. Because that's really important even if that sells no records. When you're like, you would have known. It's like, who's the you? Like who are the people in the late 1970s that were like, shitting on Tony Orlando and sure Kraftwerk was cool because they read music magazines. I think we have an idea in our mind of who that is. But like, was it how many people was it really? I would say it's the same group of people who listen to podcasts on slate about culture and cultural dynamics. So very small, a very small group of people. I'm talking to you right now. So the people who care about seeking out interesting culture or wanting to know more about it or wanting to have cultural literacy, those people think more deeply about culture. And so they are catered to by a group of critics who are supposed to be going out there and listening to things and not only evaluating it, but giving it context and explaining what's going on. And so there's this dialogue. And for a long time, that dialogue between the people who really cared about culture and the critics was the thing that created the narrative, whether what they were interested in was popular or not. That's how David says things used to work. So what does he think? Changed. And can we just blame the internet? That when we come back. As ever, when we're thinking about why something might have changed in the 21st century, there's an obvious culprit. The internet. The internet changed and disrupted so many things, including culture. And maybe we're still just digging out of that. We don't really like to sit with the fact that the internet is actually still pretty new. And so I put that to David. Maybe we just need more time to build culture back up to something similarly complex. Maybe we just need some time to get used to this internet world. Yeah, like we just might be in just like uncharted territory, which is maybe too soon to say. Did you find that convincing now? I would say that the advent of mass media and technology and industrial society in the early 20th century also was a lot of change very quickly and really disrupted the lives of people around the world. And looking at that, you had all these avant-garde artists say, wow, technology is massively disrupting the way society works. We have to also have a disrupt art. And so you have Cubism coming out of the theories of Einstein and theoretical physics and then futurism is responding to industrial society and then you have things like data and surrealism that are responding to Fordianism. And so you have these avant-garde artists take that rapid disorienting change and say that art must be more disorienting. And the 21st century has been people saying, wow, the internet is disorienting. All of our lives, how can I make more money from this? Right. Or are the appeals to the most people possible? So now that I have an audience that's not just 40 people at a club down the street, and it's 40 million potential people or 400 million, how do I make something that can connect to 400 million people rather than to 40 of my friends? One of the things that I think is so interesting about now is that if you go back to like the 90s or the 2000s, if you had to predict what the internet would have done, no one was like, it's going to make us stagnant. Like everyone was like, we're going to have access to everything ever. And it's going to make us so creative. Like at the tip of our fingers would be this knowledge that our forebears had to like go to libraries for you. Or like other countries. Like we're just going to all have it. And everyone can be able to do so much amazing stuff. Right. And the potential of blogs and websites was that you could bypass traditional gatekeepers who would obviously say, well, that's too niche to write about. And so if you could suddenly use the internet to allow everyone to publish and then everyone to access that, there would be this incredible flushing of diverse opinions and diverse different cultural forms. I think that did happen and that made the internet very exciting in the early 21st century. With hundreds of thousands of registered users, there are blogs for relapse Catholics, blogs to support the Midwest conservative journal, screensaver blogs of kitchen faucets, sand, of course, Britney Spears, not all blogs appeal to all bloggers. And that's the point. Instead of the bounty that we were promised, like creativity that seemed so clearly in the offing, something else has occurred. Like what actually happened? One of the major changes obviously was that everyone got the internet and they got it through their phone. And the internet started being for everyone instead of just this very closed off set of nerds. And they brought their own tastes and interest to these platforms. And so things that were popular in real life became popular online. And so no longer is the dominant content, niche content, the dominant content is mainstream content or kind of want to be mainstream content. YouTube is the great example I think of this. YouTube promised that you could take a film and digitize it and show it to anyone around the world. Well, what we're really doing is creating a state for everyone, the personal content to the professional content. And now everyone has their time in the spotlight. But then what kind of video content develops on YouTube and becomes popular? It is not small features and short films and of our guard things and indie things. It is people showing off their shopping. We are in Walmart going to walk around and see what we can find today. It is cooking videos. It is makeup videos. I prefer skin to know or foundation just because I like the lighter feel of it and foundations just. Now all those are interesting. Genres and very helpful to people. But they're very different than the kind of artistic content that was created in the 90s under this idea of indie film. So the distribution and the tools we have democratized, but that did not lead to an explosion of more art. I think in general, you find like TikTok videos, you're like, I'm not sure this is like the best place to like make an express art. But it also strikes me that it is something really innovative and new that young people find cool. Like that the technology might be scratching some of that same itch that we would want, art to scratch, even though it's not like a one-to-one comparison. But it's like, oh, the thing we're invested in is like, this totally new way of communicating and this new way of expressing ourselves and even if each TikTok video doesn't rise to the level of some incredible album or film or whatever, it's still like for young people doing what it's supposed to be doing, which is like a language and a communication and a way of being that's like way cooler than what the old people are up to. I think that is the best case for the way to think about cultural innovation in the 21st century, which is if you look at film and TV and music, those aren't the right areas still got. The best area to look at is what are kids making online and I would say memes have been definitional and representative of 21st century culture. They're interesting the way that just people take a meme and apply it to all these different fields and make it political commentary and humor and all that. But I guess as you said, they don't have the depth of a novel or an album and- Give them time though, maybe it needs like to cook, you know? It's like in 50 years someone will be doing something good, it won't be TikTok anymore, you know? I think that's totally- there is potential there. And so the question is, okay, you have these new art forms. They at the moment do not have the kind of complexity and weirdness to them that people of different generations can revisit and take something new from every single time. There's just some art forms that have more potential for complexity and ambiguity and at the moment a short form video could, but because of the way that they're presented to us with algorithm, it's very unlikely we're going to see something that is difficult. We're much more likely to see something that is easy to comprehend immediately. The technological platforms themselves are set up to serve you things that are immediately understandable in a way that culture in the 20th century was often here something that you're not going to understand at all, but elites are telling you that you need to strive to understand it. Reading between the lines, like your pro gatekeeper, I think I might be pro gatekeeper, but I feel like it's- you're not supposed to say that, you know? It's funny because the internet promised the destruction of gatekeeping. And I would say even in the 90s, if you were interested in India or alternative culture, you also hated gatekeepers because you believed that the gatekeepers were the people preventing your favorite thing from being more popular. So I don't think there's ever been a time when people say, "I love gatekeeping." It just is a time now where it's, "Oh, if we have no gatekeepers at all," it's more- Well, no, there is gatekeeping. It's just the platform itself. Like the people directing you are the platforms, but they have totally different incentives and concerns than whoever was directing you. Whoever the gatekeeper of the past was. Exactly. I think that is a major value shift of the 21st century, which is that by making everything data and generally feeling that we want culture to be democratic and inclusive, that you start using the data to make decisions about value and say, "Well, if this is popular, something must be good about it." And so much of 90s culture was in direct opposition. I mean, it's called alternative culture because it's an alternative to what the mainstream was and the mainstream was seen as terrible and bad. And we have to make our own things that will be relatively unpopular in order to do something good in the world and change the human mind or whatever it is. Like this to me is almost like the most black and white change, which is like the absolute disdain there was for popular culture, which in hindsight seems wedded to all these much more, you know, like homophobic and racist and unsavory, like unacceptable things. But that like, the point of view is like if you were cool, you were like, "What is on TV? Is like family ties?" Like, it's bad. I'm an adult now. I get 18 years under this belt. I think there was a sense that the 90s was so cynical and yet there seems to be something even more cynical about our era that we believe that the maximum thing that art could do is entertain the most people. The only thing that good art can do is be a bob. I think one of the reasons I'm so interested in this is because I feel like two sides in myself about these questions, which is like, I love a bob. I love a TV show that like, I'm like, "What's gonna happen next?" You know, I'm also like, I want to go interested in all of culture because like I was obsessed with like 90210. I don't think like 90210 was like art, you know, but I loved it. I guess I feel in me both things so much like I would like culture to be better and more challenging and more interesting, but also like on a day for day basis, like not only am I not choosing some of that stuff, like I kind of, sometimes I like that other stuff, you know? So the metaphor that's been used since the 90s for this is this idea of omnivore culture. And that is a great way of living because you're appreciating everything that you were taking value from so many things. But we also have this, I think democratic, inclusive instinct if you are a liberal person which is to say this low art and putting that in scare quotes, the low art appeals to the most people and brings them great joy. Why are we trying to take this joy away from them? And so I'm very, very sympathetic to that too. But if we flatten everything and say there is really no difference between high and low and no difference between art and entertainment, then you're obviously going to live in a world where the entertainment dominates the art because naturally most people do not want to have to slog through a 900 page experimental novel. Right. So you were saying if like if there's not status to the 900 page novel, then the 900 page novel is really screwed. And we are in a situation where we basically are like, there's no difference. You can like what's easy, you can like what's hard, no one's going to like what's hard. So then everyone will just like what's easy. Yes. So one of the things about this idea that we're in a period of relative cultural stagnation is that it seems to really map on to like kind of the overall revanchism of our moment. But basically there's something conservative inherently about like not making new culture. And we're in this moment where like there's a lot of looking back, like not just in a retro mania, like I want different genes way, but a lot of like, oh, we want to go back to some fantasy America. Like, is that part of what's happening? Just that people don't want to make what's new? So, culture has this mechanism that whatever is seen as hegemonic and mainstream, it inspires transgression against it as what young people are aiming for. And so, for a long time in the 20th century, what was hegemonic was this kind of patriarchal conservative society. And so, you had grunge bands being transgressive by fighting against the conservative power structure. The problem is, once this sense of political correctness had become dominant in the professional class, the power structure was seen as being liberal and inclusive. And so, Vice Magazine in the early 21st century in New York still had a kind of punk rock edge to it, but it had this kind of toxic masculinity at the heart of it as their form of transgression. My name is Gavin McKinnis. I am a conservative, liberal, neo-libertarian anarchist hip hop. I get into all sorts of shenanigans. If we, let's see with Nazi tropes or use racist words, that's us being progressive in a sense. And so, that really starts in the early 21st century, it's just continued since then. The issue with the rise of this kind of conservative transgressivism is that the content and the form of the art itself is not in any way progressive and they don't care. And so, the conservative side is not interested in cultural progress. And then the left side is an interesting cultural progress either at this point because the idea of some sort of elitist art is seen as an anti-inclusive, anti-democratic thing. And so, I think both sides of the political debate are very uncomfortable with the avant-garde philosophy that drove art in the 20th century. That avant-garde spirit is obviously important to you, I think. So, you have to say, so how do you, I mean, how do you think we get it back? So the question is not how do we completely change the cultural industry so the best things flow to the top. It's simply to think about culture as an ecosystem in which there is mass culture and there are artists. And there are people on the fringes like the artist and some cultures and countercultures who are pioneering new work that then goes on to innovate the entire system and move the entire system to new things. So, in the case of trap, trap comes out of a relatively marginal scene. In Atlanta for rap, changes the sound of rap, then changes the sound of country music, and changes the sound of pop music, and changes the sound of basically all music being created around the world. So that seems to be an example of where the whole ecosystem shifts and what's interesting about that model is that that scene on the fringes doesn't have to be that big. It just has to be a small group of people who are really excited about something. And that's what I find still a source of optimism, which is that if people who really care about culture just come together and start saying, "I believe the cultural invention is a social good. I'm going to use my time and my money to promote things that feel inventive over things that aren't inventive." That may be enough to just to create the activity that ends up still being innovative across the entire system. I think the reason that I find your work invigorated is because it's like a reminder that like even if we can't like change the structural forces of the internet, like it doesn't take that many people to like make something interesting happen for other people who care about something interesting. And kind of all that it takes for one personally, like for me personally, is to like literally just not let Spotify pick the next song. You know, like I just have to go read about some records that like someone who listens to a lot more music than me says are good. And then I can hear them. And like just trying to break out of the box of like just doing the same old thing is kind of like, it may not be enough writ large, but like it's enough to radically enrich like my own cultural consumption. And like people are doing stuff. There's not being rewarded or platformed in the same way. My book has been described as thoroughly pessimistic. And I don't think that's true. I think my general feeling is we've been on autopilot for 25 years and not thinking about these issues and not thinking that cultural intervention is needed for cultural health. We just think that the internet is going to solve all this or you know, what's good rises to the top. We have a democratic system. It requires some sort of intervention and a lot of the natural structures that let great things rise at the top and some of them were bad in the sense of being elitist or snobbish or pretentious. But those mechanisms are gone. So we have to do something. We have to think about it. We have to care and we have to want it. And if we want it, I think we can't change it. You know, John Lennon's, John and Yoko's, "Wars over if you want it." It always seems so hopelessly naive because it's not that simple. But I think for culture maybe it is that simple. The culture is good if you want it. ♪ What is our love ♪ ♪ Is you wanted ♪ Whether you agree with David about the state of culture writ large or not, it is always good to hold the good stuff close. ♪ ♪ This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If you aren't already a Slate Plus member, please subscribe now from the Dakota Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or visit Slate.com/Decoderring+ to get access wherever you listen. Slate Plus members get access to our bonus episodes and they get to hear our show and every other Slate Podcasts without any ads. They are also meaningfully contributing and supporting to our work. This episode was produced by Max Friedman. Dakota Ring is also produced by me, Katie Shepherd and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. We are editing help from Josh Levine and Mara Jacob is Senior Technical Director. All you David Marx's blank space of cultural history of the 21st century is in addition to being about all the things we discussed, a lively and fun year by year history of the culture of this century. Go read it. I also really enjoy his sometimes exasperated and exacting substack culture and owner's manual. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at [email protected] or give us a call at 347-460-7281. We love hearing from you and we'll see you in two weeks.