Some Thoughts on Pop Music, Cultural Stasis and Potential Revolution

I look at media, culture, politics and tech. I like to compare today’s media landscape with that of the past because time is cyclical and the past is prologue. Thanks for stopping by!

From 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music:

Dylan scholar Greil Marcus said, “I heard a lecture by Thomas Crow, an art historian, about ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ being about Edie Sedgwick within Andy Warhol’s circle, as something that Dylan saw from the outside, not being personally involved with either of them, but as something he saw and was scared by and saw disaster looming and wrote a song as a warning, and it was compelling.

Whether his greatest song was about Sedgwick is debatable. What is as obvious as Christmas snow is that Dylan and Warhol were massive opposing forces in the Sixties. Bob Dylan was the pop star who elevated rock to the level of art; who eschewed frivolity in his lyrics and championed authenticity. Andy Warhol, conversely, turned the art gallery into an aisle spanner for Brillo boxes. Even Marcel Duchamp’s irony was bohemian in nature; Warhol highlighted, arguably celebrated, not only commerce but the surface. Throughout the decade, it was Dylan’s philosophy that was widely espoused, but the advent of postmodernism in the early Seventies gave Warhol’s vision a prophetic charge. One reason why Dylan’s outlook dominated the decade he emerged in: by 1967, pop culture was the counterculture. A new formula was introduced: lyrics with a rebellious slant that had a tinge of surrealism.

Postmodernism slowly seeped into cultural discourse in the Seventies. One of the major casualties of course was truth. Everything was relative now. Everyone had their own truth owing to their own social construct. Who was to say that pop wasn’t valid? What was the harm in studying “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” for an entire college course?

An effective accelerant was glam rock. I have said since the ‘90s that David Bowie, not The Beatles, was the biggest influence on pop. Glam rock celebrated image, play, appearances. Authenticity was exposed as just another pose; to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the most irritating one. All the different manifestations of Bowie influenced countless genres (punk, indie, metal, etc.) but it was post-Berlin Bowie that laid the blueprint for dance-pop.

From Discordia:

[P]op music ditched the insufferable, earnest lameness of Captain & Tennille and traded it for the glossy and cool Madonna, someone whose entire schtick lampshaded its own vacuity by adopting a pop art mode about itself.

This synthetic, flatter sound came from the laboratory of Low (using field samples from Kraftwerk). Gary Numan refined the sound into something easier to replicate, but Madonna heightened Bowie’s “image is everything” game. Bowie changed personas every album; Madonna was a new person in each music video. One video, she was a pregnant Staten Island teen; the next, Marilyn Monroe.

Cards-on-the table opportunism was nothing new. Frank Zappa, with the Mothers of Invention, released the Sgt. Pepper’s parody album We’re Only in it for the Money — the most thorough rebuke to hippie idealism at that time. Even in the New York City music world Madonna was coming up in, Bronx rappers were boasting about all the wealth they amassed, through their music or other means. Madonna was different: she was the first girl-boss. Her insouciance towards Reagan-era morals felt rebellious at the time, and it was.

Madonna may have spread the Gospel of Warhol, but it wasn’t the whole message. Warhol’s concept of pop was more Zen, more catholic (and Catholic). Though the question was always whether he was putting everyone on or being sincere, his practice consisted of elevating not only pop culture iconography like Campbell’s soup cans and Elvis Presley headshots as art. He also called downtown Manhattan drag queens “superstars” and made a film showing one continuous, static shot of Empire State Building; anything could be pop culture. Warhol had to contend with the realities of the New York art world, still in the thrall of modernism, which might explain why he was drawn to the modernist screeches of The Velvet Underground, the only rock band whose album he produced (along with Tom Wilson), even though he wrote in his diaries that he loved Motown.

While Warhol and Bowie primarily operated within the confines of camp, Madonna’s philosophy was l’pop pour l’pop. Michael Jackson still had a tie, however tenuous, to Motown’s secular gospel past. Prince bridged not only sex and spirituality, but the sleazy Seventies and the utopian Sixties. Madonna, more image-conscious than anyone before her, was arguably the first pop star of the attention economy. In the MTV age, even if you were a red-blooded he-man who hated her music, you could put her on mute and watch. Madonna, Warhol and Bowie were well-established in the pantheon of gods by the end of the Eighties. The Holy Trinity of postmodernism (and of course poptimism) was solidified by this point.

Generation X and the Millennial generation were the children of Warhol. The first wave of Gen X loved Madonna. Even the second-wave alt-rock slackers of the Nineties knelt at the altar of the Warhol-anointed Velvet Underground. Unlike the hippie idealists, slackers were doggedly ironic and jaded, irony being one of Warhol’s favorite materials in the studio. 1

Millennials revived the brief, UK-contained, early Eighties fire of poptimism in the aughts. By the 2010s, pop culture was the counterculture again. Two key differences: one, mentioned numerous times in this newsletter, was that the counterculture’s demands were readily accepted by the establishment because they echoed the Boomers’ demands so neatly. Better treatment of women, gays and minorities was something Boomer liberals assumed they were already good at. Horrified to find out they needed to improve, they immediately went to work. Another key difference: the Sixties, with its newfound beliefs, had new celebrities that represented them. Bob Dylan, etc. Millennials demanded that Marvel, Beyonce, anyone who already had a platform, should amplify their barely revolutionary demands. They of course used their platforms accordingly and dance-pop was where the battle cry was heard. Until 2023.