Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow

Such a product does not exist, sir. I think you must have dreamed it.

b) indiebrow?

c) I've heard Sting described as middlebrow too (I think by Xgau).

d) see above

No one uses middlebrow as a superlative.

Two days of 'brow' puns and only one tangible stab at an actual definition. Grinning, the throng then dusted-off their hands, satisfied that the issue had been well and truly dealt with. But that's a poor way to explain this verbal sneer that supposed to represent some sort of indefensible king-hit against, well, whoever.

Isn't it just some generic raspberry critics blow at something they'd love to get into, if only their meticulously constructed theories weren't insisting that X artist was indeed mediocrity in sheep's clothing?

Maybe not. But up to this point, it's sounded like this great throwaway line anyone can use to brush under the carpet whole swathes of music they wish they were listening to 5 years earlier when it was cool. So again, what the fuck does 'middlebrow' actually mean to those people who see fit to use it?

Low brow is a no-no because it sounds classist.

"Nobrow" by John Seabrook. Ugh, is that that awful marketing book? I read the first chapter while waiting around at a friend's apartment once. I can't believe that guy ever wrote anything for The New Yorker."

Time for the Souffle.

Is there any hope of an actual debate on this? Lots of stuff I can't get my head around. Specifically:

* Can all music be placed somewhere on a low/middle/high continuum, or is the whole concept nonsense to start with?
* Anti-middlebrow people: name some high/low music you like
* Also, is there not some kind of excluded-middle thingy at work?
* Some of my most cherished albums (Revolver, Kind of Blue, etc.) seem to be staunchly middlebrow. Should I wipe my iPod and join the circus?
* What the hell are these guys on about?
* If they're so anti-middlebrow, why is Andrew Bird on their site?

i wouldn't worry about it. its all one vast fat middle now anyway.

Before I clicked on your link, I was going to say that "middlebrow" is one of those ideas that I mostly seem to read defenses of these days, rather than anyone actually sincerely attacking it (see also the concept of "guilty pleasures").

always think middlebrow should actually be called ho-brow (or maybe that should be reserved to describe taste which only goes for the highest and lowest shit)

In short, as you've guessed, the concept is nonsense to start with. "Middlebrow" is a term used only by highbrows, or highbrow-wannabes. It is always an insult. Such people say things like "Only middlebrow movies win Oscars." It's the same thing as applauding your favorite "minor novelist," so that your affection for David Lodge, say, in no way indicates that you don't venerate Joyce or Saramago like you're supposed to. It also exposes you as an incredible snob. An effective way to define these terms is to use Shakespeare: A Peter Brook Hamlet is highbrow, but the Branagh movie with Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Julie Christie, and Jack Lemmon is middlebrow (partly because of casting familiar faces and partly making the drama easier to follow--flashbacks, etc.). Hamlet 2, by design, is lowbrow.

It is difficult to apply these terms to music, except for the middlebrow one as a putdown of safe, respectable "art" (the quotation marks there are applied by the snobs, not me). The reason why Kind of Blue and Revolver might get the tag is because too many people enjoy them.

Moviemakers, in my understanding of the concepts, are easy to label (Lars von Trier = highbrow, Ron Howard = lowbrow, Farrelly Brothers = lowbrow), but I happily can't envision such a facile ranking in music. (Eno = highbrow?, Peter Gabriel = middlebrow?, John Tesh = lowbrow?) It's just a system designed for insults, so I think everyone should avoid it.

xxpost (would like to read a defense of the middlebrow, elephant rob)

edit: von Trier = high, Howard = middle, Farrellys = low

i agree with enrique

huh - i'm pretty sure there's been similar classifications in re music, or at least I can easily envision them. Eno would be middlebrow as well as Peter Gabriel. Highbrow would probably be someone like Phillip Glass. But yeah, middlebrow has historically been a snobbish pejorative.

glass is totes m/b tho

t - yeah, in terms of the avant-garde - it depends on from what perspective you're assigning these categories.

There's definitely an audience whose appetite for things are largely determined by these things not demanding too much of its audience and not being obviously trashy, and surely there are musicians who make their living catering to this audience (they'd be fools not to, if the audience were willing to pay).

sarahel pegged it: Here's Christgau on Wrong Way Up:
"After years of big-money production jobs and new age environments, we know Eno for a middlebrow dabbler--no longer can he dazzle us with unpretentious impassivity. And if his return to song form seems too easy, well, maybe it was. Nevertheless, this sea of permutation is the followup Another Green World deserved. He's been synthesizing rhythms so long he makes them sound organic--we get not only world-beat echoes but the soul shuffle his singing is now up to. As for the other guy, he hasn't sounded so sure of his ground since he played second fiddle to Lou Reed. A-

Much of this is perspective: To Kyle Gann, Philip Glass ain't exactly highbrow, but he is to my Uncle John.

But I still have a hard time clumping musicians into brows. Can you name a highbrow soul singer, a middlebrow one, and a lowbrow one? I hope not.

I'm interested how time and access changes things, as well. Today, Buster Keaton is adored by specialists and the avant-garde. Perhaps one day the Ramones will get their academic due.

for the people making such designations, i don't think there is such a thing as a highbrow soul singer. Soul, as a genre, is probably another example of the effects of time, such that there are probably plenty of "middlebrow" ones, whereas initially it was a lowbrow music.

This whole discussion reminds me of Paul Fussell's book on Class that contains a quiz at the back so you can determine for yourself where you fit in to his taxonomy.

the ramones are pretty middlebrow today, but i view that as an advancement in middlebrow sensibilities!

I am shocked at how quickly "I like big butts" went from scandalous to tweenfriendly, though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7yOB8BdpoM

FWIW, in academia, "high-culture music" refers to 'art music', basically notated music around which there is a substantial body of theoretical literature ,which is often publicly funded: just about everything from the Western classical tradition + 20th/21st century notated compositional music (including the avant-garde) + music from other cultures that shares these characteristics, such as Indian classical music or Beijing opera. Philip Glass would qualify but, especially in the last few decades, would often be seen as a relatively populist, almost crossover, example.

(So, yeah, you could call him "middlebrow" if you wanted to put him down.)

here are some of the more surprising entries from philip glass' IMDB:
Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) (VG) ("Pruit Igoe")
"Scrubs" (1 episode, 2006)

koyaanisqatsi in both cases iirc

The definition I gave is a bit too neat, of course, since e.g. electroacoustic music is 'high-culture' art music even though it is not always notated. Some people would consider some styles of jazz and improvised music to be 'high-culture' as well. (Likewise, there are counterexamples of blatantly commercial popular music that are notated. Also, the body of theoretical writing on pop music is steadily growing.)

"Perhaps one day the Ramones will get their academic due."
"the body of theoretical writing on pop music is steadily growing."

more academic attention on mass culture further cements its middlebrowness, no? I mean, that's sort of the impetus behind it, right? "It's important to study this because this is what middlebrow people like, what it says about middlebrow people," always having a flavor of anthropology behind it.

not necessarily, academics have paid plenty of attention to lowbrow culture - there are countless books and essays on it, a lot in the vein of "WTF is wrong with people?" or "This thing that seems horrible and stupid is actually a revolutionary act"

what if "middlebrow" is pubes?

re: lowbrow, no that's what I mean, that just getting more academic attention won't confer highbrow status on something. I read somewhere where someone did her grad thesis on Thomas Kinkade -- trying to evaluate whether it was art or not, and her conclusion was something like "yes, it's art by such and such criteria, but it's still crap."

lowbrow = kitschy, associated with 'the masses', and for both of these reasons a source of perverse pleasure for academics -- seeing the hidden value in lowbrow means you get to pat yourself on the back for being a revolutionary, a people's champion, a rebel against your own stuffy discipline, and an astute observer able to see what others can't.

middlebrow is for the less intellectual kids the academic went to prep school with, and is therefore the most contemptible form of pseudo-art

i thought that what you meant was that academic attention meant that something was middlebrow - not that the academic attention was responsible for the status change.

re pubes -- i thought pubes were highbrow? More likely to see pubes at a moma than hanging in dentist's office.

so would hairy feet be lowbrow then?

also..dudes...like one of my favorite bands ever but...Rush esp Peart's lyrics are the definition of middlebrow

no i meant like pubes are like eyebrows of your genitals, maybe, and that's the MIDDLE of your body! think about it

Academic attention conferred on Kinkade does not make Kinkade highbrow. But it might be highbrow to announce at an academic party that Kinkade is one of your favorite artists.

A chap called John Seabrook wrote a book called 'Nobrow', which was good, but very much not great. Interesting ideas, but he spent too much time talking about how he liked to wear Chemical Brothers t-shirts and how he once interviewed Ben Kweller for The New Yorker.

― Nick Southall (Nick Southall), Tuesday, January 7, 2003 2:31 AM (7 years ago)

Ha, I have this book, and I agree on Nick's assessment - don't remember that much else about it though

art that's old
art that's expensive to produce, or go see
art that's difficult to parse
art that's very specialized to a given discourse
art that's deliberately provocative or political, usually lefty
art that academics, as a class, are into
art that academics find ways to write about

all of this could be highbrow. or middle! but i don't think there is any such thing really, probably never was.

just getting more academic attention won't confer highbrow status on something.

I was thinking of "theoretical writing" like this:
http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.09.15.5/mto.09.15.5.adams.html
that actually seriously analyses musical structures in popular music in the way that music theorists have analysed classical music for centuries.

xxpost (would like to read a defense of the middlebrow, elephant rob)

Apparently the only things I can remember are kind of old at this point, but here are some things that came to mind:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/rise-of-the-middlebrow,14629/ (this is super long)
http://www.slate.com/id/2110472/landing/1
http://chronicle.com/article/Confessions-of-a-Middlebrow/48644

While I was trying to find that AV Club link, I found a two-month old Matos review from Resident Advisor that opens "Middlebrow music is better than middlebrow anything else." (from: http://www.residentadvisor.net/review-view.aspx?id=7406) Matos to thread?

Nobrow is basically just a collection of articles Seabrook wrote for The New Yorker with a few strands of half-baked cultural theory woven throughout for marketing purposes.

"But it might be highbrow to announce at an academic party that Kinkade is one of your favorite artists."
pubes!

"that actually seriously analyses musical structures in popular music "
these guys' approach is a little different -- but also very genre-blind:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/dan/mysong/MySongCHI2008.pdf

"all of this could be highbrow. or middle! but i don't think there is any such thing really, probably never was."
If there's a music act that has lost any will to seriously challenge/offend its audience (Rolling Stones/Rush/U2) in favor of collecting $100+ ticket prices, I'm not sure how long that tradition or mentality goes back, but it certainly exists today, and maybe middlebrow isn't the best word for this kind of operation, but it seems to fit.
Under this designation, it's actually highbrow and lowbrow that become difficult to distinguish from each other, since they both share a lack of concern for middlebrow conventions (or maybe it's lowbrow that isn't concerned, and highbrow that makes a point of eschewing them).
Weirdly, by releasing what fans would consider freakishly terrible records, Metallica acquits itself a little of the middlebrow aspirations that seem to define its career today.
So is St. Anger a lowbrow or highbrow record? It sounds pretty avant garde in parts!

Thank you, rob, for the links. And goole's bullet points above are excellent. Time and access are what helped make Buster Keaton an artist for highbrows (not to mention his brilliance, invention, surreality, etc.). So my point about the Ramones becoming highbrow adoptees someday depends probably on a few decades of neglect. So current university courses in punk rock will probably delay full snob approval.

Another question, hinted at above: When did jazz become highbrow? When people stopped dancing to it?

Maybe hiphop will become highbrow the evening people sit for it at Carnegie Hall like as they would for The Black Saint and Sinner Lady.

xp - not all jazz is highbrow

well look it used to be (a century ago, say) that there was "only" highbrow and lowbrow culture: the great composers, poetry 'n' classics vs shit the masses liked. this wasn't a very good schema for understanding things and modernism threw it into whack anyway. somewhere in the last 20 years critics (who?) came up with the "middle" to describe, well, what? pop art with some kind of intellectual activity? supposed highbrow shit that's not hard to get into? things that every college educated person knows about?

my point is that these are pretty stupid schema anyway. critics ought to try to describe the specific world a given artwork is coming from, why it was made, and how, and for whom -- rather than bothering with some three-level box system. why is that even acceptable?

some xps

uh, the idea of middlebrow culture probably dates back to the beginnings of the middle class.

http://www.allwords.com/word-middlebrow.html

if this is right...

middlebrow Twit Definition of middlebrow Share Definition of middlebrow on Facebook Digg:Definition of middlebrow! stumble Definition of middlebrow Bookmark Definition of middlebrow on Delicious submit Definition of middlebrow to reddit Bookmark Definition of middlebrow
noun

1. A person or thing that is neither a highbrow or lowbrow, but in between.

adjective

1. Neither highbrow or lowbrow, but somewhere in between.

Etymology: A spin-off from the terms highbrow and lowbrow. The term first appeared in Punch (1925) and later was used by Virginia Wolf (1930's) in an unsent letter to the "New Statesman," published as a chapter in the book "The Death of a Moth and Other Essays" (1942).

that puts the word itself appearing somewhere in the birth of modernism, but the "middle class" is about a century older, depending on how you peg its beginning

the term may be 20th century, but what it represents is older than that - I'm pretty sure.

"what it represents" is exactly the problem i'm talking about -- what does it represent? none of these word signifies anything all that useful, or signifies too much. they are not descriptors, they are crutches. just talk about the art, chrissake!!

kevindubrow - low or middlebrow?

Enrique encapsulated it fairly well as: safe and respectable - a lot of it is defining the work by its audience, "Stuff Middle Class People Like" as it were

Well, the word hints at middle class striving for status and respectability, and came into vogue just at the moment in Western life (the mid-20th century) when a massive new middle class began adoring their homes with Van Gogh prints and attending lectures on the history of the lyric form. It certainly was used in a patronizing manner by intellectuals like Dwight McDonald to signify that inauthenticity of a certain kind of cultural striving (both lowbrow and highbrow are preferable precisely because of their perceived authenticity). It's problematic because of all the classist assumptions and explicit snobbery in its usage. On the other hand, it does point to a genuine cultural phenomenon (the period of history when a newly arrived middle class tried to come to grips with the Western tradition as well as modernist extensions and critiques of that tradition - contrast with a well to do middle class perfectly happy with Big Brother and Michael Bay movies, for better or worse) in the West, and can be useful as a way of pointing out a certain status anxiety that becomes audibly apparent in certain ambitious artists who are trying to come to terms with traditions and conventions that they don't quite understand. Sometimes that's obviously bad, but on the other hand certain songwriters and performers like Ray Davies and Elvis Costello seem to me interesting and moving precisely because of their middlebrow angst.
The novel Lolita can be read partly as parody of these kinds of taste divisions in American culture - Humbert Humbert = highbrow, Dolores Haze = middlebrow, Lolita=lowbrow.

the term may be 20th century, but what it represents is older than that - I'm pretty sure.

― sarahel, Friday, July 16, 2010 11:32 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

nope

*adorning their homes* and *signify the inauthenticity*

xp - you see a major difference between mid 20th century middle class cultural ambitions and those of the mid 19th century, or turn of the century?

I'm interested how time and access changes things, as well. Today, Buster Keaton is adored by specialists and the avant-garde. Perhaps one day the Ramones will get their academic due.

― Enrique, Friday, July 16, 2010 8:01 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

I'm interested how time and access changes things, as well. Today, Buster Keaton is adored by specialists and the avant-garde. Perhaps one day the Ramones will get their academic due.

― Enrique, Friday, July 16, 2010 8:01 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

errr, gotta diverge from enrique here. what 'access' issues prevented highbrows from getting buster keaton?! (assuming that they didn't btw.) all this convo is like talking about hipsters. it's useful to know that people used these terms, but they're pretty dumb terms.

'middle class' is also a pretty gd useless term for anything other than dumb generalizations

all this convo is like talking about hipsters. it's useful to know that people used these terms, but they're pretty dumb terms.

agreed, though the reasons for their use and the insecurity that prompted it is interesting - but one does run the risk of defending the terms by having the conversation.

xp - Mostly a difference in scale rather than character (and thus a more intense anxiety on the part of some intellectuals - in the States this all intersects rather directly with things like the GI bill and the flood of new kind of student in the elite American universities), though the intervention of the modernist turn in the arts and the rise of mass media further complicated it.

*a new kind of student*

though the Victorian/turn of the century era also featured new kinds of students in elite American universities, and the rise of mass media complicating things. The scale vs. character point is well taken though.

many xposts

Agreed that these are dumb terms. "Middlebrow" is probably the insult I hate the most.

As for Keaton, by access I mean that for about thirty years hardly anyone could see any Buster Keaton movies unless one lived in a handful of giant cities. Not until the sixties was his work revived and celebrated at festivals. This period of invisibility helped make him a "higher-brow-than-thou" favorite for some film snobs, usually at the expense of the never-disappeared Chaplin.

Of course, as you suggest, some intellectuals loved him right away, particularly as a surrealist contemporary. (Much of this I learned from a good book called The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton by Robert Knopf, who describes the enthusiasm Garcia Lorca and Bunuel had for Keaton when his movies were brand new.)

keaton's films were hard enough to see between the 20s and 60s. ok. but it wasn't super easy to hear webern or read woolf. but this brings us to the heart of it. *so what* if surrealists/highbrows appreciated his work in the 1920s? why is their opinion significant when he was, you know, massively popular?

The idea of a middlebrow/highbrow divide as essentially a way to divide and describe perceived levels of sophistication within the bourgeoisie really seems to cement at the end of the Victorian era (William Dean Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham captures that cultural moment really well), but as far as I know it was the 20th century when writers begin really exploring the concept at length, with people like Dwight McDonald making the divisions into something of a crutch in a lot of aesthetic arguments (and though he didn't coin it, McDonald developed the usage of the term middlebrow more than any other writer). But the idea of that kind of divide is implicit in a more complex form in Adorno's divisions between folk culture/mass culture/high culture, so it's a common concept, and one that, as I suggested above, does possess some explanatory power, though I think one should be careful using it as an easy expression of scorn.

d-mac used 'midcult' iirc. basically the same thing. i think he said it began in the 18th century. but he had borrowed his analysis from q d leavis.

xpost - I'm think he made liberal use of middlebrow as well, though it's been awhile since I've read him (I remember him making a highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow distinction between three Jesus movies - Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew, Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told, and Nick Ray's King of Kings). But as you say, his preferred term, 'midcult,' meant the same thing.

"Today, Buster Keaton is adored by specialists and the avant-garde. Perhaps one day the Ramones will get their academic due."

I'd be surprised if there isn't at least some historical highbrow acknowledgement of the Ramones, but I think their contribution to the culture was more spiritual than technical, so I dunno if there will ever be a seminal work on downstrokes. What kind of academic dissection were you looking for?

"Due" was the wrong word there. I don't care if the Ramones are under the academic knife. I just meant that someday perhaps the kind of people who use "middlebrow" as an insult will make the Ramones one of their causes.

did anyone else read this? it kinda sucked.

http://www.marginaliabookstore.com/media/ccp0/prodsm/DSC02853.JPG

just read a review of a book by virginia woolf by philip 'partisan review' rahv from 1943

woolf's book apparently contained an item TITLED 'middlebrow' -- on another tab i see this is on the wikipedia page for 'middlebrow'. n e ways, it was apparently a new term so far as rahv was concerned, and he was a p smart guy, so.

yeah - i realize that the term, itself, was new to that time period - the idea behind it, i still think goes back further, but "middlebrow" - i agree on the chronology.

low, middle, high
high, low, high
low, middle, high, high
low, middle, high
high, low, high
high, middle, high, low
high, middle, high
low, low, low
low
high
low, middle, high
high, low, high
high, middle, high, low

Middlebrow is a played-out insult. Most people enjoy plenty of middlebrow art but they wouldn't call it that. When I think of "middlebrow" movies I think of Lasse Hallstrom rather than Ang Lee, but that's just because I like Ang Lee and find Hallstrom boring - I don't think there's any meaningful distinction between them, brow-wise.