a thread to discuss the Death of Monoculture

this is a concept that seems to come up a lot in different places and often derails threads - there seems to be a pretty solid consensus around the idea that the internet has hopelessly factured the musical culture in a manner that is likely to have long-term consequences so here is a thread to talk about what monoculture was, why it was, why its gone, and what's coming up in its place. Personally I find this whole development fascinating, kind of an outgrowth of punk ideology that was subsequently more fully realized by technology... but the monoculture itself seems like the exception in human history rather than the rule, a rare time when a whole lot of people were bound together by media that was controlled by a very small minority. Prior to mass culture you had tons of little disparate folk cultures that only intermittently interacted with each other (thanks to things like immigrant cultures mingling, etc.) and now we're in a time where a bunch of little cultures are arising, but the boundaries that separate them are completely self-imposed and artificial (as opposed to, say, the literal boundaries that used to separate cultures like language and oceans). Will we ever have giant stars on the level of Elvis or Michael Jackson or the Beatles again? Do we want to? Will control over distribution ever return to being controlled by a few outlets, would that be a good or bad thing, etc.

rather discuss the death of monocles - those were pretty cool imo

"hopelessly factured the musical culture in a manner that is likely to have long-term consequences"

Really? Like what?

<3 u alex

Keyboard Kat is the new Elvis.

i'm really looking forward to that michael jackson rehearsal movie btw.

Really? Like what?

like there being a million little scenes instead of the majority of people listening to the radio, etc. I dunno I'm just throwing ideas out there

The correct answer to the "monoculture question" is now and has always been "What do you mean 'we,' white man?" This was always a myth. Everyone didn't like Elvis; everyone didn't like the Beatles; everyone didn't own Thriller or the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack or go see Titanic or whatever else you want to point to. Half the people that say they were at Woodstock weren't. But the ones who were happened to own or have access to mass media outlets and were thus able to self-mythologize a "community" into existence.

When the next interesting electronic, or metal or punk artist is equally likely to come from Vancouver, Nagoya, San Paulo or Helsinki, monoculture is just specializing a bit. Humongous pop stars might be rare, but pop culture has conquered overall. I can see distribution consolidating in the next decade, though never like before.

media, internet, etc has allowed previously unknown cultures to emerge

"everyone" is obviously an exaggeration - but I don't think you can really deny the worldwide generational impact of people like the Beatles or Elvis or Michael Jackson or the Bee Gees. Those huge record sales numbers count for something.

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http://superfectocaballerobritanico.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/phil-spector-back-to-mono-420535.jpg
FREE POLANSKI

xp They count selling a lot of records. But so did Bing Crosby and Oum Kalsoum.

"media, internet, etc has allowed previously unknown cultures to emerge"

Uh yeah.

There's a tendency for people (esp. young people) to discuss the basic character of contemporary culture in relation to received ideas about the past as though "the change" is necessarily something that has occurred dramatically and recently, probably in response to something they remember and perceive as important. So it makes sense that people are inclined to view the internets as the prime culprit in the case of the fractured monoculture. But I think that this is something that's been going on for quite a while, and that the internet has only hastened the process, and/or made it that much more evident. After all, it was once fashionable to predict that the internet would soon usher in a trans-national techno-utopia of some sort.

Predictably, I figure that "the monoculture" (to the extent that it ever really existed in the first place: see unpersonOTM) began to fragment in the late sixties. The emergence of a viable counterculture that could claim at least some allegiance from such a vast swath of people seems to have come as a huge blow to the idea that there was a single "right" way to be, think, feel and live in the 20th century. Subsequent to this, of course, the counterculture fragmented and subdivided endlessly, and the mainstream culture it imagined it opposed did the same. By the late 80s, the idea that a homogeneous "mainstream" culture of any sort had ever existed in the first place -- even could exist in a culturally mixed society -- had come to seem naive, perhaps offensively so. Etc...

I mean obv the internet has made hearing (about) stuff more accessible for most people, but I'm not sure how much impact it has on the folks making the music in let's say Burundi that they have a couple of fans in Osaka and Cleveland.

Keyboard Kat is the new Elvis.

not sure how much alex was joking here but I think it's actually pretty otm. how many people have seen that stupid wedding dance video etc. etc. - and how does this stuff not count as cultural objects?

They count selling a lot of records. But so did Bing Crosby and Oum Kalsoum.

Exactly. Was Frank Sinatra symbolic of a "monoculture"? No. But the Beatles and Elvis were? Why? What did all the Beatle fans have in common other than owning Beatles records? Were you part of the "counterculture" if you owned the albums, but turned your nose up at the lunchbox or the boots or the wigs or any of the eight million other ancillary Beatle products?

xp I was about half joking. But yeah I don't think the internet is much of an impediment to global stardom.

jeezus I was just throwing out names my list was not comprehensive

i know "uhh yeah" alex, i was stating the obvious to shakey

Were you part of the "counterculture" if you owned the albums, but turned your nose up at the lunchbox or the boots or the wigs or any of the eight million other ancillary Beatle products?

you're overlooking the main thing here, which is that there actually WERE Beatles lunchboxes, boots, wigs, etc. and people bought them

there are probably MORE hannah montana lunchboxes, boots, wigs etc. tho

I doubt it

you were part of the counterculture if you owned beatle albums but turned your nose up at the monkees

Subsequent to this, of course, the counterculture fragmented and subdivided endlessly, and the mainstream culture it imagined it opposed did the same.

― contenderizer

When I say this, I guess I mean that the culture's portrait of itself began to fragment, in response a growing awareness of the heterogeneity that had always existed within it (hidden by the illusion of a normative mainstream propagated by certain culturally dominant groups).

I don't think its a serious argument to say that a teenybopper who's been around for a couple of years has the same merchandising clout and cultural impact as a band that's STILL churning out insanely popular product almost 50 years after ther fact

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What part of American Idol don't you understand?

xp that's a pretty arbitrary distinction though in the grand scheme. What matters in your original assessment is how largely distributed a star is not the quality/longevity of their contributions, right?

STILL churning out insanely popular product almost 50 years after ther fact

I would like to see a spreadsheet that shows me what percentage of people buying the Beatles reissues are under the age of, say, 40.

it's a cliche to say this but I really think michael jackson's performance on motown 25 was the last gasp of monoculture

Seriously doubt that anyone catapulted to fame by AI (so far) -- or even Idol itself -- is gonna be remembered like the Beatles are 50 years from now. Though the monoculture may have been a fiction, it willed itself into reality, or was willed into reality, or whatever.

The range of options available to most "cultural consumers" now is much broader than it was in 1963, and the idea that people should differentiate themselves from the pop mainstream (should even differentiate themselves from other people differentiating themselves) is much more popular. It's absurd to pretend that all eras are fundamentally alike.

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Anyone under the age of 40 probably either grabbed it from the interwebs or didn't care enough to do even that.

I don't think its a serious argument to say that a teenybopper who's been around for a couple of years has the same merchandising clout and cultural impact as a band that's STILL churning out insanely popular product almost 50 years after ther fact

shakey if your argument is 'there will never be another band who had a cultural/musical/historical impact as large as the beatles' - I'd be inclined to agree with you. but I think that has more to do with extraordinary situation/talent of the beatles than with the death of monoculture. I don't think there would be any bands that would be as universally loved, even if they got the same crazy exposure.

I think that Lucy rocking out to the Caveman Beatles in Ethiopia was the last gasp of monoculture.

San Paulo

São Paulo, whitey

I fundamentally agree with a lot of what SMC says in the intro to this thread, particularly these two bits:

a rare time when a whole lot of people were bound together by media that was controlled by a very small minority

(iow, "as goes Jann Wenner, so goes America") and

now we're in a time where a bunch of little cultures are arising, but the boundaries that separate them are completely self-imposed and artificial

except that the boundaries that separate mini-cultures are no more or less "real" than those that held together the so-called "monoculture."

i don't think we can generalize on the whole culture based on the state of pop music. it used to be that running a newspaper was a surefire moneymaker -- selling adspace on paper that had journalism printed on it in between was a great business. now, there are other ways to get that information and printing the ads on the paper is less renumerative. same goes for vinyl objects with music on them. i don't see changes to our culture that you can attribute to the "death of news" that can't be also attributed to bigger phenomena like "demographics" or "the internet" but maybe that's too vague. the same goes for music, anyway.

i'm more sympathetic to the view that the "monoculture" was absurdly narrow and non-representative to begin with. rather than talking about its death we could be talking about it finally shrinking to its proper proportions, "the unlife of the culture(s)" iow. there doesn't seem to be much evidence that people are not getting exactly the music they want.

When exactly was Elvis part of the "monoculture"? Was he part of the "monoculture" in the late 1960s, along with the Beatles? Did Beatles fans buy the new Elvis singles in 1966, e.g.?

fwiw I don't think I have "an argument" per se

I think contenderizer is articulating some good points though

Though the monoculture may have been a fiction, it willed itself into reality, or was willed into reality, or whatever.

The range of options available to most "cultural consumers" now is much broader than it was in 1963,

this seems inarguable for ex.

b/c wasn't Elvis more a guy that the "silent majority" was into in the mid 60s, rather than a counterculture guy?

Michael Jackson seems like a better case to me but it would, I was 8 years old in 1982 and didn't get the racial stuff that was going on.

I mean we had all these cultural politics arguments in the 90s that were explicitly about how narrow and exclusionary the monoculture was lolz doesn't anyone remember gender studies classes

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There was never a monoculture. However, there was a strong enough belief that there was one to allow other cultures to imagine themselves to be oppositional. What people are lamenting I think is the impossibility of being against it because suddenly it cant be imagined anymore. Harder sometimes to know what you want than what you dont want. The 60s were sort of the height of monoculture in a way because people believed in it so much that the rejection of it was broader and more strenuous than before?

youtube wedding dance video:

28,107,464 views

> São Paulo, whitey

Totally! I wish I could find the listeing time to be more fluent in "real" Brazilian culture. But Amon Tobin, Sepultura and The Sexual Life of Savages is holding me over fine for now.

At the EMP Pop Music Conference in 2008, Robert Christgau said, "I miss the monoculture" with a mixture of wistfulness and sarcasm.

It's probably easier for bad writers, I'll give Christgau that.

jeez long x-post sorry i got distracted. that thing always chokes me up...sniffle...

I mean, e-mail is the internet

― contenderizer

This was inexcusable. Point is they're both of a kind.

we're in a time where a bunch of little cultures are arising, but the boundaries that separate them are completely self-imposed and artificial
75% of the people on this planet do not have access to the internet.

Even more than that aren't American.

those people don't matter, come on now.

they don't even care what the best Beatles song on Magical Mystery Tour is

I was gonna say ...

Less than 5% of Africa has internet access. Latin America, South America, Middle East...less than 30% and obviously concentrated in two or three urban sprawls. People need to stop trying at a unified theory of culture and certainly not conflate a false sense of "worldliness" for having access to words written about the world.

But srsly, you don't think that this decade (like all other decades) won't be summed up in 30-40 years by TIME magazine with a handful of photos of various events, pop culture & otherwise? 9/11, Obama, American Idol, Iraq ... It might not feel like there's a monoculture (yecch), but it'll all get boiled down to the same bullshit in a couple decades.

yeah, i think the points made about internet sensations (like the wedding dance or susan boyle or whatev) are good ones and point more toward an evolution than a death of shared culture. (i think shared culture is a better phrase than "monoculture," because what we're really talking about is mass touchstones -- things that transcend the cultural and subcultural boundaries that have always been there and that give people a sense of common experience despite their regional, religious, racial or other differences.) if there really wasn't still a mass culture, then there would be no way that most of the people in my office would have been aware of the kanye/taylor thing by the time i came in to work the next day -- but they were, including a number of people who i'm sure couldn't name a kanye or taylor song to save their lives. there are more possible points of origin and more and faster avenues of distribution, but there is still an awful lot of shared culture going on.

won't be summed up in 30-40 years by TIME magazine

in 30-40 years there won't be any magazines

in 2-5 years there won't be any magazines

"Monoculture" in any meaningful sense would be a single culture, inescapable and therefore oppressive in its stricture. But it should be noted you are not talking about culture: you are talking about entertainment and world events, and that this decade could and would be summarized by the largest events that occurred during it would be in line with the normal course of human history.

It's just the wrong word to use, "culture". You're talking about general sociological concern. The only area where I can engage with this topic is the once farcical but now terrifyingly real polarization of both news reporting and, as a result, public discourse. In every area of life, people are louder, dumber, and more selfish than ever before. Somewhere in this thread the entitlement issues I wrote about repeatedly throughout this decade were thrown into the mix. That takes care, probably, of the insanity in educated/inherited wealth America (hi Brooklyn white kids!), but even in countries with a lower standard of living - most Japanese adults are temporary workers and live alone in apartments American building inspectors would deem too small to qualify as closets *this is not a joke* - there does seem to be a thrust of desperation and disconnection. Whether that means armed combat, religious extremism or playing videogames until you die.

In every area of life, people are louder, dumber, and more selfish than ever before.

Is this really true? If so, why do you think it is?

Of course it isn't true. They may not even be louder, dumber or more selfish than they were 10/20/30 etc. years ago.

In every area of life, people are louder, dumber, and more selfish than ever before.

I'm sympathetic to contenderizer's comment about it being stupid to treat all eras as the same but... seriously people say this about every single era of human history. Greek, Roman, Arabic, British, American, you name it, historians from every era say this kind of thing.

Japan has a lower standard of living than the US?

Ain't no poverty in the US apparently.

I do think that the (admittedly gruesome) word "monoculture" has value, at least to the extent that we're talking about the cultural hegemony of a single voice - whether it be the voice of a distinct group, a collective, a set of interests ... whatever. Or even the perception of that kind of hegemony. Of course, we will continue to retrospectively simplify and package our history and identity, but this is inevitable and has nothing to do with the culture's sense of itself as either unitary or diverse.

I think it's almost undiable that in the mid 20th century, white well-to-do America (as a cultural/economic aggregate) successfully promulgated a vision of American identity as something homogeneous, unitary, normal and right. This vision became so culturally dominant that it could luxuriate in a weird sort of ignorance of its own existence as a distinct ethnic subculture. It's been falling apart for quite some time, but isn't gone yet and will probably be reverberating within American identity for quite some time. This is the sense in which I think it's appropriate (even necessary) to talk about a monoculture.

"undiable" = undeniable. and yeah, nothing's undeniable.

"I think it's almost undiable that in the mid 20th century, white well-to-do America (as a cultural/economic aggregate) successfully promulgated a vision of American identity as something homogeneous, unitary, normal and right"

Maybe, but reality intruded pretty quick there. By the early-60s it's pretty hard to see that vision as being intact.

I dunno. I think it still exists. It started showing real cracks in the 50s and 60s, but didn't just vanish as a result. Predominantly white middle-class culture(s) is/are still often shockingly blind to and uncomfortable about their own ethnic character.

75% of the people on this planet do not have access to the internet.

Are you kidding or do you think you're making a relevant point here?

I think you are confusing people's delusions of American culture (the Glenn Beck crowds) with the reality of American culture which has always been a lot messier.

Well, I think people can be culturally myopic regardless of what side of the political fence they stand on.

white well-to-do America (as a cultural/economic aggregate) successfully promulgated a vision of American identity as something homogeneous, unitary, normal and right.

this is true in some ways, but it never was actually any of those things (homogenous, unitary, etc), and it was constantly being infiltrated and affected by "outside" forces, from dixieland jazz to chinese food. and even though the dominant culture managed to assimilate a lot of things -- after initially and futilely resisting them -- all that assimilation was part of a constant process of expanding the circle of who and what belonged to "the culture." so if what we're really talking about is the erosion of norman rockwell normative mythology, that's a process that's been going on for a looooong time (and one that the beatles and elvis, among others, were very much a party to).

xp:
honestly i can't even tell what version of american culture people like glenn beck are trying to hark back to. it's not just a culture that never existed, it's a very vague and hazy imaginary culture.

Nov. 12, 1955

Willoughby

lol x-post

this is true in some ways, but it never was actually any of those things (homogenous, unitary, etc), and it was constantly being infiltrated and affected by "outside" forces, from dixieland jazz to chinese food.

― tipsy mothra

Yeah, but the monoculture doesn't depend on America being actually, you know, monocultural. It depends only on the manufacture and sale of a myth that it is. More specifically, a myth that middle-class white culture is unitary, normal and basically good. To the extent that this myth becomes so dominant as to make other cultures seem like niches of abnormality that diverge from the "mainstream", the monoculture exists.

"To the extent that this myth becomes so dominant as to make other cultures seem like niches of abnormality that diverge from the "mainstream", the monoculture exists."

Yeah but it only becomes like that for people who are invested in the idea of the monoculture being mainstream in the first place.

I dunno. I think you can buy into that mythology without even being aware of it. Without even belonging to the supposedly "normal, mainstream" group. In fact, I think a lot of America's struggles with group identity can't really be understood without considering the invisible persistence of the monocultural norm.

among other things

I think you can buy into that mythology without even being aware of it.

It's all part of the human instinct, right? We find subconscious comfort in having some group to belong to.

My university definitely had something approaching a monoculture, although maybe it doesn't count because the student was also overwhelmingly white. If I had to name a Beatles for my generation, it would definitely be Dave Matthews Band.

chilling

yeah, but they study hard, too

is nabisco on vacation or something? you guys should just sit tight until he explains everything for you.

nabisco OTM.

But Scott he'll just end up ripping me off again.

That takes care, probably, of the insanity in educated/inherited wealth America (hi Brooklyn white kids!), but even in countries with a lower standard of living - most Japanese adults are temporary workers and live alone in apartments American building inspectors would deem too small to qualify as closets *this is not a joke*

...........................

lolwut

what next for Chris ott?

"75% of the people on this planet do not have access to the internet." <- is this true? when half the population of the planet has a mobile phone? weird.

also jeez at all the eyeroll-trolling on this thread

You sure about 50% of people of this planet having a mobile phone?

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surprised people got so interested in my life in brooklyn. i dont live in a fancy, gentrified neighborhood. i live in a predominately carribean neighborhood and I rarely hear anything but reggae and dancehall. the bodega where i buy my smokes doesnt have a magazine section, nor does the grocery store where i buy my food. I dont own a TV.

^ self parody

How?

I think it is you

Hoffer seems to describe the appeal that the American monoculture has:

There is a grandeur in the uniformity of the mass. When a fashion, a dance, a song, a slogan or a joke sweeps like wildfire from one end of the continent to the other, and a hundred million people roar with laughter, sway their bodies in unison, hum one song or break forth in anger and denunciation, there is the overpowering feeling that in this country we have come nearer the brotherhood of man than ever before.

-Eric Hoffer

this thread was kinda a trainwreck

^^ self-parody

lol