If I determined anything over my Thanksgiving holiday, it's that, if I'm going to keep up with writing these posts on a weekly basis, I'm going to have to do a better job of keeping up with and generating opinions about pop culture. My activities of the last week, culturally speaking, were rather limited, but were 1) Going to see a concert of contemporary classical music, performed by the New World Symphony, and 2) Going to an exhibition of contemporary art, the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, both of which seem outside of the initially boundaries I established for myself, in terms of what I was going to write about here for Audioshocker. And with Art Basel coming up this weekend in Miami, things don't look to be getting any better.
Which I only mention because, although I am a cultural elitist, I am not a completely rigorous snob. The main symptom of not being a completely rigorous snob is what I would call snob-angst; namely, I am not completely comfortable with the fact that my tastes tend towards the obscenely intellectual. Who is to blame for this? Anyone but myself. So far as I can tell, most intellectualism finds its source in the same thing as the more popular affliction of attention-deficiency: boredom. Humans get bored. Most of life (well, middle-class Western life, at any rate) is really really dull. The solution to this boredom? Either to a) do a lot of trivial, technologically-driven stuff, and enjoy the comforts produced by the Western Culture Industry, or b) try to figure out why you're so bored all the time. As soon as one starts trying to determine why he or she is so bored all the time, one quickly finds oneself stumbling down the path to intellectualism.
That is, it's doing versus thinking. So the thinker, when angsty, notices the perceived non-thinkers, and the fact that they're doing things, and decides to do things him or herself. Generally speaking, these artifacts of thinkers doing things are the cultural touchstones that mean the most to me. This is where, as alluded to in past posts/comments, the issue of ironic enjoyment comes up, in that it's the intellectual appreciation (whether for laughs or disgust, or whatever else) of a cultural item that was generated without thought (I'm distinguishing, here, between "thought" and "planning"--planning being the system of ideas involved in generating pop-cultural commodities).
So, yeah, I ironically enjoy things too (the movie Congo, for instance, is a great example, I think, of a movie that can be ironically enjoyed), but in the end, I have an appreciation for craft through which I very consistently get more enjoyment out of finely constructed, thoughtful works than out of the sort of "slumming it" posture of self-awarely watching (or listening to) swill. Also, ironicizing crappy things in order to enjoy them is easy. Look at the whole demographic of young American humans that are categorized as "hipsters": it's an entire subculture built entirely around ironized pleasures. Too me, even when hipsters are enjoying actually good things for actually good reasons, they're keeping their ironic stances in their back pockets, able to be reestablished at moments notice. This ability to fall back on irony so quickly is why the more rigorous appreciator of culture needs to be wary of it; the easiest position to take is not necessarily (in fact rarely is) the strongest or most useful.
At the same time, the ironic set realizes this too (the subculture collectively realizes), leading to what might be labeled as a "new sincerity" or "post-irony." Hence the success of such indie-pop musical acts such as Sufjan Stevens, John Vanderslice, Mountain Goats, Beirut, etc. So shouldn't I just be on board with this relatively recent renewed independent-cultural drive towards sincerity? Not really (as much as I do like some indie-pop), because it still has misappraised the usefulness of irony. The new sincerity still sees irony as a stance (or posture) rather than a device (whether literary, or critical), and is reactionary in motive, and therefore, post-ironic sincerity is--you guessed it--boring! Which was the problem that subcultures were trying to solve in the first place. And before you think that it's just me being bored, and not the hipsters, recall that the primary (intellectual) solution to boredom is thinking about one's boredom. Ironic appreciation is an inherently "smart" appreciation because it hinges on the fact that other people don't get what you're getting, but a thoughtless ("dumb") ameliorative such as making things that you specifically don't have to be ironic about abandons the intellect (however mismanaged, some intellect is still better than none) that generated the irony in the first place.
Then what, exactly, am I advocating? Based on what I've just written I seem to be contradicting myself a bit, since ironic enjoyment is seen as both being good and bad, and I'm also rejecting one already-existing "solution" to the problem of the ironic stance. But that's just it--irony, when utilized to enjoy things that suck, is a fine thing, but when it becomes a social posture its devalued, and any given escape route from that posture, other than abandoning it wholesale (becoming too smart for it) is destined for failure. The criteria that I use, personally, is gauging whether something is "Good for Good Reasons," whereby the good reasons can be ironic or not, sincere or not, and produced either intellectually or industrially. And further, those good reasons are a flexible thing, so I can recognize and decide whether other people's decisions towards goodness are good/reasonable or not.
Things that it is Okay to Like
7) Jason Statham. This falls in line with two obvious culturological trends: a) Generally speaking, in the world of movies (as opposed to film) I tend to enjoy action movies, and b) I tend to enjoy action movies because they straddle the line between ironic and actual enjoyment. With the recent release of Transporter 3, Statham seemed like the obvious choice for me to carry the banner for this week. The world fell in love with Statham after his rather brilliant, wry turns in both Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and Snatch (incidentally, I know some people don't like Snatch, but I think it's great), and then, seemingly overnight, Statham became an action star. I would have never guessed that such a thing would happen, but apparently, in addition to having a background in actual con-jobs and black market type stuff, which got him the job in Lock Stock, Statham also knew, like, Kung Fu, and could do (most of) his own stunts in action movies. So it makes perfect sense. So, to me, it's the perfect kind of success story. To me, action movies are a perfect example of how a pre-established set of viewing criteria allow the viewer to do very little work to appraise the movie itself, basically with an "Is this awesome or not?" query set. So, of course, there are plenty of lame action movies, but good action movies never need to be compared to anything outside of genre, and the critical viewer finally gets a chance to enjoy something on its own terms, while still maintaining the ironic distance of saying "I am watching an action movie, and this is an inherently ironicized (in that I'm "slumming it" in a genre picture); therefore I can enjoy this on its own terms."
Things that it is Not Okay to Like
7) The Vocoder. Shouldn't this argument be finished by now? What a terrible invention. But the fact that T-Pain is still on any amount of the pop-cultural radar-he just put out another album, right?-seems to think otherwise. I reckon that robo-sung hip-hop is an example of some people's guilty pleasure (I'm not worried about people that unthinkingly like it), though I don't know that the guilty pleasurers are driving the industry, but seriously, this whole douchebags-with-vocoders model of hip-hop is just plain tragic. I don't drive a car, so I don't listen to the radio, so I rarely have to hear any of the music for myself, but it still just seems, like, too bad that the vocoder is still thriving.
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