 Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar perform "Freedom" at the BET Awards at the Microsoft Theater last month in Los Angeles. (Matt Sayles/Invision via Associated Press) Seven years ago yesterday, I used the end of a guest-blogging stint at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s spot at the Atlantic to launch a little blogspot of my own. I spent two years writing as many posts as I could there in between a series of day jobs before ThinkProgress and then the lovely folks here at The Post’s Opinions sections brought me on board. Because American mass culture is evolving incredibly quickly right now, I try to take a moment every time the anniversary rolls around to think a little bit about what has changed since I started writing about culture first as a hobby and later as a profession. And this year, I thought I’d share a couple of those thoughts with you: 1. Discussions of the politics of culture are much more common — but also much more rigid: I faced an incredible amount of incredulity when I started writing about the ideas that populate mass culture seven years ago, whether people were skeptical that Hollywood actually sent messages with its products, or didn’t believe inequality was that bad or consequential, or thought I was ruining their fun. Today, I think there’s a much broader acceptance of the idea that there’s a lot of politics in our entertainment, whether artists are trying to send messages or simply buying in to old assumptions, and publications have found ways to haul in huge amounts of traffic with political criticism. But at the same time, a lot of this criticism seems to be focused on making art politically compliant, rather than embracing its disruptive potential to reframe debates beyond the left-right continuum; a great example of this is the attempts to nail down Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” album, a project that seems to me to be deliberately protean and designed to provoke discussions rather than issue pronouncements. I’m not sure how we get beyond this. 2. The barriers between fans and creators are lower than ever: The role of social media in making possible all sorts of consumer activism is fascinating and has made it possible for people who care about the politics of culture to move from passion to advocacy. I’m not as pessimistic about the relationship between creators and fans as my colleague Sonny Bunch is, though it does seem to me that audiences seem more and more reluctant to surrender themselves completely to author’s visions, and increasingly seem to expect that culture will be tailored to their personal fantasies. I don’t know where that leaves us in the long term, but it goes hand in hand with the third item I want to discuss. 3. Culture is weirder and more interesting: My time writing about pop culture has coincided with a huge fragmentation in the entertainment industry landscape. Television networks are programming more original content, more outlets, including Netflix and Amazon (whose chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Post), are creating their own shows and buying and distributing interesting movies and documentaries, and high-profile musicians have more distribution venues available to them than ever before. That means that more and more, we can have exactly the pop culture we’ve always dreamed of. But unless our favorites go viral, it can be harder for us to find people to discuss them with. I think that’s part of what’s behind a huge rise in nostalgia for old works and the corresponding coverage of them as anniversaries roll around. In any case, we’ll see where we are next year. But as always, I appreciate those of you who are along for the ride, and remarkably grateful that I get to spend time talking to you about all of these issues. |
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