Think it was the long tail that fragmented Pop? Think again.

‘Tis the season for end-of-year lists and retrospectives and the Globe and Mail joined the fun this weekend with an interesting look back at the year in pop culture. While a lot of it is the usual “man, what’s up with these starlets not wearing panties!?” shtick, what stuck out for me was the debate over whether or not we could still talk about ‘pop culture’ as that which was common. Since the article will soon disappear behind a (stupid, annoying) pay-wall, here’s how Johanna Schneller starts things off:

Johanna:… there are readers who just loved getting their hands on Harry Potter one last time. …

Victor: Insert tasteless Dumbledore joke here.

Johanna: … and those who’ve never cracked the spine of any of J.K. Rowling’s books. There are Webheads who can recite every line from baby Pearl’s performance in The Landlord, versus people who’ve never even heard of FunnyorDie.com… In fact, I think this may be the last year when one can even speak of a pop culture. It’s really pop cultures, with each individual picking and choosing his/her own entertainment threads from an ever-denser skein.

So, ignoring the mildly homophobic Dumbledore joke, I think this sounds pretty standard now – that what we can call ‘common’ in a cultural or aesthetic sense has evaporated due to the massive proliferation of both content and distribution channels available. There’s no way that a single person can (or perhaps should) stay on top of all of pop culture at the moment. So when you ask a friend “oh, did you see/hear/read so-and-so”, the chances they’ve never even heard of it are increasing. But Elizabeth Renzetti presents another possibility when she responds:

Elizabeth: …eggheads have been complaining that culture’s cracked since the days of shadow puppets on the cave wall. I’m seeing just the opposite of what you’re seeing, Johanna (or maybe I’m just Pollyanna to your Cassandra) – the same people who go see Benjamin Britten operas at night will also go see Superbad on the weekends – even without their kids. You can read Michael Chabon and comic books, too. Look what’s selling out theatres here in London: Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth, Ian McKellen’s Lear, an avant-garde adaptation of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. Now, on to the really serious topics: How does Britney get her labia so baby-soft?

I dunno’ – that’s pretty fascinating to me (not the labia part. okay, smooth labia are always slightly fascinating. anyway.). What’s being suggested here is that the fragmentation of pop culture is old news – that we have always had blind spots in relation to the murky public space we call ‘pop’ and that the current context is simply exacerbating the situation. But what’s actually new is not that the reference points of culture are changing but rather, that demographic boundaries as determined by aesthetic tastes are breaking down – not only in reaction to the expansion of available content, but also to the lack of stigma attached to the consumption of ‘low’ culture. What’s intriguing is that when Renzetti talks about “Chabon and comic books”, the high-low divide of culture is still present; but the punitive aspect that went along with it is gone (well, at least for privileged people it is). If you’re ‘educated’ or ‘savvy’, there is no longer a social constraint attached to immersing yourself in reality TV or serial dramas because the scale by which those things are judged ‘high’ or ‘low’ is so obviously and constantly in flux, to make no mention of the whole hipster/irony thing.

‘Course, I can’t yap about this and pretend that if someone wants to jump from their usual Jerry Springer routine to Murakami novels, this is all the same. Quite to the contrary, the postmodern breakdown of high/low in culture has cemented that same division in society as those who get to dabble in both are still those who have the power and privilege to do so. It’s still all quite interesting though. What it means is that the ‘pop’ at the front of ‘popular culture’ is now a misnomer – pop is not a designation of popularity or commonality as much as it is a marker of a particular aesthetic and availability – many things can be pop and they are equal in terms of their potential consumption. More significantly, I think, it means that the lack of ‘the common’ is much as a result of changes in how we relate to and identify through culture as it is the long tail or something like it.