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Crossroads
Pop Culture in the Age of Obama
By KURT ANDERSEN
Published: August 5, 2009
The term “pop culture” appeared around 1960, just as its meaning
became confused. High-culture up-and-comers were embracing pop imagery and
tropes with a vengeance, and the best and brightest creators of entertainment
were suddenly producing work of thrilling sophistication and complexity. It was
also the coming-of-age moment for the first baby boomers, a cohort defined by
its television-saturated upbringing and unparalleled level of college education
— a generation, in other words, unapologetic in its love of commercial pop even
as it put on arty airs.
A series of essays
examining changes in the collective American experience.
During the 1960s and ’70s, serious novelists could be both central
cultural figures and potential mass-market celebrities. People who hadn’t read a
word of a first-rate contemporary novel — no Cheever, no Bellow, no Salinger,
Heller, Styron, Doctorow, Updike or Roth — nevertheless knew the novelists’
names. Back then, novels by each of those authors became No. 1 New York Times
best sellers, and Updike, Norman
Mailer and Gore
Vidal were also Time magazine cover subjects — as were Alexandr
Solzhenitsyn and Günter
Grass.
And then everything changed. It has been almost a decade since Time
put a living novelist (Stephen King) on its cover. Only a handful of literary
novelists born since World War II have published a book that reached the top of
the Times list, and two of those best sellers were the result of cult leaders’
shocking public pronouncements — the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against
Salman Rushdie, and Oprah
Winfrey’s 2001 endorsement of Jonathan Franzen.
But irony of ironies, after literature was evicted from mass culture,
pop culture itself began to fragment and lose its heretofore defining quality as
the ubiquitous stuff that everybody consumed. In
a typical week nowadays, fewer than 6 percent of Americans see the most popular
scripted series on television. So we have arrived at a strange new historical
moment. Literature is just another (minor) sector of the culture industry, but
now even the mandarins agree that certain pop artifacts — “The Sopranos,” “The
Simpsons,” Radiohead — are cultural creations of the first rank. Meanwhile, popular
culture and mass media are no longer very popular or mass. By and large, both
entertainment and art appeal to niches, cultural tribes that range in size from
tiny to smallish.
But our hunger for massively shared cultural moments has not
disappeared. Thus the astonishing decade-long global frenzy
for the Harry
Potter novels, and our recent two-week obsession over Michael
Jackson as a nostalgic artifact of the late super-pop era. And also the
astonishing rise of Barack
Obama. Obama’s presidency will undoubtedly influence the tone and
substance of pop culture. But what’s most pop culturally interesting about him
is not so much Obama as cause but Obama as effect. He strategically harnessed
pop culture, he produced it with two best-selling books, he avidly consumes it. In our Balkanized era, Barack Obama
simply is the pop cultural colossus.
Three big trends made his ascension possible. First there was the
steady blackening of American popular culture. He was 4 when “I Spy,”
co-starring Bill
Cosby, first went on the air, and 6 when Sidney Poitierstarred in “Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner?” In the early ’80s, just as Obama entered adulthood,
Then there’s our turn-of-the-21st-century pop-intellectual zeitgeist.
Although most of the seats for serious novelists at the mass-market table were
removed, PowerPointable nonfiction books retained
their ability to shape the popular discourse. Malcolm Gladwell’s and Thomas Friedman’s books starting with “The
Tipping Point” (2000) and “The World Is Flat” (2005), Steven Levitt and Stephen
Dubner’s “Freakonomics”
(2005) and Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” (2008) have become phenomenally popular by
embodying a cheerful, bracing, empiricist rigor without tilting too strongly
left or right. They are lucid and accessible, carefully researched but not
boring, pop but not too pop. And they have flourished in counterpoint to the
harsh, predictably ideological manifestoes — from Rush
Limbaugh’s “Way Things Ought to Be” (1992) to Michael
Moore’s “Stupid White Men” (2001) — that dominated the pop political
discourse during the preceding decade. In other words, the new species of
pop-intellectual best seller is like Barack Obama himself.
The third big trend that helped usher in the Age of Obama was the
morphing of news into entertainment. During the last decade, with the
proliferation of Web news and 24/7 cable jabberfests,
the old ratio of news supply to demand was upended. The vast new maw needed
feeding, and a charismatic young black candidate and
then president was a godsend. “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” finally
dissolved the remaining membrane between news and pop culture. What’s more, the
Comedy Central hybrids are (like Obama) fair-mindedly center-left, manifestly
smarter (like Obama) than their conventional counterparts and hosted by men
(like Obama) born in the early ’60s.
Previous national politicians leveraged their political fame into
publishing success. But Obama became a best-selling author before he announced his candidacy. And why did he get a
book deal? Because of an amazing prime-time television
performance, his keynote speech as a little-known senatorial candidate at the
2004 Democratic convention. Thus his carefully platformed pop-cultural cred
enabled his presidency. When the McCain campaign imagined last summer that it
was dissing Obama by calling him “the biggest
celebrity in the world,” it was clear who was clueless and who had the cultural
winds at his back.
The Obama team harnessed digital social networks to organize
rock-concert-like rallies. It used pop music and music videos better than any
other presidential campaign. Shepard Fairey’s high-contrast “Hope” poster was a perfect pop icon for the
moment, both a quasi parody of old-school propaganda and the uncynical real thing.
And then there’s Obama the tasteful pop-culture-consuming American,
redefining presidential regular-guyness. On his iPod,
Obama says, are “probably 30 Dylan songs,” “African dance music,” “Javanese
flute music,” Yo-Yo
Ma, Howlin’ Wolf, John
Coltrane, Jay-Z, Frank
Sinatra and Sheryl
Crow. Having admitted getting high as a young man, as president he met
with the Grateful
Dead. The first movie he watched in the White House was “Slumdog Millionaire.” He doesn’t just name-check, but
convincingly declaims — he prefers Spider-Man and Batman to Superman because
“they have some inner turmoil.” And — crucially — he’s even acute and impolitic
enough to discriminate between quality and crud: his favorite movies are the
first two “Godfather” films, but he acknowledges the inferiority of “Godfather
III” and says his wife “likes ‘American
Idol,’ her and the girls, in a way that I don’t entirely get.” Yet the
democratic spectacle of “American Idol” is of a piece with Obamaism, of course, given that the show is all about the
excitement of watching a telegenic, talented nobody
transformed by national referendum into a celebrity.
There’s a lesson here about how we think of consuming culture. Maybe
we can once and for all stop defaulting to easy categorical boundaries between
high and low, and discriminate instead between the well made and the shoddy.
After all, didn’t Obama’s election prove that people will respond to vision and
intelligence, that familiar binary (racial and ideological) pigeonholes no
longer necessarily apply, and that the very good can occasionally become very,
very popular?
Kurt Andersen is the author of the novels “Heyday” and “Turn of the
Century.” His new book is “Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and
Renew