Wednesday, August 10, 2011

80's Pop Culture ... On The Other Hand

There's this:



Oh ... wait ...

Yep, I still feel cheated. Very.

Upchucked by Huck at 9:17 AM

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1 comment:

Eric said...

In elitist opinion, American pop culture is almost universally bad and always has been. We get a few innovative bright spots here and there, especially in music... Louis Armstrong, The Beatles, Willie Nelson... but on the whole popular culture has always tried too hard to please everyone and the quality suffers as a result.

One of the bright spots of the modern technological age is that popular culture has largely disinigrated. Today's pop stars enjoy a much smaller degree of cultural saturation than those of yesteryear (think Lady Gaga vs. Michael Jackson or Madonna). I was reading a Chuck Klosterman (who writes about pop culture for a living) article awhile back where he was discussing how Lady Gaga is history's most publicly unidentifiable pop star, both personally and through her body of work. That made a lot of sense to me. When we were kids, everyone knew who the major pop culture icons were, even if they didn't listen to their music/watch their movies. 10 year olds knew who J.R. Ewing was, but they have no clue who Donald Draper is.

And speaking of youth culture, while there is more junk out there than ever, it is also much easier than ever for parents to filter what gets into their home (somebody channel surfing at my house, for instance, won't find MTV on the available channels for viewing, even though it is included in our DirecTV subscription).

Aside from pro sports, which will always be with us, American Idol is probably the most widely recognized modern pop culture artifact, but I think of it as more of a last vestige of a dying media. A decade from now I doubt we'll have anything like it.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011 10:30:00 AM

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