Pop Goes the Culture

By Kurt Andersen.

It may be the ultimate instance of American mixed feelings. Our popular culture? Spiffy, spectacular: Billie Holiday songs, Krazy Kat, Preston Sturges movies, Ernie Kovacs, the Four Tops, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Dylan, E.T., even blue jeans, Whoppers and soda pop. But ask again, on a dull, gray, Spenglerian day, and the view is altogether different. Alarming, appalling, totally awesome. The critic Dwight Macdonald called pop culture a spreading ooze back in the 1950s, when Sylvester Stallone was still just a boy. Today America's righteous pop thug is huge, ubiquitous, swaggering from one medium into the next and the next: he is a movie warrior, he is a TV cartoon character, he is a plastic doll, he is a music-video creature and now, in candy racks all over America, he is chewing gum--Rambo black flak, jagged, black raspberry bits packed in foil pouches and meant to resemble shrapnel.

The U.S. has a knack for concocting and consuming entertainments that are quick, vivid, exuberant. Razzmatazz is a plentiful U.S. natural resource, like oil but with no OPEC competitors. Americans are pop-culture vultures, profligate in the money and time they devote to making themselves giggle and choke up on cue, ooh and aah en masse. Why is it that Americans make slick movies and snappy songs and every kind of TV show so relentlessly, so effectively, so -- well, well?

What is it about the works of Howard Hawks (The Big Sleep, Bringing Up Baby), Chuck Jones (Bugs Bunny cartoons), Phil Spector (The Ronettes, The Righteous Brothers) and Aaron Spelling (The Love Boat, Dynasty) that make them unmistakably American artifacts? To a good part of the rest of the world, the U.S. is nothing but its global pop gush. Not the Bill of Rights, not Mary Cassatt, not George Balanchine but Madonna, The A-Team and Sidney Sheldon. The respectable pieties are correct: sure, America is the land of freedom and the land of opportunity. But it is perhaps more lovably the land of great tap dancing and terrific special effects, the land of oomph.

No wonder. The nation and the proto-pop media were invented more or less simultaneously only two centuries ago. Newspapers and novels made sense. "Those who cry out now that the work of a Mickey Spillane or The Adventures of Superman travesty the novel," Critic Leslie Fiedler noted in 1955, "forget that the novel was long accused of travestying literature." Pamela and Tom Jones were, in a sense, the Magnum, P.I. and The Young and the Restless of their day. By 18th century standards, the new American flag must have seemed gaudy and flamboyant -- patriotic pop; and the national anthem composed in its honor celebrated naval war as a kind of giddy pageant.

But it was not until this hurlyburly century -- the American century, the century of mass man -- that pop simply took over. The immigrant influx had something to do with it. The funny papers were a transplant from Europe, adapted by Hearst and Pulitzer to appeal to readers freshly or barely fluent in English. Vaudeville was a spangly folk theater of bold strokes that had to entertain first- and second-generation Americans. If unbridled vitality and give-'em-what-they-want instincts were immigrant additives to the cultural mix, it was technological innovation that beamed pop everywhere, made it irresistible. By the 1920s, radio gave Americans a common, concrete bond. Moviegoing was a less universal but more intense national ritual. With performers such as Harold Lloyd and Gary Cooper, plainly Americans, compatriots could watch their national character raised to apotheosis onscreen.

The critical years, however, were the late '40s and '50s. Babies boomed, McDonald's and Disneyland appeared, and television came along just in time to immerse the new generation in hours of pop images every day. With children and teenagers as its shock troops, pop was unstoppable. From Howdy Doody to Shindig to The Monkees to West 57th, the American pursuit of happiness has turned into the pursuit of short-term, mass-market fun. Toys are us.

Pop culture is, after all, the culture of the free market: Heather Locklear and Prince and Chuck Norris are all laissez-faire by-products. Only in a wildly unregulated society could such beings have a ready means of becoming rich and famous. As a practical matter, too, only capitalists have both the necessary cash and the unembarrassed eagerness to please. It is expensive to produce convincingly slick records or movies. More than any other commodity, pop depends on blockbusterism. People listen to Michael Jackson's music in part because he has sold 69 million albums. Boffo begets boffo. Sustaining such a modulated mob psychology for profit requires an elaborate system of distribution and promotion, the pop equivalent of military command-and- control, and here the U.S. is absolutely without peer.

So pop is the invisible hand in a single sequined glove, advanced capitalism with a beat you can dance to. But the businessmen do not ultimately give pop its easy charm, its vulgar sexiness. "Extraordinary," says Amanda in Noel Coward's Private Lives, "how potent cheap music is." We can't help ourselves: we like the stuff. Pop is powerful because it takes its very simple ideas very seriously. (Consider Walt Disney.) Pop is earnest and energetic -- not necessarily sincere, but always enthusiastic. (Consider Sammy Davis Jr. and Dolly Parton.) People love pop because it is predictable and yet perpetually novel -- always new but never surprising. (Consider Johnny Carson. Consider Stallone again.)

A major pop phenomenon is comforting to Americans because it is spectacular evidence of consensus, a palpable national agreement that has nothing to do with quarrelsome issues of race or religion or class. When a new black superstar emerges, so much the nicer. Moreover, pop serves as a perfectly apolitical politics (and politics, at the televised nominating conventions, becomes a kind of weighty pop performance). The Nielsen ratings and the Billboard charts are weekly referenda, the Oscars and Emmys superstar inaugurations.

Pop is easy listening, easy watching, easy thinking. Yet it is also authentically democratic. Unlike serious painting or dance or poetry, the appreciation of popular culture requires no tutelage or special sensibility, not even close attention. Florenz Ziegfeld and George Lucas create art that is one-size-fits-all. Except perhaps for Roman Catholicism, no other Western cultural genus has been as inclusive as modern pop, so truly classless. Indeed, says Fiedler, Nikes and Garfield T shirts are class camouflage. "One of the functions of pop culture," Fiedler says, "is to make it impossible to spot where a person belongs on the social hierarchy by what he's wearing, what he's drinking, what he's watching on TV."

That great leveling effect, however, has not made pop any more palatable to old-line intellectuals. The contempt was, until rather recently, obligatory and absolute. Mandarin ill will reached a peak in "Masscult & Midcult," Dwight Macdonald's acutely cranky 1960 essay. "Masscult is bad in a new way," he wrote, because "it doesn't even have the theoretical possibility of being good." A pernicious "Gresham's law" was inevitable: good art would be driven out by the bad -- by pop. Another ferocious holdout is William Gass, a very intelligent critic whose opaque, self-conscious novels are the sort of fiction that drives literate people toward Judith Krantz. "This muck cripples consciousness," he proclaimed of pop in 1968. "Therefore no concessions should be made to it." Sorry. Concessions were made. "By the late 1960s," writes Princeton Scholar Louis Menand, "popular culture had permeated every aspect of life with an inexorability that was beyond the powers of any sort of intellectual antagonism to resist."

Some intellectuals did not even put up a fight. The Popular Culture Association, founded in 1969, now has 3,000 members. At Bowling Green State University, apparently the one college with a department devoted to the subject, 22 students are currently pursuing degrees in pop. (An undergraduate's dream: degree credit for watching Gilligan's Island reruns and reading R. Crumb.) Unfortunately, the pop academy's insights often seem to have the depth and complexity of pop itself.

The problem is their earnestness in pursuit of pop. More interesting and significant was the neo-Dada embrace of pop by artists and independent intellectuals of the 1950s and early '60s. Their approach was off-center, cool in every sense. In Andy Warhol's first shows, in 1962, he exhibited enormous paintings of Coke bottles and Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. The subject was pop, but determinedly devoid of high-culture anger. Roy Lichtenstein's jumbo cartoon-panel paintings, complete with mawkish dialogue fragments and ersatz Benday dots, were jollier expressions of the same idea.

The epicene urban subculture, Susan Sontag explained in "Notes on 'Camp,' " her remarkably astute 1964 essay, was reveling in the "great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement . . . The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure." Kitsch is amusing, not threatening. An ironic acceptance of pop effluvia, Sontag wrote, "makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated." Sontag's hip intellectuals did not like cheap science-fiction movies or Fabian: they "liked" them.

Almost immediately, however, the intellectuals' appreciation of some pop began to lose its prickly ironic edge. Robert Venturi, the father of architectural postmodernism, was not joking in Learning From Las Vegas (1972), his analysis-cum-celebration of neon, billboards and America's plebeian pop architecture. Soon the creators of kitsch were sophisticated enough to make fun of themselves even as they were creating new kitsch. The producers of TV's Batman (1966-68) played up the primary-color silliness for camp effect. "Charlie's Angels was great camp," says the show's co-producer, Aaron Spelling, "and the audience accepted it as such." Today, after a generation of taken-for-granted irony, it is often hard to know what is smirky and what is serious. Smart yuppies and new wavers say they are fans of The Jetsons and The Joe Franklin Show and the Jerry Lewis telethon. And they mean it. Sort of.

Critic Greil Marcus finds himself defending even dumb pop. "If a Swedish director wanted to make a Rambo," says Marcus, "it wouldn't be very convincing. Only Americans are arrogant, vulgar and moronic enough to make a fantasy like that credible. But I'll put our vulgar moronism versus their refined elitism any day. I'm not saying Chuck Berry is better than Flaubert. But I also don't want to live in a world where there's only one or the other."

Those refined elitists, the Europeans, happen to like our vulgar moronism. One recent week in Britain, five of the top ten singles were by black Americans. Last year two-fifths of French movie box-office receipts went to U.S. films. A catalog detailing such worldwide U.S. hegemony is a source of pride and some embarrassment. Most of the 47 radio stations in Lima, Peru, play mainly American pop music. In Nairobi last week, ten of the 16 movies playing were American, and in a record store at the Sarit Centre shopping mall, a poster of Joe Piscopo, of all people, is on the wall -- not far from the ubiquitous Sly Stallone. The Rambo prototype, First Blood, was a big hit last year in Peking. The A-Team has been the most popular series in Argentina for three years running, beaten only by the Oscar telecast, always the highest-rated show.

Big Boy, the familiar giant plastic waiter, stands in front of his restaurant in Jakarta. Pizza Hut is in Buenos Aires. And foreigners have it our way at nearly 2,000 McDonald's (pace Dwight). Stopping for a Big Mac in Singapore, says a young customer, is "like walking into a bit of America." Last October in Kenya's rugged Rift Valley at the foot of a remote volcano, nomadic Maasai gathered for a rare tribal ceremony. Young warriors' heads were shaved. An ox was ritually slaughtered. And at the edge of the encampment, a concessionaire sold Coke by the bottle.

Everyone everywhere can drink Coke (almost $3 billion in foreign sales) and wear Levi's ($600 million) and watch Little House on the Prairie (broadcast in 110 countries). The lingua franca dispersion of English is both a cause and an effect of pop's global reach, but American pop commodities are also successful abroad because they work. Blue jeans are well designed and rugged. Most Hollywood filmmaking is technically impeccable. "American TV is extraordinarily beguiling to the Poles," says Sociologist Jeffrey Goldfarb, who lived in Warsaw for 18 months, "for the technical quality alone."

But most important, American pop strikes receptive non-Americans as relaxed and slaphappily loose, even liberating. For Europeans, the cascade of pop arrived in the late 1940s and '50s along with reconstruction; it was as if the Marshall Plan came with its own USO for civilians. "Remember," says Furio Colombo, the Italian president of Fiat's American division, "we were liberated in 1945 by the American troops. That is what American pop culture represents to Europe--freedom, even when it's just a fashion."

Over there, the hierarchies of entertainment still closely corresponded to the more rigid hierarchies of social station. Caught between postwar exhaustion and a tradition of hard-line cultural formalism, young Europeans were a cinch to be enthralled by the out-front vitality of Elvis Presley and James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Mary Martin. "The musicals of the '40s and '50s," recalls Andrew Lloyd Webber, the British composer of Evita and Cats, "came out at a time when your national spirit was able to afford a great deal more than what we in Britain could. You had greater optimism." Fizzy pop culture, American style, seemed easygoing but a little wild too. Even these days, says Bonn's Christian Hoffmann, who has organized a club of Americaphiles, "here in Germany, Kultur is either folk songs sung around the campfire or Bach."

In developing countries where the American invasion has become full-scale only during the past 20 years, its messages are starker. An artifact of American pop is more vivid and more freighted with meaning in Tunis or Bogota than in Berlin or Ottawa. The explanation for pop's seductiveness seems less complicated in Senegal or Bangladesh: America is equated with prosperity and modernism, and pop connotes America. A Tina Turner song playing on the transistor can mitigate (even as it fosters) a Third Worlder's sense of backwater isolation. Charles Kasinga, the executive at McCann Erickson (Kenya) Ltd. in charge of the Coke account, practices applied semiotics. "There is a perceived way of life embedded in each bottle of Coke," Kasinga says. "Coke is modern, with it." Repp Kananga, a young Kenyan, wears his PHILADELPHIA T shirt self-consciously. "It looks like I'm kind of related to this States business," Kananga explained at a Nairobi outdoor cafe last month, "and I want to advertise it."

To people in traditional societies, TV depictions of U.S. family life can be astonishing. The irreverent interplay between Heathcliff Huxtable and his children on The Cosby Show is unthinkable and exciting to young Singaporeans, for instance. Fatalism about entrenched social arrangements is challenged by pop's anything-goes quality. In Africa and Latin America, black American pop stars bring with them an implicit hopefulness; Thriller is thrilling partly as a totem of black achievement. Hollywood does not promote revolution but rather a flashy kind of Yankee individualism--spontaneous, self-reliant and acquisitive. "American film exports the American dream," says Charlton Heston, "which is achievable, not a fantasy. What film has done to the developing world is to change its sense of possibility." Yet a car and a comfy suburban split-level are not reasonably achievable by a Pakistani farmer; thus pop's glossy portrayals of the good life can raise cruelly false hopes.

Television and movies reassuringly confirm foreigners' preconceptions of America and Americans. Such notions tend to be superficial and overdrawn, just like pop. The U.S. is violent; just look at Miami Vice. The U.S. is amazingly rich; look at Falcon Crest. The U.S. is zany--and rich and violent; look at Beverly Hills Cop. It is telling that Vanessa Redgrave defends Dynasty and Dallas on Trotskyist grounds. These portrayals of American ruling-class mischief, she says, are politically correct.

Exporters of pop pander to foreign stereotypes of Americans. "The Japanese have very firm ideas about what they think we should be," says Jim Chriss, marketing vice-president of Levi Strauss International. Real Americans, in other words, are cowboys and sexpots and raucous young hunks--Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift. It seems that Europeans and Japanese are especially fond of the American icons that provided their first pop jolt 20 or 30 or 40 years ago--pop that now has patina. The French intelligentsia still swoons for American movies of the '40s and '50s. Levi's is using images of James Dean and John Wayne in its advertisements in Japan, music by Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke in Europe. "We're selling not the America of today but the America they imagine," says Chriss, "what they'd like America to be."

On the other hand, consuming American pop is not necessarily a kind of pro- Americanism. The Rambo look is all the rage among guerrillas in Beirut. The Sandinistas are American baseball nuts. Says Peruvian Writer Augusto Ortiz de Zevallos: "You see Marxist-Leninists with T shirts that say COCA-COLA." In the view of Marc Pachter, a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, foreigners may turn to the left precisely because they like American pop so much. At least in Europe, argues Pachter, youthful political anti-Americanism is a way of "justifying their enormous thirst for American pop culture. As long as they can bad-mouth the society that produces the stuff, they don't feel so bad about indulging in its exports." But even then, apolitical American targets are not always off limits. After the U.S. bombing of Libya in April, a mob in Barcelona stoned a local McDonald's. Last year Peruvian Marxists sprayed graffiti and burned tables at three of Lima's five Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants.

In countries where American pop is officially discouraged or limited, however, playing a Huey Lewis tape or wearing Jordache jeans can be an implicit political gesture, a tiny, tinny blow for individual liberty. One young Czech puts it bluntly: "Coke equals America. America equals freedom." In the Soviet Union, VCRS and audiocassette players are inherently democratizing devices. "The new communications technology has changed things completely," says one Moscow father of teenagers. "Tapes can be played over and over, exchanged, copied." In the '50s American moral vigilantes sometimes claimed that rock 'n' roll was the creation of Communist subversives out to undermine U.S. youth; today Pravda could make the counterclaim a lot more persuasively. Says U.S. Information Agency Director Charles Z. Wick, a former talent agent: "I would hope that American pop culture would penetrate into other societies, acting as a pilot parachute for the rest of American values."

Each foreign transformation of American pop can be a small anthropological revelation. In New Delhi, the imitation McDonald's sell muttonburgers, while at Free Time, a Paris chain, the big beef pattie comes on baguette-shaped buns -- le longburger. A 15-year-old Indian schoolgirl had a hit record called Disco Diwane (Disco Junkies). One time, an adaptation of American pop returned to the U.S. and popped over the top: among the Beatles' raw material was the music of the Everly Brothers, Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, but the band's worldwide influence was greater than any of their antecedents. Today American pop-culture imagery is being recycled more obliquely by Italy's Memphis group of furniture designers and by French painters mimicking the East Village fashion for graffiti art.

That kind of tutti-frutti exchange is invigorating. Now, however, pop has started feeding off itself in remarkable new ways. Sometimes the self- references are just lazy or parochial. On situation comedies, characters make jokes about other situation comedies. In Stephen King's fiction, a character in a quandary "thought of a cartoon character with an anvil suspended over its head," and a forest "seemed alive with hokey B-movie jungle drums." Then there are the stranger entertainments about entertainment, from the small army of Elvis impersonators to the TV game show Puttin' On the Hits, on which ordinary folks lip-sync pop songs. With Entertainment To-

night, pop becomes almost overpoweringly hermetic -- a nightly TV news show that reports personnel changes on TV game shows as major stories.

The '80s are a pop decade, no question, a reclining era of good tans, big parties, beach reading, girl-group music. The stars are bigger than they have been in a long time, selling more billions of dollars worth of records and movie tickets than ever before. Celebrities are more numerous, but their fame is briefer: the half-life even of putative superstardom can be as short as a year. Fads are announced, exploited and abandoned even before Good Morning America can cover them. Philanthropy has turned into a series of prefab, single-issue Woodstocks (Live Aid, Farm Aid, Hands Across America), and the U.S. has twice elected to the presidency a marvelous pop creature who goads Congress with movie dialogue ("Go ahead; make my day!") and calls military uniforms "Pentagon wardrobe." The original make-my-day movie actor has been elected mayor of a town in California, while character actors from ultra-schlock TV shows (Love Boat, The Dukes of Hazzard) run for the House of Representatives (Iowa, Georgia).

Pop strands are converging, it seems, at an accelerating rate. By broadcasting high-concept television advertisements for records, MTV has invented a genre and become an enormous success. Michael Jackson makes TV commercials for Pepsi. Coca-Cola makes movies through its Columbia Pictures subsidiary. Any day now, all the advertising agencies in the world will merge with all the other advertising agencies. And the wall between pop and high culture that became a see-through membrane in the '60s and '70s today seems to be disintegrating. In some cases the result has been a mutually compromised commingling, the "tepid, flaccid Middlebrow Culture" that Macdonald despised. What the Boston Pops was to their parents' generation, for instance, the untroubling, undemanding "New Age" music of the Windham Hill label is to alumni of the counterculture. Like Kurt Vonnegut's novels, Artist Keith Haring's doodly paintings are very, very easy to like. In Manhattan, Haring % just opened his own boutique, where he sells Haring buttons, watches, shirts and posters. It is called the Pop Shop.

But the more ambitious mixes of pop and seriousness can be terrific. Such hybrids are not new; after World War II, for example, jazz sprouted the thorny complexities of hard bop. The crossover attempts today are more numerous and uninhibited than ever before. David Lynch's creepy, funny film Eraserhead manages to be both elliptical and punchy, complicated and visceral. The music of Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass teeters intriguingly on the line between the obvious and the arcane. Talking Heads' songs combine good jungle music and smart, edgy ideas; David Byrne, the band's songwriter and lead singer, is the Stephen Sondheim of rock 'n' roll. Performance Artist Ann Magnuson says her chief influences are William Blake, Joey Heatherton, Alfred Jarry and Wilma Flintstone.

A sort of wacky, slightly willful eclecticism is what Sontag meant, two decades before Trivial Pursuit became emblematic of a generation, by the new "democratic esprit," a generous curiosity that assumes "the equivalence of all objects." What could be more American than giving every cultural attempt a fair shake? No longer is pop presumptively inferior to works of classical form and limited appeal. Pop culture is, after all, populist culture too. Not that Sontag's equivalence means equal value, any more than constitutional guarantees of equal opportunity always produce equal results. Motley Crue's Stick to Your Guns, for instance, is going to lose any battle of the bands against Stravinsky's Petrouchka. No sane person would rise to defend Harold Robbins' novels. And if all remaining prints of Police Academy 3 happened to be destroyed in a flash fire, world culture would be undiminished. But take it easy. Lighten up. In America, putting on the ritz has never necessarily meant putting on airs. At twilight on a breezy summer evening, a cocktail in hand and not much particular in mind, Buddy Holly on the hi-fi is nothing to be ashamed of.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/New York and Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles, with other bureaus