The first part of this piece was published as a separate post but I wanted to expand my thoughts and references. Expect more to come on the subject.
W David Marx put out an edition of Culture: An Owner’s Manual last year focused on the significance of Rocky IV as a cultural artifact.
But unlike most bad films made in 1985, Rocky IV remains fascinating nearly forty years later. It has great value to us in 2024 as a relic — an artwork that embodies the unique stylistic choices of a particular point in time. Rocky IV is a time-traveling passport to 1985: the Manichaean Reaganite politics, the sassy robot maid, the soundtrack of power ballads and cold digital synths, the artless action-film editing and over-use of freeze-frame fade-outs, the casual lack of verisimilitude in using Wyoming as a stand-in for the Russian countryside.
My wife was arguing tonight that much of indie music in the 90s still sounds fresh and timeless today. I can see that in some ways, but overall I think the 90s was the last decade to have a real distinctiveness to its culture. You couldn’t make Empire Records or Belly’s “Feed The Tree” today. They just wouldn’t feel right in the current context.
Similarly, Rocky IV is a good example for the point that culture was more fluid in past decades and has been at a standstill the last 20 or so years. It simply wouldn’t be appropriate today.
Spencer Kornhaber has a lengthy peice for The Atlantic about cultural decline. In it, Spencer talks with some of the critics decrying the death of culture. One of the people he profiles is Ted Gioia of The Honest Broker.
“Most people fundamentally want to have cultural experiences that are mind-expanding and broaden their world,” he said. “If the corporations that control our culture refuse to deliver that, they will find a way around it and there will be a rebirth. We will have a new counterculture.” He predicted a wave of “new romanticism” (emphasizing humanity over technology) and “new maximalism” (art made with unbridled ambition).
Forgive the digression, but I have to point out that there is something so entirely on-brand about a former jazz writer like Gioia transitioning to producing opinion pieces about just how terrible contemporary culture appears to be.
I’ve been a fan of some of Gioia’s articles, but I’m not exactly sure that his summary thesis is valid.
Prior to the last couple of decades gatekeepers in the form of corporations had a great deal more control over what art the public was able to consume. The limitations of this structure are worth contemplation. If, for instance, Nesuhi Ertegun, brother of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, had not become a champion of Ornette Coleman, would the world be as aware of free jazz? These and other forms of art were not always expected to be commercially successful, so what if newspapers, television stations, movie studios and record labels had only been concerned with pure capitalism and what would move units?
However, it appears that when art required substantial monetary support to achieve widespread distribution, the corporations wanted to promote unconventional art, even if only to boost their cultural cachet.
Artists now have many more mediums outside corporate patrons with which to reach their would-be fans. If more DIY possibilities coincide with a period of artistic decline, I think it’s worth considering the enormous fragmentation of culture and whether the gatekeepers were actually a postive force in the advancement of even challenging art.
Perhaps portraying corporations as gatekeepers isn’t even the right framing. Maybe we should think of them as compensated curators (not completely unlike someone with a Substack or Ghost blog that points you toward the work of others). David Geffen was running a business, but he still signed a relatively unknown grunge act called Nirvana, hoping that, with enough promotion, they could become the next Sonic Youth. Important in that thought pattern is that he was all in on Sonic Youth — noise rockers inspired by the NYC no wave movement — in the first place. That such a band was the comparitive basis by which to judge the success of other bands seems somewhat remarkable in retrospect.
To go back to Gioia’s statement, he notes the potential need to form countercultures to challenge corporations as culture setters. Of course, this has always been the case.