The New Elitists: Cultural Omnivores

 

Craig Ward

Sociologist Shamus Khan, writing in the New York Times, July 8, 2012, on the tastes of today's elite. Some excerpts:

Poorer people are likely to have singular or “limited” tastes. The rich have the most expansive...Today’s elites are not “highbrow snobs.” They are “cultural omnivores.” 

Omnivorousness is part of a much broader trend in the behavior of our elite, one that embraces diversity...Diverse and populist programming is a mainstay of every museum. Elites seem more likely to confront snobbish exclusion than they are to embrace it...

To talk of “elite culture,” it seems, is to talk of something quaint, something anti-American and anti-democratic. Whereas the old elites used their culture to make explicit the differences between themselves and the rest, if you were to talk to members of the elite today, many would tell you that their culture is simply an expression of their open-minded, creative, ready-to-pounce-on-any-opportunity ethic. Others would object to the idea that they were part of an elite in the first place.  

But if you look at the omnivore from another point of view, a far different picture emerges.

Unlike the shared class character of Gilded Age elites, omnivores seem highly distinct and their tastes appear to be a matter of personal expression. Instead of liking things like opera because that’s what people of your class are supposed to like, the omnivore likes what he likes because it is an expression of a distinct self. Perhaps liking a range of things explains why elites are elite, and not the other way around. 

By contrast, those who have exclusive tastes today — middle-class and poorer Americans — are subject to disdain...

so if elites have a culture today, it is a culture of individual self-cultivation. Their rhetoric emphasizes such individualism and the talents required to “make it.” Yet there is something pernicious about this self-presentation. The narrative of openness and talent obscures the bitter truth of the American experience. Talents are costly to develop, and we refuse to socialize these costs. To be an outstanding student requires not just smarts and dedication but a well-supported school, a safe, comfortable home and leisure time to cultivate the self. These are not widely available...

Today America has less intergenerational economic mobility than almost any country in the industrialized world; one of the best predictors of being a member of the elite today is whether your parents were in the elite. The elite story about the triumph of the omnivorous individual with diverse talents is a myth...


[elites today] deploy that cultural difference to suggest that the inequality and immobility in our society is deserved rather than inherited.

Big Fun in the Big Town: Rap 1986

Film by Dutch filmmaker Bram Van Splunteren, shot in New York City in 1986. The DVD is just, now, finally, out. I especially love the beatboxing of Dough E. Fresh in this trailer.

Jeff Chang on Rap and the LA Riots of 1992

Courtesy: Los Angeles Review of Books.

it was Dr. Dre's The Chronic, released 10 days before Christmas, that became the quintessential post-riot album...Against the backdrop of the reintensified culture wars and the patently empty promises to "Rebuild LA," The Chronic seemed a heaven-sent balm, a handshake extended by capital to the kids... Dre's songs spoke less explicitly than Kam's, but no less powerfully, to the atmosphere of the truce parties, the ecstatic freedom of rolling down the street without having to worry, for once, about cops or enemies... 

But separated from the prospect of a potential war between armed united gangs and the LAPD — for which authorities were at one point reportedly preparing — The Chronic could also be heard as the beginning of a guiltless, gentrified gangsta: no Treaties, rebuilding demands, or calls for reparations: just the party and bullshit. It was the product that finally and seamlessly closed the gap between the vanilla exurbs and the chocolate inner-cities: a brand-conscious "G" Thang ready for easy consumption.

Moral panic, Japan: 'Teenage Wasteland' from LIFE magazine, 1964

Amazing set of photos shot by LIFE photographer Michael Rougier in 1964, to accompany an article by Robert Morse on Japanese youth in revolt. In the notes he sent along to accompany Rougier's film, Morse wrote:

A large segment of Japanese young people are, deep down, desperately unhappy and lost. And they talk freely about their frustrations. Many have lost respect for their elders, always a keystone of Japanese life, and in some cases denounce the older people for “for having gotten us into a senseless war.”

The article from Time-Life (no date, but contemporary) on this piece, includes the following observation:

this “lost generation” was not even remotely monolithic. While they might, to varying degrees, have shared a genuinely nihilistic outlook toward their own and their country’s future, the runaways, rock and roll fanatics (the “monkey-dance, Beatles set,” Morse calls them), pill-poppers, “motorcycle kids” — all of these groups, along with innumerable other subsets of Japan’s youth-driven subculture, attest to the breadth and depth of teen disaffection found, virtually anywhere one looked, in 1964 Tokyo.

Michael Rougier—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images 

 Caption reads: A fan (right) and a "Tokyo Beatle," 1964

Lolita fashion in Mexico

"Lolita," a fashion subculture from Japan influenced by clothing from the Victorian or Rococo eras, and anime, makes its way to Mexico. Via boingboing. And check out the Reuters photo album.

Photo: Alby Flores

ironic hipster racism

courtesy Jezebel. an excerpt:

"So I'm not allowed to have a genuine interest in another culture?!!?!??!" 
First of all, privileged dickweeds wearing Urban Outfitters "Navajo" panties, I didn't realize that you excavated those in your anthropological field work. My bad. Carry on. And second of all, again, you "can" do whatever the fuck you want. You "can" wear whatever you want, say whatever you want, and think whatever you want about whatever you want. All the time! Yaaay! But if a group of people comes to you and says, "This thing that you are doing is hurting us," and you keep doing it for fun, then you are a dickweed! Like, you know we had an actual genocide here, right? A deliberate extermination of human beings? Right where your house is? So maybe just err on the side of sensitivity.

Dick Clark and the integration of 'American Bandstand'

"Most of the obituaries of Clark, who took over Bandstand in 1956, have noted that the show used rock and roll to break down racial barriers, mostly because that is the story Clark told. But that is where his legacy gets complicated. While the nationally televised dance program hosted a number of prominent black performers, the show regularly blocked black teenagers from its studio audience until it moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles in 1964. The image of teenagers that American Bandstand popularized bore little resemblance to the racial diversity of American teens."

Matthew F. Delmont, writing in the Washington Post, April 22, 2012. Read the rest of the article here.

"Viewers would have had little idea that African Americans made up nearly 30 percent of Philadelphia's population in this era or that black teens developed many of the dances that American Bandstand popularized nationally."

Is Television "tell-a-lie-vision," "Death of a nation, breeding ignorance and spreading radiation"?

The effects of television have been questioned and critiqued almost from the moment that this medium appeared. And in particular, its negative effects on children have been widely assumed. (My mother banned the watching of the "Popeye" cartoon in our house in the mid-fifties, after reading that it might insult violence in children. So we watched the show at our neighbors' house.)

Anti-t.v. sentiment is particularly prevalent among the middle-class would-be literati. Sometimes I think the only people in the US who don't own television sets are university professors, and the Honors students I teach are likely to claim that they don't watch t.v. And although I appreciate how Five Percent hip-hoppers break the word television down to its basics ("tell-a-lie-vision") and I love the Michael Franti-led Beatnigs' 1988 song "Television" ("TV is the reason why less than ten percent of our nation reads books daily"), I couldn't live without my Mad Men and my Daily Show and my Breaking Bad.

Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal that argues that t.v. might, under certain conditions, have positive effects. (Although I'm not sure that could ever be the case with Fox News.) Here's an excerpt:

University of Chicago Graduate School of Business economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro aren't sure that TV has been all that bad for kids. In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics this year, they presented a series of analyses that showed that the advent of television might actually have had a positive effect on children's cognitive ability.

The two are part of a tight-knit group of young economists using statistical techniques to examine how television affects society. The group's research suggests TV enabled an earlier generation of American children in non-English-speaking households to do better in school, helped rural Indian women to become more independent and contributed to lowering Brazil's fertility rate.

Consumption and US voting trends

Amazing article from the New York Times, April 16. Viewers of the Golf Channel trend strongly Republican and have a very high turnout rate. Viewers of VH1 trend strongly Democrat and have a very low turnout rate. Those who eat at Cracker Barrel trend strongly Republican and turn out in big numbers. Those who eat at Church's Chicken are low-turnout, strong Democrats. Amstel Light drinkers are strongly Republican, Cognac drinkers strongly Democrat. And on it goes. Here's one of the very interesting charts.

Scotch, as the article observes, is a 'centrist' drink.

Cracking Teenagers' Online Codes

Essential reading on teens and social media, all about the work of Danah Boyd. From today's (Jan. 22) New York Times.

Children today, she said, are reacting online largely to social changes that have taken place off line.

“Children’s ability to roam has basically been destroyed,” Dr. Boyd said in her office at Microsoft, where a view of the Boston skyline is echoed in the towers of books on her shelves, desk and floor. “Letting your child out to bike around the neighborhood is seen as terrifying now, even though by all measures, life is safer for kids today.”

Children naturally congregate on social media sites for the relatively unsupervised conversations, flirtations, immature humor and social exchanges that are the normal stuff of teenage hanging-out, she said.

“We need to give kids the freedom to explore and experience things online that might actually help them,” she added.

The Berkeley Radical Prints

Great poster collection from "the Movement."

Here's one from the Kent State archive.

"What are kids supposed to do when they can't shop?"

"The Role of Youth" -- short video by Jon Savage and Matt Wolf, from the New York Times, Dec. 6, 2011. They trace the history of the emergence of the teenager, and the recent involvement of young people in the Occupy movements, the riots in the UK, the Arab Spring. "These movements share a common goal: to re-imagine the future." Read their brief description here.

Simon Reynolds on Xenomania: How Nothing is Foreign in an Internet Age

Great piece from MTV Iggy.

I hope this is true: "Recently there’s been a smatter of hipster chatter about the Egyptian dance music that gets played at Cairo street weddings." This needs to blow up. See my posts on this scene, here and here.

Viva DJs Islam Chipsy and Omar Haha and Figo.

In defence of pop, and perhaps, narcissism

Nitsuh Abebe, writing in New York, defends contempo pop music against the moral panic over youth narcissism. And he makes sense of the trajectory of popular music on the charts since the '80s.

If I could choose, in retrospect, which set of music-based pathologies to spend my teenage years absorbing—the dogged outsider mumbling I picked up from indie-rock records or the brave thrusting entitlement and self-regard that allegedly speak through today’s pop—there’s a decent chance I’d take the pop.

Frankie Beverly and Maze in Brooklyn

A friend of hawgblawg sent in this account of a concert in Brooklyn on Monday, July 11.

“Golden Time of Day”

On Monday night, as the sun set, and a moonlight spread over Brooklyn, a humid evening was made cool and bearable by the voice of an R&B legend. Thousands turned out for the first show of the Martin Luther King concert series that has taken place in Brooklyn’s Wingate field for the past 29

years. The first concert showcased the veteran singer, Frankie Beverly and Maze, a group that has been around “oh, only 45 years,” as Beverly told the audience. Beverly opened the evening with “Southern Girl.” Dressed in white and sporting a white beret, his powerful, soulful voice resonated across the field -- and all of Flatbush it seemed. Middle-aged women danced along as he sang his hit singles, songs from their youth “We Are One,” “Can’t Get Over You,” “Running Away,” and “Happy Feelings.” Whether he was singing his smooth classics -- slow jams played on the “Quiet Storm” on WBLS (the radio station sponsoring the MLK concert series), or jamming on the keyboard, or hooping like a preacher, or jumping up and down with band members -- Beverly displayed an astonishing energy throughout the two-hour show. As he wiped sweat off his forehead with a towel, he bantered with the audience, “I’m sixty-five years old - I got a three-pack, or maybe a can, or something!”

Beverly’s group was formed in Philadelphia in 1970 – and was initially called Raw Soul. Beverly moved the group to the Bay Area in 1972, and there they were given the name Maze, by none other than Marvin Gaye. “We’re from Philadelphia, grew up with Patti Labelle and Harold Melville. We moved to Cali in 1972 because of Sly and the Family Stone,” explained the vocalist. “One night we were playing in a rinky dink club and Marvin Gaye was there.” Gaye booked Maze on his 1976 concert tour and helped them secure their first album deal with Capitol Records. “Marv took us in, gave us the name Maze. We’re inspired by Marv – he took our feet out off clay and put them on solid ground.” Over the last forty years, Beverly has had nine top ten hits and eight gold records – but no Grammy, a point the singer joked about on stage. “I get mad sometimes, but then I’ve learned that you can either have re-wards or a-wards. Some of you have been with us for over thirty five years, that is the biggest reward, our following.”

The band, also decked out in casual white outfits, was pitch-perfect. Vance Taylor on keyboards, Calvin Napper on drums, and Jubu Smith, on guitar who, as per usual, delivered a beautiful solo on “Golden Time of

Day.”

Beverly closed the evening with a pulsating rendition of “Before I Let Go.”

Another magical night in Brooklyn.

Queer rappers

An article in Resonance (issue 53, 2007) discusses the 2006 documentary about queer hip-hop, Pick Up the Mic, by Alex Hinton. Unfortunately, it's not available on the web.

The article discusses the following artists: Scream Club, QBoy, Miss Money, and Johnny Dangerous.

For the moment, this is just a resource.

Flash Mobs

...were invented by a senior editor of Harper's Magazine. Read about it here. Juicy excerpts follow.

As first defined by Festinger, Pepitone, and Newcomb (1952), deindividuation is “a state of affairs in a group where members do not pay attention to other individuals qua individuals”...

Consider the generational cohort that has come to be called the hipsters–i.e., those hundreds of thousands of educated young urbanites with strikingly similar tastes. Have so many self-alleged aesthetes ever been more (in the formulation of Festinger et al.) “submerged in the group”? The hipsters make no pretense to divisions on principle, to forming intellectual or artistic camps; at any given moment, it is the same books, records, films that are judged au courant by all, leading to the curious spectacle of an “alternative” culture more unanimous than the mainstream it ostensibly opposes. What critical impulse does exist among their number merely causes a favorite to be more readily abandoned, as abandoned...it inevitably will be...

Over those who would sell to the hipsters, then, hangs the promise of instant adoption but also the specter of wholesale and irrevocable desertion...With a rising generation so mercurial, one wonders whether even the notion of “branding,” i.e., the building of long-term reputations, which has remained the watchword among our corporations for more than a decade, will itself come to lose its luster...the corporation will be content merely to hitch itself to a succession of their whims.

...Not only was the flash mob a vacuous fad; it was, in its very form (pointless aggregation and then dispersal), intended as a metaphor for the hollow hipster culture that spawned it.

I know this because I happen to have been the flash mob’s inventor...

What the project harnessed was the joining urge, a drive toward deindividuation easily discernible in the New York hipster population.

The basic hypothesis behind the Mob Project was as follows: seeing how all culture in New York was demonstrably commingled with scenesterism, the appeal of concerts and plays and readings and gallery shows deriving less from the work itself than from the social opportunities the work might engender, it should theoretically be possible to create an art project consisting of pure scene...

The mob was all about the herd instinct, I reasoned, about the desire not to be left out of the latest fad...

What the Times did, in fascinating fashion, was not just to run the backlash story (which I had been expecting in three to five more weeks) but to do so preemptively–i.e., before the backlash actually had materialized...

Nothing is more defining of hipsterism than semi-ironic coronation of its own celebrities...

I was pointing out that hipsters, our supposed cultural avant-garde, are in fact a transcontinental society of cultural receptors, straining to perceive which shifts to follow. I must hasten to add that this is not entirely their fault: the Internet can propagate any flashy notion, whether it be a style of eyewear or a presidential candidacy, with such instantaneity that a convergence on the “hip” tends now to happen unself-consciously, as a simple matter of course.

But hipsters, after becoming aware of this very dynamic, have responded in a curious and counterintuitive way. Even as they might decry this drive toward unanimity, they continually embrace it and re-embrace it in an enthusiastic, almost ecstatic fashion. No phenomenon of recent years illustrated this point as clearly as the aforementioned Strokes, who for most of 2002 held the top-band spot in hipsterdom. This was a band that, albeit enjoyable and skilled, had been clearly manufactured precisely for hipster delectation. Moreover, the hipsters were well aware of this fact, and they complained about it incessantly even as they cued up the record at parties and danced with special abandon...The Strokes made a natural object of this unanimity because their sound–derivative candy, 1970s punk simplicity dressed up with some 1990s indie-rock aloofness–was an easy common denominator...They were, moreover, easily discarded...

The most significant literary movement the hipsters have produced is McSweeney’s, which itself had essentially the characteristics of a pop-music fad...

Like the Strokes, McSweeney’s promised a cultural watershed for hipsters while making no demands on them...In its pages literature appeared as a sort of pot-luck barbecue where the young litterateur, merely by whipping up some absurdist trifle or other, could throw the Frisbee with established authors who were publishing their castoffs there...

Inevitably, even as McSweeney’s has matured and gained more seriousness of purpose, it has receded in hipster esteem, just as did trucker hats, Hush Puppies, the mullet. Like starlings on a trash-strewn field the hipsters alight together, peck intently for a time, and at some indiscernible signal take wing again at once. If they are the American avant-garde it is true, I think, in only this aspect–the unending churn of their tastes, this adult faddishness in the adolescent style...

In the media coverage of flash mobs, the most curious undercurrent was the notion, almost a wish, that they would someday become something serious....

The idea seemed to be that flash mobs could be made to convey a message, but for a number of reasons this dream was destined to run aground. First, as outlined above, flash mobs were gatherings of insiders, and as such could hardly communicate to those who did not already belong...Second, flash mobs were by definition transitory, ten minutes or less, and thereby not exactly suited to standing their ground and testifying. Third, in terms of physical space, flash mobs relied on constraints to create an illusion of superior strength...

just like flash mobs, the Dean campaign was also pure scene...

'Cash Rules Everything Around Wu'

Great piece on the Wu-Tang Clan from Jeff Weiss and Tal Rosenberg.

The music [on Wu-Tang Forever] was even more dense and abstract than Enter the Wu-Tang. In his review for SPIN, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote that “Wu-Tang Clan are basically selling avant-garde music as pop to the world. “The first single off the album, a $1 million video directed by Brett Ratner, had no discernible chorus, and featured some of the most complex, intricate rhyming by the Clan members. It is also nearly six minutes long, the “Like a Rolling Stone” of the hip-hop era.

8 Openly Queer Rappers

Via Color Lines, a list of five, from the inimitable Detroit rapper Invincible. Miz Korona, Mz Jonz, Thee Satisfaction, Las Krudas, and Skim. From Juba Kalamka, three more: Collin Clay, Wheelchair Sports Camp, and Big Freedia. Be sure to read about them.

And for more queer rappers, check out this earlier post on Yo Majesty.

Keen insights into hip-hop and feminism

from the Crunk Feminist Collective.