This Week in Achey Breaky Upstarts: The Culture Industry and You

Once upon a time, "Montana" conjured images of a sleepy state in the continental northwest, home to the Rocky Mountains, Glacier National Park, and very, very little human activity.  All that changed two years ago, when the 44th largest state in the Union found its name hijacked by its southwesterly neighbors at Disney Corp. and billed, instead, as the pseudo-surname of the new primetime Queen of Tween, Hannah Montana herself.

For those of us affluent and American enough to be shielded from the annoyance of real news, this semantic appropriation signaled the most dramatic shift in cultural awareness since the word "juicy" fell off the orange truck and into the 2003 summer rush on booty shorts.  Initially just a phenomenon, Hannah Montana became the phenomenon in prefab adolescent cuteness.  Like most Disney sensations, there was never a choice not to consume: in early 2008, Montana's music career was aggressively marketed on television and the radio; here in New York, Montana was featured in a series of "news" segments that found their way onboard the city's fleet of taxi cabs.

This unprovoked assault on civic space and public airwaves -- the unrelenting, vicious onslaught of Billy Ray Junior, nearly as unwelcome as the contemporaneous ad campaign for Legally Blonde: The Musical -- is a vivid illustration of the "culture industry," a concept discussed at length by the Frankfurt School and echoed in the polemics of Situationist International.  Put simply, all culture is created by the upper class, those who own the means of production in society.  Culture is "consumed" by the lower class in terms of commodities (music, film, media events), but these commodities do not actually meet their needs -- in fact, they act against their needs, by lulling them into complacency with the status quo.  Case in point: uber-chain Urban Outfitters, the WalMart of the Disillusioned, satisfies our drive for non-participation and antiestablishment behavior with name brand clothing.  Cha-ching; it's the sound of Revolution.

The ubiquity of the Hannah Montana marketing machine represents the latest attempt by this industry to socialize us into needs we don't really have.  This socialization is aimed at pre-teens, at young girls who are still learning about what music is and how the media relays it to them.  Here is the bizarre, even sinister disjunction: Montana (like her predecessors in the Mickey Mouse Consortium) is the pubescent simulacrum of the grownup entertainment industry.  She's an education in consumption: the platinum-blonde, eerily jubilant training wheels of adult consumer Nirvana.

The recent hubbub over Montana's snoozalicious Vanity Fair photos highlights the incoherence of this brand of fame.  Montana is expected to play at being adult, but she isn't expected to be adult -- and it is adulthood, not sex, that is at stake.  Annie Leibovitz -- best known for her photograph of a naked John Lennon clinging to wife Yoko Ono, taken hours before he was shot and killed -- was the offending photographer, an unsurprising feat for anyone so far afield of the Disney Castle.

Montana has explained that she originally thought of the photographs as "artistic" -- perhaps an unintentionally interesting choice of words.  While Leibovitz' photograph is certainly no Piss Christ -- nor is it a tawdry pinup, which seems to be the main objection -- it zeroes in on the very adult world of personality cult and media fetishism that undergirds this seemingly innocent, even childlike, system of signs.  (This has always been a perfidious veneer: who could forget the endless speculation on Britney Spears' virginity, that strange market juncture of avarice, moral sanctimony, and sexual titillation?)  By stepping outside the bounds of this system, Leibovitz forces Cyrus' audience to re-examine not only the product, but their own role as consumers.

This, of course, is the real source of controversy.  The State of Innocence is a police state, and it is jealously protective of its borders.  For better or worse, the culture industry has carved out a new cultural need: a franchised, extended childhood, almost Fascist in its suspicion of the PG and PG-13.  Disney, in a sense, has lost control of this army -- and while it might make everyone feel better if Montana just fell back into line, there will be no trouble finding new recruits if she doesn't.

This Week in Music: A Manifesto

“Hey hey, you you [sic]. I don’t like your girlfriend.”

—Avril Lavigne


It’s brassy. It’s sassy. It’s totally irrelevant to life as you know it, and it’s taken your world by storm.

The invasion is everywhere — it overruns newsstands and consumes television networks; it projects million-dollar smiles from the Hollywood Hills and into your home. It’s new wave; it’s idol worship; it’s entertainment for the terminally jaded, and it’s coming to a theater near you.

Welcome to your culture. Here it is: Nickelback, Lindsay Lohan, 50 Cent, People magazine and E! Entertainment Television. Recognize these faces? That’s interesting — they don’t seem to recognize yours.

Welcome to your culture. It’s a top-down industry; it’s generated in factories and film studios, and it doesn’t care how your day has been or what you want to be when you grow up. It does, however, care about your fantasies: drunk-driving debutantes, or transvestite teenage dropouts? Blondes, or brunettes?

The vast majority of all this noise is generated by a handful of corporations — Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group, and EMI Group account for all but a fifth of the American market. By the time consumers are given the option to buy, choices have already been made for us. Backstreet Boys, or NSync? Jessica Simpson, or the other Jessica Simpson? These clone-like apparitions are generated by an industry that appeals to the lowest common denominator, to our primal cravings for sex and simple chord progressions. The power of customers to effect change is limited by a general lack of awareness — or, in more sinister terms, the false awareness that our culture doesn’t matter.

In an era of violence and change (is there any other kind?), the American consumer is, for the most part, protected. With notable — and newsworthy — exceptions, most Americans are not affected by genocide in Sudan or by totalitarianism in North Korea. A record number of Americans are not affected by the wars America is fighting, except insofar as they unfold on television and give us something to argue about.

The same cannot be said for American Idol, which registered 74 million audience participants in its last season showdown (roughly a fourth of the United States’ population). While the United States remains a politically active superpower, our popular culture — the reality most Americans are plugged into — portrays a world of glamour and furious emotion, an eternally youthful rollercoaster of hormones and sex appeal.

The truth is, our culture does matter. American culture is our largest export — it draws from and influences global culture, marshaling talent from across the world and selling its vision in transnational packages. It is also the milieu that informs the American citizen, and therefore American policy.

Yet politically conscientious pop stars are having a rough go. Gone are the days Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, or of Tupac and Eazy-E; onetime A-listers Sinead O’Connor and U2 are looking something like outdated imports with greater pull across the Atlantic. There are exceptions, many from within the hip hop community: Nas, P. Diddy, Kanye West, and many others have put their voices behind political change; however this hardly comprises an artistic climate, or a renaissance of anti-establishment music.

For the consumer to draw meaning from a politically aware culture, he or she must search outside the mainstream. Though media conglomerates are certainly implicated in the lack of meaningful choices, consumers are implicated in their complacency.

Much is lost in this capitulation. Throughout the twentieth century, music has been the source of alternative political debate — a conversation that has little to do with electioneering, or the tit-for-tat maneuvering of partisan candidacy. Music has taken on poverty, race, sexuality, immigration, war, civil disobedience, drug culture, gang culture, and the personal dimension of political realities in a way that Crossfire and 20/20 have not.

As wars continue to rage and ideologies to be formed, a sense of their cultural immediacy has disappeared. Lyrics revolving around club culture, teenage intrigue, narcissistic materialism, and vague, irrational emotion predominate. There is the paradoxical realm of the ghetto-fabulous, in which pop idols cultivate populist appeals amidst allusions to their vast, unencumbered wealth. Some healthy cynicism might be prudent here: Fergie may still go to Taco Bell, but no abundance of Jenny’s from the Block will save us from our apathy.

Political discourse lives on in the underground. M.I.A., Atmosphere, and Cody Chesnutt are just a handful of many, many artists who have used elements of hip hop to explore their politicized identities, dwelling on issues of race, economics, and gender construction. Ladytron and The New Pornographers borrow from pop music’s electronic instrumentation and simple composition, capturing an ambivalence to youth worship that harkens back to 80’s New Wave. The list goes on, branching into hundreds of genres.

Of course the underground, by definition, remains invisible in the popular sphere — and the underground is not a consistently political milieu. The difficulty of navigating independent music (even with the recent explosion of internet-based media) is one reason many consumers remain content with the culture that is handed to them.

For better or worse, this culture is one of mass appeal, and it’s not backing down. It’s hip, it’s sexy, and it’s aggressively seductive — CNN and BBC have nothing on Paris Hilton’s legs, or on the Top 40’s cocaine for the soul.

Let’s not mince words: it is possible to be a responsible citizen and listen to popular music. Music is not the end-all of political discourse or civic responsibility, but it does represent a dimension of awareness that is rapidly shrinking.

For those who might be concerned about this state of affairs, the only option is extra legwork and responsible consumption. The invasion is everywhere — and the resistance is not. It might seem a small gesture, but change can only begin when we begin to think — and to purchase — against the grain.

This Week in Entertainment: California Wildfires?

While the recent shortage of divorces and drug charges continues to take its toll on the entertainment news community, actual reporters have had the grim privilege of covering catastrophic flooding in Mexico, out-of-control conflagrations in California, and civil unrest in Burma and Pakistan.

One has to wonder, then, what content-starved editor was handed oversight of the Los Angeles blaze when this turned up on the BBC website.

While any of us — even those of us with a multi-platinum (or whatever) selling sex tape — are worthy of human compassion, Pamela Anderson was probably the last person on your mind when you heard that hundreds of thousands of people had fled wildfires in southern California (her or Olivia Newton-John, depending on whether or not you’ve ventured outside of an underground bunker in the last thirty years).

Los Angeles, like any tourist destination, is a city that has reinvented itself in commodity form. No other place on earth, however, has monopolized televisual tourism like the City of Angels: for most tourists, a Los Angeles vacation begins and ends at the Academy Awards, or the Emmys, or the last season of The Hills. Many people associate the entire entertainment industry with Hollywood, meaning that any experience with this sort of media registers, on some level, as a brush with Los Angeles culture.

A brief survey of this commodity-Los Angeles — its sex, its fame, the eerie sedation of its teeming consumer base — should (it goes without saying?) give us no insight into the real-Los Angeles, the second largest city in the world’s third most populous nation, and one of the most diverse urban centers anywhere, ever. Baywatch may have taken place in Malibu, but it didn’t really take place in Malibu. Television may borrow from real life, but it isn’t really life… right?

Whether it’s snarky journalism or a genuinely slippery grasp on reality, an international news outlet's use of star maps to explain human tragedy does have weird and sinister implications. It also has an uncomfortable resonance with Jean Baudrillard’s “Precession of Simulacra,” which opens with the idea that human reality has already been overrun by digital and consumer models.

A Baudrillardian reading is pretty simple here: our ability to deal with real events has been warped by our penchant for fame and celebrity news. "Reality" (the fires) ceases to apply — all that applies is how this reality, or its mirror image (the map), might be packaged for easier consumption.

So, all of southern California becomes Los Angeles, and Los Angeles becomes Malibu. Can't handle the wide swath of destruction or the loss of human life? That's fine, let's just switch over to James Cameron, and see how the flames are faring against one of his many, many palatial homes. It's a tad reminiscent of the Greek fire coverage, and the perpetual updates on the Athenian acropolis — though those fires were much more lethal, and the Acropolis much less awesome.

If you think I'm picking on the BBC unfairly, you may be right — while this single graphic begs for commentary, the BBC's coverage was articulate and responsible for the most part. This, unfortunately, is more than can be said for local television news. CBS ranks as the most surreal network, featuring — among other sequences — a reporter’s onsite narration of the destruction of his own house, and an anchor’s misty-eyed recollection that wildfires always make for the most beautiful sunrises.

Which begs the question: is there no escaping television, on television? Is this universe so contained that it can't penetrate its own gee-whiz logic? Even FEMA’s valiant effort at moral bankruptcy missed the reality bandwagon, proving that cynicism does not always equal a firm grasp of practical deception (or anything at all).

The real danger here is that our packaging has begun to preempt our content, even when discussing the suffering of fellow human beings. This can be true in any media, though many print publications, and some online vendors, still outperform their lesser counterparts in cyberspace and on the airwaves.

Along with CBS and BBC's cocksure cartographer, FEMA demonstrated the worst-case scenario of our information age — a scenario in which data must compete in a market of apathy and sensationalism, in which all events are scripted in the media before they have begun. News is not the product here: entertainment is, and it is a brand of entertainment that feeds off of death and calamity. Its success relies on the fungibility of information — on the easy transformation of reality into a circus, and on our own easy transformation into spectators.