Chapter 6 - Sample Chapter

This is a sample of the sixth chapter from Adult Themes. The full text of this chapter is available in the printed version of the book.

On Culture

She’s got an iPod. He’s got a PlayStation. She saw all three adaptations of The Lord of the Rings. He likes Pixar films. She watches Big Brother. He watches The O.C. She wears trainers to work. He’s obsessed with Grand Theft Auto III. Some people would call these different cultural choices, individual questions of taste that change over time. Some you like, some you don’t. But there’s a prevailing belief that these are all portents of the endtimes of civilisation: the kidification of culture, the loss of ‘real adult art’ and the collapse of what used to be authentic in literature, films, television, music and social entertainment. In this view, culture is gradually becoming more soulless and empty, as people fail to recognise and support the noble and uplifting artistic expressions of yore. What remains is an inexorable cultural devolution creating generations of undiscerning and puerile consumers who can’t tell the top-shelf stuff from childish trash anymore.

What are the signs that a grown person is not consuming real adult culture? If you have enjoyed literature or films designed for children, it’s a warning sign. Seeing Finding Nemo or The Chronicles of Narnia at the cinema without an accompanying under-15 would immediately be suspect. Reading Harry Potter books puts you on high alert. If you have a liking for some of the current flavours of pop culture, this may be a problem: music that charted in your teens, for example, be that Bob Dylan or The Smiths, is acceptable if sufficient time has passed to cloud it in nostalgia. But an interest in anything current and well-known is another matter. The common denominator is that a liking for anything new and popular is immature: it smacks of faddishness. That can mean anything from technological gadgets to reality television shows.

The generation currently in their 20s and 30s are getting considerable flak for being in thrall to popular cultures that are better suited to children. But this criticism has a much longer history. The philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote an essay on the failings of popular music in 1941, arguing that adults were being seduced into immaturity by a childish culture. [1] Adorno believed that popular music was very different from “serious music”; it was highly standardised, based on formulas everyone could recognise, so that a love song would always be quickly discernible from a nursery rhyme, and a popular chorus would reliably consist of 32 bars. His examples of genre in the 1940s were swing and “sweet”, where now we might instead refer to post-punk and electro; but his point was that once these become commercial products, they are merely trademarks used to differentiate styles that are fundamentally the same thing.

One of the characteristics of popular music that Adorno was particularly scathing about was its tendency towards “baby talk”. Pop music establishes a childish world, full of repetition – like a child “incessantly uttering the same demand” – and melodies are limited to a very few tones the way “a small child speaks before he has the full alphabet at his disposal”.

Ultimately,“treating adults as children is involved in that representation of fun which is aimed at relieving the strain of their adult responsibilities.” The audience is infantilised by pop music, and will be lulled away from more serious concerns by mindless hit singles. Adorno mentions 1940s hits like “Cry, Baby, Cry” and Ella Fitzgerald’s hit “A Tisket a Tasket”, although in 2006 he might instead have pointed towards Ashanti’s song “Baby”, which repeats the word “baby” over forty times, or Britney Spears’ impersonation of a guilty child in “Oops! I Did it Again”.

Disputes around what is appropriate culture for adults are not new. They recur in various forms. There’s the familiar championing of high-cultureforms, like fine art or opera, over low-culture forms, like pop music or airport novels. There’s the perennial argument over what kind of art or music is truly ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ and what is mainstream and commercial. Of course, today’s cutting-edge artist can be tomorrow’s sell-out, particularly if they get any attention and earn enough to eat. The same basic tension is reflected in the “I like your old stuff better than your new stuff” refrain. It reappears in many generational variations, from the sweeping (“Kids today only want fast food and celebrity gossip”) to the specific (“Generation Y watch too much reality television, and it’s corroding their values”). What’s really at stake here is the question of who gets to decide what counts as a valuable, timeless cultural product, and what will be disregarded as a passing childish fad.

In other words, the fights over adult culture are really fights over authority: who has the authority to dictate what is good culture and what isn’t. It’s a debate which assumes that certain kinds of culture have a universal validity and that there’s a fixed hierarchy of taste. It is grounded in the idea that some people have more cultural authority than others. Authority is one of the core prerogatives of adulthood – adults are considered capable of assuming authority, of making decisions that should be respected, while children and adolescents are not. In this chapter, we’ll look at the major claims made about problem adults: they enjoy children’s culture too much, they’re obsessed with empty celebrity, they only enjoy the worst of popular culture, and they have brought consumerism to a new low.

The filthy tide of popular culture

The argument that adults shouldn’t like things that are popular or readily entertaining has had many advocates over time. It’s just that the chosen cultural demon changes. Currently it’s Harry Potter and reality television that are held responsible for destroying the greatest minds of a generation, but back in the 1800s, it was theatre.

The American evangelist preacher Charles G Finney saw the theatre as one of the great evils plaguing his nation, and frequently railed against those who would “indulge themselves in the secret sin” of theatre-going. [2] That was in 1868. Friedrich Nietzsche, not exactly a philosopher beloved of the masses, saw theatre and music as soporific influences, dulling the minds of common Europeans. “Theatre and music as the hashish-smoking and betel-chewing of the European!”, he exclaimed in 1887. [3]

Music has often been eyed with suspicion as a potentially corrupting influence, and the emergence of rock and jazz in the 20th century saw many public debates about the depravity of these cultural forms. Adorno hated jazz, describing it as musical “drivel” swept along in the “filthy tide” of entertainment music. Those who listened to jazz were“addicted” to a toxin, no different from an addict of tobacco or alcohol. [4] Metaphors of addiction emphasise the passive role of the consumer – they can’t help themselves, they lose their self-control and volition, they become as helpless as children. In contrast, adult culture is presumably non-toxic and non-addictive.

But as the decades pass, what used to be seen as mind-controlling and soul-eroding forms of culture become high cultural forms or else they fall into the background as empty threats. Theatre and jazz are now represented in conventional arts festivals the world over, but new cultural enemies have risen to take the stage, requiring a new set of responses from the guardians of contemporary culture. The danger of popular culture was once that it turned us into addicts, now we risk being turned into children.

“I had been idly considering a fiction in which this country is taken over by children,” writes British journalist Laura Thompson. [5] “Adulthood would take second place: the accretions of experience, which theoretically lead to wisdom, would be sidelined by the simplism of youth.” She imagines a world where the novels of Flaubert are considered incomprehensible, Mozart irrelevant and Shakespeare unreadable. Suddenly she realises “this was no fiction” and that kidult culture already rules. Her evidence covers the usual suspects: Shrek, Toy Story, ET and Harry Potter. Even the film Love, Actually is condemned as infantile, due to its simplistic narrative. It all amounts to a “mass adult consumption of infant culture” and the reason behind it is simple laziness. Adult culture is too hard.

“Adulthood, which is all about compromise and concealment, the equivocal and the insoluble, is out of style. Let us be brutal: the culture of the child is all the rage nowadays because it is less trouble than the culture of the adult... Child culture deals with the kind of emotions that we prefer, the ones that are not just simple but simplified. And it presents itself to us in the way that we like: with ease of access and with most of the work already done for us... Where is adult culture? Where is adulthood? Perpetually slouching through a wilderness... its ageing unfit body swaddled in toddler clothes?”

Thompson is clearly very worried that adults today aren’t chewing their food and getting sufficient cultural greens. On the surface, she argues that by succumbing to childish entertainments we are losing the essence of adulthood. To be adult means hard work before pleasure, attending the opera, reading the Man-Booker prizewinner each year and sitting through “grisly nights of Shakespeareat the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company]”. She posits that adulthood is all about compromise and concealment, an unusual definition, and certainly in contradiction with her argument. Harry Potter, Shrek and ET all feature themes of hidden identity and the value of compromise for the greater good. In fact, these concepts are the standard stuff of children’s literature.

But the unspoken substance of Thompson’s argument is the old chestnut of highbrow art versus lowbrow art – the popular or the privileged. For while Shakespeare may have been the entertainment of the masses during the Elizabethan era; catching a performance at the RSC is now a habit of the cultural elite. Reading Flaubert and attending a Mozart concert have always been the domain of the educated and the wealthy. But this isn’t acknowledged at all – Thompson’s true adult culture is the high culture of the privileged. What is resented in ‘kidult culture’ is its popularity and its accessibility. The terms of adult and kidult are a new slant on the high/low, popular/elite cultural debates. And the prejudice against popular cultures as being inadequate for adults looks like the worst kind of snobbish cultural gatekeeping.

Worse still, Thompson’sargument risks becoming a victim of its own logic. By casting popular culture as simplistic and ‘kidult’, as distinct from the authentic adult culture she approves of, she reduces a complex culture to a generational divide: the new is childish; while the old and established is timeless, worthy of consumption by adults. This black and-white rendering of culture is precisely what she argues against so fervently.

Of course, Thompson isn’t alone in transforming complexity into simplistic oppositions by using the generational lens. It has become common practice among critics to make distinctions between adult and non-adult cultures by focusing on particular attributes of each. At one time commentators might have taken the evangelical approach of designating certain entertainments as morally dangerous or ‘sinful’. Today they emphasise poor choices, intellectual laziness, gullibility or ignorance. If we were to draw up a table of how the values divide between adult culture and the culture of kidults and adultescents, it might look like this:

To be clear, this is not a defence of all cultural products, and I’m certainly not suggesting that everything is equally good. Far from it. Some films are terribly hackneyed, some books dull, some albums poorly produced, some TV shows eye-gougingly inane. These forms can be critiqued on their own merits and within their own genre aspirations. But what is problematic in the ‘end of adult culture’ argument of Thompson and her ilk is its presumption that we all consume only one type of culture all the time, and it’s turning us into infants. It assumes that ‘difficult’ cultures are being left for dead in a rush for primary colours and short sentences. It’s a blunt instrument, incapable of looking at the giant ecologies of information, art and entertainment, and their rapidly emerging hybrids. Shakespeare re-emerges in a Hollywood adaptation set in a high school, Dante in a graphic novelisation, Mozart gets sampled by Eminem, The Beatles’ White album gets mixed with Jay Z’s Black album to make DJ Dangermouse’s Grey album. These mashed-up forms put paid to any kind of apocalyptic arguments that culture is dying: it’s cross-breeding, and it’s very much alive.

References

2. Finney, Charles G (1868) Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Oberlin, Ohio, EJ Goodrich, electronic text at University of Michigan Library, viewed 3 March 2006, www.hti.umich.edu.

3. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887) The Gay Science, translated by Kaufmann, Walter (1974), Vintage, New York, p 142.

4. Adorno, Theodor (1976) Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. EB Ashton, Seabury Press, New York. For a more detailed discussion on Adordno's reasons for disliking jass, see Gracyk, Theodore A (1992) "Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics of Popular Music", The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 4, Winter, pp 526-542.

5. Thompson, Laura (2004) "To infantility and beyond!", Independent on Sunday, 1 August, pp 14-15.