Slow Cool: Pop Culture Before the World Wide Web, Part VI

Epilogue: The Future of the Cool: A Manifesto in Which I Issue Many Peremptory Fatwas About What Is and Isn’t Cool.

Read Part I. Part II. Part III. Part IV. Part V.

“But these meandering journeys across the Internet soundscape can be taxing. The medium too easily generates anxiety in place of fulfillment, an addictive cycle of craving and malaise. No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes. Putting on an old-fashioned disk and letting it play to the end restores a measure of sanity. This may explain why the archaic LP is enjoying an odd surge of popularity among younger listeners: it’s a modest rebellion against the tyranny of instant access.” – Alex Ross, The New Yorker, August 10, 2009

“What's way scarier for me, though, is the way technology has pretty much changed the way everyone under the age of the 30 makes/participates in/enjoys music. One of the saddest things for me about seeing young people go about those things is that they ALWAYS have the marketing (website, etc. and by extension the aesthetic) down before they have the music down. It's impossible, I think, for kids to not think about how they present themselves virtually in the electronic world and so the "selling" is now inextricably intertwined with the "creating" (even for bands--who are most of them--who have no hope of selling anything). And this fact changes the music that is actually being made, which means we're losing something. Worse, it feels like any sense of an "underground" is being erased—nobody stumbles on a niche out of accidental expression (previously an important part of music, I think). Instead, the niches are mapped out by hours immersed in YouTube, etc.” – Karl Hendricks, Pittsburgh musician and songwriter

“You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis!” – Tyler Durden, Fight Club

In order to answer the question, “Does the Cool have a future?” we need to define what the Cool is, and what it isn’t, and at what it’s up against now.

· The Cool is not the same as consumerism. Cool things may be available on the open market, but the Cool is not a commodity and you will not find it in the marketing or the Marketplace. Consumerism is the suffering born of ignorant craving. The Cool is satori.

· The Cool is exclusive, not democratic. It has snob appeal. If everybody is into it, it probably isn’t Cool. The Cool depends upon authenticity and a critical authority to dispense that authenticity. That authority may or may not be you, but it probably isn’t.

· The Cool is social, not solipsistic. No one asked you what is Cool. Someone else shared it with you because of something they saw in you. The Cool is not self-conscious.

· The Cool is experiential, not virtual. It takes its sweet time and lives by its own clock and calendar. It is always at the right place at the right time. Like Woodstock, you have to have been there.

· The Cool takes you out of your comfort zone. It is not convenient. It does not make itself easy. There is no map. There is no online recommendation engine. You discover yourself through finding what you think is Cool.

This list is not exhaustive.

Let’s look at the above quotes, which I selected from a large number of quotes I’ve collected lately for their lapidary glimpses on the truth. The Alex Ross quote is no less apposite because it was written about the growing number of high-quality downloads of new classical music, rather than popular music, which is probably what you were thinking. Sometimes having endless possibility of choice is not the way to happiness. Sometimes more stuff piled upon stuff is just more stuff piled upon stuff; as a friend of mine once said: Two of shit is still shit. Sometimes less is more. Karl Hendricks speaks of a horrible reality—too much awareness of the Marketplace is actually killing the Cool. The Marketplace has provided a map and thus killed the exploratory urge; it has provided a recipe and so rendered experimentation obsolete. Here the Internet creates a virtual echo-chamber of self-consciousness—for how can one not be self-conscious, as an artist, when there are so many other artists out there, flaunting their stuff! How can one resist joining in?

Those of us whose value systems were formed before the Internet age, so-called Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, believe in the concept of “selling out,” the idea that there exists a quality, something meaningful and sacred, for lack of a better term, that should retain its integrity, that should not be put on the auction block, that cannot command a price. This ineffable essence is the Cool. We hew to this faith in the same way our ancestors believed in the immortal soul, or the inevitability of the workers’ revolution. But, as Rob Walker points out in his excellent study of contemporary marketing, Buying In, Generation Y sees nothing wrong in participating fully in the electronic Marketplace. It’s natural to them—they see what they’re doing, not as selling out, but as buying in. Buying in is the way to the new Cool.

The Cool is dead; long live the Cool.

This development is probably inevitable. And as uncomfortable as it makes me and many others of my generation[1], we cannot stand in its way. But please remember: Be careful what you buy into; what you buy can easily own you. Question the marketing and all its tools. The Internet is a powerful instrument—use it as a means, not an end. It has never been simpler to find whatever material goods you want. And it has never been easier to find and connect with your peers—your true peers, those who share your interests and values, not merely the people you must throw in your lot with because of geographic proximity. But exactly because it is so easy to surround yourself with so much that you find agreeable, it is also all too easy to resist growth, to avoid stretching your mind to accommodate those parts of experience that might be necessary, but not so instantly gratifying. Use your new tools to grow, and learn, and be better people.

And so I end with immortal words of McClintic Sphere: Keep cool, but care.

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[1] “My Generation.” Such a curious, quaint concept. I think the day some anonymous, unsung marketing executive grabbed onto “my generation” and started whoring it out is the day the Cool began collapsing upon itself like a neutron star.

Slow Cool: Pop Culture Before the World Wide Web, Part V

Twilight of the Gatekeepers. The spectrum of Cool: Mainstream to Underground and back around to Mainstream.

Read Part I. Part II. Part III. Part IV.

"Until very recently, there were a handful of channels in the music business that the gatekeepers controlled. They were radio, Tower Records, MTV, certain mainstream press like Rolling Stone. That's how people found out about new things. Every record company in the industry was built to work that model. There was a time when if you had something that wasn't so good, through muscle and lack of other choices, you could push that not very good product through those channels. And that's how the music business functioned for 50 years. Well, the world has changed. And the industry has not…. [it] is stuck in the dark ages. Until a new model is agreed upon and rolling, we can be the best at the existing paradigm, but until the paradigm shifts, it's going to be a declining business. This model is done." – Rick Rubin, Co-Chairman of Columbia Records, quoted in The New York Times, September 2, 2007.

The Gatekeepers were destined to eventual extinction. Mainstream popular culture had been fragmenting for a long time, while at the same time, the Counterculture had been rising from underground into the popular consciousness and, more importantly, popular commerce, blurring the distinctions between the two. In the 1970s, a countercultural movement like Punk could not be truly entered unless it was lived. Authenticity and group identification was all: outside the group was the monolithic mainstream sellout world of American Bandstand and Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. Many young people emulated their Punk heroes to a greater or lesser degree, but were generally regarded as poseurs by Punks who had achieved greater lifestyle authenticity, and as outsiders and freaks by the population at large.

This attitude slowly softened, as awareness of Punk increased and the music and style of Punk became more generally available. Finally, as Punk morphed into Grunge in the early 1990s, and the increasing popularity of musical groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and concert films such as 1991: The Year Punk Broke, signaled a far wider mainstream awareness of alternative music, the Great Sellout was on. The 1992 film Singles didn’t actually kill Punk as a true alternative lifestyle outside the mainstream, but it served as its obituary. The cause of death was co-optation.

The population at large became more aware of alternative culture at an only slightly faster rate than the Cool-manufacturing industry—the Gatekeepers—co-opted them. One thing the Internet did was greatly increase the speed and ease of co-opting art and lifestyles into the mainstream, by making “alternative” music, movies, fashions, and other products quickly known and widely available to the general population, while at the same time making it exponentially easier to sell those products. Chris Anderson’s “long tail” marketing paradigm, whereby a company markets and sells a small volume of different, hard-to-find products to customers with many diverse interests, rather than a large volume of a few popular products to masses of like-minded customers, would be practically impossible without the Internet. Search engines, peer-written reviews, and social networking sites are only a few of the Web-based technologies which allow for “long tail” selling. No longer do you have to spend countless hours and gallons of gas going about looking for that Crass album reissue your friend told you she read about in Maximumrocknroll: it’s on iTunes and Amazon.com and a dozen other online retailers, and if you can’t find it there, you can always try eBay. By the way, you probably heard about the album, not from an actual friend, but from a virtual “friend”, or a blog you follow, or some online retailer’s recommendation engine. And chances are good you’ve never even heard of Maximumrocknroll.

Mass customization, personalized marketing, viral marketing—these terms didn’t exist fifteen years ago. They are the systematic ways in which products and information associated with Cool are presented and sold. In a way, they are nothing new. The principles behind them—word-of-mouth buzz, the idea that everyone likes things that are personally relevant to and directed at them—have been around for a long time. It’s just that the Internet makes it easy to apply these principles quickly, accurately, and on a mass scale. The Internet delivers, brisk and hard and accurate as a Justin Verlander fastball.

It isn’t just about commodities to be sold, however. It’s about[1] whatever video clip or other cultural meme[2] reflects the Zeitgeist and captures our attention for a brief moment—think “Chocolate Rain” and its many imitations and spoofs; think “Salad Fingers”—and then disappear down the pop-cultural rabbit-hole.

But we know how it works today. It surrounds us. How did it work before? How did such a meme travel and become known before YouTube and Facebook?

Let’s look at two early ‘90s memes, both video, one from Cathy’s experience and one from mine. When Cathy was in graduate school at Alabama, a friend of hers invited her and some other friends over to watch a VHS tape. The tape was a bootleg copy of Dancing Outlaw, a documentary that caused the inadvertent rise to fame of mountain dancer Jesse “Jesco” White. It became popular, mainly among twentysomethings in the Southeast and Midwest at first, for its unflinching portrayal of a man steeped in unfathomable physical, spiritual, and intellectual poverty. A few years later, I was at a small party in Brooklyn hosted by a college friend, when his roommate put a tape in the VCR for the edification of all the guests. It was a bootleg copy of Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, a documentary about the rise to notoriety and death-by-overdose of transgressive punk rocker/performance artist GG Allin. It became popular, mainly among twentysomethings of a certain countercultural bent in the Northeast, for, well, its unflinching portrayal of a man steeped in unfathomable physical, spiritual, and intellectual poverty.

Both Dancing Outlaw and Hated started life almost like old-fashioned video samizdat[3]: even though they were produced by more-or-less legitimate means, limited distribution and lack of general availability caused bootlegs to circulate hand-to-hand until authorized VHS and/or DVD editions became commercially available. Once they were “out there,” the two videos followed divergent paths. Dancing Outlaw became something of a popular hit after Roseanne Barr made it known that she was a Jesco White fan and gave Jesco a brief appearance on her TV show. Follow-up films were made, which, though not as successful as the first, found an audience. Hated, on the other hand, was probably too graphic and disturbing ever to find a wide audience, though it remains a cult classic.[4]

Something else these two films share: they are both biographies. Who doesn’t like a good biography? (Ask A&E Television Networks, who parlayed the hour-long TV biography documentary into an industry in its own right.) But more to the point, they are documentaries detailing the lives of acutely eccentric men, bizarre specimens who exist so far outside the mainstream that it is difficult to identify with them. There is something instinctively compelling about their Otherness—it’s unique, it’s Cool. But now, with social networking, we are all DIY documentarians.[5] Anyone—you, your co-worker, your Aunt Gloria, me (I’m doing it right now!)—can go on MySpace or Facebook or Blogger.com and create themselves anew. Or simply photograph—or film, or report on, or comment more or less insightfully on—life as they see it, for everyone to see. Meh. Not so Cool anymore, is it? Because frankly? you’re boring, and so is Aunt Gloria, and so am I. Nothing is Cool anymore. Not like it was.

Let me back up a step. Kevin Kelly, in his manifesto Better Than Free (you can download the PDF here) posits that “the Internet is a copy machine.” A major part of what the Internet does, Kelly says, is generate abundant free copies of ideas, data, and media. So how does one make money from free, abundant stuff? The answer is: you don’t. You sell what can’t be copied, which Kelly enumerates as the “generative values” of Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability. People will pay cash money to have free stuff delivered to them in a timely fashion (read: before anyone else gets it, or at least no later); to have someone teach them how to use the stuff; to tailor the stuff to meet their personal requirements; to make sure the stuff is not bogus; to give the stuff a pleasing real world manifestation; to have someone find stuff that’s hard to find. Et cetera. People will even voluntarily pay money to people for creating stuff, if it’s stuff they like and think is “artistic.” Imagine! This is all great, as far as making money goes. Give Kevin Kelly the Nobel Prize for Marketing[6]. But all of these “generatives” work against the Cool. They are forces of convenience and solipsism. They are all about making things more user-friendly and more about me. The Cool, whatever it is, is not user-friendly. It is not convenient. It is not about you. That’s why you’re always seeking it out.

And so this is the money shot: personalization and accessibility and findability and so on, all the great and profitable things about the Internet, killed the Cool.

Next time (if there is a next time, I’m so depressed by my findings here): How do we get out of this pickle? Does the Cool have a future? Is the Internet evil? (Kidding.) And some final random thoughts.

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[1] Also about—maybe most especially about.

[2] Yes, meme. I’ve been resisting the word since I began this essay, but now here it is. It’s a convenient term of art; plus I’m afraid that if I don’t use it you’ll think I’m a complete idiot.

[3] Now there’s a word you don’t hear much anymore, because the thing itself no longer exists, at least not outside of a few People’s and Islamic Republics and the novel Infinite Jest.

[4] Interestingly, both Dancing Outlaw and “Chocolate Rain” became so popular that they were parodied on episodes of The Simpsons, a TV show that had a certain quasi-samizdat Cool cachet of its own once upon a time, before its satire became self-referential and began feasting on itself; part of what makes “Salad Fingers” and Hated so disturbing (and, perhaps, so Cool), is that they share a curious resistance to irony and parody.

[5] My wife would like to claim credit for this observation, among others in this essay. Credit gratefully granted.

[6] What? There’s no Nobel for that yet?

Slow Cool: Pop Culture Before the World Wide Web, Part IV

Physicality (I). Gatekeepers.

Read Part I. Part II. Part III.

I ended the last installment by observing that “[t]he main thing about this process of research and serendipitous discovery [of what was Cool] was that it seemed impossibly slow and toilsome and chancy—dependent upon being in a particular place, often at a particular time.” Let’s examine that idea more closely: let’s go back to New York City in 1990 and the internship my wife Cathy held there and then, as a lowly Editorial Assistant (and then Assistant to the Photo Editor) at trendsetting Interview magazine. Interview was all about pop-culture ephemera: reporting on (and thus reifying) the Cool. More about the grand purpose of Interview in a moment. First, what were Cathy’s responsibilities at Interview—what was her work day like?

The first interesting thing about working at a magazine office, as she recalls it: she and everyone else working there were on the telephone all the time. There was no Google to use as a quick reference guide; there was the telephone. It’s hard to believe now, but “Phone first!” and “Let your fingers do the walking!” were commonly heard advertising slogans of the time, for the Yellow Pages, which existed then only in book form.[1] The telephone was always ringing. There was no e-mail to help prioritize communications, and the ringing of the phone is always urgent, even when it isn’t. Demands and questions were posed, and had to be addressed, in real time.

When we consider the specific demands of her job as Assistant to the Photo Editor, they seem equally quaint. No Internet means that photographs were physical artifacts, not virtual ones. Photographers who wished to submit their work did not have web sites to showcase their portfolios. They could not send links or attachments via e-mail. Photographs had to be hand-delivered or mailed to the magazine’s office (the same is true of music, books, and any other documents that couldn’t be faxed). A big part of Cathy’s job was meeting photographers in the lobby of the building to receive portfolios. Another was visiting the Bettmann Archive on West 57^th Street, Culver Pictures on West 22^nd, and other photo archives, to pick out images to be used in the magazine. If an article called for a picture of a tiger, for instance, a stock photo or other image (cartoon, drawing, painting) of a tiger had to be selected and physically obtained for use. Due to prior sloppy management of borrowed images, there was a large stockpile of photos and art at Interview’s offices that had been used but not yet returned to their owners; Cathy also was responsible for returning these images. Finally, she was in charge of securing costumes and props (usually hip brand items) to be used in original photo shoots. If a photo shoot about youth footwear required that a model wear a pair of X Brand sneakers, Cathy had to go out and collect a pair of X Brand sneakers, plus any other costume elements or props the model needed to wear, sit or stand on, et cetera, and deliver it to the shoot.

But who decided what these costumes and props were, and how? The Big Picture when it came to Interview, though, was that Interview was a Gatekeeper. The editors at magazines like Interview decided what was Cool. If you wanted your fashion statement, your band, your painting, your book, your café, to be Cool, you had to work through the established channels. You submitted your thing to a Gatekeeper and hoped it got favorable press. Usually, you had to pay a considerable sum of money, or cash in a sizable favor, just to get a mention, good or bad. Or, you hoped that someone who worked for a Gatekeeper like Interview (or Elle, or Entertainment Weekly, or Buzz, or any of the many other Gatekeeper publications[2]) would find you, because seeking out the Next Big Thing was their job. My friend Mike Berry, who ran a California lifestyle magazine called Citizen in 1994-95, remembers, “[H]ow did we find out [about what was cool]? We went to a lot of clubs and parties and talked to a lot of DJs and dancers...and talked to high school kids.” That was how Cool came about.

But the important thing to remember is that Cool did not just, in most cases, “come about.” Cool was (and is) created, or manufactured, and that means that somebody—the Gatekeeper—has to decide whether this person, place, or thing is Cool or not, and then that person, or that person’s superior, has also to decide whether it is Cool enough to merit inclusion in the very limited and expensive space of this month’s issue.

This is not to say that any given Gatekeeper publication or institution is inherently bad. It is just that experience is very large; no one person can winnow through everything that there is and decide for himself what is Cool and what is not. There is simply too much. We must trust someone to take on the responsibility of narrowing the choices and making informed decisions about what is more and less interesting. What Gatekeeping was, pre-Internet, was undemocratic, at least for the most part. It takes a lot of capital—money, talent, technology and infrastructure—to publish a lifestyle magazine or broadcast a lifestyle show on TV or radio.[3] So to undemocratic we can add maybe ponderous. The Gatekeeper drags its heavy, slow seine net indiscriminately through the popular culture. But the net is broad, too, and it picks up much more than one person acting alone could, and that is a large part of its value.

Next time: Twilight of the Gatekeepers. The spectrum of Cool: Mainstream to Underground.

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[1] When I Googled these slogans, I had a hard time finding a reference to their original attribution.

[2] Interesting quote from the L.A. Times, 12/27/90: “The 1980s were boom years for magazines. More than 3,000 new titles sprang from the giddy era of celebrity worship….The 1990s are quickly shaping up as a distinctly different era. Advertising revenues are following the economy into the toilet, and celeb fixation may be waning as well. Meanwhile, magazines seem to be folding as fast as they were sprouting only a few years back.” This was immediately due to a sagging economy, but the rise of the Internet would ensure that the magazine business never really made a full recovery.

[3] The exceptions to this rule, of course, are the small DIY ‘zines, which generally tried to be very egalitarian, but were limited in most instances by lack of capital (and also interest) to only very minor spheres of influence, both socially and geographically.

Slow Cool: Pop Culture Before the World Wide Web, Part III

More Media. Books, Movies, and Peers.

Read Part I. Read Part II.

Before I begin this section, a word about what I mean by “the Cool.” I feel I should emphasize that I’m not necessarily talking about just alternative music (although that’s been my main topic so far), or film, or fashion, or any other particular category of the arts and entertainment, although of course these are all huge parts of what is Cool. The Cool also includes information in general—information that is current, that is pertinent, that has a lasting effect on the development of your self-image, your personal philosophy and style, and your perception of the world around you. This is broad and weakly defined, I know. Your knowledge of Cubism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the works of Simone de Beauvoir, e.g., may have (and probably should have) a far more profound influence on your world-view and sense of style than does the latest Maroon 5 album.

With that said, I turn my attention to the flip side of student radio: public radio. Not everybody had access to public radio; like college radio, it required being in or near a large city or college town. If you did not live in a place that met either of those criteria, as Cathy did not until she graduated from high school, you were SOL. I was more fortunate: my public radio station growing up was WBEZ Chicago. WBEZ carried the standard array of NPR news and current-events-related programming, and in the evenings it featured some of the country’s best jazz programming. (Sadly, WBEZ has recently dropped its jazz lineup, a loss that brought actual tears to my eyes when I heard about it even though I don’t live in the Chicago radio market anymore.) Plus, on Friday nights, Georges Collinet and Afropop Worldwide, along with other world music shows. Hard bop, reggae, blues, and all the other musical styles WBEZ regularly showcased were (and still are) pretty hard to come by on the airwaves; I was very fortunate to have this education in the history of the Cool (not to mention “The Birth of the Cool”!) so readily available. In other markets, public radio stations tended toward classical music, another format that you rarely see succeed in commercial radio.

Public radio brought another gift to its host community besides music that could be found nowhere else. In-depth reportage and news analysis—as opposed to mere headline reporting (in Chicagoland we had WBBM for that)—which was not found anywhere else on radio, and only on PBS and CNN on television[1]. In the summer of 1987, NPR broadcast the Congressional hearings into the Iran-Contra affair, with commentary, which I listened to nearly constantly—driving in the car, mowing the lawn, smoking dope and drinking beer with my friends, it was for me the constant background conversation of the summer of my seventeenth year. And while an often tedious and dry Congressional hearing may not be considered the height of Cool, it was a vital part of my political education. More to the point, it bears mentioning that, unlike in today’s world, where we are virtually drowning in Web-driven political reporting, analysis, and commentary, there were few forums for this kind of coverage and analysis to take place in real time. Yes, Newsweek and Time and U.S. News & World Report were providing weekly analysis, and of course the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and a few other dailies were providing extensive coverage and analysis, but you had to wait until the next day to get it. But, for all intents and purposes, real-time commentary was the exclusive domain of public radio, public television, and CNN.[2]

Not content merely to be the gatekeepers of our musical tastes, Rolling Stone and Spin were also conduits of out-of-the-mainstream political and social news, along with Utne Reader and The Nation and Mother Jones and Harper’s, to name a few.[3] These magazines, like national newspapers, had to be purchased at the newsstand, or subscribed to, or read at the local library, if the local library subscribed to these publications[4]. No one worried about going bankrupt because of competition from free online media. It didn’t exist.

Need I even comment on the traditional market outlets of physical media—the record store, the bookstore, the library? You either had one nearby, or you didn’t. In a small to midsize city in the Midwest, you probably did (though Cathy’s hometown of Peru didn’t), but the quality and quantity of their offerings generally left much to be desired. You could of course order things a store didn’t have, from the store (often sight unseen) but it was far less convenient than today’s simple expedient of ordering from Amazon.com and having items delivered to your home. When I worked at such a small-town bookstore in the summer of 1989, I remember how, once a week, we would get a package of microfiches (!) from each of our wholesale distributors (we had 2 regular and one specialty-order distributor, I seem to recall; we did not deal in academic or other special-interest works; we were a retail chain bookstore). These were the catalogs from which we placed our weekly and special orders. If someone came into the store to special-order a book, the ‘fiche is how we found out if it was obtainable, and this was where we found the ISBN, order number, and price. There were actually three sets of ‘fiches for each warehouse: listings by TITLE, AUTHOR, and SUBJECT. SUBJECT was not a good way to try to find a book: if the customer did not have specific title or author information, that was a problem. If we found it, it took at least a week to get in, and the customer had to return to the store to pick it up. If he didn’t pick it up, we ate the book. The whole process was a pain in the ass.

Some of the highlights of my youth were trips taken into Chicago to bookstores and record stores. You took a list with you that you had been compiling for months of things you wanted to buy. Cool stuff often had to be sought; sometimes it was found accidentally through the process of foraging. If you wanted that translation of Camus or Turgenev or Nietzsche—God help you if it was out of print or only available through an obscure press—be prepared to spend an afternoon in the dusty stacks of Powell’s in Hyde Park. If you wanted a VHS copy of, say, 200 Motels or Fantastic Planet, or if you wanted Grateful Dead bootlegs or Joy Division imports (on cassette or vinyl, natch), or a T-shirt with Charles Manson on it, you had to physically find it, usually at little-known, hole-in-the-wall places, which finding brought with it a sense of accomplishment. Maybe while you were foraging for whatever it was you were looking for, you would find something else, and it would be Cool. You would buy it, and take it home, and share it with your friends, and it would be like a private joke among you and maybe a few other people. And that was a big part of what was Cool: it was an in-joke, but not too in.

There was a larger word-of-mouth component to learning about what was Cool, it seems. Maybe even more importantly, you had to be there, on-site, wherever on-site was: the party, the concert, the table in the cafeteria where the kids who had siblings in college sat. This was trickle-down Cool: in high school, if you had a brother or sister and/or friend who was in college and/or lived in a big city, that was where you learned about Cool. A friend told me a story about how she was dating a guy who wore a hoodie that she thought looked stupid. Then she found out that her boyfriend had learned about these hoodies from his brother, who was in college and wore one. Subsequently, my friend no longer thought her boyfriend’s hoodie was stupid-looking; in fact, she openly bragged about his excellent fashion sense.

High school lockers were the original MySpace pages. You could tell much about a person from how they decorated the inside of their locker, and the lockers of people who were thought to be “in the know” about bands were popular attractions. The admission will date me, but I remember learning about U2 in late 1984 from Katie Mulrenan, who was a senior when I was a freshman and treated me as sort of a mascot: she had the cover art from War and a picture of Bono culled from some magazine taped up in her locker; The Unforgettable Fire had just come out and almost nobody in Indiana had heard of U2 yet[5]. As anyone who knew me then will tell you, U2 became my favorite band and remained so throughout my high school years. Another measure of Cool: the little buttons, or badges, featuring the names and visages of one’s favorite bands, that many kids wore on their jackets or pinned to their bookbags (I myself had many festooning my jean jacket). The frequency of a band’s appearances on cool persons’ badges was in almost inverse proportion to their mainstream popularity, but any such band was worth investigating. And by reading the constellation of bands on a cool person’s badges—The Clash, Sex Pistols, U2, Squeeze, Ministry, The Cure, XTC, Depeche Mode—one could quite accurately identify their subculture[6].

And finally, there was independent (or sometimes merely “unscreened in Indiana”) film, which you tended to find out about in a number of mutually reinforcing ways. Example: in the late fall of 1986, I would hear a review and interview with the director of the film River’s Edge on WBEZ, read another review of the film in Rolling Stone the follow week, and proceed to forage for it, rent it on VHS, watch it, and tell every one of my friends about it. Another hot film of the time, Sid and Nancy, I read about first in Rolling Stone; then my friends Colby and Lisa insisted that I watch it with them; since they were older and thus hipper than I was (plus Colby had a sister in college), I pretended that I hadn’t heard of it and was watching it solely on the basis of their imprimatur. We watched it and found it good. We told our friends. A similar process led me to Repo Man, Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Swimming to Cambodia, Talk Radio…. In college, of course, you also had campus screenings of art films, and a newly acquired circle of friends (from whom, in fact, I learned about 200 Motels and Fantastic Planet).

The main thing about this process of research and serendipitous discovery was that it seemed impossibly slow and toilsome and chancy—dependent upon being in a particular place, often at a particular time.

More in the next installment.

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[1] PBS and CNN were also limited markets: PBS, like public radio, was far from ubiquitous; cable news also was less widespread then than now, and was still in its early days, having had only a handful of big stories under its belt by this time (the Challenger disaster comes first to mind).

[2] And of course, for good or ill, there was no public commentary on the issues of the day, no chat rooms or comment fields. The only places the average person could get his two cents in were local call-in radio and the Letters to the Editor page of the local newspaper, and both (like their modern counterparts, but more so) were notoriously the haunts of cranks and crackpots.

[3] Strange that music magazines would carry serious political journalism by the likes of William Greider, P.J. O’Rourke, Tom Wolfe, and William T. Vollmann, and interviews with world leaders. But there you have it: they did.

[4] Or read on the toilet at the house of a friend whose parents subscribed, which was how my life-long relationship with Harper’s began.

[5] Indiana learned about most trends terribly late, something that I gather doesn’t happen much anymore, thanks to the Internet. Forgive us. We had no way of knowing any better.

[6] An amusing side note: on a recent trip to Harvard campus, I noticed that a popular bookstore was selling very similar badges, only with the names of well-known authors—Lorrie Moore, James Tiptree, Philip K. Dick, etc.

Slow Cool: Pop Culture Before the World Wide Web, Part II

Radio, TV, and the Music Press

Read Part I here.

So, how was news of the Cool transmitted back in the Eighties? Cathy and I vaguely remembered that radio played a big role in broadcasting what was Cool—not the pirate radio of Pump Up the Volume’s Hard Harry, but the local college station (if you had one), and the NPR affiliate wherever you lived (if there was one). One of the hippest jobs you could have as a young person (even hipper than a job at a record store) was at the local college radio station, because you got free demos and singles from indie record companies and heard new bands before anyone else did, and that put you (and anyone you shared your finds with) ahead of the curve. Indie bands could be a tricky proposition if you didn’t know somebody who worked at a radio station or record store, because you couldn’t readily listen to what you were buying before you bought it[1], and imports (i.e., Cool music) which was mostly what my friends and I bought, were not cheap. Thus we learned by expensive trial and error that Hoodoo Gurus were not to our liking but Hüsker Dü were; that we liked the Minutemen much better than the Meatmen. So it was important to have access to the music itself. The mix tape ruled. That was how you got your friends to check out new songs. It was free (for the listener, anyway), but it was time-consuming and effortful to make.

Cathy worked at DePauw’s student radio station, WGRE, 91.5 FM, a station with an alternative rock format—the only station within receiving radius that had such a format. When the station decided to change to a classic rock format—their (laughable on the face of it) rationale was that they could compete with similarly formatted stations in Indianapolis, 50 miles away—Cathy protested playing the latest Tom Petty hit. “This is a college radio station,” she told the station manager, “and what we do here is important.” She gave up her prime time slot and moved to the midnight to 3 a.m. slot on Sunday night, so she could play what she wanted. Meanwhile, 30 miles to the north at Wabash College, my best friend and roommate[2] had the most envied music collection on campus, because he worked for Wabash’s alternative radio station, WNDY Crawfordsville, and he was systematically pilfering almost every new CD that came in. When WNDY toyed with the idea of programming changes, he quit too. And 30 miles to the north of us, at WCCR, Purdue’s student radio station, other friends kept me in the loop about the music they were playing. At the time, few things seemed more important.

You may ask: “Where was TV in all of this?” Simple. TV was a wasteland, even cable: MTV shilled mostly mainstream shit;[3] VH1, even far more than Rolling Stone, was all about your parents’ music.[4] Television labored under the presumption that there was still some remaining “Mass Market,” some majority group of people with a united set of consumption habits, tastes, and cultural assumptions that could be marketed to as one lot, when in fact this concept of a unified culture has been dead since—depending on whose assessment you favor—either 1959, 1965, 1980, or, as this amusingly clueless early web huckster/marketer asserts, 1995. Simply put, TV didn’t catch up to pop culture until after the advent of the Web as a social force, and it still struggles.

At the national level, the magazines Rolling Stone (which was, let’s face it, your daddy’s counterculture magazine) and Spin (which was newer and marketed to Gen X) were must-reads for information about music and movies, particularly alternative rock and independent film. In the area of hip-hop, Vibe was also an important magazine with broad distribution[5]. But there was a problem. Thanks to the amazing number of subgenres of alternative music and culture spinning off from the mainstream, Spin and Rolling Stone and Vibe were already having serious trouble giving meaningful purchasing recommendations to all of the various fans of the different subgenres that made up their readerships. So in the example I gave above, where a curious but cash-strapped consumer is trying to decide between Hoodoo Gurus and Hüsker Dü, or between the Minutemen and the Meatmen, Rolling Stone and Spin gave all four records great reviews. They also gave the new Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, A-ha, and Bruce Springsteen albums glowing reviews (well, at least Rolling Stone did). That’s no help.

And so other, mostly DIY (that’s Do-It-Yourself), regional, local, and specialty-scene magazines sprung up—fanzines, devoted to happenings in different towns, or within different special-interest crowds.[6] But these ‘zines tended to be, well, unprofessionally produced to say the least, and not widely distributed, and their editorial policies left much to be desired, and—let’s face it—they were not terribly consistent overall[7]. But they were hugely important, if for no other reason than that the indie record companies that produced and distributed the music that the college radio stations played had themselves, by and large, sprung from these fanzines (like Sub Pop) or, in a few cases, from independent alternative record stores (like Wax Trax!) that held to the same kinds of idiosyncratic views and standards as the local ‘zines.

Next time: more on the media, news, and marketing.

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[1] Which is to say, there was no file-sharing, no listening to samples on Amazon.com, no band web sites, no little headphone stations at record stores where you could listen to any piece of music on the shelves.

[2] (Name redacted to protect the guilty.)

[3] Although MTV did try, especially in the Eighties and very early Nineties, to stay with (if not ahead of) the curve, and even helped a few relatively unknown acts to gain wider exposure (their rotation of the minimalist video for The Replacements’ “Bastards of Young” comes to mind). MTV also recognized that the so-called “Mass Market” that had existed in popular music since the 1950s (and even longer in other areas of media culture) was breaking up into an archipelago of smaller niche markets—hip-hop/rap, heavy metal, synth-pop, Goth, New Wave, etc—all of which were publicly accessible and widely disseminated in a way that early punk, for example, was not. In the echo chamber that is the popular consciousness, MTV both programmed (a bit ham-handedly) according to the dictates of these sub-markets (MTV Raps!, Headbangers’ Ball, 120 Minutes), and by so doing also helped these newly developing subdivisions congeal. Within a few years though, as Jack Black’s character in School of Rock demonstrated, it would take a professional taxonomer to sort out all the various subgenres of popular music.

[4] And now it’s about my music. My music qualifies as “oldies.” Somebody find me a rope.

[5] And I admit with some chagrin that I am neglecting major discussion of Vibe only because I personally didn’t listen to much hip-hop music until 1989 or so, and even then, most of the information I got was word-of-mouth.

[6] The DIY magazines Riot Grrrl and Bikini Kill in the Pacific Northwest are a great example of fanzines devoted to a serious specific cause or set of causes (here, third-wave feminism), but fanzines could be about frivolous or over-the-top topics—one case in point being the backlash ‘zine Die, Evan Dando, Die!, written by and for people who hated Evan Dando of the Lemonheads.

[7] You know, like most fan/enthusiast-produced DIY material on the Web today. The big difference is that the Web-based content doesn’t depend on a great deal of physical equipment or physical effort to produce and distribute. More (much more) on the overwhelming physicality of the pre-Internet universe in an upcoming installment.

Slow Cool: Pop Culture Before the World Wide Web, Part I

Introduction

This all begins with a very important, and very personal, story: In the late summer of 1990 (I time I can scarcely believe is more distant from today than Woodstock was from the day I graduated high school) a young woman named Cathy Day and I each got on separate airplanes and flew from our home state of Indiana, where we were both enrolled at small liberal-arts colleges—she at DePauw University and I at Wabash College—to New York City. Each of us had decided to take apprenticeships in the arts through a program that placed college students from the Midwest in unpaid jobs in galleries and theaters, at recording studios, and, as in our cases, at magazines and publishing houses. It was our study-abroad semester, Cathy likes to joke, because when you’re from Indiana, Manhattan may just as well be Paris or Nairobi. So she took on her job as an editorial intern at Interview magazine, and I tackled my job as a research assistant and go-fer for a literary biographer. We lived in the same building, a townhouse in Chelsea that had been converted into a makeshift dorm for the forty-odd Midwestern arts apprentices the program sponsored. We became friends, though we never dated. Within a few months of the end of our apprenticeships and return to Indiana, we had fallen out of touch. In 1990, there was no e-mail, no Internet, at least for any practical purposes—we weren’t meteorological researchers or defense contractors, after all—and thus no practical, cheap, and easy way to keep in touch with all one’s acquaintances. And so it would take almost eighteen years and a chance occurrence for Cathy and I to meet again. A year and four weeks after that meeting, we were married. Sweet story.

Fast-forward to now. Recently, my wife and I caught the last half-hour of a movie that we had both seen when it came out in 1990, when we were in New York: Pump Up the Volume, with Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis, about an intelligent but shy teen who transfers from the freethinking East Coast to a conservative high school in Arizona. After setting up a short-wave ham radio, he goes on the air as anti-conformist pirate DJ Hard Harry and encourages students to think for themselves and (gasp) question authority. Predictably, ruction and tumult ensue, and Hard Harry’s example inspires a virtual cottage industry of pirate radio among his peers. Not the greatest film, to be sure, but it had struck a chord with both of us at the time it came out, and even now, as we chuckled over the movie’s goofy ending, it caused us to wonder aloud about what technology had caused to happen between then and now.

For one thing, internships in the publishing industry are far different: so much time-consuming, mindless drudgery can be accomplished almost effortlessly now, thanks to the Internet and other advances in home computing and telecommunications.[1] But to us, the more interesting questions about the difference between life then and life now boil down to: How did we communicate with each other, before the World Wide Web? How did we find out about what was COOL, pre-Internet? And more broadly, if you happened to live in a benighted, culturally backward place like Indiana, how and where did you learn about culture and the life of the mind in general?

The short answer is that things were slower, and much more effortful, and involved much more physical stuff.

Next time: breaking it down—the long answers.

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[1] Though not all of it. A research intern’s archival forays are much the same as they were in 1990, as Cathy has been discovering lately while researching her next book, although the laptop and digital photography speed things along somewhat. As for magazine interns, my best information is that they now hold the once-paid positions of the people who used to supervise the unpaid interns, whose work, aside from making coffee and licking boots, is now mostly automated.

I Will Not Be A Statistic!

Estimated percentage of all existing blogs that have not been updated in four months : 94 (Source: Technorati [San Francisco], via Harper's Index, August 2009).

New entry coming soon. No later than Friday. Save the date.