Let me set the scene. You are on the bus with a particular individual with whom, to make it interesting, you highly admire and perhaps even harbour some romantic feelings towards. Hypothetically speaking you plug your headphones into your iPhone and start to jam out, which probably explains why this person isn’t picturing exuding romantic vibes in return so thankfully for your sake this is all hypothetical. So anyways this desirable person who now finds you hypothetically anti-social starts to look through your iTunes library. Your reaction?
PANIC. You think to yourself, “Ohmigod this person is gonna see that I have the entire Nickleback discography on my phone. They’ll see that Mambo Number 5 is my most played song. Oh gosh even your playlists are a source of embarrassment with titles such as ‘Kick-Ass Cardio Mix’ and ‘I’m All Alone’ which consists solely of songs by Adele and Bon Iver”. Fight or flight response instantly kicks in following this internal monologue and you immediately snatch your iPhone back and insist that you haven’t updated you iTunes “since like high school”.
This phenomenon is a result of what Storey refers to in last week’s reading from Chapter 3 as “popular discrimination” (p.52), And we’ve all experienced it one time or another.
Storey defines “popular discrimination” as the critique that while most high culture is good, “some popular culture is also good” ( p.52). Popular Culture theorists Hall and Whannel pursue the ideal that taste can be taught to an extent and that “a training of discrimination” is not to be looked at as dividing pop culture into categories of good and bad but seeing the “difference in value” between, for example, Mozart vs. Bryan Adams. The two artists had different limits and goals when creating their music but they both created nonetheless.
This form of discrimination is all around us, especially college-aged kids who have very few tools to increase our social status. I believe taste in pop culture, at the moment and through-out 20-something-year-old-history, has been a vicious marker of those with elite taste and the bottom-feeders. The Beatles are a staple of any music enthusiast’s repertoire, while boy bands to many people’s chagrin are making an impression comeback. Only now they’ve swapped tear-away track pants for half sleeves and Harry Styles. However one cannot ignore the simple fact that both have girls fainting at concerts, screaming at the top of their lungs and breaking into hotels to meet the band. Just wait until our grandkids think that those 5 boys who auditioned for that reality TV show back in the early 2000s are the epitome of Classic Rock. Is it really all relative or are some of your cursing me for even attempting to compare the two such bands in the first place? Don’t be so prejudice.
Just remember folks you read this blog before it was cool
-kc