Pop versus High Culture

[Teen Age Riot]

I'm not going to try to defend pop's status as THE voice of the plebes- 
it's too depressing.  After all, most of pop IS crap.  But where it gets 
interesting is when we try to separate what's "good" pop and "bad" pop.  
Sure, pop is built upon formulaic conventions concieved by Them, but its 
other natural characteristic is that it feeds off of itself- it can take 
yesterday's pop phenomenons, and the knee-jerk, sanitized emotions they 
trigger, and use them as the discretized building blocks of a new 
language, for a new phenomenon.  The question is whether or not this 
"metapop"(ugh) is still pop.  Well, I say it is.  It's just as likely to 
be cannibalized by the next wave of pop purveyors, and it never claims to 
be anything purer than its predecessors.

	Hey look, a good chunk of pop practitioners don't even consider 
what they do to be "art", let alone "high art".  What the marketing whizzes 
are, however, are experts at recognizing the effects handily symbolized by 
pop icons, and manipulating them for personal benefit.  And 
what the good pop *artists* do is manipulate these raw elements to 
construct meaningful art.  I can pick up on this in Lotion's music, 
the way they'll shamelessly steal riffs and stereotype genres(although 
it's been far more expertly done by other bands), and I can certainly 
feel this process at work in Pynchon's stuff.

Al
__________________________________________
al wang
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~alwang/home.htm
talk request at: alwang at random.resnet.upenn.edu

"What's My Solution?" 
"Noise Pollution!"
       -- Pop WILL Eat Itself