I like reading a lot of books on my Kindle, I take it everywhere I go if I can because you just never know if you're gonna need to read something while stuck on the train or a bus. And I read some pretty interesting stuff if I don't say so myself. One of these books was We Want Some Too by Hal Niedzviecki. It was written in the early 2000s, but it was pre-viral internet, there was not nearly as big a self publishing, indie DIY presence through the internet that there is now. No social media either. Also MTV was still relevant at the time of writing.
But to discount the message this book has because of how it's aged is to ignore certain basic truths about the nature of media, and "lifestyle culture" as the book puts it. Lifestyle culture as defined by this book is essentially the mutation of the real lives of young people yearning to be part of something bigger than themselves, to contribute to the culture, to be like the people on TV. Consumerism and a desire to buy into celebrity and mass culture was there even pre-internet, but I think that the ways mass culture works now has been so splintered by the internet that any attempt to heal the wounds of the mutilated mass culture, and young people now are far apart from each other in the different groups of what people are fans of. There's fandoms now, not subcultures, that people belong to.
There's Homestuck fans, The Most Popular Girls In School fans, Disney fans, Sherlock fans, Girls fans, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com fans, Webcomic and Webseries fans, there's now a mixture of both corporate and web based counter cultural fandoms that meld together on Tumblr, posting GIF images featuring their favourite quotes from TV shows and movies they love, and share with others who also love these media bites of a larger whole. On Tumblr you can often find yourself alone if you're not part of the same fandoms that the cool kids are part of, which is not unlike the tale of the Tarzan obsessive collector from We Want Some Too who is isolated by his distinct fandom because so few others share that fandom because other fandoms are more popular.
This book was written at a time where young people's popular culture barely made reference to the internet, whereas now you can't escape it, the very people this book is telling who yearned for a way to get their voice out there, and possibly become viral, got what they wanted, at least I think so. Maybe not. I certainly don't know what it takes for something to become a viral hit, and most of the stuff that does become viral doesn't appeal to me all that much. Psy's Gangnam Style is a notable exception because the success of that song awakened the awesome market forces of the K-Pop industry, with this breakout hit that struck a chord with people around the world without anybody even understanding the lyrics, it was the shock of the new, the sound of now, Asia seems to be having a renaissance of cultural content breaking out in the West even as Japan's output like anime is sagging in popularity due to a tendency for the animation industry there to pander to local otaku instead of casual and foreign fans who might find the cultural tendencies towards otaku fetishism of little girls to be uncomfortable and not what they're looking for in their entertainment. Rather than one Asian country dominating the visual and musical culture of the now, the stranglehold Japan had in the minds of the young seems to be fading and spreading out to the rest of Asia where their own voices, once feared to be trampled by monolithic Japanese culture elements, may get a chance to be heard once again.
Meanwhile in the West, long after this book was published, I heard on Twitter a little drabble where a notable webcomic artist was saying that the electric guitar is an extinct instrument, and heavy metal is the only genre of music where the instrument is still relevant. It's not an instrument of the young, whose music is now made by DJs and computers. Occasionally you get a middle class white college educated band whining about how their city needs a guitar based band to represent them, but the ship has sailed, the damage is done. Clinging to the guitar as a cultural mode of expression is about as useful to stemming the tide of new culture as only watching MTV Classic, which in Australia where I live is a channel that's still around and plays old music videos aiming for the nostalgia and hipster markets I imagine. The overwhelming whiteness of guitar based music in both indie pop and rock, rock and roll and heavy metal has been struggling under the burden of rap and hip hop, as well as K-Pop recently becoming far more relevant to young people raised in a much more ethnically and culturally diverse world. White people are in no danger of going away, that's just stupid, only the most hardened of Stormfront members would be bold enough to suggest that white people are going extinct.
What I'm saying is that European influences, such as France, Norway, Sweden, Britain, Ireland, Scotland, to a lesser extent Australia, are fading into the background for a while because right now is the time when hip hop, rap, R&B and electronic music have gained legitimacy, they've got cultural capital that's long overdue, and the idea of what counts as legitimate music is changing. The Grammy Awards have always had a hard snub of rap as a genre, but the people, white, black or anyone else have been exposed to it long enough that it's part of life, it's just there and to ignore it would be as foolhardy as ignoring the reality that a lot of people of multiple races play video games, or that Hollywood cinema isn't speaking to the common people due to a combination of remaking classic films rather than funding new, more racially diverse content as well as more roles for women in mainstream Hollywood pictures.
Which brings me to Lena Dunham's project with HBO, Girls, a show that I can't agree with on an ideological level, I used to have my problems with Brian Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim and the movie adapted from it due to a number of reasons including that I couldn't relate to characters who so easily throw away romantic relationships where I've struggled all my life to begin my first romance that wasn't one sided, but Girls makes Scott Pilgrim look like Menace II Society. None of the houses depicted in Girls look remotely like homes that regular blokes like me or regular women I know could afford, nor do they look particularly lived in, they look like aspirational show homes rather than abodes that people live, work, play and sweat in every day of their lives. For a supposedly Bohemian show, it's very slick, polished and manufactured to appeal to the fantasy of what its fanbase wants to live as their lives rather than what I could on any level deem reality. Lena Dunham clearly wants to be the voice of a generation but when she spends a lot of episodes as do other characters romancing wealthy and culturally powerful older men with much more clout and influence than they do, I'm forced to wonder whether Dunham is being honest that she's portraying the reality of what twenty something women are these days versus what they wish they could be. Say what you will about Twilight, it's garbage, but it's very honest in what it's trying to achieve.
Mass culture, although splintered, is still around, and the internet has not completely replaced it. It does however, provide some form of escape from what society showers with mainstream and financial success, for sometimes it is undeserving.
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