I read a piece in sound on sound the other day which appeared to have been written by me (though it wasn’t) it does however convey to a great degree my thinking on the current state of ‘popular culture’ in the early part of the 21st century. For example when scanning music online, listening to new artists recommended by the so called professional filters, watching new films, TV, reading new so called difficult works etc… it’s difficult not to think that there is actually a versificator with some media hipster zombie working overtime putting in components from past decades and churning out new works to pacify the proles.

Theodor Adorno postulated that capitalism fed people with the products of a ‘culture industry’ the opposite of ‘true art’ to keep them passively satisfied and politically apathetic ‘supine listeners’ in other words. He further suggested that the culture industries churn out a debased mass of unsophisticated, sentimental products which have replaced the ‘more’ difficult and critical art forms which might lead people to actually question social life. Sound familiar?

I think that there are artists out there way way out in the so called and long tail (a proposition that has been discredited by some academics) producing new works that actually challenge and of course mass culture does occasionally gives us programming that engages (The Wire for example) but they are the exceptions and generally they attract limited exposure. Fundamentally the more difficult work is just not making it through the vapid, moronic, derivative and re constituted toss that populates the mass media; I for one though will continue to look.