From the issue dated November 17, 2000
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Pop Culture's Lists, Rankings, and CriticsBy MICHAEL BERUBEOn my desk at home, next to my list of the 75 greatest love ballads of all time, there's a list of the 100 best novellas written since Goethe. Having been thwarted in my efforts to persuade the music-video channel VH1 to publish my list of the 10,000 best guitar solos in rock 'n' roll, I have turned my attention to smaller units of measure, in another medium -- heroic couplets. I hope to have completed my list of the 1,000 best heroic couplets by the end of the year, though Heaven knows, "In human works, tho' labour'd on with pain,/A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain." So says Alexander Pope, the No. 1 Augustan poet, in the 130th-finest heroic couplet ever written. I used to disdain such lists, thinking them fodder for the fatuous. To my weary ears, littérateurs who blathered on about the five greatest modern novels or the 10 most accomplished American writers under the age of 40 didn't sound appreciably different from my high-school friends who had once blathered on about the three best lead guitarists or the five most bitchin' drum solos. Such talk had been great for staging arguments about the relative merits of Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, and it had given my teenage friends and me something to do with all that excess testosterone sloshing around in our brain pans. But I came to doubt that the rankings game could serve any nobler purpose, and so, as I got older, I pretty much stopped talking in lists. But then Nick, my older son, turned 14 last spring and began compiling lists of his own. He's always had a keen aesthetic sense; even at the tender age of 8, he had derisively described the dreamy soft-rock group Mazzy Star as "just like Leonard Cohen" -- which he pronounced "Ko-han" -- "only worse." Now, however, he's an adolescent, and it's not enough to have an aesthetic sense or, for that matter, a decent working knowledge of college football. You have to have a list. A good part of Nick's enjoyment of the history of film and of rock music, it seems, consists precisely of efforts to understand popular culture in the manner of college-football rankings. In that, as in so much else, Nick is much more knowledgeable about the workings of popular culture than I am. Nick's adolescence was timed nicely for the arrival of the millennium, which gave us lists of everything that could possibly be enumerated: most-influential people, greatest historical events, worst weather disasters, most-significant inventions. Martin Luther, the cotton gin, Hurricane Camille, Jim Thorpe, the Gutenberg printing press, the Atlantic slave trade, the Six-Day War -- all available for your perusal, all sorted, filed, and ranked. And if ESPN's yearlong countdown of the 50 greatest athletes of the century didn't slake your thirst for millennial compilations, drop by my house and check out the issue of Sports Illustrated that informed Nick and me of the 50 greatest athletes ever to come out of our home state of Illinois (and the 50 greatest out of each of the other 49 states). Imagine the possibilities if the American Film Institute and the Modern Library had followed suit and broken down their famous, century-ending Top 100 lists by state: the 100 best comedies about Delaware, the 100 greatest works of nonfiction written by residents of Minnesota, the 100 finest 20th-century novels set in Mississippi (perhaps a Faulkner bibliography). That isn't quite as far-fetched as it may seem. VH1 has, in the past year, become a list industry unto itself, churning out compendiums of the 100 greatest rock songs, the 100 greatest groups, the 100 greatest male and female artists, the 50 greatest movie soundtracks, the 50 greatest rock moments ever televised, the 50 greatest chord progressions ever penned. All right, I made up the last item. But VH1 really does have a regular program called The List, on which various critics, musicians, gadflies, and celebrities tally their three favorite songs or performers or power ballads or big-hair metal bands (I am not making up any of those) and then seek to convince the studio audience of the cogency of their choices. What does it all mean? Well, for one thing, it's annoying. Not only because all these lists truly are fodder for the fatuous (and who but the fatuous knew that the fatuous were so many?), but also because they tend to disguise the fact that a great deal of popular culture isn't worth ranking or remembering at all. Day after day, Nick and I will be flipping through our 57 channels, or tuning in to commercial radio, only to find that Bruce Springsteen (the all-time No. 12 rock-anthem singer/songwriter, by the way) was right: "There's nothing on." Nick does help me to distinguish one mainstream band from another, so that I know my Everlast from my Everclear and don't confuse the Matchbox Dolls with the Sugar Blind 20 or Third Eye Goo Goo. But, for the most part, our conversations run like so: "How's this?" "Unadulterated pap." "OK, what about this?" "Mindless drivel." "This?" "Soul-crushing swill." "Maybe this?" "Self-indulgent flapdoodle." The really interesting thing about these exchanges is that Nick isn't always the one asking the questions; sometimes he's delivering the verdicts (although, I admit, he rarely uses the term "flapdoodle"). Nick is nearly as critical as I am -- if not about Eagle-Eye Cherry, whom he likes, then certainly about Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, 98°, 'N Sync, and the Backstreet Boys, whose music he justly refers to as "mass-produced, undifferentiated crap." That crap, I used to say in bygone years, back when I still disdained lists, is just the price you pay for culture. You want Goethe and Martha Graham and the Independent Film Channel? Fine, then you have to put up with 300 versions of Us magazine at the supermarket checkout. But as I approach the age of 40, I find myself less and less willing to tolerate the tradeoff. It could be my advancing years; I've checked out the actuarial tables and figured out that at least half my time is already up. Maybe I shouldn't waste the second half with reruns of Happy Days on Nick at Nite. Or it could be simply that last summer's movies were so unrelentingly God-awful, useful only for the reflection that the budget for any one of them would have provided a year's supply of clean water, antibiotics, and salade niçoise to every human being in sub-Saharan Africa. Either way, I knew that I had had enough of pop-culture crap on the day I forbade Nick to see one of those movies, on the grounds that it was indeed, without a doubt, from beginning to end, crap. "Define 'crap,'" said Nick, in intransigent-adolescent mode, as if we had never used the word before. "OK," I replied. "How about, 'turgid, voyeuristic, gratuitously violent, misogynist,' and if that doesn't do it, 'derivative' and 'unimaginative?'" That seemed to suffice, at least for the moment. But not long after, I began to realize why lists -- even the most trivial of them -- perform so many functions in popular culture. Take the imaginative and nonderivative recent film High Fidelity, starring John Cusack and adapted from Nick Hornby's 1995 novel. The narrator, Rob, is an early-30's, alternative-rock aficionado and record-store owner who seems to experience the world by means of Top 5 lists -- including the all-important list of his Top 5 most painful breakups. But Rob's lists, like those on VH1's The List, aren't self-explanatory. On the contrary, the real fun of a list -- and the intellectual labor -- is realized only when its creator has to explain and defend its rationale. That's where the allure of lists really lies, because, for impassioned devisers of Top 5's, the nakedly evaluative function of the list is underwritten by a mode of popular-culture criticism that is considerably more complex -- and more exegetical -- than the form of the Top 5 seems to suggest. If you want to argue with any of Rob's Top 5's -- or S.I.'s rankings of athletes or the A.F.I.'s rankings of movies -- you'd better come armed with some convincing exegeses of the texts in front of you. If you are going to argue that Babe Didrikson Zaharias was, in fact, a better athlete than Babe Ruth, for example, you've got to be prepared to argue for the virtues of the multisport athlete (and the pre-Title IX female athlete) over those of a man who utterly changed the national pastime even though he was never in very good physical shape. Of course, even the nakedly evaluative aspect of lists serves an immediate purpose: Obviously enough, people want and need to winnow the wheat from the crap. But that "obvious" observation has some interesting corollaries. First of all, although there are legions of crabs, cranks, and curmudgeons who proclaim that all popular culture is worthless garbage and/or responsible for crime, violence, short attention spans, and disrespect for elders, nobody who knows anything about popular culture has so simple a relationship to the stuff. Nobody says, "I just love all movies," or "I like pretty much every song I hear," or "I'm a fan of every sports team in existence." On the contrary, as Nick is gradually learning, developing the faculty of discrimination is part of the fun of immersing oneself in the popular -- which means, interestingly, that few fans of popular culture are wholly "immersed" in it. To be a really knowledgeable fan, in other words, you usually have to be a keen critic. Remember this the next time you're accosted by some meerschaum-chomping, muttonchop-wearing columnist for The New Criterion or the National Review: It's the people who can't stand popular culture who are truly indiscriminate. Just say to your muttonchop friend, "If you can't tell the difference between Poison and the Cure, don't waste my time with your worthless denunciations of what you call 'rock 'n' roll.'" The next corollary is important not for readers of The New Criterion, but for their opposite numbers, on the cultural left. Popular culture, even at its silliest and swilliest, is saturated with criticism. Academic modes of cultural criticism, by contrast, are rarely explicitly evaluative (and the exception of that famous outlier, Harold Bloom, only proves the rule). Though this aspect of academic criticism is usually ascribed to the pernicious relativism of postmodernism, it actually has a much more tangled and interesting history. It was not Stanley Fish, after all, but Northrop Frye who, in his 1957 book Anatomy of Criticism, derided evaluative criticism as so much "literary chit-chat." Such an approach may make "the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange," Frye said, but it has no place in properly professional literary criticism. (Included in his list of inappropriate modes of criticism, sure enough, are "all lists of the 'best' novels or poems or writers.") Barbara Herrnstein Smith's 1988 book, Contingencies of Value, actually tried to reintroduce evaluation as an explicit problem in literary studies, partly by arguing that evaluation is ubiquitous and inescapable. But that's not how most people have read her work; instead, people tend to say, "As Smith has shown, value is contingent, and that means we can't talk about it." In fact, she has argued that value is contingent and, therefore, we must talk about it. It's actually one of my Top 5 favorite things about Smith's book. Cultural-studies theorists, meanwhile, have widely adopted the model of "the intellectual as fan" -- which they've generally taken to mean that you need to establish the fact that you really, really like popular culture before you embark on any discussion of popular culture and its relationship to geopolitical hegemony. But such understanding of fans misses half of what fandom is all about -- namely, criticism. Although your average cultural-studies theorist would sooner go door-to-door for the World Trade Organization than admit this, one of the most important functions that the culture industries perform is to produce criticism of the cultural artifacts produced by the culture industries. Devising lists is one rather reductive, mechanical way to produce criticism, but the entertainment industry doesn't confine itself to VH1 or A.F.I. lists; it offers up, every day, rafts of critical readings, trenchant observations, and many, many warnings that the latest summer blockbuster is nothing but . . . why, self-indulgent flapdoodle. Normally, we academic critics, whether we read The New Criterion or New Formations, think of popular-culture criticism as little more than movie or TV reviews, and we tend to discount it as criticism. If you think of the E! channel or shows like Entertainment Tonight, you'll see why: Much of the reportage about the entertainment industry takes the form of celebration and gossip, so much so that it easily falls under the heading of "promotional material." But, as it happens, lots of smart people work in the entertainment industry, criticism division, and they're often better at evaluating contemporary popular culture than their academic counterparts are. And, because they tend to work for "popular" publications, they also tend to have some influence -- as most cultural-studies theorists do not -- on how popular culture is actually consumed by actual consumers. Take this quick read of Jurassic Park: "The worst thing about it is that the very idea of Jurassic Park, a place where eye-popping wonders are served up as a megabuck attraction, seems an obvious yet pointless metaphor for the commercialization of Steven Spielberg's empire. Since Hammond's [Hammond is the film's visionary entrepreneur/corporate mogul] toys and gizmos feature the same logo that's being used to sell the movie (and its many tie-in products), there's no way to separate Spielberg's 'satire' of marketing from the marketing itself." I've scanned many a work of what academics call "cultural studies" looking for punchy, keen wit like that. But it appeared in Entertainment Weekly, in Owen Gleiberman's review of the film. Entertainment Weekly? Isn't that one of those supermarket glossies, on the rack next to Us, People, and InStyle? Well, yes, but since its first issue, in 1990, E.W. has reviewed bajillions of movies, and the average grade it's given out (yes, it uses grades, not stars or thumbs) has been something like a C-plus. Let the professor with a more stringent grade scale throw the first stone. My own favorite one-paragraph piece of pop-cultural criticism (and yes, I'm working on my list of the Top 100) appeared not in E.W. or any other culture-industry glossy, but in the online magazine Salon, in a column by James Poniewozik. In a fascinating essay on, of all things, the neglect of the work of the German writer and cultural critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger by American practitioners of cultural studies, he describes Enzensberger's rebuttal of the argument that (as Poniewozik paraphrases it) "a 'National Entertainment State' is violently and irresistibly depriving us of free thought and volition." Poniewozik writes: "In 1988's 'The Zero Medium; or, Why All Complaints About Television Are Pointless,' Enzensberger concisely lays out and coolly demolishes four reading variations on that thesis, namely, that television 1) manipulates our opinions (a belief, he notes, equally attractive to the left and the right), 2) forces us to imitate immoral behavior, 3) destroys our ability to distinguish fantasy from fact, and 4) numbs our critical faculties. Enzensberger nails the condescension underlying these theories, deadpanning that their proponent either 'makes no use of the media at all, in which case he doesn't know what he's talking about; or he subjects himself to them, and then the question arises, through what miracle he has escaped their effects . . . unlike anyone else.'" Not bad, not bad at all. Yet for some reason, Poniewozik isn't an oft-cited figure in cultural studies, any more than Enzensberger or Gleiberman is. And where is this Poniewozik now, you ask? Why, writing for the very house organ of Conventional Wisdom, Time magazine, smack in the epicenter of the Mega-Merger Culture Industry Apparatus. You can buy Time in any supermarket. It's right next to Entertainment Weekly. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't evaluate Time, or Salon, or E.W., and it doesn't mean that we can't ask about such issues as the relationship of those publications to geopolitical hegemony. But it does mean that people who call themselves professional critics of popular culture should acknowledge that many millions of amateur critics of popular culture -- also widely referred to as "consumers" -- experience it partly by reading (and taking issue with) popular-culture criticism of popular culture. Sometimes that criticism takes the form of lists, sometimes it takes the form of grades, and sometimes it's so close to "promotional material" that it hardly merits the name of criticism. And sometimes, no doubt, it is just another form of self-indulgent flapdoodle. But it's an integral element of popular culture, and no one who aspires to produce valuable evaluations of popular culture should ignore it. About lists themselves I remain ambivalent. Having outgrown the language of lists and Top 5's and 10 Bests, I'm still not sure I'm ready to outgrow my outgrowing. But I've begun to learn to enjoy an important aspect of popular culture that's overlooked by conservative curmudgeons and cult-studies cliques alike: pop-culture criticism, brought to you by the hard-working critics employed by the Popular Culture Industry itself. Next summer's movies and teen-dream hit songs may be even worse than last year's, but Nick and I won't mind wading through the sludge -- not as long as we have our wits and our lists, and, more important, our savvy, discriminating pop-culture critics writing for their Web sites and their glossy magazines. Michael Bérubé is a professor of English and director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
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Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education