The Wrath of the Masses

While reading a chapter of Excursions in World Music (2017) that was assigned for my music in world cultures class, I stumbled upon a sentence that struck me as a self-contradictory truth about Western, and more specifically North American, culture:

North Americans often understand music as a commodity produced by specializing artists. Interestingly, the two elements in play—commodification and specialization—do not always mesh smoothly. For they are associated with two different, and sometimes opposing ways of valuing. From an economic perspective, it is financial success that is esteemed, whereas from a specialist or professional perspective, it is artistic excellence that is measured. Producers of commodities are expected to make music with a wide appeal, whereas artists are supposed to make music that evidences talent and craft and pursues excellence. These ends are not always the same (Dueck 486).

I would argue further that this tug-of-war between commercialism and craft is present not just in North American music but almost every aspect of Western entertainment.

I’ve always been aware of this phenomenon. In 2014, I wrote a young adult novel that essentially personified the idea of “selling out.” In the book, I argued that embracing authenticity is to be valued above appealing to a wide range of people. But I was seventeen when I wrote that novel, and now I’m twenty. If college has taught me anything about the apparent evils of selling out to the mainstream, it’s that the yin-and-yang dichotomy between artistic integrity and commercial appeal is not as simple as it may initially seem.

People value originality. It’s this originality and scorn for mainstream culture that allowed fans of the alternative rock band Radiohead to digitally download the band’s seventh album In Rainbows, naming their own prices, and for the band to still make a profit. Radiohead seems to have found the perfect balance between being true to themselves and still catering to a large and dedicated fanbase. Yet a simple Google search will turn up thousands of complaints of alienated former fans, unhappy with the new electronic direction the band took in the early 2000s, who want nothing more than for Radiohead to return to their roots of distorted guitar shredding and angsty vocals. As an avid fan of Radiohead’s older music, I sympathize with the naysayers, but I can also imagine what people might be saying now if, instead of releasing the groundbreaking Kid A, the band had instead released six more reincarnations of The Bends. It seems that, in a culture that wants artistic output to be both universally likable and “true-to-oneself,” society will find a way to crucify anyone who can’t transcend that contradiction.

George Lucas is someone whose failure to produce content that is both high-quality and commercially successful has cost him his reputation. With the release of The Phantom Menace, The Attack of the Clones, and, to a lesser extent, The Revenge of the Sith, Lucas alienated many of the most avid Star Wars fans, with some people going as far as to say that the prequel trilogy ruined the original trilogy. What is most interesting, however, is that people cannot seem to agree on what Lucas intended by adding the three infamous films to his saga. Was it a money-grabbing move that abandoned artistic integrity in order to improve merchandising? Or was Lucas simply fulfilling his artistic vision, unconcerned with whom he offended in the process? These hypotheses are completely at odds with each other yet both equally plausible. As a young fan of Star Wars, I preferred the second explanation, but as an adult, it’s hard for me to see how Jar Jar Binks fits into Lucas’s artistic vision, or to reconcile his decision to quite literally sell out to Disney with my belief that “selling out” was the last thing Lucas intended.

In a roundabout way, that brings us back to where we started, and the most pertinent question is still to be answered: Why does any of this matter? Why should someone care what an artist decides to do with the product he or she creates? Why do we continue to consume an entertainment commodity while spouting our unwarranted opinion that it’s complete drivel? I think it’s because we, as consumers, somehow feel like artists owe us something. In a sense, they do, because in order for a creative force to gain any financial momentum, he or she must first garner a respectable fanbase, but the choice to consume and to continue consuming is on us. It always has been. We are trapped in a culture of impulse purchasing, mindless consumerism, and phony expertise, and that is where the contradiction lies. We couldn’t care less about “artistic integrity.” What is important in Western culture is that producers, artists, and entertainers continue to feed our solipsistic desires.

Is this a pessimistic view of the situation? Perhaps. After all, it's the desire to achieve the impossible—that is, to please everyone—that keeps artists creating. In a capitalistic society, every consumer market is quantified financially, and creative output is no exception. As with any other product, the market determines a piece of entertainment’s value. So the next time you consider berating Nickelback for essentially releasing the same single over and over again, appreciate the sheer marketing genius that has gone into that process and be thankful that the opposite—a dystopia of Milton Babbitt clones where nobody cares if anyone else listens—isn’t reality. In theory, everyone values artistic integrity, but in reality, nobody does.

So what’s the solution? De-monetizing the entertainment industry? Somehow that seems unlikely to solve the problem. But I would argue that this contradiction between idea and reality is not a problem but a necessary symptom of a healthy society. After all, artists appeal to a market, so to suggest that they should put no thought into what that market desires is foolish at best and a terrible business model at worse.

If you’ve read this far and are wondering why I still haven’t offered some groundbreaking plan—some method that allows artists to produce what they like, consumers to be satisfied, and neither to expect anything from the other, it’s because such a scenario does not exist. We all have different desires, ideas, and tastes, and that is why every consumer market, from mattresses to movies, is filled with diverse styles and genres. It appears that the only way to please everyone is for everyone to be the same. And that’s just far too boring, isn’t it?