{"id":11653,"date":"2011-10-17T08:58:09","date_gmt":"2011-10-17T12:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=11653"},"modified":"2011-10-17T10:02:00","modified_gmt":"2011-10-17T14:02:00","slug":"nostalgia-for-the-monoculture-that-never-was","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/10\/17\/nostalgia-for-the-monoculture-that-never-was\/","title":{"rendered":"Nostalgia for the monoculture that never was"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steven Hyden<\/a> points out that waxing nostalgic for a mythical time when “we” had a monoculture is farcical:<\/p>\n

\n

Like Tour\u00e9, I get nostalgic for the monoculture. It certainly seems like an alluring idea. The monoculture reinforces the belief that what we as critics spend so much time thinking about really is a central part of the way our society lives and breathes. Otherwise it might be hard to believe in the primacy of pop music when millions of people are out of work and our government is crippled by deep systemic dysfunction. But the best thing (or the worst thing, if you\u2019re writing a think piece) about the monoculture is that it exists safely in the past, where it can live on in our imaginations as a mythical place where, as Tour\u00e9 recently wrote in Salon<\/em>, \u201can album becomes so ubiquitous it seems to blast through the windows, to chase you down until it\u2019s impossible to ignore it\u201d — an all-powerful communal unity that comments on the shortcomings of the present.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll remember going back to my junior high school that afternoon and talking about the video with all of my classmates. We knew instantly that \u201cSmells Like Teen Spirit\u201d signaled the dawn of a new era in pop music; it expressed our joys and fears, and pointed the way to a new future. We pledged to commit all the details of this moment (sorry, Moment) to memory, so that when our children asked us what it was like When The World Changed Forever, we would be able to pass down the tale.<\/p>\n

Oh, wait a second: It didn\u2019t happen that way at all.<\/p>\n

Yes, I saw \u201cSmells Like Teen Spirit\u201d video over lunch, but nobody seemed to know who Nirvana was when I got back to school. It wasn\u2019t like my friends could just punch up the video on their iPhones after I told them about it; the clip was in heavy rotation on MTV, but you still had to watch the channel for an hour or two (and at certain times of the day) to see it. Once my classmates did see it, a number of them purchased \u201cNevermind,\u201d as I did. But many of them didn\u2019t. Some preferred Pearl Jam. Some liked N.W.A.\u2019s \u201cNiggaz4life.\u201d Some didn\u2019t care about music at all; they\u2019d rather play Tecmo Bowl. Then there were the millions and millions of Americans who bought Garth Brooks\u2019 \u201cRopin\u2019 the Wind,\u201d the best-selling album of 1991. If anything, that<\/em> was the album that we as a culture were united behind — it sold 14 million copies, though I never heard it once blasting through people\u2019s windows.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steven Hyden points out that waxing nostalgic for a mythical time when “we” had a monoculture is farcical: Like Tour\u00e9, I get nostalgic for the monoculture. It certainly seems like an alluring idea. The monoculture reinforces the belief that what we as critics spend so much time thinking about really is a central part of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,13],"tags":[200,45,101],"class_list":["post-11653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-usa","tag-music","tag-nostalgia","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-31X","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11653"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11656,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11653\/revisions\/11656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}