Popular culture is usually regarded as merely a weaker form of high culture in that it engages a less educated audience and so goes for simpler intellectual and emotional effects than does an audience prepared to deal with the difficulties in art and literature and music. It is all a matter of degree. I want to suggest a very different relation between the two. Popular and high culture are radically different in their nature in that high culture is self contained, each work a world of its own, however much criticism and footnotes can help supply the context for the work, while works of popular culture supply their own context, cluing the audience into where the work is placed within the society and how it is to be categorized in their minds. So sports events coverage will tell you that you are getting up and personal and broadcasters will allude to the events happening around them, as when a journalist will lead off an already written column with an allusion to what happened yesterday, while a “serious” essayists will hesitate before including a reference to what will soon be considered dated, such as what is today a vertually obligatory reference to Trump. A work of popular culture, such as the movie “Love Actually”, released in 2003, bears the tell tale sign of its time by referring to the fact that telephone calls on 9/11 were about love not hate or revenge and so to prove its point that love is all about us. A reference today to 9/11 would be unnecessary but at the time it was all but obligatory and clearly came readily to mind.
The methods by which popular culture recaptures its context and so successfully places itself in our past, are what we might call the structures of the moment, nostalgia and dramatic irony. Consider two radio broadcasts from 1938 by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra that have come to my attention recently.
The form of a late thirties radio broadcast of an orchestra with a regular time slot was well established by that time. Harry James would, within a few years, follow the same formula: there would be an announcer that introduced the bandleader and the orchestra and who also delivered the commercials for the sponsor. There would be brief interplays between the announcer and the bandleader in calm, friendly and informal tones, slightly jazzed up by uses of the popular music argot of the time which made the audience think it was in on how musicians talked among themselves, and the announcer or the bandleader would introduce the broadcast regulars, solo singers and singing groups, when it was time for them to perform their numbers. This all contributed to the sense of a spontaneous, “live” occasion, however carefully scripted it might be. Also, each of the bands had their own particular sound, Harry James had a lot of trumpet solos, which was to be expected since James was a trumpeter, and his music was always a bit pretentious, looking for the large, impressive, almost orchestral sound. For his part, Paul Whiteman, who had been doing this before radio started, had his own sound which relied on George Gershwin, whose “Rhapsody in Blue” he had introduced some fifteen years before and which he used as his theme song. Whiteman was also a bit pretentious but in a different direction. He wanted to capture what at the time was called the light classical style, which means that the tunes he played claimed to be complex and progressive even if they were just following the model of what Gershwin had begun a decade or more before.
So Whiteman was engaged, at this stage of his career, and would continue to be so engaged into the Fifties, when he did a television program, as a continuator of George Gerswhin, who had died suddenly in Hollywood just a year before the time of these broadcasts and was mourned throughout popular culture as the voice of someone who had risen above his roots in Tin Pan Alley to become, of all things, an opera composer, even if “Porgy and Bess” was condemned by the critics of the time as not truly grand opera. Whiteman was engaging, therefore, in something that was not just of the moment. It was nostalgia, which means recalling something from the past that had been experienced by the audience the first time around but was now remembered as something that betokened that past time, as happens when we revive the songs of the Eighties for those who were young then, or make reference to September 11th not for the sake of those too young to remember it but for those old enough to remember it. Memorial reminiscences to Pearl Harbor or D-Day have faded out because there are not many people who can wax nostalgic about those times. They are merely part of history. Gershwin was dead but his memory alive in 1938. In fact, nostalgia for Gerswhin would continue into 1944 when a movie of his musical “Girl Crazy” was made and included an orchestral rendition of some of his music just for the hell of it, though really for the sake of nostalgia. Gerswhin nostalgia continued with the 1945 biopic “Rhapsody in Blue” and I remember concerts of Gerswhin music up at Lewisohn Stadium, up on the City College of New York campus, into the Fifties. There is less nostalgia for the Beatles or for anyone since, which is different from a simple reappreciation of someone from the past, as happens with Louis Armstrong, who is a consistent favorite for a niche market.
There is also a lot of dramatic irony in the Whiteman broadcasts. That means that we can, in the present, make use of the knowledge we have gained since then because of the way we knew things would turn out-- not just the grand things, like the fact that radio would be supplanted by television, because that doesn’t deepen our appreciation of the Whiteman broadcasts, but because of what happens within those broadcasts. Whiteman features a group called “The Modernaires”, which seems a snazzy title because at the time it highlighted what seemed so modern about the era, which is that it was forward looking just like all of those streamlined railroad trains. In retrospect, however, this is not a way out title for a group, given that groups in that time’s future would take on all sorts of outlandish names that don’t seem like names at all, such as “Earth, Wind & Fire” or even “The Beatles”, which was far removed from “The Four Freshman”, which was what seemed a jaunty title a decade or so after the Whiteman broadcasts. Also dramatic in its irony is that Whiteman has as guests the Andrews Sisters, not yet the spectacular stars they would become in the World War II years because of their close harmony
“Law and Order”, the constantly in rerun series of police procedurals, is another example of how popular culture places itself. The series also contains obligatory references to 9/11. It also shows the moment it inhabits by stressing racial unrest of the verbal type characteristic of the years in which it was created, when Al Sharpton was regarded as a menace rather than, as he has become, a broadcaster with a commentary show of his own and treated as something of a statesman, that quite a dramatic irony. “Law and Order” also takes as a theme how rich people lead disolate lives and are given to connievery at the expense of regular, working class folk, and so shares the spirit of the Occupy Wall Street crowd long before the Great Recession. That is another dramatic irony, while Jerry Orhbach playing a hard bitten cop is a nostalgic turn on his having started out as a song and dance man. Other items that place it in its moment are the Mafia and the Russian mob as significant parts of the enemy, though its concern with drug rings or political corruption could occupy any number of moments.
Think how different it is with high culture, or what we now take to be high culture, however popular some parts of the present canon were in the past in view of the size of their readership or the extent to which audiences not so very well educated engaged with these items. It is literary criticism, not “Jane Eyre” itself, that places the novel as Gothic, or looks back to tales of maidens in distress and forward to “Oliver Twist”, the tale of another poor wretch, or even further forward to Helen Keller, who goes blind at the beginning of her tale of rising to the heights rather than the heroine of “Jane Eyre” rising, at the end of the book, to the heights on the basis of the blindness of Lord Rochester. It is literary criticism that places “Jane Eyre” as part of the rise and acclaim granted to the novel in the Nineteenth Century, it not saying within itself that it deserves acclaim, that not part of the aesthetic reach of the novel until Norman Mailer. It is not “Jane Eyre” that mentions in itself why it appeals to the Romantic soul. It was the critic Lionel Trilling who recognized in his comments on “Lolita”, a century later, that all love stories are transgressive. The work of art is therefore narrower than its context, while popular culture is referring to its context, Alex Trebek regularly reminding his viewers of the wide group of “Jeopardy!” enthusiasts out there, and ABC announcing on air that their nightly news show is the most widely watched.
What is external to canonical culture is internal to popular culture. Baseball manufactures its statistics and promotes its heroes with interviews mandated by their contracts. Sure, movie studios have their awards ceremonies, just as there were prizes for the best plays in Ancient Greece, but what makes those plays last are their permanent appeal not the selling of a Britney Spears tape which displays her talent at shaking her caboose, which is an attraction of the day and not for the ages. (There are other cabooses.) That “Casablanca” wins an Academy Award is incidental to its significance rather than central to it, however much that gets confusing because movies are both a popular art and high art.
So popular culture places itself in its time and space and that is part of its pleasure, decades associated with the singing groups that were then dominant rather than “War and Peace”, which seems timeless, a moment frozen in amber, rather than an artefact of the reconsideration of the Napoleonic wars from the point of view of some fifty to sixty years later. Great or canonical literature is very much its own moment, living in its own present, even if it is also the case that it was created in a time and place, “Ulysses” not from the Nineteenth Century nor from after the Second World War, and clearly steeped in Dublin life as well as the canon itself. Spelling out how a canonical work is of a time and place becomes an essential task of literary critics, who are not living off literature but rather accomplishing an essential intellectual task, which is to do what the literature cannot do for itself, which is go beyond its own existence as a moment in time, complete in itself, and so render the work accessible, which means a part of popular culture in that it too has a nostalgia and a dramatic irony and telltale signs of being in a moment and a place. Literary criticism makes Joyce into Paul Whiteman because someone has to do it.