Deviate from the Norm
[image error]
If you’ve ever wondered why nothing seems to have changed culturally since the late 1990s, it’s because culturally we are still in the late 1990s, like a wriggling bug in aspic. J.D. Cowan’s recent tour de force explains many of the reasons this is so, and I recommend you read it before reading this post.
In going through Cowan’s survey, what struck me was how much deregulation coupled with the consolidation of media companies contributed to the freezing of American culture into, essentially, how it was in the 1997-1998 time frame. We see this in the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which in relevant part lifted the restrictions on national radio station ownership. Soon, conglomerates would gobble up stations, and they’d all play the same stuff.
It wasn’t all by law either. Game companies gobbled up other game companies, movie companies devoured other smaller, independent-minded movie-houses. Comic book distribution was consolidated into one company. And so on. Soon, blandness would rule the land.
[image error]
I’m being a little bit overdramatic, but for the most part this is accurate, and the trend has only increased in the past two decades. Disney seems to own nearly everything right now, and what little it doesn’t own is owned by Warner Bros. Those smaller music, movie, and literary labels that put out the interesting stuff that deviated from the norm were snatched up and then quickly forgotten unless said giant mega entertainment corporation wanted to slap the label on them to appear edgy and hip. What gets forgotten is that prior to the late 1990s, even the mainstream stuff was pretty good and interesting. Now, the perception is that things are well-produced and nice to look at, listen to, etc., but just very, very samey.
The same messages. The same style. The same people popping up over and over and over.
Worse, entertainment franchises and consumer gadget manufacturers have become religions unto themselves. The late 90s set the groundwork for the lifestyle brand.
[image error]
In Internet-speak, this the rise of the “consoomer,” but we’re adults here so we’ll try to use adult terminology.
[image error]We can still post immature memes though.
We hear about how the American middle class and its manufacturing sector has been hollowed out, if not shipped overseas. The same can be said about American culture. We exist between two extremes: the tastes of the affluent, mostly coastal urbanite, and the tastes of the ghetto. It’s the New Yorker crowd on one side and gangsta rap on the other. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with either, but it’s that, seemingly, this is all that there is.
The reasons for this are manifold. Chief among them are that the people in control of America’s culture-producing conglomerates aren’t in it to make money. They love the money, of course, which is just how it is. But more than that, they are true evangelists of a worldview and lifestyle that they think the rest of the country–and by extension the world–should be a part of. There is no room for dissent or alternative viewpoints. Those who deviate from this norm are swiftly frozen out of further enjoying the lifestyle of the A-list creative.
I’ve said it many, may times on this website, but it bears repeating: The “freedom of speech” and “freedom of expression” battle-cries were a ruse until the self-proclaimed right people assumed control. Freedom for me, and not for thee, is the true mantra. You can let your freak flag fly as long as it’s the right kind of freak flag.
Which brings us to where we are. The Internet is the latest problem for these giant media companies. This partially explains the increasing tightening control via censorship and deplatforming.
You don’t beat moral arguments with economic arguments. And you can’t easily just “build your own.” What you have to do is play within the rules while still offering something that isn’t a copy of a copy of a copy of something that itself was a late 1990s copy of something better.
Regress harder. And look forward. We can move beyond the late 1990s and early 2000s. There’s an entire future we’ve been ignoring because we’ve been seduced by the bad kind of nostalgia.
We’re never going to recreate the past. Nor are we going to ever kill it. What we can do is use it to create something new.
[image error]
Frank Zappa said “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” And as Rush sang in “Vital Signs”:
Everybody got mixed feelings
About the function and the form
Everybody got to deviate from the norm
Mega lifestyle consumer entertainment brand is the norm. They are The Man. You don’t beat the man by doing exactly what they’re doing. You do it by finding another space, another angle . . . and you can very often find that other angle by looking where they are not.
I leave it up to you to determine where and what that is.
Speaking of Rush, now there were three men who carved out their own musical and lyrical space irrespective of what the trendmongers thought they should be doing. I wrote an entire book about Rush and why they resonated with fans so strongly. Check it out here!
