Some Thoughts on the Decline of Popular Culture

The noticeable decline in popular music and television comedy over the last twenty years is often talked about but rarely explained.

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s there was a remarkably diversity of novel output in popular music and comedy but in the mid 1980s this outpouring of creativity abruptly dried up. Twenty years on, there isn’t much sign of a renaissance.

The essential characteristic of the comedy of Monty Python and Peter Sellers was irreverence. These young guns were free to lampoon every canon of western culture from the Catholic Church to Nietzsche. Such expansive comedy was unknown in the first 60 years of the 20th century.

In the early 1980s a second wave of comedians arrived. ‘Smith and Jones’ produced elaborate satire with highly crafted sketches that the 18th Century satirists would have been proud of. Meanwhile Rowan Atkinson and Bell Elton fused A-level history with dry British sarcasm in the hilarious Black Adder series.

By the late 1980s intellectual humour became increasingly unfashionable, in part, because viewers were insufficiently educated about western culture to understand jokes about ‘soccer playing philosophers’ and ‘rococo gasworks’. Similarly, comedians aren’t interested in things they don’t have much knowledge about.

The work of today’s comedians, such as Ricky Gervais, is mainly about cultural cringe and social embarrassment. This seems appropriate for an age characterised by self-consciousness and political correctness. However, by Monty Python standards, modern comedy like the The Office is pretty mediocre.

In the early 1970s popular musicians like Yes, Genesis and Pink Floyd audaciously plundered the canons of classical music and Jazz - much to the annoyance of traditionalists. A lot of ‘prog-rock’ output was overblown, but its practitioners did produce some decent material.

At the same time notable Jazz musicians, such as Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis, experimented with funk, rock and psychedelia.

During the late 1970s punk rock emerged, partly as a reaction to the excesses of the progressive rock era. However, it proved to be even more short-lived than its predecessor and has left few memorable pieces of music.

Since the late 1970s music that includes references to western hi-culture or displays of instrumental prowess seems to be automatically derided by popular music critics. This has pretty killed off interesting and melodic popular music. When Kate Bush moved over for post-modern squawker Bjork, the end was nigh.

It seems that you can only have a vibrant and creative popular culture when you have a respected hi-culture that the popular culture can draw upon for ideas and inspiration. In today’s culture of political correctness and post-modern relativism it is difficult to produce anything intelligent, audacious or dynamic.