Pop Culture In Fractal Recursion
The standard critical response to *AI art* is that it is basically just a reshuffle of existing components; there's nothing new, it's soulless data-scraping and lacks the vital creative spark that generates and shapes *human art*.
The problem is that popular culture has long been operating unconsciously within the AI model, before ever an AI algorithm was a pixel in the third eye of a coder. In that context, our highly-treasured individual human creativity is an identical process of data-scraping and recombining existing components into something that passes as “new”. This is not something an artist wants to hear. They treasure their personal take on the world and their unique way of expressing it, defending it against any incursions by AI robot forces, which they see as threatening their right to earn a living through their art. But artists have no rights - it has always been a struggle for artists to get anyone to even pay attention, let alone the rent. Historically, artists are entitled to poverty and loneliness, and anything else is gravy. AI won’t change that, and it won’t diminish the strength of the individual’s motivation to create.
Pop music, the focus of this piece because my obsession with it goes back over sixty years, has long conceded its tent pole position in the circus of pop culture. From the late ‘fifties for a decade or so, it was youth culture’s driving force, its beating heart and a banner to march under. However much contemporary pop is valued today, it is more part of the fabric of living (sometimes called “the internet”), rather than its hub, and the idea that it has a culture-shifting momentum and evolutionary progression in itself is no longer as current as it was. Because that would be stupid. Because pop music is carried by culture, where it used to be the other way around.
In 1976 the Sex Pistols seemed to be the revolutionary jolt the music business needed, a rebirth of the wild anarchy of rock n’ roll. Something new. But that same punk teen spirit spurted into the face of the nation’s youth over a decade previously; the same two or three chords, the same snotty attitude, the same fuck-you-granddad noise rattled thousands of garages across the USA, ironically inspired by a belching busload of snaggletooth Brits who’d discovered American R&B. By ’76 the circle had gone a whole turn, and what was new to a seventeen year-old sounded pretty familiar to anyone who’d picked up The Who on pirate radio a lifetime before. For all the tabloid outrage the snotty oiks stirred up, the shock didn’t run as deep as the seismic tremor started by Elvis, gyrating his hips on primetime family TV back in the late ‘fifties. Even out of shot, he hit the mark, his aim was true, and the walls of the city shook. Pop culture was born, and it’s been going around in hula-orbit circles ever since.
My own parents, hearing Are You Experienced? thought it was just noise, a horrible hostile racket. Today’s parents, on hearing their children’s and their grandchildren’s music, have a different reaction, because they’ve heard something very much like it before. Many times. Pop culture’s defining wonder was to be new, exciting, to shake things up. This is no longer possible. Pop has become Linus’ security blanket, woven from familiar threads.
It’s not just pop - contemporary jazz may be brilliantly virtuosic, but it has yet to throw up another Louis Armstrong, another Monk, another Django. Every note blown is in homage to the original giants who lived the life in the times. Once the wildest of music, the most out there, the newest and most thrilling, jazz has become an academic exercise in respect for the form. It can be enjoyable, moving, technically impressive, but would you rather listen to an album by someone who reminds you of Charlie Parker, or Charlie Parker? That popular culture, in any form, seems to have lost the ability to gestate genius should be of grave concern. Genius is a matter of opinion? There are so many out there we take them for granted? Okay. Everything’s good.
I’m sorry, but his has been done before, and better, isn’t something anyone wants to hear. "Better is just your opinion, and everything’s new for somebody, right? What’s your point, Boomer?" Climbing a mountain gives you a wider view than struggling in the foothills. You can see the path you took, all the wrong turnings, the obstacles you overcame. No use yelling to those guys down there, they can’t hear you and will bump their heads on the same rocks you did. Getting old is climbing a mountain. Boomer means older, nothing else. It means further up that mountain. It doesn’t even guarantee a more privileged view than those deep in the valley below; we may still be staring at our calloused old feet in the dirt, trying to remember why we ever came up this damn pile of rocks in the first place. But perspective is hard-won, and worth the struggle, and to reduce this universal process to value-less calendar categorisation is one of the worst detours we can take. GenWhatev goggles are the wrong prescription for seeing the state of pop culture. Or anything, really.
The prime directive of pop music used to be newness, the first time this stuff had ever happened! Yow! You couldn’t wait to get that record home and dive into it. You pored over the album art on the bus, maybe slipping out the disc to get clues from the grooves. It was exciting, it was a message from the front line to you, so you could catch up! It was part of a whole scene happening, and if those words sound like a corny Hallmark message, that’s because that’s what they became.
If your parents like your music, it’s not your music. It may have fine qualities, but it’s not youth culture. What’s wrong with family bonding at a pop concert? It’s creepy, that’s what. Would I have wanted my parents to come to a gig with me? To sit and dig my albums with me in my room? But that is where we are - mom n’ pop listen to their kids’ music and say that’s nice! It sounds like, it reminds me of, sorta ... It wasn’t always like this. Ripples from a stone thrown in water diminish and flatten, and music can never make that splash again. The flattening of culture is subtle, unnoticed. We’re living in a world where pop culture is reduced to soothing undulations on the surface of the internet.
The internet is nothing but surface, a glittering, hypnotic veil that blinds us from the vault of heaven and the submarine depths. Fractal recursion, a hall of mirrors for the hive mind to celebrate itself, selfies, memes and streams, likes and lols! This is community, this is culture. You are not looking at the internet - it’s looking at you. You are not using the internet - it’s using you. You are not clicking and scrolling and surfing through the internet - it’s clicking and scrolling and surfing through you. You are not on the internet - the internet is on you.
Context shapes content. Mozart’s music sounded the way it did because it was articulated by the cultural matrix supporting it (curly wigs and catgut). In pop’s early days, there was no context - businessmen struggled to make sense, and a buck, out of what seemed like unpredictable chaos. How do you market something that wasn’t made to be marketed? That had already moved on by the time you got its illegible signature on a contract? It took a few years, but eventually the money won - it always does. Abbie Hoffman became a Wall Street suit, Pink Floyd shilled for Volkswagen, the Hendrix “Estate” sold the dirt from his grave. The context for pop culture became business, where the most urgent issue is risk reduction, finding the surest way to get a return on investment. Which is, rinse and repeat, don’t fuck with the formula (perfect pop analogy: Brian Wilson and Mike Love, the unhappy marriage of art and commerce). Fractal recursion sets in; it looks the same but the slight differences make it seem “new” long enough to hold the attention of consumers through a cash transaction.
Movie making has been in the hall of mirrors since George Lucas discovered that treating the audience like none-too-bright kids filled cinemas, an infantilism that crossed into “gaming” before crossing back into movies. Superheroes, shoot-‘em-ups, remakes, sequels, prequels, rinse and repeat, check the boxes. “Meta” was chosen as a brand name for a reason. Everything refers back to everything else, and pop culture feeds off itself. An unhealthy diet.
Checking the boxes. Data scraping. Research and reshuffle. Functions not limited to computers. The struggling artist makes art necessarily informed by, shaped by, influenced by the art the artist has been exposed to. There’s a wet brain search engine at work, recombining results in a way that seems new and personal to the creator. Nothing comes from nothing; out of that, this; if you bake bricks you don’t get bread.
The (inter)net result of fractal recursion is an overall homogenisation of pop culture, a dulling of the edges. Fractal changes in a familiar landscape, endless variations on a theme. Pop has forever lost the magical, startling power to be new. Everything’s new to somebody? The “now” of pop culture is new to nobody. Everybody can hear the echoes of the echoes, recognise the influences of the influences, check the references to the references. They’re cited in reviews, like ingredients in an old recipe book, handed down over generations. This is not fine dining, it’s junk food.
Artistic expression has become inseparable from the idea of internet “sharing”, as we’d share a picture of a kitten or mental health updates or a meme. It wasn’t always this way. Art, poetry, music - these used to be private pleasures, pursued for their own sake. The activity was valuable in itself, improved life, made you a better and more receptive person. Exhibiting the result, begging for praise, making money out of it, were never the primary motives, and need not be now. Talent will out, or not.
Art’s worth is not to be judged by others, does not live or die by their opinion, and the final result is almost a side effect of the process that created it. For the authentic artist, the finished work is a dead thing, a palimpsest of layered memory. The life of art is in the activity of creative process; art as verb, not noun. It’s a mistake to think you can’t do it because you’re not an “artist”. In this private process, this secret unfolding, we learn to appreciate those who do it better, and crucially, we learn to recognise the real thing. We may not be able to define it - who cares? It’s beyond the limits of language - but we know when it’s happening.
Inspiration and insight, the seeds of art, are featherweight, easily blown away. We can’t recreate the hornet’s nest “community” of the internet as a space where they can flourish. But we can cultivate a secret garden within ourselves, without the pathological need to be seen and heard, to share every passing moment, every shifting mood, every unconsidered opinion. Break the connection, break the habit, turn it off, turn away. Go for a walk in the garden.
And leave your damned phone at home; it’s Zuckerberg’s Eye of Sauron seeing right into you.
With thanks to th' Four Or Five Guy© who used "the shock of the old" in a comment - step up and take a bow!
