Pop for Fun

Immediate, massive, and fast to consume. No, it's not a breaded cutlet. It's not a McDonald's combo, nor is it drugs. It's the omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent pop culture. The new idol we worship. From boy bands to the Transformers. From the suburbs to Hollywood. Pop culture. Global mainstream culture. A local reggaeton hit racks up 97 million views on YouTube and lands a tour in Dubai. But let's not forget Jon Snow. We need to consume, everything, now, right this second. From the dancing Pokémon figurines in Tokyo's Akihabara district to the suburban braids and camo pants of cumbia singers. The only thing that's forbidden is being left out.

Consumption

Just as in the French Revolution they chopped off the aristocracy's heads and the bourgeoisie seized power, pop, flying under the radar, staged its own revolution against cultural aristocracy. You don't need good taste, nor aesthetic pleasure. You need to connect with something. How many people go to the opera house? How many people pack the mega-club every weekend? The cumbia poster plastered across the neighborhood is living proof that pop culture is defined by its audience. A catchy chorus is just as important as knowing your target demographic. While ossified, sclerotic rock is still covered as a novel cultural phenomenon, not a single mainstream "cultural" outlet covers the cumbia scene, except with that very white middle-class curiosity, as if they were rewriting An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians. But sure, don't miss the latest gig by the trendy indie band that manages to draw a whopping forty people to a community center.

Pokémon Go

There's no room for aristocracy or demagoguery. The measure of greatness is success. Relevance is determined by the audience. Not the gallerist, not the editor. It's the blockbuster phenomenon, the bestseller. If it sells, it works; if it doesn't sell, next. Stephen King as the north star. The perfect blend of quality and quantity. Pop is the great equalizer. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor. A Big Mac costs the same for both.

Accessible

Pop culture has been devouring all its competitors and little siblings. I remember that the first time I saw Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, I watched it on a pirate broadcaster: Channel 4 Utopia. That's where I also saw Akira. I was 10 years old, and my brain was fried forever. Pop culture keeps getting closer. First television, then cable, later the internet, then DVDs, and now On Demand. Today your old man can watch Nekromantik or the latest Los Pimpinela concert on Netflix, right at his fingertip.

Massive

Pop culture is globalized mainstream culture. It doesn't matter if you live in Wisconsin or in a Buenos Aires neighborhood. In the '90s you watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and now you lose your mind over Adventure Time. Game of Thrones and Pokémon are part of a global language. Pop culture is the cultural expression of capitalist democracy. The mode of production is embedded in what defines the thing itself. Change the modes of production, and the produced object changes. Cinema of the 1930s has nothing to do with today's cinema: from magnificent studios to green screens.

Aesthetics is an accident of industry

We all look to the transnational capital of pop culture. The Rome of the electric world: the United States. Back to the Future did more for American global hegemony than the Vietnam War. We all want to produce like the United States, we all want to have the culture that the US has. Every country has the culture it can afford.

Digestible

No intellectual mediation is needed to understand or consume it. It's the child of screen culture. It forged its language in cinema and extended its dominion to every corner of the planet through television. It's easier to understand The Little Mermaid than Critique of Pure Reason. Pop is, above all, entertainment. It requires no effort whatsoever. But that doesn't diminish its value; on the contrary, it grants it. Because what it loses in depth, it gains in reach. It sacrifices complexity to reach a broader audience. Simplicity becomes a democratic virtue.

Repetitive

Not everything is sunshine in pop paradise. Success is the lord and master. Then everyone wants to emulate and repeat that success, believing formulas exist for it. Did we hit it big with Iron Man? Then let's make Thor or Hulk movies. Is the competition beating you? Copy their formula: Batman, Superman, Batman VS. Superman. Today it's superheroes, yesterday it was ninja turtles, tomorrow it will be galactic octopuses with lasers on their butts. Pop culture tends to become a big pile of more of the same.

Trending

Pop culture moves by trend, by fashion. What's current is the only thing that matters. Fashion is that -- false -- negotiation between audience and industry: "We give you what you want and tell you what you should want." Today watching superheroes is the coolest thing in the universe, until tomorrow when it isn't. Maybe the day after it'll come back. Who knows? It doesn't matter. What matters is the look. What matters is the t-shirt, not knowing if Charizard evolves at level 40. Self-proclaimed pop culture experts who spout nonsense abound. Nobody corrects them because it doesn't matter. Knowing something doesn't matter; what matters is knowing what Wikipedia says so you don't look like a fool if someone asks. And nothing more. We live by the trend.

Cyclical

Everything that was once fashionable will come back. That's the supreme law of pop culture. Time and distance act as a kind of editing process on cultural memory. The passage of time allows us to cherry-pick the best of past eras, and then nostalgia does the rest. "The '80s were so great," everyone said twenty years after that decade had ended. The salvageable parts of past decades' culture will return as the new mainstream, when the youngsters of that era take the place of their predecessors and produce culture. Retro, vintage, old school -- these are labels for reselling things that had fallen out of use.

The photocopy as a device. Mass production

Pop culture is Warholian by definition. Originality loses meaning. A copy acquires value. In art, up until pop, value was granted by authenticity. The difference between a painting with Picasso's signature and one signed by some nobody is twenty million bucks. With mass production, that died. In pop, there are no originals. The trick is the serial reproduction of many identical, cheap, accessible copies. F-O-R-E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E. For everyone who pays. The global, massive, creative pop industry is marked by its origin: mass production.

Pop has no hierarchies

Pop has classics. We can understand culture as a network with thousands of nodes. A classic is defined by being a node with greater weight in the network. A nerve center that rearranges the fabric around it. The number of references that later works make to it, and its influence on future works, are the hallmarks of classics.

Appendix I: Classics

Tolkien. Asimov. Cordwainer Smith. Gary Gygax. Ron Gilbert. Tim Schafer. Philip K. Dick. Joss Whedon. Richard Garfield. Katsuhiro Otomo. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. Go Nagai. Alan Moore. Stan Lee. Kevin Eastman. Neil Gaiman. Bram Stoker. Mary Shelley. Jules Verne. H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Appendix II: Cult

For things that are good but don't achieve success, pop reserves a place: the cult work. An influence on future producers, a password to access certain prestige in some circles. There are old ones and recent ones. It has the potential to become the next classic. Just to mention a few recent ones that deserve attention: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Attack the Block, Hot Fuzz, Superbad, Ready Player One, Angry Video Game Nerd.

You are what you produce

From consumption to production, pop makes culture accessible and democratic. It's a constant tension, as democracy itself is. The very dynamics of production tend toward the monopolization of content. It opens spaces and closes others, allowing the mythical and symbolic dimension to reach a mass audience while preventing all culture that doesn't fit a solid commercial framework from getting through. It creates a business-friendly status quo.

Until some technological revolution kicks the board over. We saw how the music industry imploded at the hands of the MP3 and the iPod. We're watching Netflix nip at television's heels, which is in a golden age far surpassing cinema. The irruption of digital technology has simplified production and distribution processes like never before. If the essence of art lies in the method of production, and we are in an era where culture is produced on small handheld portable computers, then culture is going to change. A smartphone or a laptop replaces the recording studio, the set, the editing suite. What is YouTube if not the reflection of this shift in the means of production and consumption habits?

But while it simplifies, the device shapes its uses. We freed ourselves from the middleman, the editor, the curator, the museum gallerist. The new lords of the game are the device sellers. Maybe it's all just a simple passing of the baton.

You can't think about pop outside of capitalism. Its rules condition and determine us in non-mechanical ways, and yet it is a place where we can also free ourselves from the slavery of consumption. If we take the leap, if we dare, we can stop merely consuming culture and start producing, creating, for the simple fact that we are free to do so. It is a dialectical irony that the very thing that confines us is also what can set us free.

So then let us be free, and the rest, the rest is just pop for fun.

This article was originally published on NAN on July 27, 2016.