09-22-2008, 08:27 PM
$tevie wrote:
It's not just Bing Crosby vs. Frank Sinatra. What about Bill Monroe, John Coltrane, Victor Herbert operettas, Jimmie Rodgers, Paul Robeson, or Richard Strauss? The same people did not listen to all these types of music!
Those were the hipster noncomformists, the flip side of a mass white-bread population. One doesn't exclude the other, you're right, they coexisted. David Halberstam's book "The 50s" does a great job of demonstrating how radical the 50s were, many of the great social and cultural movements really started right after WW2 (the sexual revolution, civil rights, etc.) not in the 60s, he makes a case similar to yours, that the social uniformity was never there to begin with.
What about the "Cafe Society" scene in NYC in the thirties? Those people surely felt they were quite different than "the masses" in both taste and intellect.
They, too, were the nonconformists, digging jazz, radical chic, and hot bohemian sex. The intellectual left embraced--then rejected---socialist fantasy, after witnessing its inevitable path to oppression, imprisonment, and mass murder. Phony marxist phrases like "the masses" wouldn't become popular again until the 60s. But the tastes and intellect of cafe society informed and influenced mass culture, in art, music, literature.
The only big difference I see from past 20th century "elitists" and current 21st century "elitists" is that today they are not all that interested in talking about the downtrodden and the Working Man, and that is probably mostly because "socialism" and "communism" are no longer considered Hip. Or Hep as the case may be.
Socialist and communist ideology is alive well, the virus has mutated, and is flourishing around the margins of the intellectual elite, and in academia, it just has different names now, "postmodernism", "post-colonialism", etc.
The left's inability to firmly reject and successfully kill the virus is one of the things that alienates the orthodox intellectual left from the modern realist left, and burdens its ambitions for recapturing the mainstream.
I think the article--and the website---playfully mocks the insulated bubble brand-identity world consumerists inhabit. I was in Whole Foods the other day, and felt alarmingly at home. Hip, cozy conformism posing as non-conformism.
We've nicknamed our most luxurious local Mall, U-Village, as "white village", because of the elite demographic it serves. This is before the "what white people like" website and book deal, the stereotype already existed (though "white' doesn't accurately characterize it, either) It's sort of about post-mass society, insulated micro-niche society.