The Straw Man Cometh — Yet Once Again

Depending on one's mood at the moment, it's either annoying or comical to encounter one or both of the current favorite straw men set up by certain champions of pop culture in the so-called "Culture Wars" as it concerns so-called high and pop culture in the arts generally, and music in particular.

The first of these is the Graying Audience For Classical Music straw man (for a neat trashing of this straw man, see here); the second, the straw man of the flawed and ill-considered attempts by out-of-touch, old-fogey, snobbish high-culture types to "convert" younger people to their way of thinking about music. As one of the usual suspects, an indefatigable champion of pop culture, lately put this last:

Younger people (which by now means people 40 or younger...) don't make distinctions between high and popular culture, or at least not distinctions of value. That includes what used to be thought of as high culture values, like being thoughtful, noncommercial, deep, or (more simply) serious.

People in the older culture can ignore this, or try to fight it, but that's dangerous for them. They simply cut themselves off, not just from contemporary life, but from a lot of thoughtful, noncommercial, deep, and serious art. And if they're trying to make converts for high culture, than they lose bigtime, because their case won't seem plausible to the people they're trying to reach. It's a very bad strategy — obviously! — to go to smart, educated people, and say, "Listen to our music, because yours is trash."

The very notion that "people in the older culture" give so much as a rat's ass about "mak[ing] converts for high culture" among the "40 or younger" crowd (the "smart," "educated" young crowd referred to above, not the primary- and secondary-school young) is nothing short of risible. Other than misguided champions of pop culture, the only people who concern themselves with attempts at such purblind, circle-squaring exercises are well-paid marketing suits and the commercial and managerial high-culture interests who pay them to find ways to put more butts in seats.

Misguided champions of pop culture have the curious notion that it's somehow a bad thing to "make distinctions between high and popular culture" even though it's blazingly clear that not only are there clear distinctions between the two, but a vast gulf that, in one direction — from pop to high — is all but unbridgeable for the overwhelming majority of those who've not been specially schooled when very young to prepare them to be able to understand and appreciate the complexities of things high cultural, music in particular; complexities almost by definition all but totally absent from things inhabiting the pop cultural domain, again, music in particular.

One is sorely tempted to assign or speculate on the tendentious motives behind that perverse sort of thinking on the part of these misguided champions of pop culture. But identifying those motives would, ultimately, serve no useful purpose. It's more than sufficient to simply recognize the perversity and wrongheadedness of that thinking, and accordingly dismiss it from consideration entirely.