Pop Goes the Culture

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But it was not until this hurlyburly century -- the American century, the century of mass man -- that pop simply took over. The immigrant influx had something to do with it. The funny papers were a transplant from Europe, adapted by Hearst and Pulitzer to appeal to readers freshly or barely fluent in English. Vaudeville was a spangly folk theater of bold strokes that had to entertain first- and second-generation Americans. If unbridled vitality and give-'em-what-they-want instincts were immigrant additives to the cultural mix, it was technological innovation that beamed pop everywhere, made it irresistible. By the 1920s, radio gave Americans a common, concrete bond. Moviegoing was a less universal but more intense national ritual. With performers such as Harold Lloyd and Gary Cooper, plainly Americans, compatriots could watch their national character raised to apotheosis onscreen.

The critical years, however, were the late '40s and '50s. Babies boomed, McDonald's and Disneyland appeared, and television came along just in time to immerse the new generation in hours of pop images every day. With children and teenagers as its shock troops, pop was unstoppable. From Howdy Doody to Shindig to The Monkees to West 57th, the American pursuit of happiness has turned into the pursuit of short-term, mass-market fun. Toys are us.

Pop culture is, after all, the culture of the free market: Heather Locklear and Prince and Chuck Norris are all laissez-faire by-products. Only in a wildly unregulated society could such beings have a ready means of becoming rich and famous. As a practical matter, too, only capitalists have both the necessary cash and the unembarrassed eagerness to please. It is expensive to produce convincingly slick records or movies. More than any other commodity, pop depends on blockbusterism. People listen to Michael Jackson's music in part because he has sold 69 million albums. Boffo begets boffo. Sustaining such a modulated mob psychology for profit requires an elaborate system of distribution and promotion, the pop equivalent of military command-and- control, and here the U.S. is absolutely without peer.

So pop is the invisible hand in a single sequined glove, advanced capitalism with a beat you can dance to. But the businessmen do not ultimately give pop its easy charm, its vulgar sexiness. "Extraordinary," says Amanda in Noel Coward's Private Lives, "how potent cheap music is." We can't help ourselves: we like the stuff. Pop is powerful because it takes its very simple ideas very seriously. (Consider Walt Disney.) Pop is earnest and energetic -- not necessarily sincere, but always enthusiastic. (Consider Sammy Davis Jr. and Dolly Parton.) People love pop because it is predictable and yet perpetually novel -- always new but never surprising. (Consider Johnny Carson. Consider Stallone again.)

A major pop phenomenon is comforting to Americans because it is spectacular evidence of consensus, a palpable national agreement that has nothing to do with quarrelsome issues of race or religion or class. When a new black superstar emerges, so much the nicer. Moreover, pop serves as a perfectly apolitical politics (and politics, at the televised nominating conventions, becomes a kind of weighty pop performance). The Nielsen ratings and the Billboard charts are weekly referenda, the Oscars and Emmys superstar inaugurations.