Pop Goes the Culture

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Pop strands are converging, it seems, at an accelerating rate. By broadcasting high-concept television advertisements for records, MTV has invented a genre and become an enormous success. Michael Jackson makes TV commercials for Pepsi. Coca-Cola makes movies through its Columbia Pictures subsidiary. Any day now, all the advertising agencies in the world will merge with all the other advertising agencies. And the wall between pop and high culture that became a see-through membrane in the '60s and '70s today seems to be disintegrating. In some cases the result has been a mutually compromised commingling, the "tepid, flaccid Middlebrow Culture" that Macdonald despised. What the Boston Pops was to their parents' generation, for instance, the untroubling, undemanding "New Age" music of the Windham Hill label is to alumni of the counterculture. Like Kurt Vonnegut's novels, Artist Keith Haring's doodly paintings are very, very easy to like. In Manhattan, Haring % just opened his own boutique, where he sells Haring buttons, watches, shirts and posters. It is called the Pop Shop.

But the more ambitious mixes of pop and seriousness can be terrific. Such hybrids are not new; after World War II, for example, jazz sprouted the thorny complexities of hard bop. The crossover attempts today are more numerous and uninhibited than ever before. David Lynch's creepy, funny film Eraserhead manages to be both elliptical and punchy, complicated and visceral. The music of Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass teeters intriguingly on the line between the obvious and the arcane. Talking Heads' songs combine good jungle music and smart, edgy ideas; David Byrne, the band's songwriter and lead singer, is the Stephen Sondheim of rock 'n' roll. Performance Artist Ann Magnuson says her chief influences are William Blake, Joey Heatherton, Alfred Jarry and Wilma Flintstone.

A sort of wacky, slightly willful eclecticism is what Sontag meant, two decades before Trivial Pursuit became emblematic of a generation, by the new "democratic esprit," a generous curiosity that assumes "the equivalence of all objects." What could be more American than giving every cultural attempt a fair shake? No longer is pop presumptively inferior to works of classical form and limited appeal. Pop culture is, after all, populist culture too. Not that Sontag's equivalence means equal value, any more than constitutional guarantees of equal opportunity always produce equal results. Motley Crue's Stick to Your Guns, for instance, is going to lose any battle of the bands against Stravinsky's Petrouchka. No sane person would rise to defend Harold Robbins' novels. And if all remaining prints of Police Academy 3 happened to be destroyed in a flash fire, world culture would be undiminished. But take it easy. Lighten up. In America, putting on the ritz has never necessarily meant putting on airs. At twilight on a breezy summer evening, a cocktail in hand and not much particular in mind, Buddy Holly on the hi-fi is nothing to be ashamed of.