Is Our American Culture Frozen?

Is Our American Culture Frozen?
Mulling over ideas about a culture locked in its nostalgia of the past expounded in Evil Geniuses by Kurt Anderson

I’ve been reading Kurt Anderson’s Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, A Recent History. The book explores political and economic forces since the 1980s that have frozen economic mobility in our country into such an extreme gap of wealth and power. Anderson also makes a fascinating comparison with a similar freeze in our creative innovation. He defines a comorbidity between our frozen political economy where wages and mobility have stagnated, and our frozen cultural stasis that he calls  “mass nostalgia,” where we essentially haven’t progressed into anything essential “new” since the dawn of the Internet. We repeat and recycle pre-2000 genres and styles. He cites our penchant for sequels and film remakes; the pastiche of earlier styles in postmodern art; the absence of any essentially new pop music style since rap and hip-hop. In fashion, he points out that up to the 1990s, you could look at a photograph of people and define the decade it was taken just from the clothes they wore. But since 1990, people dress pretty much the same. He maintains that the idea of “newness” has disappeared.

Here are three quotes that this phenomenon that are sure to spark discussion. The first is from English music journalist Simon Reynolds writing that all pop music since 1990 is only recycling what it has already done. The second by famed science fiction writer William Gibson talks about how the digital age has snagged us in an endless present that he calls “future fatigue.”  The third by Kurt Anderson suggests we have lost our appetite for the “new.”

1.    Simon Reynolds, Retromania published in Vanity Fair
As the eighties rolled into the nineties, increasingly music began to be talked about only in terms of other music; creativity became reduced to taste games…There has never been a society in human history so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past…Is nostalgia stopping our culture’s ability to surge forward, or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times?...We’ve become so used to this convenient access [to old images and music] that it is a struggle to recall that life wasn’t always like this, that relatively recently one lived most of the time in a cultural present tense, with the past confined to specific zones, trapped in particular objects and locations.

2.    William Gibson, Book Expo America Panel, 2010
If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory.  I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.

3.    Kurt Anderson, Evil Geniuses
If you’re young, and have grown up only since the Internet has been dissolving the distinctions between past and present and old and new…a cultural diet of reboots and revivals on an endless loop habituates people to expect and put up with the same old same old forever and to lose their appetite for the new, for change, for progress.

Can we classical music listeners and musicians offer something to this conversation? We have far more experience in frozen nostalgia! Forget the digital revolution. Most of us are locked in a musical preference not much past the 1890s— the music of Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and early Debussy. Odd, isn’t it, to be frozen in an era long before any of us were born?  

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, composed in the early 20th century, well over a hundred years ago, stillsounds modern and new to most classical listeners even now. How is that possible? Throughout the 20th century, composers and contemporary music aficionados have railed against audiences resisting anything new. Their anger transformed into a revulsion with 19th century music and its Romantic ideology. Stravinsky himself said in 1921,”Beethoven…created no music. There was greatness in his soul…which he expressed in notes that said nothing to the ear.” Quite the logical twisting to liberate the “shackles” of the 19th century!

This dissonance created a schism we know all too well. Where thousands flock to hear Tchaikovsky and Mahler, mere hundreds flock to new music concerts. This has been the norm for at least 100 years. Responsible orchestras sandwich new music into standard symphonic programs, and those pieces function as agreeable or disagreeable appetizers to a main course.

Are we hopelessly stuck and stagnant? If so, why are so many orchestras and chamber ensembles flourishing with ever-fresh approaches to the same general strategy? Just as interesting/disturbing to ponder: what happened to the “newness” of contemporary music. Where is its vigor from the 1960s? Aren’t the pieces written now in 2022 also sounding essentially the same as those in the 1990s?

Anderson argues that we are in a cultural retreat from the dazzling innovations of the 1960s. He cites the experimental counter-culture movement that spawned all the revolutions in rock music, art, and fashion, with which we’re all familiar. But of course, contemporary concert music in the 1960s went even further—and in such a bewildering number of directions. Sound mass music, micropolyphony, electro-acoustic music, serial music with pitch organization far beyond the 12 tone music of Schoenberg. Even further, music built on random processes, new tuning systems, mathematic processes, and the incorporation of world music, jazz, and pop. On the bleeding edge, John Cage declared any and all noise is music, if only we decide to be.

That impulse to create the “new” did not last. We might argue that today’s composers are just as nostalgia-oriented as today’s mainstream classical listener. Instead of being stuck in the aesthetic of the 18th and 19th centuries, they brew in a  pastiche of 20th century innovations. Was 1970s minimalism the last “new” concert music style? (but minimalism itself tapped into the nostalgia for the repetitive rock music pulses and harmonies.)

So what now? Will we remain eternally postmodern? Are we so absorbed in Anderson’s “mass nostalgia,” that we prefer a static present, not impelled to leap forward to the dramatically “new”? Will contemporary music of 2030 and 2040 sound little different from music written today?

Is that important? Is “newness” the most important criteria for meaningful art? Who said progress was the goal of fine art (other than Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and they didn’t agree with each other anyway, did they)? Isn’t “new” merely a transition on the path to cliché? Unlike Stravinsky, I’m far more attracted to the impulses and ideas that music generates than “just the notes” themselves. Don’t we all disagree with him when he says Beethoven “said nothing to the ear.” The depth of Beethoven’s musical ideas is what keeps us listening.

But then I stop myself. Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Debussy’s La Mer—those pieces were absolutely revolutionary, as much if not more so than Ligeti’s Atmospheres or Cage’s 4’33. These works illuminate new horizons that inspire us to hear differently. They revitalize, recharge, reinspire. That’s why Simon Reynolds, William Gibson, and Kurt Anderson sound the alarm. Wallowing in ecstasy in the eternal present of our digital multicellular connectivity might turn out terrible imprisonment.  If we are frozen in a recycle-setting of past innovations, how will we maintain that vitality?

Please share your ideas and thoughts. I’m really interested!