Pop Culture: A Catalyst for Creativity or Conformity?

 

From the checkerboard Vans on my feet to the thrift-store flannel tied around my waist and the Manic Panic dye in my hair, I spent my high school years immersed in the music and the fashions of the Grunge movement. Without popular culture, a 16-year-old at a high school of 300 in tiny Ovid, New York would have likely never latched on to a movement with roots in Seattle, some 2700 miles away.

Grunge wasn’t just the inspiration for my wardrobe or the shrill mumblings of Nirvana and Pearl Jam blaring through the speakers of my three-disc CD changer, however. It was the catalyst for my curiosity, my first inclination that the world was bigger than farm fields and Main Street Five and Dime that I was used to.

With my newfound curiosity, I sought new music, thirsted for biographies of icons like Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin and Che Guevera. I discovered Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac and found my own passion for writing, and I decorated my walls with the very same art reproductions that fueled Walter Benjamin’s angst. While I’d never been to Norway to see “The Scream,” in person, or to the National Gallery of Art to see Monet’s “Woman with a Parasol,” those prints made me want to—and perhaps more importantly, they made me believe that I could.

Objectively, in a world where modern culture is so entrenched in the noise of video games, social media, on-demand movies and instant news, it would be easy to subscribe to the Frankfurt School’s position that mass media suppresses individual thought, creating a culture of people who look, dress and think the same. But what if it has the opposite effect? What if pop culture is what makes a teenager who has never seen anything other than the four walls of their high school or the city limit sign of their hometown realize the world isn’t flat and that the replica of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on their tee-shirt looks infinitely more beautiful on the walls of a museum in Paris or Amsterdam?

It’s like Eddie Vedder sings in Yellow Leadbetter--okay, no one really knows what Eddie Vedder says in Yellow Leadbetter—but he sang something, and that something--although wrapped in the trappings of popular culture—inspired others to find their own song, and that seems like something worth championing, not abandoning.