Trickle-Down Culture : Sharing, Sampling, Scanning, Recycling--Is It Art or Is It Memorex?

PCRV, the Pop Culture Recycling Virus, particularly plagued Broadway last season, leading some critics to carp that Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion” won the Tony for best “new” musical by default. Nearly everything else was a revival. L.A. has already been served the musical transmogrification of Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” and this fall Broadway will get a super-hyped revival of “Show Boat,” first seen in 1927 and now charging the highest ticket price in Broadway history ($75) as it vies to supplant the current Tony award-winning revival of “Carousel,” first seen in 1945, as the finest restaging of a classic Broadway musical.

But more than musical theater is in the clutches of the virus. Hollywood, which suffers acute infections, seems to be in a chronic stage of PCRV with an endless run of movies based on TV shows: “The Addams Family,” “The Flintstones,” “Dennis the Menace,” “The Fugitive,” “Maverick” and so on.

And then there is the digital world, where you can directly appropriate an image or riff. Sampling has become a medium in itself, used by hip-hop musicians as the basis of their art. Rappers sampled so many jazz riffs from Blue Note recording artists that the company threw up its hands and told one group, Us3, to go ahead and raid the entire Blue Note library of music. This year’s gold-selling album “Hand on the Torch” is the result, with its irresistible hit single “Cantaloop,” a pastiche of samples of Art Blakey and Herbie Hancock riffs with fresh hip-hop touches. As a result of Us3’s success, Blue Note profits have doubled on its back catalogue, thanks to the attention the group has brought to some of the best jazz of the mid-20th Century--certainly a salutary consequence of the virus.

But “Gilligan’s Island: The Musical”? Has the recycling phenomenon devolved to mean we are literally just reusing what was junk to begin with? Are we so devoid of new ideas at the end of the 20th Century that the era has truly become a cultural wasteland?

THE NOTION HIT ME HARDEST ONE BRIGHT SUNDAY MORNING AS I CAREENED north on the Sepulveda Pass. With the top down on the silver Mustang convertible, hair jetting backward in a braid-packed ponytail, I howled as tears streamed down my face. I was too old for Pampers and too young for Depends, but there was going to be a major accident if I didn’t pull over soon. I did. As they sped past, bewildered motorists glimpsed my bent, rocking form. I gripped my sides, trying to contain the roaring, incredulous laughter that the music in the tape deck had ignited: “Don’t you know, Blue Eyes, you never can win,” Bono squealed to Frank Sinatra. “Use your mentality, wake up to reality.” When U2’s great leader whimpered, “I’ve got you under my skin,” I moaned: Et tu Bono? Accessory to yet another recycling of pop culture? I speak, of course, of the widely hyped platinum hit “Frank Sinatra Duets”--mostly schlock commercial pairings of the Chairman of the Board with younger artists singing classic American pop tunes.

The nation’s current nostalgia for old songs, old movies, old Broadway shows, old TV shows--as well as postmodern critiques of certain of these cultural expressions (isn’t that partly what “Beavis and Butt-head” is about?) adds fuel to a debate I’ve engaged in for years--first as a musician, now as a writer. What is the distinction between artistic reinvention and recycling? What’s the difference between mere appropriation and syncretism?

I’ve been particularly preoccupied with these themes of late because of a novel I am writing: “The Secret Life of Fred Astaire.” (Relax, Mrs. Astaire, the title’s metaphorical.) As a dancer and singer, Astaire reflects a uniquely American synthesis of European and African forms. He was white and a jazzman and, to some, automatically a cultural appropriator--an early Elvis. To others, he is a dazzling totem to an inspiring syncretism that could not exist--as, indeed, contemporary U.S. culture could not exist--without an African presence.

At the road’s edge, I recalled the pale, pimple-faced young salesman in the music store who’d convinced me to buy “Duets” against my better judgment, though I am generally a Sinatra fan. I probably relented because the “Duets” cut playing softly in the store at the time was the supreme one: Natalie Cole issuing a perfectly read and unerringly swinging version with Sinatra of “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.”

Popping his fingers and wobbling his head, the young salesman stood behind the counter, now singing along with Anita Baker and Sinatra: “that sly come-hither stare, leaves my conscience bare, it’s witchcraft.” And the harder he wobbled that head, the more he reminded me of the jazz drummer whom jazz critic Stanley Crouch once tagged the “secret enemy of swing.” But I appreciated his appreciation of these great songs and told him so.

“Oh yeah, I get no kick from champagne ,” he suddenly crooned. “Wasn’t Cole Porter great? And all those other guys, too. I hope we hear a lot more of these old songs.” Mmmmm, that all depends. . . .

As if I were flashing back on a bad drug trip, Linda Ronstadt’s 1980s recordings of classic American tunes echoed in my head. I cringed. Despite Nelson Riddle’s superb arrangements, her pedestrian phrasing and inability to swing affirmed that she, too, was a card-carrying member of the cult against swing. It takes a particular sensibility, as well as talent, to interpret these songs in the jazz and big-band style that was America’s popular music.

Anyway, I told the salesman as I mounted my portable soapbox, these songs haven’t been languishing in obscurity. Long the staple of jazz musicians, the American popular song has been kept alive and constantly reinvigorated by jazz artists who mine the lyrical, melodic and harmonic possibilities of the tunes in ways usually far superior to the original. That jazz has appropriately, but grudgingly, become “art” music (which means it doesn’t make big money) and that its originators and primary innovators are African Americans (the most ambivalently loved people in the nation) continues to marginalize it. This is partly the reason it’s possible for rock superstar Bono’s squealing of Cole Porter to be hyped as a serious artistic statement, while Shirley Horn, the jazz singer and pianist who seems to atomize and freeze space and time with her peerless phrasing of similar material, dwells at the margins of popular consciousness, if not art. Go figure.

BUT THE QUESTIONS FOR THIS GRAND INQUISITION ARE THESE: WHETHER IT’S music, movies, literature, television or dance, when does the recycling of these aspects of culture elevate and illuminate the art--either through subversive reinvention or a profound talent that has absorbed and mastered tradition? And when does recycling merely appropriate the material or trash it, exposing the artistic poverty of a particular cultural era, form or artist? Between my guffaws on the Sepulveda Pass, that’s what I was thinking--more or less. And as Grand Inquisitor, I threatened a bunch of folks with the rack it they didn’t ponder it too.

“In some ways, what you are thinking about is: Who are the Andy Warhols?” suggests Laurie Horne, dance critic for the Miami Herald. “Who are the people who are going to select these pop images and really make a new statement with them? Who is going to incorporate them into a creative statement about the world and how the pop iconography of the world is, in fact, changing our perceptions of the world? And who’s just out for a ride? I am not sure anymore that we can really make these kinds of moral judgments,” she asserted, “because so many of our (cultural) references are to the iconography of the pop world.”

Early in her career, Barbra Streisand fit this iconoclastic image, and her rendition of “Happy Days Are Here Again” leaps to mind. “She was a subversive artist,” claims Armand White, the New York-based arts writer and contributor to the Village Voice. “She certainly wasn’t doing Broadway show tunes in the same old way, and she showed it was possible to reinvent, to re-energize, and not just recycle that material.”

Her inspired reading of “Children Will Listen” on the recent “Back to Broadway” album is a social statement about the consequences of abandoning--pyschologically and morally--children. And in a climate of increasing hostility between blacks and Jews, only the “stupid and bigoted,” says White, could fail to see how “daring and noble” is her duet with Johnny Mathis on that album of “I Have a Love/One Hand One Heart,” from “West Side Story.”

For a long time, “you had a standard repertoire of great songs that singers would prove themselves by. Streisand was a key exemplar of that,” White says. “Doing covers was a legitimate artistic strategy (whose merit) we lose sight of in an era of some horrible person like Michael Bolton, who has no new ideas to bring to the songs he covers.”

But “popular culture is rarely fresh or inventive,” argues Lawrence Mintz, professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland and editor of “Humor in America,” a compilation of essays on humor genres. “If it were fresh and inventive, it wouldn’t be popular culture, it would be serious culture, or avant-garde culture--there are exceptions to that--but for the most part, popular culture is about repeating formulas and changing them slightly or bringing them back in new forms. Some of the things that make popular culture appealing are familiarity, predictability, some sense of a history. People watch ‘The Cosby Show’ and want to be reminded of ‘Father Knows Best.’ They watch ‘Roseanne’ and want to be reminded of ‘The Honeymooners.’ Very rarely is there anything in popular culture that is surprisingly new.”

Well, I argue, there is little surprising in classical culture--that’s why it’s considered classic. A great opera singer gets no points for reinventing a Mozart aria. Classical music is about the mastery of technique and interpretations that honor the intentions of the composer.

“It’s true,” Mintz acknowledges, “that the classical culture, particularly the classical culture we have inherited from Europe, is not applauded for its innovation but for its faithful representation of classical standards. But the idea that popular culture is supposed to be unsettling is more easy to challenge.”

Culture, with a “capital C, I have problems with that. I don’t buy into these hierarchies,” counters Jimmy Reeves, a professor of communications at the University of Michigan, who laughs with unsneering delight at Beavis and Butt-head, the animated miscreants of MTV. “Yes, I have to say I do love them. They allow me to flash back to an earlier identity and a lot of people I knew, guys in high school, who were wasteoids and became aficionados of the low,” says the 42-year-old native of Texas.

But about this distinction between high and low culture, he continues: “In high culture, this recycling is called allusion. They will look at ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ or something by T.S. Eliot, who makes references to ancient mythology, and say that’s a literary allusion. But when it comes to the realm of popular culture it becomes, somehow, depraved, an example of a lack of creativity. I don’t buy that somehow high culture is supposed to be immune to this question of recycling, of drawing on what happened in the past. This is how culture works, it’s an ongoing conversation. It’s a recognition that a particular artistic expression is connected to a tradition and comments on the tradition.”

Recycling and reflection, one might argue, are hallmarks of the postmodern world. I learned I was in the postmodern world because critics kept calling David Letterman a postmodern comic, and I live contemporaneously with Dave. I like Letterman. I know that his humor is ironic and self-aware. He sends up conventions--especially those of the pretentiously unconventional.

THE POSTMODERN WORLD IS A transitional epoch. What does it bridge? It links the modern world that was born, many would say, in the verification of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity in 1919, the European suicide of World War I and the sexual Gnosticism of Freud, which grabbed the popular imagination after the war, with a world still forming. A new world already experienced in a multitude of ways seen and unseen, yet unnamed; one that, only in retrospect, will look upon modernism and the postmodern as did the romantics upon the classical era that preceded it and claim to know the lines of demarcation. The postmodern spirit offers nothing essentially novel; it rethinks modern culture, so it must recycle and reflect--from the sublime to the ridiculous.

For instance, at one end of the cultural continuum, the postmodern artist rereads texts, as did Toni Morrison in her collection of essays, “playing in the dark (whiteness and the literary imagination),” on the unacknowledged African presence in American literature. In America’s wholly racialized society, she writes, a calculated blindness by the literary critics makes it possible to “read Henry James scholarship exhaustively and never arrive at a nodding mention . . . of the black woman who lubricates the turn of the plot and becomes the agency of moral choice and meaning in ‘What Maisie Knew.’ ” Or, she continues, they ignore, in Gertrude Stein’s “Three Lives,” the “exploratory and explanatory” uses to which Stein puts the black woman who holds center stage in the work.

“These critics see no excitement or meaning in the tropes of darkness, sexuality and desire in Ernest Hemingway or his cast of black men,” Morrison writes. “They see no connection between God’s grace and Africanist ‘othering’ in Flannery O’Connor.” And with few exceptions, they treat William Faulkner’s later works, “whose focus is race and class,” as “minor, superficial and marked by decline.”

At the other end of the cultural continuum, we have those aficionados of the low, “Beavis and Butt-head,” and those who critique them. Farting and scratching their way to fame, B and B comment on slightly obsolete music videos that divide, as their world does, into “things that suck” and “things that are cool.” They carry postmodern sensibility to the extreme: Everything is a joke. Nothing can be taken seriously because the world is a nihilistic mess, a notion reinforced by cataclysmic 20th-Century wars, the atomic bomb, which Einstein’s theories made possible, and the popular misapprehension over his theory of relativity. At the start of the 1920s, it became the popular belief, for the first time (at least in the Western world) that there were no longer any absolutes, particularly between good and evil. Relativity became confused with relativism.

Both “Beavis and Butt-head” and “Mystery Science Theater 3000”--a kind of B and B for the intelligentsia--are really inventive ways of recycling the low end of popular culture, claims the University of Michigan’s Reeves. A cult cable hit on the Comedy Central channel, “Mystery Science Theater” is based on a nightmare anyone without cable on a Saturday night knows: A human lab technician is trapped in space with his two robot sidekicks and is forced by evil scientists to watch an endless stream of bad flicks and, a la Beavis and Butt-head, keep up a running commentary. And these are really bad flicks: “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” “Viking Women and the Sea Serpent,” “The Crawling Eye.”

But once, says the show’s head writer, Mike Nelson, they accidentally aired, as a “bad” movie, Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Even if we are a society that reads less and depends on the mass media for a shared cultural identity, how can anyone who lays claim to pop cultural literacy not know the significance of any Orson Welles film? If that error was not just a technical mishap, it may suggest the poverty of intellect and artistry that can come from milking the low end of popular culture.

It seems there is a general dumbing-down that may affect even the supposedly hip. The creators of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” may just be wisecracking on culture and lack the true wit to critique. It’s not a conviction, just a thought. Then again, this dumbing-down may be a carefully conceived plot. If the masses are kept as stupid as Beavis and Butt-head, whom we know neither think nor read, then the Ivy League types who reportedly write the show can be assured that many of their class will have job security in an economy where one in five college graduates take jobs that require no college.

Perhaps one of the consequences of PCRV is that we are literally just reusing what was waste to begin with. This can be said fearlessly about “Attack of the Giant Leeches” and with minor trepidation about “The Donna Reed Show,” which is replayed on Nick at Nite and whose commercials for it are sendups done with subliminal messages flashing “Drink Milk” and “Marry a Doctor.”

Reeves counters, however, that when the Nickelodeon channel runs a Donna Reed marathon and reframes it with commercials like that, it’s not just recycling. “They’re teaching the next generation subversive ways of viewing the material. You would never see that in the original.”

Appropriately, he notes, “there’s a profound difference between the American Movie Classics’ recycling of old movies versus Nickelodeon, which does this playful recycling of ‘50s television that invites subversive pleasures. AMC does this reverent recycling of old Hollywood movies that invites nostalgia,” to which viewers lament, “they don’t make movies like that anymore.”

In some regards, Stanley Crouch is one of those doing the lamenting. A self-proclaimed genius before he got the MacArthur Foundation award last year and an always entertaining spiritual Tory, the jazz and social critic asserts that there is a kind of artistic poverty pervading the popular culture that accounts for the nation’s nostalgic turn. The country is hungry for true romance, he says.

“One of the central things we are in the middle of, in the pop arena, is the great difficulty in achieving a certain kind of adult vision of romantic involvement. By that I mean the whole male-female story, which is about optimism on one hand, and it’s about love, loss and disillusionment on the other. In most pop music--if you look at MTV or something like that--it has been reduced to a kind of pornography with a backbeat.”

He notes that Harry Connick Jr., a jazzman and retro-romantic song stylist, and performers mining similar territory “are successful because there is an appetite in the society for an expression of male-female relationships that are neither brutally barbaric . . . or the kind of amelodic, nursery-rhyme-level songs that these pop people write (today).”

The romantic song “dignifies, in a radiant, sensual kind of way, the relationship between men and women,” he says. That relationship has been discussed ad infinitum in terms of politics and biology, Crouch notes, “but that doesn’t supply what is spiritually needed for men and women to deal with each other. In terms of the romantic ideal--and I don’t care how corny the plot is--you can’t beat a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dance as the idealization of the male-female story. You can’t beat it, nobody can smoke that. Do do dah, do do do, dedo ah, boo, be da. . . “ he scats and I recognize the tune to “Cheek to Cheek.” And their “whole dance symbolizes the ups and downs of male and female relationships. People can say it’s stupid, it’s the same movie over and over again--he meets her, they don’t like each other, he chases her, she kinda likes him, he makes a mistake, she thinks he tricked her, she quits him, and then he has to prove to her that it was actually blah, blah, blah . . . . “

But that’s the way it always is, right?

“Exactly,” he answers. “I think the first person in this decade who figures out how to tell that story in our time, who recodes the story in our terms with the same feeling--because that’s what people want--is going to make as much money as Steven Spielberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone put together.”

And of the man who helped generate Crouch’s romantic ideal--Fred--what can be said?

“Whenever you deal with widely popular figures like Astaire, they are nothing but a bundle of appropriations from one point of view,” says Sally Sommer, professor of dance history at Duke University and a dance critic. “To someone like me, who is a historian--and my specialty is black dance forms of the 20th Century--it is amalgamation. He also mixes it through his own sensibility.” Actually, she amends, she prefers to think of it as imitation. “It’s not venal, as with the record industry,” where there’s a long history of appropriation, she says. Elvis Presley was a blatant example of that: a white man who was promoted because he could copy the black style the nation’s youth hungered for without the social inconvenience of black skin. But “imitation” suggests that the artist appreciates another artist and wants to emulate what is “really cool,” she says.

In Astaire’s case, it was much more “soft edge, blurred,” Sommer offers. “He is such a stylist in his own right. I think that all jazz is black. I think that only political and economic power are held by white males in this country. Everything else, all the popular entertainment, all major American culture is, to me, black.

“Fred Astaire was a jazzman, and because of that he is, de facto, an appropriator or imitator. But he kept so many Europeanisms in his dance forms: that close couple positioning, the very upright back, the way the arms frame the body, the lightness and bounding quality of the movement, the verticality of the movement--all completely opposite of Africanisms. In the great African tradition, we get close to the earth, there is a much looser kind of spine, the pelvic area is much more free.”

Tap is what people think of when they consider the African-American influence on Astaire. They forget that the ballroom tradition that informed his work was influenced by black popular dance as well. Ballroom dancing became a fad in the United States around World War I. And all those trots: fox, turkey, etc., were African-American dance forms introduced to Vernon and Irene Castle by black bandleader James Reese Europe. The Castles “refined” these dances and used them to launch an African-based dance craze early in the century that hasn’t let up yet.

In one sense, like the nation, Astaire could culturally be called African American. He certainly was not the greatest, or even a great, tap dancer. The late and revered hoofer, Honi Coles, used to say that Astaire “was a great describer of things,” recalls Brenda Bufalino, director of the New York-based American Tap Dance Orchestra. “He described furniture and chairs and a broom really well.”

“Is that a put-down?”

“No, Honi liked Fred Astaire. He considered him a great ballroom dancer. I think he was very inventive.”

He is a classic example of syncretism, says the Miami Herald’s Horne, in that he is clearly more “reinvention than appropriation.”

If there are no new ideas, only new ways to express them, then Astaire succeeded in elevating popular dance through this Euro-Afro-American syncretism, also giving form to our deepest romantic yearnings. Whomever he imitated, when filtered though his unique sensibility, no one could duplicate him. Others had to learn, move on or stay stuck.

I feel like we’re stuck, lost in Nick at Nite. To my mind, as a cultural icon, Astaire is an inspiration for that new world yet unnamed, one surely being lived or conceptualized somewhere that’s trying to break through the expanding channels of recycled cultural debris and the sometimes deadly aesthetic virus it breeds.