The August 18th issue of Entertainment Weekly has a fun little gimmick: six covers, one for each of the James Bond actors, going back in time. It provides an interesting window into the changing pop cultural preoccupations.
In 1995, with Pierce Brosnan on the cover, we see an article on “What’s Hot (And Not) on Laserdisc.” To which today’s response is “what’s laserdisc?” We see a pre-Shakespeare in Love Gwyneth Paltrow insisting that “I’m more than a head in a box.” And the cover article asks, “Do we still need 007 in a post-Cold-War world?” The Brosnan Bond movies of course answered that question; the 1995-era sense that history had ended was turned on its ear in not too many more years.
In 1987, the cover was Timothy Dalton. The cover boldly argues “Those Silly Simpsons: Why Tracey Ullman’s Cartoon Clan Deserves Its Own Show.” Today, of course, most folks who watch The Simpsons probably don’t remember that it originated on Ullman’s ill-fated sketch comedy show. If they remember Tracey Ullman.
The cover also asks “Is Madonna Over?” way too early, but given the other evidence on the covers, it’s a reasonable question. What we’re seeing here is the way in which pop culture has real trouble seeing past its own nose. Did email jokes truly “forward” the future of comedy, as this cover asserts? Nope. But things close up to us are magnified, and things that recede from view are really easily forgotten.
The next cover hammers this home: 1973, with Roger Moore. “Helen Reddy Teams up With Flip Wilson.” “On the Set of a Very Special Maude.” And in a particularly poignant portrayal of the era, the double dose of irrelevancy of “Why We Love Jonathan Livingston Seagull: An Exclusive by the Carpenters.” At the time the issue came out, Karen Carpenter had had enormous success, was riding high with one of the top-selling greatest hits albums ever, was unknowingly at the peak of her career, as The Carpenters would face lower sales in the mid-70s — and she had less than ten years to live. As far as Jonathan Livingston Seagull, well, never mind.
Now we move before I was born, going back to 1969. The deeply ironic cover proclaims, “THE NEW BOND: George Lazenby Takes Over As 007 — And He’s Here To Stay!” I suspect most people haven’t even seen the single Lazenby Bond film; and yet Lazenby is improbably hip as he has done voicework for Yu Yu Hakusho. Other items on the cover include Gore Vidal pontificating on whether Easy Rider is art — some things never change — and a behind-the-scenes look at the amazing special effects of The Love Bug.
By the time we get to the Connery cover from 1963, proclaiming Bond “President Kennedy’s Favorite Secret Agent,” and a little blurb about how “perky Jane Fonda” is going to “follow in daddy’s footsteps,” we’re into a realm of historical artifacts; Connery remains a vital and admired presence, but this is a cover 40 years old, and the small headline about “Lesley Gore’s Secret Sadness” seems sadder because the whole context is lost to most of us — probably even to Lesley Gore fans, at this point.
Now, this excursion did have a point. Change happens, and usually faster than we quite know. We’re discussing some elements of that change in the thread on HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray, for example, and one thing that is clear is that not only is the tech changing faster than we quite know what to do with it, it’s also (as the science fiction has it) a poorly distributed future. But technical change is is many ways the easy one. Pop culture — and in this I include games as well as movies, music, books, and TV — is far more ephemeral, far more self-referential and demanding to follow, far faster in pace.
Right now, the hot game on XBox 360 is — pop quiz, do you know the answer? Well, Dead Rising is getting the ink. But no, maybe it’s still Chromehounds. Next week, what will it be? And yet the experience of playing on the 360 is also an experience of launching Joust (a game 24 years old); or Crystal Quest, which I first played on a black and white Mac; or Geometry Wars, which first saw the light of day as an Easter Egg.
Like technology, pop culture accretes. If you have the urge to check out how the modern police procedural developed, you can get the DVD set of Hill Street Blues. If you want to lord it over other commenters in a thread on Joystiq, you compare David Jaffe and Tim Schafer unfavorably to Dani Bunten (I actually saw this the other day). But pop culture is also so dense, so fast moving, that it’s easy for almost anyone to have a few memories that are so obscure that they generate a sort of underground fandom, popping up in force only at booths at geek conventions.
In a world like this, Dead Rising is destined for much the same trivial ending as that article on Lesley Gore. And it’s only going to get worse, as the volume of pop confections increases and the pace of their release increases. At any given time, pretty much everything in the pop cultural landscape is doomed to irrelevancy; the landscape is actually a landfill that hasn’t figured itself out yet.
There are basically two accomodations to reach with this, to my mind. One is to embrace the decay, to realize that despite the fact that new technologies are going to allow us to preserve all of this irrelevancy, keeping around forever pristine copies of “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” by Rupert Holmes, the #1 song in the country at Christmas of 1979 — despite this fact, nobody is going to care. So you live and work in pop culture very much for today, and perhaps for the fond memory that maybe it conjures up from time to time in someone who was touched by it.
The other is to say pop culture can go hang. This seems, to some degree, to be what at least a couple of ex-Bonds have done; neither Connery nor Brosnan seem to be particularly driven by box office in their subsequent choices. I have real doubts that Brosnan’s Evelyn will live as long as his turns as Bond, but it was certainly more heartfelt, and as I result, I can remember the plot better (frankly, the Bond films mostly mush together for me).
Either way, they both demand a sort of perspective, a perspective that was perhaps easier in the days before all this… stuff could get preserved indefinitely. In the days before recordings, this all was truly ephemeral. It evanesced the moment you walked out of the theater, the moment the song ended. Shakespeare’s company kept dozens of plays about ready to be performed on short notice — and when the Globe burned down, the great fear must have been that the only full copies might be lost (and indeed, we have lost Cardenio and others). This sort of essential disposability must affct our relationship to pop culture, and give us a very different perspective on following it obsessively.
Today, I see that happening with the indie games, which may be months of work for an hour’s amusement. And one of them ost interesting things I see surrounding that scene is the comment that “these aren’t real games” — as if because of their very ephemerality, their smaller feature set and limited scope, they are somehow less of themselves, perhaps just as many music fans might regard The Carpenters as “not a real band.”
Of course, this is silly. The Carpenters touched plenty of folks, and a casual puzzle game is just as much of a “real” game as Dead Rising. And in 100 years, nobody will give a damn about any of it, except those fans who collect the retro, recapture their youth, or prefer to live in their pop cultural pocket, ignoring the swish and flow of pop around them as they cling instead to the familiar rocks of something they once knew and loved.
16 Responses to “Some musings on ephemeral pop”
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Wow. Great post.
For more video game history, irony and the like, see my post here:
http://kpallist.blogspot.com/2006/08/plus-ca-change.html
When I teach the history of advertising, one of the break-water points I really land on is the “invention” of pop culture, which started somewhere around 1900-1920, depending on how ornery you’re feeling about the term “pop.” Before that, we just had culture. After that, we had cultural artifacts that were designed — purposefully — to be disposable. Initially, this wasn’t done anywhere near as consciously as it is today. It was part of new art and literature movements, design ideas/ideals, technological improvements, etc. It started as implicit and became, by the 1940’s, incredibly implicit. Culture was marketable, and, therefore, designed to be part of the planned obsolescence that gets built into everything that drives the economy.
Which is OK. We owe our standard of living to planned obsolescence. Whether the obsolescence is due to style, cycle-of-use, psychology or expiration… we just like lots of new stuff. And it wasn’t always that way. “Old” used to mean “classic” and “time-tested” and “worthy,” not “out-of-fashion” and “un-hip.” [Is the term “un-hip” un-hip? I forget…].
In the arts, students are often discouraged for including pop imagery and media iconography in their work for just the reasons mentioned in this post; in a few years, a picture of “James Bond” used as part of a meaningful collage will not look like Bond when the actor changes. In a couple decades, the “meaning” of a seagull will be… those birds that cry, Mine! Mine!” in “Finding Nemo.”
All cultures, even classical ones, had elements that have been disposed of. There are hundreds and thousands of writers from the periods between 1500 and now that we don’t read because, frankly, their work is crap; it wasn’t pop crap, but it was still crap. Cultural ephemera.
But just because something starts as “pop” doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t live on and become part of the enduring cultural legacy of a particular time or culture. Much of the work of Dickens, though not pop by current definitions, was as close to it as you could get in his day. Now? Classic. Will probably endure quite some time. The songs of the Beatles and Paul Simon and Pink Floyd still sell, and they pre-date the Carpenters.
And while the technology of certain “classic” games makes them obsolete from a pop standpoint, their legacy lives on in what we choose to play now. Would we have World of Warcraft withough Dungeons & Dragons? Katamari Damacy without Pac Man? Grand Theft Auto without… er… help me out here…
Genius is never “pop.” Andy Warhol proved that.
[…] Comments […]
Andy Havens wrote:
Lies. All lies! For 500 years, there was only one writer: Shakespeare!
Ouch.
Yeah, I’ve noticed this a bit. When asked about games I’ve developed in the past, once upon a time I got people saying, “Dude, you worked on Twisted Metal? That was my favorite game!”
Nowadays, they look at me in confusion. “It was for the Playstation 1,” I explain. “It was a big hit at the time.”
They nod their heads, trying to find some common ground, and say, “I have a Playstation 2.”
Yup. My minor claims to fame have been rendered ever more irrelevant by the passing of time. But, as time goes on, I’ve found I’m okay with that. In 100 years, Pac-Man might be nothing more than a footnote in a handful of books that nobody reads about the late 20th century, along with footnotes about the Hoola Hoop, Elvis, and how Detroit was once the center of the automobile industry. Few will care. They’ll have their own lives and their own pop-culture to worry about.
The best you can do is just work in the here and now. If you are making games, providing entertainment, then do it out of hope to make one person’s day a little more fun and exciting. Or more than one. Enjoy the moments, and let the future take care of itself.
Now we move before I was born, going back to 1969.
Eh? Am I really an old geriatric gamer then? That just made me feel old….
“The songs of the Beatles and Paul Simon and Pink Floyd still sell, and they pre-date the Carpenters.”
Do they sell because theyre good or because there is a financial industry incentive? Elvis still sells, Led Zepplin is still one of the highest grossing bands world wide, is it because they’re good or timeless?
Not necessarily
There is a record industry incentive to keep these bands and thier sales alive, from a strictly financial point of view they represent derivative income from ABB’s (Artist Backed Bonds). Thats why these bands are “timeless” and why they keep flogging them into the cultural consciousness. The same with 80’s music, amalgamating the bands revenues into bonded instrunments is huge money. Its not like the 80’s gave us compelling timeless music, its that the 80’s represent an income stream to be bought and sold.
The real lasting cultural “pop” phenom that will be remembered is that we were so shallow we were able to package our culture itself into financial instrunments and income streams and sell it back to ourselves, and more hilariously (if you have a sick sense of humor), sell it to others….
Soylent Green is made of people….indeed.
I’m a bit surprised you didn’t talk more about the intersection of this phenomenon and online games, Raph. Perhaps I’m just more immersed in it since I run one of those “old” games I like to think of as “classic” rather than “un-hip”. 😉
Part of this is planned obsolesence, of course. The big conversion to 3D games happened because some companies could do better 3D graphics and pushed them as being “new” and therefore “better” than the old 2D stuff. Now that we look back on them, we can see that the early 3D graphics really were awful eyesores. Yet, people thought they were the best thing since sliced bread back in the day. Seriously, go back and look at the original graphics for EverQuest; some people say it was the “full 3D” aspect that pulled people into online games in such large numbers. Really? Those graphics?
Online games are an interesting aspect to this conversation. People used to think these types of games were effectively immortal. After all, text games were still going strong. Of course, they didn’t have to worry about outdated-looking graphics. We’ve also seen that the audience is fickle, and willing to jump to the newest game easily. The original EverQuest now looks hideous by modern standards, even with the upgrades to the engine over the years. Meridian 59 will never be a large game, even if it can be kept profitable with a very low overhead. I’ve even heard the old hands start to talk about how games have a finite lifespan.
Moving on to other phenomenon, I wonder how much of this ephemeral nature applies to things we see today. People are going crazy over MySpace, but isn’t this probably just the next version of Geocities? Remember when people talked about Geocities like it was the next coming of robotic Jesus here to save the world? Perhaps someone should do a Where are they now? for Geocities. (Yeah, still at http://www.geocities.com/, but it’s more filled with spam than useful pages these days.) Will MySpace really be able to avoid becoming eventually overused, abused, and ignored like Geocities (or Usenet, or… well, you get the idea.)
Interesting to think about.
Brian wrote:
Speaking of outdated-looking graphics, Raph’s baby Ultima Online is getting a facelift. Ultima Online with a new client, new graphics, and a new interface… That’s definitely a game I shall revisit!
UO with a facelift? hmmmm should get some nostalgia re-subs for that for sure…
You could argue that literature buffs and classic film buffs and Velvet Underground fans are just pop culture bubbles themselves, but I think that marginalzes the role that powerfully vibrant beauty has in how media is remember. Dead Rising looks sweet, just like RE 4 looked sweet, and RE 2 looked sweet, but on the other hand you have stand-out titles in the history of games, like Planescape: Torment, that are celebrated for their aesthetic soul rather than their raw market penetration. We can have a canon of games without nessecarily being nostalgic.
[…] Some musings on ephemeral pop on Raph Koster Some musings on ephemeral pop on Raph Koster The August 18th issue of Entertainment Weekly has a fun little gimmick: six covers, one for each of the James Bond actors, going back in time. It provides an interesting window into the changing pop cultural preoccupations. In 1995, with Pierce Brosnan on the cover, we see an article on “What’s Hot (And Not) on Laserdisc.” […] via Raph Koster […]
[…] Raph Koster is one of my favourite bloggers. He was a lead designer on the best game of all time. His blog is nominally about games but he covers a lot of the surrounding territory too. Today’s post is about the recent history of pop culture as seen through the covers of Entertainment Weekly whenever a new actor took on the James Bond role. In 1995, with Pierce Brosnan on the cover, we see an article on “What’s Hot (And Not) on Laserdisc.” To which today’s response is “what’s laserdisc?” We see a pre-Shakespeare in Love Gwyneth Paltrow insisting that “I’m more than a head in a box.” And the cover article asks, “Do we still need 007 in a post-Cold-War world?” […]
That was one of my favorite “units” in college, though I don’t think it was part of my advertising track … maybe interpersonal communications. I think it was in conjunction with our reading of Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins, which was one of my favorite books for that course (hard to recall … coming up on 15 years ago now 🙁 )
Man, deja vu … were teaching 15 years ago, Andy? I’m having flashbacks 🙂
Allen said: Elvis still sells, Led Zepplin is still one of the highest grossing bands world wide, is it because they’re good or timeless? Not necessarily There is a record industry incentive to keep these bands and thier sales alive, from a strictly financial point of view they represent derivative income.
Yeah, but that’s true for all bands, of all times, everywhere. There’s no less industry incentive to sell the Carpenters’ music than there is to sell Led Zep’s. You can argue that Zep, the Doors, the Stones, Bealtes, etc. have better music, or better marketing. Or both. But for some reason “Dark Side of the Moon” continues to sell, year after year, generation after generation, and “Passages” does not.
Here’s an interesting “cultural value test:” go to eBay and type in the name of a band, performer, artist, writer, pop “thingy,” etc. Count both the number and value of the stuff being offered. Because, as we know, everything that has value has a price tag and somebody who has inherited it or found it in a garage sale. Pink Floyd (at the moment) has 4,554 items up for sale, with top price-tags of US $1,200 and lots of items in the $200-$300 range. The Carpenters? 191 items, top asking price for anything in the $100 range.
Yikes. I wonder if eBay could get us those statistics. Over X amount of time, what was the total value of items sold with “Brand A” vs. “Brand B.”
Double Yikes. I wonder if that’s not a huge opportunity for some enterprising marketeer…
Well, it’s designed more for eBay sellers, but do you mean something like Hammer Tap?
Andy-
Touche’ Good point, Im going to avoid the Valuation of Art landmines however (thems’s fightin’ words round’ her’), there are more than a few reasons to keep flogging those old tunes it seems “cultural valuation aside” I thought I’d mention the financial industries stake in it. Of course I’ll also avoid the whole “who are the music critics really working for” conspiracy thoery as well by avoiding this landmine.
WOW Raph, you sure are digging up some esoteric software solutions this week….
PS: Im NOT knocking the Zep or Doors btw I’m a huge fan, heck I even like VU (someone mentioned them) but well Floyd, not so much.