Is it just me, or does something about modern mainstream pop culture feel off? Not broken, but stuck. A sense of stasis. There’s more content than ever before, but less and less seems worth seeing or hearing.
Those nostalgic Facebook posts showing what was playing on multiplexes in 1987 (Robocop, Platoon, Predator, and Three Men and a Little Baby – sigh) suggest a serious problem with what’s happening now. We had good films and TV shows bursting out of our ears back then, both the conservative (in the UK, The Two Ronnies and Last of the Summer Wine) and the innovative (The Tube, Red Dwarf, and The Young Ones). There was space for both.
Entertainment executives would take a chance back then. Cheers, for example, endured a season of poor ratings, but its producers believed in it. The writing excellence was plain for all to see, as was the Sam/Diane, primitive/sophisticated, nature/culture dialectic from which so much comedy has been wrung. (Like, all 11 seasons of Frasier). Seinfeld was initially so unpromising that producers commissioned just four episodes for its first season. Yet it grew and improved.
We’re So F*cking Stuck
Simon and Schuster took a chance on publishing Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho when its initial publisher balked. Hellraiser was given a million dollars, and writer Clive Barker was allowed to direct it. (Imagine that now!) James Cameron was allowed to write and direct The Terminator after just one credit (for, um, Piranha 2).
That spirit of innovation in mainstream entertainment that we of the Gen X generation enjoyed has since been crushed in a tide of remakes, reboots, and sequels. The mainstream cultural sector – the media conglomerates that control the films, TV, and music that make popular culture – is increasingly interested in producing its own intellectual property. They want it ready-made. They don’t create: they harvest. Like so many venture capitalists, they are more about extraction than generation. They sweat existing assets instead of enabling scriptwriters and directors. Why risk it?
Why indeed, when there’s so much IP lying about with a near-guaranteed audience. The works of JRR Tolkien have become his own Moria, strip-mined for storylines, aesthetics, and even mood, in the lust for wealth. Expect to see dramatisations of his letters or animated visions of his poems in the not-too-distant future. Gotta keep churning.
In publishing, it’s possibly worse. Ghostwritten celebrity memoirs dominate the charts. Book deals go to influencers and personalities who “bring a platform”. Publishers say these books are profitable and enable them to publish the books they really want, but their bandwidth is limited. Good luck to authors trying to get a book deal unless they’re already well-known. (I know this all too well. When I was trying to find a publisher for my book about Pink Floyd, I constantly got the response: “Great book, love the writing, but you’ve no platform, so no thank you.”) That’s the game now: platform over prose, metrics over merit. Creativity is too risky.
Music, meanwhile, is in an even deeper rut. In the 1990s, new forms were constantly emerging: rave, grunge, Britpop, nu metal, trance, drum and bass, jungle, shoegaze, new jack swing, big beat – each with distinct sounds, fanbases, and meanings. The 2000s were when this unravelled. Now, legacy acts charge hundreds, even thousands, of dollars per ticket, while Spotify is home to seemingly infinite new but terribly underpaid bands that nobody knows about because they’re not reading the sources [editor’s insertion, ahem] that are struggling to enlighten listeners.
People who fight the power tell you there’s great music out there if you can find it, but that’s the point: in mainstream culture, it’s lost because there’s no unifying point for rising acts. New music thus lacks the cultural significance that legacy acts like Bruce Springsteen and Metallica have in such abundance. Not that I’m above seeing Iron Maiden (twice), David Gilmour, or Roger Waters. We all have our idols, but that shouldn’t mean acting like a musical Herod and killing the young.
“Ah!” I hear you say. “What about social media? That moves fast. Internet companies come and go. Remember MySpace? Bebo? Memes have the briefest of half-lives. That all changes constantly.” Fair point, but that’s social media, not the more complex products like films, TV, books, and music. Online discourse has a vanishingly short shelf life because being online lets everyone onto something almost instantly. Yet what we used to call physical media takes longer to assimilate.
The shift, hence, is that cultural production is no longer about creation but memory management. Labels and studios don’t want to produce the next Robocop or Thriller. (Let’s not forget that when the Jacksons moved to CBS from Motown, this was seen as risky. Their musical credibility was low. But CBS president Walter Yetnikoff took a chance on them. They were nurtured.) Now, media companies want to profit from the joys of the past.
Gen-Xers who never explore the lesser-promoted artistic rivulets that diverge from the mainstream are being fed brackish pop culture history in a nightmarish feedback loop of creativity devouring its own corpse. Like BSE cows fed the remains of dead cattle, we’re consuming regurgitated culture and calling it a feast. This is not a healthy system. It is an extractive culture that clogs the once-clear, flowing pipelines of creativity.
Nothing Old Moves and Nothing New Gets Through
Clearly, media companies are interested in reach, not voice. Whatever moves the needle, baby. Nostalgia recycled: that’s where the market is. Of course, to some extent, this was always true. Edmund White writes in City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s of the “delirious professions”, “those careers that depend on self-assurance and the opinion of others rather than on certifiable skills. The delirious professions, I’d hazard, comprise literature, criticism, design, the visual arts, acting, advertising, [and] all of the media.” It was who you know (or “who you blow”, the more sardonic said).
Before the internet – something only Gen X and the Boomers can fathom these days – those connections were pliable. You could hit the cocktail scene in New York or the publishing world in London and get to know people. That’s how yet-to-be-famous Boomers like Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe did it in New York. How Clive James broke through in London after arriving from Australia. The scene was porous. You could bluff your way in, dazzle the right person, and get your break. It was human.
These days? Buzz is quantified. It’s the numbers. How many Instagram followers you got? Are you big on X? Got paid subscribers on Substack? In other words: do you already have the name? Then we’ll sign you.
That means the work has been pre-validated—already chewed and served up.
Take YouTuber Chris Broad, who makes videos about Japan. He got a book deal. Abroad in Japan: Ten Years in the Land of the Rising Sun isn’t terrible, but it’s not great, either. It’s shallow and trite; he makes penis jokes, for example, because someone who makes popular videos doesn’t necessarily have literary talent. Writing chops aren’t the publisher’s point. Broad’s platform is the point. They could pretty much bake in the sales by looking at his subscriber numbers. Job done. Ain’t life sweet? Publishing books like that must be a doddle.
So it no longer matters if the work is good, or original, or necessary, or any of those artistic qualities we think ought to matter. What matters is if you come with built-in “reach” or “a platform”. Have you got the metrics? And so, in mainstream culture, editing has become calculus.
This cultural trend rewards safety, not risk. It creates a market that’s allergic to rawness. So instead of emerging artists who experiment, stumble, and get better, we get hyper-coiffed creators optimized for exposure, saying just enough to go viral but never enough to offend. We lose the workshop, the fuck-up, the breakthrough. Everyone’s supposed to launch fully polished – no false starts, no juvenilia, and so no risk of failure.
Yet failure is where art lives. You can’t write Ulysses or The Waste Land or Nevermind or Get Out without first writing the failures. Alastair Campbell from The Rest Is Politics started out writing porn for Forum, for god’s sake. (Though to be fair, in between, he did serve as the prime minister’s director of communications under Tony Blair).
Artists need room to bomb. More importantly, they need room to be forgotten. Not invisibility (no artist likes that), but the ability to leave something behind and move on. The greatest enemy of an artist is often their own past. Or rather, the commodification of their past work.
That Uncomfortable Bloated Feeling
The online culture, it is said, never forgets. As people say about nude photos, once they’re out there, they’re out there forever. Even dead websites can be resurrected thanks to the magic of Archive.org. But this is building up some pretty nasty side effects, like cultural bloat. We have a culture that cannot purge dead forms.
Whether it’s characters or styles (it seems like the 1980s will never leave us, thanks to synthwave and other related music subgenres) or ideas, we seem stuck in a cultural moment that can’t let go of its previous glories. Star Wars, The Beatles, Marvel Comics, christ even Hulk Hogan – they pop up again and again, not just as relics of the past but constrictors of the future. They clog up the space that should be clear and open for the new. Their continued prominence is less about enduring cultural value and more about brand recognition, nostalgia monetisation, and the easy comfort of the known.
It’s not just a few franchises hanging around too long: it’s every medium, clogged and congested. In cinema, we get sequel after sequel: Jurassic World, Avatar, Ghostbusters, Scream, Indiana Jones, The Matrix, Toy Story. None of which seems willing to die, just die, even when the stories are moldering.
In television, we’re caught in an endless feedback loop: more Star Wars prequels (Andor, The Mandalorian, The Acolyte), another Walking Dead side-series, a Frasier reboot, a Friends revival. The Office is being rebooted. Again. The Simpsons shambles on in its fourth decade like the cultural zombie it is.
In books, we get the next Game of Thrones volume (maybe), the next Harry Potter prequel or reissue, another YA fantasy trilogy pitched as the next Hunger Games. “Even Roald Dahl books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Witches get rebranded and re-edited for “modern sensibilities'” so that the feeding line stays full. In music, legacy acts dominate festivals, and dead stars keep releasing new material, from the Beatles to Abba to Prince and Tupac, AI-enhanced and archive-dredged.
Creative stasis is sold to us as abundance. Yes, there’s more content than ever to gorge upon, but almost none of it surprises. This is a culture, as E.M. Forster called it, “marked, not indeed with decay, but with the immobility that precedes it.” The unwillingness to face the new, to adapt, to innovate: these are warning signs from history. Just ask the Ming dynasty.
Flush All This Old Sh*T
What we underestimate about innovation is not its creativity but its destruction of old modes of thought and art. Every great artistic movement is its own Cultural Revolution, destroying the old to make way for the new. Sometimes you need to chop down a mighty oak to make space for new saplings.
Punk, for example, was perhaps the clearest reaction against “the dinosaurs”, fulminating against prog rock as much as creating a musical style shift. Rock n’ roll, too, and artists have known this for ages; what else is Chuck Barry‘s “Roll Over Beethoven” but an eviction notice? Move over, grandad, no more string quartets. Same with New Romantics – piss off, punks, we want colour and ambition and money. Same with Britpop – fuck off, grunge. It’s our turn. Rave culture did the same, its dance beats and collective euphoria making guitar music instantly irrelevant. How could you go back to Jesus Jones or INXS after that? Why would you?
Similarly, the Imagists and Dadaists of the 1920s dismantled Victorian sentimentality in poetry. They spoke to people in a new language. TS Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and particularly “The Waste Land” made every poem before them feel obsolete. Same for prose with Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, and with Naked Lunch. They shocked the culture and destroyed the old. Nothing was ever quite the same again.
Culture needs these slaughterhouses, these clearing stations. It needs the right to destroy.
Alas, in these times, we do the opposite. The instinct to raze has been replaced by a reverence that borders on necrophilia. We fetishize legacy. Paul McCartney is still touring in his 80s, as is Bob Dylan. David Gilmour and Bruce Springsteen are still drawing crowds while in their 70s. As are Metallica, U2, and Madonna…
This isn’t a problem in itself: the issue is that they’re treated as symbols of conscience and soul. Whereas most of these older artists haven’t released a decent album in decades, and some of their live shows are notoriously dreadful (looking at you, Zimmerman) or tacky cash grabs (everyone else).
We need more disrespect. Like, Metallica’s last great album was in 1988 – nearly forty fucking years ago. Dylan’s voice has been knackered for decades. David Gilmour can’t write a good song by himself. Madonna looks ever more like a vampire sucking inspiration from the young. These are very mortal and fallible artists.
Our artistic veneration chokes the air so much that new artists are smothered. To innovate, you must forget. There’s a very good reason why 1970s bands hated the 1960s. “No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones,” said the Clash in “1977”.
Whereas most of these older artists haven’t released a decent album in decades, and some of their live shows are notoriously dreadful (looking at you, Bob Dylan).
And they were right.
Chop ’em down.
Chop ’em right the fuck down.
Pasty-Thick Television
“Aaah!” I hear another voice piping up. “What about TV? We have just been through a Golden Age of great television – The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Succession. These shows were goddamn Shakespearean in breadth and depth. Explain that!”
I will. Put it like this: you know how car insurers and gyms throw the kitchen sink at you to get you to sign up? Then they bank on inertia to carry you through price hikes and added fees. Suddenly, the deal doesn’t seem so sweet.
That’s how it is with TV. For about a decade (the late 2000s to the mid-2010s), we saw what television could be when writers were trusted. HBO set the bar with The Sopranos and The Wire, then Mad Men hit, then Breaking Bad – it was like the industry had hit multiple vast seams of gold, and viewers were dazzled by its shine. Writers had room to breathe, episodes were treated like modern plays, and audiences were seen as intelligent enough to follow ambiguity, character depth, and narrative sprawl.
Netflix and Amazon jumped in, not out of love for the art, but because prestige TV is the way to steal market share from cable. For a moment, money was no object. The moment was stopped because the goal wasn’t to raise the cultural bar but to hook viewers on streaming channels. Once they were big enough, once viewers were safely cornered in their garden, the purse strings tightened, and TV art gave way to “content strategy”.
What followed is the era we’re in now: seasonal bloat, algorithm decisions, IP-driven spin-offs, and shows judged on engagement metrics. I mean, look at the Frasier revamp. The original stands as one of the wittiest shows ever on TV. I utterly adore it. The revamp is a tired, idea-free, landfill-sitcom that very obviously sucks. Paramount wanted to coast on the legacy of its former magnificence. Why spend loads of money on great writers? The fanbase is still there. But the fans weren’t biting Frasier‘s two seasons of mediocre dreck.
Perhaps even worse is the way that promising shows were axed if they didn’t take off instantly. The OA, The Chi, 1899, High Fidelity – all were binned mid-stride. Maybe worst of all is where shows are killed for tax write-offs. Completed seasons like Batgirl or Minx Season 2 were shelved, unreleased, or erased to reduce short-term losses. Warner Bros. Discovery is the prime culprit here, but the practise is creeping everywhere. Culture is harvested, squeezed, and regurgitated.
So no: the Golden Age of TV wasn’t a new dawn, where standards were raised, as happened with rock music in the 1960s or literature in the 1920s. It was just bait to get your money (and kill cable). Worse, it tells us that TV companies know how to make great television. They just choose not to.
The “Fat Cat” Culture Barons
It doesn’t take a genius (or a Marxist) to figure out that cultural trends are usually down to money. It’s not just the financial numbers; it’s their structure. Corporate media concentration has followed the pattern of late capitalism: mergers, takeovers, acquisitions, and the diminution of consumer choice. Once there are three or four conglomerates, each is big enough to survive without being threatened by the others, and to swallow any up-and-comer that might be threatening.
As we know, and as the brightest among the younger generations are seeing, a lack of risk leads to dull complacency. So Disney can buy Star Wars from George Lucas and assume that it can pump out related films and TV shows regardless. So Amazon can buy the Tolkien TV rights for $250 million and produce uninspired dreck like The Rings of Power (currently sitting at 38% on the Rotten Tomatoes Popcornmeter from the public). Hey, these were hit films, so the logic is impeccable, right? Except they were expecting lightning in a bottle, not just twice, but repeatedly through multiple seasons.
These conglomerates are the asset strippers of culture, soullessly buying up all the big pop-culture names to milk them. Never mind what made them good in the first place: the creativity, the daring, the insight, the sense of the future being created. That’s gone. Now it’s about leverage, IP, and platform synergy.
The conglomerates’ role in culture is hence no longer creative, but extractive: get assets, run them into the ground, then move on. With such corporate power behind them, they are the new cultural barons and we, the platform serfs, are supposed to give them tributary eyeballs, buy the merch, and shut the fuck up.
Clear the Pipes or Die a Slow, Miserable Death
Still, there is hope. There are places where there’s still humanity in our culture. Nowadays, these places are somewhat at the margins, but they’re there, and they need your business. Second-hand and independent book shops. Vinyl shops. Geek shops with names like Forbidden Planet or Plan 9 – half comic-book stores, half shrines. Flea-pit bars with local bands or cover bands. Jazz clubs where something new is being created every night. Local radio. Experimental theatre. Art-house cinemas. Even just your plain old local libraries.
These places are utterly essential to intellectual life. They enable human contact, cultural connection, and the magical threads that help the discovery of life-changing art. They’re all the more crucial because they’re not profit-driven but coming from a place of sheer enthusiasm. [Editor’s insertion, ahem.] They are not, as the phrase goes, scalable, and that’s why they matter. You can’t algorithmically reproduce the joy of crate-digging, the thrill of a chance recommendation, or the hush that falls over a tiny theatre when the lights go down. These spaces resist efficiency. They create moments. That makes them dangerous, precious, and deeply human.
Places like these created episodes in my life that I treasure. Going to a second-hand record sale and finding the first album by the Clash in mint condition for £2. Reading about Morrissey in Select magazine and then finding the Smiths’ compilation Best Of, Volume 1 in the library when I was 16, just the right age for their potent brand of literary lyricism. Browsing charity shops and finding excellent hardback books like A Passage To India or the Ted Morgan biography of William Burroughs for less than a quid each. The owner of a vinyl shop helping me find Damned! Damned! Damned!, which I still think is the greatest punk album of them all.
Watching Evil Dead II in a tiny cinema and everyone laughing themselves sick. Discovering brilliant writers like Edmund White and Leszek Kołakowski in independent bookshops. Seeing a Guns N’ Roses tribute band in a scuzzy live music bar playing a fucking wild set and enjoying myself more than I ever would at their reunion tour. (Someone tried to hit the bass player, who thumped him with his guitar. The night seemed like it might go awry, but a friend and I went down in front of the stage and responded to everything the band did with huge energy, and the whole gig took off like a rocket. It was awesome). Seeing Irvine Welsh give a reading, not at a university or bookshop, but in a nightclub.
Times like these matter for the kids these days. They need to experience art that feels real, lived.
It’s like the difference between participation and passive consumption. Kurt Cobain, in one of his final interviews, reflected on how he preferred shopping when poor, going through junk shops because “you might find a treasure that’s much more meaningful for you”. How right he was. Even when wealthy, he knew that culture is best when not curated and spoon-fed. It takes work, but from that work comes so much more meaning and delight.
Even within mainstream media, there is much we can do to foster new talent. Readings from emerging authors, thinkers, and poets. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim was featured on a BBC radio show for new writing before it was even published. Imagine that now. A greater openness to new cultures will help, too – South Korea has been producing some of the world’s best pop culture for years now, in films like Oldboy and Parasite, while Everything Everywhere All At Once was a great insight into the Chinese diaspora. Just like My Beautiful Laundrette was for the Indian community in London in the early 1990s. Interviews with rising stars, not the entrenched elite. Music sessions for fledgling bands – think of the astonishing richness of John Peel’s sessions and.
We should treat obscurity not as a flaw but as an opportunity. Regional writers, for example, aren’t just small-time scribblers: they reveal the true diversity of voice in this country. Commission work that takes risks. (A new Netflix show Dept Q. has this outline: “A brash but brilliant cop becomes head of a new police department, where he leads an unlikely team of misfits in solving Edinburgh’s cold cases.” What a brainstorming meeting that must have been.) Give column inches and airtime to those without PR teams. Bring back the old model of cultural curation as discovery.
It used to be the job of a magazine editor or a TV booker to seek out and champion the raw, the new, the unexpected. [Editor’s insertion. Ahem.] BBC DJ Jo Whiley, for example, was the researcher who got Nirvana onto the UK talk show The Word in 1991, just as they were breaking. It’s TV gold. Now, it’s too often about chasing what already has buzz. That cycle has to be broken. Algorithms don’t know what we need. People do.
Every culture has its own metabolism. That’s fine, but the danger now is that the metabolism has stalled. Mainstream culture refuses to flush out the past. The recycled old stuff lingers endlessly in the system, metastasised by corporate laziness and risk-aversion. Mainstream pop culture has become something we endure rather than something that enhances the human spirit. It’s a kind of artistic sewage system with no exit. When nothing can be cleared, nothing can grow. What we end up with isn’t heritage but dead weight, systemic blockage.
If we want a vibrant culture, we have to discard the idea that everything must be repeated. We need the occasional artistic bowel movement. We need to make space for and to respect the initial fumblings of creatives. We need to support the small labels and studios making daring, risky new content, and stop watching dross pumped out by cultural barons just because it’s got a recognisable name. We need to support affordable, accessible spaces for art that allow human connection. Otherwise, we’re just clogging the shit-pipes of culture and choking on our own waste. What will the kids think of what we’ve left behind?