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The Western canon faced scrutiny within academia for its whiteness and maleness. Boomers raised on rock ’n’ roll anointed the Beatles as geniuses. “Trash has given us an appetite for art,” Pauline Kael noted in her snobbery-shattering 1969 essay “ Trash, Art, and the Movies.” In other words, the scrappy subversiveness of B movies can ignite a passion for more sophisticated cinematic subversion.Īround the same time, hierarchies of taste were muddied by other divisions within society. Maybe the manufacturers of mass media prioritized profits over art, but art made its way into some of their wares anyway. High-minded critics such as Dwight Macdonald took aim at culture as product, but defenders of popular tastes emerged. In 1949, a rubric in Life ranked “everyday tastes” from highbrow (Eames furniture, ballet) to lowbrow (“mail order overstuffed chair,” westerns). Such evolution is the result of constant, generational negotiations-ones that intensified in the 20th century, as rapid advancements in technology yielded radio, records, movies with sound and TV, which could bring a night at the opera to the masses but more often cranked out cliché-ridden love songs.ĭuring the prosperous postwar years, as college attendance skyrocketed and the middle class swelled, adjudicating hierarchies of taste became something of a parlor game. In the 1970s, Pink Flamingos and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls epitomized bad-taste cinema now they’re in the Criterion Collection. Rock snobbery would’ve baffled 1950s parents scandalized by Elvis’ hips. For women in the Victorian era, wearing makeup was considered cheap. Yet what’s remarkable about this particular pendulum swing is that after centuries of wrestling with hierarchies of taste, the cultural stigma that has always come with indulging in bad taste has disappeared.īad taste can be tough to define, because standards are changing all the time. And nothing kills numbness like a sensory onslaught-color, sound, hedonism, melodrama, sleaze. What TikTok teens, white collar workers marooned in home offices, and the gatekept super-rich all have in common is the kind of physical isolation, if not the sense of doom, that makes a person desperate just to feel something. The 20-year nostalgia cycle, climate-change nihilism, information saturation, streaming-era content overload, and our collective Long COVID of the soul have converged in a tidal wave of tackiness.
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What we’re dealing with is a full-blown cultural moment.
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But what we’re witnessing goes far beyond cool teens and the extremely online to encompass anyone with free time, disposable income, and internet access. Trendspotters have glommed on to the Y2K nostalgia and end-times decadence in Gen Z’s nascent aesthetic sensibility (see: the skimpy, iridescent fashions of Euphoria). Certainly, there is a youthful element to this bad-taste renaissance. We have entered an era of exuberant, even apocalyptic, bad taste. The most salient new sound in recent years is hyperpop, a dizzyingly hooky, wildly referential microgenre that has been described by one of Spotify’s influential “data alchemists” as “ebullient electro-maximalism.”
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After a boom in scripted programming, trashy reality TV is surging, in a resurgence fueled by self-consciously trashy shows like Selling Sunset and FBoy Island. Designers are hawking hot-pink suits, belt-length skirts, and logo-plastered handbags. If the straights don’t do something, in a couple of generations, everyone will belong to the LGBTQ rainbow.Everything is suddenly bigger, brighter, louder, raunchier. Which sounds, to a skeptical ear, like a gay replacement theory. Under the guise of “ just asking questions,” commentators like Bill Maher are suggesting that the uptick of people identifying as queer and/or trans will probably continue until there are no cisgender heterosexuals left. Meanwhile, as anti-LGBTQ sentiment accelerates, led by a new rash of transphobic state bills, a parallel idea has been taking shape. The mass murderers who carried out shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue, two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and stores in El Paso, Texas and Buffalo, New York all appeared to believe that immigration and/or declining birth rates threaten the very existence of whites - making a violent response necessary. The “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which falsely posits that white or “European” demographics are being overtaken by non-white populations, has been linked to many far-right terrorist attacks in recent years.