Hosts
Derek Thompson
Derek ThompsonAbout the episode
In music, billion-dollar investments in old catalogs are squeezing out new music. In film, Hollywood has become addicted to the regurgitation of familiar IP. In visual art, critics bemoan the straitjacket of political correctness. On TV, as Derek told Bill Simmons, we’re in a Gilded Age of television, where every prestigious show looks absolutely amazing—but that gilded veneer often covers up for dull storytelling.
What do these trends all have in common? The slow decline of modern media. This month, The Atlantic‘s Spencer Kornhaber published a blockbuster essay, “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” Today, he joins Derek to answer that question. They discuss the four horsemen of the pop culture apocalypse—stagnation, cynicism, isolation, and brain rot—and the case that, maybe, things aren’t quite as bad as they seem.
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Summary
In the following excerpt, Derek and Spencer Kornhaber explore the ways in which American culture has declined, with a specific focus on music.
Derek Thompson: We’ve known each other for a long time. I know you and your work very well. You’re not a doomer. You are not a cultural declinist who thinks things are always getting worse. Why did you finally bite the bullet and write a long essay about the death of American culture?
Spencer Kornhaber: Yeah, I mean, you’re right. I’m sometimes a little overly optimistic. I’m accused of being a poptimist by my haters. But I try to listen widely and appreciate changing times for what they are, which is humans finding ways to express themselves in ways that suit the times that they live in. And those times are defined by technological change and social change and political change. But creativity seems like a renewable resource that’s always there. Or at least that’s what I thought, and then the 2020s rolled around, the pandemic happened, and it just felt like things in culture got a lot more confusing and, in a way, quieter.
I’ve been doing my job as a culture critic at The Atlantic since 2011, and I really felt my job changing in the 2020s. It used to always feel like you knew what you were “supposed to be writing about.” You knew what the big topics of the day were: the TV show, the album, the story line that everyone in America, or at least a big swath of America, seemed to be agreeing was the thing of the moment. In the 2020s, that just became a lot harder to identify, and there just was a lot less enthusiasm for new offerings. And while that was happening, you saw more and more people just proclaiming that it was the worst time ever.
We had terms—the slang words of our time are things like “mid” or “enshitification,” these terms that indicate that we’re not really happy with what we’re being presented. And the underlying problems in culture just became too large to ignore. Things like Hollywood’s regurgitation of corporate IP and telling stories that we’ve heard over and over again. Things like the culture wars and politics coming for actual culture, where you can’t just enjoy a movie or an album without thinking about whether it’s a piece of propaganda or something like that.
The isolation, which you’ve written about so brilliantly. The feeling that we don’t have scenes anymore. We don’t have communities in culture. We’re just all on our phones and consuming art as a way to pass the time, to distract ourselves. And just the way that everything sped up and felt like there was more and more to experience and less and less attention to be paid to any given piece of art.
We’ve all felt our attention spans rotting away in the past few years. And the fact that kids these days seem to not be able to watch a full movie or read a full book without looking at their phones—and by kids these days, I include myself—that seemed like an obvious red flag for the state of culture. So I figured it was time to stop being a Pollyanna and actually look at what was happening.
Thompson: I wanted to have a conversation about this for a long time. I also feel like every conversation about this topic, whether American culture is in decline, goes off the rails almost immediately with impossibly grand claims about the meaning of art and these impossible-to-resolve debates. Like, is Taylor Swift really better than John Lennon, or was Michael Jackson clearly better than Taylor Swift?
What I loved about your essay is that you cut right through all of that. You said, I want to analyze real trends and real facts that people have to grapple with because there are ways that culture has changed that are more true, more falsifiable than just ‘I think Anora is worse than The Godfather.’ Which is something that may be true. I certainly think it’s true but hard to actually fruitfully debate on a podcast.
So I want to start with facts here, starting with a category you know very well, which is music. What to you is the clearest evidence that something true and important has happened to the music industry that makes this moment in history different?
Kornhaber: Well, the really shocking statistic [from 2021] that I think made a lot of people wake up was that almost 75 percent of music consumed today is old music. New releases count for, really, a minority of what people are streaming at any given time. And those numbers keep getting “worse.” More and more every year, you see new releases getting a smaller, smaller piece of the pie for listenership. And that would seem to indicate that people are a lot less interested in the culture of now than the culture of yesterday. And you have very concrete examples of what this means.
A couple of years back, Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” became a huge smash. It came nearly to the top of the Billboard [Hot 100] chart despite being released three decades earlier. That was due to being placed in a TV show, Stranger Things, which is totally nostalgia bait; it’s a pastiche of tropes from ’80s movies and TV. And it happened in large part because TikTok and platforms like it allow, well, they allow a couple of things, but one of them is the flattening of culture and the flattening of time.
Things can pop up there and catch your eye and compete directly with what’s happening now. And in many cases, the things from the past have an advantage because they’ve been time-tested, and we’ve grown up in a culture where the ideas contained within them shaped our taste in the first place. So it felt like the past was eating the present.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Spencer Kornhaber
Producer: Devon Baroldi