It may be 2020 but I'm already back on my Simon Reynolds bullshit. Nosing through Energy Flash, there's this video of Popcorn by Gershon Kingsley on Top of the Pops in 1969.
And what got me is how weird it is. Weird and on BBC 1. In primetime too. And then it hit me that 50+ years on, we're not going to see something like this again anytime soon. Now, I know this isn't an original thought or observation, but are we missing something by not having a collective musical experience any more?
Any form of collective experience for that matter, with the possible exception of sport, and maybe Christmas. And both of those are pretty conservative. So, where's the mass weirdness going to come from? Would something like TV Interruptions by David Hall happen now?
Yeah, we have memes and shitposting now but you get them when you get them. You view alone and out of sync unless it's turning a phone around to show someone. Turns out that old man yells at cloud was me all along.
Reynolds highlights our fractured, kaleidoscopic cultural experience in a recent article for The Guardian - 'Streaming has killed the mainstream': the decade that broke popular culture. Despite all my hand-wringing over the loss of a cultural centre ground for weirdness to sneak in, he quite rightly points out, "There are worse fates than drowning in a flood of great entertainment and popular art."
Also, the old media mono-culture excluded many. I'm not saying we should go back to four TV channels and no catch-up or streaming. The choice is nice. Yet with so much available, I start to side with Devo and wish for freedom from choice.
Reynolds also writes "Significance doesn’t need to be universal to matter." Maybe so. Probably so. But I still feel like asking if we're missing something in this age of the LostStream.
And I feel like asking you, yes you, this question. Can you keep it weird in 2020?
Related post: Big Bright Art, Long Passionate Popcorn
EDIT: Since writing this we have The Masked Singer on ITV, so...
