Red Alert! Shields up! You only have until Monday to ask your local comic book store to reserve a copy of my Star Trek comic, Zero Point, even though it comes out 10/14. It’s about paranoia and hope, and I’m super proud of it. I hope y’all can pick up a copy of the first issue.

Psst. PSSSSSST.

You can get Lessons in Magic and Disaster in paperback anywhere, or a signed/doodled copy from Green Apple.

We’re doing another Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl on Sept. 19! It’s going to be extra gay and weird. Please come.

Nostalgia for Monoculture is fucked up, y’all

I can still remember when I had never heard the term “monoculture.” And then suddenly, it was the subject of a million think pieces. I am now ready for it to fade into obscurity again.

“Monoculture” is what it sounds like: the notion of a culture where everyone is obsessing about the same pieces of culture. In my piece about the mistakes people made when they tried to copy Game of Thrones, I mentioned the notion that Thrones was the last TV show that absolutely everyone watched and talked about. Pundits and culture writers have written endlessly about how tragic it is that monoculture no longer exists, meaning that everyone likes different stuff.

Most recently, in August, the Wall Street Journal proclaimed that monoculture had “made a comeback” thanks to the Odyssey and Taylor Swift’s wedding. That same week, Vice Magazine and The Guardian both proclaimed that monoculture was dead.

I have complicated thoughts about this. They boil down to:

1. We still kind of have a monoculture.

2. We never really did have a monoculture in the way that some people seem to think we did.

3. The notion of a monoculture feels oppressive and shitty

4. You can't separate this notion from questions around representation and assimilation. 

So let's take these one at a time.... 

We still kind of have a monoculture 

Yes, almost everybody seems to have gone and watched The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. I myself haven't seen either of those films, because I prioritized watching The Furious, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, I Want Your Sex, and The Wrong Girls. Yes, I am a hipster. In fact, one reason I've been so keen to watch underdog movies instead of the big hits is because I believe it's important to preserve the richness and diversity of films, in an ecosystem that increasingly prioritizes only the big players. More on that later.

If anything, I feel like pop culture is constantly in danger of limiting itself to a few court-appointed biggies. A lot of my favorite TV shows, books and musical artists have gone completely unappreciated despite being absolutely excellent. (Pouring one out for Deli Boys, which just got canceled and was — I promise — better than your favorite TV show. Unless your favorite TV show was Deli Boys, of course.)

I would even go so far as to say that monoculture is making a bit of a comebackk, as the internet becomes more and more unusable. Five years ago, you might well have been able to see robust conversations about a bunch of things that weren't hits, but now that social media has been eviscerated and sloppified, there are fewer opportunities for those conversations. Add the destruction of arts coverage in newspapers and other publications, and there are fewer and fewer ways to even find out about something that isn't already massive. I read plenty of entertainment journalism, and it's easy to find people talking about Hacks or Widow's Bay right now — but it's a lot harder to find people talking about the many great TV shows that have come out recently. (Please go watch Ride or Die.)

Peak TV may have ended, but the problem of excellent TV slipping through the cracks definitely has not. 

We never really had a monoculture in the first place 

At one time, there were three main TV networks, along with PBS and some oddball UHF stations. There were big movie studios and big record companies, and everybody consumed the same stuff.

Or did they?

Even if you accept the premise that the only television was on ABC, CBS, and NBC, there were plenty of wacky shows in syndication. And those networks somehow made shows like Quark, a goofy spoof of Star Trek and Star Wars that made a profound impression on a small number of people. Or all the amazing works of Sid and Marty Krofft, RIP. And those UHF stations and PBS would sometimes feature truly gonzo shit, like British comedies and low-budget trash. And meanwhile, it used to be much easier to go see bizarre indie movies in a theater, back when they were rep theaters and art houses everywhere.

Gen X people like myself often were shaped by tiny strange TV shows and movies that it seemed like nobody else had seen.

But meanwhile, there was also tons of underground stuff. Tiny indie comics, weird little books, bonkers cultural artifacts that somehow got mass produced despite never being popular at all. My local public library, when I was a kid, had film reels of strange little blips of alt culture that you could borrow along with a projector. That's how I watched Hardware Wars over and over. Even before the VCR and cable TV started to open everything up, there was always plenty that flew below the radar — and maybe the monoculture was simply the stuff that everybody agreed was important. Maybe the underground stuff was just that: underground. 

Except that there were also subcultures — like queer people, who had our own special bookstores in some places, and had to dig through piles of weird books and materials in other places. Trans people had mimeographed zines and cheaply printed magazines, going back decades. Marginalized groups always had their own cultural institutions that were mainstream to them, but invisible to everyone else. The whole concept of a cult classic implies that something is both obscure and yet has a lot of cultural capital and matters to a lot of people. 

If there was a monoculture, it was always in dialogue with other, less recognized cultures. (More on that in a sec.)

The notion of a monoculture feels oppressive

The whole idea of everybody consuming the same culture and having the same discussions feels coercive at best, and a bit fascist at worst. It puts way too much power in the hands of a few creators — but way more importantly a few companies, at a time when corporate consolidation is already narrowing our options. The concept of monoculture, for the most part, favors works from the hugest entertainment conglomerates, and probably only really benefits the most anodyne stuff that they are pushing with their massive advertising budgets. 

A monoculture sounds less dynamic and innovative then a polyculture, to coin an antonym. Even if something fresh and exciting does become the subject of a monocultural fascination, it will very quickly become trapped by all that attention and cease to be inventive very quickly. (Many such cases.) Popularity is the death of experimentation: as soon as everybody is talking about something, the creators immediately have too much to lose. 

The health of a culture can be measured in terms of how many new and interesting things are breaking through and gaining some amount of traction. A culture in which well-established giants rule over everything and smaller productions can hardly get a foothold is similar to an economy ruled by a monopoly: stagnant, rent-seeking. Nothing new or exciting can happen. The powerful gain power, everyone else starves.

And yes, I do think there's an element of fascism to all this nostalgia for groupthink. It’s about concentrating power in the hands of a few, and about disenfranchising creators who don't fit into whatever "mainstream"  narrative is being told right now.

Which brings us to the issue of representation and inclusion: the more you can focus attention on a few works, the less potential there is for marginalized creators to break through. You’ll always have the occasional unicorn, or the one work that gets tokenized — but in a monoculture, you’ll pretty much never have full representation, in which BIPOC creators, queers, the disabled and others get to have a wide variety of works in the public eye.

In fact, my senses is that the handwringing about the death of monoculture tends to get louder as marginalized creators start to approach levels of representation commensurate with their percentages of the population.

It's become a truism that much of the most exciting and groundbreaking culture is created by marginalized people, who all too often get ignored and starved of resources until someone from the dominant culture copies what they were doing and gains instant acclaim. In other words? Theft is the soul of monoculture. 

And I think the comparison of monoculture to monopoly above is very appropriate. After all, the people who yearn for monoculture often look fondly on a time when three giant companies had a strangle hold on television and a relatively insular studio infrastructure controlled films. Now, when mergers and synergies are proceeding at a rapid pace, it's our duty to stand up and demand a richer conversation, not an impoverished one. 

And yes, I think I know what the whole monoculture business is really about. As a sometime critic myself, I have felt the increasing marginalization of critics in every sphere of the arts. A marginalization driven not just by corporate cost cutting but also by a lack of interest from readers and the rise of crowdsourced alternatives like rotten tomatoes and letterboxed. Critics used to be able to get a lot of eyeballs, and they were tastemakers who could turn a TV show, movie, or other creative work into the talk of the town. At the very least, a critic used to be pretty sure that if they wrote about the latest hit in whatever format, they would get a lot of attention for it. 

It sucks that criticism as an art form is being starved by both it's funders and its consumers. This is in fact not okay. It's another sign of an unhealthy culture, and I've argued one of the most important functions of critics is to surface works that otherwise would not be appreciated enough. I am personally making more of a conscious effort to read book, tv, film and other criticism because it often gives me interesting ideas and helps me to keep abreast of what's happening in culture. I wish others would do the same. 

But a monoculture hurts everyone, including critics, who have fewer opportunities to discuss interesting works. Nostalgia for some imagined monoculture of the past feels toxic to say the least. So no, I don't think a monoculture is desirable, even if it were possible. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Music I Love Right Now

It’s been a good time lately for fans of Minneapolis funk. First André Cymone put out a new funk-centric album called The Resurrection of Funk. (If you buy it today, André Cymone gets all of the proceeds because it is Bandcamp Friday!) And then Prince’s estate put out a new compilation of previously unreleased tracks called Timeless.

I’m still listening to both albums, and I like them both a lot. But The Resurrection of Funk is more my jam, because it’s Cymone paying tribute to not just Minneapolis funk but also P-Funk and other stuff. Other recent Cymone releases were more focused on rock ‘n’ roll — and in a recent appearance on the Truth in Rhythm podcast, he made it sound as if his refusal to focus exclusively on funk music had hurt his career a bit. Now, he’s chosen to go back to funk on his own terms, and it’s pretty great. Cymone was Prince’s original bass player and my favorite 1980s Cymone tracks are the bass-heavy ones. So it’s no surprise that the best tracks on Resurrection, according to me, are the ones that showcase his bass playing, like “The Girl Next Door” and “Love Revolution.” In any case, The Resurrection of Funk is nothing groundbreaking, but it’s a solid funk album that holds its own with recent Bootsy Collins releases.

As for the Prince compilation… it’s always nice to hear some new Prince stuff. I’d rather have an other “super deluxe edition” focusing on a particular moment in Prince’s career, with unreleased songs, alt mixes and live versions. Timeless includes songs from 1977 until the end of Prince’s life, and there’s nothing much tying them together. “I Am You” is funky as heck, and sounds a lot like “I Don’t Want To Leave You” by The Time. Two ballads I had heard before: Celine Dion had recorded “With This Tear,” and there are already many versions of “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore” in official release. There’s really one standout song: “Calabama,” the title track of an album Prince abandoned in the early 2000s. Overall, Timeless is for diehard Prince fans only, and even then I’d say it’s in the nice-to-have category, rather than essential listening.