Is the culture dead?

        Not the culture that is learned, and comprises beliefs, values, customs, behaviour, and so on. Not that. Not some higher state of discernment or taste; not that, either. Not something growing in a Petri dish, or forgotten at the back of the fridge.

        Popular culture. You know: the culture that prevails in a given society at a given time. Its content -- the "stuff" of culture -- is determined, with very few exceptions, by the faceless industries that disseminate, and profit from, cultural material: the movie industry, the television industry, publishing industry, the news media industry. If you are a cynic, popular culture is simply the aggregate product of those industries; base, venal and without anything resembling a soul.

        Naturally, popular culture is changing all the time. If it is not unique to a particular place, it is almost always unique to a particular time, like Beatle boots or spiked hair. And with few exceptions, the things that constitute popular culture typically get their start in darkened corners and under dusty floorboards -- in the dodgy clubs, at the out-of-the-way studios, with the odd-looking people no one ever invites over for cocktail parties. Popular culture, almost always, emanates in a sub-culture.

        The problem, of course, is that popular culture is, well, popular. It is carefully designed by capitalists to appeal to the largest possible number of cultural consumers. Paradoxically, the culture industries are not interested in culture per se -- they are principally interested in hawking items of popular culture that maximize profit. The "stuff" of popular culture that tends to survive -- the stuff that can be seen persisting from time to time, generation to generation -- is the cultural merchandise that has propagated itself in the widest conceivable manner. That is, the s**t that sells.

        So what? So what, one might say. So popular culture is popular. So people watch the same reality shows (hell, Johnny Rotten even appeared in one!), and they listen to the same music, and they wear all the same clothes because someone they have never met has decreed that they should. So what? Well -- and this is our lament -- because popular culture is superficial. It is boring. It sucks.

        In the best book about rawk-and-role ever written, The Boy Looked At Johnny , Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons describe the dilemma thusly: "Capitalism -- the godfather of fascism -- lives to increase multi-million dollar profits. In rock'n'roll, the particular interests of the establishment and capitalism fit together as compactly as a joint, finding an affinity that they are unable to achieve in any other business venture. As soon as any ostensibly dangerous new musical phenomena appear in the sweaty clubs giving a righteous finger to the status quo, it is enticed in from the cold by the same old dangled carrots of sex/drugs/cash/fame and run through the mill of commercial assimilation. What were once sharp, angry fangs are rendered soft, ineffective gums."

        Okay, fine. Burchill and Parsons wrote their book at virtually a single sitting, and allegedly on speed. They have completely repudiated The Boy Looked At Johnny , and have even refused permission for subsequent printings. But the fact is -- and even now, a quarter-century after their wonderful, over-the-top polemic was first published -- Burchill and Parsons may be right. The various sub-cultures probably have been absorbed by the popular culture. Rendering them, accordingly, dead.

        Or, maybe not. Maybe -- just maybe! -- there are things unique to the rock & roll subcultures that make them impossible for the popular culture to assimilate. That make it impossible for the mainstream to swallow. Like the fact that rock music is by definition young. And unkillable. And that it is just more honest.

        Tony James, formerly of Generation X with Billy Idol, formerly of London SS with The Clash's Mick Jones, is now touring with Jones once more in something called Carbon/Silicon. On the road, pecking away at his laptop, James acknowledged to me that there were plenty of people who wanted to profit from the subculture: "What you soon realize is that, if you create a generation gap war, that is the way to get attention, and to exploit 'youth'. ...[T]hey dressed it up so that it became very attractive and sexy."

        But did the Sex Pistols' Malcolm McLaren and The Clash's Bernie Rhodes -- and all those who have sought to make the rock & roll subculture "attractive and sexy" and therefore marketable -- succeed? No, says Tony James. No, no, no. Writes he: "Well, to continue with a different analogy, once you've won the war and seized all the other side's assets and become rich, then it is easy to become complacent and become what you set out to destroy. But hey -- the evolution of rock'n'roll [is that] another icon will come along to be sneered at by the young punks!" Bottom line: rock & roll is inherently youthful, and young rock & rollers are not so easily seduced into capitalist schemes.

        True, we are all being overwhelmed by veritable avalanches of reality shows. True, the radio is full again with homogenized Top 40 dreck. True, most young artists seem to be mainly preoccupied with "getting signed," and not shaking things up anymore. All of that is true.

        But it's also true that, as he or she casts an eye over the cultural wasteland that is 2004, there's a young rebel out there in the dark -- like Johnny Rotten, like Kurt Cobain -- ready to strap on a guitar and kick the living s**t out of everything again. It will happen again because it has happened before. Count on it.

        And are the rest of us getting really, really impatient for the arrival of this young rock & roll iconoclast?

        Christ, yeah.

COVER: Simple Plan
.: Montreal pop-punks are Still Not Getting Any

Tour Diary
.: The Stills wreck Reykjavik

2004: The Year That Was
.: Top things we'll remember – or wish we could forget!

DVD: Sanaa Lathan
.: Alien Vs. Predator's heroine is no Ripley

Alice Cooper
.: When music meets politics

Shock and Saw
.: Serial killer thriller rewrites the genre's rules... in blood!

Suicide Girls
.: Live Burlesque in New York