Attack of the Blockbusters

After walking out of a showing of It Might Get Loud a few months ago, I commented to my pal that I wanted to check out more stuff from Jack White, who surprised me as an impressive and insanely creative musician. The White Stripes hit their stride right as I was becoming disillusioned with pop culture and anything on MTV or FM radio, so I mostly ignored his initial rise to fame. “I never listened to the White Stripes because they were too popular,” I explained. My pal seemed disappointed with me, that I based music decisions on the band’s popularity.

So, I felt vindicated reading “A World of Hits” in The Economist from a few weeks ago, which explained the increasing popularity of blockbuster films, music and books. In their analytically lovely, The Economist style, they break down the questions that have bothered me for a while: with all the many, many ways of distributing new music, movies and novels, why is it that the biggest, most formulaic, most “crowd-pleasing” remain the most popular? With new sounds coming out of every corner of the world, why does every FM station have only 8 songs to play? With innovative and interesting films available through NetFlix, Hulu and various other services that I’m not cool enough to know about, why is New Moon breaking records?

Conquering bookstores and movie theaters, all without musing that sweet ‘do.

The Economist found that audiences enjoy having a common topic to discuss with their pals. This was something that I didn’t really know about until I started working in the corporate world, where “The Office” and “Seinfeld” constitute the most in depth conversations I ever heard. People really do like to be able to throw out quotes and have everyone laugh in a communal understanding and shared experience.

They also reported that well read people were the most likely to pick up obscure titles, thus had a larger experience set on which to judge them. Therefore, they judged more harshly. Best sellers were read by an audience that didn’t read nearly as much, hence these pop culture icons “are judged by people who literally do not know any better.” Their words, my enthusiastic agreement, and the same behavior is seen in consumption of music, movies, etc.

I can’t hate on people who truly enjoyed The DiVinci Code, or think that “Friends” was the greatest show ever. Of course, I sometimes find myself drawn into the pop culture hit of the moment. And I don’t think my hatred of popular music simply because it’s popular is necessarily the best way to judge a band. But, technology has given us such amazing opportunities to read, hear, and watch great things that we didn’t have access to even a decade ago. It seems downright ungrateful to not at least try something new.

*By Jesy, who would like a little bit of credit for not mentioning New York once in this post.

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