The geopolitics of pop culture, with Jaime Brooks of Elite Gymnastics (free)

27:40And something that I read somewhere recently that was interesting to me was it was talking about like the specific Middle Eastern oil, what they really needed it for. And we don't use Middle Eastern oil. The Middle Eastern oil wasn't for us. It was for Europe. We went to war in Iraq in order to make sure that the Europeans were going to be okay. And so that is the type of decision that every subsequent presidential election, the American public has voted for the person that wants to do less of that, the person who doesn't want to go to Iraq and fight a war so that Europeans can have cheaper energy.

28:14And so as we continue to pull away from the rest of the world, then all these other countries have to stop spending so much on welfare states and social programs, and they have to start spending more on defense, building up their own army to replace our fading commitments to them. So there's the war on domestic stuff like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but we're also feeling kind of from a distance the decline of these institutions elsewhere in the Anglosphere, like the BBC, that we may not have realized were affecting us or affecting what the cultural situation in America was. But in fact, they were.

28:53You can almost kind of look at the type of liberalism that was produced in these countries that had the welfare states and had the arts funding because they existed under the umbrella of American military protection. On the right, there's this idea of the network state, of this idea where instead of being a member of America because you were born there, you choose to become a member of this network state. It's almost like in the aughts, people were choosing to become part of this larger idea of liberalism that was sometimes compatible with what was going on in America. The Obama era was very much about synergy between the rest of the Anglosphere and American liberalism.

29:31But now it's kind of changing. We don't have that synergy anymore. The world has been moving in a different direction. And so we're not just losing the domestic cultural institutions we rely on, like the NEA and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but these other institutions elsewhere within the Anglosphere that have been affecting us and affecting the scope of what seems possible in media in ways that as Americans, we may not have, you know, been totally conscious of. If you like what you're hearing on this episode, there's a place where you can join the conversation. It's called Cujoplex, and it's a private online hangout zone on Discord where smart, cool weirdos just like you, you know, people who like talking about the evolving state of independent culture, can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day.

30:21We've had some great conversations lately about creative economies, media theory, AI, politics, the future of journalism, and even the records and TV shows we've been obsessing over this year. Some of our chats have even inspired episode ideas. You can get access to Cujoplex along with our monthly bonus episodes by signing up for a paid subscription over at our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. You draw this very striking comparison between British media and American media by focusing in on the history of radio in both countries, which, as you just noted, is not not something I think a lot of people think too much about, unfortunately, anymore.

31:05Tell us, like, how did the two systems differ in terms of their economic model and their operating incentives? And what sort of results did these different systems yield, both for better and for worse? What shocked me reading about this is they were completely opposite. It wasn't just that they were different models. They were they were opposing models. They were corrosive to one another. They fought and they had like a war, like in the background of cultural production in the Anglosphere that eventually the BBC lost. At first, the situation was, you know, radio broadcasting. The story of the technological side of the equation happens in fits and starts over 20 years.

31:47At first, radio is seen as more of a point to point type of technology. The idea of using it to broadcast from one transmitter to multiple receivers. That was kind of like a pipe dream for people in the radio industry for several years before eventually the corporations figured out that they could make money off of it. And ever since then, corporations have been running everything in American broadcasting and both radio and television. So markets totally defined what mass media, electronic mass media was in America from the very beginning. And over in the UK, they're looking at this. They're looking at what it looks like in practice.

32:21and they're like, hell no, absolutely not. It's the main thing that they could agree on over there. The different factions that were deciding this stuff in the UK government at the time, they just thought that the mess that the markets were creating in the American ether, they were offended by it. They thought it was beneath them. They had like a moral objection to it. Even if they couldn't agree on what exactly they wanted to build instead, they at least just were united in their distaste for what we were doing. One of the things that I found it challenging to grasp about the BBC from somebody who, you know, didn't grow up inside that ecosystem is just how radically different it was.

33:01Because from the beginning, especially in music, especially in popular music, which is descended from jingles and advertising in America, like it's always been market first. And in the UK, like that's kind of where they have an arc where they started out like really rejecting markets. and trying to build this institution that was not motivated by profit. And then over time, it kind of falls because it keeps getting attacked by the American system. Right. As you also point out, like the result of the BBC essentially trying to stay this pure thing was also that it was quite boring. It was like just classical music.

33:37And so by not wanting to let in commercial interest, that also meant not wanting to let in popular music, which raised the question of having to cleave it from the market origins that create it. Yeah, they didn't have pop music naturally. They weren't in the UK from the 20s to the 40s. There's that song by the Pogues, Fairy Tale of New York. It's from an Irish perspective, but it's still that part of Europe. And it's kind of about the way that they saw America at the time. There's the lines about cars big as bars, rivers of gold. It's like the American economy is booming in the post-war period.

34:12They've got these giant cars that come from the manufacturing core that there's no equivalent to in the UK. And there's Broadway and Frank Sinatra. And in the UK, they just did not have those things. If you wanted to participate in that stuff, the way that the protagonists of that song do, you have to cross the ocean and come to America. If you want the chance of the big reward, you also have to subject yourself to the higher risk. That's always been the game in America, like the market driven media environment. Like that's always what it's been about is you have to take this enormous risk by participating.

34:42But the reward you can get is so much higher, both as a consumer and as an artist, presumably, than what was possible in these other countries that didn't have such advanced entertainment industries. So as a music person, what's uncomfortable about all this to me is, you know, like I love music and I grew up thinking of popular music as a form that had potential for radicalism, as something that had potential for fitting ideas into the mainstream that, you know, couldn't have gotten there any other way. I was a big true believer in popular music's abilities to do this type of thing. But looking back in this historical narrative, especially what happened with the BBC, the BBC was an institution that was trying to protect people from what Keynes called capitalism as a way of life, where everything in your life is capitalism.

35:29To us, that's normal. In America, that's normal. It's normal to have the markets in charge of everything. I think if it ever didn't seem normal, it was because of inefficiency. The core underlying incentives and rules have always been market-driven here. It's just the technology didn't used to be so good, so it was easier to escape that reality. It was easier to find a little pocket where you could hide out from capitalism as a way of life. But the BBC is an institution that's supposed to protect the entire country from capitalism as a way of life. And so if that model had continued to be in charge and continued to wield that level of power into the internet era, then the internet would have been a completely different place.

36:09And a lot of the problems that people are diagnosing in the internet that come from the incentives of a market-driven cultural ecosystem, they wouldn't have been possible in a version of the internet that was designed to shield culture production from the profit motive. And I should note for people who aren't as familiar with the BBC and what made them different, the two things that made the BBC really different were it's a nonprofit corporation. So nobody who is making programming for the BBC is thinking about making money, that they have the freedom to not do that. They have the freedom to use resources, like resources that come from the people, to stage productions, to create programming that is not designed to be popular.

36:50The other thing that's important about that is they had a monopoly. And that is the part that's really hard, I think, for Americans, North Americans to really understand is it's like this hybrid of PBS and HBO that the BBC was. It was the only thing on. So if the BBC decided to tackle some high minded thing in a documentary or something, then then everybody saw it because it was the only thing on in the era of BBC Radio One, when John Peel would play really obscure stuff on his radio show in the middle of the night, he was playing it for everybody. There was no other channel that you could listen to.

37:27There was no other alternative. So the monopoly power kind of forced things into the mainstream that just could not have ever gotten there under a market system. And I think that that's a more radical reality than I think people on either side of it realize because people who grew up in that environment, it's just normal to them. It's just like breathing. It's not even worth mentioning. They never talk about it. The big British music writers, Like, you know, a lot of them are just more focused on getting the details right about the American scenes that they're fetishizing than considering the ways in which like the fact that they had free college and we didn't like might affect like some of the some of the stuff that they're writing about.

38:08One thing I thought about when reading this piece was like you described these two different poles. And I thought of like my youth as a music journalist and the kind of the dawn of music becoming really digital and how I chose the most impossible mission, which probably both of you will identify with in some way and maybe our listeners, which was how can we use the Internet to bring about a more BBC like result or something? Yeah. Like the Internet is the tool that will finally enable the weirder stuff to succeed within the market system. And it was only later when I read more about like the history of the Internet in Silicon Valley and stuff and how, you know, this was always baked into the kind of like libertarian rhetoric around the Internet of like the Internet is a thing that will make the market produce better results.

39:00It's really interesting because like in the UK, the BBC is it's founded in the 20s and 30s. And after the war, they get started with television. And it's kind of like a golden era, the post-war era for the BBC. They make a lot of interesting stuff. They made Ways of Seeing, the John Berger documentary, which I've heard that, you know, sometimes they even would show it in American classrooms for students that are seeing art. It's something that had an impact way beyond the core audience that was actually watching live broadcasts on the BBC. So back then, there was no Margaret Thatcher. There was no neoliberalism.

39:37There was no free market absolutism in the UK conservative tendency. There was a law, the Education Act of 1962, I think, that was passed by a conservative government. And that's what made it possible for everybody to have free college in the UK. like all through the 60s, the 70s, to some extent through the 80s, they had free college. Like they not only had free college, but it's like you would finish high school and you would do your O levels or your final exam or whatever. And then you would you would apply to a college and then you would get there and they would sort out housing for you like on the first day that you got there.

40:10And the cost of housing would be paid for not by you, by, you know, money from the public. There were these things called maintenance grants that would cover your cost of living while you were studying. So during that period of time, every British college student, like John Lennon, like John Lydon, Pete Townsend, like any famous British person that you can imagine from that period of time, they all went to college for free and they didn't have to get a job. They focused entirely on their own personal development that was happening in whatever way that they wanted to. They had that freedom. They had that agency.

40:45They had that material security. And the conservatives were in favor of it. Like the conservative government helped them do it. So libertarianism during that period of time was like a crank ideology, like on both sides. It didn't have a constituency anywhere. And what is kind of interesting is that the libertarians are the ones who brought pop music to the UK by trying to fight the BBC's monopoly power by running these pirate broadcasts that come in from outside. it. And what really kind of spooks me about it is that following this intervention by the libertarians, libertarianism starts becoming really popular in England.

41:22And the capitulation of the BBC to pop music, like what happened was, is there were all these pirate stations that were broadcasting pop music into Britain from outside, from the coast of France, from Luxembourg, and then eventually from these boats that were parked directly off of the shore in international waters like outside the British Isles. And those stations became so popular with the youth that eventually the BBC, they scrapped their existing mainstream programming. And they came up with this new thing called BBC Radio One, which was going to be pop music, but without advertising. It was an attempt to kind of compromise with pop music and like, you know, give people the best of both worlds.

42:01And so like 10 years after that happens, like 10 years after the libertarians kind of like score this big cultural victory by like getting pop music into the officially sanctioned UK media environment, like Margaret Thatcher shows up and just starts like deregulating everything. There was like a cultural deregulation brought on by the arrival of pop music in Britain that preceded the economic deregulation that went on to destroy those institutions. So it's like, it kind of looks like the libertarians have been using technology and pop music, which, you know, were things that I just like, it sounds like you were very optimistic about in the aughts, like, you know, in the 60s, the libertarians use that stuff to get themselves out of the fringe and into the mainstream.

42:48Like they seem if pop music really does have the power to change the world, it seems like the libertarians have wielded it more successfully than anyone by a significant measure. There seems to be like a really deep relationship between libertarianism and commercial popular music. No, yeah, totally. And it's interesting that in like the aughts and the early 2010s, there was also this sort of dissemination of like this vehicle for libertarianism in a way, which was digital technology or digital social platforms, Web 2.0 through the arts and that like artists were some of the first to sort of jump onto these platforms and celebrate them and help disseminate them through the culture.

43:35Does that make sense? Yeah, the arts for the reasons you're describing was a very confusing time because I think part of what made the internet so exciting to those of us that were following music, following culture, like, you know, thinking about the possibilities back then is that if we were coming at it from a North American perspective or an American perspective, especially it's like, you know, the internet is when we, we finally got access to the content that was coming out of these alternative models. That's when we started being able to like download and watch BBC shows, like instead of having to worry about in what way they would be rebroadcast and the drastically different American ecosystem.

44:13And with music, especially like we're, we're downloading all this British music, all this Canadian music, all this Australian music, all this Swedish music. One of my pet things I like to complain about is everybody credits blogs and Pitchfork for helping bands blow up in the aughts. But if you really look at like the mechanics of like what was blowing up and how so much of it was already like receiving significant state power support from governments before any American critics had ever heard of it. Like the broken social scene is this giant super group of people who were part of the, you know, the Toronto Montreal Creative Corridor, which even at that point in time was notorious for hoarding grants and hoarding these resources that the government invested in music.

44:59So it's like the idea that the Pitchfork review was the thing that allowed them to happen. It's like so much building up and development and infrastructure like had already been invested in that band before Pitchfork figured out who they were. It's not that Pitchfork like had this power to get people to care about something like just completely out of nowhere. It's that they were kind of like doing arbitrage. This Canadian stuff, this Australian stuff, the Swedish stuff, like it didn't have a good way into the American market. before the internet because you would have had to get through the gatekeepers, get signed to a label, get on radio.

45:35And the internet allowed them to bypass all of that. So suddenly, American listeners are getting all this stuff that is the product of these different models where there's way more state support. And it sounds and feels very different than what was going on in American independent music at the time. What was going on in American independent music at the time was things sounded bad. There's psychedelic horse shit like in the Vivian Girls, stuff that sounds like it's being recorded inside a cardboard box, while the Canadian stuff is like 20 people playing flugelhorns and, you know, like just wielding a level of production design and budget that you would normally expect to be associated with somebody like ABBA.

46:14But that's just what the indie bands sounded like in Canada and Australia and so on during that time. So it's like in one way, like there was this explosion of culture that came from the rest of the Anglosphere. and there's these countries that had bigger social safety nets and more arts investment. But like also because it was the internet that was disseminating all that and then our enthusiasm for that music was bringing us into the internet more and familiarizing it with its tools and expanding its reach. Like ultimately the impact of that was not to further or bolster like these institutions or these social safety nets that helped create this music.

46:51The overall effect of it was to hasten the dismantling of them. We were all unwitting libertarians by participating in the internet that way. We were all pillaging these institutions that were on death's door because it was exciting in the short term and we didn't really have a sense of what the long-term impact was going to be. Back in the 60s, a lot of the kids that were actually staffing up the pirate radio stations, they just wanted to work at the BBC and there were only so many jobs at the BBC. So that was their way in. So they participated in the dismantling of the thing that they loved and wanted to contribute to.

47:29The libertarians successfully enlisted the youth culture to do this. And I feel like it's kind of like underexamined. I remember like a few years ago, there was occasional hubbub sometimes. There was Dorian Electra, the non-binary or electropop artist. When they were first starting out, they worked for a nonprofit that was funded by the Koch brothers that was to promote neoliberal libertarian ideas through pop culture. And so they created this song called I'm in Love with Friedrich von Hayek that was supposed to, you know, like get the kids into Hayekian economics. And whenever anybody talks about this, or even when Doreen Electra addressed it themselves, like it kind of seems like this weird non sequitur, like this weird aberration, like, oh, God, why would a pop star be interested in this stuff?

48:15Why would a pop star be writing a song about Friedrich Hayek? But actually, that's kind of one of the main things that pop music has been doing, like from the British perspective, like since there's been pop music, it's been, you know, advancing the ideas of Friedrich Hayek. That's one of the most successful things it's ever done is promote the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek by making market competition and novelty and turnover and all these things that used to be confined to the finance page in the newspaper. Pop music makes them into an irresistible sensory experience that's appealing, even if you don't understand what it is that's happening.

48:49And it's been good for libertarianism, just like the early promise of the Internet. It's all very connected and has been for a long time. Truly, to reference one of our recent past episodes, the culture internalizing the logic of the stock market. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's in America, like that's that's how it was from the beginning. Like the radio, it starts in the 20s and the government of the 20s was very laissez faire compared to most other American executive branches. The people who were in charge in the 20s were very, very laissez faire, very free market. And our mass media, our electronic mass media, I don't think it ever really shook those values.

49:26It's not in my view that American pop culture has internalized the values of the stock market. I think that American pop culture always was a manifestation of the logic of the stock market. It always was about applying market logic to music, which before there were recordings and before there were record charts and that type of stuff, our collective relationship is music very different. It was more participatory. It was more literate. More people could read music. More people could write music. Specific recordings weren't such a big deal. And that culture, when radio shows up, like it gets subsumed into market logic.

50:03And America has been using pop music to export this market logic to the rest of the world ever since. So in your piece, you talk about how, you know, one could say that the ideal scenario here might be a culture that's more of a hybrid between these two systems we've been talking about. But that that's also maybe like a very American way of seeing things. Jamie, do you personally lean towards one system being better than the other in terms of producing, you know, this vibrant culture or is it a hybrid between the two? I think from a consumer perspective, the hybrid is optimal because, you know, like the relationship that Americans have with the BBC is that it's just another content creator.

50:47It's just another organization that's producing content and like HBO or like, you know, like TikTok people or Substack or whatever. In America, you don't have a social safety net. You don't have arts funding. But what you do have is infinite consumer choice. So like a hybrid where you get like both is from a consumer perspective, the ideal, which is why I think it's been hard for people to relinquish the consumer perspective, especially when it comes to music. Because from a consumer perspective, like Spotify is 10 bucks a month or whatever, and you get access to, you know, 90 % of the recordings that have ever meant anything to anybody.

51:24When we depart from that framework, then what you prefer, what you think is better, it depends on what you value. I think a lot of the conversation in music is about whether or not the records are good. And I think that the market has demonstrated, the market is pretty good at producing records that are good. It's not very good at taking care of artists. It's not very good at, you know, making sure people are credited for things. It's not very good at having cultures and scenes and institutions be sustainable and healthy. Maybe also even making sure that people are able to hear those records at scale.

52:02Yeah, yeah. It's good at creating like all these different consumer options, but not really anything else. And so I think that where I've landed is that I don't think I care if the records are good anymore. I don't think that I am capable of getting excited about records being good in and of themselves because I am too concerned about what needed to get like clear cut in order to make those records. I'm too hung up on the suffering or the commodification or the damage that the record industry is doing to the cultures that generated these ideas in the first place to get excited about a recording being good.

52:42And that puts me at odds with most other people that are writing about music because by and large, the primary focus of most paid and unpaid music writing at this point in time, especially in America, is like, is the record good or not? I work all day and I need something to help me get through the day. I need, you know, constant new music and novelty as a cope. Like, tell me what the good new records are so I can keep doing it. Like, that's what the conversation about music is. And if we depart from that, like we're kind of departing from most of what people have been talking about with regard to music for the past 50 years.

53:16So it's kind of like uncharted territory. We kind of have to figure out like if we can build some kind of other consensus on like what's important and what's valuable and what's worth intervening to try to protect or build in order to figure out like what should come next. Or, you know, like we can just keep consuming, you know, the slop forever. Not to get too far afield, but you do talk about how, you know, in the UK you use theater. I don't know if it's like publicly sponsored training for actors actually has resulted in like this interesting phenomenon where in the free market Hollywood system, those actors are becoming more popular because they have this depth of training that American actors don't have because the American actors are too worried about surviving.

54:01Yeah, you know, all the superheroes are British, like a lot of the time when there's a biopic of a significant American figure of some form, it's played by a British guy. There is public support for the theater in the UK, although, you know, there's also just like this long standing tradition of the theater being important. The right and the left can agree on the theater in the context of the UK. And so that consensus allows there to be this state support for it that has kept the institutions healthy, even as the overall economic situation in the UK has not been going in good directions during most of that time.

54:37On one hand, you could argue that the state support and the big public emotional investment in the theater is an art form. You could argue that it's been good for these actors that are playing Spider-Man and Superman and Batman and whoever. But you could also argue that it's not really British culture anymore. It's really what these actors are being paid for is their skill in subsuming their own identity and characteristics, especially their national characteristics like accent or cultural reference points that are viable over there but not over here. They suppress all that stuff in order to embody the IP.

55:13There's this Karl Marx quote, So if you lower yourself to the level of the machine, then you might encounter the machine as a competitor. And you could argue that what's going on with British actors right now is kind of them lowering themselves to the level of the machine. They're suppressing their own distinguishing characteristics, like human characteristics, in order to better embody Spider-Man or characters from video games. It's not necessarily that the cultural tradition that that money is supposed to be investing in the specific British cultural tradition of theater. It's not like that's becoming popular.

55:46It just allows people from that industry to play this role in American pop culture that otherwise has very little to do with Britain or the theater. One of the big questions about this stuff is, to some extent, America only let this stuff happen elsewhere in the Anglosphere because they were more worried about the Soviet Union. They would allow these other countries to make all these investments that contradict the American way of doing things in order to make sure that we had this very big tent against communism that was full of all these different approaches, making it seem like you don't need to think about communism.

56:25You don't need to consider the Soviet perspective of capitalism or the Marxist criticism of capitalism because look how vibrant and cool and fun capitalism is. It's not just the super commercialized American stuff. It's also punk and Malcolm McLaren and John Berger, Ways of Seeing and all this other stuff. It may have existed just to try to sell capitalism to us. But once the Soviets were gone, they had no intention of keeping that going. So it's what's going on now with the actors, the way that there's the British cultural ecosystem still seems to have some leverage there, some juice. Even that is kind of sad compared to what they were accomplishing during the post-war era before Thatcherite reforms started gutting it all and making the rest of the world more like us.

57:17so the third and final section of your piece is titled optimism and you don't really talk about it that much in the sense that maybe people in music journalism invoke the term all the time you talk about actually like mark fisher's understanding of the term where he viewed it is more synonymous with like optimism but i'm curious like even just looking at it in the way that like Pitchfork would invoke the term, for example, as in, you know, celebrating pop music. How might the dichotomy you explore in the piece represent sort of a framework for making sense of the poptimism era? It came about, I think, for understandable reasons that had a lot to do with like uplifting women artists and artists of color.

58:04But it was interesting because it was a moment in which critics decided that celebrating the music that was most clearly a product of the free market or represented almost like the triumph of the market, its greatest fruits, was the most progressive stance. How do you think we'll look back on Poptimism and how do you think it was a reflection of its time? Like, you know, if we think of like the 2010s politically and economically speaking. Well, we've talked about how confusing the aughts were because of how all this culture from the rest of the Anglosphere that had been developed under protection of the government, like it was all coming onto the internet at once so the internet was this very exciting place where all these different ideas were all crashing together at once makes it kind of difficult to figure out what was happening in retrospect i think the poptimism debate is maybe like the single best example of this because and that's it for the free preview version of this episode there's lots more ahead get the full conversation and all of our bonus content plus access to our Discord community, Cujo Pucks, which is actually how we found this essay, by signing up for a paid subscription, just five bucks a month, over at theculturejournalist.substack.com.