When did pop culture really go bad?

[Red Hood]

There's been a lot of pop culture homogenization in the past 20 years or so. Despite the ability to reach a niche audience exploding, anything with any budget in a visual medium is tailored, focus grouped and mass marketed to reach the broadest audience and reach the largest audience possible (and therefore make the most money). Marvel and Star Wars, the AAA Open World games and Looter Shooters and yearly sports installments. The mid-budget sleeper hit is largely a thing of the past as producers become extremely risk averse.

Ironically, the risk-averse nature also means that some of the properties that were important catalysts in these genres- think of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman film or the earliest Legend of Zelda game- would not have been greenlit if they were made today. Though blockbuster titles in their time, they also had a strong creator's hand in them and both were comparatively big risks. Star Wars was a fucking huge risk that probably would have been just another shitty 70's movie without its excellent editors.

Music has also suffered, but from a different direction. There aren't many garage bands anymore and there's not as much of that synergy necessary to make a band work. A lot of independently generated music is Soundcloud rap- just rapping your own lyrics over a beat someone else created. That's not to say there's no creativity there, but the collaborative nature is gone, except when a producer steps in to offer a guiding hand that's essentially following a playbook of what's trending as successful.

I also point to the pornification of music and pop culture as dragging it down to an even lower common denominator. It's easier to name the "Original Series" that the networks/streaming services push that doesn't have random sex scenes for both titillation and padding, and something like "WAP" would have had to have been couched in metaphors like Kelis' "Milkshake" to be anything beyond a novelty like "My Neck, My Back" 20 years go.

tl;dr it's laser focused marketing to reach the lowest common denominator and appeal to their basest desires

 

[TFT-A9]

When it stopped conveying any kind of real meaning and just told you to go buy shit

 

[BScCollateral]

When the Forestry Service started to replace Smokey Bear with Woodsy Owl.

"Give a hoot, don't pollute." Faggot.

And I don't mean Woodsy Owl is gay. I mean Woodsy Owl is a faggot.

Spoiler: Smokey Continues to be Awesome

https://www.amazon.com/Prevent-Socialism-Graphic-Novelty-Shirts/dp/B08BR7C4CK/ref=sr_1_16_sspa?crid=9PAEO1WVGDIC&dchild=1&keywords=smokey+bear&qid=1601839117&sprefix=smokey+be%2Caps%2C170&sr=8-16-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUEyODZOVDI5MDVWNTFMJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwODE5MjI0MkFNSlJEU0c1TzRGWSZlbmNyeXB0ZWRBZElkPUEwOTc4MzI1MUNEVjU1UEVYOTNLUiZ3aWRnZXROYW1lPXNwX210ZiZhY3Rpb249Y2xpY2tSZWRpcmVjdCZkb05vdExvZ0NsaWNrPXRydWU=

 

[Troonos]

9/11. That's when everything started going south and we became culturally and creatively bankrupt.

 

[Beautiful Border]

9/11. That's when everything started going south and we became culturally and creatively bankrupt.

I hear people say this a lot but I'm not sure what the reasoning behind it is. If anything I'd be inclined to suggest the opposite and that it actually postponed the cultural decline for a few years. Political correctness and proto-SJW culture was actually on the rise in the late 90s, but 9/11 stopped it dead in its tracks and led to a boom in conservative and patriotic sentiment. The right has never been as culturally powerful as it was in the early 2000s, not even during the Reagan era (just ask the Dixie Chicks). 2020 is the way it is in spite of 9/11, not because of it.

 

[I Love Beef]

Pop culture went bad when the Great Recession of 2008 came along and kicked the economy in the head, amongst other things.

This essentially got every company to fear for their bottom line and unless they were Nintendo or other big companies that were worth billions, the consumer driven market tightened faster than girl meeting a beta simp. Out in the States, there wasn't just playing it safe, but also appeasing to comforts and base bullshit like the zombie craze and FPSes. It's why the retro gaming market got back into the spotlight.

I can't essentially curse this course of history though. This shit was way beyond any human agency to change, really. Sure, there is a lot of shit, but with every rise comes a fall, eventually.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

when it got mainstrean, cooperate and political.

 

[tehpope]

when it got mainstrean, cooperate and political.

When every major company began buying smaller companies up. Streaming has only accerlated this corporization of everything. Since every service needs an exclusive to draw folks in.

The 80s had a lot of independent media companies. In TV, Movies, and Music. Then a lot of them began to fail and got their assets bought up to the highest bidder. I think the big bang for all this in 1995-97. When Edgar Bronfman Jr, heir to and then CEO of the Seagrams brand, decided he wanted to get into music and movies. Bought up MCA, Polygram, and Deutsche Grammophon. Which is why Universal and UMG owns a ton of content. Then the second wave started when Disney bought Marvel and Pixar. Which led to them buy LucasFilm and 20th Century Fox later on. Around the same time Universal got massive, Disney also bought up ABC. A lot of this can be traced by to laws either deactivated or created in the 90s. One of which allowed Clear Channel to buy up pretty much every radio station ever. I'm not sure if I wanna blame Bill Clinton about this, since Reagan and HW could also be culpable for this too.

Basically, media declined because of the consoldiation of companies. Why compete with them when you can buy them out. Which led to stagnation. Instead of listening to advice and making quality art, they just targeted their movies/tv shows/music to the lowest common denominator and bought up their competition. They target the lcd so they can get the maximum amount of profit. And since a lot these companies have total vertical integration, they can just influence culture and the trendmakers to popularize the shit we see now. And then Teach the peons to turn against critical thinking.

The axium being:

Politics come into this because if they can court a party, said party will do their bidding. If you pay them enough. Then you can write the laws to do whatever you want. That's how Disney basically bent the copywright laws in half to keep Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain. And allowed the corporations to control a century's worth of content. They use their products to push the party that's willing to do their bidding. In the past, it was more subtle. But they've since thrown sublty out the window. Not sure if its because they though the left would be in control forever. Or that the latest crop of creators can't write subtlety if it bit them in the ass. Probably a mix of both, but mostly the latter.

The sad thing about this all is Trump will do fuck all to fix this. He is pro all of this shit. Some change might come about because of the possible breakup of a few companies stifling right wing opinions and whatnot. But most likely, Trump will make all this shit even worse by allowing the existing companies to consoldiate even more. Trump allowed the fox-disney merger. The Sprint-TMobile merge. Probably even more if he gets a second term.

The good news is that we might be seeing a backlash from all this. Gaming can be used as a bellwether to see where things are headed. See GG. But gamers have been coming down on companies like Activision and EA for release shit products. Like not functioning products. And the shareholders at these companies are also getting mad because the CEOs and exces are firing tons of employees on the lower rungs while increasing their own salaries. By tens of millions.

And Covid has really taken a number on hollywood. It cut off their precious Chinese market. Disney is the leader of the pack in a lot of aspects and they've been hit the hardest. Since they rely on their theme parks revenue to keep them a float. They just fired 28k employees this last week. It possible they might start selling off assets to keep them a float. AT&T is in the same boat. They own WB, Turner, CNN, et al. They were looking to offload the Atlanta CNN studio and WB Games in the summer. Not sure if this is the same now.

e: if Change is to happen, its going to be because the execs at these corps are losing money and want to make a profit. Not because society as a whole rises up to boycott these companies. Because Joe Sixpack doesn't care about art or quality.

 

[Thiletonomics]

It started to go bad when developers started making subverting expectations the primary goal of their media (whether it'd be video game, movie, TV show, music, etc.), instead of making stuff that is actually good. It also seems like in some of those cases, they either literally plan out, or make it come off as the subverting part was planned first (TLOU2 comes to mind), while trying to scramble to make the rest of the story come-off as being presentable, which is not an easy thing to do, and usually results in a very ugly mess.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

Fortunately, at least every now and then, we still get something good out of all media. New great shows like Chernobyl, The Expanse, movies like Joker or... uh... Twisted Pair?... well. Okay, movies are contaminated to hell and back, but every now and then, there's a gem.
In video games, quite some decent things come out, mainly thanks to indy games that cover a lot of stuff that the AAA companies would never try - so I would say, video gaming is doing best, when you go beyond AAA games. When you focus on AAA games alone , it's one of the most affected areas... music is easily the worst thing when it comes to mainstream media. Pop music is trash, pure and simple.

I think one big issue that has been overlooked in this whole debate: How do awards, """journalism""" and the public discourse on social media treat media?
It's not so much that there are absolutely no good new movies, Joker proves that wrong, what is more concerning is that when a movie comes out that plays by different rules (like Joker did), it is villified to a degree that is simply mind boggling.
Joker dared to be a tiny bit different and we ended up with a shitshow of "This movie is incel propaganda and will cause mass shootings". It's the Potter Witchcraft Sacre from 15 years ago, only now it's about Gamergate, Incels, Conservatives and so on.

This really brings me to my point, that I think wasn't made in this thread up till now:

Many people point out that pop culture started to suck when it became "chic", but you need a place to be publically "chic" on.
This directly ties into social media, as it was the window for putting oneself on public display, to whore oneself out, one's opinions, tastes and so on, to gain attention. This acted as a catalyst to turn buyers into cultists, cause it gave people a medium to show off their cool collection of status symbols and labels, like your newest Apple product and that you're "lol such a nerdxD".

Incidently, that's also what I consider the main reason why we have all these gender-special snowflakes around. If you want to gain attention by being different, you need to be different from those that are different. So you're not "bi". You're "greysexual". Or a "demi-boy". Or "queercurious" or whatever. But whatever the fuck you are, you have to be different (ie: not boring).

Social media also helped embed politics into this mess, to further continue the trend downwards. I am a fairly liberal person myself, I do think every person should be allowed to express themselves freely as long as they don't infringe on the rights of others, but holy fucking shit, do I hate liberal media. I'd rather eat broken glass then be lectured about sexism by Hollywood sexpests. With every. Single. Fucking. Movie. they made in the past 5 years. Same with racism.

 

[Getting tard comed]

Some of the answers here are really good, particularly blaming Joss Whedon coupled with The WGA strike of 07-08 but I would argue we have been on a steady decline in quality from Wagner onward particularly concerning music even though I like jazz and blue grass and rock n roll and the early pop songs of the 50's+60's. I dont think anyone can argue as good as those genres are they are of the same quality music wise as The Ring Cycle. But that might be an unfair comparison.

Pop as a category was from the 60's. Music turned shit real fast around the late 80's and really hasn't recovered from that decline since. Movies have been bad generally speaking since 2000 onward with 1999 being arguably the last "great" year for American movies. There have been really good movies since then but 1999 imo, had by far the most good, creative, new revolutionary movies in a single year since then. And the writers strike killed movies. Somehow after the writers strike we got Breaking Bad and all those other shows that are considered The Golden Age of television but besides those shows everything else was bad. Not sure how that happened, but it did.

The more fascinating question to me is why is the trend always down. Never up. I was taught things improve overtime but very few things follow that pattern.

 

[Miller]

You're onto something. The internet autism cesspool known as TvTropes also started as a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fansite (and used to use lots of fandom terms from them including "Jossed" to refer to a creator debunking a fan theory), so Whedon was pozzing fan communities at the same time as he was pozzing pop culture.

Joss Whedon's writing style has ruined storytelling (perhaps more than Bad Robot). These days it's near impossible to have a dramatic scene or tense sequence without one character making a quip, like if the whole thing was just a joke.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

Some of the answers here are really good, particularly blaming Joss Whedon coupled with The WGA strike of 07-08 but I would argue we have been on a steady decline in quality from Wagner onward particularly concerning music even though I like jazz and blue grass and rock n roll and the early pop songs of the 50's+60's. I dont think anyone can argue as good as those genres are they are of the same quality music wise as The Ring Cycle. But that might be an unfair comparison.

Pop as a category was from the 60's. Music turned shit real fast around the late 80's and really hasn't recovered from that decline since. Movies have been bad generally speaking since 2000 onward with 1999 being arguably the last "great" year for American movies. There have been really good movies since then but 1999 imo, had by far the most good, creative, new revolutionary movies in a single year since then. And the writers strike killed movies. Somehow after the writers strike we got Breaking Bad and all those other shows that are considered The Golden Age of television but besides those shows everything else was bad. Not sure how that happened, but it did.

The more fascinating question to me is why is the trend always down. Never up. I was taught things improve overtime but very few things follow that pattern.

Things improve when they have to compete with something. When the market is ruled by a tiny group of corporations, they dictate what is released and don't have to fear someone putting out a better product. If at all, they can nowadays just try to sink it by attacking its reputation. Hence: "Joker is turning the kids into incel mass shooters!".

When there is no genuine competition, it's a race to the bottom to see who can churn out the cheapest shit the quickest with the biggest mass appeal.

Something to keep in mind: With a shitton of products like coffee makers, shoes and so on, the sale strategy is not about making a better product, it's about offering exactly what the other companies sell, so that it is neither inferior nor superior in quality and then sell it via marketing by attaching some kind of braindead lifestyle bullshit to it.

Joss Whedon's writing style has ruined storytelling (perhaps more than Bad Robot). These days it's near impossible to have a dramatic scene or tense sequence without one character making a quip, like if the whole thing was just a joke.

The obvious problem here is: If the characters in the movie are not taking this seriously, then why should I as part of the audience?
It's nice when it is something that happens for a change, but when it is the norm, it's grating and infuriating.

Firefly had some great moments where Joss Whedon's style worked amazingly, that was mainly cause it was something different from what you'd normally see. When everyone does it, it wears out really fucking quickly and instead of a laid back, funny and cool character portrayal, it turns into something that throws any drama under the bus.

To wit: What if Hollywood had taken on Shyamalan's stlye of "WHAT A TWEEST!" writing? To a certain degree, they did, like in GOT or TLJ with their horrible "subvert expectations" circlejerk, but this style of cancer hasn't spread as badly as Joss Whedon-esque crap.

 

[tehpope]

The more fascinating question to me is why is the trend always down. Never up. I was taught things improve overtime but very few things follow that pattern.

Because the people who filled the seats of folks leaving aren't as creative or great writers as their predecessors.

In the animation field, a lot of folks are super deranged and deviant. The cycle goes like this. Folks join a production. They work their way up to head animator, storyboardist, or writer. They then get the opertunity to run their own shows. And then they hire on their friends. Then these friends get their own shows and hire on their friends. And so it goes. And each cycle it gets worse and worse. This is probably more or less the same in other media formats.

Because everyone is hiring their friends, they usually think a like. And because they all think alike, diversity of thought is not allowed. Period. And all these current creators are extreme leftists. So there is no room for anyone to the right of them. And if you do think center or right, you have to fall in line. Least you don't have a job. Because if you get found out, they will blacklist you forever. Some of these folks just keep their heads down, blend in, and follow the trends. Others get brainwashed and become total opposites of what they used to be. Look at people like Cliffy B or David Jaffe. They used to be edgy and make good games. But they drank the woke koolaid along the way and made shit games.

 

[Notgoodwithusernames]

mid 2010s was when it started to go downhill. There were hints before hand but it didnt become apparent to me until 2017

 

[Miller]

The more fascinating question to me is why is the trend always down. Never up. I was taught things improve overtime but very few things follow that pattern.

I think there's a desire to dumb things down to make it "more accessible" and - since 2016 - to send a message but it's also because these new writers started around the time the WGA strike was happening, a lot of them (mostly female) have no interesting stories to tell, no interest in a specific genre, they had a Livejournal, they were all raised on Whedon productions and the established pop culture. You can see it in their scripts, there's always a scene where characters eat some pastry or drink coffee, a pop culture reference, nothing too deep that would require some level of thinking. I won't say that it's a female writer thing but... a lot of them write like that. I will never forgive Ronald D. Moore for hiring Jane Espenson (who worked on several Whedon productions) on the final season of BSG, he even gave her the showrunner seat for Caprica (the writing was so bad that they had to bring another showrunner for the second half of the season).

 

[I Love Beef]

I hear people say this a lot but I'm not sure what the reasoning behind it is. If anything I'd be inclined to suggest the opposite and that it actually postponed the cultural decline for a few years. Political correctness and proto-SJW culture was actually on the rise in the late 90s, but 9/11 stopped it dead in its tracks and led to a boom in conservative and patriotic sentiment. The right has never been as culturally powerful as it was in the early 2000s, not even during the Reagan era (just ask the Dixie Chicks). 2020 is the way it is in spite of 9/11, not because of it.

If anything, the proto-SJWs had a culture tank to fester in and the political and social sensitivity of the era only helped to cultivate what we've seen in the 2010s.

For the proto-SJWs, they were the ones who were gung ho apeshit about bashing on Bush and bleeding their hearts out about how the Second Gulf War was a deathtrap for lower income citizens. Like as much as war sucks, what the fuck are you going to do about a problem that's festered since the 1980s and then just blew up in your face? In retrospect, I can proudly say that the Second Gulf War was absolutely necessary to wrap up most of the shit from the Iran Contra and Iranian Russian War days. These motherfuckers though used this opportunity to say all of the shit they wanted to. Remember Michael Moore? Remember when he openly called Bush a baby eating monster in one of his documentaries? I can tell you that opened up the floodgates big time for the proto-SJWs right there.

For society in general, it's pretty ironic that for a War on Terror, there was plenty of terror going on back at home. Everyone was still reeling from Columbine into the 2000s, and after that, the proto-SJWs going on and on about Bush and how the rest of the world sees us came into the mix full throttle. I blame all of this shit for why everything wimped out post 2010 and got to it when the Great Recession made headway, and I blame all spectrums for this garbage. It was everything. Self pitying faggots thinking that America needed to be "less boorish and act more reserved like its other sophisticated first world neighbors" and worrying about Canadians patchworking flags on their carry on luggage, to dumbasses caring about what the fuck the French had to say to get asshurt enough to change french fries into freedom fries and think every neighbor was a pedophile lurking on the internet and on that 4chan because NBC and FOX decided to bankroll themselves with Chris Hansen and Alex Wuori so hard that it made Real TV and Hard Copy look like Dateline.

It's like in that decade, America was pretending to be something that it wasn't and forgot everything in the centuries prior that made America great and allowed it to strive against all of the bad things and darkest times, all because its problems showed and shit happened. I know this is pretty "deep" and thunkful, but this lack of standing up for yourself and insightful patriotism lead into the war machine and the corporate giants to take hold when the government and the people were at its morally vulnerable, soaked in its own fear, and distracted it from its real problems before working to exploit them even more. Then, everyone began to believe their own bullshit and became a part of the pile. I believe in that America can become great again, but again, I don't believe either sides that are playing Trump Mental Disfigurement Syndrome will win, because he's just a puppet and playing everyone by the strings that pull him. Honestly, this plays into a lot of how the world is like nowadays. It's why everything feels cold and sterile and fake moreso than any other decade pre 2010.

I also now believe that pop culture is beginning to face both a crossroads and a cliff at this rate. As overt consumerist pushes and the decline of malign corporate intervention begins to show its uglier side of things, I only can predict that there's going to be a major blow up want for homegrown grassroot self made stories and without the leash of "marketability". People are going to want literature and sequential art that is not dictated merely by a cold calculated company and has the feel of being a part of a cultural fabric again that spreads without the overt use of money and advertisements like traditional folklore and tall tales. Don't quote me on this, but I feel it strongly in the air.

 

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

When shareholders became the real target demographic.
That's when pretty much everything starts to crapify - see Apple, for example. I never liked their products, but I could respect them.
After Jobs died, the tyranny shareholders and quarterly target numbers replaced his insanity and maximalism, and everything started to go to shit.

Similarly, nowadays, there are barely any directors strong enough to pursue their own vision instead of being slaves to studio heads and similar bigwigs. There's Nolan, Verhoeven, Wes Anderson, Clint Eastwood, Jodorowsky, and probably a couple others who I forgot. The majority? Easily replaceable puppets bowing to every whim of the studio financing the movie.

 

[jorgoth]

Joss Whedon apparently was the first 3rd generation screenwriter, IOW his father was a screenwriter, and his father's father was a screenwriter. He was one of the first big time Hollywood creators to have grown up entirely within the Hollywood bubble, for whom everyone important in his life grew up in the Hollywood bubble. That kind of explains everything.

This generation of elites might be the most sheltered generation to ever have been born. I'm dead fucking serious. Medieval nobility at least trained for war, these people have nothing but their entertainment centers and their laptops.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

I think there's a desire to dumb things down to make it "more accessible" and - since 2016 - to send a message [...]

And that message, more often than not, was very much like this scene from Godfather:

It's not about making something, it is almost always about tearing down what came beforehand, in part to punish the supposedly toxic fanboys that loved whatever came before, but also as a means to elevate the new stuff.
Can't have a new Terminator movie without killing off John Connor at the start and replacing him with some wetback beaner chic. Can't have a new Ghostbusters movie without shitting on the originals. Can't have a new Star Wars without turning every beloved character from the original into a loser that dies a pathetic death. Can't have a new Star Trek show without emasculating one of the finest examples of a strong diplomatic leader ever put on celluloid. I am just wondering what kind of fresh hell we'll enter once that Nightwatch TV show is released.

These new movies, shows and stories carry a message alright. And it is always one of spite, hatred and toxicity... which is insanely ironic, when you contemplate who's putting them forward and under what pretense.

...to dumbasses caring about what the fuck the French had to say to get asshurt enough to change french fries into freedom fries...

While I think your post is pretty rad, that little tidbit will never stop being funny. Murricans being so assblasted and salty over France (of all nations) telling them they don't want to engage in a war under a blatant and flimsy pretense to rename fries to something that stereotypical... that's just comedy gold.