The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture

Rating:
Summary: Post-Modern Theory at its Most Half-baked
Review: As fun as pop culture theory can be, too often it merely signifies what those suspicious of academia suspect lurks in every college campus across America. It's an unfair assessment, of course - anti-intellectualism is just as boorish as intellectualism - and yet, when one reads a book like this, it's difficult not to sympathize with the critics.

A collection of fourteen essays concerning the 1970's, this book, compiled by Shelton Waldrep, attempts to investigate just how the 1970's affected popular culture (American popular culture, of course, although that's not explicitly stated). This sounds interesting, but the theorists sampled in the book are writing from a viewpoint which suffers multiple drawbacks - the lowbrown-driven highbrow.

It's all good fun to pose theories of retro-chic and falsely-constructed nostalgia using the movie "Wayne's World" as a primary source (as Stephen Rachman does), but to what greater end? It's amusing to read how Cindy Patton compares J.L. Austin's critical analysis of words and language to "The Opening of Misty Beethoven," a porno flick, but why bother?

While articles such as Sonhya Sayres' exploration of the Jonestown massacre and Van Cagle's look at glitter and The New York Dolls are at least well-written and intelligently posed, the majority of this book is insulting to both the intelligence of highbrows and the concerns of the so-called "lowbrows" that this popular culture is supposedly aimed at. By deconstructing bellbottom fashions, say, or blaxploitation flicks, we come no closer to the "meaning" of popular culture or the forces that drive it, but merely drive a wedge between the intended audience and the apparent intellectuals who desperately need "lowbrow trash" in order to justify their upcoming journalistic essays

Only Greil Marcus's closing essay, concerning the death of 60's idealism as embodied in Bob Dylan's "Self Portrait," remains true to either the spirit of intelligent criticism or the joy of popular culture. Read this for a laugh, or to shake your head at the sorry state of academia. Otherwise, don't clutter your mind with this stab at faux-elitism.