a rhetorical thing i lost a lot of patience for over the last few years has been the second-order contrarian voice critiquing elevated artsiness and urging a return to mainstream values due to "the alternative" being unreal, or gauche, or naive or something. because if nothing else it just feels so unnecessary when everyone in that supposed alternative culture was already raised on nintendo games or warcraft or superhero comics or network tv or whatever else. they make the work they do drawing from that stuff and trying to build whatever was missing in it.
it's less that the alternative is naive than that it's not even alternative, any more than the "mainstream" is mainstream, a supposed mainstream consisting of increasingly crazed and alien-feeling operator fic and the weird backwash of upstream financial shenanigans dumped into public life like sewage coming down into the beach. what feels most wistful to me is the idea that these terms even form a pair, are a dialectic instead of just a gradient, that therefore we can always get whatever answer we're looking for by performing just one more rote inversion of our pet dead opposites - an activity which will always be both popular and profitable ("is conservatism the new punk rock??") but which chiefly serves to reassure that whatever happens next will still make sense within the tired old forms already available to us. but i think all of us are working on the same page with the same ingredients already - if there's a dynamic at play it's just between this dead world and one we don't yet know how to recognise, the one that hasn't happened yet.
in reply to @thecatamites's post:
what i find so strange about this trend is like the "mainstream" values are kind of imagined versions of what people think they are anyway, because there is really no such thing - just a collection of ways the market has arrived at a particular form. and anyway most of the people trying to achieve that can't really reach what they're trying to supposedly fall back on being because they don't have the means to do so. so it ends up being a weird approximation searching for legitimacy via this imagined past that like, when actually placed up against the past actually feels kind of weird and alienated. but people are unable to understand the ways that they're doing this. so there's this imagined "hardened wisdom" that no one really reflects on whether there's actually anything there, because the idea that it isn't is too scary.
yeah like you could equally say we need to go back and re-incorporate the pop cultural lessons of maurice chevalier and gloopy 1930s ballads but when people make this kind of argument there's like a tacit implication that there's really only one period of "mainstream" which is real and which counts, with all the other and different versions treated as distorted echoes where people didn't really know what they wanted or feel things in the same way... so i think people can be selective about this stuff but still get a sense of spooked vertigo from the follow-up idea, that none of this stuff has ever really been legitimate or made sense any more than "the way the world works" has ever really been legitimate or made sense.