Popular Culture – Holley Sociology

‘Brat’ Summer 2024: Grasping a Media Moment

At a time when wars, political campaigns, and an Olympics were going on, in Summer 2024, ‘brat’ popped up with no apparent connection to these. Here was a girl youth phenomenon expressing itself through Charli xcx’s sudden, huge celebrity.

It started with singer song writer Charli xcx’s sixth album, ‘Brat.’ Its bold green rectangle on the album cover could have writing on it. The whole package, the singer’s style, songs, and visual image, suddenly took off and became a mega hit.

Are those who study youth ready to include this moment’s splash? In a general way, sociologists recognize that media objects illuminate young people’s lives and relationships. But are we capable of grasping this phenomenon in all its various pieces? Here is a social space, radiating its meaning in a particular slice of time. Let’s list some of the dimensions of this. Its many components deliver different messages, all in a very short time.

The album cover has a catchy green rectangle. On this text can appear.

The music and lyrics are themselves memorable – Charli xcx has been recording for a number of years.

The album title is ‘Brat,’ which is a pejorative term; the written word catches attention by being unusual. The verbal meaning is deepened by Charli’s extended explanation.

Charli said that “brat” means “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party … maybe says dumb things sometimes … who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown but parties through it … is very honest, very blunt, a little bit volatile.

The word brat is used adjectivally in the phrases ‘brat girl’ and ‘brat summer.’

Note that the vision of girlhood here has contradictory opposites; it describes a girl who has many feelings and contrasting behaviors.

Brat turns out to be a good thing, not a term of disapprobation. It is a cool persona for its, mainly Gen Z, audience. It has been use supportively for the woman American presidential candidate with the phrase ‘Kamala is brat,’ suggesting that she is young at heart and cool!

My question for sociologists is whether we have put enough effort into understanding how suddenly appearing, generationally embraced images redefine what is desirable and acceptable in people. Does each generation change what it wants people to be like? Does this express what a generation feels society needs? Are social scientists able to see what is going on in this densely expressive mode of communication? My impression is that influential media events, like ‘brat’ in Summer 2024, are still dismissed by older people as too complicated, and disappearing too fast, to be credited with being influential.

This is sad because people in every generation remember the big media events of their growing up; these are defining moments, unforgettable for how they changed the picture of what produces successful and happy people. We can all remember examples of these; illuminating moments are part of our collective understanding and should not, surely, be missing from social science descriptions of modern of life.

Media Influencers and Understanding Media: Paris Hilton and Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan needs to be credited with identifying, in the 1960s, the first media cultural generation, that we now call the Boomers. We know that this has been followed by subsequent generations, each identified by its own popular culture. McLuhan made a brilliant start by identifying media users as a new sociological feature of countries. He invented the name ‘media’ and recognized its importance for the cohort of people who grew up with it.

But where McLuhan went wrong was misrepresenting what this media-using cohort of people were actually achieving. McLuhan called this media use by young people a form of ‘tribalism.’ With this term he saw youth as failing. McLuhan regarded the only useful contribution to society as what was political and ideological. For him the newly appearing Baby Boomers lacked all serious literary and moral impact…unlike his own generation.

For himself, and people his age who lacked any surrounding media, McLuhan regarded people as influential only when they were literary individuals, private thinkers who worked alone and thought for themselves, and whose only support was alcohol. McLuhan expected men – and not women or youth – to be private, boozy, and essentially moral and politically oriented contributors to the institutional order of their society.

McLuhan couldn’t see any useful purpose for the ‘tribalism’ displayed by the media-using young people of the Sixties. For him, their deficiency, was their inability to contribute abstract concepts to the ideological discourse of the state.

Let’s jump forward forty years and look at somebody else who made, in my opinion, an equally important analysis of the meaning of media. I’m talking about Paris Hilton and her contribution to media influence through fashion and beauty. Around the Millennium, Paris Hilton was criticized by the older generation for ‘not doing anything’ and therefore not deserving any fame.

But Paris Hilton did make a huge contribution. She demonstrated that being beautiful, wearing the right clothing, hair and makeup was enough. You didn’t have to do anything that was political, ideological or charitable, in order to be influential. Being beautiful was enough, because it was an effective use of the power of media. Paris Hilton showed that political, ideological, and philanthropic activities were irrelevant to the popularity of the media. Today’s ‘media influencers’ now understand this basic truth. At the Millennium, it was not clear how much work went into presenting oneself. Before she went out, Hilton had to spend 45 minutes on hair, and another 45 minutes on makeup, as well as finding and wearing the right clothing. She would make changes of clothing during the day so that news photographers could publish her pictures at different events on the same day. This was not ‘doing nothing’; this was hard work that was relevant and necessary to effective deployment of media.

In sum, Paris Hilton’s achievement was showing that being beautiful is enough; through media, anyone can be influential with youth and affect society. You don’t need to be conceptual, policy oriented, or a political advocate for one cause or another. The media is its own thing, a fact which every subsequent generation has learnt for itself, and inspires so many of our young women to become media influencers. McLuhan was wrong. He could not have predicted the profound change which has shifted society away from literary high culture and politics. Much of the old ruling heights of political consciousness have lost influence due to the rise of media.

More sadly, social science generally, has failed to catch up with the importance of youth and media. Why did reading and print media decline? Without media, how do we know how young people see themselves collectively? What is each generation adding to media? The great transformation by which youth and media have been elevated into importance is demonstrated perfectly by Paris Hilton.

Today, people have largely forgotten Marshall McLuhan. His limitations are now all too obvious; businesses now study each youthful media cohort and report on what is new. These innovations are taken very seriously – and rightly so.

So it is disappointing that academic social science has so far failed to learn the Paris Hilton message that using the media is enough in itself. What is the mechanism by which media is so effective? How does the personal life of young people shape politics, economy, and popular culture? Our current social sciences cannot tell us the answer because, in important ways, our sociology and political science are stuck back in the McLuhan Era. They still suppose that written commentary, and policy making within formal organizations, are the only ways of steering society. Revisiting the legacy of Paris Hilton may be a good way to cast off the obsolete vision that still sees no purpose for the media in a modern country.

Kylie Jenner and Society 2020

When I’m asked where to start a sociological analysis, I think of how I began, in 2020, to introduce my students to society. I started with this statement; ‘Kylie Jenner is the youngest self-made billionaire.’ Then I asked students to say what they thought about this. Student responses are very revealing. What they understand turns out to provide a perfect starting point for thinking about society.

Some students doubt the claim that Kylie Jenner is truly self-made; they point to the Kardashian family’s earlier fame and success. Some also guess that, in reality, her cosmetics business is worth less than a billion. But what students do all agree on is that she is famous and has a business. These universally known facts are profoundly important. As a sociologist, I see this knowledge as anchoring young people into society in ways that have previously been overlooked.

What is it that students know and how does this tell them about society?

Students learn through objects that express what Kylie is. Items of her cosmetics business are bought, worn, and displayed in photographs. Through these objects, the essence of ‘Kylieness’ is possessed and displayed.
Kylie’s objects are attached to the performance of the feminine.
As a person and as a designer, her objects anchor students’ experience in one particular year on the calendar. Kylie things will be understood and associated with the year 2020 when she was popular.
Kylie’s product-based fame constitutes her ‘price’ or ‘worth.’ This is a valuation of the behavior and activities associated with her objects. This is simultaneously both sociological and economic.
Kylie’s name and products will lose their ‘value of the moment’ as time elapses. In a year or two, these particular objects will no longer signify the exciting features of the feminine. New objects will be needed – which Kylie herself may be able to evolve into and create its replacements.

Taken together, we can see that meaningful objects root people into society in a variety of ways. You don’t yourself have to be feminine or interested in cosmetics for these objects to connect you; being in your age group and knowing your generational peers is enough to involve you in society. Everybody your age will know Kylie Jenner, what her family does, and what Kylie’s personality and brand stand for. The sociological lesson this gives my students is that generational objects connect the entire age group with their society.

Unfortunately for social science, Kylie Jenner and popular culture is absent from current explanations. Serious political and sociological thinking steers away from today’s material objects. Instead, theory directs social scientists toward institutions and word-based explanations. Political theory, of the ‘problem of order’ in Hobbes and Locke, looks to government and economic property to explain people’s behavior. Objects don’t get a look in here; they are not considered capable of influencing people. Sociological theory hasn’t done any better. Durkheim’s ‘anomie’ and Marx’s ‘alienation’ both claim that people are disconnected from society or alienated by harsh money economics. Weber emphasized rational action in the institutions of government and business. But celebrities, meaningful objects, and how we dress to express ourselves in our own generation is totally missing from official social science. This makes it impossible to see how buying and sharing meaningful objects integrates people into society.

Student understanding of Kylie Jenner reveals that seeing, possessing and performing with key objects connects an entire generation with its society. This is a great way to start thinking about sociology. People’s choice of stars and merchandise gives each generation shared bonds. If a celebrity like Kylie can be known and admired through her image and her products, the way is opened up to discover what else binds generations to their society – which is the purpose of studying sociology.

Watching “The Bachelor” as a Sociologist

Recently, I heard a mother apologetically admit that, with her tween daughter, she watches “The Bachelor.” Is this something that needs forgiveness because it’s embarrassing? However involving, isn’t this just trash television and watching it a waste of time? Educated people often condemn popular culture, even if they indulge in it privately. I think this is due to people knowing of no justifying reason for it. But looking closer at “The Bachelor,” isn’t this show really about relationship sociology?

Photo Credit: “The Bachelor” ABC Television

The sociology here is romance; it’s about finding your life partner – the end of the show is expected to be a marriage proposal! Seen as evaluating potential suitors, “The Bachelor” discusses an essential life skill. The contestants make revealing choices – which partner to pick and how to deploy their own courtship. Audiences get involved by evaluating the evaluators. Like all reality television, the show is contrived and largely scripted. So it’s not giving us real life. But isn’t any kind of judging people something bad?

In response, I would remind us that the choices here aren’t moral universals or political discrimination. The decisions are profoundly personal; they involve identifying the right person, meaning ‘right for me, personally.’ Half this process requires us to learn about ourselves. Making this romantic decision involves discovering what we ourselves want and imaginatively projecting who would be compatible with us. There is a profound question behind a marriage proposal – “Could I spend the rest of my life with this person?”

Watching “The Bachelor” may be a great way of improving life’s most significant skill – picking the right person to live with. In my view, this is a great way to spend mother-daughter bonding time. And sociologists should be proud of these two watching the show together!

China, Desire and Progress

People’s Republic of Desire is Hao Wu’s recent film on fan gift giving to live-streamers in China. Often poor, young people are shown spending their scant pay on gifts to online stars like Shen Man, who talks to her fans, or Big Li, a married but vigorously assertive exemplar of masculinity. Behind this fan worship are ideals of gender; young people in China now have a vast media apparatus with which to express their ideals and desires – for feminine beauty, manly assertiveness, and the personal enjoyment of fame.

Shen Man and a Diagram of the YY Entertainment Network

Behind this new industry are owners and investors; they make the big money in this live-streaming industry. The stars are shown struggling, with competition to be number one and with their relationships. Shen Man tries to stay focused because she has to support her parents and their family. And Big Li’s relationship with his manager wife is stressful for both. But beyond the money and stardom, other things are going on. Still authoritarian, the government is letting new desires be expressed; China is tolerating public fandom by millions. It is these fans who are the focus of this film. Millions of ordinary people are now deciding for themselves what they admire and who they want to see. They show this in a serious way, backed by their own precious money. Within themselves there is now space for considering desires and externally these can now be freely shown. This is recognizably progress.

While resisting the protests in Hong Kong, China’s authoritarian government is opening itself up to private life. Hao Wu shows how millions of people can now indulge personal desires and spend their money impecuniously. With government no longer campaigning for people to adopt serious purposes, the desires of private life are now tolerated. Is this because it distracts people from political protest? Or has the Chinese Communist Party glimpsed a deeper, more future-oriented possibility? Are private life ‘vices’ going to result in ‘public benefits’? Is Hao Wu’s film showing us China at its Mandeville moment?

Seen sociologically, private desires could be what is most needed to push society into its next phase. Future personal relationships may transform manners, lead people to expect romantic courtship, and result in a personally timed lifecourse. Does People’s Republic of Desire show China embracing intimate attractions and generational enthusiasms? Are we seeing a future private identity that will become a source of social change? Fantasizing about a star or hero, joining an informal association, and interfacing with the economy by consumption may preview for us what China’s future holds – a more sociological society.

English Club Football Victory in Europe: A Story Mandeville Would Love

Today, English clubs dominate European soccer. If you ask why, the simple answer is they just buy the best players. The victor here is money. This is the opposite of the German Bundesliga strategy of each club cultivating its own players and slowly building up a pool of local talent. English club football does the exact opposite: it simply buys the best players from anywhere in the world and pays whatever huge sums of money it takes to snag them.

Is this an example of vice beating morals? It’s an old question. If he could travel from the early eighteenth century and see this today, would Bernard de Mandeville be delighted with this example? Wasn’t his whole point that vices like greed for fame and profit make the world a richer and more lively place? If this argument has been known to social science for so long, why is it still strenuously resisted?

Is it wrong that money should win? Are we witnessing here the evil of big business against a German model that is more honest and moral? How can social science answer this question? Big enterprises connect in complex ways. Does the German model only help Europeans whereas global purchases launch footballer’s careers around the world? Is the English model an economic imperialism, robbing developing countries of their best talent? Doesn’t English club football get the money to pay for all these talented players because the fans find their matches more exciting? After all, bigger audiences make Premier League clubs more profitable, while the German games are often boring. In this case, big money appears to express the world popularity of a genuinely more exciting style of game played by English clubs.

In the end, Mandeville isn’t acknowledged because his theory is harder to understand. It relies on processes we call the ‘invisible hand’ – complex unintended outcomes that are hard for social scientists to track through their particulars. And sociologists are not familiar with giving such processes credit for working out well; too often people are seen as victims in these circumstances. But when its only a game, the stakes really aren’t that high. Aren’t the play-offs of a sports tournament a moment to evaluate an important theory of this neglected social scientist? It’s my guess that many other good things result from Mandevillian ‘private vice.’ The challenge lies in specifying exactly under what conditions these things work out well.

On Watching “The Duff” as a Sociologist

Of the three recent films, “The Fault in Our Stars,” “The Hunger Games” and “The Duff” no critic today will likely take the last of these seriously. But as a sociologist, I must insist that “The Duff” is the only movie of the three that any thinking person should care about.

“The Fault in Our Stars” is a tear-jerker about teenagers dying from incurable diseases. This theme is neither modern nor conceptually plausible. Death rates in modern society have fall very low and teens are the group least likely to suffer an untimely death. What is more, nobody needs to be convinced that dying young is a bad thing; conceptually, this theme has zero challenge to it. On both counts, “The Fault in Our Stars” is an intellectual dud; nobody could learn anything medical or social scientific from it.

Superficially, “The Hunger Games” looks a better candidate for learning about society. But, sadly, it is not. The fact is that nobody can learn anything from this or any other picture of dystopia. Modern societies cannot be run as dictatorships – they just don’t work this way. The most recent round of authoritarian dictatorships, those of the first half of the twentieth century, all collapsed under the weight of their own violence and mismanagement. No elite-planned competition of violence could keep any modern society together. No one could plan it; no group of people could execute it. Consider how the United States, which has the world’s largest military, cannot create a health care system that works reasonably and covers all its people. How less likely is that, in a democracy, a market economy, and an open media, any group of people could plan and run a system of compulsory, competitive and destructive games? Today’s fictional attempts to conjure up a dystopia don’t begin to provide a plausible picture of society. The idea of a fully planned dystopian society is impossible for a social scientist to take seriously. “The Hunger Games” ignores social science as much as “The Fault in Our Stars” ignores medical progress. We know that dystopias cannot exist so, as an assumption behind an entertainment, this premise offers zero intellectual challenge. You won’t learn anything from Katniss about either real people or actual societies.

When the bar is this low, it doesn’t take much for “The Duff” to soar into the heights of social science. But it’s more than just another high school movie. “The Duff” poses an intriguing problem of friendship and social ranking. Bianca becomes troubled by being the least attractive one in her group of girl friends. Significantly, it is not her enemy, Madison, nor even the cyber bullying of her fellow students, which is the thread of her story. “The Duff’s” truly important theme is how Bianca learns to deal with her own, entirely correct, assessment that she is least attractive one, the “duff,” in her group of friends. Any social scientist will find Bianca’s journey of self-discovery well worth studying. Can you conceptualize any of the work she does on herself using the concepts currently available in sociology? When social science can grasp any of Bianca’s learning and self-improvement, it will be on the cutting edge of human knowledge. The human situation here is all too real; many of us will not find ourselves on the top rung of success. And it’s vitally important to society that people deal with this constructively. Working with, and sometimes without, her friends, Bianca rebuilds herself into a more proactive and creative person. She shows us human social progress being created. Bianca, a self-defined “duff,” is a pioneering explorer of social science’s terra incognita – socially adept and high functioning self-improvement. While “The Duff” may never be considered a truly great movie – its dialog and dramatic scenes could be better – it’s the sociologist’s only choice when it comes to learning something new and genuinely interesting about modern life.

Poster Art and Sociological Metonymy

Performing Arts Office, Suffolk University, Dec. 2015

Look at this picture for the way varieties of footwear express people’s different identities in society. Each kind of shoe is a designed social object. In this poster, each designed object works as a metonym; each shoe reveals the bigger whole that is associated with it. It is a sociological principle that, because we are rich in designed objects, modern societies communicate about people by using metonymies like this. They fill our media and art. Metonyms have largely replaced symbolic expression which past state and tribal societies used. Past civilizations, which were trying to communicate the transcendental, relied on metaphor, which tries to show how something different from itself is a symbol that reveals an aspect that we cannot see. That was a kind of poetic way of seeing the world – as something magical and different from the Earthly and human. Notice how the poster is very modern in that it asks us to connect, metonymically, this-worldly things with what we cannot see so easily, namely the inner identities of people around us.

When Stars Hate Their Fans

Actor Benedict Cumberbatch has recently received bad publicity for finding his fans annoying, most likely because they embarrass him. It’s the “slash fiction” which he doesn’t like, stories which erotically pair the inexpressive Sherlock Holmes character he plays on television with his supposedly platonic companion, John Watson. Interviewers read him extracts from these imaginative and highly popular stories written by fans – knowing that they can get a rise out of him.

Writer Elizabeth Minkel in “The New Statesman” explains why Cumberbatch’s fans are rightly upset by this. How can stars hate their fans? A celebrity owes everything to his audience; they’re the ones who are buying his tickets and watching his shows.

What is surprising is that some celebrities still haven’t figured this out. In the 1920s, Rudolf Valentino was embarrassed by hordes of adoring fans. The movies were new then and fan actions were little understood. Men of Valentino’s era didn’t know what they were expected to do with the screaming and fainting women fans. Being a sex symbol seemed unmanly, undignified and impossible to respond to.

A century later, most celebrities know that they owe their success to their fans. Kathy Griffin explained that, at book signings, she smiles at whatever insults or absurdities fans say to her; she simply says, “Thank you for coming,” and that is enough. Fan fiction is something new and not widely understood. It is the new “movies.” Cumberbatch and his interviewers still have some learning to do.

Minkel is right that fan fiction isn’t written for celebrities. But stars should not have to figure out for themselves the uses and social functions of fan activities. Isn’t it the job of social scientists to explain what fan adoration is all about? After all, it’s been around for a hundred years.

Boomers Versus Millennials: Are There Generational Cultures?

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s recent statement that he won’t perform in colleges any more, for this sociologist, highlights how important decades and time are in modern society. When do generations come to an end, and where are the boundaries that separate them? What stops an older generation and starts a new one? When a famous Boomer generation entertainer is suddenly rejected by Millennials, surely light is being shed on these questions.

What is the cause of this rupture? Its protagonist blames the younger generation’s changed values and outlook. “They’re so PC,” he says. What Seinfeld means by political correctness is less important than the fact that he identifies the younger generation as having a changed view of the world. Here we find two generations on the cusp of change, with the older one discovering that the younger does not appreciate it. For Jerry Seinfeld, the young are incomprehensible for not understanding the satirical use of racism and sexism which was the common currency of Boomers. In return, Millennials think his attempts at humor just aren’t funny. Two generations have parted ways. The “Seinfeld Show,” a comedy adored by the generation of the late eighties and early nineties has, for Millennials in the mid twenty-teens, descended into cultural insensitivity and irrelevance.

Seinfeld’s honest and heartfelt frustration about this alteration is nowhere more evident than in the fact that his own fourteen-year-old daughter rejects him. “That’s racist. That’s sexist. That’s prejudice,” she hurls at her 61-year-old father. Clearly they no longer share the same cultural terrain. He expostulates “They just don’t know what they’re talking about.” For her part, his daughter holds her ground; she isn’t budging.

Whether it’s a college audience or your own children, eventually a cultural gap opens up that separates whole generations. How long is a generation given to be itself and live on top of the wave? Recent research seems to show that cultural generations last about eighteen years (see my blog post “Generations: A Mystery to Social Science”). But until we get sociological research with representative samples of generations, we must catch at what straws of information we can. The separation of generations that sincerely baffles a famous person like Jerry Seinfeld shows us the sociological process going on here.

Source: Cavan Sieczkowski The Huffington Post 8th June 2015

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/08/jerry-seinfeld-college-politically-correct-racism-sexism_n_7534978.html