Instinctively I am drawn to the attitude that we should avoid rigid boundaries between “high” and “low” culture. They delineate those works, or even entire art forms, that can be great and significant and, with equal force, those which by their very nature never can be, which seems to me a strange and judgemental approach to cultural artefacts. After all, Shakespeare was writing plays for audiences which could number in the thousands, and the cheapest entry to the Globe in the Bard’s day was a penny: the so-called “groundlings” could stand on the earthen floor by the stage and enjoy some of the greatest literature ever written.
This is a border which the short-lived but stylish Modern Review self-consciously set out to straddle. Its founders, Julie Burchill and Cosmo Landesman, then married, and Toby Young, who became editor, sought to cover “low culture for high-brows”. The publication may only have lasted for four years, from 1991 to 1995, but its ethos was seismically influential. John Harris, marking the 10th anniversary of its demise for The Observer, summed it up.
It soon comprehensively redrew the cultural map, forever wiping the high-cultural smirk from the face of Britain’s critics. From here on in, it would be acceptable, if not all but obligatory, to fill review supplements and TV programmes with a new kind of subject matter.
The inaugural issue of Modern Review carried a two-page mission statement which was as bold and unapologetic as its creators, asserting that “Mass culture may offend against good taste… but that’s what’s good about it”. The text was accompanied, punningly, by pictures of Roland Barthes and Bart Simpson. Toby Young, now the guiding spirit behind the Free Speech Union and provocative blog The Daily Sceptic, explains that the magazine was clear about its purpose.
The whole enterprise was driven by one fairly simple idea. And that was that critics had a responsibility to take the best popular culture as seriously as the best high culture. It doesn’t sound remotely radical now, because the entire broadsheet press is stuffed with Oxbridge graduates writing about The Terminator. But in those days, it was a new idea.
I was just too young to appreciate Modern Review, 17 when it closed and having just finished an unsuccessful (and only) year as an undergraduate at Oxford. But I liked the idea, which struck me as simultaneously stylish and intellectually rigorous, and it is a philosophy I still share. As a general principle, the best of anything is good, and that can be a soap opera or a detective novel just as easily as an avant-garde theatre production or a 1,000-page “state of the nation” literary work.
Example: if you watch the first episode of Coronation Street now, 64 years after it was first transmitted on 9 December 1960, and if you are mindful of the time and the context, it is a ferociously fresh and challenging dramatic miniature which must have left audiences stunned. The dialogue is lean, witty and lightning-quick, slightly redolent of music hall patter and melodic with the cadences of the North West: Tony Warren, the programme’s creator, was raised in Eccles and it was set in the fictional Greater Manchester town of Weatherfield, based on Salford.
Coronation Street was an attempt to present a realistic insight into ordinary lives. The authentic regional accents would have stood out to television audiences in a time when newsreaders and continuity announcers like Richard Dimbleby, Kenneth Kendall and Richard Baker spoke in carefully modulated Received Pronunciation, often burnished at Oxbridge. It also represented the theatre of everyday existence, finding drama in familial and social interactions, tensions between neighbours and generational norms and expectations.
Yet these quotidian events—”low culture”, if you like—in no way admitted they were lesser than the affairs of princes and kings. True, Granada Television cautiously commissioned only 13 episodes of Coronation Street at first, and The Daily Mirror’s young TV critic Ken Irwin declared it “doomed from the outset—with its dreary signature tune and grim scene of a row of terraced houses and smoking chimneys”. With more than 11,000 episodes now having been made over 64 years, this pessimism was clearly misplaced. By 1964, Coronation Street regularly attracted more than 20 million viewers.
For anyone seeking to understand the culture and society of the times, the intellectual and artistic milieu and the way in which Britain was changing, it would obviously be blinkered and self-defeating to turn a blind eye to Coronation Street on the grounds of its mass appeal or apparent low status as a soap opera. This was culture as a two-way exchange: not only did it reflect the lives of its audiences, it opened a window on the social circumstances of a distinctive region, for a country still in thrall to a top-down Establishment. Words and phrases like “By ’eck”, “chuck” and “nowt” were suddenly heard in every corner of the nation.
As Toby Young remarked, this kind of attitude is no longer controversial. Whole careers have been forged from the loving curation of popular culture, and we think nothing of dense books which dissect the Beatles, or Hammer horror films, or the Victorian music hall. Importantly, we can now see, and admit to seeing, connections which previously would have gone unnoticed or unmentioned, allowing us to appreciate cultural artefacts in a wider context.
The distinctions between genres have blurred, often unleashing enormous creative energy. I cherish the memory of an edition of BBC2’s Late Review in 1995 when the panel of critics was discussing the newly released Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s brilliantly sharp coming-of-age comedy; poet and critic Tom Paulin, never a man to take matters less than seriously, admitted to realising as he watched the film, “This is Emma!” Once he had grasped that Jane Austen’s novel of manners was the inspiration, he adored Clueless.
Like any groundbreaking new perspective, the spirit of Modern Review can be taken too far and can become the chosen weapon of the professional provocateur. In a media ecosystem which often devotes the most attention to the loudest voices, critics and journalists can be driven to go one step further than is prudent, than is plausible, stepping across the line just to catch the busy reader’s eye. We’ve all seen it, we’ve all responded to it: click-bait.
Ian Dunt, the angry man of moderate politics, summed it up in a recent Substack article:
I have two news stories in front of me. One of them is about the legal details of Labour’s plans for regulatory alignment with Europe. The other is about a man with three nipples. Which will people click on? Obviously, they click on the nipple. Everyone always clicks on the nipple. It’s one of the golden rules of journalism.
Many of us have succumbed to the temptation, as readers and writers. Enthusiasm is infectious that way. I remember an office party many years ago when, with enough wine consumed, I set about arguing to a Beatles-obsessed colleague that Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson of Abba were a better songwriting partnership than Lennon and McCartney. Did I believe it? Possibly. Was I persuasive? Unlikely. But it provoked a conversation.
It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, in the idiom of ancient Rome’s wrestling arena. Providing a “hot take” is harmless enough, and very much a contemporary mode of discourse in a world which last year saw Donald Trump, whose every take is hot, re-elected as President of the United States. For the critic, however, the danger is of sacrificing perspective, succumbing to your own techniques, and beginning to believe that your provocation is actually a profound, if contested, truth.
Taylor Swift’s mammoth Eras tour, which finally drew to a close in December last year, brought this into sharp focus. As Tay-Tay swept all before her, performing to what would eventually be 10 million fans and grossing $2 billion, Matthew Green, associate professor of English literature at the University of Nottingham, had a revelation of an especially hot variety. Writing in July last year, he brought his unquestionable academic erudition to bear and concluded that Taylor Swift should be compared to the greatest names of gothic literature and that she is the Mary Shelley of our times.
Swift’s works are every bit as profound, significant and foundational as Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
This is emphatically not an attempt to denigrate Taylor Swift. I would be regarded as a fairweather friend by true Swifties, but I find a great deal to like and admire about the singer. She is musical and has a flair for the sharp insight, delivered with knowing ruefulness or puckish wit. To an extraordinary degree, she has forged connections with a vast fanbase whose millions feel that she speaks individually and meaningfully to them. Swift exhibits a ferocious work ethic and seems to be a kind and generous philanthropist.
Some critics have gone much further. She has been compared to Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, and won plaudits from iconic figures like Madonna, Stevie Nicks and Dolly Parton. Billy Joel, who knows what it takes to enjoy lasting fame which combines commercial success and critical esteem, said “she knows music and she knows how to write. She’s like that generation’s Beatles.”
Taylor Swift is a major artist and a global star. But comparing her to Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker feels intuitively wrong. How can we possibly make that judgement now? It is nearly 130 years since Dracula was published, more than 200 since Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus reached its first readers. These are artistic touchstones which have weathered centuries, not just decades, and become foundations of our imagination and conception of the world. Joyously upbeat and expressive though it may be, to claim a similar status for 22 is to reach beyond the credible.
Green’s pronouncement met a predictable backlash. If he is anything like most academics I know, he will have savoured the spotlight, the sensation of relevance and urgency, and it would be a hard heart which begrudged him that. The bait was duly clicked: mission accomplished. Yet I see little indication in his tightly argued commentary to suggest he is insincere or simply going through the motions. On the contrary, I think he means every word.
Perhaps in 200 years’ time Green will be vindicated and my shade will feel churlish and shame-faced. More likely, though, it is a cautionary tale. By all means, challenge conventional thinking, rattle preconceptions, offer new and unexpected perspectives on culture of all kinds. That keeps the public conversation alive and makes art vibrant. If a bold assertion or image helps you grab the attention of readers, that is no sin in itself. But always remain self-aware, conscious of the rules of the game, and conscious, more importantly, that it is a game. The hot take is a mechanism but it is very often less than the truth, and a critic should never argue so smoothly that he dupes himself.
Modern Review was a revolution. Roland Barthes and Bart Simpson? Absolutely, you can be interested in both. Broad interests are a positive virtue. Remember, though, that Barthes and Bart are not the same. It is a dangerously short distance from an open mind to an empty head.
