The Art of Democracy: A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States [Paperback]

NOTE: THIS REVIEW IS BASED ON THE FIRST EDITION, NOT THE REVISED EDITION

Trying to present a "concise history of popular culture in the United States" in such a short book as this one calls to mind Samuel Johnson's remark on the dancing dog. You shouldn't focus on how bad it is, it is remarkable that it was attempted at all.

Certainly, large portions of American culture are simply ignored or get just a passing glance. So you get very little on the ante-bellum Northern writers, nothing on twentieth century magazines, only the briefest mention of Broadway musicals - a paragraph about three musicals influenced by African American music(Porgy and Bess [which is more of an opera than a musical], Showboat and On the Town) and so on.

Part of the problem lies in the author's failure to define his terms. When does popular culture end and something else begin? So we get a reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald and not Hemingway, ballet and opera but not orchestral music. Interestingly, he criticizes the inventors of movies and television for focusing on the hardware and ignoring the software, but he makes something of the same mistake, presenting a fascinating description of the technological developments of those industries, but his discussion of movies and television shows is much less focused and not very insightful.

And if you are going to discuss the Hollywood communists who were blacklisted, you should also mention that they themselves often used their influence at the studios to blacklist non-communist and anti-communist writers. Two wrongs don't make a right, of course, but you also reap what you sow.

For all his concern for the downtrodden, the author focuses strictly on mainstream, whitebread popular culture: nothing on the Yiddish theater, African American music as played to white audiences but nothing about black performers in front of black audiences (was there a difference? That would have been a valuable discussion), nothing about how immigrants formed their own culture in America (German beer gardens, foreign language newspapers, etc.)

Some of the problems of the book are part of the nature of writing a survey, but the author makes it worse, and undermines his own goals, by his Marxist analysis where almost everything he discusses is racist, sexist or part of the class struggle.

He is willing to see these flaws everywhere, but doesn't have the space to discuss them in full. Gothic novels in the early 19th Century, the author tells us, indicates that there was dissatisfaction lurking beneath the seemingly happy population, but the author barely tells us what these novels were, let alone how popular they were or whether they may have signified something other than dread to their readers. Mere assertion doesn't constitute a valid argument.

And it is the author's own selectivity which undermines his thesis. A reader wonders whether he is including evidence that proves his point and ignoring evidence to the contrary. Sean Wilentz' Chants Democratic is an excellent work that tries to accomplish what the author sets out to do, but Wilentz succeeds by narrowing his focus, whereas Cullen fails by reaching too far.

It also leads Cullen to make some strange assertions. His anti-capitalist mindset leads him to regret that American entertainment didn't develop the way the United Kingdom did, with a government monopoly controlling all broadcasting. Well, when I was in the UK recently, I had a total of five radio stations to listen to throughout my entire trip and the traffic reports in Cornwall reported delays outside of Glasgow, hundreds of miles away on the other side of the British Isles. If the author is nostalgic for the BBC, he is welcome to it: even the UK is pulling away from a government monopoly and anyway, the author has legitimate concerns about the power that a large group of megacorporations have over the airwaves, but what makes him think that a government monopoly would be anything but a good deal worse?

The author also regrets copyright laws because they stifle "cultural discourse," but I note that Mr. Cullen dutifully obtained a copyright for his book, so the less said about this soapbox of his, the better.

This is all a pity, because he is capable of more. His discussion of the trajectory of African-American music throughout American history is superb. He traces each development back to its roots, shows the reader why the music is both distinctive and special and downplays the political elements which occupy center stage in the rest of the book. For instance, he ignores the racist and sexist elements of rap to discuss the more weighty elements of its origins and future. Since African-American music is inspired by spiritual matters and not by the class struggle, the author can't drag in his tired old Marxist dialectic, either. The result is eveything you could want in a book like this.

So here's a subversive (one of the author's favorite words) idea: maybe the reason why the book succeeds so well with African-American music and falls so flat everywhere else is because Mr. Cullen left his political baggage in the cloakroom. Sometimes, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, a song is just a song, a joke is just a joke and a book is just a book.

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