As John Derbyshire is fond of saying, pop culture is filth, but it is worth noticing, if you want to get a sense of where the culture is heading. It is a strange artifact of the modern west, modern America particularly, so it’s healthy probably speaks to the health of the American society. Youth culture is not a permanent feature of human society. In fact, it is an oddity. For most of human history, youth culture did not exist.Children graduated into adulthood and that was it. Youth culture is a creation of the American post-war Left.

To be accurate, what we think of as pop culture started in earnest in the 20’s and 30’s in big cities. People with disposable income could go to clubs and hear jazz music and carry on in ways that were otherwise prohibited. That was not really youth culture as we think of it today. It was an extension of the existing cosmopolitan leisure activity, brought down to a middlebrow level. Instead of you people attending formal dances, they went to clubs and listened to black music, smoked jazz cigarettes and talk about communism,

After the Second World War, an authentic youth culture was born. The proliferation of media, TV, radio and movies, quickly centered on young people. The reason is young people are dumb and have bad tastes. It’s a lot easier to sell them pop culture than to sell it to an older person with more complex tastes. Radicals also saw it as a way to recruit the young in their efforts to subvert public order. It’s not an accident that the long cultural revolution in America started with a revolution in pop culture.

There was also money to be made selling stupid young people bad music and silly fads that changed every year. Even though most was crap, some was quite good. By the late 60’s sixties and early 70’s, a lot of pop music was very good. Listen to Led Zeppelin, for example, and you hear very accomplished musicians tapping into old traditions in western music. It’s not Beethoven of Brahms, but within that genre, many of the best performers were very talented musicians. In a better age, they would have been put to better use.

Today, pop culture is noticeably devoid of talent. The automation and technology have, as is always the case, removed the art and replaced it with decoration. In the last two decades we have seen a stream of female pop singers following a standard formula, where they gain great success, but then fade and are replaced by an updated version, doing the same act. Madonna was the first to figure out how to be the raunchy power-pop diva and after here has been a stream of imitators doing the same act.

Heterosexual male singers have just about disappeared from pop music, instead turning up in country. The beta males like Justin Beiber are designed to appeal as much to the bath house culture as teens. Just as the proliferation of gay casting directors has turned the leading man into a gay icon, the proliferation of homosexuals in the music business has turned the male singer into a twink. Gays like their men to look like steroidal freaks or like teenage boys. That’s a truth of life that is forbidden, but still true.

The trouble with the factory formula is it eventually breaks down. Lady Gaga seems to be headed to the dustbin as her latest record is a flop. Her music was never anything special, but her marketing was better than most. Her people fused David Bowie and Paris Hilton with a dash of Marilyn Manson. Wisely, they kept it PG-13 so they could target young teenage girls, but also rope in the dorky older girls. It was good timing as the victim culture was growing, particularly among young females. It was good timing.

The transcendent theme to all of pop music these days, even country, is the stunning lack of real talent. Most of the singers need electronic enhancement. Few can play more than a few notes on an instrument. None are writing music. Instead there’s a music factory cranking out their tunes and a whole marketing team to build the back story and narrative of the performer. The lack of authenticity is near universal, which is ironic, as the genesis of youth culture was a quest for authenticity that transcended bourgeois life.