Is Pop Culture Worse Than Ever?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Plain English with Derek Thompson – "Is Pop Culture Worse Than Ever?"

In the episode titled "Is Pop Culture Worse Than Ever?" released on May 9, 2025, Derek Thompson, the host and longtime Atlantic tech, culture, and political writer, engages in a profound discussion with his friend and colleague, Spencer Kornhaber. The conversation delves deep into the state of American pop culture, examining whether it has indeed deteriorated or merely transformed in response to contemporary societal changes. The dialogue is structured around four critical themes identified by Spencer in his essay: Stagnation, Cynicism, Isolation, and Brain Rot. Below is a detailed summary capturing the key points, discussions, insights, and conclusions from the episode.

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Introduction to the Debate

Derek Thompson initiates the conversation by reflecting on an article by music critic and cultural essayist Ted Gioia, who posits that American pop culture has transitioned from a "slow" to a "fast" culture, now dominated by what Gioia terms "dopamine culture." This shift is characterized by an incessant craving for instant gratification, where consumers crave more stimulation but are simultaneously less satisfied, likening modern pop culture to a "virtual casino of the mind" ([04:07] Thompson).

Spencer Kornhaber expands on this by introducing his essay, "Is this the Worst Ever Era of American Pop Culture?", where he outlines four primary themes—Stagnation, Cynicism, Isolation, and Brain Rot—that he believes are driving the perceived decline in pop culture.

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Stagnation: The First Horseman

Stagnation refers to the lack of innovation and the over-reliance on familiar content in the entertainment industry. Spencer presents alarming statistics, noting that "almost 75% of music consumed today is old music," highlighting how new releases constitute a mere fraction of what audiences engage with ([13:27] Kornhaber).

Key Points:

• Investment in the Past: Record labels and entertainment companies are increasingly investing in old music catalogs and established IPs. This financial incentive sidelines new artists and fresh content. Spencer cites the example of Kate Bush’s "Running Up That Hill" resurging in popularity decades after its release, propelled by its inclusion in the TV show Stranger Things ([15:10] Kornhaber).

• Algorithmic Influence: Platforms like Spotify and TikTok utilize algorithms that favor familiar content, making it harder for new music to gain traction. These algorithms prioritize what audiences have previously enjoyed, often sidelining innovative or experimental creations ([16:03] Thompson).

• Impact on Creativity: The data-driven approach stifles artistic risk-taking. As Spencer explains, "the more data you have, the more you invest in what worked before," leading to a cultural freeze where new and potentially groundbreaking art struggles to emerge ([20:11] Kornhaber).

Notable Quote:

"If Bach was alive today, he'd probably go to LA, try to make it in the music scene, and then give up and become a hedge fund manager." – Spencer Kornhaber ([19:25])

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Cynicism: The Second Horseman

Cynicism addresses the infiltration of politics and identity politics into art, altering its creation and reception. Spencer discusses Dean Kissick’s critique of modern visual art, which often leverages political correctness and identity-centric themes to gain prestige ([24:02] Kornhaber).

Key Points:

• Political Infusion: Art forms are increasingly used as vehicles for political messaging. This shift has created a divide where certain groups perceive mainstream entertainment as "too woke," fostering distrust and disengagement among segments of the population ([27:00] Kornhaber).

• Commercialization of Values: Entertainment companies prioritize content that aligns with specific political or social agendas, often at the expense of diverse and non-political narratives. For instance, Disney’s live-action remakes infuse classic stories with modern progressive elements, which some audiences find creatively limiting ([29:18] Kornhaber).

• Creative Constraints: The pressure to conform to political correctness stifles artistic freedom. Spencer argues that this environment discourages genuine creativity, as artists feel compelled to adhere to predefined narratives and identities rather than exploring novel themes ([31:25] Kornhaber).

Notable Quote:

"When you have this attitude that there is a right and wrong way to think about the world, then people are incentivized to make or support or consume art that is capital C, correct." – Derek Thompson ([58:31])

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Isolation: The Third Horseman

Isolation examines the shift towards solitary creation and consumption of art, exacerbated by technological advancements and societal changes. Spencer highlights how the decline of collaborative environments, such as bands, and the rise of individualistic music production have transformed the artistic landscape ([32:24] Kornhaber).

Key Points:

• Solo Creation: Modern music production is increasingly a solo endeavor, with artists relying on digital tools instead of forming bands. This trend leads to more self-confessional and individualistic art but diminishes the collaborative spark that fueled past musical innovations ([36:01] Kornhaber).

• Consumer Isolation: The way audiences consume music has also become more isolated, with personal headphones replacing communal listening experiences. This atomization affects the type of music that gains popularity, favoring introspective and personal narratives over collective storytelling ([32:28] Kornhaber).

• Impact on Art Quality: The isolation in creation and consumption results in more one-dimensional and less surprising artistic choices. Spencer expresses nostalgia for the collaborative chaos of past music scenes, which fostered richer and more varied creative outputs ([34:29] Kornhaber).

Notable Quote:

"You just have a much more solipsistic art form that is in general a lot more about someone's interior life." – Spencer Kornhaber ([33:04] Kornhaber)

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Brain Rot: The Fourth Horseman

Brain Rot refers to the diminishing ability to maintain attention and engage deeply with content, driven by the rapid influx of information and the pervasive use of digital devices. This theme explores how both creators and consumers suffer from reduced focus and cognitive overload ([43:03] Kornhaber).

Key Points:

• Attention Scarcity: The endless stream of digital content fragments attention spans, making it challenging for audiences to engage with long-form or complex art. Movies and music now cater to shorter attention spans, often resulting in faster-paced and less nuanced creations ([42:58] Kornhaber).

• Overstimulation: The constant bombardment of stimuli from the internet creates an environment where consumers are overwhelmed by choices, leading to superficial engagement rather than deep appreciation ([43:27] Kornhaber).

• Impact on Creativity: While some artists find innovative ways to work within these constraints, many struggle to create content that demands sustained attention. This phenomenon contributes to the perception of declining quality in pop culture ([44:36] Kornhaber).

Notable Quote:

"The audience is being drawn to other forms of expression... the competition for creative expression that requires your attention is so powerful that it's hard to sustain a conversation about it." – Spencer Kornhaber ([47:43] Kornhaber)

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The Case for Optimism: Emerging Golden Ages

Despite the bleak analysis, both Derek and Spencer acknowledge pockets of optimism within the current cultural landscape. They highlight areas where art thrives by embracing and adapting to contemporary challenges.

Key Points:

• Video Games: Spencer points to the golden age of video games, exemplified by titles like Baldur's Gate 3, which showcase intricate storytelling and diverse narratives. These games demonstrate how interactive media can push creative boundaries despite corporate pressures ([51:36] Kornhaber).

• Innovative Films: Contemporary movies such as Everything Everywhere All at Once and Oppenheimer utilize frenetic pacing and fragmented storytelling to captivate audiences, paralleling the hyperactive style seen in current music genres like hyper pop ([51:36] Kornhaber).

• Hyper Pop and Maximalist Creation: The rise of hyper pop, with artists like Charli XCX, embodies a creative response to brain rot by producing intensely layered and dynamic music that reflects the complexities of modern life ([55:56] Kornhaber).

• Potential for Future Renaissance: Spencer envisions that current trends in confessional pop music and the creative explosion facilitated by technology may lay the groundwork for a future renaissance, absorbing diverse influences and sparking renewed artistic innovation ([53:57] Kornhaber).

Notable Quote:

"Art doesn't have to just succumb to these forces, but can actually work with them to create something new that defies the stagnation." – Spencer Kornhaber ([51:36] Kornhaber)

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Conclusion: Navigating the Four Horsemen

Derek and Spencer conclude by reiterating the four horsemen—Stagnation, Cynicism, Isolation, and Brain Rot—as significant barriers to creativity in today’s pop culture landscape. However, they emphasize the importance of recognizing these challenges to foster a more vibrant and innovative cultural future.

Key Takeaways:

• Awareness and Adaptation: Understanding the constraints imposed by these four themes is crucial for artists and consumers alike to navigate and potentially overcome the perceived decline in pop culture quality.

• Balancing Tradition and Innovation: Striking a balance between valuing established works and encouraging new, experimental creations can mitigate stagnation and promote artistic diversity.

• Embracing Collaborative and Engaging Art: Encouraging collaborative efforts and creating content that captures sustained attention can counteract isolation and brain rot, fostering a richer cultural environment.

Final Notable Quote:

"There are no getting away from the recognition that there are some objective barriers to creativity in today's media." – Derek Thompson ([59:27] Thompson)

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Closing Remarks: Derek Thompson and Spencer Kornhaber provide a nuanced examination of the current state of American pop culture. While they highlight significant challenges posed by stagnation, cynicism, isolation, and brain rot, they also offer glimpses of hope through innovative and adaptive artistic expressions. The conversation underscores the complexity of cultural evolution and the continuous interplay between societal changes and creative output.

Transcript

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[Derek Thompson]

Why Pop Culture is Getting Worse in the last few months, I've been thinking a lot about dopamine. I guess it started with an article.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Published in 2024 that I had a hard time knocking out of my head.

[Derek Thompson]

It was written by a music critic and cultural essayist named Ted Joya. In the last few decades, Joya argues every facet of American pop culture and leisure evolved from slow to fast. Newspapers morphed into 24 Hour News. Albums Disintegrated into tracks. Handwritten letters gave way to shorter voice messages. In category after category, he said the fast ate the slow and that would be concerning enough. But it was actually just part one of a two part shift. Today, he argues, a new alpha predator has come to town. And it's not slow or fast culture. It is what Joya calls dopamine culture. Newspapers had been 24 hour news, but now cable news is dying, replaced by clickbait social media posts. Albums had become tracks, but now TikTok is eating both. Watching sports had evolved into watching highlights, but now so much of it just revolves around dopaminergic urges to gamble money. The American consumer, Joya said, often feels his or herself stuck in a kind of spin cycle.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

They feel a moment's boredom, reach for the phone, dopamine release, feel a moment's.

[Derek Thompson]

Boredom, reach for the phone, another dopamine release. Slowly but surely, Joya argued, pop culture is turning into a kind of virtual casino of the mind. Dopamine, as you might know, is a neurotransmitter, a chemical that greases the wheels of our cognitive function. The best way to understand what dopamine does to us is to see what the absence of dopamine does to us. The results are not pretty. In her book Dopamine Nation, the scientist Anna Lemke describes what happens when we genetically engineer mice. Without dopamine, these poor little guys will not seek food. In fact, the mice will starve to death even when food is placed just inches from their mouth. But here's the strangest thing. If you put the food inside the mouth of a mouse that is engineered to be without dopamine, they will chew and swallow and even like it. Dopamine, Lemke concludes, has very little to do with liking anything in the first place. It has everything to do with wanting. And a dopamine driven culture would be one in which consumers desperately want more and more. But like, less and less. This critique has really stuck with me, but for a while I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. The question of whether pop culture is getting worse feels kind of impossible to answer to anybody's satisfaction. I don't want to have a show where two people debate whether TV is getting worse. Right?

[Spencer Kornhaber]

It is.

[Derek Thompson]

No, it isn't. No, it is, you idiot. Who are you calling an idiot, moron? Like, this is the quality of dialogue that plays out in my head when I imagine an episode of plain English. That's about whether this is the worst ever era of American pop culture. At least that was true until last week, when my friend and colleague at the Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber, wrote an essay entitled Is this the Worst Ever Era of American Pop Culture? And his essay was very, very good. Rather than rest on the rickety claim that everything has just gotten worse, Spencer identified several objective trends that are changing pop culture from the fragmentation of every medium to to the rise of political identity in many categories of art. Much of pop culture, he argued, seems unusually stagnant and in thrall to the past. The trend is evident in music, where new songs make up a smaller and smaller share of total listening every year. But it's most significant in Hollywood, whose business model has become addicted to the regurgitation of familiar ip. Last year, the top grossing films in America were inside out 2 Deadpool 3 Wicked Moana 2 Despicable Me 4 Beetlejuice 2 Dune Part 2 Twister 2 Godzilla, King Kong, I don't know. Who cares? 27 Kung Fu Panda 4 Bad Boys 4 Planet of the Apes 10 Gladiator 2 Sonic the Hedgehog 3 the Dominance of sequels, movies with numbers in their names, is such a fully understood part of the entertainment landscape today. I'm not sure people truly understand just how new this Trend is. In 1996, the top grossing films in America were, in order, Independence Day one Twister one Mission Impossible one, the Rock, the Nutty Professor Ransom, the Birdcage, A time to kill, 100 Dalmatians, and the First Wives Club. As Spencer writes, the weird thing about American culture becoming more stagnant is that by all logical accounts, we should be in a renaissance. It is easier than ever to make art. More than 500 scripted TV shows get made every year. Streaming services reportedly add about 100,000 songs every day. Yet no one seems very happy with the results.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Today we talk about why I'm Derek Thompson.

[Derek Thompson]

This is plain English.

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Foreign.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Spencer Kornhaber, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

We've known each other for a long time. I know you and your work very well. You're not a doomer. You are not a cultural declinist who thinks things are always getting worse. Why did you finally bite the bullet and write a long essay about the death of American culture?

Yeah, I mean, you're right. I'm sometimes a little overly optimistic. I'm accused of being a poptimist by my haters. But I, you know, I try to listen widely and appreciate Changing times for what they are, which is, you know, humans finding ways to express themselves in ways that suit the times that they live in. And those times are defined by technological change and social change and political change. But creativity kind of seems like a kind of on a renewable resource that's always there, or at least that's what I thought. And then the 2000 and 20s rolled around, the pandemic happened, and it just felt like things in culture got a lot more confusing and in a way, quieter. I've been doing my job as a culture critic at the Atlantic since 2011, and I really felt my job changing in the 2000s. It used to always feel like you sort of knew what you were, quote, unquote, supposed to be writing about. You knew what the big topics of the day were. The. The kind of TV show, the album, the storyline that everyone in America, or at least a big swath of America, seemed to be agreeing was the thing of the moment in the 2000s. That just became a lot harder to identify and there just was a lot less enthusiasm for new, new offerings. And. And while that was happening, you saw more and more people just proclaiming that it was the worst time ever. We had terms like the slang words of our time are things like mid or shitification. These terms that indicate that we're not really happy with what we're being presented. And the underlying problems in culture just became too large to ignore. Things like Hollywood's regurgitation of corporate IP and telling stories that we've heard over and over again. Things like the culture wars and politics coming for actual culture, where you can't just enjoy a movie or an album without thinking about whether it's a piece of propaganda or something like that. The isolation, which you've written about so brilliantly, the feeling that we don't have scenes anymore, we don't have communities and culture, we're just all on our phones and consuming art sort of as a way to pass the time, to distract ourselves. And just the way that everything sped up and felt like there was more and more to experience and less and less attention to be paid to any given piece of art. You know, we've all felt our attention spans rotting away in the past few years and the fact that kids these days seem to not be able to watch a full movie or read a full book without looking at their phones. And by kids these days, I include myself. That seemed like an obvious red flag for the state of culture. So I figured it was time to stop being a Pollyanna and actually look at what was happening.

I wanted to have a conversation about this for a long time. I also feel like every conversation about this topic, whether American culture is in decline, goes off the rails almost immediately with impossibly grand claims about, like, the meaning of art and these impossible to resolve debates. Like, you know, is Taylor Swift really better than John Lennon? Or was Michael Jackson clearly better than Taylor Swift? What I loved about your essay is that you sort of cut right through all of that. You said, I want to analyze real trends and real facts that people have to grapple with, because there are ways that culture has changed that are more true, more falsifiable than just, I think Honora is worse than the Godfather, which is something that, like, may be true. I certainly think it's true, but hard to actually, like, fruitfully debate on a podcast. So I want to start with facts here, starting with a category you know very well, which is music. What to you is the clearest evidence that something true and important has happened to the music industry that makes this moment in history different?

Well, the really shocking statistic that I think made a lot of people wake up was that almost 75% of music consumed today is old music. New releases count for a real, really a minority of what people are streaming at any given time. And the number those numbers keep getting, you know, quote, unquote, worse. More and more every year, you see new releases getting a smaller, smaller piece of the pie for listenership. And that would seem to indicate that people are a lot less interested in the culture of now than the culture of yesterday. And you have kind of very concrete examples of what this means. A couple years back, Kate Bush's Running up that Hill became a huge smash, came nearly to the top of the Billboard chart, despite being released three decades earlier. That was due to being placed in a TV show, Stranger Things, which is totally nostalgia bait. Just all, you know, it's a pastiche of tropes from 80s movies and TV. And it happened in large part because TikTok and platforms like it allow. Well, they allow a couple of things, but one of them is sort of the flattening of culture they allow and the sort of flattening of time things can kind of pop up there and catch your eye and compete directly with what's happening now. And in many cases, the things from the past have an advantage because they've been time tested and we've kind of grown up in a culture where the ideas contained with them shaped our tastes in the first place. So it felt that the past was eating the present.

[Derek Thompson]

Spencer, in the essay, you serve up four themes that you claim to be driving the decline of American pop culture. And I want to think of these four themes as like the four horsemen of the cultural apocalypse. They are named stagnation, cynicism, isolation and attention Rot. And we will explain these four themes. That's how I want to structure this conversation, building them all out one by one. So let's start with number one, which is stagnation. You've just presented a way in which music seems to be stagnating. It's not just this airy, impressionistic sense that old music is better than new music. No, in a very material way. Labels and other companies are shifting their investment toward old music and away from new music. And this is having a tangible effect in the industry, making it harder for.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

New artists to catch people's eye or.

[Derek Thompson]

Make their work known. You visited the house of a prominent music critic, Ted Gioia. Tell me a little bit about Joya's stagnation critique of modern music.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Yeah, Ted, he's a fearsome jazz expert and really an expert in all sorts of music. But the funny thing about him is that he's nostalgic for a time when it seemed like the future was more exciting to culture. Thinking back to his generation as the baby boomers and know, rock and roll was this brand new thing. Kids, you know, people today don't have the equivalent of a brand new thing like rock and roll, or at least it often feels that way. What we talked about was how the kind of financial incentives in the entertainment industry have become realigned to encourage the regurgitation of the old over promoting the new. And this is happening in all sorts of ways just to stick to music. Once you have these platforms like Spotify or TikTok that so easily allow the past old hits to be treated like to compete with new ones. That creates new incentives to invest in old music. And so hedge funds and record labels have been spending really shocking amounts of money to buy up the publishing rights to classic hits. Everyone from Justin Bieber to Bruce Springsteen have sold their back catalogs to these companies for hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars. And then what that means is that these companies have a real vested interest in promoting those songs, and they're going to do everything they can to get them in front of people, which is again, creating pressure and pushing new things out of the marketplace. So that's just one way it's happening. Another way is thinking about how these platforms work based on their usage of data and algorithms. Which really are studying users habits. If you study what someone, if you study what someone wants to listen to, if you're trying to make a prediction about what someone wants to listen to, the best piece of evidence, the best clue is going to be what they listened to before. And so you have these algorithms that are training them, being trained to serve up things that were popular before, or slight variations of things that have come before. And this just leads to the state of affairs where something like AI can come along and promise to basically create imitations of music you've heard before. It's not exactly what you've heard before, but it basically is with some. The melody might be a little different, but the sound of it is the same and it's very familiar. And that's leading to a place where you don't even need artists to create anymore. If you can just create an auto remix of the past. So in the end this causes at least Ted's case is that it would discourage actually interesting artists from even giving it a go. He said something like, if Bach was alive today, he'd probably go to la, try to make it in the music scene, and then give up and become hedge fund manager. Which was a pretty bleak analysis.

This gets to something that I think is really profound, which is that in most professions we say knowledge is power. The more you know, the better off you'll be. And I certainly think that that aphorism is true for say journalism or rocket science. But I do wonder whether it's true for art. Like right now, the entertainment companies, whether you have music labels or you're talking about movie studios, they have access to an amount of data that is absolutely unprecedented in entertainment history. And when you think about what does that mountain of data do to the decision making process of what to fund? Well, you've just said it encourages in private equity a lot of money going toward buying old rights to old music.

[Derek Thompson]

Or maybe at the music labels, it.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Causes them to invest in 2025 in.

[Derek Thompson]

Versions of whatever they know to have.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Been popular in 2024. Clearly the same thing is happening in Hollywood. That as Hollywood gets smarter about audience preferences, as it clearly has over the last few decades, that has much more data. What has the effect been? Well, you just look at box Office mojo. The top 10 movies in America in the last decade have overwhelmingly been sequels, adaptations and reboots.

[Derek Thompson]

Whereas compared to the 1990s, 1980s, when.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

The movie studios were a little bit more innocent, a little bit more naive about consumer preferences, you didn't have every single top movie Every single movie with the highest production and marketing budget be a regurgitation of an already proven popular ip.

[Derek Thompson]

And so in both of these cases.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

It seems to me that the infusion of data into artistic enterprises in a weird way, like traps art. It traps art in the recent past because innocence and naivete is like a part of what encourages people to take a leap into the unknown. And if you're so sure about what was just successful in music, in film, maybe in visual art as well, you're.

[Derek Thompson]

Going to have decision makers who are.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Weirdly trapping themselves in last year, not because they're stupid, but ironically because they're so smart and they're reading the data correctly. Does that sort of spin on your stagnation thesis? Click for you.

Yeah, absolutely. But the irony about it is that entertainment companies have always done this, right? They've always tried to, you know, they tell a band, you know, make, give us a new song that sounds like your last hit, right? That's, that's kind of like the cliche of what an evil record label boss would Taliban in the 70s. But when they can back up those demands with data and the artists themselves can pull out their Spotify dashboard and see what's working, what's not working, it does create these perverse incentives. I've been thinking about what you wrote in your book Hitmakers, about the idea that hits generally are the most advanced yet acceptable twist on a formula, right? Like you take an old idea and you push it forward as far as it can go without alienating the audience to where it's unfamiliar. In an algorithmic environment, you're getting a lot of information about how to make what's acceptable, what's come before, make a version of that. But you get no information on what would be the advancing thing. How would you move that idea forward? This is why creative people, you know, are so beloved in our culture, because it's because they. They expand our minds and they. They take the world we have and show us that it can be deeper and richer in something new. Nothing about the information Spotify gets or the information that Hollywood studio gets from analyzing how much time someone watches their. Its content on Netflix is giving any indication about how to move forward.

So if the first Horseman of the apocalypse is stagnation, and stagnation that is sometimes ironically caused by entertainment companies or artists themselves knowing too much about what can or what has recently succeeded, the second Horseman that you write about is cynicism, which you unpack by speaking to the critic Dean Kissick about how cynical form of politics has warped modern visual art. So we're now switching from music and movies to the realm of visual art. What is Kissack's case?

Kissick's case can sound a lot like something you hear a lot from the conservatives these days, which is go woke, go broke, right? Like the culture has become too political, too left leaning political, too focused on identity, too focused on, you know, making statements, selling an idea of inclusivity and social progress through, you know, a number of kind of tried and true formulas for making art. So it's like artists who are doing, you know, a renaissance style or impressionistic style portraiture, but it's of marginalized group or it's taking folk art weaving, very old and tried and true and familiar crafts, and trying to recontextualize them and say, no, there's actually something very political and powerful about this because they came from a marginalized identity group. Apparently. Walking around the Chelsea gallery scene in New York City with him, he pointed out many examples of how this sort of thinking had elevated certain kinds of art to the very most prestigious spaces in the art world, presumably at the expense of art that really was driven by concerns other than, you know, capital P politics. To me, his argument rang true to a certain extent because, you know, writing about music, writing about popular culture, we all understand how much politics has sort of infected the discourse, infected what gets made or not even infected politics is always part of what artists are dealing with. But it seems that programming decisions, casting decisions, marketing decisions are more and more being driven by trying to appeal to certain demographics, trying to project certain messages about your company's values. And a lot of these efforts are well intentioned. But I think, you know, however many years we are into, whatever you, whenever you want to trace the great awokening as having begun, we can see that it's made audiences very, very cynical and jaded about the things that they see. You have a portion of America that voted for President Trump, who basically have written off the largest entertainment company in the world, Disney, as being too woke. And they don't trust the, the entertainment that's being marketed to them. And that is that so much energy in our culture is being focused on telling these big blockbuster stories that a big part of America just says, I don't trust it. I think there's an agenda there and it's creating this sort of tense, burnt out feeling for I think a lot of cultural consumers.

The case for stagnation seems to be to a certain extent, that art is being constrained by fear of novelty. People don't want to do anything too new. And so therefore art in music and in film is becoming overly familiar here. One argument I hear you representing is that in some cases, maybe especially in the world of visual art, art is constrained by the need to be correct. I don't want to say like politically correct.

[Derek Thompson]

Like in a weird way, it's about.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Like just saying the right thing, whether.

[Derek Thompson]

It'S in politics or culture, representing a set of ideas that are considered true.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

By a certain group of. I wonder, you know, granting that Kissick might have a point that this kind of political cynicism is really endemic in the world of visual art, which I don't know very well, do you agree with Kissack's diagnosis outside of visual art? Like, what is the.

[Derek Thompson]

In what way do you see his.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Critique manifesting itself in say, music or film or television in ways outside of Chelsea galleries?

I think that you're right to connect this to the stagnation argument because I think Kissick would argue, and I would argue that both in high art and in popular culture, this sort of turn towards a more political or values based or identity based zeitgeist is a reaction to stagnation. It happens. It's a way to provide a sense of almost false novelty in many cases to say, you know, this new sequel or remake, yeah, it's the thing that came before. But look, it has a female lead, you know, and that can be, you know, that can create fresh stories. But in many cases I think it's obvious that it doesn't. And so we're being sold this idea that something is new when it's really just using identity politics to market something that's really quite old and cynical.

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[Spencer Kornhaber]

I really love that point. You know, you see, for example, with Disney, these updated live action films where they'll often try to infuse a 70 or 80 year old story with some modern twists and modern progressive politics. And my feeling is, on the one hand, there's nothing wrong with updating ancient canon. Like I love Shakespeare, I don't want Every Shakespeare play to be based in the early 1600s. I think it's great for some of them to be based in the 1900s and 2000s. But also there's something very creatively limiting about the idea that the fullest expression of Disney creativity, of blockbuster creativity in the 2000s, is we're doing Snow White, but it's not going to be quite as 1937 politics as the original. Maybe that's better, maybe it's not. But certainly is that the best possible way to spend $300 million from Disney? It doesn't seem like the highest expression of creative possibility. So I am interested in this idea, which I'd never really thought of before, that these first two puzzle pieces really do click together. That a certain kind of political art can be seen as an answer to the question, how do we get out.

[Derek Thompson]

Of the rut of stagnation while doing.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

The bare minimum, which just change a.

[Derek Thompson]

Few casting decisions in a few lines.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

And call it an entirely new piece of work?

Absolutely. I mean, I think it's also related to this kind of algorithmic force that we were talking about before, where if you can segment your audience and understand its preferences in a way that you couldn't before, to a granular level that you couldn't before, and you can market to people in a way that is just so hyper targeted. Yeah, there's an incentive to create a bunch of variations on the same story with different protagonists for different groups. And I think that that is the direction we've been heading for a long time.

Horseman number three is isolation. This is the third cultural force that you identify as a possible driver of the decline of American pop culture. I want to get at this question of isolation by talking about music. Music today seems particularly likely to be made alone, in part due to the decline of bands, in part due to the extraordinary computer tools that are at the disposal of young artists today.

[Derek Thompson]

But music is also more likely to be consumed alone.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

You can sort of tell a potted history of the American music consumer by saying in the 19th century, listening to music was something you had to do in a theater or an outdoor crowd. In the 20th century, listening to music was something a lot of people did in living rooms, so with their families. And now in the 21st century, you can listen on personal headphones. So this sort of like 200 year arc of atomization of music listening across music technology. How do you think the phenomenon of isolation changes art itself, maybe starting with music?

Well, a lot of the great art that we love has been made by geniuses who were forced to collaborate with other people and make compromises and bang their head against a wall with someone else and skimp on their vision a little bit because they couldn't quite execute it with the resources they had and had to make do. But something else, when you eliminate all of that, you just have a much more solipsistic art form that is in general a lot more about someone's interior life kind of separated from a cultural context or at best, someone looking out on the world and sharing what they personally think about it. So that's one way that that's happening. And I think you see that in a lot of different ways in the kinds of music that's popular now and the songwriting and the lyrical topics and the way that those topics are written about. I think you also just end up with a lot more one dimensional and less surprising production choices, songwriting choices, because there hasn't been that push and pull. I really miss bands, you know, can.

We reveal to the audience how old you are, just in case their question is, exactly what micro generation is this coming from?

You know, I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, boom for alternative rock, indie rock, Radiohead, Nirvana, Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, those bands all came out of specific places that had specific scenes, friends hanging out in bars and jamming and creating a following in their scene. And eventually the power of the media or then eventually the Internet connecting them to the broader audience. Due to a variety of factors that, you know, again, you've described before, the physical world's being hollowed out and people aren't hanging out in person as much. And so those scenes aren't as robust as they used to be. And so we're just getting fewer bands. There's also factors like it's just really expensive to tour and to buy instruments and to have a practice space. It's a lot cheaper to have a laptop, be by yourself, download a digital audio workstation, whether you pay for it or pirate it, and you know, sit in a dark room and try to come up with something. A lot of what comes out of that I really love, but a lot of it is junk and it's flooding our culture.

So I want to interrogate this idea of isolation driving the decline of culture from a couple of different angles, because I think it's a really, really interesting topic. But one thought that I had reading your essay and you just flicked at this in your answer is that music has become so much more self confessional over the last few decades. It's like music as memoir, you listen to rock music from the 1960s through 1990s. These were not songs about the inner lives of the singers. And to the extent that they were, they certainly weren't literal. Like, you didn't learn what it was like to be Jimmy Page by listening to Led Zeppelin. Right. Beatles songs weren't about what John Lennon's life was like. But somewhere around the 1980s, 1990s, maybe coinciding with the rise of hip hop music, lyrics became much more literally about the lives of the singers. Like a lot of Taylor Swift music is about what it is like to be Taylor Swift. And a lot of popular hip hop and rap is very clearly what it's like to be that artist or what that artist wants the public to think about their lives. It's incredibly first person, it's incredibly individual. Do you think the decline of bands, which is, as you said, a clear trend over the last 40 years, is.

[Derek Thompson]

Like a really big driver of this.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Trend, that maybe music has become much more individual and confessional as the act of writing music became much more independent and solo?

I think, yeah, there's a strong case to be made that that's what's happened. I mean, I wouldn't want to say that there was no interiority in rock and roll or in music until the past few decades. Obviously you had people like Joni Mitchell writing very precisely and beautifully about their own life. But you're right that it has become more and more the norm, that it's a clear, defined first person narrator speaking in clear, concrete, specific, non metaphorical terms about what they are feeling and thinking. It's partly, probably a result of what we've talked about this just way that music is made right now, it's also serving an audience that's consuming in isolation and is consuming a culture that again, due to these algorithmic forces, they expect to be tailored for them or they expect to be, you know, people are really expecting straightforward as kind of straightforward authenticity. You know, in a world where the listener doesn't necessarily exist in their own cultural scene, they don't really have a cultural scene to even plug into. They're going online and music can help create that feeling of someone sitting in the room with you or a group of people being your friends. You know, it can kind of play the role of your imaginary friend. That's why we have. We live in this era of extremely strong, quote unquote parasocial relationships. Just fandoms that are overblown and people consider their idol to be basically both God and their best Friend. You see this in Taylor Swift's fandom, certainly. And that's because of the way Taylor Swift writes lyrics, which is again, so specific and personal. So I think that these are reinforcing things. You have isolated listeners and relatively isolated artists in many case, kind of serving each other. And it's not always a bad thing. I think in many cases it's created really cool things. But it seems to have blotted out a lot of other forms of expression in music. You just don't have really metaphorical, poetic, mysterious production, driven, instrumental, driven music gaining the kind of attention it did even 10, 15 years ago.

I'm really glad you made that last point. And I want to make sure that we sort of put it in the fridge and return to it at the end of this conversation. Because there's one way in which I absolutely agree that this sort of. Look, we're both, you know, white guys in our upper 30s. We both love Radiohead, okay? And there's a certain kind of Radiohead song, this like, incredibly fussy polyphonic song that's ultimately like a metaphor for generalized anxiety disorder, but like, doesn't use the words ga or generalized anxiety or disorder at all. It's just non stop metaphor.

[Derek Thompson]

Like those. Those sort of.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

That sort of music is like very near and dear to my heart. But I don't want to make like the pundits error of saying oh, because I was acculturated to like this kind of music when I was 21 years old, therefore it's the best kind of music. There's a possibility that 40 years from now we'll look back at the 2000s and say that was the golden age of confessional pop. That was the best decade ever for pop artists writing about what it was.

[Derek Thompson]

Like to be them.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

And there was a kind of honesty, and you use the word honestly, authenticity at that moment in music history. So I want to make sure that we leave that possibility open for the end of the show when we talk about how some of this stuff might actually be good. But just one more follow up on isolation. A theme that I really wrestled with when I was writing the Antisocial Century for the Atlantic, I guess, last year, is this question of just how alone is our alone time.

[Derek Thompson]

There is a way in which phones.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Ironically, make being in a crowd much more lonely than it used to be. Because we can just depart from the crowd and just look into our palms. And also in a way that our aloneness is much more crowded than it used to be. And because we pick up our phones, and suddenly we're thrust into the throngs of other people's minds. And I wonder how this applies to art, because surely lots of art across domains has always been produced in a kind of pure isolation that's almost impossible to imagine today. Tolstoy clearly didn't write Anna Karenina at a rave like he wrote that alone. Michelangelo was not sculpting at big, you know, sex parties in Italy, at least not often. I'm sure he made the David quite alone. What do we make of the fact that modern artists who are like the rest of us, constantly on the Internet and often by themselves alone in a room, are weirdly both more alone than previous artists, but also constantly surrounded by the intrusive thoughts of far flung strangers.

[Derek Thompson]

And therefore, in a strange way, not alone at all?

[Spencer Kornhaber]

That's a heavy question. It's what's happening to any of us? I mean, I think this would get into our fourth horseman, which is brain rot, right?

[Derek Thompson]

Yeah, let's jump right to it.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

The fourth horseman is brain rot. Let's go to brain rot.

I mean, just this feeling like your thoughts aren't your own. You're constantly overwhelmed by the possibilities of things that you could be consuming. The things that you're missing out one swipe away. So you can't pay attention to what you're actually looking at in that moment is overwhelming. The experience of being alive and I think, overwhelming culture. That's. That's, to me, the fourth horseman.

The brain rot, the attention rot that you're alluding to. Is it more important that we identify it on the side of the artist or on the side of the consumer? Because in a weird way, one could argue that the Internet's ability to make the world seem like 10,000 different five alarm fires every minute of every day shrinks our capacity to pay deep attention to anything. A movie, a piece of art, an opera, a long piece of music. And maybe the key driver here with brain route that you're alluding to isn't just on the artist side. It's on the demand side. It's on the consumer side that, that we don't have the attentional capacity to be with the kind of art that today's critics consider capital G great. Is the attention route therefore more your concern on the artist side or on the audience side?

It's on the audience side. I mean, it's the fact that, yeah, all the art forms that we grew up loving required a bit of sustained focus to enjoy those art forms. People are still trying like, people are still making movies, people are still making albums, people are still holding gallery shows. But the audience, the relationship with the audience is much more strained than it used to be. And the audience is being drawn to other forms of expression. Entertainment, maybe art, but would you call a chat podcast art? I don't know. I mean, I actually really haven't made my mind up about that. A lot of video games are art. A lot of them are addictive gambling, manipulation, machines. So, yeah, I mean, just the competition for creative expression that requires your attention is so powerful that it's hard to sustain a conversation about it. It's hard for artists to feel energized by their audiences. And I imagine that it is having an effect on the artistic process. But I can't really single out an artist who I think has succumbed to brain rot and therefore is worse. But if I thought about it, I probably could, or I could name various musicians that are supposedly the next big thing that I just think are inane, but that's not the point. I mean, it's happening to artists, but it's more importantly happening to all of us.

I want to turn to the case for optimism here, and there's a few different things I want to ask you, but one of them is definitely prompted by your allusion to video games, which I wanted to touch on. I don't play video games. I used to play them. I don't play them anymore. I have some very close friends who play them. And the testimony from my friends who are, by the way, firmly in the mainstream because video games are a much bigger market than music or even movies, I believe, is that video games are simply in the most objective, golden, or have, at least in the last few years, been in a incredible golden age. That the combination of technological sophistication, the level of cinematic storytelling that is now possible in this medium is just so completely different and obviously superior to what.

[Derek Thompson]

Gaming was 20, 30 years ago, certainly.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

40, 50 years ago. When you're talking about, you know, the Last of Us, Part two, versus, like, Game Boy and Snake on your, you know, advanced calculator in high school.

[Derek Thompson]

Are there maybe speak to video games if you'd like, but there have to.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Be some forms of pop culture that are potentially newer, that are just clearly experiencing something like a golden age today.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Video games, I would say, are currently in a sort of a mixed era where there's. There's so much money going into them that the forces of corporate greed that we've kind of alluded to throughout this conversation as having ruined Hollywood and the music industry. Very similar things are happening in video games. But at the same time, you're right. This is the era of extremely ambitious, sprawling collaborative brilliance. And a lot of these games are kind of answering the questions that I raised in this piece of how do you react to these forces? Or what is an artist to do in the face of a culture that's so overrun by stagnation, cynicism, isolation and acceleration, or brain rot? And I think the answer is to confront those things head on and think about what it means for art to be made in an environment that is ruled by those things. And can those forces actually be creative prompts? And so I'm thinking about one of the big games of the past few years is Baldur's Gate 3, which is incredibly immersive role playing game that some would accuse it as being too woke to function or whatever. But what it's really doing is creating a fantasy world full of all sorts of different diverse, you know, races, monsters, sexualities, all that, and using the powers of modern video game design. And, you know, just how intricate can a story can you tell? You can tell now using the complexity of these really identity politics to make a really, really rich game. So that's just one example. You know, I think about blockbuster movies that have broken through and have been interesting. Like everything, everywhere, all at once, from a few years ago, Barbie, even Oppenheimer, to me, these are all playing with rhythm and tempo and the audience's attention more than movies or in a different way than movies of previous generations had. They're all fast movies. They're all movies that are kind of cut at a relentless pace. And, you know, I think would maybe have given a moviegoer in the 70s a stroke to watch some of these movies. And you know, like, in a lot of cases, it sounds like a movie like that would be succumbing to brain rot. But no, I would argue that these are really fabulous works of art that are able to tell kind of intricate, powerful stories by being so intensely almost frenetic or hyperactive. All the most interesting music right now has this kind of aesthetic of hyperactivity. It's called hyper pop. Something like Charli Xiax's album from last year, Brat, that seemed like no one could get it was all about this kind of fried, overdriven. Too many thoughts in your heads at once, like, how do we connect in a world that feels so fragmented feeling? And it really captured and reacted to this moment. I think in a way that showed art doesn't have to just succumb to these forces, but can actually work with them to create something new that defies the stagnation.

I love that. And it seems like an important reminder that all great art has to deal with and make the most of its limitations. The limitations today are not the limitations of the 19th century, when we had a scarcity of technology, but an abundance of people's ability to pay attention for four hours to listen to Mahler's symphony. Today, it's the opposite. We have an abundance of technology and a shortage of attention. And so it's like, how can art fit within those guardrails? How can art make the most of the guardrails that it's given? I mean, that question feels like an eternal question, But I think you're very smart and right to think about the ingredients changing today. And I love this idea of, like, I was thinking about Oppenheimer, which I would never think about comparing Oppenheimer to Charlie xcx, except that you're absolutely right. Thinking back on it, every scene is basically the length of a TikTok. I mean, it's cut from these intensely atomized, no pun intended, scenes that are just designed to be almost like this. Like this weird, like, cubist experiment in moviemaking where, like, everything is just little. Little tiny, like a little moment in time, but stitched in this way that's edited so intricately is to create a story that feels much bigger than some of its parts. You're right. That does feel like a film that, in a weird way hangs exactly with the Charlie XCX style of music making, Even though I never, ever think to make that connection. Taking the biggest possible angle here, every decade has cultural declinists who read their Spengler and their gibbons and insist that we're the fall of Rome and this is the death of civilization. And then 40 years later, every decade is considered a golden age for some art form. The 1910s were the Golden Age of Ragtime, 1950s film noir, 1960s, a certain kind of pop music, 1970s, a certain kind of film, especially if it was directed by a Coppola. Forty years from now, it's the 2000s, and you and I are on whatever's left of Social Security. What are we going to look back on the 2020s as being the golden age of, obviously, besides conversational podcasts?

Well, I mean, I think that might be one answer, but I guess I would have two answers. One of them we already got into, which is what's happening in pop Music right now, this boom for confessional singers, songwriters at a mass scale, People like Taylor Swift for sure. But then also you have Olivia Rodrigo, Billie, Eilish Chapel, Roan Sza, the list goes on and on of pop singers who are telling these complicated, specific stories about what it's like to be, in general, a young woman in this moment in time. They're writing songs in a way that just really doesn't feel like what was happening in previous generations of pop music. And what I imagine is going to happen is that their techniques are going to be absorbed by other identity groups and kind of bleed out and create, hopefully, an ongoing renaissance for really, really smart, interesting songwriting. So that. That really gives me hope and I think is a cool thing about being alive right now. The other one, if it's something that I really can't even speak that much to, but I think web, video, TikTok, things like that, maybe not for you and me, but for people a bit younger than us, they will be in 40 years. Thinking back about the beautiful memes they consumed, and some of them are really brilliant and vivid creative pieces of creative expression. I mean, I don't know a lot about Skibidi Toilet, but maybe someday that'll be looked back on as the Godfather right now. But I think if that's the case, then the declinists will have been right.

Yeah. I mean, not to stretch it all the way out, but if AI gets as good at mimicking human creativity as some people fear that it is, maybe we'll look back at the 2020s as.

[Derek Thompson]

Being the golden age of just maximalist creation.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

I mean, there's so much stuff just being made by people, so much music, so many videos, so many movies. A lot of them don't make more than, you know, 17 cents, but a lot. So many documentaries are made every single year. And I wonder like, 40, 50 years from now if, you know, maybe we'll make even more because AI will make it easier. But also maybe we'll look back and.

[Derek Thompson]

We'Ll be a world that's more leaning.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Into consumption than production. And we'll look back sort of fondly at the 2000s and say, man, remember when people just could not stop making shit? And the Internet was just full of people making shit constantly, and some of it really was shit, but, like, the sheer maximalist quantity of it might be the thing that we're nostalgic for. So there's always hope.

That's a bit dark, though.

Do you want to enter the darkness?

No, it's not. I mean, just the idea that this will be the last gasp of human creation. I mean, sure. But in that case, this is a golden age. Beautiful.

Final thought. Spencer Kornaber, thank you very much.

Thanks. So good to talk to you.

Many thanks to Spencer Kornhaber. I want to close by reminding myself.

[Derek Thompson]

Reminding listeners, these four pillars.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Stagnation, cynicism, isolation, rot.

[Derek Thompson]

I think in their own way, each.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Of them constrains artistic expression in a really interesting way. Stagnation, as we talked about it, creates.

[Derek Thompson]

This scenario in entertainment markets and for.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Media companies, where too much information about.

[Derek Thompson]

What is likely to succeed constricts the courage to make something that by virtue of its novelty is less likely to succeed, but also more likely to be unique and great.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

I think that's a subtle idea, but.

[Derek Thompson]

I think it's really important. Number two, cynicism, as Spencer described it. I think when we draw bright lines in art between what kind of stories and characters and motifs are politically celebrated versus politically unacceptable, I think that pinches creativity. Art should not be made to be correct. But when you have this attitude that there is a right and wrong way to think about the world, then people are incentivized to make or support or consume art that is capital C, correct. And I do think that that is.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

An anchor on creativity.

[Derek Thompson]

Isolation clearly deprives people of face to face collaboration, or in some cases, of.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Face to face consumption. And then rot obviously constrains our ability to pay attention.

[Derek Thompson]

And when you put all of this together, stagnation, cynicism, isolation and rotation, I.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Don'T think it's possible to prove that.

[Derek Thompson]

Pop culture is getting worse. I think that's unfalsifiable. But I do think these are objective trends.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

These are objective changes to the cultural landscape.

[Derek Thompson]

As Spencer said, there are surely ways in which pop culture today is as glorious and strange as ever. And surely there are markets, like in video games, where there's just no way to argue that these things were better 40 years ago. But I think there's no getting away from the recognition that there are some.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Objective barriers to creativity in today's media.

[Derek Thompson]

Entertainment markets and naming them and identifying.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Them and wrestling with them. I think that's really important. Thank you for listening and we will talk to you next week.

[Derek Thompson]

Sam.