What do we do with popular culture in academia? Do we express shock and disdain and dismiss it as misogynist, racist, and homophobic? Geoffrey Sirc argues no, especially when it comes to the the popular avant-garde, like Fight Club and Eminem: “Expressing righteous outrage over the popular avant-garde, because our keen political insights process it in full-panic mode, we risk becoming as meaningless as everything else in this absurd culture” (426).
Nihilism is central in the popular avant-garde, calling for a dismissal of the politics: “According to Poggioli, ‘the only omnipreesent or recurring political ideology within the avant-guard is the least political or the most anti-political of all: libertarianism and anarchism” (426, quoting Poggioli 97). The popular avant-garde is purposefully shocking as well:
Eminem…chooses to enter into the violence and hate and drama and lies to search out some point of real feeling and truth, mirroring back a culture distinguished by its inhumanity. Political progressives offer a positive message because they ultimately believe in the culture’s promise and potential to be reformed. The attitude of Burden, Eminem, Durden, et al. is that of consumerist culture’s end -logic, the Final Clearnace: ‘Everything Must Go!’ As Tristan Tzara put it: ‘There is a great destructive, negative task to be done: sweeping out, cleaning up’ (qtd. in Poggioli 63). The resulting work is as off-putting as possible, to cause uneasy self-consciousness in hypocrities and poseurs. (427)
Sirc asks the question, “Do lyrics in Eminem’s (or films like Fight Club promote cynicism in politics, or do the politicians themselves do that?” (427). I’d say this is the wrong question, because politics is not just about the politicians. I’d say both promote cynicism, but what about cynicism for local change? For change between people? For treating your neighbor more like a human being? What about the cynicism that gets in the way of that?
I like the popular avant-garde, Fight Club, Eminem (to a degree), punk music. This stuff explores violence, wounds, pain, that so much else tries to bandage, tries to sanitize, to ignore. Fuck the Radio Top 40. I’ve never liked that drivel. Of course, like the academics that Sirc deplores, I find the misogyny and homophobia problematic. I used to hate Eminem for his those two things. How damaging to myself and to women and queers his music was, I thought. But then I realized, as one of Sirc’s students points out, this misogyny is everywhere, and why does Eminem get the flack for it? Is it “because he is so brash and no-nonsense, or probably that he doesn’t sugar coat anything” (431)?
I want to read, write, and play with things that explore wounds, pain, anger, sorrow. I’m tired of sugar coats. Where is the fucking ugly and the fucking raw? “Fight Club’s Tyler Durden says, ‘I don’t want to die without any scars'” (422).
Sirc, Geoffrey. “The Difficult Politics of the Popular.” JAC 21.2 (Spring 2001): 421-433.
