"There is a great need, I think, for criticism of 'popular culture' which can acknowledge its pervasive and disturbing power without ceasing to be aware of the superior claims of the higher arts and yet without a bad conscience."
This was written by Robert Warshow, a US critic of originality and promise who died in 1955 aged 37. Despite far too much criticism of pop culture on a hip intellectual level, I believe it's still to the point.
Pop music, for example, is both pervasive and disturbing. It contains objectively a few nuggets of real, if low-grade, value among the mountains of rubbish.
It's made by young people for young people and is, for the most part, emotionally immature. This, like the company of young people, makes it boring for any length of time but not all the time. For them, it's an important part of their lives, the only art form they feel the need for, a projection of their dreams and feelings.
For anyone over 20 who can listen without bias it's a mild stimulant. It helps us over the more tiresome daily hurdles, shaving and dressing, but it's also a key to understanding them. There are two nations, but there's no reason for them to be at war.
Of course pop music is an industry and while both artists and their audiences are young, the middlemen – managers, disc jockeys and so on – tend to be middle aged. It's this that has led some people – such as Paul Johnson of the New Statesman – to imagine a conspiracy to corrupt the innocent. They believe that the success of what to them seems a hideous and meaningless noise can only have come about through manipulation. The industry wishes they were right. If the pop public could be manipulated it would make its job not only easier but even more profitable. In fact, the teenage thumbs turn up or down as capriciously as Caesar's and all the plugging in the world seems to make no difference.
Once a trend, a singer or an individual song has begun to move then the industry does put the pressure full on. Success is by design extremely transitory. Like paper cups and cheap ballpoint pens, pop music is meant to be used and thrown away. Very few songs live longer than a month. Only a handful of artists survive the decline of the fad that brought them fame.
What is remarkable is that every pop trend has to an extent derived from the blues, the only real folk music to have come out of this century. Due to the rise of British r'n'b, it has become financially more attractive for promoters to bring over from America many of the great bluesmen. Some of them are uneducated and unequal performers, but none of them is emotionally immature. In writing for the Observer, I shall make the blues my second subject, as it is my first interest.
This is an edited extract