Spontaneous

Measuring the energy of cultural movements

Energy can never be created nor destroyed. It only changes form. It vibrates. It pulses. Energy is transferred. It takes you on a journey. It leaves you breathless and energized or both - and takes up space somewhere else. Cultural movements have an organic fluid energy that feeds off itself as it morphs, pulsing through society creating connections and pushing progress. The best cultural movements rose up from the streets and made their way into our entertainment, and yes, our brands, but it always started with real people on the street going about their daily lives, spontaneously coming together and evolving culture. 

Is the endless fragmentation and separation of people from their source material the slow big bang of human connection?

Organic and unscripted street culture created the Harlem Renaissance. Hip hop came humming to life without a business strategy to make us dance and sing along. Hip Hop history, some say, began in 1973 when DJ Kool Herc had a party (planned by sister Cindy Campbell) in his apartment in the Bronx with two turntables and an amp that flooded out to a nearby playground but it’s not that simple. It never is. It was a moving energy with defining points. There was Grandmaster Flash. There was Afrika Bambaataa. There was the Rock Steady Crew and the graffiti artists memorialized in Wild Style, there was uptown and downtown, there was Malcom McClaren and Keith Haring pushing it in different directions and Harrell, Russell, Rick, Babyface and so on. It was a confluence, but it was most certainly driven by spontaneity and an energy with no one data point. People would play music in The Bronx on hot city summer streets and in parks and in 1977, there was a blackout that is said to have accelerated hip hop, another high point in the oscillogram of culture. Freaknik in Atlanta started as a picnic for students and house music started in Chicago when DJs wanted to keep the crowd dancing. This cultural energy is a moving force made up of people. Moving bodies moving.

A rose is a rose is a rose.

From the embers of the industrial revolution and the anger over Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the UK came punk and then new wave and goth. In this way, anger and disenchantment of the status quo ebbed to a more introspective, inventive place. The fifties fixation on conformity and complacent prosperity after the trauma of WWII was challenged by the Civil Rights Movement and the Beat poets exploding in the sixties as the Vietnam war dragged on creating the hippy movement on college campuses. 

A high point in that oscillogram would definitely be Woodstock. Organic and spontaneous movement created the literary and art movements of café society (hence the reference to the Gertrude Stein poem above) in Paris and other European cities.

I'm skipping around on purpose. Cultural energy moves latitudinally and longitudinally repeating itself as it gathers new bits and pieces and evolves. My early career consisted of reporting on visual street culture. I sent out a stream of consciousness list of cultural observations I’d see and hear in New York to 18,000 subscribers from 1998 through 2003. 

It was then, around the turn of the century, where we discovered that we could all individually brand ourselves because of the Internet. Personal branding was not a completely new concept but it suddenly got a whole lot easier.

David Bowie had already turned himself into an art piece. Madonna was a construct of many parts she gathered and repurposed for her own brand. Bob Dylan was a savvy brand strategist, creating multiple personas for himself. 

The impetus for their  ‘brands' was to take up space and be heard. To exist. All those hangers-on during fashion week, they brought it with their ‘fits’. They were cool.They weren’t the Kardashians. They didn't have a TV show. They weren’t there to hawk a product other than themselves. That was enough. That was a lot.

A copy of a copy.

Recently, The New York Times ran an article by a writer named Mireille Silcoff who was born within a month of me in 1973, so also 51 and a tween parent. She observed that where we used to have actual scenes, the kids now have aesthetics with no antecedent. 

Today's aesthetics are disconnected from their origins.

That is the definition of a simulacrum, a copy of a copy. 

The original is lost. 

Aesthetics used to reference actual culture and movements that emerged from people spending time together. Now it's online cosplay.  Even though they are more like trading cards than culture, that doesn’t mean they aren’t utterly fascinating. Some of my fave aesthetic names are Art Ho, Goblincore, Appalachian Gothic, and Cartelcore. And you've heard of Mob Wife. That's an aesthetic too. 

You probably know Cottagecore and Grandmacore? No? Look it up, this is quite a rabbit hole. 

Is the endless fragmentation and separation of people from their source material and each other like the slow big bang of human connection? I was thrilled about the Barbie phenomenon last summer, of all things, (who knew a corporate product that worked against feminism for so many years would bring about such a thing?) because it was a shared experience. 

In the distant past of 15 years ago, we loved the idea of the long tail, the niche market you could connect with through a small business or small business segments. It was exciting because we assumed it would be a causal relationship with real life interest groups born of social and cultural movements and togetherness. We had no way of predicting these niches would exist solely in the ether and be manufactured by algorithms, often to dangerous affect.

With all the power that we bestow onto the social media influencer, do their audiences even think about them for one millisecond after their content is viewed and the next thing pops up? There is no cohesion. Nothing sticks.

So lonely.

The loneliness epidemic is staggering and sad. The CDC website reports that 1 in 3  adults in the U.S. report feeling lonely. 1 in 4 feel like they don't have any sort of social or emotional support. Before the pandemic, one answer to this growing alienation was the creation of adult summer camps. They might still exist but you don’t hear about them all that often. The retreat business is a $436-billion industry that's projected to get to $1.1 trillion by 2025 (numbers vary slightly between sources) but from private conversations I’ve had with leaders in this space, it’s a difficult business to maintain and has suffered like every other industry over the past few years. 

Not all is well in wellness retreats. Still I would say it is dire that we find a way to sit around the old campfire again. The closest thing we have are music festivals. They still thrill. Big time. There must to be a way to stretch that energy and innovation into daily life. 

I’m encouraged by what I see as an excitement in the air around music in particular these days. I always thought Taylor Swift surely couldn’t be the entire answer to the big problem of cultural disconnection. She’s a gifted songwriter but she isn’t the entire message. I’m grateful for singers like Lola Young, Charli xcx (her new album feels like old times), Chapell Roan, Blondshell, Beyonce's Cowboy Carter, and Jelly Roll. These artists seem to actually be saying something new and not just practicing repetition. They are pushing the energy.

Listen to my interview with longtime Moth executive and co-author of “How to Tell a Story”, Kate Tellers, on Episode 15 of my Actual People podcast available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and listen to hear them all as they come out. 

Video version below (click here to see them all):