The Idler

In Defence of the Middlebrow

In the eighties, pop culture fought for the same critical treatment as the so-called highbrow arts. But, writes LOUIS THEROUX, the cultural grail lies somewhere in between

Hands up who remembers Warlord? Anyone? It was a bizarre jingoistic war comic, the same size and format as The Beano, but instead of ‘Minnie the Minx’ and; Little Plum’, the stories were all about plucky English tommies dog fighting with the Germans and shoutng ‘Die Hun! Die!’ I swear it had about five hundred distinct phonetic renderings of the noise a machine gun makes. I subscribed to it for a year or so in the seventies and even became a member of the top-secret Warlord fanclub (it wasn’t called a ‘fanclub’, of course; it was some sort of intelligence agency and I remember the induction letter contained strict instructions to ‘memorise and destroy!’. Funny thing was, despite subscribing to it and joining the club and thinking of myself as ‘a Warlord kind of a boy’, I didn’t care a toss for Warlord. I’d never read more than one story before I’d stash it away in an upstairs cupboard and go and read my brothers Beano cover to cover.

If you’d asked me, I’d have told you I loved it. Hegemony’s funny that way. From somewhere you get the idea that it’s cool to like something, or that that’s who you are, and even if that something’s completely not who you are - even if you’re not sure who ‘the jerries’ are or why it’s important to eat your fancy paperwork - you’ll stick at it because, well, I suppose because we need myths about ourselves, and the wrong myth is better than no myth at all. Sometimes I feel my whole life has been spent trying to like things I was supposed to like - thinking I liked them for a while and then one day sort of noticing that I don’t like them at all and never did. My first single was ‘Don’t Go’ by Yazoo. OK, that I liked. But my first album - Snap! By The Jam - I found unlistenable. From somewhere (my brother, actually, source of most hegemonic delusions) I’d got the idea that I was a mod. I started parting my hair in the middle, wearing white socks and thought about buying a parka. Snap!, then , was my bid to get into the right kind of music, the sort of music a mod like me would like. That I actually hated it, that secretly I much preferred my mum’s tapes of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers and The Pirates of Penzance, seemed a small detail, the tiniest kink in the big scheme of things. Keep thinking you’re a mod, the rest will come.

And so on through the years, taking in passing attachments to funk (Twice As Kool, Kool and the Gang’s greatest hits compilation which I bought in 1983, occupies a special place in my Fad Memorabilia Hall of Shame as the album album I didn’t even bother to listen to when I got home): bird-watching (I suppose I liked it for a while but not as much as my family seemed to to need me to like it. Why do they need you to have hobbies? It’s the precursor of the job, isn’t it? ‘Louis enjoys bird watching’ is the linear antecedent of ‘Louis is a highly paid surgeon’); JRR Tolkein (I pretended to have finished Lord of the Rings); cats (I never gave a shit about cats but was roped into being a cat partisan by my brother when he was campaigning for one); post-punk (I was sort of enjoying the music by this time but hated going to the gigs; too scary); and Philip Larkin.

Growing up is a process of sloughing off false consciousness. It is an on-going effort to try to become who you are - of working out that you’re not, in fact, a Warlord kind of a boy. As the millennium draws near this is more important than ever: not that the world’s abut to end, but that the closing of a thousand-year cycle possesses its own kind of historico-temporal gravity, even for the secular: it’s no time for silliness. You don’t want to be pretending to like Warlord when the wheels on the world-historical tachometer roll around. It just wouldn’t look right. No, now more than ever we must see that the things we like are also the things we enjoy: that the things we attach importance to also enrich us. What we must do now is nothing less than acquire a new, more sensitive, more questioning relationship with art.

Now, I have a big problem with art but I also think I may have found the solution - so don’t worry just yet. My problem with art is a problem with ‘art’ the word as much as anything else: I have a problem with art as a self evident ontological category of ‘things’. I’m sure I’m not alone in this - I don’t think anyone really supposes that there’s a clear cut-off between things that are allowed in the museums and libraries and things that aren’t; but there is still this idea around of art being a kind of benevolent radioactivity for the soul, that you’re supposed to walk around galleries soaking up the good vibes, that even though you can’t feel anything, that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing you any good. Let’s face it; galleries are nothing. Seriously, are they anything at all? No! I’ve wandered around maybe a hundred galleries in my life, some of them many times; I’ve memorised names and dates and scenes until I’m crotchety and footsore and to what end?

So fuck galleries, to start with. I hate them - churches of culture. Is there anything in the world less likely to encourage an intimate relationship with the best the human spirit has produced than a big echoing knackering gallery? Also, the avant-garde: fuck it. Fuck the avant-garde. I hate it. We want something we understand, not something we have to work at. We’ve got jobs for work; don’t make the art work too! Art should be user-friendly, like watching TV or reading a book that isn’t Ulysses or going to see a film. So the avant-garde goes out the window. Also, popular culture; fuck that, too. A ridiculous patronising expression - it comes pre-packaged in an ironic brainier-than-thou attitude; it screams ‘thesis’. Its undiscriminating gaze lumps The Dukes of Hazzard in with Larry Sanders - they’re all just ‘popular culture’ - and that’s inexcusable. There’s something wrong with ‘popular culture’ otherwise it would be called just ‘culture’. We know what ‘popular culture’ means, it means sea shanties and maypole dancing. Get away from that phrase. Don’t touch it.

What are we left with? Have you guessed yet? A phrase that’s friendly, modest, unpretentious, hard-working, fun? A phrase with a meaningful continuity through the years - that doesn’t include maypole dancing and sea shanties? A phrase that cups and cradles in its soft hands the best the human spirit has produced but without interposing its great pointy head the way the word ‘art’ does? A phrase that will see us through the millennium, our self respect, our dignity intact? A phrase which courteously ushers Bob Dylan, Charles Dickens, Johannes Vermeer, George Meyer, Jane Austen, Marvin Gaye, Sam Raimi, Jarvis Cocker and Marcel Proust over its velvet ropes, but seeing TS Eliot says, ‘Stop! Scooby Doo I can forgive, but Captain Caveman?’ A phrase which shuns on the one hand the post-modern ironizing of the post-graduate trendies and on the other the backward-looking fogeyisms of the gallery. Can you hear the music on the wind? It’s faint, but one phrase is echoing over and over… ‘Middlebrow!’ “Middlebrow!”… It’s getting louder…

Middlebrow is about modesty, control, technique, craft. Middlebrow defies the ironic: it won’t be patronised. Middlebrow is not self hating (’lowbrow’?) or self-loving (’highbrow”!)’ it is self-knowing (’middlebrow”). Middlebrow is often bad, but ‘bad’ is not its habitual mode (unlike low-brow), and when it’s bad we know why it’s bad - why it failed; where it was trying to go and why it didn’t get there - unlike highbrow. (Can you imagine someone saying of a Pollock painting, ‘The drips aren’t so good on that one’?) The middlebrow may not be the smartest brow but it works harder and achieves results. Middlebrow is deaf to the tittering of those embarassed by real feeling. Middlebrow isn’t smug. Middlebrow wouldn’t presume to think it’s at the centre of anything interesting or cool. Middlebrow is pseudo refined, genteel, bourgeois - yes, but it is also fair, accomodating, consistent. Middlebrow is virtually any good children’s book from the Wizard of Oz to Fantastic Mister Fox. Middlebrow is entertaining but not just entertaining. Middlebrow is any artform in its ripest, tastiest phase - before it turns baroque and difficult and self involved; it is nineteenth century English novels and the paintings of the North European renaissance, it is rock in the Sixties and television in the Nineties, and, who knows? Maybe drum and bass, too.