Pop juggernaut invades...again

I was wandering aimlessly around Old Campus with a friend a few weeks ago when we were astounded by the dearth of people outside. Something was obviously amiss. A solitary girl darted by us and we asked her where everybody was. She replied, rather matter-of-factly, "The MTV Video Music Awards." I wonder at the power of this insipid piece of televised garbage. In fact, I wonder at the power of all insipid pieces of televised garbage. Why do people, cultured Yalies included, watch the crap that is played on television and labeled as entertainment?

SARAH ENGLAND/YH

They are addicted: flat-out chemically dependent. On what, you ask? On pop culture. TRL is on—why not watch it? Yet something else draws viewers, something even more insidious and empty than hype. You just have to see the Video Music Awards live. You can't miss the first episode of The Real World. Formless and ubiquitous, hype is a black hole, attracting everything toward its empty center. Too bad I can't think of any prime examples of Americans getting addicted to crappy network media programming.

Oh wait, has anyone heard of this show Survivor? How about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? I've never watched a full episode of either, and as far as I can tell, I'm not really missing out. One summer night, I was sitting in front of the tube when some jerk in my family casually mentioned that we were missing the much-touted final episode of Survivor. This annoying cousin would not stop pestering me until I changed the channel so we could watch. She had never seen the show either, but she felt some sort of duty as an American to at least take a peek at the final episode. I felt no such compulsion. As far I could tell, the basic plot involved a few odd-looking people walking around a wooden post on a beach, while the show had weird, bad-Polynesian-restaurant tiki-torch decor. I left and went to bed. Somehow this crappy show, reminiscent of a crappy restaurant, was the biggest thing since the hula hoop. Suddenly, everything in America was somehow related to Survivor, and everything about Survivor was somehow related to America. Yet it was just a stupid TV show. How did some piece of network rubbish take the country hostage?

Pure hype. A pop culture media feeding frenzy. A stupid TV show becomes a cultural staple. People watch The Truman Show and say, "Wow, really makes you think," and then turn right around to worship a new television idol. Media pundits and cultural experts declare that Survivor represents a national mood and try to interpret the cultural significance of such pop culture fads. Even the intellectuals are addicted, rationalizing that they watch to analyze; everyone wants a piece of the craze. So I ask this question: Does anyone know why lemmings jump of cliffs? Wouldn't the answer explain America's manic addictions to stupid waves of pop culture phenomena?

The heart of the issue is that many Americans think that popularity is, in and of itself, a reason for participating in national fads. To an educated Yale student, just watching a TV show might not seem like a big deal, but I think that there is more behind the music than VH-1 would have you believe. When you watch the Video Music Awards, for whatever reason, you become the pawn of Sumner Redstone, of Viacom, of MTV, and of pop culture. You are the fuel of a complex machine that pays "musicians," the music industry, television stations, and, most importantly, advertising executives, ridiculous amounts of money on the assumption that you will watch TV. The thing about this machine, though, is that participation in it is a choice. As a free-willed lemming living in the United States of America, you have the right to choose not to watch what everyone else is watching. At Yale, you have better things to do. If you just ignore the ugly drone of popular culture, you won't miss anything; it will just lose its power over you.

Josh Cohen is a freshman in Pierson.

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