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PaperclipPerfector
1d ago
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Notes -
Lately I've been listening to The Mikado, so of course I was very amused to see @Celestial-body-NOS's recent comment referencing it. But this got me thinking about the place of Gilbert & Sullivan culturally, and how much it has changed over my lifetime.
In the 90's it was very common to see Gilbert & Sullivan referenced. In The Simpsons you had Sideshow Bob routinely breaking into a G&S song. The Mikado was referenced in Seinfeld as something Jerry's cousin was in a production of. Other shows as well like Frasier and Cheers referenced it repeatedly. I get the sense that Gilbert & Sullivan was still extremely popular as sort of "Ivy League Humor" as late as the 1990s. Obviously most of these characters like Sideshow Bob were supposed to be pretentious, but at the same time the shows clearly expected the audience to recognize the reference. The audience might not know all the words like Sideshow Bob, but getting the joke requires recognizing the song to some extent. The joke wouldn't land if they were instead referencing some obscure medieval poem that would be completely unknown to the audience. I feel like it was sort of classified as pretentious but relatable, as in, if you were college educated in the 1990s you probably knew at least one friend that was way too into G&S.
Of course, needless to say I don't think it's that way anymore. I think amateur collegiate G&S productions were a staple of Ivy League college life, I mean you had Simpsons writers like Conan O'Brien that literally attended Harvard and was president of The Harvard Lampoon. When I was at college in the late 2000s I don't remember any of that. I think by then productions of G&S had largely been replaced by a capella groups and improv which share a lot of the same sensibilities but strip away any history or cultural tradition.
It makes me a bit sad and nostalgic. In a way it is very remarkable that operas from the 1880s still held any degree of currency in popular culture over 100 years later. I think it speaks to the aspirations of past generations that were still to some degree rooted in old aristocratic Victorian ideals. And I think it went along with a whole host of related ideals like reverence for Shakespeare and classical music and such, all as part of a package ideal of what the cultured intellectual looked like and I don't know that any of that has really survived to the present. It's not so much that G&S or Shakespeare would be frowned upon exactly, or read as gauche (though perhaps they would by some of the ultra-woke crowd), but more just that they aren't really a part of a culturally shared vision for what an intellectually developed person looks like anymore.
It does make me wonder, what do you think the image today of the "slightly pretentious but admirably cultured intellectual" looks like today, in the popular imagination? Do any fictional characters come to mind? What are the markers that would identify such a person most accurately?
At least in the circles I've run in, the idea of "cultured intellectualism" that sticks today has a lot to do with knowing prominent but countercultural figures, movements and pieces of art that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, e.g. New Hollywood and independent films (such as knowing the oeuvres of Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich and John Cassavetes), the Manchester and London punk and post-punk scene (listening to and appreciating the Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd, The Fall, Joy Division, etc) and other such things. Knowing critical modernist and abstract-expressionist artists and designers such as people involved in the Bauhaus movement and de Stijl, as well as Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and so on is also a big part of it.
In general, the art that we venerate and consider intellectual says a lot about the aspirations, beliefs and general zeitgeist of our society, and it certainly applies here. Any such aristocratic Victorian ideals that persisted in the early half of the twentieth century were all but swept away by the counterculture of the post-war period, and by the time the third millennium began it had largely been replaced with an... entirely different set of ideals and hierarchies. All of the stuff that is considered intellectual today was explicitly about "breaking from tradition", breaking from conventional notions of beauty, prioritising the individual artist and their subjectivity over the consumer, accepting the strange and absurd and even the outright ugly. That goes along with a zeitgeist that's typified by a blank-slatist idea of the human mind wherein all aesthetics, beliefs and social structures are fully enculturated, it embraces absurdism and subjectivity to the point that it claims that truth is unattainable and morality is merely a construct (used primarily as a rhetorical device to undermine and expose the previous system as fake, all while the ideology contradictorily makes its own sweeping claims about truth and morality and imposes its own social stratifications that are elevated to the level of dogma), and it's so beholden to its roots and needs something to be in opposition to so badly that it's unable to stop LARPing as subversive and countercultural even after it has ossified into every institution and become the hegemony. I find it very funny that progressive media and art now finds itself in the strange position of having become an institution with its own stringent and limiting criteria for deemed excellence.
I think there is a nascent counter-counterculture forming at the moment in certain very online dissident right and dirtbag left spaces with their own distinct mannerisms and aesthetics, but it's going to be a good long while before they take the world by storm in the same way that the 1960s and 1970s saw.
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