Stop Waiting for Pop Culture to Mean Something

• Posted by Dez Fontaine May 24 Filed in Arts & Culture #Entertainment  #Authenticity  #pop culture  #criticism  #consumer culture  44 views
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  You ever notice how we treat pop culture like it owes us answers? Like a movie or album or TV show has some hidden message that's gonna crack open how we understand the world, and if we just analyze it hard enough, we'll finally get it? We'll finally understand ourselves?

  That's the game everybody's playing right now. We're all sitting around waiting for entertainment to be profound. We need it to justify the time we spent consuming it. I get it. I do it too. You watch some prestige drama and suddenly you're in the comments section writing three paragraphs about what it says about late capitalism or whatever, and honestly? Sometimes it's just a good story about people. Sometimes it's supposed to be empty calories for your brain.

  The real tell is how mad people get when pop culture doesn't deliver on the meaning they already decided it should have. You see a movie that's just trying to be fun and entertaining, and there's this whole segment of people who feel betrayed. Like the filmmakers personally owed them a thesis statement. Like entertainment has some moral obligation to be smart or important. The thing is, that expectation says way more about us than it says about the art.

  What I've been realizing is that pop culture works best when you stop asking it to do your thinking for you. When you just let it exist in the space it's trying to occupy. A song can be catchy without being profound. A show can be entertaining without changing your life. A celebrity can be talented without being a role model. These things can just be what they are, and somehow that's become controversial.

  But here's what actually gets me twisted. We've created this weird feedback loop where everybody's so desperate for pop culture to validate their own opinions that we've stopped just experiencing things. We're all too busy being critics. We're all performing our analysis before we've even finished watching. I'm guilty of this too, like I'll be halfway through something and already thinking about how I'm gonna frame my take for maximum engagement.

  The funniest part is that the pop culture that actually hits different, that sticks with you for real? Usually it's the stuff you weren't trying so hard to decode. It just landed because it was honest or weird or unexpected or it caught you at the exact right moment in your life. Not because you spent hours thinking about its deeper meaning.

  I think we need to give ourselves permission to just like things again without justifying them. To consume something without needing it to be a statement about society. To enjoy entertainment the way we enjoyed stuff as kids, before we learned that everything had to mean something bigger.

  This doesn't mean turn your brain off. It just means let things breathe. Let pop culture exist without putting it on trial before we've even decided if we like it.

  What's the last thing you actually enjoyed without immediately trying to explain why it mattered?