First of all, I’m in the process of re-reading a kind of diary notebook I shared with a friend in high school. In the 1980s, we did this all the time. That way we could look like we were doing homework in class but we were really goofing off writing letters to our friends. Passing notes was too dangerous. Between classes, you could easily trade notebooks. We were about 14 years old, living in St. Louis, reading “The Jungle” in history class (probably a banned book now because it’s anti-capitalist).

My friend and I are re-reading the notebook together and the process has been both painful and funny. And timely because I’ve been wondering lately if I’ve been exaggerating my childhood interest in Sonny & Cher and Paul Sand. This notebook disabuses me of that doubt, however. At one point my friend gets exacerbated with my Sonny & Cher obsession and later I tell her to be sure to catch Paul Sand on St. Elsewhere.

What a nerd! But we are talking quite often about music and co-existing with divergent musical tastes. (I have no record of what kinds of music conversations I was having at 14 with my other friends.)

And here we come back to cultural authority. Because I know what’s coming up in the notebook. We are about to get into an argument about Bob Dylan. I won’t go into any particulars about that or the rest of the notebook but all to say this was in my head this morning (and how our identities were forming around music) while I started reading the book No Respect, Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989) by Andrew Ross.

Ross talks about pop culture as a tug between “distrust and hostility” on one end and “deference and respect” on the other, a very binary, polarizing arrangement. This has always been challenging for me because I just can’t see the world as black and white and binary. (I am convinced no one can, but it’s simply a very popular coping mechanism.)

Anyway, Ross says, “The struggle to win popular respect and consent for authority is endlessly being waged and most of it takes place in the realm of what we recognize as popular culture” which includes defining “what is legitimate…the patrol over shifting borders of popular and legitimate taste, who supervises the passports, the temporary visas, the cultural identities, the threatening ‘alien’ elements and the deportation orders and who occasionally makes their own adventurist forays across the border.” (I forgot how much Ross is my favorite cultural writer.)

How timely a metaphor this is for us today in the days of I.C.E. And you can also see how debates about ‘alien’ tools and styles play out these days, music that is different or threatening, technology often seen as the new target but is actually a very old foe. I’ve just watched hours of footage of Daryl Dragon in 1977 sitting atop his mountain of keyboards (and a xylophone) on The Captain & Tennille Show. As a great example just take a listen to the music of muskrat sex for a minute. You will either feel that this is sweet or a sign of the apocalypse.  Those aren’t authentic muskrats, for one…and then, just imagine for another minute those same muskrats getting ahold of autotune.

(I for one believe a chipmunk album or two could have been improved with autotune.)

Ross talks about elitism, anti-intellectualism, vanguardism, populism, paternalism and delinquency.  And to me there seems to be a strangely symbiotic relationship between paternalism and delinquency. I find people’s attitudes around authority change depending upon where they sit in the scenario: as the being-told-to or the teller-over-others. It’s that flip-flop paradox that always seems to happen around extreme positions.

Ross says the use of “categories of taste,” (like hip, camp, bad, sick and fun), serve as “opportunities for intellectuals to sample the emotional charge of popular culture while guaranteeing their immunity from its power to constitute social identities that are in some way marked as subordinate.”

That triggering feeling of subordinance.

People have choices when put up against the taste-authoritarians: they either can go along and become super-followers or they can trespass on that authority. Camp is one way to trespass. Ignoring the authority altogether is another. I like both of those strategies.

You can see, in the case of autotune, how copious amounts of criticism from one group (aging rock music snobs, even Spinal Tap had to weigh in recently) never serves to discourage the other group (young rap and dance-music snobs) from wanting to define their own identities within music. In fact I would argue criticism of autotune has actually only accelerated its use, as any kind of criticism from an old authority to an unempowered group will. It’s like their food and fuel. And all because of those structures of authoritarianism. Because young people aren’t going to be told what to do by the likes of…

Well…it’s now become a struggle of identities what could have been perceived as simply one tool in the toolbox. It has become the specific thorn that defines the big cultural struggle between competing groups over cultural authority.

When you step out of the matrix and look at it from a distance you can see that it’s the stupidest f**king argument you’ve ever heard in the history of anything. But on it goes.

Another thing Ross talks about is how authority works with identity and personality, who sings what and from what gender. His example is the most perfect example: Aretha Franklin wresting away Otis Redding’s song about “conjugal rights” and turning it into a feminist anthem. Well-played challenge to patriarchal authority, Aretha Franklin.

Respect! and no respect, and “respect my authority!”

And all this just in Andrew Ross’ introduction!