Mainstream
Way back in 1987, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions released a song called “Mainstream” on an album by the same name. The chorus goes like this: “Swimming is easy when you're stuck in the middle of the Mississippi/All you have to do is crawl.” The idea is simple: when you’re in the mainstream, you don’t need to work very hard. The current carries you, and any version of the Australian crawl, however weak, is enough to take you out to sea.
Cole is likely talking about the music industry in “Mainstream,” but the idea works elsewhere, too. Artists and writers of all sorts often enough find a strong current (my friend the paragliding fanatic talks endlessly of “thermals” that carry one skyward) and stay within it, floating downstream past other swimmers struggling with flat water. You find a current, move like you’re swimming, and then let the river do the work. In academic fields like the humanities, where nearly everything revolves around subjective peer review (and often in fields so small that anonymity can never be guaranteed), this also happens.
Trends come and go in the humanities. For a time we’re deeply concerned about subjectivity, and then we mostly agree that subjects don’t exist. We ignore identity for decades, and then it’s all we can write about. It will go this way until we rediscover subjectivity and discard identity as too fixed and deterministic. We were focused on humans, but now we’re skeptical of anthropocentrism. This will also pass, likely when it becomes clear that post-humanism has become weaponized by fascists. Wide ties, thin ties, wide ties again.
It might be useful to abandon the mainstream and the marketplace logic it accepts. What do we lose or gain by letting go of the chimera of innovation (as if each of us were a tech startup with an app to sell) and refocusing our efforts on solid philological work? In 1993, a deconstructionist reading of Latin American fiction was cutting-edge. Now people roll their eyes. In 2003, articles and books attacked neoliberalism and showed how writers in the Global South were artfully pointing out its human cost. Now serious talk about neoliberalism takes place mostly in high school essays.
In the 1990s, we often referred to well known academic humanists as “rock stars.” Stephen Greenblatt was a “rock star.” Judith Butler was a “rock star,” and so on. I don’t know if this habit continues, but it at least has the virtue of being gender-neutral. We talked about academics as though they were the Rolling Stones, even if this image fell apart immediately upon meeting them. Even if a decade later we’d treat them like a Buddy Holly cover band. What we failed to realize, of course, is that the Rolling Stones were themselves a (Muddy Waters) cover band. And they were hopelessly mainstream. If anything, they can be credited with taking American Blues music, coating in several layers of pop sugar, and selling it to millions of white kids who knew no better. Like them or hate them, but there’s just nothing very edgy about the Rolling Stones. In “Street Fighting Man,” Mick Jagger’s conclusion, after all, is that a “poor boy” (which he never was, especially by late 1968) can’t really do anything else but “sing for a rock and roll band.” This is about as mainstream as it gets, and it unfortunately prompted far too many teens to join bands and make horrid music. We can give the Stones a pass for Liz Phair’s first album, but we should never forgive them for inspiring Steven Tyler and Julian Casablancas to record music and make it available to others.
My point is that humanists have been trained for nearly four decades that having a viable career means discarding “The Four Olds” and resolving to “sweep away all monsters and demons” without realizing how derivative or silly (or just damaging) the new ideas might be. It’s like someone in 1993 throwing out all their Prince albums (too mainstream!) only to torture their friends with Siamese Dream or In Utero on repeat. If you’ve ever had a friend who was a Radiohead fan, then you get the idea.
Not to pile onto Radiohead (the new millennium’s dystopian response to The Smiths’ breakup), but David Marchese’s recent Thom Yorke interview in the New York Times Magazine is particularly useful to think with. In it, Yorke responds to a question about the commodification of music:
“The value is in the way you encounter music. It was going to a record shop with someone who you think is cool and trying to be as cool as them while they talked about the latest Red Lorry Yellow Lorry record. It’s being around a friend’s house and putting on a record and talking about it with them. It’s having a girlfriend who’s constantly playing the Velvet Underground, and eventually you believe it’s great, too. The pleasure of discovering stuff like that is why music is so valuable. I guess we’re lucky that there are so many ways to discover music now, but at the same time I feel that “If you like this, you’ll love this” or “share this” is commodifying a deeply personal human experience between people. That experience is why music matters, because the experience stays with you forever.”
It’s hard to argue with the idea that it’s wonderful when good friends recommend music and that it’s horrifying when AI tries to emulate this. Most of the music I enjoy came from friends’ recommendations (and loaned-out albums and cds), and this is probably pretty common. In some cases, I only like a certain band or album because I associate it with that friend. But notice that Yorke doesn’t lead with “a friend”—he leads with “someone who you think is cool and trying to be as cool as them.” This is common adolescent stuff, but it also pretty much describes Radiohead’s entire discography. And of course he drops Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, an obscure 1980s band whose name all but guarantees zero uptake outside the UK (imagine a Brazilian band named “Bagre branco, branco bagre”). Marchese even feels the need to add a footnote: “When was the last time anyone referenced this British post-punk band? “Talk About the Weather” (1985) is the album to hear.” Marchese makes his living interviewing celebrities (be careful what you wish for), so maybe he gets a pass for not rolling his eyes at Yorke. Yorke’s next reference is playing a record at a friend’s house and talking about it, which is probably okay if your friend isn’t name-dropping obscure British post-punk bands. He then goes on to imagine a girlfriend playing Velvet Underground so much that you start liking it, which seems dangerously close to a behavior modification technique from A Clockwork Orange. Has Yorke ever been in a relationship? He doesn’t seem to understand how they work, especially post-breakup. But what he says sounds cool and slightly cutting-edge, and that’s what matters, right? He’s a rock star, after all.
Swimming is easy when you're stuck in the middle of the Mississippi. All you have to do is find out what theories (they’re called “conversations” now) are trending and apply them to books written in the languages you study, no matter how poor the fit. You’ll need to look like you’re actually swimming, but it’s really just a matter of moving from one current to the next. It’s not rocket science, it’s the mainstream.
