Proof positive that humanity gets the world it deserves: it has emerged this week that EL James, writer of the bewilderingly popular Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, boasts a net worth of €52 million after the latest instalment, Grey, sold more than 1.1 million copies in four days.
Yet, after a Twitter live Q&A went spectacularly awry earlier this week (sample question, and one of the more printable: "Does the EL stand for ELiterate?"), James learned a bitter lesson: selling lots of books isn't strictly synonymous with being universally liked. A stick aimed at the spoke, certainly, but, with two more movies on the slate, it wasn't nearly enough to derail the Fifty Shades behemoth.
Enough ink has been spilled on the merits of James' writing, so there's little point regurgitating it here (although I'm tickled by New Yorker critic Anthony Lane's observation that "no new reader could reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth"). The truth is inescapable: we have an insatiable appetite for the mediocre. And a hefty dollop of white-hot hype goes a long way towards sweetening the pill. Keep this up, and celebrity culture is going to look a right state in 20 years' time.
James isn't the only pop-culture heavyweight afforded so much for seemingly delivering so little: one look at Kanye West flubbing the lines of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody at Glastonbury recently was enough to suggest that mainstream pop culture has become a congealed mass of the calcified and the pedestrian. Once upon a time, it was a pulsating breeding ground for innovation and subversion.
I grew up listening to Nirvana and Guns'n'Roses, and, as a 10-year-old weaned on the teat of Button Moon and Bros, their gnarly vitality almost scared me. From that starting point I dug deeper, mining until I hit my cultural sweet spot. In the 1990s, those at the top of their influential powers were artists and mavericks who by turns provided a voice for disaffected youth and my first tantalising, nectar-like taste of how sexiness might sound. Honestly, can we say as much about the likes of Ed Sheeran and Kodaline? Not that those two are without merit, but had either been the soundtrack to my thorny walk into puberty, I'd most likely be a very different person.
A turn for the anodyne
It's not just in pop music that things have taken a turn for the anodyne. Elsewhere, we trudge along to half-baked cinema sequels, with barely a frame of inventiveness between them, then marvel when their box office receipts hit seven figures. The ongoing success of Mrs Brown's Boys – a Dubliner saying "feck" in a frock – remains a mystery to many. There are delightful pockets of ingenuity here and there in pop culture, but when did we become sufficiently satisfied at consuming so little?
The delicious irony is that this cultural low point collides with the surfacing of a most intriguing pejorative term: the “basic bitch”. Long before Kate Moss deployed the term on an EasyJet flight to denigrate a pilot last month, it was being bandied about as a haughty gut-punch.
For the uninitiated, “basic bitch” is a term for someone who opts for a middle-of-the-road existence, and is happy enough to consume whatever’s coming down the mainstream pop-culture chute, irrespective of merit or quality.
There is no inclination to scratch the surface of a life less ordinary to inquire about what other possibilities might lie beneath. Her (and it's always a she, because honestly, who would bother to judge the lifestyle choices of a man?) life is a succession of unironic X Factor watching, soaps, Taylor Swift, Starbucks and selfies. Whatever everyone else is doing, essentially. "Basic" has become the ultimate put-down, hinting as it does at a herd mentality, and the idea that someone isn't smart, imaginative or engaged enough to even be their own person. Business Insider magazine reported earlier this year that Starbucks is "desperately trying to shed its basic image". It's come to that, basically.
At the far reach of the spectrum, the basic bitch has a counterpoint: the “Yuccie” or Young Urban Creative. The way the internet tells it, jam jar cocktails, avocado, matcha tea and “fauxronic” karaoke are staples of the Yuccie’s existence. As cultural tropes go, Yuccies – none-too-distant cousins of the much-maligned hipsters – are every bit as uniform and unimaginative consumers as the Basic Bitch. They just happen to have better PR. Besides, Yuccies listens to Taylor Swift too, albeit with a post-rock or folktronica chaser.
Weirdly, the big winners in today’s cultural tug-of-war are in fact the ordinary people. There are superstars, certainly, but merely by name and barely by nature. The chasm between the superstar and the pleb has dissolved to the point where an Instagram-using yogi with a couple of hundred thousand followers has become youth culture’s most aspirational figure. No discernible talent – unless you count the art of self-promotion – required.
Isn’t is fauxronic, don’t you think?