P4 NY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019
a teenager asked Bill Clinton about his underwear at
an MTV town hall, or when Frank Sinatra reworked a
hit for John F. Kennedy’s campaign. Now, just about
anyone can mash the two together.
Fan culture’s political takeover is obviously accel-
erated by the internet, but it does not represent a
replacement of corporate media or political machines.
It’s more in negotiation with them. It isolates
moments from the mainstream — like this week’s
Democratic primary debate — and shoots them off in
new directions, layered with additional meanings.
Andrew Slack, the creator of the Harry Potter Alliance
— a real nonprofit dedicated to making social change
inspired by a fake hero — calls such practices “cultur-
al acupuncture.” They’re fantasy worlds poking holes
in society’s skin.
Even as our politics is translated into the lan-
guage and aesthetics of pop culture, the opposite is
happening, too: Cultural products are being weighted
with great political significance. Comedians like John
Oliver and Trevor Noah deliver the news. Fans of tele-
vision shows crib from activist playbooks: A Los
Angeles woman recently staged a hunger strike to
protest Netflix’s cancellation of the sci-fi series “The
OA.” Meanwhile, some liberals are protesting Trump
and his allies not by taking to the streets but by skip-
ping SoulCycle.
And when the reality television personality Kylie
Jenner threw a birthday party themed around a
friend’s favorite show, “The Handmaid’s Tale” — with
guests dressed in red cloaks and white bonnets, sip-
ping themed cocktails like “Praise Be Vodka” — the
internet threw a fit. Before Jenner tied on the bonnet,
the costume had been co-opted by abortion rights ac-
tivists. The subtext of the outrage was this: A pre-
existing political connotation automatically subsumes
a frivolous but harmless one. A TV show is serious
politics now, not entertainment.
T
HERE IS GREAT OPPORTUNITYto be found in the
fanning of politics — for candidates, corpora-
tions, and sometimes, even for us. When civics is con-
verted into a pop culture product and set loose online,
it is capable of engaging people who might not other-
wise participate. And networks of fans aren’t just used
to generate content; they can also mobilize when
news breaks or polls open. Enthusiastically memeing
Elizabeth Warren into a treasured fantasy world
drums up attention and energy that theoretically align
with grass-roots campaigning. The media scholar
Henry Jenkins has likened photoshopping a meme to
writing a letter to the editor: just another mold for citi-
zenship, cracked open to new groups.
Besides, experiencing politics as fandom is not
necessarily more harmful to our self-rule than, say, the
horse race analogy sometimes favored by the tradi-
tional political media, which promotes campaigns’
competitive acumen at the expense of the likely conse-
quences of the outcomes. Memes do carry values
across the culture, even if subtly or strangely. Styles of
humor vary markedly between political perspectives.
A pop cultural alliance can open a window on a candi-
date’s priorities, or so we have come to think. Aesthet-
ics have become the shorthand for ideas.
It’s not that a politician’s actual politics have
become unimportant in these fandoms, but they have
become sublimated into spectacle. A candidate’s polit-
ical reputation — as a centrist or a radical, a liberal or a
conservative, independent or corporate — helps inform
the online personality that is built up around her, and
from there it is inflated or distorted by cultural clues.
All this can make people feel like they have a great
deal of control (fig. 11)over the political process. But
this feeling can be deceptive. Citizens may be the ones
creating material about the candidates, but they are
also helping to build cults of personality around poli-
ticians that erode their accountability. Fandoms are
fundamentally about promoting their central celebri-
ty, not holding them to account. Our political repre-
sentatives are supposed to work for the people, but
fandoms reverse that proposition: They make us
work for them.
And this is questionable work that we are doing.
The point of translating politics into pop culture may
Presidential candidate
Bill Clinton played the
sax on “The Arsenio
Hall Show” in 1992.
He played “Heart-
break Hotel.”
Photograph by Reed
Saxon/Associated
Pressfig. 8
fig. 9
fig. 10
fig. 11
BERNIE SANDERS HAS Acurious relationship to popular music. I suspect
he doesn’t really listen to it. His iPad, he told Rolling Stone, is stocked with
Beethoven’s symphonies. And yet his campaign has forged a strategic alli-
ance with the pop music world that feels genuine.
In 2016, Sanders failed to name a favorite David Bowie song — “I know
he passed away, and the answer is that I wasn’t much of a follower of his,”
he said — but his campaign deployed “Starman” in a way that Newsweek
called “inspirational” and “sincere.” His sit-down interviews with musi-
cians — first with the rapper Killer Mike (fig. 8) at a cafe and a barber-
shop, then with the rapper Cardi B at a nail salon (fig. 9) — have been hits.
The Cardi B footage, in which the senator and the star discuss Medicare,
police brutality and the minimum wage, has reeled in tens of millions of
views across social media.
His fans have helped enhance his musical persona, too. The “Bernie
vs. Hillary” meme that defined the 2016 primary imbued him with cool-kid
taste and an encyclopedic command of Radiohead’s catalog.(fig. 10)
There is an advantage to Sanders’ personal disengagement with mu-
sic, and with pop culture more generally. Hillary Clinton courted celebri-
ties with such a thirst that it seemed as if she might swallow them whole.
She engaged so gamely with the surface delights of popular culture, she
invited suspicion — that she was operating transactionally, using pop fig-
ures for the sheen of cool they could infuse into her campaign.
Sanders is using Cardi B’s celebrity, too, but his attitude toward that
celebrity feels agnostic. In the video, he treats her not like a star but like a
constituent. His very distance from pop culture allows him to create credi-
ble pop objects of his own.What if his pop culture illiteracy is the secret
to his pop culture success?CASE STUDY
BERNIE SANDERS
LISTENS TO CARDI B