It has produced some genuinely odd mashups.
I have found “Edelweiss,” a show tune, cast as a
cowboy song; Wham’s elegiac “Careless Whisper”
branded as perfect driving music; and Scott
Joplin’s 1902 ragtime classic “The Entertainer”
pressed into service as a cell-phone ringtone in
Islamabad, Pakistan, by a man who didn’t know it
but liked it better than the built-in ring.
If the recent past is any hint, cultural context will
matter less and less.
Consider what happened to my wife in China a
few years back. She was driving around Beijing
with a twentysomething Chinese real-estate
agent named Kimberly Teng when they passed
a certain roast-chicken restaurant named after a
certain white-bearded Southern singer known
for certain pop-country standards such as “The
Gambler” and “Coward of the County.”
“Do you know of Kenny Rogers?” Teng asked
reverently. Then an earnest, serious look came
over her face. “He sings many ancient and
beautiful love songs.”
A good chunk of our global culture —
misquoted, revered, decontextualized and
misquoted again, then served up for an entirely
new audience — is, for better or worse, now in
the hands of a generation of Kimberly Tengs in
many lands. Movies, videogames and music are
their currency, streamed into the devices in their
pockets, purses and packs.
It can bind itself to local traditions and flourish,
growing into something fresh and exciting.
Or, commoditized to the nth degree, it could
become the equivalent of putting “Careless
Whisper” on a road-trip playlist — something
decontextualized and irrelevant to anyone’s life
experience anywhere. To the dump indeed.