TIME OFF OPENER
I
N 2022, POP CULTURE IS DOING
the most. Consider some of the
most memorable images to come
out of the entertainment indus-
try recently: Mr. Big campily keeling
over on his Peloton in And Just Like
That... Nicole Kidman baring an im-
possible 3 ft. of midriff on the cover of
Vanity Fair. The sight of dopey, meme-
based game show Is It Cake? claiming
the No. 1 slot on Netflix.
Everything is suddenly bigger,
brighter, louder, raunchier. Design-
ers are hawking hot-pink suits, belt-
length skirts, and logo- plastered
handbags. After a boom in scripted
programming, trashy reality TV is
surging. The most salient new sound
in recent years is hyper pop, a dizzy-
ingly hooky, wildly referential micro-
genre that has been described as
“ebullient electro- maximalism.” We
have entered an era of exuberant,
even apocalyptic, bad taste. There is a
youthful element to this bad-taste re-
naissance. Trendspotters have glom-
med on to the Y2K nostalgia and end-
times decadence in Gen Z’s nascent
aesthetic sensibility. But what we’re
witnessing goes far beyond cool teens
and the extremely online to encom-
pass anyone with free time, disposable
income, and internet access.
What we’re dealing with is a full-
blown cultural moment. The 20-
year nostalgia cycle, climate-change
nihilism, information saturation,
streaming- era content overload, and
our collective Long COVID of the soul
have converged in a tidal wave of tacki-
ness. What TikTok teens, white col-
lar workers marooned in home offices,
and the gatekept super-rich all have
in common is the kind of physical iso-
lation, if not the sense of doom, that
makes a person desperate just to feel
something. And nothing kills numb-
ness like a sensory onslaught: color,
sound, hedonism, melodrama, sleaze.
Yet what’s remarkable about this par-
ticular pendulum swing is that after
centuries of wrestling with hierarchies
of taste, the cultural stigma that has al-
ways come with indulging in bad taste
has disappeared.
BAD TASTE CAN BE TOUGH to define,
because standards are changing all the
time. Rock snobbery would’ve baffled
1950s parents scandalized by Elvis’
hips. Such evolution is the result of
constant, generational negotiations—
ones that intensified in the 20th cen-
tury, as rapid advancements in tech-
nology yielded radio, records, and TV,
which could bring a night at the opera
to the masses but more often cranked
out cliché- ridden love songs.
During the prosperous postwar
years, as college attendance skyrock-
eted and the middle class swelled,
adjudicating hierarchies of taste be-
came something of a parlor game. In
1949, a rubric in Life ranked “everyday
tastes” from highbrow (Eames furni-
ture, ballet) to lowbrow (“mail-order
overstuffed chair,” westerns). High-
minded critics took aim at culture as
product, but defenders of popular
tastes emerged. Maybe the manufac-
turers of mass media prioritized prof-
its over art, but art made its way intosome of their wares anyway. “Trash
has given us an appetite for art,”
Pauline Kael noted in her snobbery-
shattering 1969 essay “Trash, Art,
and the Movies.” In other words, the
scrappy subversiveness of B movies
can ignite a passion for more sophisti-
cated cinematic subversion.
Around the same time, hierarchies
of taste were muddied by other divi-
sions within society. Boomers raised
on rock ’n’ roll anointed the Beatles
as geniuses. The Western canon faced
scrutiny within academia for its white-
ness and maleness. John Waters el-
evated the practice of self- consciously
reveling in bad taste, a.k.a. camp, to
an art form. Andy Warhol enshrined
Campbell’s and Brillo in galleries, and
60 years later we’re still arguing over
whether he was celebrating or critiqu-
ing mass- market consumerism.
What’s become ever more appar-
ent is that there’s no such thing as82 TIME May 23/May 30, 2022