I love pop culture.

Sure, I’m biased.  How could I not be? After all, this is the only culture I’ve ever actually known.

But still, allow me the ethno-centric space to proudly proclaim: pop culture is the most amazing cultural force the world has ever seen.

Never in history have we had such a comprehensive reflection of the human condition—whether you’d like to wade in the bubble-gum shallows or dive into the deepest esoteric waters, pop culture has it all, and it’s all waiting for you.

Pop culture does not seek to transcend the superficial, it revels in it.  It is mysticism wrapped in cellophane, sprouting from seeds planted deep in the heart of the American Tantra, and blossoming in recent decades as the world’s first truly global culture.

The ancients have descended from Olympus and taken up residence in the Hollywood Hills, trading their togas for the new regalia: blue jeans, black leather jackets, and black sunglasses—the perennial vestments of cool.  Make no mistake: these archetypal deities are alive and well in the 21st century, they’re just a little bit harder to see.  The gods of pop continue to shape our world and our thoughts, invisible patterns shining through a perpetual parade of actors, actresses, and musicians, enveloping us in a warm blanket of shared symbolism that ensures that we will always have something to talk about.

I wasn’t always so in love with pop culture.  I used to resent being born into an American mythos that seemed to me to have about as much depth as a thinly stretched sheet of saran wrap.  This was especially true as a younger man, back when it was more difficult to tease my own sense of identity apart from the media I surrounded myself with, afflicted with the same false sense of “hipper-than-thou” elitism that seems to plague so many immature aficionados.  I would stubbornly ignore and condescend pretty much anything that got pulled into the currents of the pop mainstream, turning my attention instead to the sounds of the underground—sounds that I would not only find to be far more interesting (which they were), but would also assist my own desperate struggle to feel cool (which they did), while convincing myself that the underground was somehow separate from the rest of pop culture and safely quarantined from the candy-coated surfaces of the mainstream (which it wasn’t).

But eventually, my tireless search for the ever-elusive “cool” began to flip itself inside-out, beginning in my late twenties when I discovered my new obsession with hip hop and the art of the DJ.

When I acquired my first set of turntables, I was almost immediately confronted with my own naive elitism: “I’m only going to play integral music,” I told myself. Well, it only took a day or two to find the five-or-so albums that could even come close to meeting this nobly closed-minded standard, and it didn’t take much longer before I realized that there was something fundamentally flawed in my own aesthetic sensibilities.

I eventually began to realize that it’s not so much the depth of the actual artistic expression that matters, but the depth of authenticity behind the expression that ultimately makes me shake my ass into oblivion.  This was the opening I needed, through which my own palette of artistic influences and inspirations would expand until it covered all space and all time.  The relentless quest for the sort of exclusivity I needed to prop up my own sense of separateness finally began to quiet, and a deep yearning for inclusivity began to trickle through.  I no longer wanted to play integral music; I wanted to play music integrally.

Pop culture—this unholy union of capitalism, mass production, and artistic passion—suddenly revealed her true form to me, whispered her secrets into my ear, and showed me how to find limitless beauty in even the most superficial drips of gloss.

I often say that if understanding the depths and patterns of growth explored by integral theory doesn’t help you love more of the world, you’re obviously doing it wrong.

And it is as true for art as it is for human psychology.

If your own elite sense of aesthetics doesn’t help you see more beauty in the world, you’re doing it wrong. After all, the superficial is not the enemy of the beautiful—it is beauty in its most accessible form.

But God knows that doesn’t make it any prettier….

Related:

dj rekluse Music Page
(tons of free dj mixes)


The Church of Rock

Every now and again, pop culture is forced to reinvent itself. Like an epic drama among Hindu deities, our collective tastes are born, destroyed, and reborn again, swinging like a massive pendulum from one aesthetic extreme to the other. As a new cultural niche becomes more and more popularized, what typically begins as fierce artistic independence eventually devolves into reckless overindulgence, and creative novelty slowly bleeds away until all that is left is a formulaic husk used to manufacture tomorrow’s next fads. It is usually at this point, when a particular scene becomes so over-saturated that it can no longer support the weight of its own excess, that the entire scene will die an often-humiliating death, bloated and alone on an unflushed toilet.

In the 1980’s, the music scene in America was dominated by the glut and theatrics of “glam metal.” For nearly 10 years, most of popular music was defined by sex, drugs, and machismo-in-drag, and an entire generation of youth nearly lost themselves within a cloud of hairspray. There was a void in the cultural heart of the musical mainstream that was dying to be filled—an utter lack of artistic interiority, emotional depth, and authenticity. Untold millions were craving artistic substance, and were only offered artificial decadence. Read the rest of this entry

Our consciousness is inextricable from our environment.  Colors, angles, textures, and lights all conspire to sway our moods and shape our experiences; molding our conscious and unconscious minds according to the prevailing social norms and cultural trends of the time.  We can feel this every time we walk into a room, a very subtle but noticeable reaction to our surroundings—perhaps a sense of calm and spaciousness, or of creativity and energetic vibrancy, or of anxiety and claustrophobia.  You can feel this right now as you read this, your immediate habitat inescapably affecting the sound, feel, and meaning of every word.  There is no simple mathematical equation to make sense of the connection between consciousness and environment, as the same surroundings can elicit entirely different reactions from psyche to psyche, culture to culture.  Adding to the complexity, we often surprise ourselves by naturally surrounding ourselves with environs that dramatically contrast our interior states:

“Very often people think that people are like the environments that they choose to build or go to.  But it’s not so much that we are like them, it’s more that these things capture our aspirations.  So the person that lives in a minimalist New York loft probably isn’t a very calm person—that’s why they need the loft so badly!  The person who builds in a very gaudy and expensive way, it’s not so much that this person feels rich—in fact they feel very poor, that’s why they had to go in for all this conspicuous display.  So there’s kind of an element of opposites at play whenever you look at people’s tastes.” -Alain de Botton Read the rest of this entry

From indigenous shamans invoking the elements through rhythm and dance, to the ancient cult of Pythagoras seeking the ever-elusive “harmony of the spheres,” to Sufi dervishes whirling their way to enlightenment, to the hallowed tones of sacred hymns echoing through secluded monasteries—all throughout history, music has always been an important part of spiritual life. It has been used as an instrument of worship, appreciation, and fellowship; a channel for inspiration and illumination; and a gateway to both sensual embodiment as well as radical self-transcendence. Music has often been thought to mirror the elusive mysteries of creation itself: all melodies reflecting the mathematical patterns of the universe, all rhythms echoing the primordial heartbeat of God.

Such metaphors, however, seem to find little resonance in today’s world. Magical and mythical approaches to reality have been largely supplanted by the skeptical gaze of rationality, while purely metaphysical descriptions of existence have been almost entirely deconstructed by postmodern thought. A great many people have abandoned the myths of the past—exchanging blind faith for calculated reason, agrarian religion for industrial secularism, and the certitude of moral absolutism for the shifting sands of moral relativism. None of this is bad in itself—quite the contrary, it is an indication that the evolutionary engine continues to chug along in this corner of the universe, continuously adding new layers of depth and complexity to the spectra of consciousness, culture, and technology. Read the rest of this entry

Deconstructing Niggy

There is much talk in America these days around the issue of race. With Barack Hussein Obama as the elected President of the United States, we have begun to collectively reflect upon our relationship with race and racism—and the conversation seems to have polarized into two radically different positions. On one hand, Obama’s viability as a presidential candidate across a wide range of demographics prompts liberals to proudly declare that, finally, we live in a “post-racial” America, no longer tethered to the racial divisiveness that has infected our political systems since the country’s inception. On the other hand, a great number of people are still asking the question “are we ready for a black president?,” which itself seems to indicate that a genuine “post-racial” America is still on the horizon of human evolution. The truth, of course, lies somewhere between, or beyond, these two extremes—we have certainly made some tremendous strides in our collective attitudes toward race and racism, but we cannot confuse our accomplishments with outright victory. There can be no singular victory over racism, but like peace itself, it is a victory that must be won again and again, perpetually into the future. Read the rest of this entry