Has the Mainstream Run Dry?

By James Poniewozik Sunday, Dec. 21, 2003

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    We'll have the fish, please.

    Finding Nemo was the kind of exception that proves that just when you're ready to declare the mainstream dead, it swims up and bites you on the tush. The year's top-grossing movie was also an example of just what it takes — in a culture broken down by tribes and ages and demographics — to make an across-the-board hit. People flocked to Nemo because it was a good movie, of course. It was moving, it was beautifully animated. And who doesn't like a good ink-spurting joke? But more important, it was about easy-to-agree-with universals: loving your family, learning to live with risks. (It was the sort of movie that, before the statute of limitations expired, we would have called "post-Sept. 11.") And it had a cast whose appeal was not laser-targeted toward young urban males or moms over 40. Black or white, young or old, liberal or conservative, we all feel pretty much the same about fish, except that some of us don't like tartar sauce.

    Other times, though, you don't immediately recognize the voice of the mainstream even when it shows up on your TV and belts out Mack the Knife. Clay Aiken, the skinny, geeky American Idol runner-up who was the year's surprise recording star, was, you might say, so mainstream that he was weird: a straitlaced, smiling, asexual whippet who loved to sing standards. Idol's judges, and record-company execs, doubted that Clay could make it in the pop market of 2003. One multiplatinum CD later — Measure of a Man, so pure it floats — he proved them wrong and showed that in some ways the mainstream is now itself a niche.

    Aiken's sales, by the way, outstripped those of Ruben Studdard, the moon-faced R.-and-B. crooner who won Idol. So who speaks for the mainstream, the TV audience voting with its phones or the music audience voting with its wallets? Is a thing mainstream only to the extent that we're willing to pay money for it?

    Well, that doesn't hurt — this is America. Aikenmania also showed how the culture is increasingly in the hands of nontraditional commercial tastemakers like Wal-Mart. Measure was sold largely to kids and parents in checkout lines — people who might never set foot inside a record store. With almost 3,000 locations in the U.S., Wal-Mart is more of a broadcaster than NBC is. And it's using that power culturally — deciding this year, for instance, to exclude racy "lad" magazines like Maxim from its news racks. Big discounters also helped popularize conservative-pundit books and the Veggie Tales Christian videos. Likewise, Queer Eye brought us together through consumerism: gay or straight, it said, we stood united in our need to blow $40 on a bottle of moisturizer. (The show was perhaps the most visible sign of masstige, the fashion world's rather oxymoronic new term for bringing prestige style to the masses — Isaac Mizrahi at Target, for instance.) The Fab Five made gay culture cross over with promises of bourgeois paradise, just as 50 Cent, Jay-Z and many before them brought hip-hop culture over with tales of bling-bling. Big pimpin', meet big primpin'.

    But wait a second here. Which one is mainstream? The Fab Five, showing up to make over — and showily flirt with — an ex-Marine (who whipped up a lovely souffle)? Or Aiken, who cut the patriotic single God Bless the USA with his Idol mates during the war and strenuously purged sex — any kind of sex — from his music and persona? 50 Cent, who sold more than 6 million copies of Get Rich ("I'm high all the time/I smoke that good s___")? Or Wal-Mart, which carried only the bowdlerized version of his album? The de-religionized spirituality of Mitch Albom's No. 1-selling The Five People You Meet in Heaven? Or the literalistic Christianity of the No. 1-selling thriller Armageddon, from the Left Behind series? Fox News, which carried the flag (in the corner of its screen) for Bush's war? Or the Fox network, which scandalized cultural conservatives with its reality shows and aired The O.C., The Simple Life and Arrested Development, three of 2003's strongest pop-culture jabs at the rich?

    In American culture, as in American politics, it was possible to assemble a case for two entirely different visions of the mainstream: one libertine, irreverent and p.c., the other traditional, devout and PG. It's tempting to borrow the electoral blue-state/red-state template and say there are two mainstreams, equal and opposite — but that beggars the definition of mainstream, no? The year 2003, we've heard, was when the swing voter became irrelevant. It could be that our pop culture too no longer has that swing.

    Unless — pardon me, Carson Kressley, for the pun — it swings both ways.

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