Cultural Ground Zero

Often of late this blog has turned an unflinching eye to the rapidly accelerating meltdown of popular Western culture.

By now we all know that movies are watered-down retreads mostly produced for overseas markets by people who neither understand nor care to understand their former core audience.

Top 40 radio is a wasteland of overproduced, oversampled prefab corporate drek that's aggressively empty of substance but is designed by behavioral psychologists to get that nothing stuck in your head.

Comic books--one of only four original American art forms--shamble on long after the speculator crash that killed them: useful to their multinational conglomerate masters only as movie IP farms. For now.

The decline has been underway for a long time--at least since the Commie infiltration of science fiction back in the 30s. But ongoing discussions with others who've noticed pop culture's terminal descent have led me to ponder when the West's cultural decay reached critical mass.

In the 80s, only pearl-clutchers blustering about satanic messages hidden in Ozzie records thought civilization was going downhill. The 90s began with a fresh influx of optimism when the wall came down and for a minute it looked like we might get our bright shiny Star Trek future after all.

The speed with which the optimism bubble burst must have set some kind of record. I won't get into the possible causes here--though the Bush and Clinton dynasties almost certainly bear some of the blame. My purpose today is to identify Ground Zero: the exact point where Western pop culture exploded to leave us picking up the shattered pieces ever since.

Obtaining the answer required only a moment's reflection. It occurred to me that I knew exactly when, as commenter JD Cowan phrased it, the culture "froze" before melting into a stagnant puddle. I lived through it, and in retrospect, I knew the moment when it came--even if I didn't want to admit it to myself at the time.

Pop culture ground zero was 1997.

That was when the sputtering engine of creativity stalled, and it happened almost exactly at the beginning of that year. The dividing line between the last semblance of a healthy culture and the subsequent smoking crater is that sharply defined.

Let's recap.

Music

The fascinating--and now tragic--career of Irish rock band U2 serves as an effective microcosm of unfulfilled 80s optimism. After the band came within a hair of producing the next Sergeant Pepper's in 1991 (appropriately enough, inspired by a trip to post-wall Berlin) the music world eagerly anticipated what would surely be U2's earth-shattering redefinition of rock music as we knew it. The fans held their breath and waited.

And got a half-assed offering of scraps from the prior album.

And waited.

And got a bizarre collection of ambient tracks written for real and fake movies.

And waited...

...until early February of 1997 when the first single from the band's forthcoming album Pop hit record store shelves.

And it was OK. While Pop is hardly the disaster that tin-eared critics make it out to be, the rushed, unfocused effort fell far short of the musical revelation that many had been expecting for six years. Since then, U2 has fallen into the trap of trying to be what they think everyone thinks they should be--which pretty much sums up the crisis in popular music.

Comics

The American comic book industry had already been moribund for a while when 1997 rolled around, but that year in comics is remarkable for being a time when nothing worthwhile happened.

The formerly dominant Batman film franchise slumped to an inglorious end with the atrocious Batman and Robin. Despite occasional rumblings of James Cameron's involvement with a nebulous Spider-Man project, the industry would have to wait five more years for the next film franchise that would reignite public interest in superhero movies. And leave comic publishers forever beholden to Hollywood.On the business front, 1997 was the year that Diamond cinched its monopoly over comic book distribution. The resulting mini command economy has forced more and more comic book shops out of business with each passing year.

Speaking of which...

Movies

1997 began with a film event that would portend an even more ominous trend than the aforementioned Batman and Robin. The Star Wars Trilogy Special Editions were released starting in January and continuing monthly through March. Thus began the cynical strip-mining of a 70s space opera that until recently was the only remaining cultural touchstone that bound the atomized American populace.

Everybody likes to point out how the warning signs of what awaited us in the prequels were all there in the Special Editions. But now another, more distant, red flag pops into focus: the fact that George Lucas doesn't particularly care about the iconic saga whose artistic success he personally had little to do with. If he was willing to shoehorn in Special Jabba the Hutt and a CG Muppet dance number, we should've known he'd eventually sell out to the highest bidder.

In short, the bastardization of Star Wars that plagues us to this day began in 1997.

Video Games

On the exact same day that moviegoers first saw Greedo shooting first, a video game that drew more than once from the Star Wars well was also released. That game, Final Fantasy VII, would go on to become the most overrated JRPG of all time.

I realize that FFVII has a whole generation of staunch adherents who take deep umbrage at the merest suggestion that the RPG which, for many of them, was their first (condolences), ain't the best thing since indoor plumbing. To them, I have one question:

Have you played FFVII lately?

Not the mobile version, not the remake, and not the international PC version. The original North American Play Station release.

If so, did you make it all the way to the end?

Me, either.

Final Fantasy VII spawned the unfortunate trend of JRPG-as-Hollywood-blockbuster that gave us interminable cinema scenes that gobbled up disc space while the games themselves stagnated. The bursting of that bubble killed JRPGs for a generation. Gee...that sounds familiar.

Also familiar: FFVII is about to become fodder for a series of remakes.

Conclusion
There can be no doubt. Western pop culture froze as solid as a gas station burrito on the summit of K2 at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 1997. The corpsesickle has since blasted into the ground like a Siberian comet strike. It's up to artists like the up-and-coming generation of creators I proudly stand among to build something new in the ruins.

...a way out of the filth and nihilism that seems to plague so much of modern fiction.