You're not cool for hating The Beatles
When does “popular” equal “good”?
Since I am often what might be called a “negative Nancy,” I decided to use my post today to complain about other negative Nancy types, but in a positive, constructive way. Hopefully that makes sense.
There is a type of person who thrives on hating what is popular. You have almost certainly come across this sort of person. Many of these pop up as detractors of popular authors many Christians take as the pinnacle of literary achievement. “Tolkien is overrated,” they might sneer, “there are far better fantasy authors out there. And don’t get me started on C.S. Lewis.” These types are not exclusive to Christian circles, however; they seem to concentrate around discussions of anything of sufficient popularity. My personal least favorite example of this is the kind of person who somehow always shows up in internet discussions of The Beatles to remind everyone that they think The Beatles are actually horrible musicians who wrote silly songs for people with no taste.
These people are, to put it succinctly, the worst. They seem to derive great joy from playing the role of what might be called a “hater,” existing only to deride those things that they think are “pop” enough to merit their disdain (ironically, some of these same people are themselves fans of things popular enough to also earn the ire of other buzzkills. One Beatles hater I knew for many years never made it past Pink Floyd in expanding his taste in rock music).
But you know how insufferable these people are, so I don’t need to belabor the point. I want to consider here the possibility that they aren’t just annoying, but are actually wrong on a more fundamental level. That is, I want to argue that many wildly popular things are popular because they are good. They have achieved acclaim and celebrity status and make it on every list of recommendations of books, movies, or whatever because of their quality and their ability to win admirers and obsessive fans.
Now, I obviously have to be careful here. Popularity is not cleanly determinative of quality, or else I would be forced to concede that the Twilight and Diary of a Wimpy Kid series are in the top 20 best book series of all time, a claim that would strain credulity. But among that same list of bestselling series, you can find several that undoubtably would crack the top lists of any discerning critic.
There is obviously much dreck, or “slop” as we’re fond of saying now, among the shelves of what’s most popular at the bookstore. Similarly, the top 10 most streamed pieces of media on Netflix will include things like “Love Island” and other such garbage, and thrift stores are full of overproduced art by Thomas Kinkade and the like. But if you dig a little deeper in each of these creative domains, you will find something remarkable: the most popular, acclaimed, recommended books, films, and art all have something to commend them to careful readers, viewers, and art appreciators. Dickens and Dostoevsky just are that good, Scorsese and Kubrick just did make excellent films, Monet and Rembrandt just are artistic masters. Their popularity reflects real quality, their appeal is earned.
There are plentiful examples of the formula I’m describing, where something of quality explodes in popularity precisely because of that quality. Against detractors, I would provide as examples the success of The Hobbit and its successor The Lord of the Rings, both in market-shaping contemporary success and enduring appeal. Think, too, of some of the best examples we have of songwriting in the 1960s and 70s: before their untimely breakup, Simon & Garfunkel first released what would briefly become the best-selling album of all time, Bridge Over Troubled Water. I defy anyone to deny the poetic lyricism and angelic voice of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel (respectively) their award for merit. That artistic wizardry eventually earned them widespread acclaim, leading to their success as one of the biggest and best-selling acts of their era.
It is undeniably true that various forces (market and otherwise) prevent much of quality from rising to the level of popularity. Simon & Garfunkel nearly fizzled out before their time, until their soulful, folksy song originally titled The Sounds of Silence was remixed with drums and electric guitar and rereleased as the familiar version of Sound of Silence known today. It is unfortunate that quality does not cleanly lead to success in all cases, and that some aspect of popular appeal might need to be intentionally undertaken. But neither the fact that good things sometimes lie undiscovered nor the fact that some good things require appealing tweaks to reach the zenith of their popularity undermine the idea that many things gain a popular audience in proportion to their quality.
The topic of this essay was brought to mind recently by a note I saw on Substack, where someone was reading Don DeLillo’s White Noise and was sort of taken by how fun, funny, and engrossing the book was. It’s easy to think, the sentiment seems to be, that books that perennially land on “best 100 novels of all time” lists are maybe being carried along by sheer force of their own reputation but are actually quite boring to read when it comes down to it (some people have this experience with Dostoevsky, and to them I say: try again). I had the exact same experience, as I just read White Noise myself for the first time, after acquiring various copies over the years and always intending to read it. Indeed, it was hilarious, and to my amateur eye it was well-deserving of the acclaim I have always heard for it.
Though I often write negatively here, I have endeavored in recent years to be less of a “hater” and to lean, in many instances, towards the injunction to “let people enjoy things.” This doesn’t mean being unable to criticize works of poor quality, but it does mean making a more serious effort to understand why other people enjoy things I don’t, and perhaps to consider that I am not the final arbiter of taste and quality. It may be that things I do not actively enjoy nevertheless have much to recommend them.
I want to return to C.S. Lewis, a frequent target of those intellectual amoebas whose favorite pastime is mocking the pastimes of others. Lewis is probably best known for his Chronicles of Narnia, a series which makes that list of bestselling series I mentioned earlier, the first book of which has by best accounting sold north of 85 million copies since its publication. This rich, layered series that bears reading by the young and old alike. If you think it’s overrated, you’re simply wrong.
But rather than defend that claim, I want to focus on a less-read part of Lewis’s corpus, a little academic volume called An Experiment in Criticism. This short book was very shaping for me. There are portions of it that may actually cut against some of my intuitions here, but in some ways I’ve found it quite helpful. While many critics of literature are often obsessed with dividing literature into ”highbrow” and “lowbrow” categories, the former deserving of respect and serious treatment, the latter fit only for the masses, Lewis instead suggests that critics can approach texts and the evaluation of their quality by a different metric, namely by what kind of reading they can bear. Is this the type of text that opens up under examination, becomes better on each re-read, clears new intellectual pathways for the reader each time they encounter it, chew on it, exegete it, and compare it to other great works of literature? Or is it the type of literature where, once read, its use is somewhat exhausted?
We can tell which type some book is not by some sort of “objective” evaluative criticism, something that ostensibly gives us rankings of the quality of a work and an activity which Lewis roundly critiques, but instead by looking at what sort of readers are drawn to the work. One type of reader, those who make up the group Lewis calls “the Few,” enjoy literature for its own sake, savor it as a whole, tasting the words and the rhythm and the story and all parts of the work, returning to the same book time and again. These discerning readers will certainly read some bad works, but will devote their time and attention largely to works that hold up to that sort of savoring. The second type of reader, those who make up the group Lewis calls “the Many,” are those analogous to people who fill their walls with art to take up the blank spaces, not for any merit of the pieces of art chosen. They read to kill time, on a train, or to assuage boredom, but instead as a sort of utilitarian exercise. A mark of a good book then seems to be that it draws readers from the former group, though obviously any sufficiently popular work will draw readers from both groups.
I’m not doing justice to the nuances of Lewis’s argument here, but allow me to abuse him for my own purposes. Returning to the list of most popular book series I mentioned earlier, there are examples there worth reading that fall into both categories of book, that attract both types of reader. I recall as a child being obsessed with the Magic Treehouse series, devouring them as quickly as my library could obtain them. I don’t recall, however, ever revisiting those books, and I don’t imagine I would have “gotten much out of it” if I did. In contrast, I lost count of the number of times I read The Hobbit before I turned 13, and continue to revisit it today. The same is true, incidentally, of Lewis’s Narnia, a series that only becomes richer with age. There are, at the same time, series on that list that I imagine almost exclusively attracting readers from what Lewis calls “The Many.” I don’t imagine, for example, that many literary imaginations are wasting time with 50 Shades of Gray.
I suppose my point with all of this is to encourage the snobbish among us to reconsider a reflexive urge to deride the popular, assuming that popularity is a measure of mass appeal as opposed to quality. While it can certainly be such, sometimes popularity is earned.
I love you for this.