Middlebrow art

Glee, the Twilight soundtrack, and the streaming economy

I wrote an essay for Teen Vogue in 2019 about how Glee gave me an education in American music (funnily enough, it was the first time Claire ever edited me and the beginning of our friendship). When I read that essay now, all I can think about is how I was a worse writer back then. I was still finding my voice as a writer, but I think the point I was trying to make is still salient: middlebrow contemporary art is a port to discover other art, older art, niche art, weird art. And hopefully then, to discover our actual taste — to stumble upon things, to understand why we are pulled in certain directions and why we liked that original middlebrow thing to begin with. 

An easily accessible piece of art leads you somewhere else. This is true about any creative expression: fashion, cinema, books, photography, even senses of humor. You watch Twilight, you listen to the soundtrack, you find bands you’ve never heard of before, bands you’d maybe never hear otherwise. I used to become obsessed with artists and look up the people who inspired and influenced their sound and then become obsessed with those influences. Right now, most artists seeing success in the streaming economy all have the same influences, in part because the For You Page has kind of made it clear that they have to. Middlebrow art can now only help you discover more of the same stuff.

I think about this a lot as I’m experiencing what is probably a universal late-twenties crotchetiness over how difficult, or at least how different, that sense of discovery is now. Everything is algorithmic, and while I don’t wanna say that nothing new is getting discovered, it’s certainly true that under this framework, discoverability is most often awarded to sameness. Same sounds, same styles, same aesthetics. If you’re a young artist, the best way to make art is to make it for the explore page, not for a real audience. People will get a bit defensive when you say that Spotify playlists are built algorithmically, and that the low-key new indie darling they just discovered was selected for them by the machine learning tool employed by a corporation; all their friends, fellow unique-taste-havers as well, are discovering the same thing. 

I think the reason that preserving that middlebrow mechanism for discovery feels important to me is because it was my way into the arts, and there’s a part of me that wonders if I ever would’ve gotten here without it, if my child-self would’ve been eaten whole by TikTok. My parents were not artists or writers, and I didn’t grow up with much art exposure from them, and I wonder whose journeys to art will be left out in a creative economy that follows such a script. I wonder if caring about niche art will one day be considered elitist and class-privileged, if the only people with weird and interesting points of view will be people who’ve always had access to them, people whose parents are artists or who grow up in arts capitals. That pool alone limits what new ideas can be possible.

I wonder what the new mechanism for discovery will be. I mean, for every 10-year-old in Sephora, there is a 10-year-old freak of nature who is bored of it, feels shut out by it, and is dying to find a movie that makes them feel alive and understood for the first time. I do feel really heartened by the fact that old music is getting rediscovered because of covers and soundtracks, like “Running Up That Hill” in Stranger Things, “Murder On The Dancefloor'' in Saltburn, or even “Dreams” in Derry Girls. The rediscovery of those songs feels like receiving inheritance. Crucially, those songs are the result of IRL curation — real people in real rooms selecting music that fits and magnifies a story. To me, that shares an ethos with Glee.

So culture is finding its stage again. I want to have faith that people, for the rest of time, will be just as curious, just as bored by monotony, and that human curation, in some form or another, won’t disappear. Younger generations aren’t mythically different, as hysteria likes to suggest, but the world they’re adapting to is drastically different. The thing I’m hopeful about is that new things will find a way to see the light of day. A while back, I saw a girl, funnily enough on TikTok, talk about how artists with hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify are often having a hard time selling out venues, but artists in smaller scenes with lower online listenership are regularly selling out these rooms. I couldn’t find the video, and she didn’t mention who these artists are, so it’s hard for me to fact check that, but the idea sounds kind of right (or at least I want it to.) New things are still happening, and they’re being found. I love the idea that while the mainstream happens online, subculture is happening outside.