There’s really no such thing as a unifying mass entertainment or pop culture anymore, certainly not like in the days of the Beatles, Elvis, Casablanca, etc. Audiences for all forms of media have become so fragmented and self-contained that modern “classics” are known only to aficionados rather than to everyone like classics of yesteryear, and as such do not get absorbed into mass pop culture, becoming common touchstones or references.
Even in the eighties, this was different, and your average person has still heard “Born in the U.S.A.” or knows Madonna. Now, it seems to be totally different - every audience is so fragmented that knowledge and canon never seem to coalesce on a mass level.
What are the implications of this?
I saw your point but I eated it.
Can has pop culture? Have you considered that you’re becoming an old person and are essentially making a “Kids these days with that noise they call music!” type argument?
I think the fragmentation you see is the tendency of large media companies to grab $random.attractive.person run them through photoshop and a vocoder and call them the Best Thing Evar. Once they stop bringing in the dollars, repeat with a new Best Thing Evar.
Unless the top-down culture conglomerates buy enough laws to persist in their irrelevancy, they’ll go away eventually. The path from the bottom-up makes a more durable fan base that’s never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around, or desert you largely because you actually have to have a skill worth celebrating for people to realize you should be a celebrity.