I don’t know if there’s been a loss of a famous person of this magnitude before…certainly not in my lifetime nor, I’d be willing to bet, for at least the generation before me.
Dolly Parton’s death is so difficult and weird to conceptualize because it seemed she was always around and always would be. She is the only American — not even famous American, just American citizen period — I can think of who was omnipresent and if not universally adored, then universally respected by just about everyone from every walk of life. Her impact as a singer, songwriter, businesswoman, actor, philanthropist, celebrity, and general public do-gooder for more than 50 years was remarkable and inspiring on a titanic level. It was long accepted as a cultural stronghold, as permanent, as fact. Whether or not it was fair to project our desperate hopes for unity onto her, we did. No matter how divided we were, we could at least all agree on Dolly Parton, our national treasure, our glue.
I don’t want to add to the flood of tributes and in memoriams that focus mainly on the great things Dolly created in her lifetime, as warranted and lovely and moving as they are, and as much as I’m in the same boat, remembering and feeling through my own associations with her music and what she meant to me as a strong-willed woman. There is less discussed but crucial layer underneath that interests me even more: the loss of Dolly Parton as a monocultural symbol.
Lately I’ve been angry at the powers that be for making Jane Fonda and Carol Burnett write way too many Instagram tribute posts for their fallen friends and fellow superstars — I say this partially in jest, but there’s a true sadness and frustration there. It feels like the end of an era.
Particularly in losing Dolly, I’ve realized for the first time that the deeper layer of sadness I feel when an especially prominent musician, artist, or public figure dies, the ache in my chest that just hurts more than usual, is grief over the death of American popular culture, our monoculture. I think we’ve been silently feeling it for the last several years, the whispers getting louder. And I’m not sure if we are prepared for this kind of national heartbreak and splintering to pick up pace and continue with seemingly no consolation.
Monoculture comes from the mass recognition and acknowledgment of defining icons, images, and events in global or national history. It’s the idea of everyone experiencing the same cultural events at the same time and thus understanding the same references. In America, this has been a central part of our social fabric since the rise of radio and TV in the 1950s and 60s, with waves in the decades after: MTV in the 80s and 90s, the new Golden Age of Television in the 2000s. From mid-20th century on, many big artists of the Baby Boomer generation were essentially the architects of Western pop culture as we still know it today, defining entire genres and creating the unforgettable moments that built our iconography.
To me, losing Dolly Parton is a stark reminder of the past, present, and future losses of our true cultural vanguards, the ones who were and are the reference, lest we forget…and I worry we are.
Or maybe not forgetting, but certainly taking for granted the massive scale of their stardom and unique impact because they’ve always been around, on our radios and televisions, in the magazines and our everyday gossip. But we’ve already lost a good number of icons of modern pop music and culture…long ago untimely deaths like Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia, but recent tragedies, too: Michael Jackson, Prince, David Bowie. Many are thankfully still with us but won’t be for much longer: the two remaining Beatles, Bob Dylan, Berry Gordy, Diana Ross, Elton John, Stevie Nicks, just to name a few.
Over time, these artists have transcended their celebrity; beyond record-breaking hits or albums, they have helped create, and often become themselves, seminal moments. For example, everybody — well, I would hope everybody! — knows Bob Mackie’s Dodgers Stadium concert outfit for Elton John, his inimitable custom designs for Carol Burnett and Cher (another legend of this ilk and age gone this week – rest in peace and sequins, Bob, you genius!). Everybody understands the significance of the Motown Machine. Everybody knows Dolly Parton. These are essential ingredients of the musical and cultural stew we’re still swimming in. And I feel deeply distraught to lose Dolly, to keep losing these artists, because there seems to be no modern day equivalent or signs of monoculture continuing into the future.
Has all of Western pop culture been created already? Will there ever be anything truly distinct or groundbreaking again? I don’t know, but I ponder it almost obsessively (if you do as well, I encourage you to look into Mark Fisher’s work and the “slow cancellation of the future”).
I personally feel like new cultural churn stopped in the mid-2010s. The concept of a singular song of the summer, viral hits that took over the nation like Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” dance video trends like the Harlem shake, or novel celebrity group hangs like the famous Oscars selfie, were all last gasps before our digital and cultural separation via algorithms really set in.
Now we live in a nostalgia-addicted culture, one that has been obsessed with ”Y2K fashion” for the last 5 years and where a lot of new music takes from sounds that were first popularized in the 70s-90s (not that I don’t often enjoy it!). These days, most “moments” at award shows are a hot, young celebrity wearing an archival designer outfit that someone else made iconic at least two decades ago. It’s a boring, performative nostalgia based in recreation and pastiche and not spurring innovation. Who knows, perhaps time will reveal a new crop of larger-than-life stars who are bold and exciting and doing things never done before…but right now I sense that singular pop culture is eroding and leaving a vacuum in its wake.
I don’t want this lament to turn into a “back in my day, we walked three miles in the snow to get to school” thing, because I am only freshly 30 years old. But that should tell you just how quickly American monoculture has changed and begun to disappear!
And it’s not just evident through music or a celebrity’s death…I notice it most often when I’m in casual conversation with someone and I mention a very famous and acclaimed actor that they have no knowledge of (maybe they know the face but not the name, sometimes neither). Or they mention some new film or TV show I’ve never heard of, or vice versa. We all use different streaming services to watch our own programs but seldom watch the same thing at the same time anymore, unless it’s the Super Bowl. It’s a far cry from the throngs of people watching the Seinfeld series finale together in Times Square.
Another sure sign of our dying monoculture is the loss of re-run and movie premiere culture. I was born after Full House went off the air, but I absorbed the entire show through Nickelodeon re-runs, as did my peers, so we grew up knowing the same episodes, catchphrases, and references as the adults in our lives. Going to the midnight premiere of the final Harry Potter films, parties with friends to watch the newest Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM!) at “8/7 central” on the big TV at someone’s house…these were monocultural events!
I don’t think this is an entirely inevitable result of generational differences — after all, Americans of every generation know Dolly Parton because her star touched nearly every aspect of culture over several decades. I was too young to watch The Sopranos when it originally aired, but I remember that the iconic final scene was the talk of the town the day after the series finale and is still relished by fans today. I hadn’t seen the show but I still knew enough to know it was a huge television and cultural moment, and that it helped re-popularize Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which the radio stations then played multiple times a day for the rest of my middle school years. (The use of the song in the pilot of Glee just two years later made matters worse, but don’t get me started on that.)
I believe that the common knowledge of monoculture gives us space to get curious and engage on our own and contribute back to the culture in a richer way. Our relative experiences to and with the celebrities, the music, the shows and films becoming one through conversation with fellow fans or shared entertainment like a concert is a beautiful thing. It breaks my heart that this gets more lost as the phenomenon of guaranteed mass exposure goes away and is replaced by hyper-personalization.
Our media and cultural landscape has fractured since social media became the dominant form of consumption. Everyone has their individual music, film, and television tastes and can now choose to stay in their tailored media streams to no end. Sure, there are countless cultural moments we may see on our feeds at the same time, but we experience them alone and with varying degrees of interest, choosing to watch or scroll on in an instant. Because of this, it’s becoming less common to make a pop culture reference with the implicit understanding that the other person knows exactly what you’re talking about. The once-firm collective foundation of pop culture is now shaky ground riddled with fault lines and islands unto ourselves.
That is in part how you end up with scenes like this, of people in the crowd at Coachella standing still as robots when Sabrina Carpenter brought Madonna on stage as a surprise guest. This video saddens me.
Their phones were thrust in the air, so they must have known enough about Madonna to know that they were observing a “moment” and it would make for great social media content later. But FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE, WHERE IS THE FUN?! How and why did barely anybody move during “Like A Prayer,” one of Madonna’s all-time hits, one of the biggest songs of the ’80s, and a cultural moment-maker itself with its “controversial” music video that drew the fury of the Catholic Church? Is it possible they truly did not know the song, have never belted the words at the top of their lungs or felt it move through their body and soul? I can’t imagine!
The other potential factor at play is that in the absence of MTV and radio dominance, perhaps we just don’t educate each other enough on these pop stars and their icon status or big cultural moments in our circles…if this is the case, parents, grandparents, older relatives and family friends, I beg: PLEASE play the songs, pass your favorite cultural lore down like other stories, and teach your children well! If you ask me, the simple joy and comfort of knowing your neighbor, partner, relative, friend, or coworker knows exactly why Madonna is one of the Greats should be guaranteed forever.
I’m not saying we should force-feed every member of the population the defining music of the 60s-80s, as nice as that would be, or reruns of Friends (which would actually be my own personal hell…no, thanks), and the era of cable and premium TV with the same set of channels is clearly gone. There are benefits to the endless choice that the new infinite media landscape enables, like being able to discover your own old and new favorite films and musicians, developing and indulging your own tastes by consuming whatever you love most whenever you want. But I wish the domination of smartphones and streaming didn’t have to come at the cost of our collective experience of American culture.
No matter what people say, I firmly believe pop culture is not frivolous — it is a point of true connection! It meant something when the vast majority of the country, millions of people, tuned in to watch the same program at the same time or knew all the same chart-topping songs and artists through radio and TV. It demonstrated the staying power of stars and the real value of their work through the tests of time and trends. Mass media creates shared understanding and helps build a sort of cultural shorthand. And through her music and philosophies and life’s work in the public eye, “Dolly” became shorthand for generosity, big personality, grit, wit, take no s***, and a fierce love and acceptance of all.
I don’t know what, if anything, can be done to remedy this, save a sudden and significant period of new pop cultural innovation…but even so, the environment has completely changed. We can’t rewind to a time before the advent and domination of social media and streaming platforms. All I know is there will damn sure never be another Dolly Parton. And we will continue to lose the most notable artists and creators of our monoculture. For many reasons, her passing the most recent among them, it feels like American pop culture as we knew it and lived it for the last half-century is quickly on its way out.
I don’t know what will be carried on in the light of a brand new day, but I hope there is someone or something new and positive that can bring us together even a small fraction of the way Dolly did.
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