why is pop writing bad?

yeah i'm still cranky about the barbie take industry

JRennocks via Wikimedia Commons.

1. Almost everybody who writes about culture will write about the popular stuff much more than they write about the opera or Thomas Bernhard.

2. Though not everybody, of course.

3. Furthermore, editors like commissioning on these topics much more. This means there’s always a glut of articles on the popular stuff.

4. As a person with broad but mostly accessible tastes, I benefit from this situation, as I can put on one sort of hat to write about what I guess we could call “high middlebrow” subject matter (NYRB Classics reissues, etc) and then another hat to write about Taylor Swift and Japanese crime fiction and I don’t feel like doing one compromises my ability to do the other.

5. However, most writing about popular culture is bad, even though it’s in demand. Why?

6. First we have to separate out the stuff that wasn’t really ever meant to be good: quick write-ups, puff pieces, that kind of thing. “So And So Released The Jam Of The Season And We’re So Here For It.” This stuf…