This Culture Machine Kills Fascists.

So we've made it through the entire class and it's inevitable. We need to (once again) evaluate ourselves self-reflexively. What brow are you now that you have thought about it for 14 weeks?

I think there's a reoccurring problem that we (as consumers and defenders of taste) need to come to grips with. Artists don't want to be highbrow, but critics do.

In his discussion of American folk culture resisting the imposition of German Romantic (and dangerously Fascistic) "kultur," Kammen narrates a little story from our old friend Woody Guthrie. Guthrie exemplifies the paradoxes of a modern "folk" artist--incredibly commercially successful, sung in Kindergarten classrooms around the world, and yet connected to the "roots" of some "authentic" Americana. From his popularity we see and outpouring of support for the Tin Pan Alley crowd and protest singers of the sixties, and eventually, the epochal changing of the guard when Bob Dylan sold his soul and "plugged in." A similar kind of seduction to "sell out" took place even earlier, Kammen suggests. He writes that Guthrie "wrote to a friend early in the 1940s, referring to folk singers Pete Seeger and Lee Hays: 'Don't let Pete and Lee go highbrow on you'"...also asking Alan Lomax how "to get some of our upper crusts to listen to the real thing" (Kammen, 43).

This kind of distrust of highbrow art is not limited to folk culture, as we have seen throughout the semester. But I think we need to ask the following question: why can't highbrow/middlebrow/and lowbrow all be authentic elements of American culture?

I can imagine a class where Guthrie could be taught alongside Whitman and Bob Dylan and even Hawthorne and Melville for that matter. Just because Guthrie makes a claim to authenticity (that he can't really fulfill to some because of his commericial success) doesn't mean that he should not be remembered as a central part of our cultural history just like how Whitman was obscure and avant-garde in the 19th century as Kammen also points out.

Quality is not eradicated when we think about the brows, but it is evaluated by different criteria. Guthrie's famous line (later appropriated by Bob Dylan) "Some people can rob with a six gun and others with a fountain pen" needs to be updated for our context. Some people can rob you of an education with a canon and others with a dollar sign. As serious critic of American culture as a whole way of life we need to open ourselves to non-so authentic folk singers, plugged-in rock and rollers and popular artists alike. Can we be highbrow and defend Woody? I think so.