Some twenty years ago, the American sociologist Robert Wuthnow found in an opinion survey that his subjects consistently expressed extraordinarily conflicting attitudes toward money, proclaiming in one breath that Americans are too materialistic, and then in the next breath unashamedly affirming money's central importance, and wishing they had more of it.Footnote ¹ At the time, Wuthnow argued that these strikingly contradictory results probably reflected something in the national mood during a time of economic stagnation. But I think we are safe in guessing that his findings are not too different from what a similar survey of Americans would find at almost any time in the recent past. The ambivalences he detected in his survey have about them the ring of truth, the feel of something enduring. Even conspicuous comets of material ambition may be trailed by long tails of moral misgiving; and something like the reverse, conspicuous rectitude veiling grand acquisitive passion, may also be the case. Prosperity generates an “embarrassment of riches,” as Simon Schama put it, which is why “the tensions of a capitalism that endeavoured to make itself moral were the same whether in sixteenth-century Venice, seventeenth-century Amsterdam, or eighteenth-century London.”Footnote ²

Or nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, one might add, given the frequency with which such tensions pop up in classic American literature. Whatever the aesthetic merits of the glitzy recent cinematic remake of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), we can be grateful that it has pointed a new generation of readers toward that novel's revelatory power. With an uncanny mixture of cynicism, shrewdness, romanticism, and moralism, Fitzgerald elegantly captured a very similar ambivalence in the 1920s ethos of acquisitive materialism, coming at the very dawn of the consumer economy. The elegance is intensified for us by the knowledge that Fitzgerald himself longed for the very status, wealth, and pleasure whose pursuit simultaneously fascinated and dismayed him in the characters he created, most of all the archetypal Gatsby. He wrote a great book that was also a profound mirror, personal and cultural, whose confusions and tensions faithfully registered not only those of the author, but also those of his legions of readers and of their world. If he was a bit of a libertine, he was just as much a moralist, and he lived with the tension between them.

So perhaps do we all. Which may be why this same ambivalence, a tension between the desire to celebrate wealth and unapologetic self-indulgence, and the compulsion to decry and disparage them, or more generally the tension between simple pleasure seeking and conscientious self-restraint, has forever been playing itself out in Americans’ confused and split-minded views about popular culture. By the term “popular culture,” we are generally referring to commercial culture, to the making of commodities or artifacts that are mass-produced and sold for a profit, supported by revenues from advertisers, and designed expressly for the entertainment of mass audiences in mass markets: such artifacts as movies, commercial recorded music, television shows, mass-circulation books and magazines, professional athletic competitions, and Broadway-style musical theater, among other things, each one involving the use of modern techniques of publicity to create celebrity figures who serve as focal points for mass-cultural attention. Precisely because of the elements of artifice and self-conscious mass commerciality in its making, popular culture is generally treated as something distinct in this regard from “folk culture,” or from high or elite culture. It is a manufactured product, and Hollywood, Broadway, Nashville, and Tin Pan Alley, and to some extent Madison Avenue, are or have been among the principal sites of a “culture industry.” And for precisely these reasons, among others, popular culture has often been regarded with suspicion or hostility by intellectuals, as an activity contaminated by trade.

That this should be so may seem more than a little paradoxical. Most modern intellectuals subscribe to broadly democratic political dicta and strive to evince consistently democratic sensibilities and sympathies. They are intent upon siding with “the people” over “the interests.” One might think they would have particular fondness for “the lively arts,” as Gilbert Seldes called them.Footnote ³ But intellectuals also are committed to the autonomy of intellect, and believe in the importance of maintaining critical detachment and intellectual refinement in their views of art and culture, seeking to define themselves in opposition to the clichés, sentimentalism, and ignorant philistinism, real or perceived, of the great middling classes, i.e. of a great many of “the people.” Intellectuals want art to be demanding, not comforting; revolutionary, not status-quo-affirming. It should unsettle complacency rather than protect it.

Popular culture was long seen to have failed those tests, because it was designed not to be challenging; it was manufactured precisely to be anodyne, even trivial, to gently take occupation of the minds of the many, narcotize them, feed their illusions, and drive them into the tight embrace of an all-pervading consumer economy, for which the mindless and ever-escalating acquisition of useless and trivial consumer goods had become the be-all and end-all of human existence. This consumer culture would, if it were to be given free rein in the realm of art and ideas, consume all before it, demolishing all given notions of cultural hierarchy, including the idea that there was a clear distinction between higher and lower art forms; that the high calling of art was to transform and not merely to entertain, to edify and not merely to provide escapism; and that what was best was always certified by sources of authority other than sales and profits.

How, then, to make sense of this paradox? It is a particularly acute question for Americans, to whose populace a peculiar facility for the creation of popular culture seems to have fallen, and with whose nation and culture much of the cause of popular culture is rightly or wrongly associated around the world. How to account for the conflictedness that has so often shaped our ways of thinking about popular culture? And how to understand more generally the complex and shifting ways that intellectuals have understood the artifacts of popular culture, and integrated their understandings into more general views of modern society? Enter the historian Daniel Horowitz, who has for some four decades been one of our wisest, most thorough, most judicious, and most indefatigable chroniclers of such matters. In his latest book, Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World, Horowitz has given us a tour de force, building on a veritable shelf of his own previous writings on affluence and consumer culture to describe and explain where we are in all this now, and how we have got there.Footnote ⁴ The book is a thoroughly impressive work of scholarship, drawing on an enormous range of critical writings, including works of influential European writers whose crucial role in shaping discourse about this subject has often been rendered inadequately, if at all, in nationally oriented accounts. There is seemingly no one and nothing on the subject he hasn't read. And yet, despite the sheer volume of scholarship being brought to bear on the subject, Horowitz has a remarkably clear and productive argument to deliver.

Horowitz begins with the observation that intellectuals have indeed tended to be moralistic about consumer culture, but their style of moralism has gone through three distinct phases. The “traditional moralism” that prevailed up until the 1920s was essentially Victorian in character, valuing self-restraint and abstemiousness over self-expression and permissiveness; it saw virtue in thrift and refused to countenance extravagance. Hence it approved popular culture exclusively in the role of moral preceptor, as a moral force encouraging habits of reliability, responsibility, and temperance among the lower classes. That view would be overthrown by the cultural upheavals of the 1920s, but instead of producing an end to moralism, Horowitz argues that the traditional moralism was replaced by a “new moralism,” which found a culture of consumption to be morally toxic because of the ways it served the interests of corporate capitalism and degraded the sensibilities of citizens, while denying high culture the honor that would otherwise be its due, through the operation of a version of Gresham's law, as Dwight Macdonald famously argued, with bad cultural currency driving out good. This “new moralism” was part Puritan declension narrative, part pure intellectual and class snobbery, and part radical Marxist–Frankfurt school critique—Macdonald was perhaps unique in managing to incorporate elements of all three—but the end result was, Horowitz argues, similar in certain respects to the Victorianism it replaced. Of course, the differences were evident as well; nothing excited Macdonald's disdain more reliably than “middlebrow” culture that earnestly sought to be morally improving and uplifting for the middle classes. But Horowitz's point is that both forms of “moralism” were hostile to a playful, easygoing, nonprescriptive, and receptive approach to popular culture, let alone a respectful one.

In any event this “new moralism” would soon itself be supplanted, and it is that act of displacement, and the substitution of a more accepting “postmoralism,” that is the principal subject of Horowitz's latest book. Postmoralism, whose emergence is surely related to the emergence of postmodernism, “underwrote an embrace of pleasure and symbolic exchange,” while “avoiding or transcending moral issues that bothered earlier generations of intellectuals.” Those issues would be bracketed, or relegated to secondary status. With postmoralism's arrival, “American writers shifted their attention from an emphasis on self-restraint to the achievement of satisfaction through commercial goods and experiences” (x). It was a shift “from moral threat to symbolic promise” (7). This change—how it happened, and why it happened—forms the central subject of Consuming Pleasures, and marks the book as a culminating volume in Horowitz's years-long study of the subject. It is written with his characteristic scholarly detachment, but it is clear that he believes that this latest turn of the wheel has much to be said for it. He makes his arguments with nuance, attentive to the ways in which countercurrents are constantly at work, and he clearly does not want to be taken as an uncritical celebrant of unbridled consumer capitalism. Indeed, he goes out of his way to state that the movement from “moral scorn to playful engagement” should not be regarded as “a Whiggish narrative of progress” (18). But he clearly approves of the fact that the pleasures of consumerism, and thereby the pleasures of things, and of the acquisition and possession and appreciative use of them, have at last begun to be explored honestly and fairly, without being shouted down by condemnation or preempted by the prerogative force of metaphysical or ideological guilt.

That said, though, Horowitz concludes his Preface with an expression of modest apprehension. “Sometimes I think my timing is exquisitely off,” he confesses. He may have a point there. After all, he began work on this book during the height of the postwar consumer culture, but finished it at the end of the new century's first decade in the wake of the recession and financial collapse, events that have, along with other elements of national decline, cast a shadow over the American future in ways not seen since the 1930s, and revived public discussions of “thrift, prudence, and simple living” (xi). A detractor might be tempted to argue not only that this is not the most propitious moment to celebrate the infinite playfulness of consumer culture, but also that we have been living through circumstances that demand the return of a measure of moral gravity in the way we think about our relation to our possessions, and to the material world more generally. Signifiers can float for a while, but reality does have a way of eventually bringing them down to earth. Eleven years after the appearance of Gatsby, the no longer high-flying Fitzgerald published a searing autobiographical essay in Esquire called “The Crack-Up.” And it is not for nothing that one of our most enduring influential historical studies of the 1920s remains William Leuchtenberg's The Perils of Prosperity.Footnote ⁵

A deluge of recent books have underscored the return of this theme. Michael Sandel's What Money Can't Buy asserted, “We live at a time when almost everything can be bought and sold . . . [and] it is time to ask whether we want to live this way.”Footnote ⁶ Robert and Edward Skidelsky's How Much Is Enough? sought to restore economics as a “moral science” concerned with achieving the ideal of “the good life,” a quest that they argue will mean “reanimating philosophical and ethical ideas that have long been out of favor” but whose necessity and persistence are reflected in the fact that “people are actually quite torn about their ethics.”Footnote ⁷ James Davison Hunter and Joshua Yates published a superb collection of essays with an all-star cast of contributors, under the title Thrift and Thriving in America, which is built around the premise that “economic life” has “inescapably normative dimensions,” and that the concept of “thrift” supplies “a badly needed normative vocabulary for thinking and talking about present economic, environmental, and social challenges.”Footnote ⁸ The appearance of such books, and there are many others complementary to them, does suggest that the zeitgeist might be working against Horowitz, and that moralizing about consumption is not yet a lost art. The trend toward “austerity” in the fiscal thinking of governments across the globe is yet another indicator.

But as Daniel Walker Howe admitted in his contribution to the Hunter–Yates book, “Thrift has been a perennially contested virtue, even among those who claim to honor it.”Footnote ⁹ Which indicates that our split-mindedness about it, and about consumer culture, is not likely to disappear either. We are just as vulnerable to being embarrassed by the absence of riches as we are by their presence. And indeed, writing in the pages of the same book, economist Deirdre McCloskey admonishes her readers not to get too carried away with this “thrift” business, since, she argues, the qualities of inventiveness and imagination and entrepreneurship, rather than the brute facts of sheer accumulation, have always been the heart of modern economic growth; besides, a lively bourgeois society has the power to generate its own sets of virtues, of which thrift is likely to be a junior partner at best, necessary but not sufficient.Footnote ¹⁰

An even more ambitious rebuke to the reemergence of “thrift, prudence, and simple living,” also written under the shadow of the 2007–8 financial crisis, comes from the pen of economic historian James Livingston, who lays it on the line with a lively romp of a book, Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul.Footnote ¹¹ Livingston's energetic argument is impossible to summarize briefly—it freely mixes historical and economic analysis with personal anecdote, and climaxes in the author's happy consumption of a Kobe hamburger—but it is a relentless attack, carried out with charm and humor, on most of our day's conventional economic wisdom, arguing in a roughly neo-Keynesian fashion that underconsumption was the chief cause of the crisis, and that underconsumption (read: austerity) will only prolong its negative effects. His arguments dovetail nicely with a shelf full of anti-austerity writings, and reflect some of the tenets of the Occupy Wall Street movement.Footnote ¹² Indeed, it is no coincidence that sociologist Andrew Ross of NYU, who was highly visible in the early stages of that movement, is also the author of a prime example of “postmoralist” cultural analysis, his influential book No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture.Footnote ¹³

Which brings us back at last to Horowitz's central subject, popular culture and its meanings, but also indicates what a crowded and noisy field his book has walked onto, a field on which several different contests are being played out at once, fast and furious. For that very reason, Horowitz's timing actually could not have been more opportune, since his studied detachment offers a refreshing contrast, and an invitation to step back from the heated debates among more engaged parties to take a longer, cooler, and more reflective view of the matter. His study is not an overheated account of movements and manifestos, or the striking of yet another ironic and knowing pose, but a stately succession of books and authors, intellectual history in the grand manner, even if addressing a subject that is, by definition, un-grand.

His account begins with a highly critical examination of what was arguably the single most influential account of popular culture in the postwar era: Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White's 1957 collection entitled Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. Riding the intense postwar wave of interest in “mass-society” theory, which had also informed the rise of the concept of “totalitarianism,” Rosenberg and White's book reflected, on balance, the gloomy view of mass culture that had been propagated since the 1930s by the New York intellectuals. There were exceptions in the tone conveyed by the contributors, including that in White's own editorial remarks, and Horowitz duly notes them. But the book's principal thrust was embodied with particular force in its two most famous essays, Clement Greenberg's “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” and Macdonald's “The Theory of Mass Culture.” Not only did such works disparage popular culture as degraded fare for degraded people, masses who were “insensible to the values of genuine culture,” but also the authors’ outlook bore the stigmata of the anti-Stalinist left, with its horror of anything that suggested the possibility of the absorption of intellectual life into the requirements of a new Popular Front. Horowitz explores how much Rosenberg and White left out of their book, and therefore how surprisingly narrow and limited was the range of what they chose to acknowledge in the cultural criticism of their own day, compared to what they could have reported on. They could, for example, have chosen far more radical and incisive works by, for example, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, which went much further in identifying the pathologies of “the culture industry,” associating them not only with capitalism but with the Enlightenment itself; or they could have drawn upon the long and vibrant British traditions of popular-culture criticism, such as those associated with figures such as T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and the Leavises.

More generally, Horowitz seeks in subsequent chapters to draw our attention to a series of European writers, many of them virtually unknown to American readers of the time, whose position outside American intellectual, moral, and political traditions freed them to think about the pitfalls and possibilities of popular culture in much more interesting and various ways than the standard critiques found in Rosenberg and Manning. In some ways, this part of the book is an extended exploration of a multitude of roads not taken, rather a tracing-out of lines of influence, of which there were virtually none. To that end, Horowitz devotes extensive attention to the writings of Jürgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, and Umberto Eco, as well as Walter Benjamin and C. L. R. James, all of whom were unknown to, and unread by, Americans of the 1950s, often because their works remained unpublished or unavailable in translation. (James's American Civilization would not be published until 1993.)

Yet all had certain things in common. They took the works of popular culture seriously, and argued for the importance of making the same kinds of discrimination of quality that would be made in any other cultural evaluation, while refraining from making any stock appeal to notions of cultural hierarchy, by combining a skepticism of the high with an openness to the low. Most of all, they saw different potentialities in popular culture, because their experiences of the world, and particularly their political experiences in the twentieth century, had been so dramatically different from that of Americans. Because of that experience, and the residual cultural effects of powerful Roman Catholic and Lutheran religious institutions and traditions, their antipathies tended to be directed toward all forms of authoritarianism, including moral authoritarianism, and made them far more attracted to the “ludic possibilities” of a playful, supple, and unpretentious popular sphere of cultural production.

But even before Rosenberg and White's book, there were others on the American scene whose insights at least touched upon such themes, and who could have been more influential. Such possibilities were also of interest to the American sociologist David Riesman, whose 1950 bestseller The Lonely Crowd explored the possibility that, in an affluent society, play could come to take the place of work, leisure could be an instrument for achieving personal autonomy, and consumption could be a source of meaning and pleasure, rather than mere distraction. But as Horowitz shrewdly observes, Riesman's embrace of these ideas was partial and tentative: a “reluctant fascination,” held back by his distrust of popular sentiment and his residual attachment to “inner direction.” Similarly, Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride (1951) was an ingenious effort to treat newspapers, advertising, and other elements in the seeming effluvia of popular culture as if they were poetic texts, charged with meaning. But as Horowitz puts it, McLuhan sought to “make his readers conscious of the ways commercial culture tried to shape their dreams,” an enterprise that could not help but lead him into a “moralistic position,” turning his admiration for popular culture into a “blistering critique” of advertising and of capitalism itself (149). He too, like Riesman, proved to be a transitional figure. So too was Richard Hoggart, whose important 1957 book The Uses of Literacy “resisted the notion of a conspiracy to keep the working class in a soporific state,” and helped legitimate the academic study of popular culture in Great Britain.

Hoggart came closest to glimpsing the new way. But the full transition did not come until the 1960s, and in Great Britain, with the writers of the Independent Group along with the emergence of pop art, and the creation in 1964 of the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, begun by Hoggart but soon coming under the direction of Stuart Hall, which initiated a far-reaching and unapologetic commitment to the serious study of popular culture. Nor was this an exclusively British phenomenon, as one can see in the examples such as Tom Wolfe's Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), a lively and highly detailed account of American car culture, or the respectful works of Herbert Gans, whose sociological studies documented the subtleties and complexities of working-class culture, and in the process demolished the elitist pretentions of the mass-culture critique. Susan Sontag's “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964) filled in another element in the emerging paradigm, an attack on the high “seriousness” of the modernists, and on the preference for depths over surfaces, and a willingness to link sexuality with the pleasures derived from commercial goods.

Finally, Horowitz looks at the ways that the new paradigm regarded the urban and architectural scene, through Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies (1971) and Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas (1972). As Horowitz observed, those two cities were, and continue to be, the principal urban symbols of commercial culture, and therefore, in many minds, of “gaudiness, poor taste, and moral compromise.” One design theorist called Las Vegas “the most brutal, degrading, and corrupt [city] that consumer society has ever created.” Not to be outdone, the journalist Adam Raphael called Los Angeles “the noisiest, the smelliest, the most uncomfortable, and most uncivilized major city in the United States.” But Tom Wolfe, speaking for the new sensibility, called Las Vegas “the Versailles of America,” and saw its neon lights and other forms as “the new landmarks of America” (335). He spoke for the future of popular-culture criticism.

It was in something of Wolfe's exuberant spirit that Banham, Brown, and Venturi approached their own revisionings of these urban landscapes. The Independent Group-influenced Banham saw Los Angeles as a culture system, a place where “commercial culture,” regarded as something “not at all morally problematic,” could provide “a system of symbols that conveyed key values,” the chief among them being “freedom of movement.” Aesthetes who lamented the city's “visual pollution” and sought to eliminate billboard advertising were missing the point; to do so would be “like depriving San Gimignano of its towers or the City of London of its Wren steeples” (342). Brown and Venturi lovingly detailed all aspects of Las Vegas's unprecedented physiognomy, from its signage to its parking lots to its casinos to its desert vistas, and concluded that there is “no reason why the methods of commercial persuasion and the skyline of signs analyzed here should not serve the purpose of civic and cultural enhancement” (355). Thus the barrier between the atelier and the ad agency, the gallery (or parlor) and the street, seemed to collapse—and good riddance to it.

And so the upward climb of an affirmative and postmoralist perspective on commercial culture reached a kind of pinnacle of success. But it is, even by Horowitz's own account, a tenuous achievement. Banham's celebratory Los Angeles book, Horowitz acknowledges, was also “problematic,” because it showed “the limitations of symbolic analyses of commercial culture that avoided issues of ecological degradation, economic power, and racial justice” (344). And one might add other concerns. How well, for example, does the celebration of fluidity of personal identity and the fungibility of social roles, so favored by a postmodern, postmoral social order, benefit the formation of healthy children who can grow up to be responsible citizens, who will care about issues of ecological degradation, economic power, and racial justice, among other things? And particularly for children who are born into the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, and lack the luxury of experimental wiggle-room enjoyed by well-heeled students at elite universities? I think of the plight of such children when I read celebrations of “the development of a view of fragmented identities playfully exploring multiple meanings through commercial culture” (362). This is surely not what those children need, and it seems incumbent upon us to recognize that fact, when we begin to entertain the idea that our popular culture and our public culture are one and the same thing.

In addition, the intellectual celebration of popular culture that Horowitz chronicles has an element of what might be called the “anti-anti” syndrome. In human affairs, a double negative is not always the same as a positive; there is a huge difference between being a communist and being an anti-anticommunist. In cultural terms, this means that one may be motivated to defend something, and to do so with zeal, less out of love for it than out of contempt for its detractors. One senses this kind of motivation in a figure like, say, Herbert Gans, who admitted to his own preference for high culture, but was consistently enraged by the snobbish condescension of other intellectuals. Or in Susan Sontag's flippant dismissal of “the Matthew Arnold ideal of culture,” as a gibe directed at the “high seriousness” of modernists like Lionel Trilling (a dismissal she would later try to disown). Or in Robert Venturi, whose response to Mies van der Rohe's coolly ascetic “Less is more” was the bird-flipping retort “Less is a bore.” As Tom Wolfe noticed in his treatment of modernist and postmodernist architects in From Bauhaus to Our House, intellectuals often respond most powerfully (and competitively) to the words and thoughts of other intellectuals, rather than to a careful examination of the circumstances or the evidence before them. Or, to put it more bluntly, many of the intellectuals who so fulsomely celebrated popular culture may have been more reacting against the views of other intellectuals than they were acting in appreciative response to the things they wrote in praise of. This position that Horowitz describes may have arisen more out of a spirit of sheer contrarianism or provocation—which is, after all, one of the ways one makes a reputation for oneself in present-day academia—than Horowitz's account allows for.

That granted, there is much to be said for the general trend toward taking popular culture seriously, if for no other reason that it means caring about, and seeking to understand, the lives and emotions of ordinary people and ordinary life. (The humor of “camp,” on the other hand, seems to violate that spirit, since it trades on the mockery of those who take seriously the very things being ironized.) But it seems perilous to lean too heavily on the fragile negative concept of “moralism”—which too often means little more than “moral judgments of which one disapproves”—in making that affirmation. At the same time, one should be able to make the kind of distinctions and discriminations that are that at the heart of useful cultural criticism and appreciation. The weakening of cultural hierarchy can be, up to a point, a good and even admirable thing. But it should not bar us from making judgments about good and bad, both morally and aesthetically.

Such a discussion suffers from excessive abstraction when it gets too far away from actual cases and artifacts, so let me offer a concrete example of what I am talking about, an example which I would argue is one of the greatest achievements of modern popular culture: the Great American Songbook.Footnote ¹⁴ This is a term used, loosely and imprecisely, to designate the large group of classic American popular songs first written and performed in the years roughly between 1920 and 1960—roughly, that is, the years between the decline of the sentimental songs of the late Victorian era and the rise of rock ’n’ roll and its various older and younger cousins (and also, ironically, during the period when intellectuals were so disdainful of popular culture). The name is slightly misleading, since there is no “book” as such—it's rather like the British constitution in that sense—but there is a remarkable level of agreement as to its contents. It includes the productions of Tin Pan Alley, meaning the New York-based songwriting and music-publishing industry of the day, as well as the Broadway and Hollywood musical theatre. It is, let it be noted, an entirely commercial undertaking, dependent for its survival on the favor of the general consuming public, like any other such entertainment business. Far from standing athwart the forces of the market and commerce, it was completely enmeshed in them.

The song titles are still very familiar to most of us: “Night and Day,” “All the Things You Are,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Stormy Weather,” “Stardust,” “I Got Rhythm,” “My Funny Valentine,” “My Favorite Things,” “Cheek to Cheek,” and “All the Way,” just to name a few for starters. So too are the names of the composers and lyricists who produced these songs: respectively Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, and Jimmy Van Heusen. Jazz musicians and aficionados of jazz are especially knowledgeable about these songs, because they are the “standards” that have formed the core of the jazz repertoire for the past six decades.

One should acknowledge the Songbook's limitations. Its contents do not concern great historical events. It makes no pretense to the heroic or epochal, and hardly shows any interest in larger public affairs, or even in public life per se. Instead, the overwhelming majority of the songs are—like most popular music the world over—about romantic love between a man and a woman, with all its excitements, frustrations, mysteries, satisfactions, vexations, and ultimate joys. But the lyrics and the music do not attempt to capture love at any and all times. Instead, they capture a particular historical moment, and a particular moral valence, in the evolution of modern relations between men and women.

And here we come to an important reason why the quality of popular culture is so variable, and so specific to time and place. One of the most creative moments in the life of a culture is the fragile liberalizing moment when the forces of an entrenched and rigid cultural orthodoxy loosen their grip a bit, but not so much as to risk being overwhelmed by disorder. Energies that have been held in check then have their chance to play. That is the moment in twentieth-century American life that these Songbook tunes capture. The songs are urbane, witty, playful, intelligent, occasionally naughty (in an oblique way), but also full of heart and spirit, neither brutally sexual nor relentlessly high-minded, but ultimately (in the aggregate) altar-directed and commitment-affirming. There still is courtship, there still are rules, but there also is a kind of easygoing freedom, within well-understood limits. They perfectly express the interlude between the loosening of strict nineteenth-century mores and the onslaught of the post-World War II cultural revolution. The ethos of the songs is post-Victorian but pre-no-fault-divorce, not to say pre-hookup-culture. Even the racier lyrics of Cole Porter (see, for example, the Noah's Ark list of the animals that “do it” in “Let's Fall in Love”) have a lightness and humor to them, and a comfortable sense of their own edginess, that makes them fit their moment.

I could go on, and pay homage to the formal musical qualities of the Songbook's contents, a simplicity which perfectly suited it to carry such lyrical freight. But the point is that the Songbook was a quintessential popular form. If you want an exemplar of popular culture, it is one of the best you could find. And it was thoroughly commercial. The popular market imposed a fairly strict discipline that was an essential element in the Songbook's greatness. The Songbook is an expression of what is possible in American culture, in its blending of high and low, its intelligence and wit, its beauty and ingenuity, its sheer pleasure and accessibility, and the incomparable palette of many colors that its lyrics bring to our understanding and appreciation of the endlessly fascination phenomena of romantic love, and the honest aspirations of ordinary people. And like all great works of art, it forms us as we listen to it, shapes our expectations, cultivates us, cultures us. It explains our perplexities in love, and makes merry with them at the same time.

But nothing lasts forever, and least of all a truly vibrant popular form. We play and replay those songs today, but we do not write them anymore, any more than we compose new piano sonatas in the style of Beethoven, or new Gregorian chants. One might claim for the popular music of the 1960s a similar kind of status, and we have “classic-rock” radio stations that will continue to play such fare until the last prematurely deafened baby-boomer is laid to rest with his tie-dyed burial shroud. But there is no new Lennon and McCartney. There are golden ages and bronze ages in the life of human societies, moments of cultural creativity, in popular culture as in everything else, and then long periods of derivativeness, decadence, stagnation, and futility. For my own part, I do not see much vitality in the popular culture of the moment, despite all the voices of celebration Horowitz describes. The liberating moment seems to have passed its sell-by date when there are no envelopes left to push. But one should also remember that the scowling New York intellectuals failed to see the virtues of their moment, never grasped the genius of Jerome Kern. I may be just as deaf and blind, in my own way.

But I would contend, too, that one can expect too much, and want too much, from popular culture. That shows a kind of disrespect for it too, as if it must be heroic and world-changing and demonstrably sophisticated to be worthy of our commendation and love. Such a dictum offends against the humane principle that the ordinary should be taken as it is, for what it is. And if I have a complaint about Horowitz's humane and thoughtful book, it would be that he seems too willing to sign on with others who want too much from popular culture, and consumer culture, and who are too unwilling to see that we might need the countervailing force of the past, and of tradition, and above all of something that Horowitz derides as “moralism,” more than ever before. His conclusion is a virtual hymn to the utopian possibilities of “a new politics of consumption . . . that moved beyond moral condemnation to advocate the agency of consumers in the public sphere” (363). I am not sure what this means. But I doubt that it will ever come to pass. The need to indulge in moral condemnation would seem perennial, and is an equal-opportunity tempter. It may change its outward appearance and move around in its party affiliation, but it shows no sign of going out of business, just as our split-mindedness about material prosperity is not going away. Anyone who thinks otherwise should try boasting in public about his or her personal wealth, à la Donald Trump, and see what happens.