Don’t Think Twice 10.18.08: For the Love of the Pop

Pop. Somewhere along the line, it became a dirty word. Pop. It’s practically a four letter word in some circles, intriguing given the fact that it’s only three letters long. Pop music. Pop art. Pop culture. Base, bastardized subsets of serious music, legitimate art, high culture. When did popularity become a condemnation? Why can’t the entertainment that appeals to the masses also speak to them as well? Pop is a uniquely fascinating phenomenon. But in order to understand my fascination with pop, I suppose you have to understand how I came to think of pop as more than just a four letter word.

Growing up, I was a nerd. Seriously, I was a hardcore academic nerd. And the fact that I now look back in both wonder and horror at how much of a nerd I was then even though I’m now an eighth year graduate student in Materials Science and Engineering should give you some indication of the true magnitude of my prior nerdliness. It is not hyperbole to say that I spent the vast majority of the first eighteen years of my life studying. I studied a lot. More than was healthy, I’m now quite sure. I wasn’t just a good student; I was the freak that was buried so deep in his books that he couldn’t even see how far from normal he was. And don’t get me wrong; the fact that I studied so hard and so much then has allowed me to get where I am today. It’s just that I sometimes wonder what I lost by studying so much, what extra-curricular rights of passage I somehow missed along the way. But the point here is that there was a time in my life not so long ago when I had a fairly well-rounded knowledge of academics. But despite all that I studied, it always seemed that the subjects that fascinated me most were not the ones that I was told to study, but rather the ones that were overlooked.

One of the questions that has always fascinated me the most is how people define art, what they consider to be art, and what they dismiss as less than art. Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, which sits on my bookshelf wedged quite curiously between a hardbound edition of J. M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck’s Kraven’s Last Hunt on one side and a tattered soft cover edition of The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: 1934 – 1952 on the other, defines art as “creative work or its principles; making or doing of things that display form, beauty, and unusual perception: art includes painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, drama, the dance, etc.: see also fine art,” which some 445 pages later is defined quite similarly as “any of the art forms that include drawing, painting, sculpture, and ceramics, or, occasionally, architecture, literature, music, dramatic art, or dancing.”

As I expected, those definitions are descriptive and yet less than satisfactory, for I’ve always thought of art as something more. In my mind, art is anything that speaks to the human condition, that reflects our nature, that gives voice to the human spirit, that expresses our hopes and dreams as well as our pain and suffering. For me, art is a connection between artist and audience, an attempt to bridge the gap between our souls. What sex is to the body and debate is to the mind, art is to the soul. And thus, as you might expect, I tend to define art quite broadly. It certainly encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, drama, and dance, but it can be so much more. And yet I’ve always been perplexed as to why art is often presented and taught as such a limited concept.

The study of art in its many forms is one of the fundamental cornerstones of education, from finger painting in kindergarten to doctoral theses on Shakespeare and da Vinci. Common subjects include the painting and sculpture of Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance, the literature of Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and J. D. Salinger, the music of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn, the drama of William Shakespeare and Arthur Miller, and if you grew up in or around Chicago as I did, maybe even the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. But often the study of art is treated with a peculiar formality and sense of disconnection, as if the art that is worthy of study is somehow distinct from the art that permeates our world and surrounds us every day. And as I said, while I have a great fondness for much of the classical art and many of the influential artists that I have formally studied, it has always been the art that was overlooked in school that fascinated me the most. And that brings us back to Pop, that dirty little word that so often seems to be avoided in academic studies of art. As I studied various forms of art in school, I began to wonder if there really was a difference between the art that I studied and the popular entertainment that I loved. And so because studying was a way of life for me, I began to view the world of pop with a more critical eye in an attempt to discern whether or not there was art to be found in pop.

I was drawn first to movies and television, to what seemed to me to be to be perfectly valid forms of drama, to what seemed to me to be the modern evolution of theatre. I was never given the chance to formally study movies or television in high school, and yet I could find no intrinsic difference between what I saw on the screen and what I studied on the stage. But eventually I came to understand that while movies and television may not have originally been appreciated as art, and while they may not yet have found a place in many high school curricula, there have been movies and television shows of such high quality that their value as art is undeniable. From Citizen Kane to The Godfather to Schindler’s List, from All in the Family to Roots to The Sopranos, I came to see that movies and television have established themselves as valid, meaningful forms of art.

I moved on to music, to pop music, to rock ‘n roll. I took piano lessons for twelve years, and yet the closest I ever came to studying modern music was once learning a piece by Paderewski (and he died in 1941). I wondered if something had fundamentally changed music since then, wondered if something had gone so horribly wrong that music could no longer be considered art. But as had been the case with my infatuation with movies and television, I eventually found that even rock ‘n roll had evolved to the point where in some cases it had to be considered art. From Bob Dylan to The Beatles to Simon and Garfunkel to Prince, rock music had certainly defined itself as a unique melding of music and poetry, an art form capable of defining generations and provoking cultural change.

My next discovery was comic books, a most fascinating medium that seemed to me to be an intriguing hybrid of painting and literature, but which was minimized by many as a juvenile waste of time. I have one aunt in particular that to this day refers to comic books as “funny books.” I’m pretty sure she thinks that Superman and Batman’s secret identities are really Archie and Jughead. But after finding that movies and television and rock music had achieved some degree of artistic credibility, the story was a bit different with comic books. Citizen Kane and All in the Family and Blonde on Blonde had all made their mark on the world before I was born, but I had the chance to start reading comic books in the days before the greatest successes of the medium. And so one of the great joys of my life was watching as comic books became genuine art right before my eyes, as Art Spiegelman’s Maus changed the way that the world viewed the medium, as Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns made superheroes into masterpieces.

I still love movies and television and rock music and comic books. I know that in their most refined forms, each of these wonderful forms of entertainment and expression can be valuable, meaningful art, and I know that there are others who know this as well. You can major in film at college, and music majors can take entire classes on The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Watchmen is even found among the text books in many college book stores. And so while I still love movies and television and rock music and comic books, I no longer feel as though I’m trying to prove something to myself or to anyone else. But that’s not to say that there aren’t even more daring forms of expression that even the most liberal academics would be wary to classify as art. What about graffiti, hastily spray painted in an alleyway? What about video games, a medium once constrained by technology but now free to allow uninhibited expression? And what about the industry that we love, professional wrestling?

Could professional wrestling ever be serious art? I suppose that question hinges on whether or not professional wrestling even fits into any of the broad categories of art described above. On the surface, in terms of kayfabe, professional wrestling claims to be a sport, claims to be athletic competition. But only the truest marks still believe that to be the case. Most fans of the industry, and even most people who aren’t fans of the industry, know that professional wrestling is not truly sport, because professional wrestling is not truly athletic competition. The finish of a professional wrestling match is predetermined, the winner and the loser decided before the match even begins. And so does that make professional wrestling a rigged sport? As so many critics claim, is professional wrestling just a fake sport?

The answer, as far as I’m concerned, is no. Because to say that professional wresting is a rigged sport or a fake sport would be to imply that it is somehow an athletic competition right up until the finish of the match, as if one competitor had simply been paid to take a fall. There’s a difference between professional wrestling and the 1919 World Series in which the Chicago White Sox (a.k.a. the Black Sox) were paid to throw the series. There’s a difference between professional wrestling and so many boxing matches in which one of the fighters has been paid to stay down when he could easily get back to his feet. There’s a difference between professional wrestling and the NBA games whose outcomes were swayed by corrupt referee Tim Donaghy. And that difference is that the most fundamental goal of professional wrestling is to entertain the fans.

The goal of sport, even of rigged sports or fake sports, is to get to the end, to determine the winner and the loser. Even when betting on sports, it doesn’t matter if the spread was covered in the first quarter or in the fourth, it doesn’t matter if the game was tight in the first inning but a blowout by the ninth. All that matters is the final score. All that matters is the destination, not the journey. But the outcome of a professional wrestling match is only a part of the story. Hell, some of the time we all know who’s going to win a match before the bell even rings, and yet what matters is what happens between the bells. In professional wrestling, the journey matters just as much, if not more, than the destination. And that’s because professional wrestling is about entertainment and storytelling. That’s because professional wrestling is not sport, but theatre.

Professional wrestling is theatre, and in my mind that makes it very easy to consider professional wresting to be art. It is capable of telling tales of good and evil, of love and hate, of success and failure, of corruption and redemption. Like so many forms of pop entertainment, it’s hard for me to believe that professional wrestling could be so popular without being able to speak to its fans. Throughout the history of the industry there have been performers that have pushed the limits of how a professional wrestler could be an entertainer and an artist. From Dusty Rhodes and “Superstar” Billy Graham innovating the art of the promo, to Cactus Jack and Raven personalizing storylines as never before, to Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit living out their dreams and ours on the grandest stage of them all, there have always been professional wrestlers that have fought for their art.