In its manifestation in the broader culture, PBSification is a movement outward, which is both good for you (socially progressive if you're on the left, radically preservative and even apocalyptic if you're on the right) and bad for you (so touts bad girls and wildness and recalcitrance), and being bad is good for you because it challenges the mainstream's idea of goodness, even if it's the mainstream that generates this challenge to its goodness. And my complaint is that once we know or think we know this significance of the good-bad stuff [i.e., the "bad" stuff that we've decided is therefore good], once we realize that it actually does have cultural value and impact, we let the symbol, capital-S Significance, stand in for actual significance — but prior to our really comprehending the significance, the good-bad stuff was walled-off into entertainment, so was like Elsa isolated with her "power." So I'm sorta saying that Angry Bird Toons, prior to being lionized and crowned king or queen by PBS/MMI types like me, is like Elsa on her mountain, where it's safe from our really understanding its cultural value and we're safe from understanding its potency. So there, I've conflated Elsa and Angry Bird Toons, which is both a strength and weakness of my PBS metaphor, that I seem to be able to make it absorb anything. But remember that, though I wasn't using the term "PBS" entirely as a pejorative, it still primarily is pejorative, and as such it's not a criticism of understanding but of a type of neutralization that follows and perhaps undoes understanding.
In saying in 1987 that the supposed punk supposed alternative supposed indie supposed underground had become our own little "PBS," I was saying that in effect it had become a cultural niche, one that let the symbol of its own challenge to the culture substitute for any actual challenge, while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge that it — the subculture, the MMI — was generated by the overall culture and was part of the overall culture.
(And this claim of mine is ridiculously overbroad, but still somewhat right, and still necessary in its overbroadness.)
no subject
In saying in 1987 that the supposed punk supposed alternative supposed indie supposed underground had become our own little "PBS," I was saying that in effect it had become a cultural niche, one that let the symbol of its own challenge to the culture substitute for any actual challenge, while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge that it — the subculture, the MMI — was generated by the overall culture and was part of the overall culture.
(And this claim of mine is ridiculously overbroad, but still somewhat right, and still necessary in its overbroadness.)