I wrote this sentence in my notes the other day and - even if it’s obvious, it feels important: Monoculture is dead. Long live mini-culture.

It was after I spent a lot of time trying to process Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show (which, I loved), the alternate halftime show (which, I, musically and socially -errr, well, I can admit I loved watching Pat Finnerty livestream it at least), and then, I spent even more time getting lost in a Panoptica Storyboard rabbit hole about what even is the state of entertainment right now?

And all that produced my bolded declaration above.*

I’ve been under the influence of Samuel W. Franklin’s book, The Cult of Creativity, and the interview I just got to do with Neil Howe and Ben Hunt on the narratives in and surrounding Howe’s work on Generational Theory.

Seems to me that there are three trends going at once, and I hadn’t really appreciated how much they show up in music (but am not at all surprised by it now that I’m seeing it).

Monoculture is a function of a dominant medium - think TV at its peak. Mini-culture is everything that wasn’t TV when TV mattered most, kind of like every sub-community you can find on the internet these days (but maybe was a thing you talked about with friends at the mall during the peak TV era).

The pendulum swings between a culturally dominant medium and a culture dominated by no single focus, and neither is good or bad, but the transition always feels weird because the pendulum never (ever) stops swinging except for a moment at the extremes when we are reversing course.

I think we’re near one of those extremes right now - and yeah, it’s disorienting.

But this is where music comes in so let’s talk about it for a second.

Everybody mourning the death of the monoculture still has some mini-culture they’re tied to. These people want their mini-culture to be the new/next monoculture. I am not going to link to it, but the “try that in a small town” people and basically that entire Kid Rock / TPUSA halftime show was creativity used to express this view.

It’s a lame take. It’s a lame perspective. I am using lame out of kindness. Lazy comes to mind, too. These are the people holding out for monoculture and whining why they can’t have it, without any contextual awareness for how the dominant medium shifted, and it’s really (truly, thankfully) not all about them.

It’s the reason 106 million American households watched the Mash finale (in 1983) and 128 million people watched Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show, and 6 million people watched the TPUSA alternate show.

Kid and friends want their mini-culture to be the monoculture of the 1980s and - well, it doesn’t exist anymore so, nice try, good effort fellas.

In the internet era, mini-cultures without a singular dominant medium for distribution, win by not attempting to declare themselves a monoculture.

That’s what Bad Bunny did. He did it when he kept to only singing in Spanish. He kept it when he made the performance hyper-specific to Puerto Rican references. He kept it when he named all of the Americas and spiked the football with “Together, We Are America” written on it, and then exited the field, ripping out his in ears, with a chorus of people around him singing “Debí Tirar Más Fotos.”

I am all about celebrating mini-cultures that aren’t attempting to forcibly become the new monoculture.

I am all about tolerance for other mini-cultures (I do think “Bawitdaba” is a fine song, and I also believe Kid Rock was singing, and that he got done dirty with the lip synching accusations).

I am all about THIS sentiment:

Oh, and if you listen to the whole song, yeah - it’s still a crazy successful 30ish year old writing bedroom poetry, just for the record.

Is he going to regret some of these lyrics (like Kid Rock) in 25 years? Of course he is! But this is art. This is expression. This is a story, and a mini-cultural moment, and it’s NOT attempting to take over your world. There is no threat here. Just art. Just beauty.

Monoculture is dead. Long live mini-culture. At least until a new medium emerges and we have monoculture again for a while.

There’s a connection here - to the cyclicality Neil Howe writes about, and what Samuel W. Franklin explored about how we literally invented “creativity” as a consulting practice in the 1950s in an effort to preserve originality without a (communist) ideological threat. Each generation grapples with this as they age. The halftime shows just put it all in such a sharp contrast as examples for me.

I find a lot of comfort in this context.

But, most of all - take more photos of the people you love. Life is short. Be less angry, be more happy. Celebrate a little. I’m so happy to run this little mini-culture here on Cultish Creative and that you care enough to read this - know that.

*if I coined mini-culture, somebody time stamp this and give me credit. If somebody else already said it, in self-defense, it was pretty obvious.

PS. Special thanks to the conversations I had with Ryan M., my wife, and Dave Nadig (part of which is in an episode of Click Beta on Excess Returns) who helped push all these thoughts together in my head.

IF YOU’RE STILL HERE - this is probably my most replayed Bad Bunny song (I’m pretty basic at the end of the day, what can I say). If I was 23 and living in hard hittin’ New Britain again, like I was when Reggaeton broke in 2004ish, surrounded by Puerto Ricans who knew how to get down, I’d have been putting this one on at all the neighborhood parties: