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Jim Emerson in The Chicago Sun-Times has written a column about how disorienting it was to realize that the 17-year-olds at a recent high school graduation did not recognize a reference to the Beatles tune “Drive My Car.” As a result, Emerson wonders whether The Beatles’ days are numbered as a relevant item of our shared popular culture. (I’d ask, “What shared popular culture?” but I’m getting ahead of myself.)

Emerson writes, “As George Harrison memorably (for some of us) sang, ‘All things must pass.’ Even the ubiquity of the Beatles’ catalog.”

Blowing up a molehill of experience into a mountain of perceived relevance is Column Writing 101, and Emerson turns in a fine example of it. It’s not gratuitous; we’re not in Bob Greene territory here. But as somebody who grew up reading Greene’s endless paeans to all things Boomer (in the very same Chicago Sun-Times, if memory serves), I want to point a few things out.

First of all: what teenagers do or do not recognize is not particularly predictive, and getting less so by the year, because pop culture is so incredibly fragmented. If there’s such a thing as a shared pop culture, it’s in shorter and shorter segments, timespans too short to weld generations together in any meaningful way. The Sixties generation found its identity in Vietnam; can today’s college kids say the same about Iraq/Afghanistan? Doubtful. The touchstones aren’t wars, they’re stuff like the Wii. And if you think that shift isn’t political, I’ve got a copy of Beatles Rockband to sell you.

As somebody who’s interacted with college kids in an unbroken stream since I was one myself, there is no monoculture in the popular arts any more. That the kids in Emerson’s piece “did vaguely remember the song when I reminded them” is miraculous, and shows just how incredibly powerful The Beatles remain, even today. They DO reach young people, in the face of an entire industry actively antagonistic towards the past (with a few exceptions, The Beatles among them for the moment).

The fragmenting of popular culture is not happenstance; it is a business strategy. In rock, it has been employed since around 1968—interestingly enough, the same time that The Beatles, for all their glory, changed from THE group to A group. The Summer of Love—I’d argue Sgt. Pepper—is really the last moment in rock where one person/group led, and everybody else followed. After 1968, you have lots of great, but different, types of rock being put out all at the same time; partly that’s the maturing of the form, and partly it’s the big media corporations finally getting the measure of it—being able to really milk that cow. And make new, slightly different cows, over and over and over again.

You see the same thing happen across all areas of popular culture: first, a technology allows for mass consumption. That consumption brings notoriety and money. The notoriety and money attracts talent. The talent eventually coalesces into something massively, wildly popular. At that point, the companies controlling the technology realize the only way to make more money in a predictable way is to subdivide the market. Beatlemania was the natural culmination of what started with Sinatra (or maybe with Edison) and continued with Elvis. After that was over, the businessmen in charge of pop music decided to rationalize and control the industry by subdividing it. So instead of putting out 5 very distinct bands and hope that one starts a craze, you put out 100 bands, and hope that each one sells 50,000 to its own audience, and that some fans crossover and buy multiple bands, and in this way you make more money in a much more predictable stream.

Whether this is good or bad for an art I really can’t say; what I can say is that it keeps any one band from encompassing an era the way that The Beatles did. It creates a kind of cultural confusion, and perhaps reduces the attachment of fans to any one band. Occasionally unpredictable circumstances push a band forward (as say, the Sex Pistols were in 1976); but the moment that happens, the corporations kick into high gear and introduce more product designed to take advantage of “the zeitgeist.” And because there is so much choice, there really is no zeitgeist anymore, because zeitgeist relies on everybody thinking about the same one thing at the same time.

So The Beatles were very fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on whether you’re asking Paul or George). They came along at a time when youth culture was still a very new business; as a result, crazes could appear and crest naturally. But along with all the other things The Beatles did, they showed just how much money could be made; and so in their wake you get an immense amount of corporate interest in predicting those crazes, milking those crazes, and (whenever possible) creating those crazes. (Cue The Monkees.) But the crazes we remember—the pop culture stuff that really touches people, stuff like The Beatles or Harry Potter—they must be 100% authentic, fan-driven, a complete surprise. For the one corporation that owns them, they are a dream come true; for the rest, these crazes are a nightmare. “Fire Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong; somebody get me some guitar groups! And make sure they’re ENGLISH!”

“Wait a sec,” you say. “The Beatles were packaged relentlessly, by Brian Epstein and others. The ‘loveable mop-top’ persona was a media fiction.” To some degree, that’s true. And if loveable mop-tops were all The Beatles had been, they would’ve been owning hair salons (Ringo’s famous wish) by 1968. Instead…we all know the story, but wrap your head around this: in 1965, Al Brodax at King Features Syndicate was pumping out The Beatles as an insipid, poorly drawn Saturday morning cartoon. Within two years, the same people had hired Heinz Edelmann and were making “Yellow Submarine.” The gap between the Beatles cartoon and Edelmann’s op-art acid trip not only shows just how quickly pop culture was changing, but that it was being driven by the wishes of the artists and audience, not by the convenience of the corporations. That makes all the difference. It’s probably why The Beatles are still remembered today.

Nobody really knew this in 1963, not even the four guys themselves, but The Beatles had an artistic depth and intellectual force that was completely unexpected in a pop group, and because it was unexpected, it caught the corporations they dealt with completely off-guard. So with The Beatles, you get something pretty unique in the history of pop culture: genuine, sincere, artist-driven content distributed on a massive scale without lots of corporate control. Dylan and The Beatles convinced the corporations that “art sells,” and for the period that the corporations felt uncertain, they stayed out of the way. This explains the high quality of rock from 1964 to 1969 or so. You see the same thing in comedy about five years later (1970-75), and Hollywood from 1967 to 1976. What makes something like “Revolution #9″ seem so dated today is how much of the rest of the Beatles’ catalog isn’t faddish. “She Loves You” is British beat music circa 1963, but it also succeeds on its own terms as an pop song, and that’s why in the future it may not sound current, but it will endure. People will be listening to “Revolver” in 2100, just like they’ll still be watching “The Godfather.”

Part of why it will endure is genius; there’s no proving that, but there’s no denying it, either. Lennon and McCartney were geniuses of songwriting, and while Rolling Stone was saying that in 1967, it’s taken 40-plus years for us to realize what “genius” means in the context of rock. It’s not just sales or relevance or even virtuosity. It’s an ability to transcend pop culture to become culture. Genius means that nobody’s been as good, as consistently, in the form ever since—artistically, commercially, or in any other way. It means that every nine-year-old I’ve ever met likes Beatle music. It means that we’re still talking about them today, a full forty years later, when nobody in 1970 ever thought that would happen, Rolling Stone included. The Beatles’ contemporaries—Cream, Hendrix, The Doors, even The Stones—are a subgenre, “classic rock,” a marketing term, while The Beatles are simply The Beatles. That’s genius. Due respect to any other group you care to name—really popular acts like U2, or really influential ones like Radiohead—odds are very long that we will be discussing their oeuvre much in 2050. The teacher in the column didn’t lift a reference from U2′s “Boy” album (released only 10 years after The Beatles broke up, and 30 years ago), which is a fine LP that I loved at the time and could still listen to happily. The reason that he didn’t quote “I Will Follow” is that it doesn’t have that extra thing—skill, luck, timing, genius—that turns very good pop culture into something more.

This fragmentation of pop culture means that there are nearly endless bits of ground for people to obsess over and claim as their own; part of this shift is based on a sense that MY tastes and YOUR tastes, being equally subjective, are equally valid. Thus the movie “Basket Case” is as worthy of discussion as “Gone With the Wind,” even though one movie is a cult favorite with no lasting impact and the other casts a irrefutable cultural shadow. I can’t argue against this, because it’s a worldview as fundamental to the internet as HTML. I suspect that my assertions will be dismissed as just more pro-Beatle haranguing by an avowed fanatic. Fair enough; what I am really asserting is only tangentially related to The Beatles: Not all popular culture, or for that matter, culture in general, is equivalent. The needs of corporations aside, some is better than others and, for me, persistence over decades is a pretty good measure of an item’s worth.

Why? Because it benefits the corporate manufacturers of culture to have consumers exist in an eternal “now,” where the newness of an item is a primary selling point. This is what’s behind the modern fetish for decades; consumers are constantly encouraged to identify themselves, and their “era” via cultural products…which are then replaced by other products. Newness and nostalgia, both are just mind-tricks to get people to buy more stuff. They mean nothing. Something from 1930, if you’ve never seen it, is it new? Or nostalgia? Is new better than old? What’s the difference?

These categories are mostly harmless, but people can get confused, and here’s how: In the comments to Emerson’s article, someone remarks that they were “appalled” when a bunch of 19-year-olds didn’t know Moby. But by any measure other than the commenter’s own life, Moby’s cultural impact is vanishingly small next to The Beatles. It’s completely predictable that they wouldn’t know Moby…or Macy Gray, who was the UK #1 the week before Moby, or Santana, who was the week after. Corporations have replaced genuine historical significance with significance to you personally, and encouraged you to invest the pop culture you live through with a kind of borrowed gravitas. They do this because while they can’t make something historically important, they can make it omnipresent; they can’t make something good, but they can make sure you know about it. People are encouraged to consume passively, and completely narcissistically; it’s akin to believing a singer is the greatest singer ever, simply because you were listening to him/her the first time you got laid.

Which doesn’t matter all that much, except for this: I know people, smart people, who will not watch a movie in black-and-white. At what point does corporate-encouraged cultural narcissism actively shut us off from the great art of the past? At what point are our imaginations so weakened by the pandering of industries desperate to sell us the new thing, that the good old stuff becomes too difficult to understand? Another commenter at Emerson’s article laments that “every generation becomes more and more ignorant/uninterested/etc in the art that was created before they were born,” then apologizes for this opinion. But why apologize? There’s truth in that, and my point is: it’s not natural, or inevitable, or the way things have always been. It’s done on purpose, to the corporations can keep selling us stuff. Any sensible person should want to experience the best culture, not out of misguided snobbery, but because life is short, and you can’t get more of it.

Maybe the internet helps with this…or maybe it makes it worse. A commenter writes: “With the internet, it’s just as easy to listen to Rudy Vallee, Mamie Smith, or the Beatles as it is to Lady Gaga.” Except nobody’s working 24/7 to tell you about Rudy Vallee or Mamie Smith. There are people whose job it is to tell you about The Beatles, but that will change the moment their catalogue passes into the public domain. There is an entire industry which exists solely to put stuff like Lady Gaga in your consciousness; she may be worthy, she may not, I haven’t heard her. But the new has a decisive advantage over the old in our culture, and it’s an advantage that grows stronger by the year, and has NOTHING to do with quality.

The Beatles will be fine; the last 40 years have proved that. But the real question is: can today’s writers outdo Shakespeare? Will they even be allowed to try? Is “Girlfriends of Christmases Past” better than a classic rom-com from, say, Preston Sturges? I’d say it’s not. That’s not to say that people can’t or shouldn’t be allowed to make, watch or enjoy “Girlfriends of Christmases Past,” but pop culture consumers need to be educated consumers. A life so filled with Taylor Swift that there is no room for The Beatles, or so filled with “Sex and the City 2″ that “Casablanca” feels boring, that to me is an impoverished existence. Certainly it encourages lousy, cynical, disposable pop culture in the future. The problem isn’t that people aren’t interested in stuff before they were born, it’s that the big corporations don’t make as much money off it; and while I don’t fear for The Beatles—they seem to be doing fine—is this eternal now good for us? Because we can choose to live differently.

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