Come on in, the monoculture's warm

I have a shortlist of cultural moments that I can distinctly recall from my childhood:

• December 1992: Seeing the Muppets Christmas Carol in the theater with my family.

• September 6, 1997: Watching Princess Diana’s funeral with my mom in my parents' bedroom.

• May 15, 1998: Sitting in the parking lot of my grade school during recess, listening to my classmates talk about the Seinfeld finale.

• A variety of ordeals involving Michael Jackson (Music video releases! Marriages! Dangling babies!)

I can ask a sample of my friends and their own lists likely include overlaps with mine and each other’s — because we used to be a proper country; we used to have a monoculture.

I hadn’t thought much about our disparate cultural experiences until I read about how “going viral” is nearly dead. Collectively, we once argued about what color the dress was, we watched the skateboarder swigging Ocean Spray to a Fleetwood Mac soundtrack, and we watched that lady in the Chewbacca mask fall into hysterics. It was the online version of everyone huddled around the water cooler, recapping the en vogue TV show the morning after. 

“With the rise of algorithmically driven social media platforms like TikTok, moments that get people around the world talking, on cable news and at the dinner table, are becoming less common,” writes Madison Malone Kircher in The New York Times. “Each user’s feed is hypertailored to them, meaning no one sees the same version of the internet.”

Save for the weather, pop culture has so often been the one connecting topic we could all discuss no matter who we are — and without too much bad blood. M*A*S*H, the series finale of which captured 105.97 million total U.S. viewers (?!?!!?!), was the great equalizer.

“Americans could count on the fact that their neighbors, their co-workers, or the stranger they sat next to on a plane knew the same pop culture as them and quite possibly had an interesting opinion about it,” wrote Ben Fritz in the Wall Street Journal. “We talked about the stuff we had watched and listened to at work, on dates and at family reunions. The monoculture was a unifying force when politics, race, and geographic and generational divides kept threatening to tear us apart.”

Which brings us to today: Lots of division, very little unifying culture. Could pop save America(n small talk)?

I bring this up because I was dee-lighted by the chatter around Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. For a brief period Sunday night through Monday, it felt like we all had a big, fat shared cultural experience to discuss. I was chronically opening Instagram and Bluesky after his performance, just to see a new image, analysis, or video about the half time show. Everyone was talking! Yes, it was political — that’s not to be ignored in all this, by any means — but it was also, as Spencer Kornhaber wrote in The Atlantic, fundamentally a blast: “an instant-classic, precisely detailed, relentlessly stimulating medley rooted in the good old-fashioned pleasure principle.”

God, it felt good to see people chatting about it, discussing how it brilliantly put Latin culture on display, how cleverly it winked at Benito’s personal experiences, how it stood firmly on sociopolitical statements. It was cinematic! It was sexy! It was fun! And nearly everyone watched it. (I hope all the rest enjoyed Kid Rock’s lip-syncing, of course.)

“It’s undeniably good that entertainment-industry decision makers are no longer all-powerful arbiters of mass culture,” Fritz writes in the WSJ. “But it’s a loss that connecting over entertainment is now a rarer thing.”

I won’t gloss over the fact that Bad Bunny likely wouldn’t have been given much of a platform by yesteryear’s monoculture authoritarians. No concept is without criticism. For every Star War given the green light because the industry knew hordes of suburbanites would flock to the theater, a lesser-known diverse voice was likely ignored.

Part of me kicks myself for not getting into Game of Thrones when everyone else did — sorry that I didn’t immediately see the appeal of dragons and incest!! — so that I could yap about it on Twitter or with colleagues. I lost an opportunity for a low-stakes connection with just about half the population, it seems. (I absolutely will not get on board with watching Love Island, though. Some of you should bond over getting your heads checked!!)

That’s why, with all the problems of professional sports — and there are many — it’s tough to downplay the shared energy around a winning team. When the Bears made it into the playoffs this past season, Chicago was vibrating. After an autumn where neighbors were handing out whistles and trying to keep one another safe from ICE and Border Patrol agents, it was a balm to be gleefully recounting incredible plays and not commiserating over arrests.

To be collectively swept up in entertainment feels so good. The halftime show on Sunday was enthralling for so many reasons, not the least of which was because it felt like we were all witnessing a cultural touchstone.

…which also included this tweet