The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture - not only national culture but global culture.
People are people, and I get a bit annoyed that the music business only focuses in on the big metropolises. I find that people that don't live in big cities are just as likely to enjoy music as people that do live in big cities.
When people say that L.A. doesn't have a culture, I think it really does: a very old culture, and very specific. There's streets named after entertainers, and statues of entertainers, and it's great. Entertainment is still art, even if it makes billions of dollars. So it's like a city built on entertainment, and art in a way.
The trouble with those people is that they think all the best things are made in the cities. It is not so.
Hollywood is a very small world; the people who matter matter, and the people who don't matter are just like nothing.
Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.
If something is really outrageous, it doesn't matter if it is one culture, or another, it's outrageous.
I think that every minority in the United States of America knows everything about the dominant culture. From the time you can think, you are bombarded with images from TV, film, magazines, newspapers.
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.