In response to a blog over at www.newmusicstrategies.com I innocently typed in the sentence:

In case anyone is still in doubt as to the confusion that is rife with regards to aesthetic standards: there is no doubt in my mind that the cultural significance of Aqua far outweighs that of Radiohead.

A debate opened up in which the following is a contribution of mine. It explains my position in the concisest way I could manage on such a profound subject:

Cultural Significance

‘Barbie Girl’ by Aqua is a remarkable pop masterpiece. Its immediate tradition can be traced back through Pixar, Abba, Disney, ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ all the way to Lewis Carol’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’. The thing these artistic expressions have in common is that they appear to be harmless fun for kids, whilst carrying a profound, highly subversive, adult message. It is this ambiguity that lends them their aesthetic power, their cultural significance. It is in any case only the symbolic aspect of a work of art that truly resonates with audiences: not the real people in the narrative, but the archetypes they represent.

Barbie is furthermore in the mainline of Western femme fatales of the fluid, malleable kind, such as Hitchcock’s Marnie and Carlotta Valdes, from ‘Marnie’ and ‘Vertigo’ respectively, Eliza Dolittle from ‘My Fair Lady’ (and by extension: Shaw’s as well as Ovid’s ‘Pygmalion’,) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Christine, from ‘Phantom of the Opera’, even the Marquis de Sade’s Eugenie and my own Rhiannon from ‘Ridinghood’, all heroines whose ‘owners’, in a sense, create them: dress them, make them sit up, sing, dance, speak properly etc, in short: treat them like dolls. The owners always pay for their authorship with their souls. In that sense finally, Barbie is Robert Graves’s ‘White Goddess’ and Coleridge’s ‘Nightmare Life in Death’, dicing with Death for the soul of Ken. She contributes to an ancient tradition whose cultural significance will endure for millennia to come: she is archetypal.

Thom Yorke is a geek (creep) and while there is a flimsy case to be made that the modern figure of the ‘smart but disintegrated youth’ is taking on archetypal proportions, Thom Yorke does not represent him, he is him. Thom Yorke represents nothing. Even the Beatles understood the importance of inhabiting a role and promptly turned themselves into a cheesy cabaret act called Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the silliness of which might even rival that of Aqua’s ‘Barbie’. Aqua are more Beatle-esque than Radiohead, for there is no art in Radiohead.

It may have been misleading to state in my previous post that the cultural significance of Aqua outweighs that of Radiohead. From a historical perspective (the only relevant one in aesthetic matters) Radiohead are not culturally significant at all. I cannot denigrate Radiohead’s collective achievement as businessmen: they make a lot of money. However, to grant them cultural significance on account of the fact that millions of people buy their albums is ludicrous. To say it again: there is no art in Radiohead, they contribute to no vibrant ancient tradition; they can achieve exactly nothing on a cultural level.

Long after Radiohead will be mercifully forgotten, poets will still be invoking the eternal Goddess, singing songs in her honour, keeping alive the legacy of the ancient muse, who, for the shortest moment, thanks to the magnificent Aqua, came in our time to look a little like Barbie.

One last thing: What is fake plastic?