From listening to the Beatles to eating beetles

Music has lost much of its charge, food has taken its place

Since the 1960s and ’70s, food has replaced music’s centrality to American culture. These are invariably somewhat subjective impressions, but I’d like to lay out my sense of how the social impact of music has fallen and the social role of food has risen.
 
In the earlier era, new albums were eagerly awaited and bought in the hundreds of thousands immediately upon their release. Diversity in the musical world was relatively low, as genres such as rap, heavy metal, techno and ambient either didn’t exist or weren’t well developed. It was also harder to access the music of the more distant past — no Spotify or YouTube — and thus people listened to the same common music more frequently.
 
That was by no means a good deal for every listener in terms of pleasure, but it did give music a powerful social influence. Bob Dylan, the Beatles and various forms of hippie music shaped political debates, introduced many people to drugs or long hair, and were a touchstone for the age. With the possible exception of Kendrick Lamar, musicians today don’t have comparable ideological reach. Taylor Swift is a paradigm of the non-political, intellectually generic pop star, and it was mostly a non-event when Kanye West endorsed Donald Trump for president. In contrast to the past, today’s pop hardly ever cites literary sources, a sign of its relatively generic content.
 
The rhythmic, propulsive and sometimes dissonant nature of cutting-edge music in the 1960s and ’70s often impelled us to get up and do something. Both black and white music were central to the civil rights era and the protests against the Vietnam War, and Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome” were known to millions of Americans. 
 
As for where the change and innovation have come, it’s hard to think of any sphere of American life where the selection and quality have improved so much as food, whether in the supermarket or in restaurants. American cities become more interesting places to dine each year, and the attention paid to food on TV and online has been growing steadily since the 1990s.
 
Restaurants are increasingly an organising and revitalising force in the cities, and eating out has continued to rise as a means of socialising. America’s educated professional class may be out of touch with sports and tired of discussing the weather, and so trading information about new or favourite restaurants, or recipes and ingredients, has become one of the new all-purpose topics of conversation. Food is a relatively gender-neutral topic, and furthermore, immigrant newcomers can be immediately proud of what they know and have eaten.
 
The current culinary touchstone is the foodie or TV host who “eats everything,” from pig snouts to worms to scorpions. Cannibalism aside, the list of what has been consumed on television is now so long it’s hard to shock viewers (not only do some insects taste like potato chips, but in some dining circles consuming potato chips is arguably the more rebellious act). The more prosaic truth, however, is that eating everything is not much of a revolution. If anything, historical resonance has been achieved by people who refused to eat certain foods, whether the underlying doctrine was vegetarianism, Jainism, Judaism or Islam.

© Bloomberg