The High Low specializes in high-end takes on the low art of pop culture.
But why?
I graduated from the University of Minnesota with an American Studies degree (shout out Maya Angelou).
It shaped the way I’ve looked at the world since, specifically, how culture influences identity and identity shapes culture.
By saying “high end takes on the low are of pop culture” I mean, I try to write very seriously and thoughtfully about things that are otherwise, largely inconsequential. To that end I try to follow Jerry Seinfeld’s paraphrased mantra: spend an inappropriate amount of time on undeserving subjects.
Besides the idea of thinking deeply on shallow subject matter, the dynamic of High and Low can manifest itself in many ways. It can be an extended essay on taking a luxury cruise by David Foster Wallace. The way Basquiat brought NYC 1980’s street culture to abstract painting. Or James Franco’s stint on General Hospital. Not to equate these 3 pieces of culture, but that’s the point.
Even the interview above is an example: The New York Times creating a well produced interview about how Jerry Seinfeld writes a joke, an exercise (breaking down the process of joke writing) that Seinfeld himself feels is beneath anyone’s possible interest.
While Seinfeld will spend 2 years thinking about the tagline to a joke in hopes of a laugh, I will spend 2 years thinking about Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska with the hopes that writing about it will lead to a deeper truth about American culture.
In essence, I follow an idea when it does for me what this verse from Kendrick Lamar’s song “Rigamortis” did, that is, stimulate my intellectual senses like a lightning strike to the brain stem:
And this is rigor mortis, and it’s gorgeous when you die
Ali recorded, and I’m Morpheus; the matrix of my mind
I’m out the orbit, you an orphan and a hairdresser combined
I’m on the toilet when I rhyme, if you the shit, then I decline
I climax where you begin and then I end on cloud nine
And that’s important when you morph into an angel in the sky
And don’t be forging all my signatures, my listeners reply
And tell me that you biting style, you got a hell of an appetite
And I’ma be here for a while, just buckle up before the ride
Or knuckle up if you can fight, we always making ’em duck or die
A suit and tie is suitable and usual in suicide
CSI just might investigate this fucking parasite
(He dead! Amen!) That’s what they telling me
Aim it at your celebrities, this is studio felony
Ferragami, so many, and cool enough for the ’70s
Nigga, payback’s a bitch, and bitch you been living in debt with me