Unpopular culture

Unpopular culture

I have this idea about "unpopular culture".

High culture is high, and always receding away from what the masses like. Always trying to draw the boundary between it and low culture, what in the modern era is called popular culture.

Mechanized reproduction and information technology have made popular or folk culture into a mass culture. There is one massive, worldwide folk who shares taste for low, folk, mass things like pop music, popular film, pop novels or whatever else.

There is another thing, though, and it has been around a long time. It is unpopular culture. Low low low culture that very few people actually like. In fact it is a revolting culture from the dank alleys and street and backs of saloons or bowels of ghettos or rural backwaters. It is jazz or hip hop or indie lo-fi cultures -- it is what Mailer identified as the pursuit of the beatnik "white niggers" and what today is called anti-aestheticism.

Unpopular culture. I have to think a bit now about how far back it goes. 19th C? 4th?