Danny Goldberg, Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit (New York: Miramax Books, 2003), 336 pages, $23.95
Washington, D.C., is Hollywood for ugly people—or so the saying goes. This cultural observation highlights the longstanding and often tendentious relationship that the entertainment industry has had with policymakers in the nation’s capital—that peculiar breed of sensible shoe-wearing, briefcase-toting policy wonks who thrive inside the Beltway. Each group takes turns using the other as a creative foil or a punching bag, and each, at times, feels moved to decry the other’s excesses.
In Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit, record company executive and writer Danny Goldberg argues that the leaders of the Democratic Party are losing the hearts and minds of younger generations because they are no longer summoning the powerful force of popular culture to spread their message. "Among voters aged 18-24, Clinton defeated Bob Dole, the arch enemy of popular culture, by 19 percent in 1996," Goldberg notes. In 2000, however, "Gore and Bush, who was not identified with attacks on youth culture, equally split nine million voters in the 18-24 category." For Goldberg, this is an ominous sign. Recalling a recent meeting with a "senior Democratic campaign adviser," Goldberg was shocked—shocked!—to realize that the man was unfamiliar with rapper Eminem’s oeuvre and flummoxed when "one of New York’s most progressive congressmen" drew a blank when he heard the name of rap producer Russell Simmons. The kids are all right, by Goldberg’s estimation; it is the pols in his own party who are the problem. Democrats have become "uptight, preachy elitists," dismissive or ignorant of the medium—popular culture—that fuels "teen spirit."
The reference to "teen spirit" in Goldberg’s title is borrowed, with suitable gravitas, from the 1991 song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by the rock group Nirvana, whose lead singer, the late Kurt Cobain, was "one of the few real geniuses I have ever known," Goldberg writes. It is a rather inauspicious cultural signifier for galvanizing a generation: Cobain was not describing youthful political energy; he used the phrase because it was a popular brand of deodorant. No matter. Goldberg argues that the Democratic Party faces a moribund political future if it doesn’t reengage with popular culture.
"I’m sick and tired of watching the ideas that I believe in lose political ground," Goldberg writes in his introduction. But what, exactly, are the ideas he believes in? Goldberg is a self-described "progressive," Baby Boomer, and "aging hippie." He has lived in Los Angeles and in New York and is politically active—he has hosted numerous fundraisers for Democratic candidates and spent many years doing work for the American Civil Liberties Union. Along the way he has met major celebrities, nearly all of whom are mentioned in the book.
The orgy of name-dropping begins on page two, as Goldberg mentions figures with such star wattage as Diana Ross, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, and Nelson Mandela. Barbra Streisand, Goldberg assures us, is no "flaky dilettante." He calls her "extremely well read and thoughtful." All are given their due, including every minor figure of cultural import that happened to be seated next to Goldberg at the dinner parties he has frequented over the years. Goldberg is the Forrest Gump of the New York-Los Angeles-Washington social nexus: he chats with Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis, has intimate dinners with Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, participates in backstage rap sessions with Jerry Brown, and takes junkets to El Salvador with Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.
Goldberg calls his book a memoir, but it lacks both the reflection and close observation that characterize the best memoirs. We learn about his childhood—"I had few friends and lived vicariously through the media"—and, in more detail, about his illegal drug use. "I had started smoking pot in my junior year of high school," he writes matter-of-factly, "begun taking LSD in earnest in my senior year, and in Berkeley and Oakland I did just about every other drug that existed at the time." He is spared the consequences of an arrest for drug possession, since—lucky Danny—"an expensive lawyer my parents hired got me released into their custody." It’s not hard to imagine him proudly describing this episode, years later, to friends at a New York cocktail party as his "youthful drug arrest," a badge of his membership in that elite clan, the real ’60s hippie. At other times, the book descends drearily into a narration of Goldberg’s resume, as he moves from one job to another in the recording industry, by his own account never losing his enthusiasm for the power of popular music as a medium for social change.
Goldberg’s enthusiasm for the ’60s—"It is hard to find any facet of contemporary politics and culture that does not in some way reflect that decade"—allows him to forgive the excesses of his generation, particularly its self-destructive drug use. It also allows him to grant reprieves to politicians who meet his standards for true liberalism. After several flattering paragraphs about Gary Hart’s political virtues, for example, Goldberg mentions only in passing the reason for Hart’s public denouement: an affair with Donna Rice (who Goldberg contemptuously describes as having once seen hanging around a Miami recording studio "looking available").
As for another legacy of the ’60s—political correctness—Goldberg devotes only two paragraphs to it, treating it as an aberration of the American Left, rather than the logical conclusion of the Left’s more authoritarian tendencies. Some former hippies "had gone into academia and developed a kind of intolerance," Goldberg writes, with considerable understatement. Little mention is made of the fact that this "kind of intolerance," with its speech codes, excessive sexual harassment rules, and hostility to "incorrect" ideas, has had damaging consequences for free thought on campus, or that it has galvanized a generation of younger conservatives on college campuses to fight such restrictions on free speech.
If Goldberg’s memoir was merely a slickly-packaged tale of Baby Boomer nostalgia, with a few celebrity nuggets, it would make for a clichéd but breezy book; his reminiscence reads like an eager boy writing home from summer camp: "The ’60s was a good time, a time of hope, idealism, exuberant youthful rebellion, and sheer fun," he enthuses. His heroes are the men and women associated with that era, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Abbie Hoffman, the latter of whom he describes as having "a brilliant sense of how to use the mass media."
Unfortunately, Goldberg aspires to be a political polemicist as well, one operating from the inside of the Democratic-progressive movement. His misguided political intuition grew from his experience fighting the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), a group founded in 1985 by Tipper Gore, wife of then-Senator Albert Gore, and Susan Baker, wife of then-Treasury Secretary James Baker. Alarmed by the escalation of violent and misogynistic lyrics in rock music, leaders of the PMRC sought to convince the record industry to establish, voluntarily, its own ratings board, much like the one that rates movies. Tipper and her cohorts never sought to censor music or introduce legislation, although the Senate did hold a hearing about possible ratings systems. What Tipper and millions of American parents felt keenly was the need for voluntary, sensible disclosure of explicit content in music.
Labeling the PMRC "cultural terrorists," Goldberg helped form a rival group, the Musical Majority, and proceeded to launch a campaign that tarred Tipper, unfairly, as the Mrs. Grundy of the musical world. In the process he also succumbed to extreme pundicitis, noting the heady feelings brought on by "being quoted and being seen on TV." Yet Goldberg’s attacks on the PMRC were hardly fair given the modest recommendations the group was making; they eventually reached a compromise with the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) to place parental advisory stickers on explicit records. If such a campaign for public awareness warrants the label cultural terrorist, then Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Parent Teacher Association are also terrorist groups.
One gets the sense, however, that for Goldberg, Tipper’s worst sin was not her campaign for a music ratings system; it was that her efforts made her, in his mind, an inauthentic child of the ’60s, one who betrayed her generation’s dedication to freedom and suspicion of authority. "There is something eerie about her as there is with almost everyone connected with the national government," Goldberg reports one of his friends once observing. "She might as well have been on Mars during the ’60s." Tipper and her ilk—including her husband Al, former president Bill Clinton, and former first lady Hillary Clinton—are viewed as careerists, an unpardonable sin from the perspective of real radicals like Mr. Goldberg. Many others fail Goldberg’s rigorous hippie litmus test. The "Washington media," most politicians, and political consultants of all persuasions are deemed "snobbish," and Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman emerges as Goldberg’s latest whipping boy for his devotion to Orthodox Judaism and his public impatience with the wilder side of popular culture.
Yet for all of his criticism of Democratic politicians, Goldberg himself lacks even the rudimentary diplomatic skills of a freshman congressman. His anti-PMRC campaign succeeded only insofar as it kept peddling a steady stream of celebrities to the media, and when the RIAA agreed on warning labels, "I decided to declare victory while holding my nose," he notes primly. Goldberg also seems to have a penchant for making otherwise mild-mannered pols go berserk: the book recounts an expletive-laced confrontation with Al Gore at a "fabled Beverly Hills mansion" in 1989 and a screaming match with Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, via telephone, among other inflammatory episodes. Goldberg doesn’t seem to realize that, from the perspective of the politicians he’s chastising, he’s likely viewed not as a hip political seer but simply as a nuisance, although one that must be endured to secure campaign donations from the entertainment industry.
Ultimately, Goldberg’s ’60s myopia prevents him from seeing something more important: the generation he is urging Democrats to court—the Millennial generation—is different both from his own aging Boomer cohort and the generations that followed, including Gen X. Children of the Millennial generation, who were born in the early 1980s, are civic-minded, tech-savvy achievers who think in terms of "we," not "I." As Neil Howe and William Strauss have noted in Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (2000), they express neither the condescending solipsism of the Boomers or the posturing cynicism of Gen X. They respect authority and more than half of those polled "believe that lack of parental discipline is a major social problem." These kids are rebels—but they are rebelling against the very ’60s ethos that Goldberg praises throughout his book.
Goldberg has nothing to say about these kids, a glaring oversight in a book ostensibly concerned with capturing the political imaginations of the next generation. In part this oversight is due to the fact that Goldberg is happy only when pop culture is used in the service of "progressive" goals; it frustrates him to no end, for example, that the greatest master of the art of melding politics, performance, and culture, President Ronald Reagan, was a conservative. But overlooking this next generation also allows Goldberg to continue to pretend that his own worldview—one nurtured by ’60s self-indulgence and late twentieth-century prosperity—is the best one for future generations, too. Goldberg ends his book with a line from Bob Dylan—"the times they are a-changin.’" If the early signs from the Millennial generation are any guide, the changes that are coming will be fueled by a very different kind of "teen spirit," one that Goldberg likely won’t understand or appreciate.
Christine Rosen is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and a contributor to American Outlook.
