We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture

Jeffrey J. Cormier, Ph.D., specializes in Canadian society at McGill
University.

Hal Niedzviecki has been lauded as a key member of a generation of young
hip Canadian writers, a generation that includes the likes of Mark
Kingwell and Naomi Klein. However, Niedzviecki has neither the quick
insightful wit of Kingwell nor the research propensity of Klein,
essential prerequisites for membership in that rather elite group.

Niedzviecki has set for himself the task of writing a pop culture
manifesto. Mass culture is an all-pervasive force in today’s
media-saturated world, he warns, which brings with it several negative
consequences. The first and perhaps most important of these consequences
is the transformation of the average citizen into a quiescent,
“colonized” consumer. If that weren’t bad enough, this mass
culture is centrally controlled by a few very large, faceless
megacorporations whose major goal is the ruthless—and
reckless—pursuit of profit.

Redemption is ultimately to be found, the author suggests, in
often-obscure expressions of cultural rebellion. From the underground
magazines written in small towns and suburbs across North America, to
conferences held for and by cultural activists, an alternative-lifestyle
counterculture is thriving. The important function that these various
manifestations serve is to co-opt and adapt mass consumer culture,
redefining it as individual and collective expressions of liberation. At
bottom Niedzviecki is pushing for a program of pop culture populism: he
encourages each of us to be active producers of culture instead of
passive, mindless receptors.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that for all his exalted praise for
alternative pop culture, Niedzviecki is himself thoroughly mainstream.
Unless writing a regular column for the National Post, working for the
CBC, and publishing a book with Penguin are now considered
alternative-lifestyle activities, Niedzviecki is thoroughly part of the
mass-consumer culture he criticizes.