The Politics of Culture: A Conversation with Ross Barkan
Political commenter Ross Barkan sits down to talk about The Beach Boys, how politics impact music, and his latest novel, Glass Century
If you enjoy this newsletter, consider ordering a copy of my debut book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music covering 1958 to 2025.
Today’s newsletter is an interview with Ross Barkan, a guy that isn’t easy to pin down. When I first came across Barkan, I assumed he was a cultural critic. But that’s actually not how most people knew him. Barkan made a name for himself as a political commenter, his words appearing in basically any magazine you could name. But even that only scratches the surface.
Barkan is a writer and critic, but he’s also made forays into politics and writing fiction. A few weeks ago, Barkan and I sat down to talk about his strange relationship with The Beach Boys, what’s wrong with contemporary culture, and his excellent novel Glass Century.
I want to start with the first way that you and I became acquainted, namely through your love of The Beach Boys. You’ve made the case that The Beach Boys are underrated. Can you explain why?
My Beach Boys journey is fascinating because I in no way cared about them in my adolescence or in my 20s. I was always a devotee to Simon and Garfunkel, The Beatles, and The Velvet Underground. I was also very much into 2000s indie rock and would always hear about how the Beach Boys were an influence on a lot of those bands. But none of that really clicked for me. I was not someone who was listening to Pet Sounds in college.
It wasn’t until I got SiriusXM in my 30s that things changed. They would play this Beach Boys channel in the summer and I became entranced by all this music that I’d never heard before. “Heroes and Villains.” “The Surfer Moon.” From there, I started to get into their albums. They are a very strange band. In one sense, they are extraordinarily popular. They’ve sold over 100 million units. They have a bunch of classics. They played the Ed Sullivan Show many times. They personify the 1960s in many respects, but unlike The Beatles, Beach Boys fandom exists on very different planes. Sure, there are some people who only like the psychedelic Beatles, but most people appreciate the entire ten-year arc of the band. “Please Please Me” is as celebrated as “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
The Beach Boys aren’t like that. You have some people that only think of them as this summery surf band. You have some people who only know “Kokomo.” But their catalog is very deep and weird. I wouldn’t say they have a lost history, but it’s not as appreciated as that of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. Even a big music fan might only think of Pet Sounds and the mythos around Smile when they think of The Beach Boys. In my view, the late 1960s and early 1970s are some of their best music. It’s an endless vortex of beauty.
At the same time, I think Pet Sounds really is worth the hype. It is an ageless album. Like I appreciate Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, but that is such an album of 1967. Pet Sounds exists outside of time. It doesn’t have that 1960s’ sheen. To me, that makes it even more exciting. Their level of artistry just doesn’t align with the image your average person has of the band. There's always a lack of seriousness that's ascribed to them. Very few people talk about them the same way they talk about Springsteen or Dylan, but they are just as good.
How much do you think their underrated-ness is driven by their name?
A big part. Comparing them to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones really illustrates the point because they all became major rock bands around the same time. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were just so savvy in how they curated their image. They knew how to position their music.
The Beach Boys’ name was actually chosen by a record executive before their first song came out. They were originally called The Pendletones. At first, they had no issue with The Beach Boys name because surf music was very popular. But The Beach Boys aren’t really surf music. They’re not doing the instrumental Dick Dale thing. Their singing doo-wop harmonies with surfing themes. But then the surf aesthetic becomes much less popular. The Beach Boys have a huge hit with “Good Vibrations” in 1966, but then by 1967 they are completely out of the loop. These white-bread kids can’t go up against acid rock. The name hurts them. It conjures an image that they could never outrun.
Do you have any examples of that?
Sure. In the 1970s, they release three dark, complex albums: Surfs Up, Sunflower, and Holland. Then what happens? They are eaten by nostalgia. A greatest hits album called Endless Summer becomes extremely popular in 1974. This is just as Nixon steps down. The country is in tumult. There’s a ton of urban violence and instability. Right at that time, Endless Summer hits, Happy Days is on TV, American Graffiti makes a ton of money in theaters. People long for that tranquility of the past, and The Beach Boys are there to give it to them. Suddenly, they’re playing arenas and making tons of money. It’s basically the creative end of the band. They are captive to their name.
I think you are most well known for writing about politics. While I don’t want to have a political discussion, I want to touch on the interaction between culture and politics. In what ways do you think the political climate shapes art?
On a macro level, you cannot separate politics and culture. Politics is always seeping into culture and culture has the ability to shape politics. In the 1960s and 1970s, you have a great countercultural movement in music, film, and literature that is a reaction to shifting political views of the youth.
The Trump era is really interesting. I think the first Trump era had a real impact on popular contemporary literature, where you saw — for lack of a better term — “woke” literature take hold. I can’t speak as much to music. But if you look at how someone like Ocean Vuong was treated in 2019 when they put out their debut novel as compared to their follow up in 2025, it’s night and day. I don’t think his writing has declined dramatically at all. The climate has just shifted. The social justice identity just fell out.
To go back to The Beach Boys, they were not good at playing politics. One member of the band, Carl Wilson, was a conscientious objector and faced prison time for not going to Vietnam, but largely the Beach Boys were an apolitical band. They were not known for making statements. They did not have music that lent itself well to the counterculture. Pet Sounds really doesn’t wedge itself neatly into anything else going on at the time. Even if groups like The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel weren’t taking up the flag and protesting Vietnam, their music was opaque in a way that felt right for the moment.
You’ve also written about how culture is divided into micro, meso, and macro buckets. Can you give me a summary of what you mean by that?
I didn’t coin any of those terms.
writes a lot about the micro and macro culture. I believe coined the term “mesoculture.” Macroculture is the mainstream, which includes big publishing houses, newspapers, Hollywood, cable television and other large cultural institutions. The 20th century was defined by macroculture, but the macro has less power these days.The micro is what is burbling below. That’s YouTube. It’s Substack. It’s TikTok. As macroculture has declined, microculture has grown. They are in complete tension. Many macro institutions are starting to look like the micro. You have The Washington Post trying to pull Substack writers to their opinion pages. You have Netflix shows starting to resemble YouTube series.
Mesoculture, as you’d expect, exists in between. Mo Diggs defines this quite well. Meso mostly refers to indie or alternative culture. You had a ton of that in the 1990s and 2000s. Stuff like independent record stores or alt weeklies. It sat between the microculture, or counterculture, and macro institutions.
Do we need all three?
Yes. Healthy culture needs all three of these things to flourish at the same time. In the 20th century, you’d have mainstream culture looking to the counterculture for ideas. That’s how Hollywood goes from stagnant in the early 1960s to magnificent a decade later with Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather and stuff like that. We need this tension between micro, mezzo, and macro. We don’t really have it now. Right now, digital is desiccating the mainstream, but there’s really no large scale counterculture to make the mainstream better.
When I think of microculture, I think of how things have become niche-ified. For example, you can find a YouTube channel about the most obscure ideas possible. Do you think it’s a problem that everyone can now live in their own cultural niche? Like do things break down when we don’t have shared moments?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Can't Get Much Higher to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.